This month, Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre hosts a one-off screening of a little-known psychological drama directed by FW Murnau, the master filmmaker who created iconic 1922 horror, Nosferatu. Made in 1924 and titled The Last Laugh, the silent film will be accompanied by live, improvised music performed by British-Austrian musician, filmmaker & painter Hugo Max, who has embarked on a national tour in celebration of three of Murnau’s groundbreaking movies. 

What’s On caught up with Hugo to find out more about the film and the MAC screening, which will be his first public performance of The Last Laugh...

Hugo, you’re touring three films by FW Murnau. Why this director and these films?

Murnau directed Nosferatu in 1922, and there’s been a lot of interest recently around Nosferatu, with Robert Eggers’ remake that came out last December. It’s a film which continues to compel audiences and get people into the cinema. There are so many other films by Murnau which people haven’t seen, which I would argue are just as thrilling and visionary. 

Murnau made 21 films, and we only have nine left, and these three are some of the last he made in Germany before leaving to go to Hollywood... The Last Laugh is what I’ll be performing at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), which I’m really excited about - it will be the first time I ever score that film.

Can you hint at what happens in The Last Laugh?

It’s about a hotel doorman, in this majestic uniform, who is quite elderly. His job becomes harder and harder - he can’t lift the cases up. He gets demoted to being the janitor of the hotel, so he goes from being front-of-house, to downstairs - this invisible figure. His uniform gets taken away from him, his status has been stolen. The film follows his psychology as it unravels as a result of this decision. 
It’s a film about the identity that is thrust upon us and that which we choose for ourselves - and the conflict between these things. I think it’s a very contemporary idea, particularly with social media. We can create an identity for ourselves, and that can be taken from us in a moment. Also, within the context of Germany at the time - the German psyche, and the role of the uniform between the wars, and what that would symbolise. 

Alfred Hitchcock was working in the same studio that Murnau was filming in when The Last Laugh was being made. Hitchcock observed Murnau work, and I think he called The Last Laugh an ‘almost perfect’ film. He gave it very high praise indeed, and certain camera movements which Murnau, with his cinematographer, pioneered on the film, Hitchcock uses later, and draws even further into the mainstream.

You’re both a musician and a filmmaker. What has inspired you to explore these films from the 1920s?
Lots of my filmmaking has been exploring my Austrian family history. I’ve been thinking a lot about the time period that I’ve been delving into - the narratives, the stories - at the same time as looking into these German expressionist films, which were from exactly the same environment. Particularly with Nosferatu, which was my gateway into scoring silent films. 

A lot of my soundtracks also draw on my Jewish heritage - thinking about Second Viennese School composers, and also Klezmer music, and the importance of the solo string sound within Klezmer.

Your soundtrack will be improvised live, with you playing solo viola. How do you prepare for these spontaneous performances?

It’s terrifying and wonderful. Particularly as a string player within classical music education, there’s very little room to improvise. Having been taught very intensely on the violin, I came to the viola in a much more exploratory approach. Not being conventionally taught on this instrument, and finding my own relationship with it through improvisation, has been a really rewarding and exciting journey.

The viola has this capacity to be very thematic and melodic with its upper register, like the violin, and then be quite percussive and bass-like as well, in its lower registers. I think that variety of textures is why it works so well scoring silent film. It’s naturally a theatrical instrument. 

Nobody on the screen is still alive, and my viola was actually made in 1920, so accompanying their actions with an instrument made in their lifetime feels quite fitting. I always approach each screening as if each character will behave differently, and secure a different fate. 

I work with leitmotifs - small, melodic ideas which are associated with different themes and characters - which I structure quite carefully at the start of the film. But then the characters’ psychologies tend to break down over the course of the film, so the same thing can happen to the music as well.

You’ve performed in Birmingham before, but why choose MAC as the venue for this tour?

It’s been lovely to build a relationship with MAC. It’s a multi-disciplinary arts centre, and that’s really special. The lovely thing about scoring silent film is that it engages people passionate about different crafts and different art forms, in direct conversation about how those things speak to each other. It’s been really lovely working with the team there to plan this show, and I’m looking forward to being back in Birmingham.

Do you have a favourite moment to score In The Last Laugh?

There’s an astounding dream sequence. It’s just astonishing, with various filters in front of the lens, and sets which are built to look expansive but they must have been tiny. Models that you don’t believe are models, and bits of filmcraft which are just charming, and you don’t believe what you’re watching.

Another very important detail about this work is that it’s one of the first narrative films to almost completely do away with intertitles. There are no text boxes, there are no title cards on the screen during the film. It’s purely visual, except for a title card at the beginning and the end. There’s a moment when a character playing a trumpet wakes another character on a second storey of a building, and the camera follows the sound of the trumpet up to his ear. How Murnau gets around that is very joyful, and very inspiring to behold, I think.

FW Murnau’s The Last Laugh will be screened, with a live soundtrack by Hugo Max, at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) on Sunday 15 June