Happy Birthday, F. W. Murnau! Born today in 1888 as Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, Murnau was one of just three directors responsible for revolutionizing German silent cinema during the 1920s.
Born in Bielefeld, Germany, in the Province of Westphalia, Murnau had two brothers and two stepsisters. His mother was the second wife of his father, an owner of a cloth factory in the northwest part of Germany.
The villa of Murnau and his family was often turned into a stage for little plays, directed by the young Plumpe, who had already read books by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen and German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer plays by the age of twelve.
Plumpe would later take on the pseudonym of "Murnau" from the town of that name near Lake Staffel, south of Munich, where he lived for a time.
The young Murnau was said to have an icy, imperious disposition and an obsession with film. Some reference sources list him as being almost 210 cm (7 ft) tall. In real life, he was six feet four inches.
Years later, Murnau studied philology at the University in Berlin and later art history and literature in Heidelberg.
It was here where Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer Max Reinhardt saw him at a students' performance and decided to invite him to his actor-school.
In World War I, Murnau served as a company commander at the eastern front. He then joined the Imperial German Flying Corps and flew missions in northern France for two years; surviving eight crashes without severe injuries.
After landing in Switzerland, he was arrested and interned for the remainder of the war. In his POW camp he was involved with a prisoner theater group and wrote a film script.
According to Murnau's personal life, he is said to have been homosexual, though sources conflict on whether he was closeted or openly gay.
According to Murnau's trademarks, these included innovative uses of light and dark shadowing to create a certain mood and visual storytelling without intertitles.
In mid-May 1929, 'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' won an Oscar for Unique and Artistic Picture. This occurred at the 1st Academy Awards.
American film, stage, and television actress Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in the film (the award was also for her performances in 1927's '7th Heaven'and 1928's 'Street Angel').
A week prior to the opening of his 1931 Tahitian silent black and white romance/drama film 'Tabu: A Story of the South Seas' (sometimes simply called 'Tabu'), Murnau drove up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles in a hired Rolls-Royce.
The young driver, a fourteen-year-old Filipino servant, crashed the car against an electric pole. Due to this, Murnau suffered a head injury.
He passed in a hospital the next day, in nearby Santa Barbara, California before the premiere of his last film. This occurred on March 11, 1931. Murnau was 42.
Murnau was entombed in Berlin. Only eleven people attended the funeral. Most notably among them were Robert J. Flaherty ('Nanook of the North', 'Louisiana Story'), Greta Garbo, and German actor Emil Jennings.
This also included Fritz Lang ('Dr. Mabuse: Parts 1 & 2', 'Metropolis', 'M', 'Secret Beyond the Door', 'The Big Heat'), who delivered the eulogy.
Garbo also commissioned a death mask of Murnau, which she kept on her desk during her years in Hollywood.
Eight months later, American cinematographer Floyd Crosby won an Oscar for Best Cinematography. This was for his work on 'Tabu: A Story of the South Seas'. This occurred at the 4th Academy Awards in mid-November 1931.
Five years later, the original 35mm negative of the original American version of 'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' was destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire. Later on, a new negative was created from a surviving print.
In 1989, 'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' was the of the twenty-five films selected by the U.S. Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The film's legacy has endured, and it is now widely considered a masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. Many have called it the greatest film of the silent era.
In 1994, 'Tabu: A Story of the South Seas' was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In 2007, an update of the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films ranked 'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' at 82.
In 2012, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' poll named it the fifth-best film in the history of motion pictures, while directors named it the twenty-second.
In July 2015, Murnau's grave was broken into, the remains disturbed and the skull removed by persons unknown.
Waxy residue was reportedly found at the site, leading some to speculate that candles had been lit, perhaps with an occult or ceremonial significance.
As this disturbance was not an isolated incident, the cemetery managers are considering sealing the grave.
On October 7, 2015, this date began the fifth season of FX's American anthology horror television series American Horror Story (2011–present), sometimes abbreviated as AHS). The season was subtitled "Hotel".
Murnau is a mentioned character who, sometime in the early 1920s, travels to the Carpathian Mountains while doing research for the film 'Nosferatu'.
While there, he discovers a community of vampires, and becomes one himself.
After returning to the United States, Murnau turns Rudolph Valentino and American film costume designer and set designer, and occasional actress Natacha Rambova into vampires to preserve their beauty.
Valentino later transforms his fictional lover, Elizabeth Johnson, into a vampire, and she goes on to become The Countess (Lady Gaga), the central antagonist of the season.
Murnau had revolutionized the art of cinematic expression by using the camera subjectively to interpret German silent cinema as the emotional state of a character.
Rivaled only by Lang and Austrian film director and screenwriter G. W. Pabst ('Pandora's Box') as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down.
Once called "the greatest poet the screen has ever known" by French film critic and director Alexandre Astruc, Murnau did more than any of his contemporaries to liberate the cinema from theatrical and literary conventions.
He had achieved a seamless narrative fluency by freeing the camera to discover varied perspectives in the medium's fledgling stages.
Criticized for facile, underdeveloped characters, Murnau was more a painter than a novelist, his art more concerned with mood and rhythm than whether his characters were dimensional.
He was a master chiaroscurist, brilliantly orchestrating a world moving between lightness and shadows.
Though perhaps best known for his Expressionist aesthetic, his films have shown him to be a master craftsman who helped to set the bar for visual storytelling in the 20th century and beyond.
Though only twelve of his twenty-one films survived the passage of time, those titles - 'Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror' (1922), 'The Last Laugh' (1924), 'Tartuffe' (1925), 'Faust' (1926), 'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' (1927) and 'Tabu' - kept alive Murnau's status as an innovator in the history of cinema.
It is as hard to define and classify the films of Murnau as it is to define the boundaries of Expressionist cinema.
Was he an expressionist? An innovator? What was he trying to achieve and what did his films bring into the world of cinema? The answer depends on one’s understanding of Expressionism.
If Expressionism in film is the ability to convey emotion and bare the inmost desires of the soul, and show every object and character’s most “expressive expression” through the use of camera, lighting, design, and acting, then Murnau was a true Expressionist.
Therefore, his ability to take all the tools and knowledge at his disposal and fuse them into a new universe and a new way of communicating through film makes him a true auteur.
Murnau had been active from 1919–1931.
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