A director from Bielefeld, and a 1926 move to Hollywood

The notes open a May 2022 paper from the German language and literature department at Ewha Womans University with a short life of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. He was born in Bielefeld, studied philosophy and art history in Berlin and in Heidelberg, and also took acting classes at Max Reinhardt’s theatre school, named here as the Reinhardt Schauspielschule. He had a usual interest in painting, and kept a friendship with painters of the group Der blaue Reiter. The notes also record that he was a homosexual man, at a time when that was treated as a social crime and a taboo. When the First World War began he was still a student, but he took part as a combat pilot; his aircraft crossed into Switzerland, and he was detained there for a time.

In 1926, they write, Murnau went to Hollywood with a cinematographer, a writer, and other staff he had already worked with, and made the film Sunrise, A song of Two Human Beings, in 1927. The wording of that English title is left as the notes give it. Critics received the film well, and Janet Gaynor, who appeared as the woman at the centre of the story, together with the cinematographer and the interior-design staff, won Academy Awards; but Sunrise did not have a great success at the box office, and the studio, the notes say, then intervened deeply in the making of his later films.

A 2022 paper, and the chapters it sets out

The paper, dated May 2022, is presented under a Korean title on expressionism in the film Nosferatu, and an English title, An Analysis of Expressionism in the Movie Nosferatu. The student author is left anonymized, as in the notes. The table of contents, as they transcribe it, begins with an introduction: a section on the background of the research, and a section on its purpose. A second chapter turns to expressionist visual style in Nosferatu, and is divided into setting, light and space, camera angle, and special effects. A third chapter turns to expressionist narrative style, and is divided into plot, artistic image, and montage. Those headings mark what the paper set out to examine. This page does not fill them with visual or narrative conclusions the notes themselves do not draw.

A bookshelf the notes leave in view

Around the paper, the notes also leave a short bookshelf: a 1985 translation of R. S. Furness by Kim Gil-jung; Siegfried Kracauer’s Von Caligari zu Hitler, in a 1984 German edition, and his From Caligari to Hitler, published by Princeton University Press in 1947; Rudolf Kurtz’s Expressionismus und Film, Berlin, 1926; Frida Grafe’s 1990 annotated biography Der Mann Murnau; and a volume on Murnau edited by Jansen and Wolfram Schütte. Later Korean essays in the same list take up montage theory, makeup drawn from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the range of German expressionist film, a rereading of Murnau that moves from a theory of Romantic painting toward a discourse of a third kind of being, the aesthetics of fear, and the visualisation of a fearful double. The dates belong to that bibliography, and are not recast as events in Murnau’s life or in the 2022 paper. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ presentation of a May 2022 Ewha paper on expressionism in Nosferatu, including Murnau’s biography and the 1927 title Sunrise, A song of Two Human Beings

Last updated: 14 November 2026