The Last Laugh · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the old man in the doorway. In his braided coat he fills it — chest out, beard lifted, swinging a heavy trunk onto his shoulder as though it weighed nothing. The uniform is doing his standing for him. Then management takes the coat, hands him a white attendant's smock and the keys to the basement lavatory, and the same body folds. The shoulders round forward. The head sinks. He flattens himself against a tiled wall as if hoping to be mistaken for part of it. Murnau gives you an entire social order in the carriage of one spine, and he does it with almost no words.

Deleuze has a name for what Emil Jannings is doing, though it comes from his writing on much later films: the gest. Not a gesture but a whole bodily attitude that makes visible the social relation a person is caught inside. When the doorman struts, you can see deference flowing toward him; when he stoops, you watch that deference drain away and curdle into scorn. The drama isn't in events. It's in posture. Murnau and his screenwriter Carl Mayer built the Kammerspielfilm, the chamber-play film, precisely so the body could carry what the stage would have handed to dialogue — and here the experiment reaches its limit. A feature told, very nearly, in how a man holds himself.

Stay on the face. Deleuze splits the moving image roughly three ways: we perceive a situation, we feel something about it, we act to change it. That middle term — the feeling that swells but hasn't yet emptied into a deed — is what he calls the affection-image, and its natural home is the close-up. The doorman's tragedy is that he is stranded there. He perceives everything: the neighbour women's heads turning, the relatives' disgust, his own reflection minus the coat. He can do nothing with any of it. So the feeling has nowhere to go but his features and his weight. Jannings gives you a face that doesn't dramatise so much as absorb, wonder thickening into shame and shame settling into stupor. This is German Expressionism's deepest instinct in Deleuze's account: detach the affect from action and let a pure quality fill the frame.

The camera feels it too. The famous opening glides down in the hotel lift and out across the lobby, unhurried, as though it had somewhere of its own to be. Later, drunk on stolen champagne, the doorman reels, and the camera reels with him — focus swimming, the hotel architecture tipping and folding over his head. Karl Freund strapped the apparatus to his own body and rode moving platforms to get this. Deleuze would call the result a dicisign: an image in which we don't merely see what a character sees, we feel the camera as a perceiving presence leaning into his perception. Before this film the camera mostly stood back and watched the play. Freund made vantage itself part of the telling, and when he later carried the technique into Hollywood, the whole industry's sense of where a camera could stand travelled with him.

Look at how the world is lit. Wet pavement throws the street back at you, glass doubles every figure, the braid on the coat gleams as if it were alive. Deleuze reads German cinema as light fighting darkness across a continuous gradient, a world where objects take on a non-organic life of their own. The coat is more vital than the man inside it. The revolving door turns and turns, a lit machine that swallows and disgorges people without caring which is which.

That door and that coat are the film's two great objects. The uniform is what Deleuze calls a mark: a thing that means by habit, so the sight of it tugs deference along an established chain — gold braid, therefore respect. Its removal is the demark, the break in the habit, the anomaly that forces everyone in the courtyard to look again and re-sort the man downward. The coat condenses the whole relation the film is about. Status is a costume, and the body underneath has been telling an older, truer story the entire time.

The radical move is the silence. A single title card appears in the film, and it isn't dialogue — it is the author stepping forward to announce the absurd, studio-ordered happy ending in which the doorman suddenly inherits a fortune. The irony is deliberate and it stings: real life, the card all but admits, would have left him in the basement. By refusing intertitles Murnau and Mayer bet that image and body could carry narrative on their own, and the bet was built to travel, since a film "without words" could in principle cross any border. It came out of Mayer's earlier chamber tragedies, Shattered and Backstairs, where a humiliated working man's fate is squeezed into a single stairwell; Murnau took that compression and scaled it up to a looming hotel built in forced perspective, turning Caligari's painted madness into something that looks almost real. The next year Freund bolted the same unchained camera to a trapeze for Variety, with Jannings again. The line runs straight from here into how movies move.

Watch it once for the plot and you get a sad man and a cruel joke. Watch the body, the light on the coat, the camera leaning in close, and you see Murnau proving that cinema could think entirely in postures and vantage with the words switched off. The last laugh of the title is partly the film's own. It dares you to need a title card, then takes them all away.