-Devdutt Trivedi
F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh is witness to the high mark achieved by silent cinema at the peak of the Expressionistic aesthetic, largely prevalent in Germany, where the emphasis on the visual supersedes representation. The focus of Expressionistic forms, which largely consisted of exaggerated shadows and crooked diagonals, focused on either the nature of filmic perception itself or the nature of the suggested dream that the forms invoked. These works of Murnau and his Expressionist contemporaries, Pabst, Wegener and Lang, with their objective of capturing ‘the soul at work’ were analyzed by Gilles Deleuze’s as creating a “dynamism”, meaning a single succession of continuous motion over an “opposition”, referring to the class conflict, as in the case of Eisenstein and the other Communist Russian Formalists.
This “dynamism” creates a dynamic flow of imagery through which a becoming of the image, either its perception correlative or its dream correlative creates a becoming of the materiality of the things within the image or suggested by it. This notion of materiality includes the material elements in the text and their reference to material subjects and objects within the frame. These subjects and objects within the frame suggest the possibility of materiality outside the frame and the possibility of recording it through the materiality of the film medium itself i.e. through the texture of celluloid.
The Last Laugh, like Murnau’s other late silent work is without inter-titles i.e. the descriptive text in between two successive images. Murnau saw inter-titles as an unnecessary aid to the forwarding of images and made important critic Roger Ebert comment on the film being “one of the most truly silent” films ever made. The lack of inter-titles or the lack of names for his characters (the lead characters in his masterwork Sunrise(1926) are ‘The Man’ and ‘The Wife’) allowed Murnau to make his work more universal and accessible across audiences. Murnau’s film juxtaposes Lang’s discourse in his early silent works such as Spies (1919) and especially Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1921) of utilizing Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch or the ‘Superman.’ Nietzsche claimed the ideal of the ‘Superman’ as the goal of human thought.
However Murnau’s work especially The Last Laugh is also heavily influenced by Kafka’s discourse around the emergence of hierarchy in human relationships and their transformation of lived experience into a mechanism that is like a many-sided machine. Kafka’s textual form splits the text into several dissimilar machines. Kafka, according to Deleuze’s reading of his work, links hierarchy to the image of the father, the oppressive semi-heroic figure already closer to becoming the Übermensch. The father- Übermensch in the works of Kafka produces hierarchy both in the social as well as the work space. This creates different ‘qualitative’ formations of hierarchy in different work spaces that create a mechanism which forms its own resonating organism.
At the same time it would be important to link the film’s discourse to contemporary politics in Germany where the rise of the fascistic Nazi regime was being witnessed.
Lotte Eisner in her important book on Murnau, F.W. Murnau (1961, translated into English in 1972) states that the porter’s tragedy could ‘only be a German story’ and could only occur in a country ‘where the uniform is more than God.’ According to Roger Ebert “the doorman's total identification with his job, his position, his uniform and his image helps foreshadow the rise of the Nazi Party.” Murnau’s linkage of the hierarchy laden work space with a quintessentially expressionistic approach to space, underlines the presence of a disturbed middle-class, and their formation of a public that could become a violent mob (as it explicitly does in Lang’s M (1931)).
A large factor in the greatness of Murnau’s films are his collaborations with Karl Freund, the cinematographer who single handedly established the chiaroscuro or light and shadow technique that would form the backbone of the German Expressionistic style. Freund later moved to Hollywood where he was responsible for the development of the Film Noir genre. Some of Murnau’s most important work would be shot by Freund’s assistant Karl Struss. However The Last Laugh is shot by Freund, the same man responsible for creating the gargoyle-like forms that defined German Expressionism in the movements’ prime examples: Paul Wegener’s masterpiece Der Golem (1920) and in Lang’s early work Spiders (1919). Freund was known for his iconoclastic camera movements where he would place the camera on a moving object like a swing. In The Last Laugh, Freund invented the first ‘dolly’, a device that allows a camera to move during a shot. According to Edgar G. Ulmer, who worked on the set design of the film and would go onto becoming an important film noir directors in his own right, the idea to make the first dolly came from the director’s need to capture the details on Emil Jannings' face during the first shot of the film, as he moved through the hotel. The crew didn’t know how to make a dolly technically, so they created the first one out of a baby's carriage. After this they pulled the carriage on railway track that was built on the studio.
