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Rohmer on Murnau: About Point of View copyright Janet Bergstrom

Janet Bergstrom

I came to Eric Rohmer indirectly because I was studying Murnau and Tabu. From that direction,

I re-entered the world of Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North and Moana. Then I re-read

Rohmer’s – or, as he then signed his articles – Maurice Shérer’s essays on Tabu, Flaherty and

Murnau. Whence these brief observations.

*****

Murnau was already an important point of reference – much more than that – in Rohmer’s first

published essay, “Le Cinéma, art de l’espace”, which appeared in La Revue du Cinéma in June

1948.

Il convient ici de rendre un hommage tout particulier à F. W. Murnau auquel, faute de

projections plus fréquentes, on n’accorde pas toujours la place qui lui est due parmi les
grands réalisateurs, place qui est peut-être la première. ...Murnau a su non seulement
éviter toute concession à l’anecdote, mais déshumaniser les sujets les plus riches, en
apparence, d’émotion humaine. Ainsi Nosferatu le vampire est construit tout entier
autour de thèmes visuels correspondant à des concepts qui ont en nous des répondants
physiologiques ou métaphysiques (concept de succion, d’absorption, d’emprise,
d’écrasement etc.) : sont éliminés tous les éléments pouvant orienter notre attention sur
autre chose que cette saisie immédiate de la transcendance à l’intérieur du signe : tout ce
qui aurait, par exemple, contribué à la création d’une atmosphère d’épouvante, le
caractère fascinant de la sensation d’horreur cessant au moment où elle devient peur,
c’est-à-dire émotion. Tartuffe, Le Dernier des hommes, l’admirable -- et pourtant fort
discuté -- Faust, L’Aurore et le “documentaire romancé” Tabou révèlent, par la totalité de
leurs plans, l’imagination cinématographique la plus riche qui soit.1

How interesting to praise Murnau for “déshumaniser les sujets les plus riches, en apparence,

d’émotion humaine”, a different way to approach, perhaps, the kind of abstraction that Murnau

developed from his Expressionist background.

 Rohmer referred to Murnau frequently in his early film writings. In March 1953, in a

review of Tabu for the Cahiers du Cinéma when it was re-released, he described Murnau’s final

film as no less than “le chef d’oeuvre de son auteur, le plus grand film du plus grand auteur de

films.”2

Elegant and erudite in his discourse, Rohmer’s meaning can be elusive, but one aspect of

his thought and passion is insistently clear: he argues for cinema as a distinctive art form by

drawing comparisons with the established arts, especially painting, literature and classical music.

“Vanité que la peinture...” (Cahiers du Cinéma no. 3, 1951) ends as a manifesto: “Aussi mon

dessein n’était-il pas de montrer que le cinéma n’a rien à envier aux autres arts ses rivaux, mais

de dire ce qu’à leur tour ceux-ci pourraient lui envier.” Rohmer placed Pascal’s entire statement,

from which he derived his title, at the head of his essay: “Quelle vanité que la peinture qui attire

l’admiration par la ressemblance des choses dont on n’admire pas les originaux.” Beneath this

quotation, like a counter-proposition, is a photo from Tabu as if to say: here, on the other hand,

the “original” is admired – meaning the entire world to which the film gives form and direction.

For Rohmer, Murnau stood for what the cinema had already achieved as an art form and what it

should still aspire to, a proposition about the vocation of the cinema that Murnau himself had

advocated decades earlier. Inside the world of the cinema, the question for Rohmer becomes:

how can a director make the presence of the “world” felt within a narrative space, according to

what kinds of conventions? Rohmer contrasts Nanook and Tabu, or Flaherty and Murnau, two

admirable tendencies.

What does Rohmer see in Nanook? Flaherty was able to make the spectator feel the

weight of the present, its duration, moment by moment.

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Nanouk l’Esquimau est le plus beau des films. Il fallait un tragique qui fût à notre
mesure, non du destin, mais de la dimension même du temps. Je sais que l’effort du
cinéaste tend, depuis cinquante ans, à faire éclater les bornes de ce présent où il nous
enferme d’emblée. Reste que sa destination première est de donner à l’instant ce poids
que les autres arts lui refusent. Le pathétique de l’attente, partout ailleurs ressort grossier,
nous jette mystérieusement au coeur de la compréhension même des choses. Car nul
artifice, ici, n’est possible pour dilater ou rétrécir la durée...

[photo one and two: walrus hunt - place between first and second
part of quotation, if possible]

Rohmer takes as his example the walrus hunt and the enigmatic shot that introduces human

presence into the frame slowly, halting and unrecognizable at first, as the hunters attempt to

avoid notice before descending on their prey.

