German filmmaker created things of silent beauty

If ever a filmmaker was in need of career rehabilitation, it's F.W. Murnau. Born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in Germany in 1888, Murnau directed a handful of intensely poetic hits in his native country, established a beachhead in Hollywood with a masterpiece that shared the first best picture Academy Award (with the dogfight film "Wings") -- and died in a 1931 car crash before he could make a talking picture.

Mention Murnau today, and knowledgeable film fanatics know him as the creator of "Nosferatu" (1922), the first Dracula feature and the one starring the creepy, ratlike Max Schreck. Really knowledgeable fanatics know that his 1927 Oscar winner, "Sunrise," is one of the all-time great films, period. Collectors of musty Hollywood scandal trade rumors about the director's demise: Some say he was bestowing a sexual favor upon his Filipino valet when their car crashed on the Pacific Coast Highway; others say the valet simply wasn't a very good driver.

In any event, few people have seen enough of Murnau's films to make any sort of case for a personal vision. All that changes with "Haunted Visions: The Films of F.W. Murnau," a remarkable touring retrospective that will fill the screens of the Harvard Film Archive and the Museum of Fine Arts from Thursday through Oct. 13. A collaboration between the HFA, the MFA, and the Goethe-Institut Boston, the series will present restored prints of the 12 surviving works by the director, most with live musical accompaniment.

It's a one-time-only chance to experience the breadth of Murnau's artistry, and it underscores why the filmmaker can fall through the cracks of casual film scholarship. This is one director who's almost impossible to pin down, so different are the looks and sensibilities of his individual movies. "Nosferatu" is an elegy of German Expressionist horror, while "The Last Laugh" (1924) is one of the towering examples of 1920s street realism. "Faust" (1926) fuses theatrical fire-and-brimstone with startlingly advanced special effects, while "The Haunted Castle" (1921) is a brooding but straightforward drawing-room mystery. "Tartuffe" (1926) is a clever clockwork film-within-a-film, while "Sunrise" is as simple and elemental as its title.

The common thread to Murnau's movies is their visual beauty -- by all means do what you can to see them on a big screen. The director reveled in the natural world and was unique in his ability to poetically capture it (with all due respect to his gifted cinematographers, including Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner). A recurrent theme, though, is the damage that people inflict on themselves and on others through pride and delusion. It's a wonderful life, Murnau often insists -- if only mankind took the time to notice.

"The Haunted Castle" is the earliest film in the series, and the most atypical one. It's a murder mystery, but the gloom that settles over the upper-class mansion of the title seems more philosophical than forensic. There's an accused killer (Paul Hartman) who seems carved from granite, a grieving widow (Olga Tschechowa) afflicted with proto-existentialist vapors, and a priest from Rome who keeps popping up and disappearing. Dread secrets fester just under the surface of this slow death-waltz of a movie; the taloned hand that creeps through a window in one dream sequence could have crawled over from "Nosferatu."

That film, for its part, has become trapped in its own legend. Werner Herzog made a shot-for-shot 1979 remake called "Nosferatu the Vampyr," while "Shadow of the Vampire" (2000) cast John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Shreck in a witty, unsettling behind-the-scenes version. Yet the original remains hard to beat for its sense of a nightmarish (and prescient) terror being unleashed across Europe. An unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" -- the author's widow fought for years to have all copies of the film destroyed -- it's one of the transition points between 19th-century gothic fiction and late 20th-century Goth culture, with images and associations that recur throughout film history.

With "The Last Laugh," "Faust," and "Tartuffe," Murnau hitched his wagon to the star of Emil Jannings, the German film actor and a ham of Brobdingnagian proportions. "Laugh" is, famously, the silent film made with no intertitles: a story of petty hubris and brutal downfall in which all is pathetically clear to everyone except the aging hotel doorman played by Jannings. The framing in the film (shot by Freund) is exquisite; through simple camera placement, the hotel's revolving door becomes an inexorable metaphor of fate.

"Faust" casts Jannings as Satan -- which may have still been too small a role for the man -- and fills the screen with apocalyptic imagery that recalls the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch; the smaller-scale "Tartuffe" imbeds an abridged version of the Moliere farce in a surrounding story of modern greed and hypocrisy. These were Murnau's last two German films before traveling to Hollywood and making "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans."

That's a flowery title, and the film might have been a sugarcoated misfire in lesser hands. Yet Murnau takes a baseline narrative about a murderously misguided husband (George O'Brien) and his rapprochement with his wife (the incandescent Janet Gaynor) and infuses it with a visual purity that can bring tears to the eyes of the most cynical 2004 viewer.

The couple's trip from the country into the city and the reawakening of their love there is realized in terms touchingly human and archetypal; above all, it's the sureness of the director's touch that makes the film work. "Sunrise" won three Academy Awards at the inaugural 1929 ceremonies, including one for Gaynor and one for "Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production" -- another way of saying the critics loved it but audiences didn't show up.

"City Girl," Murnau's follow-up, is a more traditional melodrama and a lesser one, since Paramount forced the director to cut back on his epic narrative set in the high plains wheat country and focus instead on the farmer's young son (Charles Farrell) and his marriage to a tough-talking Chicago waitress (Mary Duncan). Enough of Murnau's original conception remains to make "City Girl" breathtakingly beautiful in spots and an obvious influence on Terence Malick's 1978 "Days of Heaven."

Even more visually resplendent is Murnau's final film, "Tabu" (1931), an Edenic tragedy shot on the South Seas island of Bora Bora and cast entirely with nonprofessional actors. The film was initially a collaboration with famed documentarian Robert Flaherty ("Nanook of the North"), but the two didn't see eye to eye -- not hard to imagine -- and the final product owes more to the German's allegorical elegance than the American's "realistic" showmanship. Most impressively, there's not a whiff of condescension in Murnau's approach to his cast or his characters. If he romanticizes Matahi and Reri, the doomed lovers who break the island taboo and pay the price, it's to exalt their feelings rather than paint them as noble savages.

If Murnau had lived, would he be celebrated the way Fritz Lang and other Hollywood emigres are? It's a fascinating and fruitless parlor game. The studios might have marginalized him as a costly artiste, the way they did with bad boys such as Erich von Stroheim and Joseph von Sternberg. On the other hand, Murnau's gift for full-throttle cinematic poetry might have positioned him as a more visually talented version of romantic idealist Frank Borzage ("Seventh Heaven").

We'll never know. These 12 films are all we have. But they're enough on which to stake the claim of greatness.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.