A Tribute to F. W. Murnau is presented by Enno
Patalas, director of the Munich Filmmuseum, and in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and UCLA Film Archives. PFA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Goethe Institute, San Francisco.
Enno Patalas, who will appear in person on May 9, has been director of the Munich Filmmuseum--the film department of the Municipal Museum of Munich--since its inception in 1973. One of the Filmmuseum's major archival activities is the reconstruction of classic German films, often from fragments of different origin, in order to create a print that is as close as possible in length, format and language to the original. Mr. Patalas has visited PFA several times in the past with reconstructed classics by Lang, Pabst, Dupont, Murnau and others, as well as the revival of Ernst Lubitsch's German films.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in Westphalia, Germany, in 1888; he died in a crash on a Los Angeles highway on March 11, 1931, a week before the premiere of his last film, Tabu. In the years in between, he proved himself to be an artist for whom the cinema was a palette for the most extraordinary of personal visions. Many critics hold with the statement of Lotte Eisner, the German film historian most responsible for the resurgence of Murnau's reputation over the last 20 years, that Murnau is “the greatest film director the Germans have ever known.... He created the most overwhelming and poignant images in the whole of German cinema.” Murnau was a student of art history and literature and a pupil of Max Reinhardt before he began directing theater in the 'teens. Turning to the cinema in 1919, he proceeded to complete some 12 feature films before 1923, five of which survive and are included in this retrospective. In 1923 he joined the prestigious UFA company where he worked until 1926, when he sailed for America. In Hollywood, Murnau proved to be as demanding an artist as he had been in Germany and the result was Sunrise, the film many historians consider to be the last great masterpiece of the silent cinema.
