MURNAU, Friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm
Stage name of Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, German film director, born in Bielefeld on December 28, 1888 and died in Santa Barbara (California) on March 11, 1931. Actor like many left the group of Max Reinhardt, after some tests of excellent craftsmanship he established himself, starting from Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. Experimental poet of the camera and admirable explorer of the human soul, he was an author strongly attracted by the drama of the Single who often places himself in a romantic controversy against the dehumanization induced by the capitalist system. In a non-extensive filmography, while touching all genres, he achieved maximum results in the Kammerspielfilm with Der letzte Mann (1924; The last laugh), in the transcriptions of literary works, or in melodrama, e.g. in Sunrise. A song of two humans (1927; Aurora), made overseas and for which he obtained three Oscar awards.
Born in a rich family of textile industrialists where the mother supported the artistic interests of his son, in 1907 he achieved his maturity in Kassel, then starting, without concluding them, philosophy studies in Berlin. Probably as early as 1909 it assumed the stage name of Murnau, from the homonymous town in Lower Bavaria where he had traveled with his friend H. Ehrenbaum-Degele. Thus, in 1928, the same author summarized the stages of his biography: "I am the son of the red earth and I was born in Westphalia. I studied art history in Heidelberg and Berlin and, subsequently, I devoted myself to theater. Finally I found myself at Max Reinhardt. Here I had some actors of secondary roles as colleagues, their name is Conrad Veidt and Ernst Lubitsch. Many theatrical tours followed and I soon also started I am my director of theater at Reinhardt. The war saw me at the front as an aviation officer. […] Here [in Switzerland where he was interned] I arrived at the cinema in a singular way. When I staged some pièces in Zurich and Bern, the German embassy contacted me and entrusted me with the task of making propaganda films. I was very interested in this activity, so much so that I immediately decided to devote myself entirely to cinema "(FW Murnau über sich selbst, 1928). After returning to Berlin, in the first post-war period he quickly consumed his apprenticeship in cinema: shot a first film, Der Knabe in Blau, also known as Der Todesmaragd (1919, lost), inspired by the painting by Th. Gainsborough Blue boy and The picture of Dorian Gray by O. Wilde, in the following Satanas (1920; Lucifer, also lost), film in three episodes with artistic supervision and screenplay by Robert Wiene, he had the opportunity to work with the actor Conrad Veidt and the director of photography Karl Freund, with whom he would have collaborated for a long time. Another decisive encounter was that, in Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin (1920, lost), with Carl Mayer to whom we owe the script of his first important work preserved: Der Gang in die Nacht (1921). Preceded by Schloss Vogelöd (1921), another film written by Mayer which confirms the director's already full artistic maturity, Nosferatu, written by Henrik Galeen, established himself as a fantasy masterpiece, enhanced by the legendary halo from which his construction, in which elements attributable to the actor Conrad Veidt and director of photography Karl Freund, with whom he would have collaborated for a long time. Another decisive encounter was that, in Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin (1920, lost), with Carl Mayer to whom we owe the script of his first important work preserved: Der Gang in die Nacht (1921). Preceded by Schloss Vogelöd (1921), another film written by Mayer which confirms the director's already full artistic maturity, Nosferatu, written by Henrik Galeen, established himself as a fantasy masterpiece, enhanced by the legendary halo from which his realization, in which elements attributable to the actor Conrad Veidt and director of photography Karl Freund, with whom he would have collaborated for a long time. Another decisive encounter was that, in Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin (1920, lost), with Carl Mayer to whom we owe the script of his first important work preserved: Der Gang in die Nacht (1921). Preceded by Schloss Vogelöd (1921), another film written by Mayer which confirms the director's already full artistic maturity, Nosferatu, written by Henrik Galeen, established himself as a fantasy masterpiece, enhanced by the legendary halo from which his realization, in which elements attributable to the with Carl Mayer who is responsible for the script of his first important work preserved: Der Gang in die Nacht (1921). Preceded by Schloss Vogelöd (1921), another film written by Mayer which confirms the director's already full artistic maturity, Nosferatu, written by Henrik Galeen, established himself as a fantasy masterpiece, enhanced by the legendary halo from which his realization, in which elements attributable to the with Carl Mayer who is responsible for the script of his first important work preserved: Der Gang in die