MURNAU, FRIEDRICH WILHELM

Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm: translation

born Plumpe (1888-1931)

film* director; with Fritz Lang,* Germany's finest maker of silent films. He was born to prosperous circumstances in Bielefeld; his father, owner of a thriving textile factory, moved the family to a country estate near Kassel when Murnau was seven. When business failure took the family s fortune, the estate was sold and the family moved to Kassel. With sibling help, Murnau constructed a chamber theater* that staged Sunday performances. After Gymnasium he studied at Hei-delberg. While acting locally, he was seen by Max Reinhardt,* who invited him to join hisDeutsches Theaterin Berlin.* Welcoming the offer, Murnau at-tempted to maintain his studies, but adopted the name Murnau in 1909 to pre-clude his father discovering what he was doing. The ploy failed when a family friend saw him on stage; disinherited, he relied thereafter upon his maternal grandfather for funding. After university he joined Reinhardt as an assistant director. Serving during the war in the flying corps, he was forced by a fog to land in Switzerland and in 1917 was interned for the war's duration. He was allowed, however, to direct stage productions while he compiled propaganda films for the German embassy in Bern. The propaganda work enticed Murnau to film.

After the war Murnau returned to Berlin and, with actor Conrad Veidt,* formed theMurnau-Veidt Filmgesellschaft. His first production wasDer Knabe in Blau(The boy in blue), a 1919 melodrama inspired by Gainsborough's paint-ing and Oscar Wilde'sPicture of Dorian Gray. He rapidly produced twenty more films, nine of which have been lost.Satanas, another 1919 endeavor, was written by Robert Wiene (director ofThe Cabinet of Dr.Caligari*) and featured Veidt as the devil.Der Bucklige und die Tanzerin(The hunchback and the dancer) followed in 1920 and initiated his collaboration with Carl Mayer.The first of his surviving films wasDer Gang in die Nacht(Journey into the night, 1920), a tragic story, scripted by Mayer, of a doctor who loses his wife to a painter whom he cures of blindness. His best-known silent film wasNosferatu(1922), a chilly version of Bram Stoker sDracula.

Murnau was unsurpassed in the use of evocative symbols.Der letzte Mann(in English,Last Laugh), released during the 1924 currency stabilization, estab-lished his international reputation and inspired his later departure for Hollywood. Making use of a steadily moving camera, the film, which features the social collapse of a uniformed hotel doorman (Emil Jannings*), was the first Murnau directed for UFA.* Erich Pommer, who headed UFA at the time, soon assigned Murnau two big-budget films:Tartuff(1925), an adaptation of Moliere's satire on religious hypocrisy; andFaust, a controversial rendition of Goethe s classic. Both were enormous commercial successes.

Faustwas Murnau's final German film. In 1926 he was in America working for William Fox onSunrise(scripted by Mayer); the film won three Academy Awards in 1927 and was hailed as a masterpiece. Following two more films, Murnau broke his contract with Fox in 1929. In a collaborative effort with Robert Flaherty, he filmedTabu, a tragedy of forbidden love between two native islanders in the South Pacific.

Murnau died in an automobile accident in March 1931, a week before the opening ofTabu. It is difficult to assess how his career might have progressed. Because he was consistently imposing European values on his work and, as critic Lotte Eisner remarked, struggling with "a world in which he remained despairingly alien, his disposition would have provoked constant problems in Hollywood (Wakeman). This aside, Eisner judged him "the greatest film-director the Germans have ever known.