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With cinematography by Karl Freund, a virtuoso performance by Emil Jannings and innovative direction from F W Murnau, this tale of an eminent doorman whose world crumbles when he is demoted to lavatory attendant is one of the finest artistic triumphs of the silent era. It is a landmark work on a number of fronts. Firstly, it introduced a method of purely visual storytelling in which all intertitles and dialogue were jettisoned, setting the stage for a seamless interaction between film-world and viewer. Secondly, it put to use a panoply of technical innovations that continue to point distinct ways forward for cinematic expression nearly a century later. It guides the silent cinema's melodramatic brio to its lowest abject abyss — before disposing of the tragic arc altogether. The lesson in all this? That a film can be anything it wants to be. Murnau's film depicts the tale of an elderly hotel doorman (played by the inimitable Emil Jannings) whose superiors have come to deem his station as transitory as the revolving doors through which he has ushered guests in and out, day upon day, decade after decade. Reduced to polishing tiles beneath a sink in the gents' lavatory and towelling the hands of Berlin's most vulgar barons, the doorman soon uncovers the ironical underside of old-world hospitality. And then — one day — his fate suddenly changes... Der Letzte Mann (also known as The Last Laugh, although its original title translates to 'The Last Man') inaugurated a new era of mobile camera expression whose handheld aesthetic and sheer plastic fervour predated the various 'New Wave' movements of the 1960s and beyond. As the watershed entry in Murnau's work, its influence can be detected in such later masterpieces as Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu — and in the films of the same Hollywood dream-factory that would offer him a contract shortly after Der Letzte Mann's release.
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