What I know going in
That the film is a story about the infidelity and later make-up between a central romantic pairing. I also know the film is famous for its technical and artistic accomplishments.
Immediate reaction
Sunrise begins with the following text: “This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets, in the city's turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.”
That quote sets Sunrise up perfectly as a fairytale. Every element of the film fits that designation. The little village where the beginning and end of the film take place looks like it was ripped right out of a nostalgic memory of an old European countryside. Many of the film’s compositions, especially those set around the lake, are so striking and evocative that they have a storybook illustration quality to them. The plot is also fairly simple (I don’t mean that as a complaint) with a man being tempted by a seductress to sell his farm, kill his wife, and leave for the big city. The fairytale aspect of the film is even carried out to the naming of the characters who are given titles like “The Man”, “The Woman”, and “Woman from the city”.
What isn’t simple
about Sunrise is its style. During
the first ever Academy Awards, it was given the special honor for Unique and
Artistic Production, with the WWI drama Wings
winning in the more standard “Outstanding Picture” category. Sunrise’s category would be removed
after the first ceremony, giving Wings its
status as the first best picture winner, and leaving Sunrise as the only film to be given such an award, which seems
fitting for a movie as wondrous as Sunrise.
I mentioned the scenes at the lake in my first paragraph, but they are so
incredible that I’ll bring them up again. We first see the set when The Man
sneaks out of his house to be with his mistress. The lake and the shoreline are
dark, ominous, and drenched in fog (something playfully reflected in the
intertitles in this section). It is the perfect setting for the mistress to lay
out her sinister plot to kill the man’s wife. This matching of emotion and
setting reflects the film’s German Expressionist roots, which makes sense as Murnau,
the director of such classics as Faust and
The Last Laugh, was one of the
greatest directors of that era. Later the lake descends into an unbelievable
storm, which I assume was done in a water tank, but retains all of its power,
as a last test of the pair’s strength. The setting also provides one of the
most beautiful shots in all of cinema history when the villager set out in
boats to search for the woman. The sky and the water are completely black and
the only illumination comes from a few handheld lanterns. It looks like the
villagers are floating, ghost-like through space. The visual
mastery extends to the film’s camerawork as well. The Steadicam, which allows
for fluid handheld movement without the use of tracks or board, wasn’t invented
until the late 70’s, but there are several sequences in Sunrise that look like a Steadicam was sent back in time to the
20’s. The best example is a long tracking shot going through the entrance of an
amusement park. Another is an incredibly fluid tracking shot following The
Man’s mistress as she stalks through the village.
The film also takes some of the experimental techniques of a film like Man with Movie Camera and applies them to a narrative. For example, it frequently uses double exposure to suggest dreams, flashbacks, the craziness of the city, and the fears and desires of The Man. I’m worried this is becoming me pointing out various images, so I’ll move on one more. There is strangely a moment that reminded me of 2001. The shot opens with spinning lights surrounded by nothing but darkness. Eventually the film reveals this is a part of the amusement park, but for a few seconds, I thought the planets were aligning for the dawn of man.
Sunrise has plenty to recommend about it outside of its imagery. First, even though it’s a simple story, the script (a weird thing to mention for a film with so few intertitles) is actually pretty well thought out. Two elements seen at the beginning, the bundled reeds and the mistress’s suggestion that The Man tell the village his wife’s slaying was an accident, actually come back at the end of film in an organic manner. The storm pushes The Man to give the reeds to his wife to save her and the mistress assumes that he went through with the murder after he rushes everyone to search for his wife. The film could have forgotten those details and I wouldn’t have noticed, but I appreciated that it tied everything together. Second, George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor are fantastic as the central couple. They are the first silent film pairing I’ve seen that I would actually describe as having chemistry. They also play everything pretty naturalistically. I would be eager to show this film to someone who thinks of silent film acting as broad or over the top. It’s a shame that the other film they made with Murnau, 4 Devils, is thought to be lost. Hopefully it gets re-discovered sometime soon.
Further thoughts
As a part of this marathon I have been luck in that I have been able to discover and revisit a fair number of silent films. These include City Lights, Metropolis, The General, The Passion of Joan of Arc, with the last being Sunrise. I’ve fallen in love with the aesthetics of silent cinema to such a degree that I am starting to worry that it’s negatively affecting my enjoyment of talkies from all eras. For one, silent films have aged to the point where they all have this scratchy-soft texture to them that makes them look like old photographs. This aspect also gives every silent film, from the high fantasy of Metropolis to the first ever documentary Nanook of the North, a certain anthropological quality. It’s engaging just to see what people and places looked like back then, and it’s amazing that various facets of life from the beginning of the 20th century are recorded, hopefully forever, on film and can be easily viewed today.
I also love that silent films didn’t require over-expository dialogue and convoluted plots. They were free to focus on the characteristics of film that separate it from all other art forms. With their heightened emotions, wild acting, expressive visual styling, and willingness to throw new techniques, silent films sometimes feel more like recorded dreams from bygone era than normal movies.
I have come to love many aspects of Sunrise. I love the gloriously-free tracking and crane shots. I love the beautiful light-play that can be seen in The Woman’s initial outing, the tram ride into the city, and boat search party on the lake. I love Murnau’s marriage of emotion and setting in scenes like the sinister tryst in the ominous bog. I love the complicated compositions that feature a delicate interplay between the foreground and background elements, such as The Woman quietly watch from a tree while the search party comes back from the shore. There are moments in Sunrise that knock the breath from my lungs just from sheer visual beauty, such as The Man’s entrance into the bog, the couple’s reconciliation set to the sound of bells, the lantern-lit boat search, and final shot of the glorious rising sun.
Unfortunately, for some reason, I don’t love the film as a whole, or at least wouldn’t list it as one of my favorites. I don’t really know why either, but even though I love many elements from the film, some part of me can’t help feeling that; overall, Sunrise is a little too slight. That’s not really a criticism of the film, just a subjective statement.
Why is the film on this list?
Sunrise was the last great gasp of silent film before sound pushed movies back visually for a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment