Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the director who unchained the camera and couldn’t outrun the studio

F. W. Murnau

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 28, 1888 Bielefeld, Germany
Died	March 11, 1931 (42)
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Nosferatu, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Faust
Awards	Academy Award

The week before Tabu opened in cinemas, its director was dead. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau had walked away from Fox Film Corporation after they cut his follow-up to Sunrise, lost most of the footage, and then recut City Girl until he resigned. His response was a yacht, Robert Flaherty, and Bora Bora — an attempt to make something no distributor had ordered and no studio would allow. Artistic disputes with Flaherty ended the partnership. Murnau finished the film alone, then drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway toward Los Angeles. The car overturned. He died in Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital on March 11, 1931. Tabu opened March 18.

Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe was born in Bielefeld on December 28, 1888, to a cloth merchant’s family. The surname he gave himself — Murnau — came from a Bavarian town he loved, adopted around 1910: a gesture that said something about how he understood himself, aesthetically self-constructed rather than inherited. By twelve he was reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He studied art history and literature at Heidelberg, then came to Max Reinhardt’s acting school in Berlin, that combustible laboratory of Weimar modernism. The First World War interrupted everything. He flew on the Western Front, survived eight crashes, made an emergency landing in Switzerland in December 1917, was interned, and spent the rest of the war writing film scripts. The scripts would turn out to be the most useful thing he did in uniform.

His German period began in 1919 and produced fourteen films before he left for Hollywood in 1926. The most significant — and most nearly lost — was Nosferatu in 1922. The film was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, made without permission from Stoker’s estate. Florence Stoker won the copyright case. A German court ordered all prints destroyed. The film survived because copies had already been shipped abroad before the order reached them, and Max Schreck’s shadow climbing a staircase, the elongated fingers, the coffin carried at shoulder height through a plague-emptied town — all of it would have vanished without an accident of geography. That survival is now part of cinema’s foundation mythology.

Der letzte Mann came two years later. Murnau stripped the film of every intertitle — no cards, no captions, pure image — and simultaneously freed the camera from its tripod with a totality that had not been attempted before. Karl Freund built rigs that allowed the camera to track with the character, tilt when he was drunk, move through corridors as an extension of consciousness. Emil Jannings played a hotel doorman humiliated by the loss of his uniform. The story is almost too simple for what the film does with it. The unchained camera — entfesselte Kamera — became the technical vocabulary that subsequent cinematographers had to learn from or argue against. Carl Mayer’s screenplay was written as pure visual notation, designed to be read by a camera, not by actors waiting for their cue to speak.

Fox Film Corporation brought Murnau to Hollywood in 1926 at a salary that shocked the industry. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) was the result — a film so formally accomplished that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created a special category for it at the very first Oscar ceremony: Best Unique and Artistic Production. The award was given once and never again. The category was retired. The implication — that nothing else had qualified, that the category existed solely for this film — was left unspoken but widely understood.

What Fox then did was mismanage everything that came after. They cut 4 Devils and then lost most of the footage; the film is now largely gone. They imposed sound sequences on City Girl until Murnau walked. The pattern was a Hollywood habit: import a foreign director with an unusual reputation, give them enough latitude for one masterpiece, then industrialize them. Murnau refused the industrialization. There is something both principled and self-defeating about a filmmaker who responded to the most prestigious production apparatus in the world by sailing to the South Pacific to make a film no distributor had commissioned.

The standard critical framework places Murnau as a German Expressionist filmmaker whose American work was a brilliant compromise with Hollywood conventions, then a retreat to independence. This periodization flattens what was actually a continuous experiment. Sunrise is not European cinema preserved inside a studio system — it absorbed and exceeded both. And Tabu, his final film, is not Expressionist at all: luminous, elegiac, shot entirely in Bora Bora with non-professional performers, it represents a third visual language he had found, entirely different from the Weimar darkness he started with. He never got to answer for the departure.

The gay dimension of Murnau’s biography is documented and publicly relevant: his closest companion Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele was killed on the Eastern Front in 1915, a loss that runs through his work’s interest in isolation and unreachable desire. In Hollywood he became involved with actor David Rollins. The biographical record exists; what it means for the internal argument of the films is a matter of informed inference rather than documentation.

When Robert Eggers remade Nosferatu in 2024, released December 25, he described first seeing Murnau’s original at age nine as a defining encounter — not an influence absorbed over time but something more immediate. The 2024 film deliberately walked through Murnau’s own shots: the shadow climbing the wall, the seaside cemetery, the sarcophagus’s position in the frame. The homage is specific because the argument is specific: that the 1922 film found solutions that a century of horror cinema had not improved on. Werner Herzog made the same argument in his 1979 remake, more elegiacally. Two directors, fifty years apart, arriving at the same conclusion from different directions.

The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, established in 1966 and custodian of some 4,000 titles in German film heritage, continues to commission restorations and new orchestral accompaniments for the surviving films. Nine of Murnau’s twenty-one directorial works are entirely gone. The remaining twelve — including the ones that changed how cinema moves — survive through what amounts to a series of accidents: prints shipped before court orders arrived, nitrate canisters that didn’t catch fire, archivists who noticed in time. The Academy Award called Sunrise ‘unique.’ The word functions less as compliment than as admission: there was no genre for what Murnau was doing. There still isn’t, quite. The camera he unchained is still moving.

Featured Films

Tags: F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, Emil Jannings, Karl Freund, Sunrise, Tabu

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