by Jim Shepard
In the darkness, Spiess’s absence is more comfortable and familiar. The more he pursued me, the more I restrained my passion for him. This sense of never being at home, with anyone, grows stronger the older I get.
More footage. My concentration dissipates. I remember living in a series of hotels, when I was very small, before Father bought the estate. One small old hotel in particular, by the sea, a little room full of sun in which you could smell the apples and the waves.
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
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.
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?
The idea was Mayer’s. A newspaper report about a toilet attendant’s suicide had prompted him to write the story. Originally it was to be directed by Lupu Pick, as part of a triptych, with Scherben and Sylvester as the flanking panels; the protagonist was to be played by Pick himself. A disagreement put an end to the plan, and Pommer assigned the script to me at Jannings’s suggestion. Then he granted the project a budget three times higher than we’d submitted. Why? The appeal of the American market. The size of their exhibition circuit. But also in retaliation for Hollywood’s invasion of our market. Anyway, this was the thinking behind the millions thrown at Lang for his Die Nibelungen. Ufa is staking its existence on cracking the American market. Pommer’s program will cost too much to recoup itself in Germany alone.
Of the one million six hundred thousand marks set aside, Jannings is pocketing six hundred thousand. Most of the rest is funding an arena for formal experiment.
This is fine with Pommer; if the film doesn’t represent something exciting and different, then why on earth would the Americans buy it? Especially given that the story is one that a non-German mind will have trouble comprehending as any kind of tragedy at all. As Pommer put it in his closing remarks at our first preproduction meeting: “Please invent something new, even if it’s crazy!”
Our plan is simple. The whole script has been modified to be based on the continuous movement of the camera.
Mayer toyed with the notion in his script for Sylvester, but Pick did little with it. For the dramatic shot of the clock just before midnight, Pick and Seeber, his cameraman, constructed a two-level platform with wheels, a huge thing that looked like one of the old Farman bombers stripped of its wings, though they never took it any further: the camera could now slowly close in on an object. Could it turn? Climb? Descend? Swoop?
Those questions obsess Mayer as much as the rest of us. His scripts are dramatic poems—a detailed narration of the shots and pacing, the film imagined in verse. For him the camera is not just a helpful optical device but an extension of his senses. He tests each shot he imagines with a viewfinder Freund gave him; such is his persistence to comprehend more about what we’re doing. Late at night he appears at my house, a squat man with a vaguely Oriental face, waiting impatiently for the door to be opened so that we might resume our discussion. He works day and night. He takes such long walks to sort things out that his neighbors call him the Mailman.
His writing has prompted both his critics and colleagues to view the art form’s capabilities with greater precision. With his script, we’re halfway there; we need only determine how to pull off the miracles envisioned. The script pages for the scene in which the doorman
steals back the uniform of which he’s been stripped:
FADE IN: The front of the hotel at night.
CLOSE-UP: feeling his way through the revolving door: the old man.
In his hands, the uniform.
He listens behind him, like a wary thief.
But suddenly … what’s that?
Light flashes from a lantern.
It’s swaying in the wind,
while now the old man gets ready to run. And …
WHILE THE CAMERA RUNS IN FRONT OF HIM,
He starts convulsively squeezing the uniform. And …
SINCE THE CAMERA IS MOVING MORE QUICKLY THAN HIM:
Soon he’s silhouetted against the hotel.
STILL MOVING, THE CAMERA RETURNS TO HIS FACE.
Does his stained conscience rule him?
And now! What fear!
The hotel! Growing and growing, larger and larger!
And while he’s now running, panting—
Do tentacles stretch out behind him?
Will they want to overwhelm him?
Here his knees give out,
And he falls against a wall.
HERE THE CAMERA CATCHES UP WITH HIM.
LONG-SHOT: The hotel in darkness.
LS: Here he remains.
Panting horribly.
He squeezes the uniform against his chest.
What had he seen back there?
What in the bulk of the hotel had threatened him?
WE SEE FROM HIS POINT OF VIEW:
The hotel.
It stands there serenely, in the peace of the night. And now,
LS: The Old Man
Still gazing in that direction.
Ever panting.
And then, what’s this?
It’s a guffaw, or a cackle!
Is he completely crazy?
Anyway, he has the uniform!
He even has the cap, which he puts on.
Now he gets into his overcoat. Adjusts it.
All the same, he still pants.
He finally relaxes,
And now, stroking his beard, smoothing it,
He is once again the Doorman.
And meanwhile …
THE FRAME FADES QUICKLY TO BLACK.
I work away from the quiet stasis of my study, in the cafés bordering the Grunewald. I sit at outdoor tables surrounded by chaos and take notes in English, which provides a soothing sense of privacy that the noisy talk can’t disturb. I drink milk from tall narrow glasses that don’t stay cold. During breaks, I consider the red freckles on the backs of my hands. My spine and eyes ache. The time is impossible to determine. The chestnut shadows wheel across the gravel. I organize my notecards into piles by category, leave money on the plate, and meander home, thinking, This is what freedom is. This is how I should always have lived.
Every Saturday, a visit, alone, to the circus. Hans’s ponies. I feed them carrots during intermissions. A day or two of immobility afterwards; listless work or none at all.
This is my film, too. The psychic violence in it is mine. All my films demonstrate that we create violence out of our memories and not out of what is presented to our vision, just the way in childhood we fill the blanks of our understanding with image-stories we manufacture in retrospect.
