Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau - 1924
So incredibly beautful, but not without difficulty, not too smooth or shiny. This is like a great ancient classical work; perfect, but with that air of the primitive.
More sepcifically, many low angles for the very strong whites, like on fire. The money is even white. This all goes with the themes of smoke throughout, hell... Deleuze.
We have a mixture of long shots, but the film seems at once modern for its mediums, more than I can think certainly most black and whites, nevermind silents... The edit is precise, but never pnderous, very exact moves, often nintety or one eighty.
In a way, this is two different films; we have a real change from the hotel to the housing estate; there we have remarkable non-centering, the windows come alive across the frame in that great early stil shot. I don't know what to say but the ridiculous; neo realism? Cramped interiors, everyday washing, life, little moves, dirty faces. There is a slightly odd attitude to the woman gossips, sympathetic but cruel...
The hotel is shot more precise ly, with those wonderful singular (literally) moves towards or away from an action. Also note similar moves for travelling sound; into the ear. The earline match.
And the epilogue; at first quite a smart inversion, of excess, moving the film from parochialism of a single kind of consciousness one could say, for all the obvious absurdity. Once this exercise is clear through, it becomes downright odd
This film is still for me sensational; just Jannings against that wall. Perhaps my favourite silent film; or just film, long with a few incomparable others.
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