Der brennende Acker (Murnau, 1922)

My experience with The Burning Soil was mildly unpleasant. Ripped from an unknown source, it was murky and constantly deinterlacing, mutating every flickering figure into a pixelated ghost from a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. A 4K transfer on blu-ray would undoubtedly have made this more visually arresting, but I doubt it would have made me love the film any more. To be frank, The Burning Soil is pretty boring. Much like The Haunted Castle, it reveals early Murnau as an adept stager of scenes, an otherworldly creator of images, but lacking the depth and electricity of his cannon of greats.

What grabbed me in The Burning Soil is the near-excessive use of written letters. One could complain that this chains cinema to the devices of Victorian literature, which is constantly framed by correspondence. But Murnau renders these letters as artifacts, conjuring a future archival cinema. I thought about the books in Farocki or the baseball cards in American Dreams: Lost and Found.

The letters could be the only actualities here: real documents. The players are merely re-enacting the historical events that the letters suggest.

Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (Murnau, 1924)

A man of means, who is also a master of disguises, frequently veers The Finances of the Grand Duke into Fantomas territory. Outwitting plainclothes pursuers and seemingly having a hand in every correspondence that crosses his path. But how long have tiny little dogs trailed packs of big dogs for comedic effect? That is the question I was left with after one of the funniest fake-out set ups I've seen.

At a first glance I thought I accidentally threw on an early Lubitsch film. The lightness of touch; the economy of narrative and excess of style; the ephemeral nature with which it deals with romance, economic distress, and plutocrat-funded revolution against royalty.

No one filmed the sea quite like Murnau, especially tall ships on the water. Docks, coastlines, harbors, and cityscapes  are framed with a frankness that emphases the quality of the images as actualities, but the tinting, the montage, the mood renders them simultaneously expressionistic landscapes of dreams.

Nowhere near as jaw-dropping as Nosferatu, but The Finances of the Grand Duke is a worthy comedic counterpart to Murnau's early masterpiece. It is these qualities that recall for me the silent-cinematic fantasias of later-period Catherine Breillat (An Old Mistress, Bluebeard, The Sleeping Beauty) which know the power of the tinted still actuality.

Everything in cinema has already been achieved by the silent masters, even if by accident. This tracking shot on the boat crashes into the doc. It inserts a fluidity akin to a GoPro or when Michael Mann cuts from a hand on the gear stick to the side-view mirror of a sports car.

We're in an Eisenstein film now!

Quit the opposite, in fact. The Finances of the Grand Duke romanticizes its royalty, even when critiquing capitalists but also the industry so essential to communism (have you seen any Vertov?). Murnau loves dichotomous notions of nature as pure and unspoiled. Edenic nature. Perhaps the revolutionaries had real cause to overthrow the Grand Duke because they were denied access to the very Eden the Grand Duke sought to preserve. They were, after all, sleeping in a fucking boat on the shore. Nature as bucolic salve is only a privilege of the rich: that strange opening of the Grand Duke flinging his money into the sea where naked boys splash about to recover it. This is strangely in opposition to other Murnau films that render poverty virtuous through its closeness to the soil (Sunrise is the obvious reference here, but see also the much, much lesser Der brennende Acker aka The Burning Soil).

Last, I wish to highlight this sequence of the Grand Duke himself imagining his nation transformed into a wasteland from a proposed sulphur mine:

Phantom (Murnau, 1922)

What an opening.

Cut to former life.

Color codes (mostly):

Blue is for dreams.

Yellow for schemes.

***

This is classic Murnau: an ordinary man with a simple life gets lost in an image. The image is a desire for something that he believes is better than what he already has. The image always leads the ordinary man astray leading to betrayal, violence, and depravity. It's hard to feel sorry for Lorenz here. He's a real dumbass. Perhaps that's why Phantom is so underwhelming compared to Murnau's greats. However, the dreams are so enthralling that I'll take a little narrative boredom if it means we get sequences like this.