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F. W. Murnau, right, as Pierrot in a stage production from 1911.
13 September 2004
The Murnau festival at the Film Forum in New York City began tonight with two early films -- "Journey Into the Night"
(Murnau's earliest surviving feature, from 1920) and the "The Burning Earth" (from 1922.) Neither is a very good
film ("The Burning Earth" is actually pretty bad) but each has breathtaking passages, as you might imagine, that
show the start of the filmmaker's journey towards the stunning mastery of the later films.
"Journey Into the Night" is the stranger and more entertaining of the two films. It begins as a drawing room
farce and about halfway through shifts suddenly, with demented determination, into a Gothic tragedy -- or a send-up of a Gothic
tragedy . . . it's hard to tell. The opening section, in which a serious doctor is seduced from his respectable fiancee by
a delightfully irresponsible showgirl, is almost breezy, and sometimes delicately erotic. At one point, in a two-shot, the
showgirl moves to drop a sugar cube into the doctor's tea. There's a cut-in to a close-up of her bare arm, lit with silky
delicacy, moving with seductive slowness towards the cup -- and the final release of the cube has the effect of an erotic
shudder. It's very sexy stuff.
Throughout the film Murnau seems formally obsessed with extremely deep shots (in interiors!) including figures close to
the foreground and other figures who approach or recede from the foreground figures. I call the obsession formal because Murnau
doesn't always seem to be using the framing and mise-en-scene for expressive effect -- he simply seems to like it, or perhaps
to have just discovered it, and in some way recognized that this means of creating the illusion of depth on a flat screen
was magical.
Like Welles and Bertollucci, Murnau appears to have been born with an instinctive understanding of the plastic possibilities
of film composition, camera movement and choreography within a scene -- and like them he sometimes appears mesmerized by the
enchantment he can cast by passages of pure plastic beauty, not always using them in the service of narrative or emotional
effect.
All of these filmmakers can at times be fairly accused of mannerism to one degree or another, but there is no denying
the power of the enchantment, and when it is used in the service of narrative and emotion, we know we are seeing cinema at
the height of its capacity as a medium.
As I say, about halfway through, the film shifts radically in tone, and this seems to have been absolutely deliberate.
The doctor and his showgirl bride have established themselves in a charming seaside village. One day we see a small open boat
approaching the village dock. Standing up in it, totally immobile, like Nosferatu in stasis, is Conrad Veidt. As he's helped
onto the dock we see that he's blind. We follow him home as he walks past the doctor's wife. He looks like an automaton, like
one of the living dead. And yet there's something oddly beautiful about the way he moves, about his creepy self-containment.
It's as though a figure from a German-Expressionist horror film suddenly walked into a Lubitsch comedy. And like a kind
of virus he infects the other players from that point on, as he infects the narrative, and we are in another genre . . . really
in another universe. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, but can be guessed at, the showgirl goes mad as the result of
a thunderstorm, dallies with Veidt as waves churn at odd speeds against the base of jagged rocks, which in turn causes the
doctor to go mad, imitating Veidt's extreme pantomime, and suddenly everybody is writhing in theatrical hysteria and you just
know it's not going to end well.
One can't really blame the other actors for jumping on the Veidt bandwagon. His physical performance is as amazing as
it is extreme -- one of the great horror-film performances of all time. No flick of a finger is uncalculated, unstylized --
and it's all executed beautifully. You'd want to move like that, too, if you could, and the other actors pull it off pretty
well.
In one extraordinary scene, when the doctor restores Veidt's sight, the doctor moves up to the bed Veidt is lying on and
blocks him from our view -- all but his hand. The hand trembles and twitches as the bandages are removed from Veidt's eyes
-- foreshadowing a hundred such coming-alive moments in monster movies -- and then the doctor steps back again and Veidt rises
up to a sitting position on the bed like a half-revived corpse.
