Murnau’s silent film The Last Laugh tells the tragic story of a self-confident hotel porter, brilliantly portrayed by Emil Jannings, who is demoted to lavatory attendant. The porter’s entire identity is based on his position and especially on his uniform, which symbolizes power and respectability to his lower-middle-class community of family and friends. The film’s most shocking and brutal moment comes when the hotel manager unrelentingly strips the pleading porter of his uniform; it is as if his skin were being ripped off. But this is only the beginning of his trials. The unexpected deus-ex-machina ending tries to whitewash the porter’s suffering, but his tragic decline remains unforgettable.

Dispensing with the customary intertitles and filming while moving the camera in extraordinarily inventive ways, Murnau and his cinematographer, Karl Freund, transformed the language of film. In shooting the opening sequence, the camera descended in the hotel’s glass elevator and was then carried on a bicycle through the lobby. In addition, The Last Laugh succeeds in combining expressionist elements—such as extreme camera angles, distorted dream imagery, and disturbing light and shadow effects—with a complex psychological study of the main character in his fall from privilege.