Tartuffe or Herr Tartuf

Tartuffe or Herr Tartuf is F.W. Murnau’s radical simplification of Moliere’s classic play about hypocrisy. Shot in 1926 by the great Karl Freund, the film is exceedingly self-assured and boldly directed. Murnau had made Nosferatu in 1922, The Last Laugh (Der Letze Mann) with Emil Jannings the year before and would produce his most elaborate surviving silent film, Faust, eine Deutsche Volksage, at UFA the year after this picture was released. The extreme and stylized simplicity of Tartuffe is its most remarkable feature – Murnau favored fantastically complex moving camera shots and dense expressionistic décor; none of this is really on display in Tartuffe. Murnau’s true métier was probably horror films, pictures about the uncanny, and he stages Tartuffe in that genre. A remarkably ugly housekeeper is slowly poisoning her boss, the feeble Herman Picha, playing the perfect embodiment of somewhat dimwitted Biedermeier rectitude. The housekeeper and Picha are filmed in big close shots – they don’t look like movie stars and their huge, weathered faces seem thrust into our laps; they are shockingly real, but also fairy tale characters. A great Berlin cabaret actress, Rosa Valetti, plays the housekeeper who is angling for a legacy in Picha’s last will and testament; she is tremendously vivid, like the evil witch in a fairytale. Picha’s grandson, who he intends to disinherit, is a handsome actor. The actor also seems to have wandered into the film from some uncanny realm – he is a master of disguise and has hypnotic, brightly glaring eyes. The actor discovers the plot and, wrongfully expelled from the house, strides up to the camera and announces to the audience that he is going to save the old man. He next appears as a kind of Caligari, the purveyor of a traveling cinema, driving up to the house in an expressionistically painted wagon. He screens a film version of Tartuffe starring Emil Jannings as the hypocrite, Werner Krauss as Count Orgon, Tartuffe’s fawning admirer, and Lil Dagover as Orgon’s wife. In the film within the film, Tartuffe is lustful and Dagover’s character decides to seduce him with the Count watching to prove the infamous hypocrisy of the supposed holy man. This aspect of the film plays like a reprise of Nosferatu: Janning’s character is horrific, filthy, and monstrously ugly; by contrast, Lil Dagover is pale to the point of ghostliness invested with a spooky kind of sepulchral beauty. Like the wife in Nosferatu, she is prepared to have sex and spend the night with the monster to save her husband from his icy grip. The scenes between Dagover and Jannings are bizarre, a weird combination of sex and horror – the audience may be forgiven for the surmise that there is more life in the grasping, malevolently squinting, toadlike Tartuffe than in the rather remote and childlike Count Organ, played pallidly by Werner Krauss. (Krauss like Jannings is not conventionally handsome and, in some angles, resembles Tartuffe – in the German expressionistic cinema, beauty is used like ugliness, as a special effect – unlike American films where everyone is handsome or attractive, German pictures frequently display actors and actresses that are overtly ugly or, at minimum, normally unhandsome.) Dagover and Jannings are the adults in the film within the film; he squints at Dagover’s famous décolletage, swills wine, and pulls aside the curtains to the marital bed while the heroine alternately throws herself at him and swoons. Orgon peers through a key hole, charges into the room at the opportune time, beating Jannings savagely before resting his head like a little boy on the breasts of his wife. The whole thing is strange and perverse. Murnau’s film within a film features weird elements quite beyond Jannings horrifically grotesque performance: the action takes place in a chateau that is filmed like a miniature gazebo under a resplendent field of stars – it’s a totally excessive effect – and since Tartuffe supposedly despises extravagance, most of the lighting in the place is removed creating extraordinary (and extraordinarily gratuitous) shadow effects. The movie within the movie ends and the actor exposes the slow poisoner, throwing her onto a street where a mob of street urchins throng around the villainess taunting her. Film is revealed to be a tool for exposing the truth of human nature. “Do you know… really…who you are sitting next to?” a title rhetorically asks before the film fades to black.