False Dawn

[Sunrise] is Murnau’s most powerful and advanced film, far surpassing The Last Laugh. (Lotte Eisner, Murnau) 

Sunrise is a great film; slow and classical. Photographically, it is a work of genius. Its European flavor is very strong, even though it was made in California. But however brilliant the European cameramen may have been, no one could have infused the visuals with such a combination of delicacy and richness as the great Charles Rosher. (Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By) 

What did Eisner mean by "advanced?" And what did Brownlow mean by "classical?" 

F. W. Murnau had been making films in Germany for a decade when in 1926, due to the sensation caused by his film The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann), he was perduaded by William Fox, then head of his own studio, to move to California and make films there. The cinematographer Charles Rosher had already gone to Germany to observe Murnau’s working methods. William Fox was anxious to produce a film that had European qualities, and Murnau’s films exhibited these qualities most abundantly. Along with Nosferatu, his unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's gothic novel Dracula in 1920, Murnau made films brimming with atmosphere and sophisticated narratives. Phantom was a kind of hetero Death in Venice, with a young artist in desperate pursuit of a woman who has become his ideal of Beauty. The Last Laugh was about a Gogolesque hotel doorman who is demoted to washroom attendant, Tartuffe and Faust were plays without words, but with recognizable themes and characters. 

Despite all of this European sophistication, Murnau chose for his first American film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, an unbelievably threadbare story, based on a novella by Hermann Sundermann (who also supplied the story for the Garbo vehicle Flesh and the Devil). In a village on the shore of a lake a man and a woman live on a farm with their baby son. A woman of the city (that's how the film's titles identify her - in other words, the Vamp) seduces the man and tells him to go with her to the city. When he reminds her that he's married, she suggests that his wife could "get drowned" in the lake and he could make it look like an accident. He resists her suggestion violently but she somehow (use your imagination) convinces him. Back home he talks his wife into a trip to the city across the lake. Having rowed the boat some distance from the shore, the man releases the oars and approaches his wife menacingly - but he can't go through with it and returns to rowing. In the city (once again, neither the village nor the lake nor the city is otherwise identified), the man and woman wander the streets in amazement. After various encounters - a wedding in a church, a photographer's studio, a restaurant and dance hall - the two are reconciled. Returning to their village across the lake, however, their boat is caught in a storm and capsizes. The man makes it to shore but, believing his wife has drowned, he tries to murder the city woman. The wife is rescued and resuscitated. 

Fans of Sunrise will insist that the story is irrelevant, that it's Murnau's manner of telling it that makes the film great. This is where Lotte Eisner's choice of the word "advanced" and Brownlow's "classical" comes in. The photographic effects used in Sunrise were a kind of summation of silent film effects, rather as Gregg Toland's were in Citizen Kane. It's why so many critics call Sunrise the last great silent film. For example, there is a long process shot, using rear-screen projection, when the man and woman leave the church and, gazing at each other, they cross a busy street oblivious of all the passing automobiles. It is a perfect illustration, albeit unintentional, of the fantasy world the two are occupying, while everyone else in the crowded city is behaving, not exactly naturally but much closer to reality. But "classical" is definitely not the word I would use for Sunrise - not even compared to the puerile films being made 95 years later. It's as much an example of German expressionism as Dupont's Variety or Murnau's own Phantom. Expressionism was once defined as "stranger than life," and the visual effects of Sunrise bear only a tenuous resemblance to life. Early in the film, the city woman is telling the man about the attractions to be found in the city and Murnau shows us, superimposed on the nocturnal "sky," resplendent images of flashing signs and trolley cars and a brass band moving rhythmically to couples dancing until finally the city woman leaps to her feet like she's got a snake in her pants. In a later scene, after drinking some wine, the man and woman lean back in their chairs as shadowy figures dance in the air above them. The actor who plays the man (George O'Brien), a hulking figure, looks and moves like Boris Karloff through the first third of the film. But later, when he stops rowing the boat on the lake and advances toward his wife cowering at the rudder, he looks like John Barrymore as Dr. Jekyll. No wonder she became terrified. 

All of these effects and performances possess a technical sophistication but they are completely devoid of dramatic subtlety. And this is where I disagree with everything I've read about Sunrise. All of the "delicacy and richness" of the film that Brownlow identified is at the service of a quite silly and hackneyed story. It's like watching Glenn Gould approach a Steinway piano only to have him sit down and play "chopsticks." 

Murnau's style seems antiquated today (I can't believe that some critics call it "difficult" or "cerebral"). It's because, especially after the introduction of sound, cinema moved away from rigorous stylization like German expressionism toward simplicity and naturalism. Even when a filmmaker used artificial devices in his work, it was invariably there to heighten its verisimilitude - its resemblance to the truth. By now the word realism is so overused as to render it meaningless, but no matter what form was employed in the 1920s, '30s, or '40s, whether surrealism or poetic realism, neo-realism or fantastic realism, the intent has always been the revelation of truth. 

Sunrise was a disappointment at the box office, but Murnau enjoyed the technical supremacy that Hollywood offered and, despite the interference of producers, made three more films there. William Fox lost most of his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash, and his studio was merged with 20th Century Pictures to form 20th Century-Fox. On March 11, 1931, just days before his last film Tabu was premiered, Murnau was killed in a car crash. The negative of Sunrise was destroyed in a fire at a New Jersey film vault in 1937, and thereafter only mentioned by scholars like Eisner and Brownlow. (Hundreds more film negatives on nitrate stock were lost, including D. W. Griffith's Way Down East.) But a new negative of Sunrise was struck from a positive print and released by the British Film Institute in 2004. Critics, most of whom had never seen it before, were so amazed by its photographic qualities that Sunrise was ranked #7 on Sight and Sound's 2012 poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. The same phenomenon - the release of a new print - got Hitchcock's Vertigo all the way to #1 on the same poll. If you ask me, the wrong movies are being restored.