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DAVID THORBURN: This afternoon I talked a bit about Russian film
and suggested that among other things
that the cultural environment in which the Russian film emerged
was an environment of revolution and of ideological turmoil.
And we could say, therefore, in some degree,
if Russian film served revolutionary ideals
and the ideology of the Bolsheviks,
the German film had its own sort of boss, its own authorities
that it was following.
But it was not in a narrow sense political or ideological
as the Russian example was.
But it was something similar.
The German film I want to suggest
for a good part of life, a silent film,
was in thrall to established culture.
It's an example of the sort of thing
I was saying this afternoon about the difference
between European cinema and American cinema.
American cinema grew up in an atmosphere
of wild populist freedom, almost untouched
by the cultural authorities who mostly
on the east coast of the country dominated
literature, drama, and so forth-- music.
In contrast, in Germany, the film
grew up in the cultural centers of the society,
and the dominant cultural figures, the major writers,
the major dramatists, the major poets and musicians,
the established theater actors and directors
all migrated into the film.
And it gave German film a tremendous intellectual
ambition and authority from its various earliest stages,
and I'll show you some examples of this.
It made the German film, especially the German film
in the period between the end of the First World War
and the advent of sound that sometimes
is called-- I don't know if this is correct--
but some people call it the golden age
of German silent film, the golden age of German film,
because an extraordinary number of very
important and influential films were made
in this period, roughly from about 1916 or '17
through the '20s, through about 1926
or '27 before the advent of sound.
And it certainly is a very distinctive and influential
moment in the history of cinema, but as you
will see in the examples I'm going to give you, influential
as many of these films were, they
were influential in what we might
say-- they were influential in part
not because they were wonderful examples
of exploratory innovative cinema,
but because of the grandeur or the disturbing authority
of the themes they encompassed.
In other words, the German film, as I suggested this afternoon,
because it was guided by cultural authorities who
were adept at earlier media, at older media,
they already came to the making of film, of their films,
with high artistic intentions.
I'm not so sure they realized those intentions, because they
didn't explore the full nature of film
as much as might have been done.
But they were interesting and deeply influential films.
And I should also admit that my perspective
is, perhaps, biased.
There are certainly many, many people
who have written magnificently and seriously
on this era of German film, who would not be negative
as I am about what I'm calling the sort
of uncinematic or unvisual qualities of some
of the masterpieces, early masterpieces in the category.
It's a contested argument, and I don't want you to simply accept
my word for this.
Take it as a perspective that could be qualified
or even challenged by other folks,
and especially by certain film scholars
who see this moment in German cinema as a really
fruitful and generative moment.
Much of the basic understanding that we
have of German silent film comes from one remarkable book
by a woman named Lottie Eisner, and I
wanted to mention it here.
I borrowed a tremendous amount of what
I'm going to say from her book, learned a great deal from it.
Eisner was a wonderfully important historical figure,
worked as a film historian and annotator and film archivist
for a good part of her career.
Some of you who are film buffs may
know that Wim Wender, as the great contemporary experimental
German director, dedicated his film Paris,
Texas to Lottie Eisner.
She worked for a long time in the French Biblioteque,
the first great archive of movies in the Western world.
She also wrote books, separate books
about Murnau and Fritz Lang, two of the great figures
in this tradition we're looking at briefly this evening.
And her arguments in The Haunted Screen
are still widely accepted.
The book focuses on the Weimar period, the period
before the rise of Hitler, after the First World War,
in which German culture was an astonishingly rich, fermenting,
stew of innovation and anxiety.
It's the era of the great cabarets,
and you will return to this era in an imaginative way
when you come to see the film Cabaret later
in the term, which tries to reimagine that moment.
And it actually dramatizes the era
in which the German films I'm talking about this evening
were made.
One way I can begin to identify or explain
the distinctive qualities of these German films
is to talk briefly about the idea of expressionism.
The broad word expressionism refers
to movement in modernist art that
involves principles of distortion and surreal
exaggeration.
So an expressionist work of art, either a painting
or a poem or a film, is in some degree
interested in finding equivalents for the inner life,
dramatizing not the external world, but the world within us,
and especially the tormented world within us--
our anxieties, our fears, our sexual fantasies,
our murderous impulses.
There's a dark, disturbing side to expressionism, especially
to German expressionism.
There are expressionist artists who appear in other traditions,
and expressionism is a movement that goes far beyond Germany.
