Phantom

One of Murnau's silent films. Lorenz is an ordinary town-hall clerk. One day in the street he is struck by a carriage drawn by white horses. He sees the young woman inside for an instant, and that instant ends his life. What follows is an obsession: he cannot find her and cannot get free of the image. He decides he is a poet, runs into debt, turns to someone who resembles her, and as his lies grow he drags his family in with him. The title comes from that. There is no ghost; the phantom is the image in the man's head. Murnau builds this visually too: there are passages where the houses advance on the hero, the streets bend, and space reshapes itself according to a person's state of mind. It stands close to the expressionist language of German cinema of the period. The source is Gerhart Hauptmann's novel. The film was timed to the writer's sixtieth birthday. It stayed in the shade for a long time and was little discussed next to Murnau's known works; it was restored and shown again later. A worthwhile discovery for anyone who likes silent cinema and German expressionism. For a viewer expecting a fast narrative, the film is long and the pace is heavy even by the standards of its time.