Late in the climax of Metropolis (1927), there is a moment when Joh Fredersen, the master of Metropolis, the wealthy industrialist who has behaved throughout with the careless authority of a man who will never have to descend into the smoky, steamy depths from which his pristine skyscrapers rise like Babel—driving his faithful secretary to near-suicide with a casual dismissal, setting spies on his politically awakening son, commanding his old rival to discredit a workers' rebellion with a robot provocateur—catches sight of his only son wrestling with a maddened inventor on the crumbling parapets of the city's cathedral and Alfred Abel, who until then has underplayed his character with a cool naturalism that still feels modern where his co-stars' gestures are marked of their decade, clutches his head and sinks to his knees and BSODs out in the best Expressionist style; it feels as plausible as anything else in Fritz Lang's techno-Biblical fever dream that by the time Fredersen gets enough control of himself to take his hands down, his formerly greying hair has gone stark white.
If you would like to see a movie in which Alfred Abel is about that emotional from the seventeen-minute mark on, F. W. Murnau's Phantom (1922) is the film for you.
Lorenz Lubota is not master of anything, least of all himself. He's a luftmensch, a shabby, dreamy, provincial town clerk who lives with his family and reads every spare minute he's not writing poetry, which he has just begun to show shyly to the bookbinder next door. The actor is older than his character, but it works here as in Moonrise (1948) because it gives Lorenz a simultaneously careworn and feckless look—he's the sole support of his ailing mother (Frida Richard), his hard-partying sister (Aud Egede-Nissen), and his art-student brother (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), but he's perpetually late for work because he has to pass the bookseller's on the way. The bookbinder's daughter Marie (Lil Dagover) is carrying a rather obvious torch for him, but her father cautions her that Lorenz will need to "wake up from his dream world" to see it. Don't hold your breath waiting, because that very morning something hits him like an apparition from one of his own poems, where the Muse is represented as a sphinx clawing the song from his breast: a carriage drawn by two white horses, driven by a beautiful woman (Lya De Putti) in a white frock, her thick bob of hair hardly darker. She comes clattering off the bridge just as Lorenz steps into the street with his head down, lost in his latest book. He's knocked off his feet like a rag doll. For a sickening moment, he lies so bonelessly tumbled against the curb that even the audience isn't sure. Then he comes to in a circle of concerned strangers, her small hands gently pressing his chest and shoulders, her crescent face an apology's breadth from his own. They are held together in the iris of the camera's tinted eye as if spotlit on the sun-washed street. We never hear what she says to him. He is left staring after her, physically undamaged but thunderstruck. From that moment until the very close of the film, he will not be what a disinterested observer would call sane. It's not the daydreaming. Plenty of people fantasize about themselves as celebrated artists, suitably impressive mates for otherwise inaccessible objects of desire like the daughters of well-to-do families. Fewer, however, borrow substantial sums against nonexistent royalties in order to pursue self-destructive love affairs with déclassé doppelgängers of their obsessions, neglect their families to the point of illness, neglect their jobs to the point of unemployment, go around dazedly bursting into tears like a sleepwalker with an alarming case of Stendhal syndrome, and if at any point in this progression you find yourself seriously considering going in on a burglary with that sleazy boyfriend (Anton Edthofer) of your sister's who used to be your rich aunt's fancy man? Protip: don't. And yet here we are after midnight, skittering a flashlight over the locked face of a safe as a woman sleeps and a policeman wheels his bicycle up the street. Nightmare shadows from a moment of absentminded sun.
