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.
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