Der brennende Acker (1922)
Directed by F.W. Murnau

Film Review

In 1922, the 33-year-old German film director F.W. Murnau exhibited three very different films in which his striving for psychological realism is achieved in startlingly different ways.  Of these, the most celebrated is his vivid vampire tale Nosferatu, an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula that ended in a costly lawsuit for plagiarism and a court order that all prints of the film be destroyed (thankfully a few copies survived).  The other two - The Burning Soil (originally titled Der Brennende Acker) and Phantom - are more down-to-earth melodramas, and like Nosferatu both came close to being obliterated not long after they were made.  After being lost for many decades, The Burning Soil resurfaced in 1978 (in an Italian psychiatric institution), and Phantom was only restored in 2002.

Watching these three miraculously preserved films back-to-back, you cannot help being struck by how different they are, and yet they have a single, unifying thread: man's tragic susceptibility to corrupting influences that prevent him from finding true fulfilment in life.  The influence of Schopenhauer runs through much of Murnau's work but in this collection of films (to call them a 'trilogy' would be overstating matters somewhat) the idea that human beings are forever prone to irresistible forces (greed, malice, desire) which inevitably result in loss and suffering is at the heart of the narrative.

The Burning Soil is the most conventional of the three films, a mix of morality play and crowdpleasing melodrama which, stylistically, lies midway between the bold expressionism of Nosferatu and surprising naturalism of Phantom.  Its one supernatural element - a seemingly cursed plot of land - is quickly dispelled once it has been revealed that the land owes it unnatural character to the vast oil deposit lying beneath it.  What then follows is a scenario familiar to anyone who has ever watched George Stevens' Giant (1956) or the 1980s TV soap opera Dallas - a lurid tale of ambition, greed, frustrated love, sibling rivalry, betrayal and revenge, with a spectacular denouement and a worryingly high body count.

The film's secondary title The Drama of an Ambitious Man is a suitable résumé for the plot, which (uncannily presaging Murnau's subsequent Faust) sees an ambitious young man selling his soul for the sake of wealth and social advancement.  Johannes Rog (played by the prolific Russian film star Vladimir Gajdarov) could teach the Ewing family a thing or two about skulduggery and double dealing - is it a coincidence that his initials are J.R.? - but some of the other characters are just as prone to human frailty, including the psychotically vindictive Gerda and the apparently unforgiving older brother, Peter.

This rambling, soap-style intrigue contains some of the most vivid characters of Murnau's entire oeuvre, all played with arresting conviction by some very capable actors.  The impressive cast includes (in a minor role) the remarkable character actor Werner Krauss - he played Orgon in the director's later film Herr Tartuffe (1926) but is best known as the evil showman in Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).  In opposition to the overtly expressionistic approach used in Nosferatu, Murnau relies far more on his actors to express their characters' psychological state, using close-ups much more freely than exaggerated camera angles and lighting effects.  The film's style is nearer to that of Carl Theodor Dreyer than F.W. Murnau - Dreyer's Master of the House (1925) in particular looks as if it may have been influenced by this film.

In common with many of Murnau's subsequent films - including Der Letzte Mann (1924) and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (1924) - The Burning Soil is as much a scathing piece of social commentary as it is a morality play, and the director's evident contempt for raw capitalism is powerfully expressed by contrasting the ruinous pursuit of wealth at all costs with the honest life of the peasant farmer.   As in City Girl (1930), one of the films that Murnau made in Hollywood not long before his untimely death, the simple life of the farmer cultivating the land is an ideal that offers man the surest path to happiness, whilst those who are lured away by the prospect of easy wealth and social advancement are destined for disappointment and personal failure.

The film's realistic sets are given a subtle expressionistic lift to create a clearer demarcation of the two very different worlds portrayed in the film.  The peasants' cottage feels claustrophobically confined (which helps us to appreciate J.R.'s need to escape from it), but it has a warmth and security which is totally lacking in the cathedral-like rooms in the aristocrats' icy cold ancestral castle.  Between these two there lies a vast expanse of flat open countryside that seems to be perpetually covered in a thick blanket of snow.  This is the so-called Devil's Field, where apparently nothing grows and no one dares to set foot, although it harbours untold wealth for anyone brave enough or greedy enough to defy the ancient superstition.  The only sign that man has ever set foot here is a derelict chapel, alongside which J.R. will construct his cursed oil well.  Once the cycle of greed and malice has run its fiery course, these two structures stand together in the wintry wilderness like the last skeletal remnants of a lost civilisation, tombstones to two of mankind's greatest follies - religion and capitalism. The Devil's Field is aptly named.

Film Synopsis

For generations, a plot of land belonging to the wealthy Rudenburg family has been known as the Devil's Field, on account of the fact that, many years ago, the head of the family was killed in an explosion whilst digging a well to find buried treasure.  Since then, nothing has ever grown on the field and the local peasants are convinced it is touched by Satan.  The present Count von Rudenburg is not so superstitious and his own investigations lead him to discover that beneath the field there is an enormous oil deposit.  Just before his death, he bequeaths the field to his younger wife, Helga, knowing that it will one day make her a rich woman.  The count's ambitious young secretary, Johannes Rog, had been courting his daughter Gerda, but the discovery of the oil deposit prompts him to transfer his attentions to Helga.  Johannes and Helga marry not long after the count's death, and within no time Johannes is out trying to raise the capital to begin construction of an oil well on the Devil's Field.  Fearing that her inheritance is cursed, Helga persuades Johannes' peasant brother Peter to buy the field off her for a paltry sum.  On hearing this news, Johannes is overcome with rage and orders Helga to buy back the field from Peter.  Now knowing that Johannes only married her for her legacy, Helga does as she is commanded and then kills herself.  Gerda seizes the opportunity to try to resume her former romance with Johannes, but when she learns that he loves her no more than he loved her stepmother she is sickened and conceives a spectacular revenge...