According to the great Hollywood film maker Alfred Hitchcock, who was working at the UFA Studios in Germany at that time, Murnau had all the street signs done in Esperanto, an international neutral language which was created with the objective of ‘peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages.’ The language was designed by Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, a Russian who wanted to create a language that would unite the Poles, Jews, Russians and Germans. The language came to be suspected by several international regimes including Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The film was written by Carl Mayer, the revolutionary scriptwriter of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Mayer had intended Caligari to be a metaphor for the German mass possessed by paranoia after the completion of the First War and bearing the consequences of the prejudiced Treaty of Versailles. Caligari was subverted by the film’s director Robert Wiene, in connivance with producer of Decla Film, Erich Pommer. From the ending of Wiene’s film the spectator can infer the link between the suggested pathetic state of the German public (‘true’) and it being coded by the film’s ending as a madman’s fantasy (‘false’). Carl Mayer who collaborated with Murnau on the film as scriptwriter intended the film to be a commentary on the redundancy of the uniform and more importantly: that true power comes with money and not the uniform.
The fact that the tables do turn for Jannings brings one back to the problem of German silent cinema: that the revolutionary form of ‘men at work’ is transformed into a petit-bourgeoisie desire for power. The Kafkaesque discourse on the emergence of a hierarchy, through the hallucinatory social formation, denoted by the circling doors of Hotel Atlantic, seem to make class a necessity and suggest an emergence of violence that is against the idea of the father.
Originallly, F.W. Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer wanted the film to end with the death of the doorman at the bathroom. Much like in the case of Caligari, executives at UFA pressed them to conjure up a happy ending before the film's premiere in order to maximize its economic potential. In response to studio pressure, Murnau and Mayer, created a cynical epilogue, showing the doorman as having inherited a fortune from an eccentric hotel guest, who bequeathed his entire estate to the last person seen before he died. The executives also pressed the artists to change the film's title from "The Last Man" to "The Last Laughter". Largely memorable for the performance of Emil Jannings in the lead, playing the unnamed hotel porter, the film’s success produced offers for both Jannings and Murnau that prompted their move to America at the dawn of sound.
Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: Movement image and Cinema 2: Time image engage with cinema as have a circuit as its object, which consists of two sides much like the brain, the sensory aspect and the motor aspect that in turn form conflicting and often contradictory machines. Deleuze’s reading of The Last Laugh emphasizes Freund’s legendary tracking shots as being part of “a closed circuit” that no longer follows the characters but “moves among them.” Deleuze emphasizes the light-image and the movement-image as being two sides to the hallucinatory images that create “dynamism.” This “dynamism” is transcended in Murnau’s work, by movement and the presence of dark spaces, which Deleuze reads as denoting “black holes.” This “black hole” both comments on German society as well as talks about an extreme form of the Other which is not a country outside of Germany, not another unknown language that opposes the neutral Esperanto or another formation from the same world but instead suggests a phenomenological possibility in outer space that defies gravitation much like Freund’s camerawork.
Murnau’s film which has correctly been called “Expressionism’s most mature form” is also the peak of silent cinema. Murnau followed up with his first film in Hollywood, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1926), produced by William Fox, which has been often pronounced the “greatest silent film ever made.” He completed three films following Sunrise in America, 4 Devils (1928), City Girl (1930) and his last film, Tabu (1931). His sudden death following an automobile accident in Santa Barbara, California on March 11, 1931 prevented him from attending the premiere of his last film. The car was driven by Murnau's fourteen-year old Filipino valet Garcia Stevenson. Murnau was entombed in Berlin. Robert Flaherty, Emil Jannings and Greta Garbo attended the funeral, and Fritz Lang delivered the funeral speech.
Jannings on the other hand won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his part in Joseph Von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) at the 1929 Academy
Awards. However, he was out of work following the arrival of sound. Following his portrayal of the possessed lover in Joseph Von Sternberg’s Blue Angel (1930) opposite Marlene Dietrich, he embraced the rise of the Nazis and fell out of favour after the war.
References:
Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema:2: The Time Image, Gilles Deleuze, Les Editions De Minuit, 1983
Roger Ebert