Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the emblematic director of the silent film era, made a name with such groundbreaking works as Nosferatu, a chilling adaptation of the Dracula story, and Faust, which is based on Goethe’s classic and features the latest technical innovations of its time. Murnau was also ahead of his contemporaries in being one of the first to have original music composed for his films; the score for Faust, for instance, was written by Werner Richard Heymann, a very popular artist of the period. Countless composers have revisited Faust over time, and at the opening concert of this year’s Liszt Fest, László Fassang will provide improvised incidental music for a screening of this masterpiece, which is almost a hundred years old. Among other things, the resident organist of Müpa Budapest will quote the revolutionary Faust Symphony by the festival’s namesake.
The director was born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, and took the pseudonym Murnau only during his university years, when he took an interest in acting and directing. His relationship with his parents, who deeply disapproved of his career choice and his romantic partners, deteriorated so much that he changed his name, taking his surname from Murnau am Staffelsee, a small town in Bavaria where he lived for a while.
At age 12, he was reading Shakespeare, Ibsen, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and regularly staged plays with his siblings in the family villa in Kassel.
While at university in Heidelberg, he joined the students’ theatre company, and was noticed by Max Reinhardt, the famous Austrian director and impresario, who invited him to his acting school.
During World War I, he served as a pilot in the German air force for two years. He survived eight crashes during this time – without serious injuries. After an emergency landing in Switzerland, he was interned for the rest of the war. In the Lucerne POW camp, he founded a theatre company and wrote a film script.
F.W. Murnau directed 21 films during his tragically short career, 17 of them in Germany and four in the United States. Eight of them, including the 1928 film 4 Devils, which starred Janet Gaynor, have been completely destroyed, while only fragments have survived of another two: a single reel of Marizza (1922) is known to exist, and only 35 short snippets could be saved from his first film, Der Knabe in Blau, which was in part inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Perhaps one of his best-known works is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. In order to avoid possible legal repercussions, Murnau changed several essential aspects of the story on which the script was based: the protagonist was named Count Orlok instead of Dracula, and the events take place in Germany, not England. Stoker’s widow nonetheless took the matter to court, and when the production company was unable to pay the damages due to bankruptcy, she secured an order to have all copies of the film destroyed. While the original negatives were indeed destroyed, some of the prints in circulation in foreign cinemas were saved for posterity. Nosferatu is now considered a textbook example of German expressionist horror cinema, despite the mixed reviews it received at the time of its release: the German and European press unanimously admired Murnau’s groundbreaking film, but British and American critics hated it.
The last film Murnau directed in Germany was Faust in 1926, which cost 2 million Reichsmarks and earned barely half as much – becoming the most expensive production of Universum Film AG up to that point. This was in part because Murnau employed the latest available technology, used two cameras, and shot certain scenes multiple times. Filming the signing of the contract took a whole day, while the scene with the bear was shot both with an actor in a bear suit and a real bear – so it is little wonder the film took six months to shoot. Murnau made several different cuts, of which five are now known, and there are considerable differences between them. The original German print, from which several scenes are incidentally absent, is now held at the Danish Film Institute.
Murnau moved to the United States in 1926, and in 1927 made Sunrise for Fox Film studios. It was nominated for four awards at the 1st Academy Awards, and raked in three: Best Unique and Artistic Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Best Cinematography. The original 35 mm negative was destroyed in a fire at Fox’s New Jersey warehouse less than 10 years later, but a surviving copy was successfully used to reproduce the negatives.
For what would become his last film, Murnau travelled to the island of Bora Bora in the South Pacific. The cast of Tabu was made up almost entirely of locals, with the female star, Anne Chevalier, for example, working on the island as a bartender. Murnau was no longer backed by Fox, and was facing serious funding problems due to a lack of suitable investors. To cut costs, he sent the Hollywood crew home and tried to replace them with local film-makers, patching up the holes in the budget with his own money. But it wasn’t just financial problems; as filming started, he fell out with his co-writer, co-producer and co-director, Robert J. Flaherty, who left the island after the first few days on set and later sold his rights to the film to Murnau. In hindsight, the problems surrounding the filming could be interpreted as a bad omen, because although the film was finished, Murnau did not live to see the première. Tabu grossed less than half a million dollars, although Floyd Crosby, who replaced Flaherty, won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
Murnau was only 42 years old when, following a car accident in Santa Barbara on 10 March 1931, he died in hospital the next day. He was laid to rest in Berlin on 13 April, with only eleven people present, including Flaherty, actor Emil Jannings, an Oscar-winning star of the silent era, the seminal German director Fritz Lang, and Greta Garbo, the legendary Swedish actress. The latter had a death mask made of Murnau, which she was later rumoured to keep on her desk. Murnau’s tomb was broken into in 2015, and wax traces found at the site led the authorities to believe that the intruders were performing some kind of occult ritual. His skull has still not been recovered.
