F.W. Murnau

En el presente escrito se analiza la ambigüedad que presenta el expresionismo como movimiento de vanguardia y los conflictos estilísticos de cine expresionista alemán, dando cuenta de la potente influencia que tiene el romanticismo alemán en dicha corriente.

This article argues that the camera is a protean, mutable figure, and investigates the power of moving image sequences to perform aspects of this multifaceted apparatus. By comparing the technical characteristics of the hand-held camera, the Steadicam, and the virtual camera to their aesthetic performance on screen, this paper offers an interpretation that underlines the influence of filmmakers and technicians in producing particular camera movement effects. Analyses of virtuosic camera movements in The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924), Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) serve to illustrate the protean nature of the camera by highlighting how films can put on display different facets of these camera movement technologies. Finally, this paper gestures towards the importance of engaging with the work performed by camera operators and technicians behind these machines, which plays a key role in producing these effects on screen.

The film “Der Letzte Mann” (the English title is: “The Last Laugh”) is one of F.W. Murnau’s best known films. It is a German black and white silent film released in 1924. The plot is all about an old man with a prestigious job as a hotel doorman who ends up working in the lavatory losing his social status.
The film belongs in the German Expressionistic Cinema and has the specific “dark” atmosphere of almost every Murnau film. But this film has a very important innovation that distinguishes it from every other silent film of its era. It is the only one without intertitles. This is crucial if we can understand that since dialogue was absent it was very difficult to make a film coherent and easily understandable by the audience.
Thus, the aim of this essay is to analyze the different techniques Murnau used to make the film actually have a “dialogue” without the use of sound or titles and how this was perceived by the different audiences and as well by the promotion companies.

The final shot of German director F. W. Murnau’s 1931 masterpiece, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, is an especially suitable coda to this silent-era filmmaker’s career – one that, despite its epic heights and lasting influence, was often shrouded in mystery and coloured by misfortune. The four-letter word ‘TABU’ materializes like a spectral apparition over dark and ominous swells, appearing as an esoteric warning against forbidden transgressions (Figure 1). Before one’s eyes the word transforms from mere text into a veritable icon, a cinematic image of impending doom and inescapable destiny. The portentous icon immediately follows the film’s dramatic finale, one that film critic Lotte Eisner called ‘the apogee of the art of silent film’ (Eisner 1973: 203). In this scene, the young protagonist, the native South Islander Matahi, swims after a ship bearing his forbidden love. Just as Matahi finally reaches the boat, Hitu, the priest, cuts the rope dangling from its deck. Ultimately overwhelmed by a dark and hostile sea, Matahi sinks silently beneath its waves as the ship’s white sail can be seen darting off into the distance...

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5000 word essay in: W. Hughes, D. Punter & A. Smith eds, Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic 2 vols. (London: Wiley-Blackwell 2012). (Other entries: David Cronenberg; Hammer Films; W.H. Ainsworth; Thomas De Quincey; John Polidori; Regency Tales of Terror; Monster Movies; Richard Matheson.) This is an historical overview of the form from early European and American silent adaptations of Gothic novels and Victorian theatre to the hyper-real twenty-first century Hollywood product, via Expressionism, Universal Studios, Hammer Films, Mario Bava, and Roger Corman’s ‘Poe Cycle’ for American International. The full entry includes close readings of Robert Weine’s influential and often imitated Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), and James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The paper also considers period revivals such as Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Kenneth Branagh (1994), as well as more contemporary Gothic film, in particular the current trend for franchised vampires. I conclude that the synergy of the literary gothic, stage melodrama, and Expressionism that characterises Gothic film now finds its purest form in the films of Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro.

es un referente a nivel internacional de la restauración fílmica. Además de ser un gran investigador e historiador del cine mudo, Berriatúa es en la actualidad uno de los mayores conocedores de la obra de F. W. Murnau. A través de sus diferentes libros, monografías y restauraciones, tenemos acceso a muchos materiales en español sobre el trabajo de Murnau. Berriatúa llegó al mundo de la restauración cinematográfica simplemente porque le interesaba ver las películas tal y como eran y no como muchas veces se comercializan: «Para mí, restaurar es poder presentar la película como se vio y como era en su día, no mejorar, ni cambiar. Creo que estas modificaciones son falsificaciones y operaciones comerciales» (1). Partiendo de esta afirmación fue precisamente como comenzó nuestra conversación que acabó derivando en muchos otros aspectos.

