At the premiere screening of Der letzte Mann in Berlin on 23 December 1924, critic and sometime screenwriter Willy Haas witnessed what he felt was the dawn of “a new epoch in the history of cinematography”. To Haas, the film’s artistic merits were such as to make it “uncriticisable”. These included: Carl Mayer’s script that manages to eschew intertitles almost entirely, with one notable exception forcefully intervening into the unfolding of the tragic events just before the end; Emil Jannings’ performance as the ageing hotel porter, whose world
collapses after he is demoted to toilet attendant; Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig’s sets, which lend architectural form to social contrasts in the sharp juxtaposition between the sophisticated world of the brightly lit Atlantic Hotel and the gloomy cosmos of the tenement; Karl Freund’s agile camera, whose floating movements gradually dissolve the plot’s “heroic monumentality” into an “immaterial” flow of images; and, last but not least, Murnau’s direction, which combines all the different elements to create a pulsating visual music: “The nature, the rhythm of the vibration changes; but the magic of the vibration, the nature of the effect remains the same,” as Haas succinctly put it in his review.
The conclusion reached by Haas on the evening of the premiere has long since solidified into an aphorism of film history: Der letzte Mann is considered a major achievement in both German and international cinema, venturing beyond the stylistic models of expressionism and the Kammerspielfilm, transforming them into a form of “poetry in pictures” (Siegfried Kracauer) that was previously unthinkable in film, while giving rise to an entirely “new way of seeing” (Herbert Ihering). Future filmmakers learned from this film how to captivate audiences with stories told by purely visual means. Not least among them was Alfred Hitchcock, who arrived in Babelsberg just in time to observe Murnau during the shooting of Der letzte Mann, and who never ceased to emphasise the formative influence this film exerted on his own work.

Michael Wedel