Nosferatu, Tartuffe And Faust

Of the directors who have made Weimar Cinema famous, F.W. Murnau has always seemed the most enigmatic, though probably the one best loved by film makers and cinephiles. ¹ When, in the 1960s, Lotte Eisner referred to Murnau as 'The Great Unknown', she did more than create a space for her pioneering study on the director. ² The paradoxical blend of mystery and admiration she alludes to was at least in part due to the mutilation and destruction suffered by so many of his films, especially the ones made between 1919 and 1924. ³ Murnau's muchvaunted visual poetry was not helped by the fact that others of his key early films did not survive in the way he had planned or edited them. This includes Nosferatu: cut by distributors, incomplete or perishing prints of the film were later reassembled according to an idea of dramatic pace or continuity editing not always mindful of Murnau's own conception. ⁴ Looking back at this history of reception, it is evident that Murnau was appreciated by his contemporaries for his technical skills, then largely misappropriated or even forgotten during the sound period, and only 'rehabilitated' after the end of the Second World War, mainly by critics and archivists who had access to good prints. As with so many other directors of the silent era, chief honour must go to Henri Langlois, his assistant Lotte Eisner and the members of the nouvelle vague, whom Langlois's Paris Cinemathèque provided with their filmic education. ⁵ But it also suggests that there is something about Murnau's films which makes them peculiarly vulnerable to the physical degradation of the surface textures of the photographic image: in several senses, each frame is fringed with death, as Alexandre Astruc wrote, and meaning resides in Murnau's forms, as Rohmer argued. ⁶ More than Fritz Lang, Murnau is the director of a special kind of photographic indexicality, which again explains why among André Bazin's disciples his star should have risen so high. ⁷ It needs the original pin-sharp, luminous prints, in order to engage with Murnau's work at all, rather than the washed-out or smudged duplicate copies that for decades shaped one's view of the cinema of the 1920s, and the German classics in particular. As already argued in the Introduction to this volume, the study of Weimar cinema has benefited crucially from the technically exacting and historically informed standards of preservation become the rule since the 1970s, and few bodies of film have opened themselves up more stardingly than those of Murnau. ⁸