Murnau set the first of his theatrically based costume spectaculars for UFA (see also Faust, May 17) firmly within his own artistic medium, the cinema, by presenting Molière's satire as a film-within-a-film, sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue with a contemporary setting. (A devious housekeeper convinces her master to cut his worthy nephew out of his will and leave his riches to her instead; the nephew, disguised as the operator of a traveling cinema show, flatters his way into the home and proceeds to project Tartuffe by way of opening his uncle's eyes.) Tour-de-force performances by Emil Jannings as Tartuffe, Lil Dagover as Elmire, and Werner Krauss as Orgon, are elegantly integrated into the concerns for set design and camera movement that, as always, are Murnau's chief preoccupation. The script developed by the Murnau-Carl Mayer-Karl Freund team, fresh from The Last Laugh, calls for an angular camera style (facilitated by sets raised onto ramps) and extreme naturalism (actors wore no make-up, and the camera seemed to penetrate the surfaces of their infinitely flawed faces!) in the prologue and epilogue; and a gauzy, artificial approach to the “fiction” that comprises the main body of Tartuffe. Lotte Eisner has noted “the mobility of the camera” and the way that “the elegant contours of the simple, restrained architecture are...adapted to the movement of the camera.... Every element of the set plays a predetermined role in the action.”