Last Luagh Essay Research Paper About The

Last Luagh Essay, Research Paper

About The Director:

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau is one of the most important filmmakers of the cinema during Weimar Republic period. He is often grouped with Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst as the “big three” directors of Weimar Germany. He finished his career in Hollywood and was killed at a young age in a car crash. Three of his films appear on the greatest films lists of critics and film groups. Even though there seems to be little written about him.

Early in his career he created one of horror film, Nosferatu (1922); his last film was Tabu (1931), a documentary film in the South Seas. He was one of the pioneers in the technical side of the film industry, experimenting special effects in Nosferatu and Faust and the use of the moving camera in The Last Laugh. But at the same time he was a master storyteller, a director who could describe simple stories with a vast range of emotion and meaning.

Plot Summary:

The old doorman at the Hotel Atlantis is proud of his job and he does it well (sort of). One day he carries a large suitcase into the lobby. He needs to sit down for a moment what is seen and written down by a young hotel manager. The old man looses his job and is made the toilet man of the hotel. He tries not to show it, but he is broken. Now only some kind of wonder can help!!

The film begins a trip down an open elevator and through the busy lobby of the Hotel Atlantic. The movement continues straight through the hotel’s revolving doors to rainy outside. The main character is the hotel doorman, a striking but he is old. He is an important person, a respected person. But he is getting older and has trouble lifting a large luggage from a car to the hotel and needs a few minutes to rest. The young hotel manager witnesses this situation and the next day the doorman finds out that he has been replaced by a younger man and demoted to toilet attendant. This demotion leads him to isolation. It comes to the situation where his neighbors and even his own family reject him.

Just when things seem as bad as they could get for the doorman, the film presents us with the only upside. The film says that ordinarily the story should end here, for an old man like this, but instead, the director has taken mercy on the doorman and presented us with a happy ending. In the end, the man inherits a vast sum of money from an American millionaire. And he lives happily ever after!

Analysis Of The Film:

The Last Laugh is the last but one expressionistic street film, full of sets that look both realistic and unlikely at the same time, unsettling multiple exposures, fantastic performances particularly Emil Jennings whose weight you can feel on your chest, in a performance through the entire range of emotions. Many writers give Carl Mayer, the co-writer on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and one of the chief minds behind the excellence of German film in the 1920’s, the big share of credit for The Last Laugh. Sadly Murnau is sometimes shrugged off with Karl Freund, the film’s cameraman, as part of the team that executed Mayer’s idea.

Although the film is often criticized for its happy ending, it is done with irony that the film would not be the same without it, in which all wrongs have been righted.

In The Last Laugh the man derives his power from his uniform, alcohol and wealth; without at least one of the three he is only a hunched man. He has habits of stroking his mustache and waving hid hand in the air, the habits that disappear when he loses his uniform. After he steals it and quickly pulls it over his shoulders, the first thing he does is stroke that mustache. Or after he becomes rich he starts waving his hand in the air again.

This movie is almost purely visual; the few pieces of expository writing are worked into the film cleverly via papers and letters rather than bluntly cleaving the action. Murnau takes a situation that should seem trivial and turns it into high tragedy. Yet the movie still contains some incredibly funny scenes.

Innovations And Its Place In History Of Cinema:

The camera movement in this film had a deep effect on world cinema. The camera movement is smooth; it draws the viewer into the film much more carefully than does the nonstop camera movement. However it is not only the movement of the camera that makes this film so different, it is the careful relation between people, objects and the camera.

In one part of the film, doorman after stealing the uniform he attends his daughter’s wedding and he gets drunk. Then a camera that staggers across the room shows the man’s drunkenness. The man soon drifts off to a blurry fantasy and revolving doors. In the dream he lifts with one hand a luggage that six men could not lift and to the amazement of an audience hurls the trunk up and down, always catching it perfectly with his one extended arm.

These Blurry sequences and the many subjective shots through out the film were quite unique for its time and place. The Last Laugh raised the art of the silent film to its highest level of achievement.

Germany At The Time:

This is quite interesting since almost all the films during 1918 till 1945 reflects a picture of the social, economical and political situation of Germany at the time. Hence it would be quite useful to have an understanding of the time when The Las

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