Sunrise (1927) - film review

A young woman from the city finds refuge in an isolated rural community, where she immediately starts to have an affair with a married farmer.  Mesmerised by the alluring woman, the farmer neglects his wife and squanders his money to impress his new lover.  As her holiday comes to an end, the temptress suggests that the farmer should sell his land and return with her to the city.  But there is a problem: what should the farmer do about his wife?   "Couldn’t she just... drown...?"

Sunrise, F.W. Murnau’s timeless classic of corruption, redemption and true love, is widely regarded as one of the most exquisitely realised of all silent films, and arguably one of the greatest films of the Twentieth Century.  Murnau brings his experience as one of Germany’s leading directors of the 1920s to slick Hollywood production methods, and the result is devastatingly beautiful portrait of human fallibility and nobility, nothing less than a masterpiece.

Although the expressionist influence is felt throughout the film, Sunrise is much lighter than any of Murnau’s earlier films – indeed some parts of it (such as the farmer’s pursuit of an errant pig) are hilariously funny. Sunrise is a film of contrasts - the mood shifts from extremes of dramatic intensity to out-and-out farce and you are never quite sure where the film will end up.  It is also a film with a striking poetic form, rivalling some of the greatest works of literature in its effective and innovative use of imagery and symbolism to convey meaning and emotion.  In style, structure and impact, it is a million miles from the kind of shallow meaningless tear-jerker which Hollywood would shamelessly churn out by the lorry-load in the following decades – pale imitations of this work of sublime artistic genius.

Sunrise is unquestionably a film of huge technical achievement.  The resources afforded by Hollywood allowed Murnau and his photographers, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, to experiment and perfect new techniques which give the film a visual feel hitherto unseen in cinema.   Skilful use of superimposition and extraordinarily fluid camera movements gives the film the character, if not the substance, of a dream, with images dissolving into one another in a way that seems to capture both the miracle and  transitoriness of human existence.  The subtitle which Murnau gave to the film (A Song of Two Humans) aptly summarises its cinematic form – a composition of great expression and humanity which moves the soul and enchants the intellect.

Sunrise was distinguished at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, where it won three awards (Best Actress for Janet Gaynor, Best Cinematography and Best Unique and Artistic Picture).  It was also the first film to be released with sound-on-film (which included a synchronised score by Hugo Riesenfeld).

© James Travers 2003

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