The subtle power struggle with Jannings has already begun. He’s concerned about playing second fiddle to the technicians. He also wants to make certain of my gratitude. He wants me properly cowed. He dropped by my office after a makeup check to chat. He said he thought the film’s main question to be “What makes a man a man?” He remarked on the humor of a homosexual making a film entitled The Last Man.
Here it’s 1924 and Ufa still has no effects department. The American example remains to be emulated. In the meantime the creation of special-effects or trick photography—all innovation, of any sort, with the camera—is left to on-the-spot resourcefulness and improvisation. The basis of problem-solving is not systematic research but chance and inspiration.
For that, Freund is ideal. He knows more about the technical side of filmmaking than anyone on Earth. He was in the business in 1906 as a fifteen-year-old projectionist. A master of the established procedures, he never hesitates when innovations are proposed, and proposes most of them himself. He has an army of assistants, each filled with fear and devotion.
One he sat on before firing. He’s a fat man, so fat he had to be released from the Army after only three months in 1915. His weight doesn’t hinder his manipulation of the cameras, though the vest buttons under his white work-coat may be straining and popping. He has two all-consuming interests: the science of camerawork and the safety and virtue of his teenaged daughter.
His working habits are as ordered as his equipment. During a break once, I watched him take a delicate shutter apart. This was of special interest to me because, as a young man, I too had taken a shutter apart, and knew what to expect. I had removed the screws from the front and lifted off the top, whereupon the entire internal economy of the shutter exploded in my face and scattered across the floor.
Working with watchmaker’s screwdrivers, he removed the screws one by one, placing each in a row on a sheet of clean paper, the edges of which were folded up. The first screw he placed in the upper left corner, and each subsequent piece followed in a line from left to right in the order of its removal. Then he eased the front of the case loose like someone lifting a foreign object from a lover’s eye. All the springs stayed in place beneath. He removed them with fine-pointed pliers. Then came the blades of the iris diaphragm, one after another. At every moment, he lingered where I would have rushed.
It’ll be his duty throughout this project to rein in my impatience in the same way.
Our watchword will be simplicity, achieved through the fullest possible realization of our technical resources. Our ambition is to photograph thought.
Principal technical work at the studio began yesterday. I announced the time for the next day’s organizational meeting and pep talk as six a.m. It seemed to fit the overall fanaticism of the company. The assembled stagehands answered in one voice, “Jawohl!”
After dinner, a walk in the park to clear my head. Sandri accompanied me.
The police have taken notice of my preference for exotic young house-servants. Sandri is an especially intriguing Malaysian. Each house-servant lasts only a few months before he aches to return home, wherever that might be—Borneo, Java, the Solomons. I pay their way. In the meantime, they build up a savings to take back with them. Many have families.
There have been awkwardnesses. Frau Reger has been rigid with disapproval since this practice started. But she runs the household and her loyalty is firm. She hasn’t offered her resignation, and I haven’t requested it.
Last night I found him looking through these journals. He was stretched out in my morning robe across my bed, paging around. Later I found in the margins next to some of my sketches peculiar patterns of lines and circles.
The city still frightens him. When we have time together, he wishes to visit the park. He likes to inspect new areas and follow different paths, which in the Grunewald is not difficult. We periodically pass the Morals Police, who devote a sizeable part of their force to the city parks. They travel in pairs, lingering by shadowy thickets or resting amiably on benches. They’re instructed to proceed with the greatest circumspection, since for them “a hundred omissions are preferable to a single error” in terms of accusations.
Nevertheless, there’s always a tremor when they fall into step behind us.
When we went by car to the Friedrichstrasse to buy a new hall carpet, he was fascinated with the prostitutes. I was astonished at the speed with which he recognized them; I’m never really sure. The odd restraint of the Berlin prostitute creates a tension of not knowing which itself is perversely exciting. The slow walk alongside, the willingness to catch one’s eye, and yet the seeming lack of interest: perhaps that young girl is only window-shopping? The siren with carmine lips and Egyptian eye
s turns out to be a mother with three in tow; the sprite from a children’s book turns out to be soliciting. After the war some of the younger prostitutes wore widows’ veils, and refused to stay in certain districts, so that everywhere the streets were suffused with a pervasive erotic ambiguity.
I began my habit of house-servants five months to the day after Spiess’s departure. Soon after that, Lasker-Schüler asked how I dealt with the paradox of that sort of behavior and my supposed ongoing feelings for Hans. They were not, I told her, the same thing.
Yet the day she asked, I was up all night reliving what I’d done to Hans. The next morning, I arranged for the return voyage of the house-servant of the moment, a boy from Borneo.
Sandri has taken to leaving the house less and less. Recently he’s had to be cajoled even to walk in the park. He refuses all fish and now eats only fruit, the rinds and seeds of which he leaves scattered around the house.
Most of the time he sits by the gramophone, which he reveres, playing over and over again a record from America that fascinates him: “The Vamp of Savannah.”
I’m of two minds about this. He’s erratic enough that his presence in public generates anxiety. He accompanied me to meet a Swiss camera-manufacturer at a nearby hotel, and was instructed to wait near the front desk. After my business, I discovered that Sandri had been put out on the street. The hotel detective said that he’d noticed in the lobby what he’d considered to be a pervert. He wondered if a beating administered by the night manager in the garden out back would be appropriate. I said that if he made it his duty to beat house-servants, I would make it mine to see him off to Brandenburg for five years. He was unfazed. I returned home shaken. Sandri, too, was out of sorts.
Our second day at the studio. Eighteen minutes by car. The new driver is sour and not good-looking. The occasional fond thought for Huber, now off with the Freikorps harassing the French occupation troops in the Ruhr.