Je ne citerai que le passage où l’on voit l’Esquimau blotti dans l’angle du cadre, à l’afflût
du troupeau de phoques [actually, walruses] endormi sur la plage. D’où vient la beauté
de ce plan, sinon du fait que le point de vue que la caméra nous impose n’est ni celui des
acteurs du drame, ni même d’un oeil humain dont un élément à l’exclusion des autres eût
accaparé l’attention ?

The important thing is that we, spectators, are put in the position of watching and waiting from

the outside for the moment the hunters will move into action or when the animals will realize

their presence and react. We are not brought “inside” the subjectivity of any of the Eskimos.

We are definitely separated from the world we see on the screen and that we sense off-screen.

“Citez un romancier,” continued Rohmer, “qui ait décrit l’attente sans, en quelque manière,
exiger notre participation. Plus que le pathétique de l’action, c’est le mystère même du temps

qui compose ici notre angoisse.”3

For Rohmer, Murnau’s films avoid access to his characters’ interiority. They are fully

integrated into the “world” around them, whether “natural” or constructed in the studio, although

in a different way than in Flaherty’s films. In Le Dernier des hommes, Rohmer argues that

Murnau far exceeds the emotions of Emil Jannings’ reaction to losing his job by filming the

actor’s facial expressions so that his face becomes like a mask, inhuman. Moreover, Jannings’

movements slow to immobility rather than becoming agitated, likewise distancing his character

from everyday psychological realism. “Ce que le peintre ou le sculpteur n’obtiennent que par

ruse ou violence, “l’expression”, est donné au cinéma comme le fruit de sa condition même. Il

appartiendra pour la rendre plus intense non toujours d’en accélérer le rhythme, mais de le

ralentir jusqu’à la limite de l’insolite fixté.”4

Rohmer’s comments on Tabu that follow this line of thinking are most clearly articulated

in his 1953 essay, “La Revanche de l’Occident”.

[pensive shot - TABU]

He chooses the scene when Matahi sits alone, in profile, his head bowed, after he learns that Reri

has been declared tabu, that she will be dedicated to the gods and may not to be touched by any
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man, or else both will die. What Rohmer describes as Murnau’s imprint of “le marque de l’esprit

de l’Occident” here is the choice of this pose, this immobility, to show thought as an image, from

the outside: “peindre le mouvement par la représentation de l’immobile, de préférer au

hiératisme des poses... l’évidence nue d’une chair mystérieusement modelée par les inflexions de

la pensée (je pense à cette scène où le jeune Tahitien, la tête sur les genoux, les muscles relâchés

par le désespoir évoque le bas-relief grec du Chasseur endormi”).

This image of thought that Murnau is able to show “from the outside,” Rohmer states, is

conveyed formally through composition and time (“l’espace-temps,” as he says elsewhere). Its

power comes from Murnau’s ability to integrate so imperceptibly those formal elements with the

gravity of the narrative situation: “l’emprise du cinéaste sur la matière naturelle est telle, ici,

qu’on distinguerait avec peine ce qui ressortit au domaine de la mise en scène et à celui de

l’image, l’éclat de la photographie devant plus au mouvement incessant des mass ou des

particules brillantes qu’à la répartition statique des zones d’ombre et de lumière ; sommet du

raffinement dans l’art...”5 Later, in his study of Faust, Rohmer will argue much the same thing

at greater length.6

******

Rohmer describes Flaherty and Murnau’s different modes of separating the spectators’

apprehension of a film from character psychology, watching waiting, or watching thought, for

instance, rather than having the impression of thinking with or in the place of a character. There

is another important distinction between these two directors who, for a brief time, believed that

they could collaborate as co-directors making the film that became Tabu. For Flaherty and

Murnau had entirely different formations as filmmakers. The coordination of all elements of
mise en scène and story that Murnau had perfected by the time he was ready to begin Tabu was

based on a mastery of cinematic structure, such that he could do away with as much story as

possible and concentrate on exactly what Rohmer praised him for – the integration of all

elements at his disposal – actors, costumes, constructed sets, the sun, the moon, the trees, the

water. His scenes were divided into shots, and his découpage was planned for point of view

editing. Planning for scene construction (pre-visualization) was one of the chief problems

Flaherty had working with Murnau, and which led to Flaherty being forced to renounce all but

participation in the story during the two year shoot in and around Tahiti. According to Tabu’s

cinematographer, Floyd Crosby: “Flaherty hated Hollywood. He wouldn’t observe to see how

directors worked, and he had no feeling for the mechanics. He didn’t know how to break things

up, how to do long shots, and medium shots, and close-ups... He had made films of a certain kind

which had been successful, and I don’t think -- in his mind -- he differentiated between that type

of film and the type of film that Tabu was.”7

Interesting because of its absence, Rohmer did not seem interested in Murnau’s

mobilization of point of view as one of the foundations of his integrated cinematic expression.

