F. W. Murnau

Of Swedish origin and coming from a well-to-do and traveling family, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau studied History, Art and Music, to later start in the theater with Max Reinhardt between 1911 and 1914. He would go on to direct films in 1919.

However, its international release would not take place until 1922 with its masterful Nosferatu , based on “Dracula” by Bram Stoker , and which popularized the expressionist movement together with The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari ( Robert Wiene, 1919), despite its romantic and naturalistic elements. In these years, he would state: “The decorators who made Caligari did not imagine the importance that their film would have, and yet surprising things had been discovered in it. Simplicity, more and more simplicity: this is what must be the character of the films of the future… Our effort must tend towards the abstraction of everything that is not true cinema, towards the exclusion of everything that does not belong to the true film heritage, whatever is trivial and comes from other sources: resources, vulgar molds from the script or the book. Well, this is what happens to a film when it manages to reach the level of great art”.

Then came his other great classics: The Last (1924), a masterpiece performed by the great Emil Jannings and offering sharp social criticism of the Weimar Republic; Tartuffe or the Hypocrite (1925) and Faust (1926), adaptations by Molière and Goethe, respectively.

He was then hired by the Hollywood industry, and there he made one of his biggest films: the romantic Dawn (1927), based on Hermann Sudermann ‘s work “The Journey to Tilsit”, with which he won the first Oscar awarded by Mecca. of Cinema, jointly with Alas , by William A. Wellman . With this film, starring the American actors George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor , FW Murnau did not lose his German spirit as a creator, thanks also to the script written by the expressionist Carl Mayer . Finally, he would perform with Robert J. Flaherty the naturalist Taboo(1931), shot on the islands of Tahiti and Bora-Bora.

Murnau’s work presents a series of characteristics that distinguish him as an author: anguish, fatality, the impossibility of loving or consummating love, the exaltation of nature, his obsessions with death and divine curse… All expressed in a somber and lyrical atmosphere, which brought aesthetic-narrative innovations to the cinema. The camera would become one more character reproducing, through its mobility, everything that the expressionist filmmakers had done through deformation or light play, and in turn giving an important role to the decoration and objects. The lighting and the “tricks”, especially the idle, would make up a singular and influential style. In this sense, he had written: “The drama enters us with the image due to the way in which the sets have been placed or photographed.

When FW Murnau died at the age of 42 in a car accident, he had already reached the height of his artistic maturity, being considered one of the greatest exponents of world silent cinema.