Jan Svankmajer’s cinematic animation of puppets and use of life-sized puppets renders a situation where animated objects have a dominant function that is separate from their pragmatic function. This plurality of function constitutes dynamic characteristics for the object whereby the object has an ambivalent status at the semiotic level – the object can also be a subject. Cinematic animation and cinema specific properties and techniques such as editing, framing or superimposition foreground this plurality of an object’s function by altering its spatiotemporal context and allowing it to be liberated from its recognition as a prop of the mise-en-scene. The Faust tradition foregrounds the plurality of function for the object most near and dear to us – our bodies – when Faust challenges the supernatural world into manipulating the body’s natural relationship with the course of time. Svankmajer’s Lesson Faust (1994) adeptly negotiates the complexities of a discourse on the dramatic and semiological process of objects becoming subjects (and vice-versa) while foregrounding the ambivalence surrounding such ‘transformations’. Cinematic animation (technological), puppets (material) and the Faust tradition (narrative) can each be demonstrated as modes of presentation which actively endow objects with dominant functions separate from their pragmatic function thus creating ambivalence for the object at the semiotic level.

A comparison between the release of SUNRISE in New York and then in LA, the first with a Movietone sound/effects track, preceded by a long talking Mussolini newsfilm, the second the "silent" version, with prologue, music and all else in keeping with the mood of Murnau's film.  Questions about executive decision-making and the relative importance of the Movietone system per se vs. SUNRISE as Wm Fox's investment in prestige cinema.  A study in promotion, distribution, exhibition, technology, context, international travels of movie personnel, mysteries of the very early recording of sound/effects tracks for Fox, dual-version films, and conflicts with Wm. Fox-Murnau's aspirations toward furthering film as an art form, highlighting questions as yet unanswered regarding  a much-studied, classic film

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern fiction and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. From Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen and Charlie Chaplin, from the ecstatic Waldorf to the ephemeral Ritz, from upstate New York to the Italian Riviera, the book considers the effects of hotel space on bodies, selves and communities.

"The renaissance of silent film studies that started more than thirty years ago had only a minor impact on film music theory. Discourses on silent film music are usually part of vaster works on music in cinema, where one can read that «almost nothing has changed from the beginnings to present days»  in the general way in which music interacts with moving images. Silent film music has often been considered just as a vehicle of a “primitive” audiovisual aesthetic, waiting for the “evolution” into sound film music.

It is possible to prove, on the contrary, how silent film music triggers unique audiovisual functions, that cannot find a place in sound cinema. There are at least two peculiar audiovisual strategies: a “bridge” function, that is born from the improvisational nature of silent film music practice, and a “meta-diegetic” function, which takes advantage of the impossibility to hear the sounds of the world which seems to be beyond the silver screen.

The two strategies will be studied by a succinct review of the literature that already acknowledged their existence, mostly in an indirect way (from Ricciotto Canudo to Sebastiano Arturo Luciani, Edith Lang and George West). Examples of these strategies will be given by quoting historical musical illustrations of silents (like the one by Hugo Riesenfeld for Cecil B. DeMille’s Carmen, 1915) as well as from contemporary ones (e. g. Neil Brand’s 2004 music for The Cat and the Canary, Paul Leni, 1927).
"

Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu has a screenplay by Henrik Galeen, based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hans Erdmann composed the original music, which received mixed reviews when it was first presented in Berlin in the 1920s. Eighty years later, at least ten other music accompaniments have been composed. Why should anyone want to make yet another score to this film?