Twenty years later, this plot would be film noir; in the same year as Dr. Mabuse der Spieler and Nosferatu, it's noir's ancestor, first-generation Expressionism, with a healthy assist from the intimate, street-level psychology of Kammerspielfilm. I have to be careful talking about it, because it is terribly easy to evaluate in terms of the later genre. It has the destabilization, the shape-changing of the everyday. The one thing happens and then nothing is secure, not the world around you, certainly not yourself. Whatever patrician detachment you remember from Metropolis, forget it. Abel as Lorenz has one of those nervously beautiful faces, all long melancholy bones, and if there's comedy at first in his forgetting even which pocket he's put his poems in, very soon his characteristic distraction—pleating at tablecloths and crumpling his hat in his hands, straightening his tie like he's clearing his throat and never quite getting his hair to lie flat—is sharpening into real existential fear. He's out of himself as surely as if her carriage-wheels really did separate body from soul and the gap is widening by the second. "My brother Lorenz is the most upright man in the world," Melanie warns off her flash beau, correctly suspecting that a sharp character like Wigottschinsky wouldn't wine and dine a nebbish like Lorenz unless he had an angle in mind—and two days ago she'd have been right, but now as they speak her rechtschaffenste brother is chokily pleading with the wealthy Harlans to know if their daughter Veronika is really betrothed. His mother wonders if he's ill, Marie's father worries that he's going "astray," Marie reassures them both in the negative and Lorenz trails home after the flirtatious Melitta (De Putti again, natch), who beckoned him across the restaurant like Veronika's good-time ghost. Even his no-nonsense aunt, the pawnbroker Schwabe (Grete Berger), has a soft spot for her näif of a nephew, which only means that he's entangled himself in a scheme to chisel her for money, because a fifty-fifty split still leaves him 30,000 Mark to spend on Melitta. He's obsessed, not oblivious; he knows he's not all right, conscience-racked and weeping at the Harlans' door: "Ich komme nicht los von ihr! – Ich komme nicht los von ihr – – !" But knowing won't get him out of this riptide of dream, epitomized by recurring visions of Veronika with her white horses, like the Queen of Elfland. Again and again her carriage races down the street and Lorenz runs after her, arms held out like a beggar. He doesn't know any longer how far he will or won't go.
A hero that far off kilter deserves an equally fractured heroine, which is where De Putti comes in. Her role in Phantom is obviously split between the ethereal, unattainable Veronika and the earthy, purchasable Melitta, but the film handles this duality with significantly less misogyny than some movies I have seen. After that one glancing, life-altering encounter, Veronika is never seen again. She's the shadow Lorenz speaks of chasing, the phantom of the title. The closest he will ever get in real life is the painfully awkward interview with her parents, which the audience can feel safe assuming will go no further than the relieved looks they exchange as he leaves. Her dominating presence is nothing more than fantasy. We're not even sure if Melitta is a dead ringer for her or if the double-exposure blur of one face across the other is nothing more than Lorenz's wishful idée fixe. She's no gold-digging siren, whatever she is; if she exists, like Melanie, at the negotiable intersection of prostitution and permitting the gentleman to pick up the tab, she takes the moonstruck Lorenz home with genuine friendliness and scolds her mother the morning after for not so delicately raising the matter of "income" with the unprotesting poet-clerk as he slipped out. She understands that she's an eidolon. Before they make love for the first time, she asks him to tell her who he imagines he's kissing, kissing her. (He can't answer: the white horses gallop again through his mind.) But she finds something touching and romantic, Romantic even, in his lost and distraught fixation, so much so that when Lorenz in despair of his sanity begs her to help him, she draws his head down to her breast with wondering regret: "If I could help you . . . if I could save you . . . then I would no longer love you . . ." That might be codependent, but I wouldn't call it fatale. The real problem is that she laughed off his confession of being a recently sacked town clerk and believes, like his aunt who pressed a wad of notes on him gratis when she thought he had an interview with a publisher and needed a good suit, that he's a poet with prospects. That gun, too, will have to come off the wall.
What is not at all noir-like about Phantom is its pace. In the hands of Warners or Universal, this story could be over and out in eighty minutes; Phantom under the auspices of Decla-Bioscop runs just over two hours in the current restoration and takes its time with Lorenz's floundering slide from dime-novel dreamer to debt-ridden thief, as frozen and headlong as a nightmare. It doesn't overplay its Expressionism. Much of the film is strictly, even seedily realist, reserving the weirdness for maximum emotional effect. The memory of Veronika with her carriage becomes more phantasmagoric with every replay, the buildings of the town fading first into smeary sketches of themselves and then a plain of blackness, until at last her transparent ghost comes trotting across the quite real, night-deserted town square and runs Lorenz right down. It's a simple in-camera effect, almost certainly inspired by similar images in Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1921), but it's more unnerving for being all in Lorenz's head. His last day with Melitta begins in a spiral-staircase reel of apprehension and capitalism, as she tows him through fashion houses and flower shops, drinking and dancing and dining, but it isn't until their table begins to plummet as if down a mineshaft while a trick cyclist from a Wall of Death rides round and round above them that the audience really appreciates the magnitude of Lorenz's panic attack. He stumbles out of a disastrous conversation with his aunt to find the house-fronts beginning to crash in on him, their toppling razor-toothed shadows pursuing him down the street. The film's editing itself becomes anxious. I particularly like the trick of inserting quick scenes from other threads like intrusive thoughts: his mother's waxen face, his wasted, rowdy sister; as Wigottschinsky reminds him that he has no leverage without his pretense of literary success, the screen fills with a statuesque close-up of Veronika-Melitta, head arched back in dreamlike ecstasy, while a shot of Melitta herself in bed, delightedly modeling two hats of the latest vogue, answers for a speechless Lorenz when his aunt demands to know just what became of her sixty thou. We're not always in our antihero's head, but when we are it's a hell of a place to be.
