I recently saw F. W. Murnau’s Faust and I want to write about it while the feelings are white hot. That makes for a very poor introduction to one of the worlds great filmmakers but we will pick up background later. “Faust” made in 1926 is silent, but it speaks volumes. Mephistopheles is not your cynical devil with all the good lines. He is pure evil. He is infinitely closer to Murnau’s “Nosferatu” the vampire than Gounod’s clever rogue. Emil Janning’s who was often Murnau’s star plays the part. I can still see any actor angling for the part, not for all the clever lines, but to breathe fire. In Goethe and Gounod, Mephisto causes many problems, but they grow out of the situations he and Faust are in. This Mephisto revels in causing misery. In fact, in the film, Faust accuses him of breaking the compact to do his bidding on earth and of failing to make him happy here. For the first time, I had the realization that from a legal point of view, let alone a moral point of view, Mephistopheles has no right to Faust’s soul. This devil stinks of hell and all the perfumes of Araby cannot disguise that. This, and this above all, distinguishes Murnau’s “Faust” from all those who have gone before him.
Murnau also manages to pull an amazing switch which also distinguishes his “Faust”. In the beginning you not only have the world weary “Faust,” but you have the failing “Faust.” We see Faust in the middle of a plague with people begging him to save them. He tries his medicine on a plague victim and she instantly dies. At this point Faust is both losing faith in God and is feeling utterly worthless, but he is not seeking anything for himself, let alone youth, and wham bang Mephistophele’s tests him with a mirror showing him young, and a Gretchen waiting. Faust actually takes a twenty-four hour option, but be soon resigns himself. Now if Murnau was famous for anything it was his use of light and shadow, black and white, and what is filmically called chiaroscuro. “Faust” abounds in the vinues of chiaroscuro.
Let’s digress here to give a plug to a private vendor. The Cinematheque video store on 7th Avenue has “Faust.” They also have a fine foreign film collection that bears support. There is a five dollar membership fee, but that’s for a photo membership card. The hardest, thing for me is getting back and forth to Park Slope because unlike libraries you don’t get a week to view.
Back to Murnau. It seems that be likes to put a hideous face on evil. His Nosferatu is horrible, not your Bela Lugosi in tails. It also isn’t reverse eroticism. You don’t want “Nosferatu” to suck your blood. Even later in his masterpieces you never just get plain people, but types. The characters don’t even have names. You get ‘Toe man.” “The woman,” and “The Vamp.” The Vamp is the temptress, the mephisto, and the Nosferatu. Perhaps there is a bit of the erotic. We mankind, but men more particularly, cannot resist their blandishments. By the way “The man.” “The woman” and “The Vamp” refer to “Sunrise.” Murnau’s first Hollywood masterpiece.
Who was Murnau? What materials do I have? Obviously, Murnau was a film director. He, like Lang and Pabst, came out of the German cinema which was marked mainly by expressionism. Lotte Eisner, most famous for her critical biography of Fritz Lang, says: “Unlike Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst, the two other great directors of the German cinema, F.W. Murnau bas been mostly loved and admired by a specialist minority. His films are not widely known to a larger cinema public” I can buy that as to Lang, but I have trouble buying that as to Pabst. However, Lang lived long and made many films, Pabst less so, but Murnau died young at 42, and 9 of his 21 films are missing. Her book has some background as to Murnau’s life, but the film segments deal more with shot by shot analysis and script dissection than meaning. It is still vital to read for Murnau scholarship.
I have Sarris’s essay from “The American Cinema” and “From Caligari to Hitler” by Siegfried Kracauer. lncidentally, I hadn’t looked at my copy of the Kracauer years, and Out popped.an envelope with Fritz. Lang’s New York Times obituary. I have an old “Film Comment” devoted to Murnau, Welles and Ophuls. Seeing the films however is another problem. I covered “Faust” and where to get it; Grand Army has “Nosferatu.” After that you are on your own. Somehow on T.V. I’ve seen “The Last Laugh” and “Sunrise.” I have not seen “Tartuffe,” “Tabu,” “Our Daily Bread” and “City Girl.” The last three with “Sunrise” are Murnau’s Hollywood output. Molly Haskell (Mrs. Andrew Sarris) wrote the article on “Sunrise” to “Film Comment” When I studied with Andrew Sarris at the School of Visual Arts they were not even married, but they were going out. I estimate that was thirty-two years ago.