This article proposes the concept of vampiric love as love of the dreaded thing. Through an analysis of F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, I show how vampiric love is love turned back on itself to threaten the communal bond with its own excess. Through an act of sacrifice, catastrophe is averted and the community saved in leaping from dread to love. Drawing on Derrida's idea of autoimmunization as well as Hägglund's idea of secular love, the article examines vampiric love as an autoimmunization of the biopolitical community - an attack upon itself - that exposes the communal organism to death and chance as salvation from dread. The autoimmune process is traced back to Romantic yearning for impossibly lost love and its flipside in Gothic dread in Polidori's 1819 short story The Vampyre, where the outlines of the autoimmune process can be clearly seen. Employing Kierkegaard's concept of dread, I undertake an analysis of the sacrificial logic at work in Nosferatu. where dread must be passed through in an awakening of the spirit to possibility; a process enfolded into the performativity of the film itself in an autoimmune attack on its own formal system.

Segunda Parte de la conversación con el realizador y restaurador Luciano Berriatúa ¿Cómo consigue financiación para restaurar las películas?, ¿Cómo se inició en ese mundo de la conservación de archivos? Yo trabajo para archivos, y los archivos tienen, al igual que los museos de arte, la responsabilidad de preservar el patrimonio. Empecé en el año 77 con la película Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1921), así que estaba medio asociado con Enno Patalas (1). Yo no soy restaurador, quiero decir, me dedico a eso pero entre otros miles de cosas, hago películas de animación, películas documentales para DVD y la restauración no me interesa en si. Con esto quiero decir que lo que me interesa es ver las películas como eran porque estoy harto de ver las películas falsificadas. Por ejemplo, el cine mudo se veía durante muchos años en blanco y negro, en copias que eran copias de copias, de copias con los rótulos que no eran los originales y que podían ser la traducción de la traducción de una traducción incompleta de cuatro países, sin las músicas. Entonces en el caso de Murnau, como a mi me gustaba muchísimo, empecé a estudiarle como realizador para aprender sus técnicas de rodaje. Lo que me empecé a encontrar es que sobre Nosferatu, Lotte Eisner decía que había escenas que no se habían rodado nunca y en una moviola podía verlas ante mi (2). Me pasaban cosas de ese estilo, así que, a partir de ahí me planteé la restauración para ver como era originalmente la película. La primera restauración importante que hicimos fue el Fausto (F.W. Murnau, 1926) dentro del Proyecto Lumiere de la Union Europea que da dinero para una restauración en la que intervengan tres archivos, y estos fueron: la Filmoteca española, la filmoteca danesa de Copenhage (Det Danske Filmmuseum) y hacia falta una alemana, sin embargo, la Murnau Stiftung (Fundación Murnau) no quiso intervenir, entonces intervino el DIF (Deutsches Filminstitut). Leí que hubo problemas con la restauración de Fausto... Cuando sacamos Fausto lo que hizo la Murnau Stiftung fue boicotearla e impedir que se pasase en Berlín. Ellos decían que como había unos españoles que estaban interviniendo en Fausto, que no hacia falta que se restaurase, ya que había un negativo original perfecto. El "negativo original perfecto" era uno horrible, pero como tenía los rótulos en alemán, era mas largo. Entonces cuando Faust ya estaba en el catalogo de la Berlinale (3), con la música y la orquesta, de pronto la Berlinale nos comunica que aún estando en el catálogo no la pueden pasar en la sala porque la Murnau Stiftung lo ha prohibido, pues ellos tienen los derechos de la película y también son ellos quienes suministran todos los clásicos a la Berlinale (4), nos dicen que lo sienten mucho pero no pueden hacer nada por nosotros, entonces lo que hace Berndt Heller, el músico, es alquilar una sala de conciertos justo frente a la Berlinale y allí pasamos el Fausto. Entró toda la gente de la Berlinale a verlo, puesto que estaba anunciado en el catálogo y en los carteles que ponemos en la Berlinale. Durante tres o cuatro años la Murnau Stiftung prohibió que la película se viese y al cabo de cuatro años de discusiones, lo que hizo fue comprarla, pagando cuatro veces más de lo que DVD de la restauración de Faust de la Murnau Stiftung

