silver nitrate notes

The Last Laugh and Karl Freund's Camera Off the Wall

4 nov 2011

F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924) is the film in which the unchained camera was, for the first time, fully unchained. The cinematographer was Karl Freund (1890-1969), later Lang's collaborator on Metropolis and eventually a Hollywood DP whose work would include Dracula (1931) and Key Largo (1948). What Freund and Murnau set out to do in The Last Laugh was move the camera in ways that the bolted, tripod-mounted cameras of 1924 did not move.

The premise is simple. An aging hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) loses his job to a younger man and is demoted to the men's washroom attendant. His pride collapses. The film tells the story almost entirely without intertitles; Murnau wanted the visual register alone to carry the narrative.

Freund's camera is on a bicycle in the opening shot, descending in a hotel elevator while the doorman watches the lobby below. It is on a wire suspended from a crane in the sequence where Jannings's character looks up at the building from the street. It is held in Freund's hands as he runs alongside Jannings through a hotel corridor. None of this was standard equipment. Freund and Murnau invented or modified each rig for the specific shot.

The result, in 1924, was disorienting. Critics said the camera made them dizzy. The film was a commercial success in Germany and a critical event in Hollywood, where studios noted what UFA was doing and began to imitate it within two years.

Jannings's performance is large in the German expressionist sense: gestural, full of physical postures, played to the back row. The camera, however, is doing most of the work. By the time Murnau cut to a close-up of the doorman's coat being taken from him, we already know what the loss means because the camera has been describing his world for eighty minutes.

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sources
[1] Eisner, Lotte. Murnau. University of California Press, 1973.
[2] Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. University of California Press, 1969.
[3] McGilligan, Patrick. Karl Freund: An Anthology. Anthology Film Archives, 1985.
[4] Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler. Princeton UP, 1947.