I usually give Sarris the last word, but-this time we’ll put him smack dab in the middle. First we will note that Sarris places Murnau in the Pantheon which is the highest category. Paraphrasing, he says that in “Faust” for a while the screen is dark. Then a candle materializes and then a man. The cinema of Murnau is how he lights that screen. I like that be chose “Faust” to make the point. Any director can light a screen, but only Murnau can do it this way. Quoting: “Murnau never really made the transition to the sound film, but it is difficult to see how his style could have been adversely affected by the elimination of titles as breaks in the continuousness of his visual field.” Whicb brings up the point that although “Tabu” had some music, it was basically a silent film. When I began to study film, I began with silent films. There used to be a program on T.V. “Silents Please.” Then I turned against silent films, The acting just seemed too exaggerated. Now I’m back to loving them. While I’m for all technological advances. as long as directors control its use; you have to remember that silents were a universal language. All you had to do is put the titles in whatever language the audience uses. With the coming of sound you had to use subtitles or dubbing. I know geniuses who will not read subtitles. Sarris says that Murnau saw silents as a universal language.
Lotte Eisner says that when Murnau was killed in a car accident, he was driving instead of his driver. Sarris calls Murnau suicidal. Evidently, in 1964 when her book came out it was still actionable to impute homosexuality to a man, but she says by rumor Murnau was homosexual. Eisner makes the point that of the big three of the German cinema only Murnau was German. Lang and Pabst were Austrian. Her book has no real biography, but there are three reminiscences by his brother, his mother, and a fellow officer that Murnau served with in World War I. I can’t tell you much about him from them except that Murnau had expensive tastes which were cultured and cultivated. In his youth he had girl friends. Many of his friends were Jewish. He was good in languages especially French. I can’t even tell you what, if anything, he did in the war. He apparently studied acting and his grandfather had to pay because his father wouldn’t.
Memory is a tricky thing. I thought Kracauer venerated Murnau, and I thought he really wanted to the point out in “From Caligari to Hitler”· that the Germans venerated the uniform and “The Last Langu” is most indicative of that. On re-reading, he seems to dislike rather venerate Murnau. He gives most of the credit for Murnau’s success to his scriptwriter Carl Mayer. He hasn’t that much to say other than the obvious about “The Last Laugh”. He deplores Murnau’s move to Hollywood and evidently has no respect for “Sunrise” or “Tahu.” I know Sarris thinks “From Caligari to Hitler” is after the fact sociology, but now I know that I think Kracauer knows nothing of a true auteur or the auteur theory. As to “Faust” he quotes, with approval, a reviewer who said: “We find ourselves descending from the masculine version of Marlowe and the philosophical concept of Goethe to the level of the libretto of Gounod.” Damn, he doesn’t know beans about good and evil and this is the man who says the early German cinema predicts the ultimate evil, Hitler. You’d be better off to read Parker Tyler’s account of “The Last Laugh” in “Classics of the Foreign Film.” Ironically, Hollywood could’ve had this film for a song and didn’t want it. Then they had to have Murnau after it’s release. It is the film that brought him to Hollywood even though it was not his last German film.
In “Film Comment” Gilbeno Perez Guillermo writes an overall article on Murnau before the individual articles. He takes Kracauer to task for not seeing Murnau as an auteur, but he also takes the Cahiers crew to task for venerating “Sunrise” over “The Last Laugh” because you must extend to all the work of an auteur. I agree! However, he then opts for “Nosferatu” as the Murnau par excellence. I’m not buying. He should have stuck with oeuvre. To know Murnau vou need to know all his work.
How about this guide from Haskell: “Sunrise” becomes the lyrical culmination of a strain of German Expressionism that, married to American technology, could almost serve as a definition of the cinema. She also takes Kracauer to task in the Mayer vs. Murnau controversy. At least Kracauer should have credited Murnau with unleashing the camera. While I’m bashing Kracauer let me remind myself that without him I’d never have learned about the German cinema. Robin Wood, who I deeply admire, wrote the article on “Tabu.”
Here Murnau with Flaherty married fiction to documentary on location in the South Seas. He says it is not about fiction and documentery and says it is about “an interior world of psychic conflict.” Good and evil, psychic conflict, lighting, camera movement, realism. on location; what more do you want? Murnau gave a lot to the cinema.