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 Born Freidrich Wilhelm Plumpe, he later adopted the surname of “Murnau” from a German town called Murnau am Staffelsee. Murnau studied literature and art history at the University of Heidelberg after growing up in the rolling farmlands of Bielefeld, Westphalia. After a stint as a combat pilot in World War I, he worked in the theater with Max Reinhardt whose expressionistic theater had a great influence on Murnau. The expressionism movement greatly impacted the German film industry after the war with it's emphasis on emotion more than realism. This expressionistic background can be found throughout most of Murnau's films.
While Murnau directed several films of importance to the history of filmmaking, he is most famous for his 1922 unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula which he titled Nosferatu. The limited budget Murnau unintentionally helped to contribute to the quality of the finished film. Rather than use the studio sets common to current film making styles, Murnau did much of the film on actual locations, capturing existing landscapes and buildings in a way that established the dark atmosphere found in the film. The fact that the film lacked the usual polish of a studio film added to the edgy mood that helped make Nosferatu so terrifying. Another of his most important works was The Last Laugh which was filmed in 1925 starring Emil Jannings and written by Carl Mayer who was very prominent in the new Kammerspeil film movement of that period. Murnau's use of innovative camera work is what makes this film so valuable to the history of film. He introduced the subjective point of view camera work which is when the camera shows the action from the point of view of the character while using visual style to impart a feeling of the character's state of mind. Another historical innovation was used in The Last Laugh called the “Unchained Camera Technique”. This is an intense combination of zooms, pans, tilts and tracking shots which emphasizes the psychological aspects of the film. In 1926, Murnau moved to Hollywood and joined the Fox Studio. In 1927, he directed the film Sunrise which has often been cited by industry scholars as one of the greatest films of all time. This was a music and sound effects only film using the Fox Movietone sound-on-film technique. While not financially successful, the film garnered several Oscars at the initial Academy Awards in 1929 including a joint award for Best Picture. As in all his work, the movie benefited greatly from Murnau's photographic talents that depicted emotions without words. Murnau became quickly disillusioned with the Hollywood scene, feeling that his talent was being subjugated and smothered, as artistic control was placed more in the studio heads than the directors and producers of that period. He partnered with Robert Flaherty to make a semi-documentary on the Polynesian people of Bora Bora. After an argument over artistic differences, Flaherty left and Murnau finished the movie on his own. Using real Polynesian natives instead of actors in much of the film, Tabu was censored in the U.S. due to images of the bare-breasted native women included. Unfortunately, Murnau was killed in an automobile accident on March 11, 1931 shortly before the premiere of the film.
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