Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	F. W. Murnau
Produced by	William Fox
Written by	Carl Mayer Story: Hermann Sudermann
Starring	George O'Brien Janet Gaynor Margaret Livingston
Cinematography	Charles Rosher Karl Struss
Editing by	Harold D. Schuster
Distributed by	Fox Film Corporation
Release date(s)	September 23, 1927
Running time	95 minutes
Country	United States
Language	Silent film English intertitles

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, also known as Sunrise, is a 1927 American film directed by German film director F. W. Murnau. The story was adapted by Carl Mayer from the short story Die Reise nach Tilsit by Hermann Sudermann.

Sunrise won an Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production at the first ever Oscar ceremony in 1929. In 1937, Sunrise's original negative was destroyed in a nitrate fire. A new negative was created from a surviving print.^[1] In 1989, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.^{[citation needed]} In a 2002 critics' poll for the British Film Institute, Sunrise was named the seventh-best film in the history of motion pictures.^[2]

In 2007, the film was chosen #82 on the 10th anniversary update of the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies list of great films.^[3] Sunrise is one of the first with a soundtrack of music and sound effects recorded in the then-new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system.^{[citation needed]} Much of the exterior shooting was done at Lake Arrowhead, California.

Plot

A Woman From The City (Margaret Livingston) travels to the country on a summertime vacation, and lingers in one particular lakeside town for weeks. One night she puts on a slinky black dress and wanders through town to a farmhouse where The Man (George O'Brien) and The Wife (Janet Gaynor) live with their infant child. She whistles from outside to the Man, who is sitting dejectedly at a table his wife is preparing for dinner. The Man--with whom she has been having an affair--notices the Woman waiting for him outside and motions her to meet him nearby. He changes his coat, and leaves his wife and child alone in the house. The Wife, seeing her husband has left, leaves the empty dinner table to cry on her childs pillow. The Man walks through the moonlit woods to the shore of the lake where the Woman is waiting for him. The Woman seduces The Man into thinking that he should sell the farm and move with her to The City. Images of the big city, brass bands, and bright lights flash above them as they lay together among the reeds. When she subtly suggests he could drown his wife, he objects violently at first but reluctantly agrees. They decide he will take her on a trip to The City, drown her on their way across the lake in a small boat, then sink the boat to make it look like an accident. The Man would then use bundles of reeds secretly placed in the boat to swim ashore on. The Wife happily agrees to go on the trip, yearning for any bit of time and affection from her emotionally distant husband. The next day, the Man and the Wife set off across the lake, but she soon grows suspicious of his strange behavior. Halfway across, the Man stands up menacingly and prepares to throw the Wife overboard. Looking into her eyes as he stands over her, he realizes he can't do it. He sits back down and begins rowing frantically. When the boat lands on the other shore, the Wife flees and the Man follows, begging her not to be afraid of him.

Eventually, the couple board a trolley that takes them into the City, and once there, the Wife runs from the Man in a state of fear and confusion into the busy street. The Man catches her and pulls her to safety. Together they wander the City, the Wife still fearful and unsure of the Man's intentions toward her, until they see a church where a wedding is being performed. They go inside and watch as a young couple exchange their vows. The Man breaks down in terrible guilt and shame, realizing how horrible a husband he has been to her and begs forgiveness. After a tearful reconciliation, they leave the church and wander into the street gazing into each other's eyes, oblivious to the busy traffic around them. As they lose awareness of all but each other, the busy street slowly dissolves into an idyllic wooded meadow, where they kiss in a passionate embrace. When they come to their senses, they suddenly find themselves back in the middle of the city street again with traffic stopped around them. They wander giddily around the City, looking at wedding pictures in a window, visiting a barber shop, and having their picture taken. Making their way to a bustling amusement park, they play games, dance to a country tune, and in a state of marital bliss, dreamily imagine angels floating above their heads. As darkness falls and they leave the amusement park to board the trolley for home, fireworks light up the sky.

Soon they are drifting peacefully back across the lake under the moonlight. They pass a skiff filled with festive people, and the Wife falls asleep in the Man's arms. A storm begins to blow through the city, dispersing the people from the streets and the amusement park. As the storm reaches the lake, the Man tries desperately to keep them afloat, but the wind and waves become so violent that the boat begins to sink. The Man remembers the two bundles of reeds he placed in the boat earlier while planning the Wife's murder, and ties the bundles around her. They cling together as a wall of water hits them and the boat capsizes. The storm passes and the Man awakes on the rocky shore, where he calls repeatedly for his wife in vain. He gathers the townspeople to search the lake in boats for the Wife, but all they find is a broken bundle of reeds floating in the dark water.

