F. W. Murnau | Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe) / 1925

enlightened nightmares

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Mayer (screenplay, based on the play by Molière), F. W. Murnau (director) Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe) / 1925

 

Director F. W. Murnau always recognized a good play which he might adapt to the screen, and Moliere’s Tartuffe from 1925 was clearly one of them, as was his next work for cinema, Faust. I use the word “cinema” here more emphatically than I usually mean it, for Murnau’s filmmaking, from the very beginning, was not only an attempt to take dreaming into the everyday lives of movie audiences, but to uplift them; to put their subconscious joys and fears into a near delirious mix of imagination and spiritual uplift.

     Using images from visual art and combining them with detailed realistic settings, yet unafraid of theatrical tropes and melodramatic scenes, Murnau—a gay man who, if he’d lived beyond 1931, might have produced radically gay-oriented, even campy films worthy of James Whale, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others—turned Molière’s classic on its head, so to speak, revealing the hypocrisy in all of society instead of just its religiously-inclined central figure.

     Today, in fact, this film has even more significance than it might have at its original showing. It represents, after all, a figure of amazing power—a man who could transform the happily married and clearly bourgeois Orgon (Werner Krauss) into a penitent who, upon his return home wants to remove every object of luxury, including his beautiful wife, Elmire (Lil Dagover), from his house.

      Although Orgon's and Tartuffe's relationship is not at what one might describe as gay—certainly is not sexual—it is most certainly a queer relationship, and even more obviously a perverse one. And one cannot help but wondering moreover what has happened between these two men in Orgon's long absence from home that brought him so fully to fall under the spell of the unattractive Tartuffe that he is suddenly willing to give up his heterosexual relationship and his personal wealth only to wait literally hand and foot on the religious zealot. It almost reminds one of the cult-like followers of men such as Jim Jones, Ted Haggard, Eddie Long, Marshall Herff Applewhite, and others who were involved with homosexual relationships with some of their cult or church followers or whose beliefs involved a struggle with their own homosexual desires—although Tartuffe himself seems, in his interest in Tartuffe's wife's cleavage, fully heterosexual. 

 

     One by one, the wonderful Emil Jannings—one of Murnau’s favorite actors—reveals himself as a complete fraud, despite the small booklet of his spiritual prescriptions pasted almost always in this film to his face. Never was an actor more obscured from the busy work of the camera than in this picture. Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride are, one-by-one, trotted out to reveal the vile nature of the man to whom Orgon has sacrificed his former life. This film is a kind a Faust in fomentation, a satiric version of the black contagion of his later villain.

      To save her husband from his new “religious mania,” Elmire dons her best dress and attempts, quite successfully, to arouse Tartuffe’s not-so-very-hidden passions. Yet even what he might easily observe before his very eyes is overlooked by Orgon, apparently unable any longer to see the truth—always a wobbly thing in Murnau’s movies.

     The hero of this story is actually Orgon’s now unbeloved grandson, who having discredited himself by becoming an actor, returns home to find that the house has been taken over by Orgon’s equally hypocritical housekeeper (the wonderful cabaret singer Rosa Valetti), who with a wink of the eye reveals both her hate and obsequious love of her master, who is now about to leave her his entire fortune. The scene in which he writes his will while she pretends to dust and clear up his desk, watching him with wide-eyed worry and pleasure, is one of the many charming moments of this movie.

      Murnau, from his childhood on, was characterized by his friends as a dreamer, a man who almost daily described to his brother the intense nightmares and dreams he had had the night before. Films, art, and theater were clearly manifestations of his desire to return to those sometimes pleasant tales and nightmares he experienced in his sleep. In this film the “actor” (André Mattoni), who quickly deduces what is going on and, donning a costume out of his stock, becomes a mustachioed film-producer, this time by showing the film-within-the-film of Tartuffe revealing the perfidy of both the “saintly” Tartuffe and Ogron’s housekeeper at the very same moment.

      If Orgon’s wife almost disappears from the film, it nonetheless is clear that the handsome young grandson, a mirror we might say of Murnau himself, takes center-stage, resurrecting the chaos around him, and moving through the film-within-a-film his fictional characters and his real uncle back into social order—an outsider gay man, somewhat ironically, restoring heteronormative reality. Just so for Murnau does the light and dark of cinema return meaning to everyday life.

      As film critic Tristan Ettleman writes:

 

"The frame story hammers the point home a bit too clearly, but nevertheless, it’s a fun bit of metafictional business with technical significance. André Mattoni’s grandson addresses the camera directly with an intertitle, at one point, asking the audience if they had seen what just took place. It’s a fun gag, and in this point, Tartuffe illustrates the power of cinema itself."

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).