I do not have enough experience with film tinting to tell much about Murnau's use of color except that it seems both scene-setting and emotionally charged. Scenes in the Lubotas' cramped, underfurnished apartment are tinted in shades of somber blue and candle-amber while the heady whirl of nightlife flushes magenta and anything to do with Lorenz's obsession is suffused in a cloudy, luminous ultramarine; the streets are neutral sepia by day, as are other people's houses, but they sink to a kind of drowned, bottled teal at night. I would love for it to mean something about the fusion of Lorenz's two lives that the redemptive frame story is tinted violet, but now I'm just imagining this movie by Tanith Lee. It was a lost film until the early 2000's and the writing of hers of which it most reminds me is the Secret Books of Paradys (1988–93), so maybe this is just some kind of Symbolist convergent evolution. I have no idea if Boileau-Narcejac and/or Hitchcock ever saw it, either, for all that it looks like an influence on D'entre les morts (1954)/Vertigo (1958). Abel starred in the German-language version of Hitchcock's Murder! (1930). I am now very curious about that.
I had barely heard of Phantom before Saturday night. I have no idea why it took me so long. I've seen other movies by Murnau. This one has no shortage of pedigree—besides the direction, there's set design by Hermann Warm, production by Erich Pommer, and a screenplay by Thea von Harbou from the serialized short novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, who cameos as himself in the credits—and it has Alfred Abel, whose acting even as the high-keyed Lorenz still falls well on the naturalistic side of troubled smiles, fidgeting hands, and hangdog slumps. It even has a beautiful-looking Flicker Alley DVD. It has no supernatural elements, which I suppose may confuse viewers coming straight off Nosferatu, but it's the kind of story where it's worse that it doesn't. A man can hardly be blamed for falling in love with a real ghost, but it's his own lookout if he builds one up inside his mind. This fool's fire brought to you by my bookish backers at Patreon.
If you would like to see a movie in which Alfred Abel is about that emotional from the seventeen-minute mark on, F. W. Murnau's Phantom (1922) is the film for you.
Lorenz Lubota is not master of anything, least of all himself. He's a luftmensch, a shabby, dreamy, provincial town clerk who lives with his family and reads every spare minute he's not writing poetry, which he has just begun to show shyly to the bookbinder next door. The actor is older than his character, but it works here as in Moonrise (1948) because it gives Lorenz a simultaneously careworn and feckless look—he's the sole support of his ailing mother (Frida Richard), his hard-partying sister (Aud Egede-Nissen), and his art-student brother (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), but he's perpetually late for work because he has to pass the bookseller's on the way. The bookbinder's daughter Marie (Lil Dagover) is carrying a rather obvious torch for him, but her father cautions her that Lorenz will need to "wake up from his dream world" to see it. Don't hold your breath waiting, because that very morning something hits him like an apparition from one of his own poems, where the Muse is represented as a sphinx clawing the song from his breast: a carriage drawn by two white horses, driven by a beautiful woman (Lya De Putti) in a white frock, her thick bob of hair hardly darker. She comes clattering off the bridge just as Lorenz steps into the street with his head down, lost in his latest book. He's knocked off his feet like a rag doll. For a sickening moment, he lies so bonelessly tumbled against the curb that even the audience isn't sure. Then he comes to in a circle of concerned strangers, her small hands gently pressing his chest and shoulders, her crescent face an apology's breadth from his own. They are held together in the iris of the camera's tinted eye as if spotlit on the sun-washed street. We never hear what she says to him. He is left staring after her, physically undamaged but thunderstruck. From that moment until the very close of the film, he will not be what a disinterested observer would call sane. It's not the daydreaming. Plenty of people fantasize about themselves as celebrated artists, suitably impressive mates for otherwise inaccessible objects of desire like the daughters of well-to-do families. Fewer, however, borrow substantial sums against nonexistent royalties in order to pursue self-destructive love affairs with déclassé doppelgängers of their obsessions, neglect their families to the point of illness, neglect their jobs to the point of unemployment, go around dazedly bursting into tears like a sleepwalker with an alarming case of Stendhal syndrome, and if at any point in this progression you find yourself seriously considering going in on a burglary with that sleazy boyfriend (Anton Edthofer) of your sister's who used to be your rich aunt's fancy man? Protip: don't. And yet here we are after midnight, skittering a flashlight over the locked face of a safe as a woman sleeps and a policeman wheels his bicycle up the street. Nightmare shadows from a moment of absentminded sun.