But one might say that German expressionism is the expression
of modernism in German culture.
It's almost indistinguishable.
If we talked about modernism more generally,
we would say that not every aspect of modernism
involves expressionism.
But in Germany, we would say the modernist impulse was embodied
in the expressionist tendencies of the art forms that
appear in that period.
Let me talk a bit about them.
They involve the external representation
of the inner life, as I've said.
And they're interested, the expressionists,
in elemental emotions like fear, love, hatred, anxiety.
They're interested in our aggressive and appetitive
impulses.
The sources of this expressionist movement
are in German romanticism.
This is the literary movement that
gave rise to important poets and painters
in the earlier part of the 19th century.
And also in economics, in the historical realities
of German culture, because the period we're
talking about when these films were made,
the Weimar period was a period of-- was
a unstable and turbulent period.
There were power outages all the time, for example, frequently,
even in the major cities like Berlin.
And the visual style of the expressionists--
there were expressionist painters, expressionist poets,
expressionist musicians, expressionist dramatists.
Virtually all the art forms in Germany
in some degree participated in this interest in the irrational
and in the hidden and in the turbulent night
side of our personalities.
And I can, perhaps, very quickly capture
some of the essence of this movement
by showing you a couple of paintings that are examples
of this expressionist movement.
Let me show you one image first, and then I'll
do a slideshow while I talk a bit more,
and you can watch the slideshow.
This is a painting by the German painter Beckmann,
and it's called "The Family."
It sometimes has been used as the illustration on the cover
of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
And we might say incidentally, if you're
looking for examples of what expressionism would be like,
how many of you have read Kafka?
Only a couple.
OK.
How many of you remember the first sentence
of The Metamorphosis?
All right.
I'll tell it to you in some translations.
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning after a night of uneasy dreams
to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect.
Maybe the most famous first sentence in modern literature.
But think about that.
And then the whole story proceeds
from that shocking transformation.
So one of the things that's characteristic of these forms
of expression of are principles of exaggeration
that take you into surrealism and into modes of exaggeration
that attempt to illuminate reality not by giving you
a realistic picture of it, but by exaggerating
certain elements in reality so intensely that you understand
them more deeply and fully than you might have otherwise.
It's important to recognize that surreal impulses like this
or expressionist impulses like this
do not mean that the stories or art forms that
are committed to these strategies
are unrealistic in the broadest sense.
That is to say they still talk about reality.
It's just that the realities they talk about
do not allow themselves to be represented
in straightforward ways, because they're either hidden,
or the intensity that they represent
is so hidden within us that if you represent them externally,
you need to exaggerate.
You need to highlight.
You need to enlarge.
So we might think of Kafka as a literary embodiment
of this principle of expressionism,
and we might think of paintings like this
as the painterly embodiment of it.
And look at this.
We won't have to spend much time on this,
but look closely at it.
Look at how the whole family is crammed together
in an incredibly tight space, the ceiling pressing down
on them.
Look how grotesque each of them is.
But what's the most obvious thing about the painting?
Can you see what it looks like?
None of the characters are looking at each other.
There's no connection between them.
They're all isolated in their own little space.
Not only are they physically grotesque and a little weird,
but they're all caught in their own narcissistic or, perhaps,
drug-induced stupor.
Calling it "The Family?"
Think of what an unromantic unsentimental view
of the family this is.
But it's the principles of distortion
and surreal exaggeration that you can see in this image
that we might say are the essence of what
is meant by expressionism.
Do the slideshow now.
While I'm talking, I'll show you a series of images
by other painters, and we can put this
on so they'll see what's what.
So just play this, Kristen, while I continue.
So one of the things that-- so this expressionist movement
was central to all the high arts of German society at the time.
And it's, therefore, not an accident,
not at all, not even remotely an accident
that such energies would express themselves
in the new medium of the movies, because so
much of the German art establishment
was already embracing principles of this kind.
And some very remarkable, of course,
and significant, immensely influential
films grew out of this movement.
They emphasized atmospheric qualities like lighting and set
design, and they were interested,
as I've already implied, in morbid states
and in distortion, in inner fears and anxieties.
And what one of the things that the expressionist moment
in German cinema certainly did was
it tremendously furthered our sense
of the power of the cinema to explore human subjectivity.
Even the films that, for me at least,
looked more like historical artifacts
than living works of art have this fascination for us,
for me.
