Sunrise

Lucy Fischer

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839022005
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is one of the most historically pivotal of all films. The first American film of the celebrated German director F.W. Murnau, Sunrise tells the story of a love triangle between characters named only as The Man, The Wife, and The Woman from the City. Lucy Fischer's compelling study of the film shows how it mediates between German expressionism and American melodrama, the avantgarde and popular film, silent cinema and 'talkies'. A lavish and sumptuous production famous for its vast, specially-constructed sets, and one of the first feature films with a synchronized musical score and sound effects soundtrack, Sunrise was one of early Hollywood's most ambitious undertakings. In her foreword to this new edition, Lucy Fischer considers the film as an abiding classic of world cinema.

‘Sunrise’: Border Crossings

Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology. In this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity … of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.

Marshall Berman (15)

In the quote above, Berman conceives modernity as entailing two major features: a lack of boundaries and a wealth of contradictions. As an exemplary modern text, it should not come as a surprise that such elements profoundly structure Sunrise (1927).

For Nestor Almendros, Sunrise is ‘a dialectical movie’. Similarly, for Tony Rayns, its ‘meaning springs largely from [its] oppositions’ (92).¹ For Dorothy Jones, it ‘communicate[s] by establishing significant contrasts’ (255). While these critical views highlight the film’s antitheses (a trope that Berman associates with modernity), they stress separation at the expense of continuity (or ‘disunity’ at the expense of ‘unity’). Rather than embrace fixed divisions, Sunrise is a text marked by fluid boundaries – junctions that trace the subtle connection between entities rather than their clear demarcation. It is this complex mode of ‘border crossing’ (this world of ‘Both/And’ – not – ‘Either/Or’ [Berman, 24]) that makes the film so poignant, resonant, fascinating and modern.

Europe/America

As contemporary critics observed, Murnau had made neither an ‘American’ nor a ‘Continental’ film, but something with a deliberately ‘universal’ quality that mediated between the two.

Graham Petrie (41)

In July 1926, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) travelled from Germany to the United States – traversing national and continental perimeters – to make Sunrise for the Fox Film Corporation in Hollywood (Eisner, 167). Born F.W. Plumpe in Bielefeld, Westphalia, he adopted the name of Murnau after a small Bavarian town famous for its artists colony, the Blaue Reiter group. As a student he studied literature and art history at the University of Heidelberg (Eisner, 13, 17). Since childhood, Murnau had displayed an interest in the theatre, and, as a young man, had acted in numerous productions. When Max Reinhardt observed Murnau perform, he invited him to join his Deutsches Theatre. Murnau’s stage career was briefly interrupted by infantry service in World War I, but he returned to Berlin and, along with others from the Reinhardt school (among them Conrad Veidt), devoted himself to the cinema – founding the Murnau Veidt Filmgesellschaft (Eisner, 23).

F.W. Murnau

Between 1919 and 1923, Murnau directed some fourteen films, most of which have been lost. Especially noteworthy is Nosferatu (1922), his brilliant adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – a film which many have seen as presaging Sunrise in its fascination with ‘perverse’ love (Wood, 16). With Der Letzte Mann (1924), Murnau achieved international fame and became renowned for his use of camera movement. When the film opened in the United States as The Last Laugh, it enjoyed great critical success.

Hailed in America as the ‘German genius’, Murnau caught the attention of William Fox who was seeking to lend art-house prestige to his studio in the mid-20s. Negotiations with Murnau began in 1924 and contracts were signed in 1925 (Everson, 318, 321). As Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery note, the decision to produce Sunrise was ‘a fortuitous historical accident by which the resources of Hollywood were put, for once, at the service of a great film artist’ (91).

Of course, Murnau’s success should be seen as part of a broader context – that is the international cachet of German cinema in the silent era. Such directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Ludwig Berger, Paul Leni, and E.A. Dupont had already made their mark on American cinema, and films like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), Passion (1919), The Golem (1920) and Siegfried (1924), had achieved acclaim. According to Allen and Gomery, Fox Studios signed Murnau in order ‘to demonstrate that they were more than venders of entertainment for the masses but were also patrons of the highest cinematic art’ (99). Since The Last Laugh had been a commercial failure in the United States, Fox could have had no delusions that Murnau would be a box-office winner.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

The Last Laugh (1924)

Murnau was given almost unprecedented freedom and control over his first project for Fox – a film titled Sunrise to be based on a story by Hermann Sudermann. In addition to his drawing on a German literary source, Murnau employed a host of European colleagues for the project. His scenarist was Carl Mayer (1894–1944), an Austrian writer who collaborated with Murnau on seven films over the course of his career, including The Last Laugh. With Mayer, came the legacy of German Expressionism: he had co-authored the script for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Some claim that Mayer was also influential in bringing camera movement to Murnau’s work, and in valorizing a purely visual (almost title-less) form of silent cinema (Desil ets, 6–7). Rather than travel to Hollywood, Mayer remained in Germany to write the treatment for Sunrise, which modified Sudermann’s story about a married farmer who becomes involved in an obsessive, adulterous affair.

