Another talented chip off the German Expressionist block, F. W. Murnau had a penchant for horror. With "Nosferatu" (1922) he brought the first of countless Count Dracula stories to cinematic light. Murnau made his Dracula as hideous, doomed, and gloomy as...
[more]Another talented chip off the German Expressionist block, F. W. Murnau had a penchant for horror. With "Nosferatu" (1922) he brought the first of countless Count Dracula stories to cinematic light. Murnau made his Dracula as hideous, doomed, and gloomy as later incarnations are suave, elegant, and tasteful. His heightened sets and shadowy exteriors mirror the moods of the film's human subjects. "Faust" (1926), another excursion into human darkness, tells its legendary tale in scenes of almost reverent beauty.
In Hollywood, Murnau replicated the elaborate exteriors of his German productions. "Sunrise" (1927), his first American film, reflects this romantic preoccupation with place: "It is difficult to recall another film that has so many complicated, multidirectional movements, particularly those of the city scenes," observes film historian John Fell.
Murnau's constantly moving camera faithfully depicts altered states of mind. He was a pioneer of the visual effect, rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst for the title of Germany's greatest director of the silent era. Trained as an art historian, Murnau based his highly stylized images on the painting of the Romantic, Impressionist, and German Expressionist movements, yet his work also betrays a repulsion towards the spiritual heavy-handedness of Expressionism's weaker moments. His regular collaboration with cinematographer Karl Freund resulted in some of the most flawless and fantastic images in all of cinematic history.
Murnau labored unceasingly to produce a cinema with its own vocabulary of images and to rid the art of the titles, theatrical histrionics, and visual shorthand that were gimmicks of the stage. Though most of Murnau's work is lost, what films do survive remain a potent reminder of the pure visual power of the cinema. Speaking about his last film, "Tabu," filmed in Tahiti, a painterly playground if ever there was one, Murnau summed up his artistic credo: "I like the reality of things, but not without fantasy."
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