Lecture for Il Caffè, Ghent, 2 March 2018.
***
Giuseppe Becce è un personaggio pieno di paradossi: collaboratore, da compositore come anche da attore, di Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene e Leni Riefenstahl, i più famosi registi del suo tempo. Oggi il suo nome è totalmente sconosciuto; emigrato a Berlino (per motivi di carriera), nella patria fu condannato a morte; in pieno modernismo ed espressionismo degli anni 20 del cinema tedesco, continuò ad operare uno stilo romantico tardivo (per non dire ‘in ritardo’).
Questa figura emminente del periodo tra le due guerre, vi sarà presentata in questa conferenza su base di frammenti musicali e cinematografici.
***
Giuseppe Becce is een personage vol paradoxen. Omdat zijn naam vandaag niet langer bekend is, terwijl hij als componist (en acteur!) wel met de grootste filmregisseurs van zijn tijd samenwerkte – Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene en Leni Riefenstahl. Omdat hij als Italiaan emigreerde naar Berlijn om daar carrière te maken, en daarna in zijn thuisland ter dood werd veroordeeld. Omdat hij ondanks alle modernisme en expressionisme in de film van de jaren 1920 eigenlijk in een laat- (of zelfs ‘verlate’) romantische stijl bleef componeren.
Aan de hand van muziek- en beeldfragmenten laat deze lezing u kennismaken met deze eminente figuur uit het interbellum.

This chapter addresses questions about mediation of cultural memory. Taking an intertextual approach to traveling words and images, it aims to bring into conversation the archive of (post)colonial history with artistic and activist interventions in debates on migration and citizenship in contemporary Germany and Europe. In response to such debates and dominant media practices, the transethnic activist network Kanak Attack produced provocative video spots that employ reverse ethnography in pubic places to expose people's commonplace assumptions and unsettle binaries between the indigenous and the foreign. Such spirited reversals of the ethnographic gaze call for an investigation of the group's name. The submerged colonial baggage inherent in the word "Kanak" points to a taboo in memorial culture in and beyond Germany. Taking a Freudian approach to the notion of the "Taboo," I propose that F.W. Murnau's film "Tabu: A Story of the South Seas" (1931) offers a complex critique of the complicit forces of economy, governmentality, and ritual in the "contact zone" that begs to be brought to resonance in counter-media practices. In conclusion, I would like to propose a critique of presentist culturalism and promote creative uses of the visual archive at the intersections of activist intervention and academic research that illuminate representational regimes concerning migrant as well as native populations and that inspire us to rethink categories of colonial memory, postcolonial critique, and global circulation.

Em 1927 os realizadores alemães F.W. Murnau e Paul Leni chegaram aos EUA,
contratados pelos estúdios FOX e Universal, respetivamente. Graças a filmes como
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1928) e The Cat and the Canary (P. Leni, 1928), os dois
cineastas introduziram um estilo “expressionista” cujo formalismo, apesar de
contrário ao estilo clássico hollywoodiano, exerceu uma profunda influência em
cineastas norte-americanos como Frank Borzage, John Ford e Raoul Walsh.

This essay explores how Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic silent film Sunrise (1927) participates in discourses of modernity in the mid- to late-1920s. It shows that the film – against many prior interpretations – can be read as a timely contribution to specific US-American debates: discourses about the big city, the new consumer society, tourism, the emancipation of the New Woman, and changing morals. The film thus documents in audiovisual form a discontent with rapid modernization – a discontent the film mitigates in dialectical form.

El  compositor  Pablo  Sorozábal  fue  uno  de  los  últimos  y  más  destacados  cultivadores  de  la  tradición  teatral  lírica  española.  Sin  embargo,  su  labor  en  este  campo  se  desarrolló  en  una  época en que los géneros tradicionales (opereta, zarzuela, ópera) acusaban ya una creciente pérdida de vitalidad frente a la generalización de nuevas formas de entretenimiento como el cine, la radio o el jazz. En medio de esta crisis, el músico fue generalmente reconocido, desde sus inicios, como uno de los más audaces del panorama lírico contemporáneo. En concreto, un análisis del lenguaje dramatúrgico y musical de este repertorio revela ciertas influencias, referencias  y  paralelismos  cinematográficos.  A  su  vez,  un  repaso  del  exiguo  catálogo  de  música para el cine firmado por Sorozábal corrobora su inequívoca vocación lírica y teatral, más allá de modas y consideraciones mercantiles.