At the end, the showgirl's suicide is revealed in a shot from behind a divan. All we see at first is her bare arm, lit
with silky delicacy, draped off the edge of the divan, deathly still -- an echo and revision of the sugar cube image. Then
Veidt rises up suddenly and unexpectedly from behind the divan with a gravity and intensity which suggests that he's just
been going down on her, but also with a stylized other-worldiness which suggests he's been sucking her blood. In fact he's
just been grieving, according to the putative storyline -- but at this point Murnau is flying high above the radar of the
storyline.
In fact he's reveling in all the unique things moving images can do and suggest, in all the unique ways they can charm
and transport and move us. You also get a feeling that Murnau is goofing on the melodramatic conventions of his day -- at
the same time as he's celebrating the art of actors who know how to go over the top with impeccable style.
It's a stunning film to have been made in 1920 -- crazy as it is, mixed up as it is. It's the work of a genius who hasn't
quite decided what he wants to use his genius for.
"The Burning Earth" is a real let-down by comparison -- you'd think it was made well before "Journey Into
the Night" and never imagine it was made in the same year as "Nosferatu". It's a very conventional soap-opera
of a movie, and maybe Murnau was just knocking it out for the money or the experience. But it has its moments -- many of them
sublime.
It treats some of the same themes as "Sunrise" -- the innocence and decency of country life, the corrupting
effects of city values . . . though in this case the temptations are mercenary rather than erotic. The plot is convoluted
without being complex, the performances are good without being terribly affecting, and in the many interiors Murnau seems
to have abandoned his earlier interest in creating exaggerated impressions of depth.
But when he moves to the wintry landscape outdoors the visual style sometimes soars. There are beautiful shots of a woman
wandering forlorn on a frozen river which remind one of "Way Down East" and must certainly have been influenced
by Griffith's film. There's a wonderful image shot from the bed of a cart carrying a frozen corpse, looking over the corpse
at a village lane. People rush up the lane and crowd the end of the cart, blocking off our view, and then the corpse, hideously
stiff and bent, is lifted into frame and carried off. And brilliant, unforgettable images pop up randomly all the time --
like the shot from an upper window looking down at dusk on a man backing a team of horses into the traces of a cart, as a
lantern makes a circle of light on the snowy ground beside him . . . or the shot looking past a stationary sled at a tree-lined
road as a line of other sleds move along it and towards us.
Organizing and enchanting space by the gracious and imaginative framing of a shot, marrying it with time by the way things
move through that space, are the heart of film -- mirroring the way we enchant the spaces of the real world by the emotion
we project into them. By this process, the dirt walkway behind the bleachers where you got your first kiss becomes part of
the landscape of mythology. The fact that a first kiss can do this to a dirt walkway behind some bleachers tells us what a
first kiss is.
By a kind of reverse engineering, movies can create the illusion of spaces that are enchanted in the same way and invite
us to project onto the characters who inhabit those spaces and the events that unfold in them the same mythological importance,
the same emotional intensity.
Murnau knew this secret at a very early age, almost, it seems, from the moment he stepped behind a camera, and we're so
lucky he was able to share some of it with us before he died at the age of 42. Those in search of the future of cinema will
always be able to find it by looking back at the work of Murnau.
The films tonight were wonderfully served by a musical accompaniment on piano by Steve Sterner, and translations of the
German intertitles were read with skill by someone whose name I didn't catch.
15 September 2004
The Film Forum's Murnau festival continued Wednesday night with "Phantom" (from 1922) and Janet Bergstrom's
documentary about "Four Devils" (a lost film from 1928).
Based on what I'd seen of his work up to Wednesday, I would have said that Murnau was incapable of making an outright
dud of a movie . . . but he was a genius -- he could do anything, apparently -- and in "Phantom" he proved it. It's
an outright dud.
Formally it's crafted in the tasteful, unimaginative style of "The Haunted Castle". There is one memorable image
in a dream sequence -- as the shadow of a falling building pursues the tormented hero -- and the exteriors of a quaint old
town are photographed with charm, recalling the light of Atget's urban studies, with their stereometric precision. There are
a few dynamic shots of antics at decadent parties and nightclubs. But in general the visual style is repressed. Maybe Murnau
used up his yearly supply of plastic inventiveness on "Nosferatu", also made in 1922.