Twenty years later, this plot would be film noir; in the same year as Dr. Mabuse der Spieler and Nosferatu, it's noir's ancestor, first-generation Expressionism, with a healthy assist from the intimate, street-level psychology of Kammerspielfilm. I have to be careful talking about it, because it is terribly easy to evaluate in terms of the later genre. It has the destabilization, the shape-changing of the everyday. The one thing happens and then nothing is secure, not the world around you, certainly not yourself. Whatever patrician detachment you remember from Metropolis, forget it. Abel as Lorenz has one of those nervously beautiful faces, all long melancholy bones, and if there's comedy at first in his forgetting even which pocket he's put his poems in, very soon his characteristic distraction—pleating at tablecloths and crumpling his hat in his hands, straightening his tie like he's clearing his throat and never quite getting his hair to lie flat—is sharpening into real existential fear. He's out of himself as surely as if her carriage-wheels really did separate body from soul and the gap is widening by the second. "My brother Lorenz is the most upright man in the world," Melanie warns off her flash beau, correctly suspecting that a sharp character like Wigottschinsky wouldn't wine and dine a nebbish like Lorenz unless he had an angle in mind—and two days ago she'd have been right, but now as they speak her rechtschaffenste brother is chokily pleading with the wealthy Harlans to know if their daughter Veronika is really betrothed. His mother wonders if he's ill, Marie's father worries that he's going "astray," Marie reassures them both in the negative and Lorenz trails home after the flirtatious Melitta (De Putti again, natch), who beckoned him across the restaurant like Veronika's good-time ghost. Even his no-nonsense aunt, the pawnbroker Schwabe (Grete Berger), has a soft spot for her näif of a nephew, which only means that he's entangled himself in a scheme to chisel her for money, because a fifty-fifty split still leaves him 30,000 Mark to spend on Melitta. He's obsessed, not oblivious; he knows he's not all right, conscience-racked and weeping at the Harlans' door: "Ich komme nicht los von ihr! – Ich komme nicht los von ihr – – !" But knowing won't get him out of this riptide of dream, epitomized by recurring visions of Veronika with her white horses, like the Queen of Elfland. Again and again her carriage races down the street and Lorenz runs after her, arms held out like a beggar. He doesn't know any longer how far he will or won't go.
A hero that far off kilter deserves an equally fractured heroine, which is where De Putti comes in. Her role in Phantom is obviously split between the ethereal, unattainable Veronika and the earthy, purchasable Melitta, but the film handles this duality with significantly less misogyny than some movies I have seen. After that one glancing, life-altering encounter, Veronika is never seen again. She's the shadow Lorenz speaks of chasing, the phantom of the title. The closest he will ever get in real life is the painfully awkward interview with her parents, which the audience can feel safe assuming will go no further than the relieved looks they exchange as he leaves. Her dominating presence is nothing more than fantasy. We're not even sure if Melitta is a dead ringer for her or if the double-exposure blur of one face across the other is nothing more than Lorenz's wishful idée fixe. She's no gold-digging siren, whatever she is; if she exists, like Melanie, at the negotiable intersection of prostitution and permitting the gentleman to pick up the tab, she takes the moonstruck Lorenz home with genuine friendliness and scolds her mother the morning after for not so delicately raising the matter of "income" with the unprotesting poet-clerk as he slipped out. She understands that she's an eidolon. Before they make love for the first time, she asks him to tell her who he imagines he's kissing, kissing her. (He can't answer: the white horses gallop again through his mind.) But she finds something touching and romantic, Romantic even, in his lost and distraught fixation, so much so that when Lorenz in despair of his sanity begs her to help him, she draws his head down to her breast with wondering regret: "If I could help you . . . if I could save you . . . then I would no longer love you . . ." That might be codependent, but I wouldn't call it fatale. The real problem is that she laughed off his confession of being a recently sacked town clerk and believes, like his aunt who pressed a wad of notes on him gratis when she thought he had an interview with a publisher and needed a good suit, that he's a poet with prospects. That gun, too, will have to come off the wall.
