Career
After World War I Murnau returned to Germany and established his own film-studio with an actor Conrad Veidt. His first feature-length film, The Boy in Blue, a drama inspired by the famous Thomas Gainsborough painting, was released in 1919.
Murnau's most famous film is Nosferatu, a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Nearly as important as Nosferatu in Murnau's filmography was The Last Laugh ("Der Letzte Mann", German "The Last Man") (1924), written by Carl Mayer. In this film are used the subjective point of view camera and "Unchained Camera Technique", a mix of tracking shots, pans, tilts, and dolly moves.
In 1926 Murnau immigrated to Hollywood. He joined the Fox Studio and made Sunrise (1927), a movie often cited by film scholars as one of the greatest films of all time.
His next 2 films (now lost) Four Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930), were modified to adapt to the new era of sound film and were not well received. Thus he quit Fox to journey for a while in the South Pacific.
Together with documentary film pioneer Robert Flaherty, Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to make the film Tabu in 1931. The movie was censored in the United States for images of bare-breasted Polynesian women.