The Last Laugh - Production

Production

Director F. W. Murnau was at the height of his film career in Germany and had high ambitions for his first film with UFA. He stated that "All our efforts must be directed towards abstracting everything that isn't the true domain of the cinema. Everything that is trivial and acquired from other sources, all the tricks, devices and cliches inheirited from the stage and from books." Murnau called screenwriter Carl Mayer someone who worked in "the true domain of the cinema" and agreed to make The Last Laugh after Mayer and film director Lupu Pick fought and Pick left the film. The film famously uses no intertitles, which had previously been done by Mayer and Pick on Scherben and Sylvester several years earlier, as well as by director Arthur Robinson in the film Schatten in 1923.

The film was shot entirely at the UFA Studios. Murnau and cinematographer Karl Freund used elaborate camera movements for the film, a technique later called "entfesslte Kamera" (unchained camera). In one scene a camera was strapped to Freund's chest as he rode a bicycle into an elevator and onto the street below. In another scene a camera in sent down a wire from a window to the street below, and later reversed in editing. French filmmaker Marcel Carne later said that "The camera...glides, rises, zooms or weaves where the story takes it. It is no longer fixed, but takes part in the action and becomes a character in the drama." Years later Karl Freund dismissed Murnau's contributions to the films that they made together, claiming that Murnau had no interest in lighting and never looked through the camera, and that "Carl Mayer used to take much more interest than he did in framing." The films set designers Robert Herlth and Walter Rohrig denied this statement and defended Murnau. Murnau described the films cinematography as being "on account of the way... were placed or photographed, their image is a visual drama. In their relationship with other objects or with the characters, they are units in the symphony of the film."