The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard University Film Archive will be screening the touring retrospective for the German Expressionist flim director F.W.Murnau. “Haunted Visions: The Films of F.W. Murnau” runs through October 13 and features original prints of 12 films with music accompaniment. Murnau is generally regarded now as the greatest director of the silent film era. He is best remebered by film enthusiasts in the US for his powerful rendition of the Dracula story Nosferatu(1922). But he estblished himself in Hollywood with the the masterpiece Sunrise (1927) which won an Oscar. Tragically, he died in a car crash in 1931 before he could bring his genius to ‘talking pictures’.
Ty Burr has a good introduction to the retrospective in the Boston Globe:
“The common thread to Murnau’s movies is their visual beauty — by all means do what you can to see them on a big screen. The director reveled in the natural world and was unique in his ability to poetically capture it (with all due respect to his gifted cinematographers, including Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner). A recurrent theme, though, is the damage that people inflict on themselves and on others through pride and delusion. It’s a wonderful life, Murnau often insists — if only mankind took the time to notice.”
There is musch fascinating material on the Web concerning Murnau’s life and films. Probably the best place to start is with the Web site of the Murnau Gesellschaft. which has resources in German and English.