What is not at all noir-like about Phantom is its pace. In the hands of Warners or Universal, this story could be over and out in eighty minutes; Phantom under the auspices of Decla-Bioscop runs just over two hours in the current restoration and takes its time with Lorenz's floundering slide from dime-novel dreamer to debt-ridden thief, as frozen and headlong as a nightmare. It doesn't overplay its Expressionism. Much of the film is strictly, even seedily realist, reserving the weirdness for maximum emotional effect. The memory of Veronika with her carriage becomes more phantasmagoric with every replay, the buildings of the town fading first into smeary sketches of themselves and then a plain of blackness, until at last her transparent ghost comes trotting across the quite real, night-deserted town square and runs Lorenz right down. It's a simple in-camera effect, almost certainly inspired by similar images in Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1921), but it's more unnerving for being all in Lorenz's head. His last day with Melitta begins in a spiral-staircase reel of apprehension and capitalism, as she tows him through fashion houses and flower shops, drinking and dancing and dining, but it isn't until their table begins to plummet as if down a mineshaft while a trick cyclist from a Wall of Death rides round and round above them that the audience really appreciates the magnitude of Lorenz's panic attack. He stumbles out of a disastrous conversation with his aunt to find the house-fronts beginning to crash in on him, their toppling razor-toothed shadows pursuing him down the street. The film's editing itself becomes anxious. I particularly like the trick of inserting quick scenes from other threads like intrusive thoughts: his mother's waxen face, his wasted, rowdy sister; as Wigottschinsky reminds him that he has no leverage without his pretense of literary success, the screen fills with a statuesque close-up of Veronika-Melitta, head arched back in dreamlike ecstasy, while a shot of Melitta herself in bed, delightedly modeling two hats of the latest vogue, answers for a speechless Lorenz when his aunt demands to know just what became of her sixty thou. We're not always in our antihero's head, but when we are it's a hell of a place to be.
I do not have enough experience with film tinting to tell much about Murnau's use of color except that it seems both scene-setting and emotionally charged. Scenes in the Lubotas' cramped, underfurnished apartment are tinted in shades of somber blue and candle-amber while the heady whirl of nightlife flushes magenta and anything to do with Lorenz's obsession is suffused in a cloudy, luminous ultramarine; the streets are neutral sepia by day, as are other people's houses, but they sink to a kind of drowned, bottled teal at night. I would love for it to mean something about the fusion of Lorenz's two lives that the redemptive frame story is tinted violet, but now I'm just imagining this movie by Tanith Lee. It was a lost film until the early 2000's and the writing of hers of which it most reminds me is the Secret Books of Paradys (1988–93), so maybe this is just some kind of Symbolist convergent evolution. I have no idea if Boileau-Narcejac and/or Hitchcock ever saw it, either, for all that it looks like an influence on D'entre les morts (1954)/Vertigo (1958). Abel starred in the German-language version of Hitchcock's Murder! (1930). I am now very curious about that.
I had barely heard of Phantom before Saturday night. I have no idea why it took me so long. I've seen other movies by Murnau. This one has no shortage of pedigree—besides the direction, there's set design by Hermann Warm, production by Erich Pommer, and a screenplay by Thea von Harbou from the serialized short novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, who cameos as himself in the credits—and it has Alfred Abel, whose acting even as the high-keyed Lorenz still falls well on the naturalistic side of troubled smiles, fidgeting hands, and hangdog slumps. It even has a beautiful-looking Flicker Alley DVD. It has no supernatural elements, which I suppose may confuse viewers coming straight off Nosferatu, but it's the kind of story where it's worse that it doesn't. A man can hardly be blamed for falling in love with a real ghost, but it's his own lookout if he builds one up inside his mind. This fool's fire brought to you by my bookish backers at Patreon.
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