The set designer for Sunrise, Rochus Gliese (1891–1978), was also German, but, unlike Mayer, he accompanied Murnau to Hollywood. Gliese had worked on three of Murnau’s previous films (Der Brennende Acker [The Burning Earth, 1922]; Die Austreilbung [The Expulsion, 1923]; and Die Fananzen des Grossherhozgs [The Finances of the Grand Duke, 1923]), as well as on Paul Wegener’s Expressionist classic, The Golem. Gliese’s work was central to the visual effect and aesthetics of Sunrise, and the film immediately became known for its grand, ambitious and expensive mise en scène. (Mordaunt Hall, in his New York Times review, referred to Sunrise as costing ‘a staggering sum of money’.) Especially noteworthy was the elaborate artificial city Gliese created for the farm couple’s visit to town, as well as the scenery they passed on their way there during a trolley ride. Eisner quotes an Austrian journalist who wrote:

Only what was strictly necessary was constructed, and the sets never went beyond what the camera itself required. Everything was built in terms of the camera lens, using … trompe l’œil. (Eisner, 180)

Gliese was also responsible for constructing a simulated rural village by the shores of Lake Arrowhead, California to serve as the farm couple’s community. Though the locale of Sunrise is left vague (the intertitles explain that it is ‘no place’ and ‘every place’), to Eisner, the village ‘looks completely German’, with The Wife (Janet Gaynor, 1906–84) ‘a sort of German Gretchen’ (176, 183). As for the city, Petrie observes that, though it is ‘furnished with shop signs in English, [it] is not recognisably American in architecture’ (41). Likewise, Everson finds the setting of Sunrise ‘ambiguous’ and filled with elements that ‘suggest Europe’ (324). The result is a kind of ‘no man’s land’, or, as Petrie describes it, a world that is ‘exotic without being totally alien’ (41).

The village where The Man and The Wife live

City view: opening montage

Gliese also brought to the look of Sunrise an Expressionist use of ‘forced perspective’. This means that objects in the foreground of the frame are sometimes unusually large, making the background recede in an exaggerated manner (for example, the mise en scène of the farm house in which the Woman from the City resides). Similarly, to heighten the sense of artificiality, Gliese ‘combined life-size structures (and people) with scale models, sloping floors, dwarfs and dolls’ (Desilets, 27). One of the most dazzling instances of this technique occurs in the opening montage of the film which entails a modernist, graphic representation of summer vacation time, with images of people leaving the city. As Eisner states:

For this quite short sequence Gliese made a model for the camera about 20 yards high, overlooking the square. In front of this ‘tower’ he suspended two model train rails in such a way that, between them, the camera could photograph two platforms with passengers. (172, note)

Due in large part to Gliese’s superb work on the film, Sunrise received a special Academy Award for ‘Artistic Quality of Production’ (Desilets, 28).

One of the cameramen on Sunrise, Charles Rosher (1885–1974), was an Englishman who had worked in Hollywood since the early days. By the time Rosher met Murnau, the cinematographer had worked with Cecil B. DeMille and was Mary Pickford’s chief cameraman and publicity photographer. Rosher’s first professional contact with Murnau was when the cameraman spent a year in residence at the Ufa studios in Berlin, serving as a consultant on Murnau’s last European film, Faust (1925). Since Murnau knew that he was about to start work in the States, he asked Rosher’s advice about how scenes were shot in Hollywood. For his part, Rosher claims to have learnt a great deal from Faust’s German cameraman, Carl Hoffman: ‘I took several ideas back, including a dolly suspended from railway tracks in the ceiling which I adapted for Sunrise’ (Desilets, 29–30). Both Rosher and the other cameraman on Sunrise, Karl Struss, received the first Academy Award for Cinematography in honour of their work.

The American, Karl Struss (1891–1981) began his career studying photography at Columbia University, and later became a member of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession group. After publishing in such magazines as Camera Work, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar, he moved to Hollywood, where he did portraiture for celebrities, including Cecil B. DeMille and Gloria Swanson. He then worked as a cinematographer on such films as Ben-Hur (1925) and Sparrows (1926). It was on the latter film that he first worked with Rosher, who later engaged him for Sunrise (Desilets, 51–2).

Aside from its transcontinental crew and its European visual tropes, the narrative of Sunrise bears traces of German Expressionism. On the one hand, the film seems consonant with American traditions of melodrama (the story’s focus on domestic life, its prurient concern with adultery, its quasi-Manichaean structure of good versus evil, its valorization of female innocence). However, on the other hand, Sunrise transcends its standard m...