This year FILMUSIC will be a virtual film festival
JUNE 25-JULY 1
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The Last Laugh tells a simple tale through intensely subjective devices. A hotel doorman is forced by old age to trade in his gold-buttoned paramilitary finery for a lavatory attendant’s smock, falling from graceful dignity to stooped humiliation in a peculiarly German warning against the decline of benign authority. In contrast to the mechanical wonders of the modern world surrounding him—cars, trains, neon lights, elevators—the porter, and his old-fashioned values, are outdated hulks. A son of rural Westphalia, Murnau located terror in the countryside for Nosferatu; with The Last Laugh, he places it in the city, its reflective surfaces generating a frenzied kaleidoscope.
Special Musical Score by the Berklee College of Music
“The 1924 film in which F.W. Murnau freed his camera from its stationary tripod and took it on a flight of imagination and expression that changed the way movies were made.” – Chicago Reader
“The film would be famous just for its lack of titles, and for its lead performance by Emil Jannings, which is so effective that both Jannings and Murnau were offered Hollywood contracts and moved to America at the dawn of sound.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
