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Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

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F. W. Murnau.
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F. W. Murnau.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (December 28, 1888 – March 11, 1931) was one of the most influential directors of the silent film era. 


He was one of a number of German film directors to take part in the expressionist movement that took root in German cinema during the 1920s, and he directed a number of movies that were influential and remain widely seen among film scholars today. Some of Murnau's output from the silent era has been lost, although many of his films still survive; film scholars widely acknowledge them as masterpieces.





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Birth and early years

He was born as Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany. He attended the University of Heidelberg and studied art history. He took the name "Murnau" from a town in Germany. He was a combat pilot during World War I and directed his first film Der Knabe in Blau ('The Child in Blue') in 1919.



Nosferatu

Murnau's most famous film is Nosferatu, a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula that caused Stoker's estate to sue for copyright infringement. Murnau lost the lawsuit and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed, but bootleg prints were stored and preserved over time, so that Nosferatu is widely available in the present era. Werner Herzog remade the film in 1979. Nosferatu, subtextually, depicted demoralized Germany post World War I. The vampire, played by German stage actor Max Schreck, resembled a rat which was known to carry the plague. The origins of the word are unclear, but "Nosferatu" is similar sounding to the Greek "nosophoros", roughly translating to "plague-bearer".



The Last Laugh

Nearly as important as Nosferatu in Murnau's filmography was The Last Laugh ("Der Letzte Mann") (1925), written by Carl Mayer and starring Emil Jannings.  Often voted second greatest film of all time by international critics' polls, the film introduced the subjective point of view camera, where the camera "sees" from the eyes of a character and uses visual style to convey a character's psychological state. It also anticipated the cinéma vérité movement in its subject matter.



Hollywood

Murnau emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made Sunrise (1927), a movie often cited by film scholars as one of the greatest films of all time. Filmed in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system (music and sound effects only), Sunrise was a financial success and it received several Oscars at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1928. It lost the award for Best Picture to the movie Wings. Murnau's next two pictures, Four Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930), were modified to adapt to the new era of sound film and were not well received. No copy of Four Devils now exists. Their poor reception disillusioned Murnau, and he quit Fox to journey for a while in the South Pacific.



Documentary

Together with documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty Murnau travelled abroad to Bora Bora to realize the film Tabu in 1931. But Flaherty left after artistic disputes with Murnau who had to finish the movie on his own. Because of images of bare-breasted "native" Polynesian women the movie was censored in the US. The film was originally shot as half talkie, half silent, before being fully restored as a silent film - Murnau's preferred medium.  



Death

Murnau did not live to see the premiere of his last film; he died in an automobile accident in Santa Barbara, California on March 11, 1931.  The car was driven by Murnau's fourteen-year old Filipino valet Garcia Stevenson, and it was widely rumored (as written by Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon) that Murnau was performing fellatio on the young driver at the time of the accident.  Murnau was entombed in Berlin. Robert Flaherty, Emil Jannings and Greta Garbo attended the funeral, and Fritz Lang delivered the funeral speech.



Legacy

A fictionalized account of the making of the film Nosferatu was Shadow of the Vampire by director E. Elias Merhige.



Filmography:



External links






Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau






Der Knabe in Blau (1919) •
Der Januskopf (1920) •
Abend - Nacht - Morgen (1920) •
Satanas (1920) •
Sehnsucht (1920) •
Der Gang in die Nacht (1920) •
Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin (1920) •
Schloß Vogelöd (1921) •
Marizza (1922) •
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) •
Phantom (1922) •
Der Brennende Acker (1922) •
Die Austreibung (1923) •
Der Letzte Mann (1924) •
Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (1924) •
Herr Tartüff (1926) •
Faust (1926) •
Sunrise (1927) •
Four Devils (1928) •
City Girl (1930) •
Tabu (1931)



































 





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