We might also very quickly acknowledge
how profoundly influential the movement was.
Can you think-- any of you know what
famous directors after the-- not even German directors--
are linked repeatedly with German expressionism,
have connections to them?
One of them is Alfred Hitchcock, who
actually, his very first film was a co-production
with German producers.
And he carried it-- if you think of Hitchcock's work,
Hitchcock carries the some of the darkness and the distortion
and the interest in our inner convulsive lives
that is present in German expressionism.
But there are other examples as well.
The American gangster film shows the influence
of German expressionism very powerfully,
and the great American director Orson Welles
was steeped in German expressionism,
and some of his greatest effects and the atmospheres
of his films could be said to be a direct outgrowth
of expressionist directing, of expressionist movies.
So it's a critical and powerful movement.
So let me now turn to a couple of examples
to give you a sense in film of how this expressed itself.
And my first example comes from the film, the very famous film
directed by Robert Wayne, called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
It's a story about a murderer, who when he goes to sleep,
he turns into a monster, and he wakes up
and he walks around like a somnambulist ready to kill
people.
And it may be there were, of course,
lurid stories in the public press
of these kinds of all the time.
So there may have been, in the watching of the film,
there may have also been a kind of [INAUDIBLE] in the audience
of feeling that what they were watching potentially
was possibly real or reflected certain forms
of certain possibilities in reality.
But as you'll see, the film is tremendously stylized.
It's tremendously planned in a way.
One of the most interesting things about the film
is that the sets were designed and painted
by prominent expressionist artists,
and then the fact is it was as much an artwork
as it was a movie.
Let me show you part of it, and you could see for yourself
the consequences of an artistic movement that
grows out of traditional art being transferred
to the movies.
Here's a scene from the film.
Do we have sound?
No sound, I guess.
Sorry.
There would have been music, of course, and very scary music.
Maybe you can hear some of it.
I think their soundtrack is also a new one.
It was superimposed and made for the film later.
But I suppose in a certain way, this has a kind of interest.
But do you see how static it is, how uncinematic it
is, how stable the camera is, how the emphasis is
on-- I don't know.
What could we call it?
On set design, on surreal angles,
on this strange form of lighting?
This chiaroscuro black and white lighting, very great emphasis
on contrast between black and white, of course,
becomes a trademark element of expressionistic films
and then is carried over in many other film traditions,
including the American tradition called film
noir-- dark film, black film.
So here's this somnambulist walking over
to the sleeping woman.
We might note parenthetically, isn't interesting
how long one might say that this is one of the earliest horror
films?
How long has the horror film used
as one of its central elements violence
against women, and especially sexual violence against women?
Look at this.
Do you see how he looks like an actor on a stage?
Now surely it was intentional that they put those two men who
were woken up by the noise in a space that seems without space.
There's a surreal ungrounded element in the film.
All right.
So they're looking for her now, and they're
going to be [INAUDIBLE].
Can you speed up, Kristen, so we don't
watch the whole thing in slow motion, in full,
but we get near the end?
Is that possible to do?
So they're-- keep-- let it speed up a little bit more.
OK.
Now we're near the ending here.
Again, see how static it is, how that's impressive,
the building of the sets might have been impressive.
But you see how in some sense how uncinematic
this is in certain ways?
Seeing the camera stable in one spot, active moving toward it,
moving in and out of the camera's range.
This is a theatrical idea of what the camera should do.
It's sitting in the audience watching a set,
and in fact, you can feel the theatrical authority here.
Watch this image now.
And then it's something clever if you're interested
in silhouettes, creating an image of darkness and horror,
I guess.
But you can also see the limitations of it.
I want to show you one other example, a more distinguished
example, an example that does begin
to manipulate the visual image in somewhat more
rich and significant ways, a film even more influential
than Caligari, what is called so often
the first science-fiction film.
It was the very first feature length science-fiction film
in the world.
Its title is Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang.
And at the time, many film scholars
claim it cost something like five million Reichsmarks
to make.
I don't know if Reichsmarks were the equivalent of dollars,
but let's assume they were.
In 1926, this was the most expensive film
that had ever been made up to that point,
and it is a measure of the authority and the prestige
that movies had in German society,
that so much money would be invested in a film.
This would never have happened in the United States.
They weren't spending that level of money on American movies.
They didn't have to.
They couldn't.
