Quote:
Phantom is a 1922 silent film that was directed by F. W. Murnau the same year Murnau directed Nosferatu. It is an example of German Expressionist film and has a surreal, dreamlike quality.

phantom.1922.1080p.bluray.x264-usury.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 1mn
Size: 	12.0 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1440x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	22.000 fps
Bit rate: 	12.8 Mbps
BPP: 	0.373
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch 24bit FLAC @ 1 394 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/ED5632F02348C12/phantom.1922.1080p.bluray.x264-usury.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post F.W. Murnau – Phantom (1922) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT: In the castle Vogeloed, a few aristocrats are awaiting baroness Safferstätt. But first count Oetsch invites himself.. Everyone thinks he murdered his brother, baroness Safferstat’s first husband, three years ago. So he is rather undesirable. But Oetsch stays; arguing he is not the murderer and will find the real one…

The.Haunted.Castle.1921.F.W.Murnau.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 21 min
Size: 	1.98 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 270 kb/s
BPP: 	0.308
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AAC LC @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B83D88148F404FC/The.Haunted.Castle.1921.F.W.Murnau.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

https://ddownload.com/r0lw1n31txgb/The.Haunted.Castle.1921.F.W.Murnau.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):German [intertitles]
Subtitles:English, French

The post F.W. Murnau – Schloß Vogeloed AKA The Haunted Castle (1921) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Dr Eigil Borne is engaged to Hélène, a girl who is madly in love with him. At Hélène’s birthday celebration, Eigil invites her to a cabaret, where he meets his other love, Lily, a passionate, fiery and funny dancer.

Filmmuseum wrote:
The beautiful restoration from the original camera negative of the earliest surviving film by F. W. Murnau gives an accurate representation of Murnau’s innovative, highly expressive lighting techniques. The plotan eminent physician comes under the spell of an unscrupulous dancer finds echoes in Murnau’s later masterpiece Sunrise. Conrad Veidt appears in a supporting role as a sinister painter, whose entrance eerily presages Nosferatu. “The new restoration allows you to see everything in the frame, with a marvelous translucence and density of detail. Forget High Frame Rate: This is hypnotic, immersive cinema.” (David Bordwell)

Extra – Musik für Murnau:

0.99GB | 1h 20m | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5C56FB97A70C767/Der_Gang_in_die_Nacht.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/470687EE4AF22B4/Extra.Musik_fur_Murnau.mkv

Language:German intertitles
Subtitles:English, French

The post F.W. Murnau – Der Gang in die Nacht AKA Walking into the Night [+extra] (1921) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The likeable and carefree Grand Duke of Abacco is in dire straits. There is no money left to service the State’s debt; the main creditor is looking forward to expropriating the entire Duchy. The marriage with Olga, Grand Duchess of Russia, would solve everything, but a crucial letter of hers about the engagement has been stolen. Besides, a bunch of revolutionaries and a dubious businessman have other plans regarding the Grand Duke. With the intrusion of adventurer Philipp Collins into the Grand Duke’s affairs, a series of frantic chases, plots and counter-plots begins…

3.28GB | 1 h 17 min | 960×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/CFA4C6C9A647898/finances.of.the.grand.duke.1924.720p.bluray.x264-usury.mkv

https://ddownload.com/p1st4xaapgx1/finances.of.the.grand.duke.1924.720p.bluray.x264-usury.mkv

Language:German Intertitles
Subtitles:English

The post F.W. Murnau – Die Finanzen des Großherzogs AKA The Finances of the Grand Duke (1924) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

When farmer Rog dies, his son Peter stays, but Johannes can not be satisfied with such a condition (and servant Maria’s love) and finds a job as old Count Rudenberg’s secretary. His ambition leads him to charm Gerda, the Count’s unique daughter. But when he discovers that Count’s second wife Helga will soon inherit a field that only he knows his underground is full with petroleum, he changes his allegiance… Greed and death.

1.37GB | 1h 40mn | 512×384 | avi
https://nitro.download/view/991D15C69D0ACAF/Burning_Soil.cd1.avi
https://nitro.download/view/053A0912670325D/Burning_Soil.cd2.avi

Language:Silent (German Intertitles)
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post F.W. Murnau – Der Brennende Acker AKA Burning Soil (1922) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Based illegally on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, F. W. Murnau’s film is undeniably the best and probably the most faithful of the myriad of films based on the novel. Naively, the film’s producers attempted to circumvent the author’s estate’s copyright by changing the names and central location of the film. London became Wisborg, Count Dracula is called Graf Orlock, Jonathan Harker became Hutter and his wife Mina was named Ellen, and so on. Ironically, in all prints struck over the last few decades, the names (apart from the location, for obvious reasons) have reverted to the originals of Stoker’s novel. Made on a tiny budget by Praha-Film, as the first of an ambitious slate of occult films, an overzealous spending on promotion sent the film rapidly into debt, limiting its distribution potential. Add to this, a tenacious perseverance on the part of Stoker’s wife Florence to protect her copyright (who almost saw to the destruction of all prints of the film when the original negative was destroyed after a court decision). Certainly, the novice producers, businessman Enrico Dieckmann and designer, painter, architect, and occultist Albin Grau, who was the film’s art director (costumes and sets) and story board artist, were familiar with Stoker’s novel. The title of the film comes allegedly from the Romanian word for the undead, and The Undead was the working title of Stoker’s book. The Carpathian Mountains, in Romania, is where Dracula lives prior to his relocating.

