E-Mail This Article to a Friend Almost a phantom F.W. Murnau over Boston and Cambridge BY A.S. HAMRAH
	"Haunted Visions: The Films of F.W. Murnau" At the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive September 30 through October 13.

F.W. Murnau never made a talking picture (even D.W. Griffith made a couple), yet alone among the great directors who made only silent films he continues to compel. And not just to compel but to fascinate. Whereas we know Fritz Lang and Lubitsch, and Chaplin too, from their sound films as much as from their silents, Murnau is a pure expression of the silent cinema, one who predicted, or invented, the mise en scène of sound films, who in a way made sound films without sound. He strikes us as wholly modern in a way his contemporaries among the German Expressionists do not. In part, that’s because even his most studio-bound films are suffused with a real feeling for landscape and nature — they breathe, albeit an often pestilent air. And in part it’s because he died in a car accident in 1931, after striking out on his own in Tahiti, away from both Hollywood and Berlin. He never had a chance to decline.

Over seven decades, Murnau has followed the trajectory of our culture, sliding from pantheon auteur to posthumous celebrity. Jim Shepard’s 1998 fictionalized biography, Nosferatu: A Novel, explored Murnau’s longings (he was homosexual) as much as his work. And he’s been paid a kind of ultimate compliment: John Malkovich played him in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a loony account of the making of Nosferatu. Despite this slightly elevated E! Channel–fication, Murnau’s achievement has never been in question. His best films — Nosferatu, Der letzte Mann, Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu — deserve their reputation as masterpieces. His 1930 City Girl should be on that list, despite the studio interference that truncated it. Since interest in Murnau is reaching new levels, the film series "Haunted Visions: The Films of F.W. Murnau," at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive through October 13, comes at a good time, when moviegoers will be open to the unfamiliar works this series (which is co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Boston) brings to light. It’s great that those films are all here in new prints. This chance to see all of Murnau’s surviving films (nine others are lost) in one series is a first.

Another reason Murnau is unique among directors of his era is the impression he gives of not having a consistent style. He doesn’t fall into the trap of style, and yet his films are unmistakably his own. His early exegete Lotte Eisner called her book on German Expressionist cinema The Haunted Screen, but it’s only Murnau’s films that seem truly haunted, haunted from within. This quality emanates from his own consciousness. He never seems to be channeling a Weimar zeitgeist. Other directors of that time and place impose a look, a framework on their films that can prevent us from living inside their emotions today. Murnau’s films are not like that.

In his seventh and earliest surviving film, 1921’s Der Gang in die Nacht/Journey into the Night (October 1 at 7 p.m. at the HFA), the set-bound opening scenes might strike you as trivial. A dancer (Lya de Putti) tries to seduce a doctor (Werner Krauss) away from his work. When the pair relocate to a fishing village, the feeling for landscape Murnau had picked up from the Swedish cinema kicks in and becomes thoroughly mixed with his innate ominousness. And his idea of dramatic construction is already in place. He sets up a situation that at first seems generic or light and then gradually deepens and darkens it. Direction becomes a play of competing forces doomed to defeat each other; tragedy is inescapable. This is also true in 1921’s Schloß Vogelöd/The Haunted Castle (October 1 at 9 p.m. at HFA), a less successful country-house mystery, like Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. The film is both plot-heavy and loaded with characters, but Murnau overcomes those shortcomings with group compositions in depth and a rain-soaked atmosphere. Dream sequences point to his future. One, with the shadow of a clawed hand, brings Nosferatu to mind. Another, in which a priest spoons frosting into a kitchen boy’s mouth, is better left to a novelist to analyze.

If Murnau had made no film other than Nosferatu (1922; September 30 at 8 p.m., October 1 at 6 p.m., and October 2 at 2 p.m. at the MFA; October 9 at 9 p.m. and October 10 at 7 p.m. at the HFA), a "free" adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he would have contributed enough to cinema. There isn’t another horror film like it, despite subsequent attempts to re-create its feeling of subtle movement between two worlds — the one we know and one that lies just beneath it. The thematic concerns and events consistent from one Murnau film to the next are all present here: the movement from city to country; a plague that overtakes the film’s world; an evil outsider; a sacrificial woman; compositions uniquely (even painfully) aware of art history; the replacement of intertitles with texts; characters framed in arches and doorways; good people trapped by the mirrors they hold.