And in some sense, it shows you the authority
and the centrality, but it also explains
why we had to wait before the German film fully
discovered its cinematic or its filmic essence.
And I'm going to show you what I think
is the moment or one of the moments in which this discovery
was made.
And the director we're looking at tonight, FW Murnau,
is the director who made this discovery
and freed the camera from the constraints of high art,
from the constraints of the inherited attitudes toward art
that the established culture in Europe and especially
in Germany imposed upon the making.
So here are a couple of scenes from Metropolis.
Still, I think we're not fully there yet,
but it's a significant film.
It's much admired by certain film scholars,
although not by me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Some of you may notice how Chaplin borrowed
from this introduction.
And you could certainly see how this film influenced
Modern Times.
Feel a lot of Chaplin there, I hope.
You think there's an idea or an attitude toward what
labor means in these images?
These are the workers of the city.
Interesting that such a politically radical film
would be so heavily financed.
That's enough of this.
That's plenty of this, too much of it, in fact, I think.
But can we speed up a little, Kristen?
I think we can come to one more image from a different part
of the film.
So I won't talk about the plot of the film, which
is rather ridiculous I think, although it's also
a kind of science-fiction fantasy, a dystopian fantasy.
But there is a sequence later in the film.
Let's go further.
So here's another image, another moment from the film.
Visually more exciting, but it also
shows you in some sense how literary the film is.
And also, I want you see it also,
because it remind you, again, of how much Chaplin
borrowed from this movie when he made Modern Times.
Now there are many imaginative effects here,
but still, you see how stable the camera
is, how stationary it is?
The kinetic power of the camera had not yet
been discovered, not because it was undiscoverable,
because the Americans had discovered it a decade earlier,
but because the power of older forms
was inhibiting the people making the movies.
Again, in the early days, you can
imagine that some of these effects
would have been very dramatic-- the falling bodies.
Still, watch what happens here.
We've turned symbolic-- Moloch, the devil,
the devil's henchman.
That's what modern industrial society is,
a maw that will swallow us up.
You see how weird and disturbing it is.
Thank you, Kristen.
A serious, an interesting film, but still in certain ways,
I hope you could see both deeply melodramatic,
and the acting styles are very broad.
Where do they come from?
Theater.
They're theatrical acting still.
They haven't fully adjusted despite the power
of these films, and in intellectual and thematic ways,
they haven't fully adjusted to the idea that they're movies.
And the man who solved this problem or the German director
who understood more fully than the others
what it meant to make a movie was FW Murnau.
His dates are on the board.
You could see he died in his early 40s.
It was a tragic death.
He was just coming into his own as a great, great director.
He had emigrated to the United States in the late '20s,
and the film I've listed on the board, Sunrise in 1927,
was made in the United States.
And many people think it is the greatest silent non-comedy made
in the United States.
It's a bit sentimental, but there
are brilliant, brilliant, brilliant things in it.
It's a very, very rich artifact.
And then with the famous documentary director,
Robert Flaherty, his last film Tabu,
which he co-directed with Robert Flaherty,
became a tremendous success.
But he died in 1931 just before the film was released,
just on the verge of a kind of a claim
that perhaps no other director in the world at that time had.
It's tragic, a tragic story.
The film in which we can see Murnau freeing the camera
is the film called Nosferatu made in 1922.
And some of you will perhaps recognize it
as the origin film for a tremendous number of horror
movies.
Many people would call it the first horror movie.
That may be an exaggeration or inaccurate,
but it is among-- it is certainly
the most influential and significant early horror film.
It's based on the Dracula story, and like Dracula itself,
it tells a very strange sort of story
about vampires who survived for centuries
and then come into the world, and by their little sort
of suggestive sexual bite in the neck of a woman,
transform the women into vampires as well.
And it's now a kind of commonplace established idea
that this energy, that the kind of Gothic fantasy
that is embodied in the story of Dracula
and in so many similar ones, has its origins in various forms
of sexual fantasy.
And the Dracula figure, when he kisses the woman's neck,
is symbolically engaged in a sexual act.
And the woman's resistance but then her transformation
into a vampire is presumably the woman's transformation
to sexual activeness in some way.
At least these are the kinds of symbolic or underlying
associations that many scholars bring
to bear when they talk about why such stories were
so fascinating and so popular at the end of the 19th century.
So one thing to remember about Nosferatu
is it is an adaptation of a novel
already very widely known.
