Murnau
Kino International, $99.95Nearly 100 years after the release of his first movie, F.W. Murnau is due the biggest, fullest, most elaborate, most extra-laden DVD box set available. As one of the titans of early German film, he belongs in that elite group of directors whose movies cast wide and everlasting shadows on the industry, such as D.W. Griffith, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard. This set features six of the expressionist’s most famous movies from his early years in Germany (before Hollywood and Sunrise): The Haunted Castle, Tartuffe, The Finances of the Grand Duke, The Last Laugh, Nosferatu, and – please bow your heads in deference – Faust. Each one of which is a masterpiece of symphonic chiaroscuro: shadow and light, smoke and fabrication, abstraction and near-operatic emotional candor coming together in service of a single story.
All of the films here have been painstakingly restored, bringing to life Murnau’s impossibly deep, nearly tactile whites and blacks, the foundation of a visual style that would influence both Orson Welles and John Ford, not to mention every director who ever took a stab at film noir. And then there are the set’s generous extras, which include documentaries, short films, book excerpts, set-design galleries, new translations, etc. And though it’s doubtful a three-minute movie about digital restoration will affect viewers’ feelings about masterpieces such as Nosferatu or Faust, it’s always good to know that fans and scholars aren’t letting silent masters like Murnau slip into obscurity.
Watching this set, what struck me most is how simultaneously familiar and otherworldly Murnau’s films are. I guess this is the mark of a true artist: the ability to create a language everyone would end up using but also to speak that language in a way no one else will ever really comprehend.
This article appears in April 10 • 2009.