Nacht (1921). Preceded by Schloss Vogelöd (1921), another film written by Mayer which confirms the director's already full artistic maturity, Nosferatu, written by Henrik Galeen, established himself as a fantasy masterpiece, enhanced by the legendary halo from which his realization, in which elements attributable to theExpressionism. For Nosferatu M. was prosecuted and convicted of plagiarism of the story of B. Stoker and the negatives of the film were destroyed. These two works began, together with some great Heimatfilme ante litteram written by Thea von Harbou - Der brennende Acker (1922; The Devil's Field), Phantom (1922; The ghost, from the novel by G. Hauptmann) or the lost Die Austreibung ( 1923, from the novel by C. Hauptmann) -, an acute reflection on the dissolution of the bourgeois and peasant world operated through endogenous agents, of a psychoanalytic or supernatural nature (the vampire, the ghost). After the playful parenthesis of the comedy Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (1924; Le finanze del granduca), M. also explored the Kammerspielfilm, in what many consider his masterpiece, namely Der letzte Mann, written by C. Mayer. Before separating from Erich Pommer and UFA and moving to Hol-lywood, at the height of his career, he made two other works of exquisite literary work: Tartüff (1925; Tartufo) by Molière and Faust - Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926; Faust ) by W. Goethe. Under a four-year contract with Fox Film Corporation, he shot Sunrise, from H. Sudermann's Die Reise nach Tilsit, written by C. Mayer (then remade in 1939 by Veit Harlan in Die Reise nach Tilsit, Towards Love), which continues the author's pessimistic Weltanschauung narrating in a sublime and abstract melodrama the symbolic events of a man split between two women, between city and countryside, between Zivilisation and Kultur. The subsequent works, on the other hand, are tarnished by the heavy interference of the production that marked, irreversibly, the distance between the filmmaker and the Hollywood mode of production: a four happy end was added to Four devils (1929; The Four Devils, lost), while he was prevented from completing the soundtrack version of Our daily bread, initially conceived silent and released with the title of City girl (1930; Our daily bread). Uncomfortable in the Hollywood industrial machine and following a maxim ("I try, through each of my films, to discover a new artistic territory and find new forms of poetic expression"), M. then designed an independent production with the great documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, Tabu (1931; Tabù): in Tahiti, however, the film was made, due to stylistic differences, by the only German director, and it was his last masterpiece. One week before
Trying to situate the multifaceted, labyrinthine personality of the director of Bielefeld is not easy, and in addition his filmography, from the point of view of philological completeness, is largely incomplete (9 films lost out of 21 made overall). Multi-faceted and experimenting personality that German cinema never had, M. is the eclectic genius, the director who, touching or ranging in different genres (from Heimatfilm to comedy, from horror and Kammerspiel to reductions from literary works), was able to reinvent cinema every time on the basis of an authorial red thread, a couple of recurring obsessions such as the city-countryside relationship (Der brennende Acker, Sunrise, City girl) or the theme of transgressive desire (Schloss Vogelöd, Nosferatu or Phantom). It is amazing to note, among other things, the linguistic refinement that runs from the rough and 'primitive' style of Der Gang in die Nacht, made of fixed planes and fades to irises, to the 'unleashing' of the camera by K. Freund in Der letzte Mann, or to the triumph of special effects, total dynamization of the image and depth of field in Faust, all in a span of just five years. To do this M. probed different narrative areas, using the best screenwriters of the time from time to time: from H. Galeen (Nosferatu) and Hans Janowitz (Der Januskopf, 1920 and Marizza, genannt die Schmuggler-Madonna, 1922) for fantasy films, from von Harbou for the literary-peasant mélo (but also for the comedy, Die Finanzen des Grosserzogs) to Mayer, the most 'faithful' of his scenarists, the author of five of his films shot in Germany and two in Hollywood. Based on the studies of L. Eisner (1964) and L. Berriatúa (1990-1992) it is now customary to remember the author's figurativeness in relation to the iconographic aspect and to pictorial quotations (in particular CD Friedrich, but more generally all romantic painting). What is striking in M. - placing it in the same and opposite groove of that productive group of film-painters of the twenties such as Hans Richter, Walther Ruttmann or Viking Eggeling - is the cleanliness and pictorial care of the image, but equally relevant are the scenography and the architectural space of his films. And not only because in a book of fundamental importance another filmmaker, Eric Rohmer (1977), paid attention to the problem by pointing out the systematic use of décadrage, that is of decentralized figures