Der Letzte Mann premieres at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, which boasts 2,165 seats and, since its opening in 1919 with Lubitsch’s Passion, has been the uncontested flagship of Ufa’s theaters. Ventilation is supplied by a miniature electric zeppelin three feet long which drifts through the house during intermissions and sprays eau de cologne about with an atomizer. There are standing ovations even before the final curtain. Jannings pulls me up out of the audience. The adulation washes over us in waves.

There’s hardly time, that week, for Frau Reger’s funeral. Sandri is buried in a field for transients. Late at night, when the schedule permits, my chauffeur drives me there. On each visit, I’m reminded of a moment from the premiere: the solitary figure of Jannings, which became Sandri, which became Hans, and then, finally, only a dumb image, which quivered for a moment on the screen and then disappeared.

Tabu

TABU

****14/15 June 1929 (Midnight). No sleep. All afternoon, the trace odor of land, unmistakable after eight weeks of open sea. Toward sunset we began to notice the scent of flowers. Cassi, David informed us: a low, bushlike plant that carpets the Marquesas.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, filmmaker in the Republic of Germany from 1919 to 1925, and in the United States of America from 1926 to 1929, was spending May and June of 1929 in a ketch halfway between Mexico and New Zealand. For three straight nights he had slept only one or two hours. He was writing on deck. The cockpit bench was rigged like a divan with throw-pillows. Pal was curled at his feet. The dog’s tongue lolled about. The sea air made the poor animal endlessly thirsty.

The moon went all the way down. Before he lit the lamp, he could see his hand in the starlight.

They had traveled southwest by west from Mazatlán to Nukahiva, in the Marquesas. It was one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the direct course was also the fastest.

Sometime the next day he would get his first view of the South Seas. Sitting there on the deck, every so often he would write: The South Seas! He had constructed a little column of such exclamations. From there to Papeete, some 400 miles, would be about four days.

Anxiety piled up behind his excitement the way a wake surge overtook smaller waves. All those lives transformed to suit his purposes: seventeen intelligent men who’d never been far from pavement were about to be marooned across those isolated islands. Their average age was twenty-three.

He fretted constantly that this project, in ways none of the group could fully understand, was bigger than any studio-made film. With a studio, the world was built to suit the filmmaker. But here! Eighteen thousand dollars had already been forwarded not for sets and mysterious union “overheads,” but to natives for food, transport, shelter, carpenters, carriers, divers, fishermen, and brush-clearers. This was the first time he’d seen brush-clearing listed as an expense.