Almost a phantom F.W. Murnau over Boston and Cambridge BY A.S. HAMRAH
	"Haunted Visions: The Films of F.W. Murnau" At the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive September 30 through October 13.

F.W. Murnau never made a talking picture (even D.W. Griffith made a couple), yet alone among the great directors who made only silent films he continues to compel. And not just to compel but to fascinate. Whereas we know Fritz Lang and Lubitsch, and Chaplin too, from their sound films as much as from their silents, Murnau is a pure expression of the silent cinema, one who predicted, or invented, the mise en scène of sound films, who in a way made sound films without sound. He strikes us as wholly modern in a way his contemporaries among the German Expressionists do not. In part, that’s because even his most studio-bound films are suffused with a real feeling for landscape and nature — they breathe, albeit an often pestilent air. And in part it’s because he died in a car accident in 1931, after striking out on his own in Tahiti, away from both Hollywood and Berlin. He never had a chance to decline.

Over seven decades, Murnau has followed the trajectory of our culture, sliding from pantheon auteur to posthumous celebrity. Jim Shepard’s 1998 fictionalized biography, Nosferatu: A Novel, explored Murnau’s longings (he was homosexual) as much as his work. And he’s been paid a kind of ultimate compliment: John Malkovich played him in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a loony account of the making of Nosferatu. Despite this slightly elevated E! Channel–fication, Murnau’s achievement has never been in question. His best films — Nosferatu, Der letzte Mann, Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu — deserve their reputation as masterpieces. His 1930 City Girl should be on that list, despite the studio interference that truncated it. Since interest in Murnau is reaching new levels, the film series "Haunted Visions: The Films of F.W. Murnau," at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive through October 13, comes at a good time, when moviegoers will be open to the unfamiliar works this series (which is co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Boston) brings to light. It’s great that those films are all here in new prints. This chance to see all of Murnau’s surviving films (nine others are lost) in one series is a first.

Another reason Murnau is unique among directors of his era is the impression he gives of not having a consistent style. He doesn’t fall into the trap of style, and yet his films are unmistakably his own. His early exegete Lotte Eisner called her book on German Expressionist cinema The Haunted Screen, but it’s only Murnau’s films that seem truly haunted, haunted from within. This quality emanates from his own consciousness. He never seems to be channeling a Weimar zeitgeist. Other directors of that time and place impose a look, a framework on their films that can prevent us from living inside their emotions today. Murnau’s films are not like that.

In his seventh and earliest surviving film, 1921’s Der Gang in die Nacht/Journey into the Night (October 1 at 7 p.m. at the HFA), the set-bound opening scenes might strike you as trivial. A dancer (Lya de Putti) tries to seduce a doctor (Werner Krauss) away from his work. When the pair relocate to a fishing village, the feeling for landscape Murnau had picked up from the Swedish cinema kicks in and becomes thoroughly mixed with his innate ominousness. And his idea of dramatic construction is already in place. He sets up a situation that at first seems generic or light and then gradually deepens and darkens it. Direction becomes a play of competing forces doomed to defeat each other; tragedy is inescapable. This is also true in 1921’s Schloß Vogelöd/The Haunted Castle (October 1 at 9 p.m. at HFA), a less successful country-house mystery, like Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. The film is both plot-heavy and loaded with characters, but Murnau overcomes those shortcomings with group compositions in depth and a rain-soaked atmosphere. Dream sequences point to his future. One, with the shadow of a clawed hand, brings Nosferatu to mind. Another, in which a priest spoons frosting into a kitchen boy’s mouth, is better left to a novelist to analyze.

If Murnau had made no film other than Nosferatu (1922; September 30 at 8 p.m., October 1 at 6 p.m., and October 2 at 2 p.m. at the MFA; October 9 at 9 p.m. and October 10 at 7 p.m. at the HFA), a "free" adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he would have contributed enough to cinema. There isn’t another horror film like it, despite subsequent attempts to re-create its feeling of subtle movement between two worlds — the one we know and one that lies just beneath it. The thematic concerns and events consistent from one Murnau film to the next are all present here: the movement from city to country; a plague that overtakes the film’s world; an evil outsider; a sacrificial woman; compositions uniquely (even painfully) aware of art history; the replacement of intertitles with texts; characters framed in arches and doorways; good people trapped by the mirrors they hold.

Murnau never loses his themes in phantasmagoria — science and economics underpin the film’s horror. On some level, this is a parable about gentrification. A real-estate agent (Dracula’s Harker, here called Hutter, played by Gustav von Wagenheim) brings the wealthy Count Orlok — Nosferatu (Max Schreck) — into his neighborhood, which Nosferatu devastates. The film’s Van Helsing character (John Gottowt) lectures his students in a biology class, and we see microscope views of predatory life forms. "This one . . . clear . . . almost bodiless . . . almost a phantom," intones the professor in the intertitles. The dark world he leads us into is predatory, dream-like, hidden but real. Murnau created a bridge between the two. (And indeed, bridges appear throughout his work.)