within the frame; but also because many works by the Bielefeld filmmaker must be analyzed from the point of view of the complex topography of the interiors (e.g. the labyrinth in Schloss Vogelöd, the staircase in Tartüff) and the exteriors reconstructed in the studio: from Phantom's Wroclaw to the futuristic Faust models . However, even the dialectic between pictorial inspiration and daring architectural constructions only partially exhausts the conceptual richness of M.'s work, who has chosen the contamination and variety of genres as his characteristic feature. There is, in fact, a M. author inclined to comedy - to tell the truth perhaps not excellent - which runs parallel to the 'spiritual' and melancholic author. Not only because he filmed a comedy and a half (Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs and Tartüff), but for the fact that he often mixes the ingredients: happy tones determine for example. the narrative atmosphere of the first part of Nosferatu, or again, in Faust, Gretchen's perdition is prepared by a playful and histrionic Mephisto-Emil Jannings. However, in a poetics that takes multiplicity as an inspiring principle, a 'polar star' remains fixed, the natural absolute observes and accompanies the sad destinies of the protagonists. Never as a pure, simple scenographic background, nature with its forces (wind, storm, rain) has a polysemic and cathartic dramaturgical function, whether it is reconstructed in the studio, as in Sunrise, or that it entails a strong and harsh physicality obtained by shooting en plein air. All this is framed against the background of a strong German matrix, starting from that characteristic romanticism that intimately crosses the characters of M., both the many losers (even if saved in extremis by a consoling and necessary happy end) and the few winners . We find ourselves then in the bed of the Schwärmer, of the eternal enthusiastic dreamers, as represented by Goethe and the Sturm und Drang. But not only: German is the obsession of the uniform (ie the problem of identity) that moves and upsets Jannings in Der letzte Mann; German is still the latent conservative matrix of its melodramas, from the ascetic and rough Der brennende Acker to Sunrise, already designed for a supranational audience. We are therefore at the source of the Heimatfilm, but also at the attempt of a supernatural challenge destined for failure, to the attempt of a 'demonic' overcoming of the natural order. Finally, the theme of the tragic fulfillment of love at the stake of death is of strong German origin, as happens in the Faust finale, which unwittingly foreshadows the future funeral melodramas of V. Harlan. In any case, whatever the anthropological root of his art was - romantic enthusiasm or psychological obsession or other - in M. there was an unstoppable spring that always pushed him forward, with restlessness, towards ever new acquisitions. Until a premature death, at a fundamental crossroads in his career, one of his less monochordic artists was taken from the history of cinema. love at the stake of death, as happens in the Faust finale, which unknowingly foreshadows the future funeral melodramas of V. Harlan. In any case, whatever the anthropological root of his art was - romantic enthusiasm or psychological obsession or other - in M. there was an unstoppable spring that always pushed him forward, with restlessness, towards ever new acquisitions. Until a premature death, at a fundamental crossroads in his career, one of his less monochordic artists was taken from the history of cinema. love at the stake of death, as happens in the Faust finale, which unknowingly foreshadows the future funeral melodramas of V. Harlan. In any case, whatever the anthropological root of his art was - romantic enthusiasm or psychological obsession or other - in M. there was an unstoppable spring that always pushed him forward, with restlessness, towards ever new acquisitions. Until a premature death, at a fundamental crossroads in his career, one of his less monochordic artists was taken from the history of cinema. he lived an unstoppable spring that always pushed him forward, with restlessness, towards ever new acquisitions. Until a premature death, at a fundamental crossroads in his career, one of his less monochordic artists was taken from the history of cinema. he lived an unstoppable spring that always pushed him forward, with restlessness, towards ever new acquisitions. Until a premature death, at a fundamental crossroads in his career, one of his less monochordic artists was taken from the history of cinema.BIBLIOGRAPHY
FW Murnau über sich selbst , in Filmkünstler. Wir über uns selbst , hrsg. H. Treuner, Berlin 1928.
LH Eisner, FW Murnau , Paris 1964.
PG Tone, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , Florence 1976.
E. Rohmer, The organization of the space in the "Faust" de Murnau , Paris 1977 (trad. It. Venice 1985).
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , hrsg. PW Jansen, W. Schütte, München 1990.
L. Berriatúa, Los proverbios chinos de FW Murnau , 2 vols., Madrid 1990-1992.
HH Prinzler, Murnau. Ein Melancholiker des Films , Berlin 2003.
[ بازدید : 55 ] [ امتیاز : 0 ] [ نظر شما : ]
