Fridriech Willhem Murnau was a German director who flourished in the late 1920s, mostly for his post-expressionistic mise-en-scene, and his complete reliance on visual storytelling, a concept that a later visual director, Alfred Hitchcock, labeled "pure cinema". This film, the "Last Laugh", was made in '24, just before his next success and the film which still keeps him alive, "Sunrise". The "Last Laugh" tells the story of a hotel clerk who is demoted to lavatory attendant, because of his infirmity. As brilliantly portrayed by silent actor Emil Jannings, this hotel clerk takes pride in wearing his military uniform and going to work everyday, and has reached a clichéd level of glory and respect amongst his neighbors. When he loses this position, he sees his whole word being destroyed. The noirish photography implies not only the influence of German expressionism, but also of such great filmmakers as Lang, Griffith and Dryer, all of them directors who had an impact on later European art-house filmmakers such as Bergman, Rosselini and Reed. The overrated value we attach to appearances and the way people are judged by what they are wearing is the center of this movie. Emancipating from the mainstream American way of movie-making at the time, Murnau does more than simply telling the story in a way that involves the audience's emotions; his mise-en-scene is always subjective, as if the camera was in the mind of his protagonist. In that sense, not only is he able to include the hero's dreams and fantasies in the story, but also portray the realistic scenery as perceived by Janning's view: bright and shining at the first part of the story, while our hero is still enjoying his position as hotel clerk, dark and threatening in the second part, as the hero's situational development leads him to a more pessimistic view of life. Perhaps Murnau was not aware of it at the time, but the manner in which he balanced his direction, constantly alternating between fantasy and reality, formed a landmark of a film, possibly the greatest of the whole silent era, equal to such silent films as "Metropolis", "The Passion of Joan of Arc"and "The Lodger". This conscious disregard for realistic mainstream movie-making and the emphasis on subjective experience also originated and inspired yet another European filmmaker, who, even though lived much later and based his visual techniques on surrealism and neo-realism, founded his art completely on the intrinsic emotional impression of reality, just as Murnau did in this film. His name has Federico Fellini.
Review of The Last Laugh