Die Finanzen des Großherzogs/The Grand Duke’s Finances (1924; October 2 at 9 p.m. at the HFA), Murnau’s one comedy, travels Lubitsch territory in a decidedly Murnavian way. Sunlight streams into this island movie and combines with Murnau’s agile use of large-scale city sets and his love of ships and trolleys to set the stage for Sunrise. Duke Ramon XII (Harry Liedtke, a Lubitsch actor who’s a dead ringer for Bill Clinton), ruler of the Mediterranean kingdom of Abacco, must secure marriage to a Russian countess before his island goes bankrupt and falls to revolution. The film is frenetic and winning. Alfred Abel, the industrialist from Metropolis, is a standout in the cast as a suave thief named Philipp Collins.

Abel is a desperate poet in 1922’s Phantom (October 7 at 2:15 p.m. and October 9 at 10:30 a.m. at the MFA), a melodrama that uses another impressive city set. At one point in the film, this set begins to collapse around Abel and, yes, pursue him down a street. Abel’s whole life here is a traffic accident; he’s struck twice by a carriage like the one in Nosferatu. What starts as a glossy, somewhat unfelt tale of pity evolves into a self-aware melodrama in which a sister says to her brother, "We’re lost, both of us. We’ve fallen under the wheels of fate." Family drama is also at the heart of 1922’s Der brennende Acker/The Burning Soil (October 2 at 7 p.m. at the HFA), which is about grasping for oil rights in a place called "The Devil’s Field." Here, fire replaces plague, and for once the tinting in silent movies comes off as dramatic rather than nostalgic. Like so much of Murnau, this German film predicts American cinema yet to come. It’s a better film than Giant.

Murnau was always fortunate in his collaborators. The cinematographers, screenwriters, and set designers he worked with in Germany at Ufa and elsewhere were among the best the cinema had in the 1920s. In Emil Jannings, despite the hamminess, he had an actor of real power. Jannings’s performance as the doorman in Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924; October 2 at noon at the MFA; October 9 at 7 p.m. and October 10 at 9 p.m. at the HFA) is one of the greatest in movies. Because of its ending, this film’s reputation has waned a little. It shouldn’t have. The ending is shocking, both parodistic and eerie, and Murnau uses his newly mobile camera to show the audience itself, a device he uses again in Tartuffe (1926; October 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the MFA), also with Jannings. Faust (1926; October 8 at 7 p.m. at the HFA; October 10 at 2 p.m. at the MFA), with Jannings in various incarnations of the Devil, is the culmination of Murnau’s German career. It’s his most bravura film, overflowing and cosmic.

Sunrise (1927; October 7 at 4:40 p.m. and October 8 at 8 p.m. at the MFA; October 10 at 4 p.m., October 11 at 9 p.m., and October 13 at 7 p.m. at the HFA) and City Girl (1930; October 7 at 8:15 p.m. at the MFA), the two American films that survive of the three Murnau made, are arguably his best. Sunrise is a film encrusted by trivia: it was a huge success when it came out but still lost money because it was the most expensive film Fox had made up to that time; Janet Gaynor won the first Oscar for it (and for two other films); the set was enormous; the moving-camera shots were extraordinary. The film still stuns. It’s perhaps the best introduction to silent cinema for the uninitiated. It changed the movies in a way that wouldn’t happen again until Citizen Kane. City Girl is the series’s revelation. Without these films, John Ford and Terence Malick would have been impossible, just as Ingmar Bergman could not have existed without Murnau’s German films. Malick’s Days of Heaven is a virtual remake of City Girl, but the relevance and beauty of Murnau’s films do not depend in any way on movies they influenced. The way the lonely, unassuming he achieved this level of mastery remains a little enigmatic.

Tabu (1931; October 8 at 6:15 p.m. at the MFA; October 11 at 7 p.m. and October 13 at 9 p.m. at the HFA) was planned as a collaboration with the documentarist Robert Flaherty, but Murnau and Flaherty parted after shooting began in Tahiti. The film was made using non-actors in natural locations in the South Pacific. More than any novel about the South Seas, it is like a dream, echoing Nosferatu at every turn, mythic in a true sense, as if in a myth described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. This tragic exotica made without the support of a studio shows that Murnau could invent anywhere with whatever means he had. At Ufa, they used to say that he "had a camera for a head." Tabu — the result of two years’ effort — seems made inside the director’s mind and projected directly onto the screen. Where Murnau would’ve gone from there is anybody’s guess.