Year: 1927
Director: FW Murnau
This is the 11th best film ever made, according to the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, and the latest in my sporadic walk through the lesser known titles – no need for another review of The Godfather or Apocalypse Now.
Here’s a counterfactual theory: the talkies were the worst thing to happen to cinema as an artform. Having started as moving pictures pure and simple, in thirty years it had developed to become an entirely new artform. FW Murnau (he of the 1922 Nosferatu) was a director who raised the silent film to peaks of artistic expression, and here is a pretty compelling slab of evidence in the form of his first big Hollywood movie.
Sunrise was released in the same year as The Jazz Singer, 1927, the year that effectively saw the talkies take over as the next stage of film technology. While I don’t buy this argument, there’s no question that the requirements of recording sound made the film a more stagey artform for a few years.
Murnau’s film starts out with a melodramatic plot, something out of a Victorian gothic novel. A man and a woman live with a maid and child on a farm on the edge of big city. A vacationing woman from the city (a fabulous Margeret Livingston in a severe bob and wreathed in perpetual cigarette smoke) begins a passionate affair with the farmer and she convinces him to murder his wife in a staged boat accident. Unable to go through with it (and Janet Gaynor, so innocent looking, who could) he and his wife have a bizarre semi-chase in which he pursues her via trolley bus to the big city.
It’s here the cinematography really flies – Murnau built vast sets and the camera tracks, swoops and flies as the couple are re-united through the power of bread and by happening on another wedding. There are numerous stunning sequences: from Man With a Movie Camera-type montages to a piece of low comedy featuring a rogue piglet that Chaplin would have been proud of. This central part of the film recalls the ‘city symphonies’ that were popular at the time. After what is effectively a second honeymoon the couple return home by boat, only for a storm to capsize their boat. I won’t spoil the third act and ending as we return to the full-on melodrama, including sophisticated bob hair lady, and there are several twists and turns.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Nosferatu, Louise Brooks, Man With a Movie Camera, Dr Caligari….
It’s a film that pulls in a number of different directions: Murnau’s fabulously modernist sets and camera moves, the actors attempts – struggles at times – to convey emotions, thoughts, intentions without us hearing them; and the melodramatic plot. Perhaps this was a dead end for cinema, and though the silent film would never disappear (La Jetee, Koyaanisquatsi) and even be pastiched (The Artist) it was finished as a mainstream entertainment form. But what an ending to go out on. Practically a mic drop – over to you talkies.
The film was chopped around on release, as the studio were concerned it wasn’t going to make it’s fabulously expensive investment back. You can see a pretty complete version on the wikipedia page for the film. The BFI version is unusually a shorter version.
I’ve fallen in love with silent film in later years – or perhaps I should say silent drama, as I did love the silent comedies as a child (growing up they were always on TV) but didn’t see any of the dramatic silent films until much later.
I’ll try to remember to check this one out – I’ll have plenty of time in January when I’m scheduled for surgery that will keep me mostly still for a couple of weeks after.
I like silent films and have seen both Sunrise and Nosferatu which I watched fairly recently. Other favourities include Hitchcock’s The Lodger (which has been restored with a really intrusive music soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney – best to watch it in silence), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.