Rohmer’s extended study of the use of space in Murnau’s Faust does not list point of view as a

category of analysis, and point of view is mentioned in almost none of his descriptions of shots. Point of view is

the difference was between Murnau’s conception of cinema and Flaherty’s.

We can see this by comparing the courtship dances from Moana and Tabu. Flaherty

shoots the dance frontally, against a flat backdrop, as if to document the movements of the

dancers engaged in a ritual act. Indeed, it is like a “chapter” in his anthology of images of

Samoan life. If looking is involved, it is more or less in the same way that Rohmer describes
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Flaherty’s distanced view in the hunt scene in Nanook. Although some shots are devoted to on-

lookers happily watching, point of view is not a dynamic element that moves the story forward,

either on a literal level or in a much more complex and abstract level, as is the case in Tabu.

[shot of dance from MOANA]

Robert Flaherty’s wife Frances shared the adventure of living in Samoa in 1923-1924 and

gradually finding a theme for the film with him. About the Samoans, she observed: “In some

ways the Samoans are curiously like us...but for the expression of the eyes. There was the

difference, the gulf, the chasm. These people have no thought-life, no intellect. They have not

tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Existence for them is a beautiful plain, sun-blessed, fertile,

flower-spread, balm-kissed, a plain where life runs in and out and in and out like an unending

repetition of song.”8 A shocking statement today, and so far from what Murnau saw in

Polynesia. In any event, Moana shows a mode of filming and editing in which the characters’

eyes are almost absent, negligible.

Tabu is the antithesis of Moana in that respect. It is not only entirely based on point-of-

view editing, more than that, it is entirely dependent on actors who have the ability to speak with

their eyes. Murnau conveys thought through the eyes, shots planned and edited together to form
as integral a part of his cinematic repertoire as all the other elements of his mise en scène. In

Tabu, the dance meant to be a dedication of Reri to the gods as a vestal virgin is turned into a

courtship dance when Matahi comes out of the pensive state Rohmer referred to and dances to

compete for her attention, for her eyes, for her expression, her eyes declaring unmistakably their

magnetic attraction, despite the grave situation, and that everyone is begins to share as if it is

contagious, first with their eyes, then joining the dance. The series of shots I reproduce here,

taken from a much more complex interchange of looking, begins when Matahi returns to the

dance, his eyes dominating the scene at the same time as his movements pressure rival dancers to

move away from Reri. All the while, Hitu’s static, stony look governs the scene: the dance is

being performed for his eyes, under his authority. Although Reri looks downward at first, in

keeping with her promised role in this event, she cannot help but look up at Matahi, and then

seems to become more and more taken up in the music, by his eyes attracting hers, by their

double pleasure in the dance and forgetting the consequences. Around them, the musicians and

villagers look on with increasing pleasure and movement, until they rise and crowd toward the

couple to join them in dance. Significantly but subtly, Murnau has moved the camera behind

Hitu, showing how his eyes can no longer control the scene, or even see it. At this point when he

loses his visual authority, he throws down the garland from his head, the music stops, and Reri is

led away.
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 [6 photos]

One cannot reproach any critic for what does not appeal to him, and besides that, I have limited

my discussion to several of Rohmer’s early essays. But I still find them provocative for thinking

about Murnau. Murnau is not generally thought about as a point-of-view director, as Lang and

Hitchcock always are, for instance. His particular inflection of point-of-view editing within his

overall conception of film construction, as it evolved and as it became more independent of

external constraints, is not so obvious. Nor is the distinction between internal and external

modes that Rohmer draws our attention to, or the levels of non-reductive meaning that cannot

really be put into words.

NOTES
1
. “Le Cinéma, art de l’espace,” reprinted in Eric Rohmer, Le Goût de la beauté, textes réunis et
présentés par Jean Narboni (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1984), p. 32.
2
. Maurice Schérer, “La Revanche de l’Occident,” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 21 (mars 1953), p. 46.
3
. Le Goût de la beauté, p. 55.
4
. Ibid., p. 59.
5
. “La Revanche de l’Occident”, p. 47.
6
. Rohmer’s book L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau, the best-known of his
writings on Murnau, was written in 1972, that is to say, very late in Rohmer’s career as a writer
and critic, as a thèse de doctorat de 3e cycle, soutenue devant l’université de Paris I.
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7
. Floyd Crosby, The Development of Cinematography (American Film Institute/Louis B.
Mayer oral history collection, 1977, from interviews conducted by Nicholas Pasquariello in
1973), pp. 16, 59.
8
. Richard Griffith, The World of Robert Flaherty (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1953),
p. 64.