Pablo  Sorozábal  was  one  of  the  latest  and most outstanding composers  in  the  tradition  of  Spanish  musical  theatre.  Nevertheless,  his  theatrical  work  was  developed  in  an  age  when  traditional genres (operetta, zarzuela, opera) showed an increasing loss of vitality, opposite to the spread of new entertaining and cultural means, such as cinema, radio and jazz. In this * Este trabajo se enmarca en las actuaciones del proyecto de I+D Música en los márgenes. Diálogos y transferencias entre España y las Américas (siglos XIX y XX) (HAR2015-64285-C2-2-P) de la Universidad Complutense  de  Madrid,  financiado  por  el  Ministeriode  Economía  y  Competitividad.  Una  versiónpreliminar y parcial del mismo fue presentada de forma oral en el Symposium Internacional “Entre la escena y la gran pantalla” (Universidad de Oviedo, 19-21 de junio de 2014). 
Síneris. Revista de música, nº 36 (marzo de 2020)2 critical context, Sorozábal was soon acknowledged as one of the most progressive and boldstage composers of his time. In fact, an analysis of the dramaturgical and musical features of his lyrical repertoire reveals some links, allusions and similarities to cinematic models. On the other hand, a review on Sorozábal’s scant movie soundtracks confirms his inmost preference for lyrical and theatrical fields, beyond trends and commercial interest.

Schloß Vogelöd è il film che precede Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie desGrauens (Nosferatu, 1921). Appartiene a quella serie di opere meno conosciute del regista tedesco risalenti al periodo in cui è sotto contratto
con la Decla-Bioscop, anni durante i quali, nonostante il successo di film come Der Gang in die Nacht (Il cammino della notte, 1920), non viene ancora ritenuto dalla critica un grande artista bensì solo un’interessante e promettente giovane di talento.

Cet article explique comment les thèmes de la catastrophe et de la tragédie ont suivi l’évolution du récit cinématographique et en ont été transformés, à partir d’études sur les films "Intolérance" de D.W. Griffith et "Aurora" de F.W. Murnau. Publié dans Le livre de L'Harmattan: L'Imaginaire de la catastrophe dans la communication et les arts.

This article discusses how the themes of catastrophe and tragedy followed the development of film narrative and were transformed by it, from studies on the films "Intolerance" by D.W. Griffith, and "Sunrise" by F.W. Murnau. Published in the book L'Imaginaire de la Catastrophe dans la Communication et les Arts, by L'Harmattan.

Este artigo fala sobre como os temas da catástrofe e da tragédia acompanharam o desenvolvimento da narrativa cinematográfica e foram transformados por ela, a partir de estudos a respeito dos filmes “Intolerância”, de D.W. Griffith, e “Aurora”, de F.W. Murnau. Publicado no livro L’Imaginaire de la Catastrophe dans la Communication et les Arts, da L’Harmattan.

Sunrise was made toward the end of the era in which in-camera “special effects” – achieved through the co-cinematographers’ close collaboration with the director and the architect/art director – were about to give way to effects “specialists,” then to special effects departments, and then to optical printing. During the late 1920s cinematographers in the US and in Germany protested that they should be supervising outside specialists. One of the most famous effects shots in Sunrise employs an outside specialist’s process. Questioning that shot can draw attention to many other kinds of special effects throughout the film. This paper is about the achievement and function of specific shots as well as the larger debate. That debate is not so different from recent arguments about who should control the final look of a film, digital intermediate specialists or the cinematographer and director.

BIOBIBLIOGRAPHIE / BIO

Janet Bergstrom, Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, UCLA, specializes in archivally-based, cross-national studies of émigré directors such as Murnau, Renoir, Lang and Sternberg. She pursues the same approach in documentaries created for DVD – Murnau’s 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film (Twentieth Century Fox), Introduction to Phantom (Flicker Alley), Murnau and Borzage at Fox: The Expressionist Heritage (Editions Filmmuseum) and Sternberg’s Underworld: How It Came to Be (Criterion). She is currently working on a monograph on Sunrise and a book on “Murnau in America”.