Some of us—Freund, Wagner, and Carl Mayer, who’s working on the screenplay—want a variable, multiple, living scene. We intend to shatter the bonds that keep the audience as passive as the theatergoer in his seat; we intend to give the spectator the illusion of agency. Theatrical space will be left behind. The camera will travel through uncharted territory. Filmmaking will seem to have come from somewhere else, and not from the human hand.

Years ago this seemed even farther from realization. Every so often I’d discover in the trade papers someone who shared my obsession. When Hermann Warm declared in an interview, “The cinema must be a living sketch,” I hired him as set designer for Schloss Vogelöd. When Carl Theodor Dreyer, lecturing in Berlin, spoke of the camera as an active part of “the music of images,” I wrote to him and asked to pick his brain. I saved everything from the practical to the inspirational in a file, then new, slender, and clean; now old, bulging, and weather-stained.

I’m convinced that this is the point at which my will meets and moves with destiny, as if life, as the poet said, was a horse, to whose motion one yielded only after having trained the animal to the utmost. All of my work in theater and film has been leading up to this: the unchained camera.

We’ve come together—Freund, Mayer, and myself—to realize our ambition. We have the talent and the budget of which we’ve dreamed. We have no more excuses.

The film is to be called Der Letzte Mann—from the biblical admonition that the last will be first—and concerns the tragicomedy of a hotel doorman, proud of his braided livery, admired by his family and neighbors, the general of his own back courtyard. Too old to carry the heavy luggage, he’s retired to the gentlemen’s lavatories, forced to exchange his uniform for a simple white jacket. His family feels dishonored, and he becomes the laughing-stock of the neighbors, who take their revenge for the adulation they had lavished upon him.

It’s a pre-eminently German tragedy. It can only be understood in a country where uniform is King. The old morality based on Wilhelmine authority is pitted against this new matter-of-factness that trusts only money. The thought of the film is this: they take away his uniform from a man, and what has he lost? With his uniform he can be king, general, judge, with all the power of his position. Take that away, and what remains?