The movie is based on a novel by Gerhart Hauptman, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1912. Gerhart appears in
a prologue to the film, walking down a country lane, then gazing about the landscape with pompous gravity. Perhaps he was
a fine writer, though it's hard to imagine any version of the story of this film which wouldn't be ridiculous. The narrative
implausibility is not helped by the casting here. The film shows us an older married man troubled by memories of his youth.
His wife suggests he write about it, to ease his mind, and as he begins to do so we flash back to the years he's recalling,
the body of the film's narrative. But the same middle-aged actor is cast as the writer when young -- a miscalculation which
the film never recovers from. It just doesn't make sense, and neither does much else in the tale.
The middle-aged actor plays an idealistic youth who catches a brief glimpse of a beautiful women when her carriage knocks
him down in the street one day. He becomes obsessed with her, loses his job and his scruples, meets another woman who looks
like his "phantom" and squanders part of his aunt's fortune keeping this second woman as his mistress, which eventually
lands him in jail.
The Film Forum program notes indicate that the "phantom", played in both incarnations by Lya de Putti, is scamming
the old boy in collaboration with his aunt, but this is never made clear in the film itself -- not that anyone could possibly
care.
One always suspects that Murnau is working with tongue in cheek when he takes on material like this -- subverting it by
taking its preposterous twists and turns a bit TOO seriously. This suspicion is partly confirmed here, when one of the "youth's"
disreputable companions says, "With the right costumes we could put on a pretty good melodrama." In fact there's
nothing wrong with the costumes here, but little right with any of the rest of it.
I personally don't get Lya de Putti. She has a wonderful iconic face in stills, and sometimes in stasis on moving picture
film, but she doesn't move well -- her plump pear-shaped body never suggests sensuality to me, although de Putti postures
as though it might suggest something of the sort to somebody. I really can't imagine why she became a star.
Lil Dagover, without much to do as the "youth's" true-hearted admirer, is briefly charming.
Janet Bergstrom has made a straightforward no-frills documentary called "Four Devils: Traces Of A Lost Film"
about Murnau's most famous vanished work. She uses production stills and drawings, surviving treatment and script drafts,
intertitle lists and reviews of the time to try and give us a sense of what the film was like.
From the evidence it seems to have been a charming, visually elaborate fable about four orphaned kids who grow up together
in the circus and eventually perform together as a team of high-flying acrobats called "The Four Devils". Janet
Gaynor, the only major star in the picture, loves one of the other guys in the act, but he's seduced away from her and the
circus by an aristocratic vamp -- a familiar enough Murnau theme.
The movie originally had a spectacular tragic ending, but a happy one was substituted by Murnau before its premiere (as
a silent film.) For reasons that Bergstrom cannot identify -- perhaps they are simply not known -- Murnau and Fox were becoming
disenchanted with each other after "Sunrise". "Four Devils" was reworked extensively for a sound release
without Murnau's participation -- the story was changed, long talking sequences were shot and the ending was modified yet
again. The result seems to have been far inferior to Murnau's original silent version, even as amended by the happy ending
he shot.
All versions of the film have been lost.
Some reviewers of the time found the film emotionally unconvincing -- it seems to have offered the same sort of simple-minded
moralizing that bothers many people in "Sunrise" -- but the film's cinematography was nominated for an Academy Award
and the atmospheric sketches of various scenes by the film's designer and descriptions of some of the moving camera shots
suggest that it was a visual feast. One suspects that Murnau's plastic imagination may have invested the modest tale with
mythic dimensions which no plot summary could ever convey -- as no plot summary can ever convey the power of "Sunrise".
The milieu of the circus strikes me as a rich subject for Murnau's eye -- and the thought of what images might have vanished
forever with the last print of this film is heartbreaking.
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