And in fact, there were copyright questions
about Nosferatu.
The copyright owners from the book sued the filmmakers,
and I'm not sure what the outcome was.
But the film did survive in any case.
So here are a couple of scenes.
Here is the beginning of Nosferatu.
And the subject matter seems to me not that interesting,
but again, my view is not necessarily the only view.
There are people who love these films.
I don't know why they do, but I don't want to simply impose
my view on you.
If you're interested in this, or if you
share a love of horror film-- one of my problems
is I don't like horror films today,
even though they've reached a very sophisticated level.
I think they're silly.
I don't get them.
So I'm not a good judge of them, and my negative judgments,
take them with a grain of salt.
They're partly colored by my own preoccupations.
There are ways I could defend my position,
but I don't feel I should impose my views on you.
I do think it's a silly story, and it seems to me
that reality is complex enough without sort
of inventing horrors that hide underground
for thousands of years and emerge with magical powers.
The actual horrors of reality seem to me
sufficient and not adequately studied.
So that's one of my objections to these forms of fantasy.
But in any case, that's personal.
But in any case, what you can see in Nosferatu, even
people who are not as interested in the subject matter,
they can see what a technically innovative film it is.
Watch this.
Here's the beginning.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In, fact freeze it already.
Does this seem more realistic to you?
Do you see already-- no fake sets?
We don't feel we're watching a theatrical piece, that a camera
is filming a theater piece?
What's one of the reasons for that?
The natural sunlight.
That's natural sunlight.
Go ahead.
The texture of his bedding also is a factor.
And of course, the sunlight is a crucial motif in the film,
because Dracula lives by darkness.
And the film depends, quite brilliantly,
on a series of juxtapositions of light and dark,
of shadow and brightness.
Now look at this.
Freeze it, Kristen.
Freeze it for a second.
Look at this.
We're really outside in a real world.
Look at these animals.
And you can feel the film-- at first, we're disoriented.
We don't even know why are we looking here?
But the film's joy-- we can feel almost the film's excitement
at showing us what the real world looks like.
I actually find this visually and intellectually
much more exciting than a ridiculous set in which
a symbolically dressed monster staggers around in a way
that no one who ever walked the earth moved.
I find this much more compelling.
But what was important at the time
was how liberating it was, because what Murnau was showing
is look what the camera can actually do.
He's freeing the camera.
Go ahead.
OK.
That's enough of this.
Maybe I'll give you one more quick scene.
Do we have a separate clip?
Let's go to the other clip.
Now here's something from the end of the film.
Can you freeze it a second?
I'll sort of briefly set the [INAUDIBLE].
This guy is Dracula's weird assistant,
and he's escaped from jail.
I find the story idiotic, ridiculous, totally unserious.
But look at the realism visually here.
This is maybe the first time that these narrow alleyways
were captured with such precision.
It's almost as if, at least for me,
the subject matter is irrelevant,
and what the film is showing about how it can render reality
is so exciting that it's as if a new universe has opened up.
And I must admit that even though there
were American directors who were working with a freed camera
long before this, no one ever used
the camera outdoors more effectively up to this time
than Murnau.
And I'll show you a little more of this,
even though the plot is stupid, because you
can see how realistic and persuasive, compelling
the visual experience is.
See the freedom of the camera to shoot down,
how that changes around you?
The quickness of the editing.
There he is up on top of his roof.
If you didn't know the context, you
would see this as a form of oppression and mistreatment.
Why are they going after this poor guy?
And I think that is an implication of this,
even though he's the source of evil.
But look at the realism of this.
Look at the texture of the bricks, the sense
you have that this is a real place, that he really
climbed down a roof.
The movies.
If the movies don't do this, they
have to give us a sense of that gross reality, which the movies
have the power to do.
They have to have very good reasons
for giving up that power.
It's a very rare film that can really give it up.
Some animations can do it.
But even surreal films, even films that exaggerate
or that create alternative worlds that are not
like our real worlds today have the kind of kinetic camera
and sense of the textured quality of the external world
that we get in those images.
So Murnau was critical to us and crucial to us for this reason,
and his great masterpiece is one of the two films
that I've asked you to watch tonight.
We're showing both Nosferatu and The Last Laugh.
Let's do it in the order of The Last Laugh first.
I think Nosferatu's a less interesting film, but still
from a technical standpoint, fascinating.
