The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present
The Last Laugh
When
Wed 9 Nov 2022
This giant among silent film classics, documenting the fall and eventual “rise” of an ageing hotel doorman, was scripted by Carl Mayer, directed by Murnau, co-photographed by Karl Freund, production designed by Edgar G. Ulmer and boasts an outstandingly expressive lead performance by Emil Jannings. Eschewing intertitles and featuring “unchained” camerawork of unprecedented agility, this is one of the most lasting, influential and dazzling of silent films and a landmark in the integration of expressionist techniques with more naturalistic forms of cinema.
Also screening on Wed 9 November
Program
The Brink of Life: F.W. Murnau, Cinematic Visionary
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) – Wed 9 Nov, 7pm
The Last Laugh (1924) – Wed 9 Nov, 8.50pm
Nosferatu (1922) – Wed 16 Nov, 7pm
Faust (1926) – Wed 16 Nov, 8.25pm
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) – Wed 23 Nov, 7pm
The Haunted Castle (1921) – Wed 23 Nov, 8.40pm
The Grand Duke's Finances (1924) – Wed 23 Nov, 9.50pm
About the program
The Brink of Life: F.W. Murnau, Cinematic Visionary
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) was a perfectionist, an aesthete and, in many ways, a visionary, whose poetic, painterly, literate and highly cinematic sensibilities brought to the golden age of German cinema new concepts of film form based on a synthesis of all the elements then in vogue – from Caligari-like horrors to an expressionist use of actors’ bodies through to a rugged, sometimes optimistic naturalism (especially in his American period).
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About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