Nosferatu‘s scriptwriter Henrik Galeen, had previously gained a reputation for his horror/fantasy and Expressionistic work through his co-direction and scripting of the 1914 version of Der Golem and Der Student von Prague (1920) and his script for the 1920 version of Der Golem. Later he was to script Waxworks (1924) and write and direct Alraune (1927), cementing his position as the major collaborator on all of the best German fantasy films. His technique for maintaining the multiple perspectives and the fragmentary nature of Stoker’s novel was to frame the story as the chronicle of an unidentified narrator, inserting texts, letters, newspaper clippings, diary and log book entries and documentary footage similar in style to the arachnid footage later used by Buñuel in L’Age d’Or (1930). Murnau further added to this fragmentation with an extensive and complex use of cross-cutting between scenes. Whereas Stoker’s novel is contemporaneous (1897), Galeen’s script is set at the time of “The Great Death in Wisborg in the year 1843 A.D.” In the English language version, the intertitles have altered the location and era to Bremen, 1838, with the historian’s name given as Johann Cavallius. The English language version alters several other plot details and sadly, loses the lyrical, Expressionistic character of Galeen’s original intertitles. The original has, as Eisner notes, “oddly-broken lines. prolific use of exclamation marks, words in capitals, and letter-spaced lower-case matter. [a] staccato rhythm. with its incomplete sentences, clauses, phrases and idiosyncratic punctuation.” For simplicity’s sake the remainder of the article will refer to the film’s location as Bremen.

The positing of the story back in time by fifty years and the location shooting necessitated by the film’s low budget had a profound effect upon the look of the film. Whereas Stoker’s novel invokes Jack the Ripper, who operated in London in the late 1880s, Murnau’s film conjures up the mediaeval Europe of the Plague. The film had, even at the time of its release, “the patina of antiquity”, a look that Murnau created through the careful choice of locations. Location filming was rare in Germany at the time of the film’s production, but this allowed Murnau to suitably combine the two contradictory elements which exist in most of his work: expressionism and realism. Murnau was greatly influenced by the Swedish director Victor Sjöström in his use of the environment as a vital character in the drama of a film, and this is no better displayed than in this film. The busy, cluttered detail of Murnau’s Transylvania and Bremen wreaks of old world decay and menace. These are the kind of locations where Dracula would feel at home, and his Bremen residence looks condemned. This appearance was achieved without the use of chiaroscuro lighting effects usually associated with German horror. Fritz Arno Wagner’s use of shadows is very effective but surprisingly controlled considering the nature of the tale.

The film begins very conventionally. The initial exposition is uni-linear, realistic and pedestrian. It is only after the vampire appears that the tone changes and the cross-cutting begins. The precise sense of place is set dialectically against, although not always successfully, optical effects (speeded-up motion, stop-motion photography, superimpositions, and the use of negative), heavy make-up and Expressionist performances. The almost contradictory dichotomy of filmic realism partnered with Expressionist acting exists elsewhere in Murnau’s work. This can produce profound results, as it does with Emil Jannings characterisations in Der Letzte Mann (1924) and Faust (1926), and with Max Schreck in the second half of Nosferatu, or it can unbalance the film as occurs with George O’Brien and Max Schreck, in the earlier stages of Sunrise (1927) and Nosferatu respectively. This may not be Schreck’s fault. His performance is very restrained throughout. Schreck’s make-up early in the film appears theatrical, but as the film progresses, this becomes more subtle and believable, perhaps developing with the skill of the make-up artist, culminating in the powerful images of the vampire that are commonly reproduced.

