F. W. Murnau was born on December 28, 1888. Murnau was a German film director, one of the most acclaimed craftsmen of the silent film era.
Murnau took to directing early, staging plays with his friends and family as a child. He was involved with several student theater groups during his college years. He served with the German military as a pilot during World War I, and spent part of the war in a Swiss prison camp, where he performed with a prisoner acting company. After the war, Murnau formed his own film company, releasing his first films in 1919. Murnau directed only 21 films, and only 12 of those have survived. Among his lost early films was an unauthorized adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The earliest surviving work from Murnau is from 1921. The Haunted Castle is the story of a hunting party trapped in a castle by a storm, growing increasingly worried about the possibility that one of their group might be a murderer.
Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu is one of his finest films, and by rights, it ought not have survived. The movie is an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's Dracula; Stoker's heirs sued for copyright infringement, and won. The court ordered that all prints of the film were to be destroyed, but one print that had been sent out of the country survived. Max Schreck's performance as the vampire Count Orlok is so eerily unhuman that it inspired the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, which imagines that Schreck (played by Willem Dafoe) was so convincing as a vampire because he actually was one.
The other masterpiece of Murnau's German career is 1924's The Last Laugh, starring Emil Jannings as a hotel doorman who attempts to hide from his family the news that he has been demoted to a less prestigious position. By now, Murnau was introducing innovative new techniques to his filmmaking. His camera was more mobile; he used shots that were deliberately out of focus to reflect his characters' state of mind; he filmed shots that, instead of showing us the characters in the scene, seemed to be from their point of view. He was becoming a master of using editing technique to tell us about his characters—smooth, calm transitions when things were going well; faster, more frantic editing in moments of unrest. And like his colleagues in the German Expressionist school of directing, he combined unrealistic sets with extreme angles and lighting to indicate emotional extremes.
The success of The Last Laugh gave Murnau the financial resources to make two more literary adaptations—films of Moliere's Tartuffe and Goethe's Faust—bringing the German part of his career to an end. His first Hollywood film, 1927's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, was well received. It was one of the winners at the first Academy Awards, winning the award for "Best Unique and Artistic Picture." (That award was meant to be a co-equal prize with the Best Picture award, but the Academy abandoned it after the first ceremony.)
Murnau's final film, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, had a complicated production history. It was originally to be a collaboration with documentarian Robert Flaherty; the two began filming in Tahiti. When they had trouble getting the promised funding from their producers, Murnau cut ties with them, re-wrote the script (so that the producers would have no claim on the "new" project), and funded the film himself. Flaherty objected to the new script, thinking that it was a less accurate, overly Westernized version of the lives of the native Tahitians. Flaherty and Murnau continued to argue about virtually every aspect of the film, which wound up being directed almost entirely by Murnau. After shooting was finished, Murnau bought out Flaherty's share of the film, and edited it himself.
Murnau was killed in an auto accident in March 1931, a week before the premiere of Tabu. By the time the film was released, the transition to sound films was well underway. Parts of Tabu had actually been shot as a sound film, but Murnau insisted on releasing it as a silent film, which he thought was a more artistic medium. A silent film already seemed quaintly old-fashioned in 1931, and Tabu was not a commercial success.
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