And those of you who are interested in the history
of horror films, you should pay attention,
because there's hardly a frame in Nosferatu that
has not been alluded to or echoed in later horror films.
And it is the origins of what is now
a dominant movie genre, both a literary and a cinematic genre.
So it's a very, very important film.
But The Last Laugh is a true masterpiece,
and one of the reasons I think it's such a remarkable film
is that it's freed in some degree
from the pretentiousness, the surreal pretentiousness
of expressionism.
There are expressionist elements in the film as you'll see.
Very cleverly done.
There's one immensely grotesque and powerful moment
in which, for example, there are a series--
we are given an image of some gossiping women, who
are trading gossip about the primary character.
And we'll see how interestingly Murnau handles that sequence.
And there's an element of distortion or grotesquery
in that.
There are also elements in the film, moments
in the film, brilliant moments in the film where
what is shown externally is not what's happening externally,
but what is going on in the mind of the primary character.
In other words, it carries the principle
of finding ways to create a subjective camera even
further than any previous film had done.
There's one remarkable moment in this film-- watch for it.
It's very astonishing-- in which the director of photography,
Karl Freund, was asked to sort of figure this out.
There's a moment when the protagonist gets drunk.
He's very disappointed about something, and he gets drunk,
and he staggers around.
And they were trying to figure out a way of dramatizing this.
They played around with the camera,
and they strapped the camera to the actor's waist,
and when he staggered around, the world you saw
was staggering too.
And it created an immensely powerful sort
of subjective experience for the viewer.
And there are a number of other places in the film where
you can see that what's being dramatized
is the inner life of the characters.
So there are expressionist elements in the film,
but it transcends expressionism.
It becomes a film truly about reality without distortion,
and of course, its basic subject is
what happens to our old people when
they get too old to function.
This is a theme I'm beginning to find more
and more sympathetic as I age.
But it's one of the most powerful treatments
of this subject.
And basically, the story is about--
as you'll see-- it's about a porter in a hotel whose job is
to help carry baggage in.
But he's an immense big man played
by one of the most famous theater actors of the day, Emil
Jannings.
And at a certain point in the film, as you'll see,
he's demoted.
He loses his job.
They take his uniform away.
His uniform is very important to him.
And they demote him.
He has to go and work in the men's room
as a men's room attendant.
So the film in a certain way does several things.
First, it shows us what Murnau himself
came to call the unchanged camera, the free camera.
And over and over again, you can see
how immensely innovative the camera work in this film is.
The very opening scene of the film
is a tour de force you might miss
because it happened so quickly.
The camera follows a person down an elevator, a glass elevator,
and then follows it across the room.
The camera was actually mounted on a bicycle
so they could move it that way.
It happens so quickly you might not even
notice it, although filmmakers were overwhelmed by it,
because he was doing things with the camera
that no one else had done before.
And you'll see other moments in the film
where his use of the camera is complex and innovative.
I've already talked a bit about the themes in the film,
but let me continue this.
So I've said in a way it's a working class tragedy.
And the very fact that it's about an ordinary man,
but it tries to treat him with the kind of dignity
that in the classical times kings and high born characters
would receive is very significant
and is a powerful aspect of the subject matter.
What also develops is a deep sense
of the character of the protagonist.
The way in which his identity is connected to his job
and how when his job, and especially his uniform,
which is the symbol of his authority,
is taken away, how he's unmanned, unhousled, undone,
incapable of functioning.
So it's a very powerful, socially aware movie.
It dramatizes character with a kind of subtlety that's
very rare in silent film.
You really have a sense of this man's character.
It's quite a brilliant performance,
even though Jannings was its theater actor,
and there is something somewhat broad about his performance,
you can see him beginning to adapt to the camera
and to the more nuanced things that the camera can do.
But even the parts of his role that
are a little sort of exaggerated make sense
because there's something pretentious and pompous
about his character.
One of the subtlest things about the film, in fact,
is the way the character has this complexity.
A character for whom the audience's sympathy
is constantly solicited is also imperfect,
in some ways, an annoying old man, not a nice person,
selfish, proud of his superiority to the other people
with whom he lives.
One of the ways you could see this operating
is the film really operates in two different spaces--
the space of the great hotel and the space
where the character played by Jannings lives.
He lives in a working class ghetto, a working class
part of the city.
And the two environments, the hotel and the working class
part of the city, are juxtaposed,
and we learn about each of them by their juxtaposition.
