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.
Ah! You finally re-viewed it. Well, you can hardly expect an unequivocal miracle from a director who had probably fewer verbal ideas than even Antonioni. This is a strong parts adding up to questionable whole movie, pretty much all the way. Great Film. But. My patience for silent films without Charlie-Harold-Buster can be limited, yet the dramatic pull of this one tugs on me like few other silents that don't have those other actors. (The Knowledge I've acquired that Janet Gaynor was much saucier than her parts suggest, like some girls I knew in college, may help me to sustain my suspension-of-disbelief over the unbelievability of the two basic characters.) For a Murnau with a lighter touch, not counting the few intentionally comic scenes in "Nosferatu", there is, why, of course, "Tartuffe" (somewhat underrated), and the ending of "Der Letzte Mann". (Well, there is also something called Finances of the Grand Duke, rediscovered from '24 and hardly worth mentioning. Tabu is only 1/2-Murnau.) Silent acting is hard-to-judge, but for Bad-vs.-Good-Gal, any day of the week I'll take Janet Gaynor and Margaret Livingston over les dames du "Children du Paradis", an esteemed movie which I remember barely making an impact on me at all. (Same with Tokyo Story.) But I was 17 when seeing CoP, so obviously some re-viewing is required!
ReplyDeleteSunrise: I wholeheartedly agree that the style of the film is "Expressionism"... but there may be a couple points at or on The Lake where this is transcended in a sense, just via what Murnau's cameramen (Rosher&Struss) are capturing with the actors. Their movements. It is a night scene, before Livingston's character has actually met up with George O'Brien (Nic Cage in a past-life) that I am predominantly thinking of. She stalks her way in, and it's one of those night scenes, just like the rustling leaves part of Blow-Up, where you feel the chill of "Realism"; I mean that it's as though you are right there, which must be a surprisingly hard quality to capture. So, three or four scenes in the first thirty minutes that could be added to a Silent Film Compendium/Documentary. This would certainly includes the Credits+Introduction. And when those illicit nighttime lovers look out to the sky panorama, I'll bet that is just the proper metaphorical foreshadowing of one unforgettable statement -one of her rare memorable quotes, offhand - that Pauline Kael made about "all our hopes being projected onto the screen." And Livingston's dancing! Too bad Pabst never saw her, maybe "Pandora's Box" could've approached "Realism" with her cast as its lead (I do love Louise Brooks, though, and the "Peeping Tom"-foreshadowing Ripper murderer.)
"Sunrise" wouldn't count for half as much without its music, which is redolent of what Jazz was in America before Swing. And I do subscribe to the idea of this film having a unique power most of the way through, but there are many longeurs, and a lot of my enthusiasm wanes, in particular, after the scenes at the carnival. A "Woman's Film," too, but then isn't that what Sarris et. al.extolled it for? Far better than "Written on the Wind", in any case. ~p.r.
"Allowances made…" is my invariable reaction to silent films, with 2 or 3 exceptions. Lending oneself to it is somewhat akin to being taken in by it. Tell viewers who haven't seen The Birth of a Nation to just lend themselves to it. Even uninitiated viewers could follow Sunrise, while finding a lot of it unbelievably corny. Janet Gaynor is the only one in the film who acts in a manner we can still recognize. Her performance is exquisite. But those gags in the dance hall, the shoulder straps, the drunken piglet. Intended to add to the joyous uplift of the scenes, but that feel like padding. Hitchcock defended his lack of content by saying it's like wanting to know whether the fruit in a still life was sweet or sour. But you would know it from the way they're painted if they were sweet or sour. Murnau was a god in Hollywood. 4 Devils is lost, but have you seen City Girl? Reminded me of Bus Stop without MM. One advantage to having a recognized star in a film (Murnau didn't want anyone else stealing his thunder - something Bresson took to an absolute extreme) is how every film they're in becomes unified around them. Keaton's silents are full of people you never saw again. Think of Virginia Cherill (sp?) in City Lights. She married a British nobleman and disappeared. Or Georgia Hale - who was in a Sternberg film I haven't seen. After that - -! Louise Brooks was in several American films, including W. C. Fields' It's the Old Army Game. Imagine the fun they had! But Pabst saw her as Lulu. It made her world famous, but wrecked her career. Then there's Falconetti… A shame sound had to be invented. Bresson said sound film introduced silence to cinema - true silence.
DeleteI think silent films can only be taken in at an emotional level, too.
ReplyDelete(And Birth of a Nation's famous Lincoln scene, from what I remember, was essentially captured better - direct balcony-into-stage jump at a camera diag - by Hitchcock's Thirty-Nine Steps. I have no idea what Dwight Macdonald was talking about as for its unsurpassed photography, and, anyway, most reissue companies regrettably tint their old stuff for us plebs here in the New Millennium.)
I have scene "City Girl". Grapevine Video had it on DVD. No Livingston! (That style of perhaps-not-so-naughty-as-Betty-Page woman lasted at least into the '50s, haircut and all, in America). But at least it had a different actor than Nic Cage... I mean, well, you know what I mean, forgetting that I'm not watching Cage (a fairly terrible actor) in "Sunrise" is a major distraction, I can't remember if I noticed it immediately when I first saw it at about age 17. Cage certainly was never as good an actor - he hams up the "strong&silent" bit - as whoever was cast, for example, opposite Lillian Gish in that one other, almost equally famous "final hurrah" to the Silent Era which she was in. (I am fairly convinced that any director working in Hollywood in 1927, even if it was before the outing of the Jazz Singer, they must have already known where the tide was leading... and it follows that "Sunrise" was such a technical tour de force, really in its way as impressive as what the Soviets were doing. I don't worship Murnau by any means, but his allowing for a memorable and timely music score should also be taken into account.) I've seen "The Wind", obviously (just once on TCM); which I'd easily compare with "City Girl". "City Girl" benefits from having two good lead actors, but I just can't remember a real stand-out scene, obviously Murnau didn't totally believe in it and had it taken away, re-edited, etc. And "The Wind" can also compare to Sunrise. But while the ending of Sjostrom's movie may place it over and above there seriousness of Sunrise, I just don't feel that the parts coming before it have the same "power". Yet "Sunrise" has those undeniable "longeurs"...
But, I think, in the case of Sunrise, as with, say, the Wizard of Oz (or, perhaps more apropos - the movie is generally aimed at adults - the outdoor scenes of Reinhardt's 1935 AMS), it's just the fact of there being really nothing like it that gets me past everything that qualifies as ridiculous. And it's without any truly ludicrous finale a la Red Shoes. (I actually only recently saw - most of - WoO again, yet was watching, no jest!, with a somewhat compulsive person I take care of, who may have forced its stoppage - "what are ya, 4!" - just as Dorothy finally goes back to Kansas.) I'm sure that if you saw it (Sunrise) on a large enough tv, the opening credits and early night scenes, for example, can quite maintain their eerie power. And then, so can that bit where all goes quiet on the water - followed by the train trip into town. And so on. I also feel some of the carnival bits are unforgettable (the pig, that rollercoaster coming and going to its early soundtrack music, "Hungarian Dance"????)... as is Janet Gaynor's little laugh in that most awkward scene of all, the bit with the photographer.