Max Schreck’s role as the vampire was for many years after the completion of the film shrouded in legend, probably, in no small part due to Schreck’s apt name (Schreck translates from German as fright, fear, terror, horror). Some believed, or were encouraged to believe, that Murnau had taken the role or that The Count was playing himself. Such tales are unfortunately untrue. Schreck may have been given the role because of his name, but he had been associated with Max Reinhardt’s Berlin company, as had many of Murnau’s collaborators. Schreck had an undistinguished film career apart from his role as the vampire, appearing in Murnau’s The Grand Duke’s Finances the year after Nosferatu. Murnau himself had been a student of, then actor and finally assistant to Reinhardt before the war, taking up filmmaking in 1919. Murnau was a perfectionist and a name alone would not have been sufficient reason to cast someone in a pivotal role. Schreck’s emaciated, ungainly appearance, combined with his character’s rodent-like features and the vampire’s lengthening fingernails creates cinema’s ugliest vampire, and fits with the film’s aesthetic and theme of the vampire as the contagion of the epidemic that spread throughout Europe (vampire = rats); as a symbol of a diseased and corrupted aristocracy feeding off the vitality and youth of the young. This is different from the novel where the vampire is a suave and sophisticated seducer who is more akin to the sexual threat of Hammer’s Christopher Lee. Here the relationship is more predatory than sexual. This is the natural order. The fatal disease is due to the parasite feeding off the living. Dr. Van Helsing shows his students a Venus fly-trap devouring a fly and a polyp with mouth and tentacles consuming its live victim. Life is the fear of death and disease.

Lotte Eisner draws a parallel between the dire influence of the vampire, and Murnau’s personally traumatic struggle with his homosexuality and with Germany’s repressive turn of the century legal code and moral climate which lent itself to the possibilities of blackmail. Homosexuality may have been an implicit theme of vampire lore, but the repressive nature of the German state made it difficult to raise this theme.

Throughout the film, Murnau draws a fateful triangle between Dracula, Harker and Mina. At one point, as the vampire and Harker race to Bremen where Mina waits, Mina states, “He’s coming. I must go out to meet him.” The ‘he’ is made ambiguous, and this ambiguity has already been suggested earlier in the film where cross-cutting makes it appear that Mina is beckoning the vampire into her arms. He has already stated that she has a lovely neck and, at the conclusion of the film it is Mina’s sacrifice that destroys the vampire. In Stoker it is Mina that must be saved, but here it is Mina that ends the tyranny. Whereas Stoker’s vampire is killed by a stake, Nosferatu introduced the device of the vampire who is destroyed by the sun’s rays and where Stoker’s vampire casts no shadow, Murnau’s does throughout to great dramatic effect. At the climax of the film, the shadow of the vampire’s hand grasps at Mina’s heart and she arches in pain. Murnau may have broken the laws of vampires, but he has obeyed the laws of the cinema.

http://nitroflare.com/view/4606A5DBC5763F3/F.W._Murnau_-_%281922%29_Nosferatu.mkv

Language(s):English intertitles
Subtitles:None

The post F.W. Murnau – Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Roger Ebert wrote:
The camera’s freedom to move is taken for granted in these days of the Steadicam, the lightweight digital camera, and even special effects that reproduce camera movement. A single unbroken shot can seem to begin with an entire city and end with a detail inside a window — consider the opening of “Moulin Rouge!” (2001). But the camera did not move so easily in the early days.

The cameras employed in the first silent films were lightweight enough to be picked up and carried, but moving them was problematic because they were attached to the cameraman, who was cranking them by hand. Camera movement was rare; the camera would pan from a fixed position. Then came tracking shots — the camera literally mounted on rails, so that it could be moved along parallel to the action. But a camera that was apparently weightless, that could fly, that could move through physical barriers — that kind of dreamlike freedom had to wait until almost the last days of silent films. And then, when the talkies came and noisy sound cameras had to be sealed in soundproof booths, it was lost again for several years.

F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” (1928) conquered time and gravity with a freedom that was startling to its first audiences. To see it today is to be astonished by the boldness of its visual experimentation. Murnau was one of the greatest of the German expressionists; his “Nosferatu” (1922) invented the vampire movie, and his “The Last Laugh” (1924) became famous for doing away altogether with intertitles and telling the story entirely with images.

Summoned to the United States by William Fox to make a film for his new studio, Murnau worked with the cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss to achieve an extraordinary stylistic breakthrough. The Murnau admirer Todd Ludy wrote: “The motion picture camera — for so long tethered by sheer bulk and naivete — had with ‘Sunrise’ finally learned to fly.”

The film was released at the very moment when silent films were giving way to sound; “The Jazz Singer” was already making its way into theaters. Murnau’s film actually had a soundtrack, avoiding dialogue but using music and sound effects in sync with the action. By the next year, audiences would want to hear the actors speaking, and that led to an era of static compositions and talking heads, unforgettably lampooned in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Released in what Peter Bogdanovich calls the greatest year in Hollywood history, when silent films reached perfection and then disappeared, “Sunrise” was not a box-office success, but the industry knew it was looking at a masterpiece. When the first Academy Awards were held, the top prize was shared: “Wings” won for “best production,” and “Sunrise” won for “best unique and artistic picture.”

Its story can be told in a few words. It is a fable, denying the characters even names; the key players are The Man (George O’Brien), The Wife (Janet Gaynor, also an Oscar winner that year), and The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). In a quaint lakeside village, the city woman has come for a holiday, and lingered on to seduce and entrap the man.

