Sunrise

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (also known as Sunrise) is a 1927 American silent romantic comedy-drama directed by German director F. W. Murnau.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) It's the first feature film to be released with synchronized sound-on-film using the Fox Movietone system. (Less than three weeks before the groundbreaking The Jazz Singer got released) Hugo Riesenfeld's score mirrored the plot's Sturm and Drang, and at times pretended to synchronize with action on the screen.
 * 2) The film script's based on Hermman Sudermann's short story "Die Riese nach Tilsit" and was transformed into the equivalent of a blank-verse title poem on film that transformed Sudermann's characters into moral archetypes. The plot, a romantic triangle that develops after a "city woman" seduces a married farmer, is simple on a narrative level but filled with psychological nuance.
 * 3) With a nearly unlimited budget, set designer Rochus Gliese's sketches were turned into remarkable sets characterized by foreshortening and sharp angles. In collaboration with Rosher and Struss, Murnau develops a style the relies on long takes, flowing camera movements that fluidly and sophisticatedly move through space, and emphatic acting.
 * 4) *For one scene, cameraman Charles Rosher hung tracks from the ceilings, placed the camera on a suspended platform and had it associate Karl Struss operate it upside-down while the platform revolved around the action below.
 * 5) *In another scene, the husband and wife take a trolley from the country to the city. Murnau had a mile of railway track laid near Lake Arrowhead to film the sequence, ending is the trolley enters a city set that reputedly cost $200,000.
 * 6) The above-mentioned "style" isn't just self-indulgence, it actually serves the story. The visuals are tied to the narrative, to Murnau's view of his characters and how he wanted moviegoers to interpret the plot.
 * 7) *He also intentionally inserted comic relief involving a drunken pig to let both the characters and the audience "take a breath" before a harrow storm sequence.
 * 8) Talented, emphatic acting (as mentioned in a previous pointer) and complex characters -- despite them being archetypes
 * 9) especially Janet Gaynor who won the Best Actress award for playing the Wife.
 * 10) George O'Brien as The Man also deserves credit for his acting skills.
 * 11) along with Margaret Livingston who really set the standard for evil women by playing the Woman from the City.
 * 12) Excellent personality contrasts between the good-hearted Wife from the Country, and the evil Woman from the City, despite neither of them ever meeting each other. Even though it's a silent film, hardly any dialogue or title cards appear onscreen, allowing the audience to be able to see the story for more time.

Trivia

 * Wide angle lenses did not exist at the time the film was filmed, so forced perspective was used to create an artificial sense of depth. In the cafe sequence, sets were created in which the floors sloped upwards as they receded, with larger ceiling bulbs in the foreground than those in the background. The scene was further populated with children and little people dressed as adults, positioned in the middle ground and background.
 * According to production designer Rochus Gliese, the marsh scene was filmed in the studio by a camera on a rail that was fixed to the ceiling, with the boat suspended from a crane that hung from the rafters. Acrobats doubled for the actors, with the woman falling into a net outside of frame - shot at a higher frame rate to create the slow-motion drowning effect.
 * The film was released in 1927 and was among the crop of the films considered for the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. It was recognized for Best Cinematography and also won the award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, a category that was discontinued after the first year.

Gallery
Alternate film posters

The Film
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