The working class part of the city
is interesting for a number of reasons, but one of the best
is the pride he takes in his uniform.
He may be only a hotel porter, But in his neighborhood,
he's a big man.
He's a big shot, and he's very proud of himself.
You can even see him boring the children
and giving them instructions and things.
The most important point I'm trying to make
is that he's a complex character that we learn
this without dialogue through the genius of silent film,
because he's both flawed and also
an object of sympathy and affection.
The film doesn't simplify his character.
He's a spiky, unpleasant man in some ways,
but we also still feel for him and recognize
how terrible his tragedy is.
One of the most important characteristics of the film
and the mark of what a cinematic achievement it is
is that up until very close to the very end of the film,
there is not a single title card, not
a single use of words.
In other words, the film depends upon its visual power.
And you understand even complex things like the fact
that the character is drunk, whether he's not
thinking straight, or that what he's seeing is not reality,
but some distorted version of reality.
No title cords explain this to you.
The film has a fluency, a visual eloquence
that's very remark-- that's the mark of a movie maker.
But there's an interesting tip-off here.
An interesting problem here is presented,
and I'll end with this point.
It has to do with the ending of the film,
and I want you to think about this as you reflect on the film
after you've watched it.
I've described the basic plot of the film,
and as you'll discover, this catastrophe
that descends upon the protagonist of the film
is reversed at the end of the movie.
And see, he wins a lottery, and great good fortune
descends upon him.
Don't be angry that I've given you the plot.
You can't talk about film seriously without doing it,
so don't be disappointed.
I won't spoil movies by doing real spoilers.
If I think you shouldn't know this
for the experience of the film, I won't mention it.
But don't be annoyed if I do this,
because I need to explain this stuff to you.
So there's this reversal at the end, but it's a fake reversal.
You don't really believe it.
It seems inconsistent.
Why do you think it's there?
The film was such a downer.
The original cut was such a downer
that the people, the producers paying for the film
said, no, no, no, you've got to put
a happy ending on the movie.
So Murnau and his colleagues-- it
was a collaborative process-- the screenwriter, Carl Mayer,
and the director of photography Carl [? Freund, ?]
as well as the actors were all collaborating
in the making of the film.
They said, OK, well, what should we do?
So they tacked on this happy ending.
One of the things that marks the happy ending is a title card,
and the appearance of the title card
is a confession or a secret signal
to the real members of the audience-- this film is over.
Forget this crap that's coming at the end.
At least that's how I want to read it.
But what you should ask yourself as you're watching the film
are two things.
First-- not ask but meditate on-- first
of all, this poor ending or this ending that seems to reverse.
The reason the ending is bad is that the whole momentum
of the film leads toward this catastrophe at the end,
and to reverse it by an act of fortune
like that is to deny the social and political implications
and psychological implications of the story.
It's a very unartistic thing to do.
It violates the momentum of the text,
of the trajectory of the character.
So it's a bad thing.
But it is also an embodiment of an enduring issue
in movie making, which is the conflict between art
and commerce.
Movies are commercial objects.
This is hardly the only film in the history of movies
to be distorted in this way.
And in fact, that tension is not always negative.
Sometimes forcing directors to sort of communicate
with their audiences is helpful.
It isn't always the case that these commercial imperatives
are negative, although they often are.
But this is one of those classic instances that can you
think of other famous examples?
Orson Welles, the American director,
was often-- suffered tremendously
from this kind of pressure, because his films were thought
to be unwatchable, and one of his films
was cut against his will, and he lost control of his films.
And he made very many fewer films
than he might have made had he not
been thought of as a commercial disaster by the Hollywood money
people.
And there are many, many other examples
of this in the history of movies.
One could say that this is one of the originating moments
in which the conflict between art and commerce in the movies
is dramatized for us.
But there's something else I want
you to think about as well as you're
thinking about the ending.
What is the moment at the end of the film that
really would end the film?
Because I think there is one.
It's a visually very powerful moment, but it's so bleak.
It's so sad that you can understand why the money
men wouldn't have liked it.
So as you're watching the film, think about all
of these matters, but especially think
about the way in which Murnau discovered
more fully than any director up to his time
what we might call the kinetic powers of the camera.
He unchained the camera.
He [? fliberated ?] the camera, and German film
was-- world cinema, but German film especially,
was never the same after that.