In a remarkable early sequence, we see her smoking in her room, prowling restlessly in lingerie, and then walking through the village to the lighted window of the man’s cottage, where she whistles (there is a low and ominous musical note on the soundtrack). Inside the cottage, the man hears her, we see torment and temptation in his face, and finally he slips out of the cottage; when his wife returns to the table with their dinner, he is gone, and the movie juxtaposes her embracing their child and the woman from the city embracing him.
But look at the shot that shows the man and the city woman slipping off into a foggy marsh area. Although the ground is muddy and uneven, the camera seems to glide smoothly along with them, pushing through shrubbery, following their progress, finally watching them embrace beneath a full moon. I’ve seen “Sunrise” several times and always noted this shot without quite realizing how impossible it was.

Now I have had it explained. The commentary track on the 20th Century-Fox DVD is by the gifted cinematographer John Bailey, who is a student of early camera techniques and a particular admirer of Struss. He explains that the marsh is a studio set, that the sky and the moon are actually quite close, and that the camera platform is suspended from overhead cables so that it glides behind them as they push through the mud and the shrubbery.
If the poetry of this scene is haunting, listen to Bailey as he analyzes some of the famous later scenes, including two boat trips across the lake and a fantastical interlude in the city on the other shore. He has the gift, rare among experts, of explaining his art with such love and clarity that everyone can understand; he uses the writings of Struss, still photos taken on the set, and above all his own instinct and experience to explain how extraordinary shots were created.
Many of the best moments involve superimposed images. At one point, we see the man being enveloped by two ghostly images of the woman from the city. We see a train passing in the foreground while extras walk in the middle distance, and the city rises in the background. We see a frenzied nightclub scene, musicians on the left, dancers in the center, all seeming to float in a void.
These shots, Bailey explains, were created in the camera. It was an era before optical printers, let alone computers; the camera operators masked part of the film, exposed the rest, then masked the those portions and exposed what remained. Meticulous control of the lens and the counting of individual frames was necessary. In addition, they were made of different kinds of reality; the train was a model which looked large in the foreground, the extras were real, the city was a form of matte drawing.
As I listened to Bailey, it occurred to me that the best commentary tracks are often by experts who did not work on the film but love it and have given it a lot of thought. They’re more useful than those rambling tracks where directors (notoriously shy about explaining their techniques or purposes) reminisce about the weather on the set that day.
The power of “Sunrise” comes precisely through its visual images, and Bailey makes a good case that Struss, who got second billing after Charles Rosher, made the key contribution. He had purchased his own camera, powered by an electric motor, which set it free to glide through space and give “Sunrise” its peculiar dreamlike quality. And he devised techniques to create some of the effects; looking at stills taken on the set, Bailey takes hints from such details as a black back cloth that was used to obscure part of an image so it could be replaced with another.
The story, as I said, is very simple, but it has power. The woman from the city persuades the man to drown his wife so they can run away together. The film has few titles, but they are dramatic: the word “drown” swims into view and then appears to run down the screen and disappear.
As the man and his wife begin their boat journey across the lake, Bailey notes that the camera always regards him from a high angle, even when he is towering over his wife and the natural angle would have him looking down at the camera. This strategy keeps him subservient to the camera and emphasizes the pressure he’s under; and Murnau underlines his tortured psychological state by making the actor, O’Brien, wear shoes with lead weights in them, so that he steps slowly and reluctantly.
He does not after all drown his wife. In the city, which is constructed from fanciful sets that suggest the “city of the future” often seen in silent films, the man and wife fall back in love — and then, as they return across the lake, a tempest overturns the boat and it appears she may have been drowned by chance.
It’s very broad melodrama, and the realism of spoken dialogue would have made it impossible. But silent films were more dreamlike, and Murnau was a genius at evoking odd, disturbing images and juxtapositions that created a nightmare state. Because the characters are simple, they take on a kind of moral clarity, and their choices are magnified into fundamental decisions of life and death.
I imagine it is possible to see “Sunrise” for the first time and think it simplistic; to be amused that the academy could have honored it. But silent films had a language of their own; they aimed for the emotions, not the mind, and the best of them wanted to be, not a story, but an experience.
Murnau, raised in the dark shadows of expressionism, pushed his images as far as he could, forced them upon us, haunted us with them. The more you consider “Sunrise” the deeper it becomes — not because the story grows any more subtle, but because you realize the real subject is the horror beneath the surface.

http://nitroflare.com/view/DED902BAD6AF709/Sunrise.A.Song.Of.Two.Humans.1927.720p.BluRay.x264-SiNNERS.mkv

Language(s):Silent (English Intertitles)
Subtitles:None

The post F.W. Murnau – Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) first appeared on Cinema of the World.