Last Laugh
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€31.99
A01=Professor Samuel Frederick
A01=Samuel Frederick
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Professor Samuel Frederick
Author_Samuel Frederick
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APFA
Category=ATFA
Category=DS
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
democracy
economic instability
Emil Jannings
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Expressionist
F.W. Murnau
Karl Freund
Language_English
New Objectivity
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
silent film
softlaunch
Weimar Republic
working-class
Product details
- ISBN 9781640141292
- Weight: 142g
- Dimensions: 133 x 191mm
- Publication Date: 19 Sep 2023
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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A penetrating new reading of Murnau's classic silent film that shows its transitional status, both historically and stylistically, while emphasizing its innovative camerawork and the ethical stakes of its story.
An undisputed masterpiece of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) stars the larger-than-life Emil Jannings as a proud hotel porter who is demoted to lowly washroom attendant. One worker's misfortune becomes a tragic turning point in a social drama as much about the struggling Weimar Republic, which had just overcome several years of social, political, and economic instability, as about its working-class citizens. At once clinging to the symbols of the old order while helplessly thrust into an unforgiving modern world, Jannings's fallen porter embodies the contradictions of this transitional moment for the young democracy. Samuel Frederick shows us that Murnau's film is similarly transitional: born at the crossroads between the Expressionist style of the early 1920s and the emerging aesthetics of New Objectivity, it is both soberly realistic and oneirically distorted. With only one intertitle, The Last Laugh's flow of images is complemented by cinematographer Karl Freund's innovative mobile camera, which, "unchained" from the tripod, swims effortlessly through the film's different urban spaces. Here, inanimate objects become charged with potency and architecture is animated, conveying both allure and danger. Frederick's incisive analysis of the film foregrounds the visual dynamism of its technological and aesthetic experimentation while also pursuing the ethical implications of its central figure's downfall.
SAMUEL FREDERICK is Professor of German at Penn State University.