The Woman From The City, who has waited patiently in the town to find out if their plan was successful, wakes to the frantic mobilization of the townsfolk and leaves to watch the activity from the shadows. Convinced the Wife has drowned, the grief-stricken Man stumbles home and sobs uncontrollably on the Wife's empty bed. The Woman goes to his house, assuming their nefarious plan has succeeded, but recoils in horror as the Man lunges at her in a murderous rage, chases her down, and begins to choke her. Someone calls to him that his wife is alive, and he releases the Woman. In stunned disbelief, he runs home to find the Wife has survived by clinging to one last bundle of reeds, and having been pulled from the lake by an old fisherman.

The Man kneels by the Wife's bed as she slowly opens her eyes and smiles radiantly at him. As the sun rises over their farmhouse, the Woman From The City leaves town, forlornly and unceremoniously, on the back of a cart, and the Man and Wife kiss as they dissolve into the sunrise itself.

Cast

• George O'Brien as The Man (Anses)
• Janet Gaynor as The Wife (Indre)
• Margaret Livingston as The Woman from the City
• Bodil Rosing as The Maid
• J. Farrell MacDonald as The Photographer
• Ralph Sipperly as The Barber
• Jane Winton as The Manicure Girl
• Arthur Housman as The Obtrusive Gentleman
• Eddie Boland as The Obliging Gentleman

Style

Sunrise was made by F. W. Murnau, a German director who was one of the leading figures in German Expressionism, a style that uses distorted art design for symbolic effect. Murnau was invited by William Fox to make an Expressionist film in Hollywood.

The resulting film features enormous stylized sets that create an exaggerated, fairy-tale-like world; the City street set alone reportedly cost over US$200,000 to build and was re-used in many subsequent Fox productions including John Ford's Four Sons (1928)^[4]. Murnau manages to use a subtle technique of animal and plant imagery as an important tool to indicate the mood or tone in a particular scene and accent the deconstruction of generic dichotomies.

Titles are used sparingly in the film. Previously, in Germany, Murnau had made a film called The Last Laugh which told its story with only one title card (to explain the ending). In Sunrise, there are long sequences without titles, and the bulk of the story is told through images in a similar style. Murnau makes extensive use of forced perspective throughout the film. Of special note is a shot of the City where you see normal-sized people and sets in the foreground and little people in the background along with much smaller sets.

The film is also notable for its groundbreaking cinematography (by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss), and features some particularly impressive tracking shots that influenced later filmmakers.^{[citation needed]} These innovations have led some to call it the Citizen Kane of American silent cinema.^{[citation needed]}

Awards and nominations

Academy Award wins (1929)^[5]

• Best Actress in a Leading Role - Janet Gaynor (at this time acting awards were given for an actor's entire body of work in a year, so Gaynor's award was actually for this film, Seventh Heaven, and Street Angel)
• Best Cinematography - Charles Rosher and Karl Struss
• Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production^[6]

Academy Award nominations (1929)

• Best Art Direction - Rochus Gliese.

Other awards

• Kinema Junpo Awards: Kinema Junpo Award; Best Foreign Language Film F.W. Murnau; 1929.

Other distinguishments

• In 1989- National Film Registry.
• Top 10 of the Sight and Sound critic's poll for best film ever made in 2002.
• American Film Institute's 100 Passions list.

DVD and Blu-ray releases

20th Century Fox originally released Sunrise on DVD in Region 1, but only as a special, limited edition available only by mailing in proofs-of-purchase for other DVD titles in their 20th Century Fox Studio Classics line, or as part of the box set Studio Classics: The 'Best Picture' Collection. Individual copies of this DVD can frequently be found on eBay. The DVD includes commentary, a copy of the film's trailer, details about Murnau's lost film Four Devils, outtakes and a great many more features.

In late 2008, Fox released the "Murnau, Borzage and Fox Box Set" in some markets. Both Movietone and European silent versions of "Sunrise" are included. A documentary of the three individuals is also part of the collection.

Sunrise has also been released on DVD in the UK as part of the Masters of Cinema series. In the Summer of 2009, Masters of Cinema announced s 2-disc DVD reissue, to be released on September 21, 2009, which will contain both the Movietone version and the longer Czech print found on the 2008 "Murnau, Borzage and Fox" DVD, as well as the extra features found on the previous MoC DVD release and the Fox Studio Classics release. MoC will also release the film simultaneously on Blu-ray Disc,^[7] where both versions of the feature will be rendered in 1080p High-definition video, and both the stereo and the mono soundtracks will be rendered in Dolby TrueHD lossless audio. This UK release will mark the worldwide debut of silent feature films on Blu-ray.

References

External links

• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans at the Internet Movie Database
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans at Allmovie
• An essay on Sunrise by R. Dixon Smith for the Masters of Cinema DVD release.
• Roger Ebert's Great Movie essay on Sunrise.
• Village Voice essay.
• Reprint of historic review at CinemaWeb.com
• Murnau, Borzage & Fox at 20th Century Fox Studio Classics.