Someone yawns. Another shifts in his chair. In the silence of a changeover in reels, I can hear us all—Grau, Wagner, Greta—murmuring with pleasure and amusement. Behind the whirring of Wagner cueing up the final leader, we can hear the sound of many voices singing in the garden below: children outside our dark little room, shouting in the sunlight.

Der Letzte Mann

DER LETZTE MANN

5/3/24. A few weeks ago I found the notebooks from my first film projects, optimistically marked Murnau—Film 1919. The first entries involved Satanas, untitled at that point. They were instructions to myself, to convince myself of my own authority, in a loose-leafed binder that probably did the opposite for my young crew. I was touched, leafing back through them.

Master precision. Be a precision instrument yourself.

Problem: to make what you see be seen, through the intermediary of a machine that does not see as you do. To make what you understand be understood, through the intermediary of that same machine.

Rid yourself of accumulated untruths. Know your own resources. You are not “directing” someone else, but yourself.

A few weeks after those words were written, a Tarzan-film out of America crystallized my sense that in terms of the arts, I was moving into a new world. This Tarzan-film set itself with sovereign blitheness above probability, truthfulness, logic, and other such modest criteria of modern thought. But the electrifying thing was that I did not notice those flaws as long as the film was showing; I only became aware of the inner incoherence on the way home, when I stopped at a café and tried to rework what I’d seen. Then I confronted closed doors and absurd coincidences. But even so, I felt no anger or betrayal, and smiled. For despite its absurdity, the Tarzan-film was a masterpiece of modern technique: suspenseful, adventurous, and high-spirited. Instead of intellectual gratification, it had captivated and delighted its audience with technical finesse.

My life changed there in that café. The insight that even discriminating viewers could be seduced by such an approach was exhilarating: I realized the kinetic character of cinema, the primacy of pictorial rhythm. Understandings that I’d come to during the war concerning the ways photography could move had been given a form.

Since I’ve had the power to choose, I’ve worked with Karl Freund or Fritz Arno Wagner as cameramen for that reason: they see the camera as an artistic element in and of itself, and understand that it cannot, in its present immobility, express the potential of cinematography. The old practice dictates a static composition as the backdrop before which the actors cavort: only the space within the reach of a shackled apparatus.