F.W. Murnau’s Wondrous Romance of Space & Light
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“Who is the greatest filmmaker of all time?” A ridiculous question, when you get down to it. But 100 years into the history of the art form, it is worth considering who on earth would have the necessary credentials to fill the position. Perhaps the least ridiculous answer, the only name that begins to approach plausibility, is Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.
It is doubtful anyone has ever moved the camera through space more expressively than Murnau. He envisioned cinema as “the fluid architecture of bodies with blood in their veins moving through mobile space,” in which the camera would ideally become an instrument so sensitive as to catch “the most fleeting harmony of atmosphere.” In Mephistopheles’s flight over the small town in “Faust” (September 20) or the amazingly varied textures of light and shadow in his final, independently made masterpiece “Tabu” (September 19-20), Murnau made his own dream of cinema come true. The greatest passages in his work quiver with beauty, as the meeting ground between vision, space, and human experience becomes erotically charged.
If you’re a New Yorker who really cares about movies, then from September 10-20 Film Forum is the only place to be. Everything in this series, from “Journey into the Night” (September 13), the earliest surviving film, to “City Girl” (September 19-20), damaged by studio interference but still extraordinary, is worthy of your rapt attention.
The preternaturally sensitive aesthete from Westphalia was born three days after Christmas in 1888 as Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (somewhere along the line, he renamed himself after the Bavarian town of Murnau). A devotee of theater, literature, and the fine arts from an early age, Murnau was plucked from his studies at Heidelberg by Expressionist stage pioneer Max Reinhardt, and it was during his time on tour with Reinhardt’s company that his interest shifted from acting to directing.
During a lengthy stint in the German army and air force during World War I, Murnau took his first step into movies, collecting propaganda for the German Embassy in Switzerland. As soon as he was demobilized, Murnau plunged into filmmaking, forming his own production company with some of his old Reinhardt-era colleagues, including Conrad Veidt.
Few of Murnau’s early films have survived, but the ones that are still with us provide evidence of a uniquely rarefied, visionary sensibility right out of the gate. As you follow his career, you see him moving away from a heavily designed and blatantly expressionist visual style – one that owes no small debt to Reinhardt – to what can only be called a wondrous romance with space and light.
In his mature phase, Murnau made three of the most influential films in the history of the medium. “Nosferatu” (September 17-18), his unofficial 1922 version of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” was suppressed for years by Stoker’s estate. Some 80 years later, when the Dracula character has been subjected to Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and countless revisionist assaults – not to mention face-offs with everyone from Billy the Kid to Abbott and Costello – Murnau’s original film version stands like a lone Redwood amidst a forest of fir trees. It’s the only version of the story with a sense of truly bottomless dread.
“The Last Laugh” (September 17-18), starring Emil Jannings (formerly known, now somewhat improbably, as the greatest actor in movies), was once celebrated for its “liberated” camera, employed to dramatize the inner life of a proud Berlin hotel doorman demoted to washroom attendant. In retrospect, this overly schematic but still impressive 1925 classic prefigures the humanist simplicity of the neorealist movement, particularly such films as “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.”
In any discussion of Murnau, however, all roads lead back to “Sunrise.” The first film he made in Hollywood and the last over which he exercised complete control (like Orson Welles 14 years later, he had the reins yanked away from him after his critical success failed to translate into box-office dollars), “Sunrise” remains a breathtaking achievement.
It is often said that this “song of two humans,” the simple tale of a peasant who regains his love for his virtuous wife after nearly succumbing to the lures of the city, was a European film made in Hollywood. Yet what makes “Sunrise” so wondrous is the fact that it’s 100% Murnau. Liberated from the intensely competitive atmosphere of UFA (at Murnau’s funeral, Fritz Lang prefaced his eulogy by referring to the deceased as his former adversary) and momentarily free of executive interference, Murnau was able to reshoot to his heart’s content and invent his own poetic film grammar from the ground up.
Everything in “Sunrise,” from the gorgeously designed city to the ineffable beauty of Janet Gaynor’s face, seems new born, as if the world were being seen for the first time. In its celebrated tramway sequence, where movement through space harmonizes with the couple’s wordless reconciliation, Murnau and his camera seem to be bearing their way toward the poetic heart of cinema. Like “Citizen Kane,” “Sunrise” had an incalculable effect on American moviemaking. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest films ever made.
Murnau was killed at the age of 42, thrown from a speeding car just outside Santa Barbara. It was a merciful end, in a way, as he couldn’t have borne to see the art form he had helped bring to life wrenched away from the nurturing embrace of silence. “Here are the talkies and the camera is forgotten while people rack their brains about how to use the microphone,” he wrote in a letter to his mother from the Tahitian set of “Tabu.”
In the 70-plus years since Murnau, has the cinema advanced? Technologically it has, but artistically? We’ve had Welles and Renoir, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, “2001” and “Raging Bull.” But nothing to compare with the finest moments of Murnau. Go to Film Forum, see for yourself. For the next 10 days, at least, Murnau lives.