In 1999 Murnau-Stiftung asked me to supervise the restoration of Der letzte Mann and Tartüff. In subsequent years I have collected information on these films by looking for and analysing any existing materials. A 2003 retrospective on Murnau at the Berlinale accelerated and gave shape to the project. Along with Camille Blot-Wellens I worked for a couple of years on restoring Schloss Vogeloed, Phantom, Der letzte Mann and Tartüff. But many questions have remained unanswered and many areas for research untapped. We needed to carry on the work and, more importantly, provide an explanation for what had been done. Murnau-Stiftung’s commission to prepare the DVD editions of Der letzte Mann and Tartüff seemed to us to be a good opportunity to reorganise and divulge the outcome of our research. The result of our work has been collected in two documentaries, which are part of the special contents of both DVDs. Der letzte Mann: The Making of reconstructs, as the title suggests, the realisation of Murnau’s film through the documentation that we have been able to collect and through interviews with Robert Herlth’s daughter, the film’s set designer. In this section we compare material relative to the three negatives of the film, cut in 1924 by UFA. The second part illustrates what was involved in the restoration of the film and the problems that we encountered and had to resolve. Similarly Tartüff, the Lost Film shows us the realisation of the film and features a comparison between the three negatives cut by UFA. Most importantly it reveals that the original negative (the one cut by Murnau for the film’s German distribution), as well as the original intertitles, have disappeared.

Luciano Berriatúa