The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

A Song of Two Humans

by R. Dixon Smith, 2004

Every decade, the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound polls hundreds of directors and critics to determine their favourite films of all time. Battleship Potemkin and Citizen Kane are unsurprising choices, as are the predictable titles made during the past thirty or forty years. But how does one explain the appearance of Sunrise, made in 1927 just as talkies were about to change the nature of cinema forever?

Practically everyone knows that RKO Pictures hired 24-year-old Orson Welles and granted him carte blanche to make a film of his choice in August 1939. He could write, produce, direct, or star in whatever project he chose to make, free from any studio meddling. Welles decided he would write, produce, direct, and star in the film. The picture was Citizen Kane. Less well known is the fact that such unheard-of artistic freedom was not unprecedented. It had been granted once before, to another film maker. F. W. Murnau, Germany’s finest exponent of mood and atmosphere, Expressionism, and camera movement, was imported to Hollywood in July 1926, after the well-received American release of The Last Laugh. William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation promised and gave him complete artistic freedom. Fox told Murnau to take his time, spend whatever he had to, and make any film he wished to make.

The film that resulted was Sunrise, made entirely without studio interference. It had been planned down to the last detail in Berlin before Murnau departed for California. The novella on which the film was based, Hermann Sudermann’s Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Excursion to Tilsit), was German. The script was written in Germany by Carl Mayer, the master of Expressionism who had co-authored The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and wrote Murnau’s The Last Laugh. The sets were designed in Germany by Rochus Gliese, who had designed Paul Wegener’s Expressionist classic, The Golem. Even Murnau’s chief cinematographer, Charles Rosher, went to Berlin to join the director in working over the details of lighting and camera set-ups. No one saw the picture except Murnau, his two cameramen, and his cutter, until it was delivered to William Fox as a completed work.

So Sunrise may be called, strictly speaking, a German-American production. It is not only one of Hollywood’s most ambitious projects but one of the greatest films of all time. It showed what was possible near the end of the silent era when doom-laden German Expressionism was ingeniously wedded to Hollywood’s technology and millions. The silent picture would soon pass into history, but with Sunrise it reached artistic perfection. Thirteen days after its premiere, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first part-talkie feature film.

Sunrise is Murnau’s masterwork, more powerful and advanced than either The Last Laugh or Faust. It is one of the most moving stories ever told on screen—a tale of temptation, reconciliation, reconsecration, and redemption, told with a lyrical simplicity that gives it the timeless universality of a fable. As the subtitle of the film puts it, Sunrise is “A Song of Two Humans”. Its protagonists are identified only as “The Man” (George O’Brien) and “The Wife” (Janet Gaynor).

Most of Sunrise takes place outdoors, but, as with Faust, it was almost completely filmed indoors on stages with specially constructed sets and models, where Murnau could control every shadow, every nuance of composition, and all the intricate camera movement. The only set built off the lot was a rural village on the shores of Lake Arrowhead, California. It looks authentically German, but its setting is “no place and every place”. The other side of the lake – the route to the big city – was shot on the Fox lot. Legend has it that the circuitous trolley ride into the city was necessitated by Murnau’s having to avoid shooting on the part of the lot where the great Tom Mix was making westerns!

Sunrise premiered in New York at the Times Square Theatre on 23 September 1927. It fared poorly at the box office, as did many late silents released during the advent of talking pictures. At the very first Academy Awards ceremony, which honoured the 1927-1928 season, Sunrise won three Oscars. Janet Gaynor received the Best Actress award for her work in Sunrise, 7th Heaven, and Street Angel. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, two of Hollywood’s most capable cameramen, received the award for Best Cinematography; Rosher had been Mary Pickford’s chief cameraman for years and served as a consultant on Murnau’s Faust at Ufa Studios in Berlin in 1925. Sunrise itself received a special Oscar for “Artistic Quality of Production”, the only time this award was ever given. And although it did not win an Oscar, the film’s experimental sound-on-disc orchestral score with accompanying sound effects, by Hugo Riesenfeld, was equally effective.

The extent of the meticulous visual detail throughout the picture is astonishing. For the scene in which Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien arrive in the big city, for instance, Murnau and Rochus Gliese built what to this day remains the largest down-town set ever assembled on a stage. It employed deliberate forced perspective to emphasise not only size but also the alienation — both physical and psychological — the couple feel in their new surroundings. It is said that Murnau employed children and midgets as extras; they appear in what looks to be the far distance, further emphasising the false perspective.

One of the most innovative and impressive camera stunts ever achieved occurs during the sequence in which O’Brien walks through the desolate, marshy swamp to his rendezvous with “The Woman from the City” (Margaret Livingston). In one long, continuous take, Murnau’s tracking camera follows him for a distance, but then becomes subjective, showing us what he sees; it takes us to the shadowy, muddy clearing where the vamp awaits him, powdering her nose; they then embrace with a passion that has seldom been equalled in the history of the cinema for its sheer lust. To film this trek, Murnau built a track on the ceiling of his set and suspended the camera on a dolly from it.

Murnau’s style in Sunrise, which utilises virtually every technical device available to the silent film-maker, makes one wonder just how far film art has “advanced” since 1927. The notion that most silent films represent some kind of apprentice period to the sound era is so utterly disspelled by the dazzling cinematography in Sunrise as to make the very concept of progress in motion-picture art meaningless.

What modern director, for instance, has ever equalled the mesmerising trolley-ride sequence or the dazzling “Summertime… vacation time” montage sequence of train, ship, and seashore with which the film begins? And who could have made a psychologically plausible picture about a man who decides to murder his wife and run away with a vamp, but who changes his mind, is forgiven by his wife, and is so transformed by remorse that he undergoes what amounts to a religious conversion?

Some critics, of course, have misread the subtleties of the film’s plot. Film historian Lewis Jacobs wrote in his 1939 The Rise of the American Film that “the first half was characteristically Murnau. This half had a lyrical quality and was removed from the real world. The second half, obviously suffering from Hollywood interference, was realistic; the lyricism was dissipated by comic relief; the universality was destroyed by melodrama.”

Jacobs’ conjecture that Hollywood, or William Fox, interfered with Sunrise is not in accordance with the facts as we now know them to have been. The mood of the first half is indeed removed from the real world, exactly as Murnau had intended. O’Brien was a man obsessed, moving with nightmares and apparitions. Murnau made him act with his back and shoulders — heavy, hulking, stylised, slouched, distorted, thoroughly Expressionistic, complete with twenty-pound lead weights in his shoes. (One perceptive reviewer actually called O’Brien “Golem’s little boy”!) Finally, unable to go through with the city woman’s murderous plans, the spell is broken, the phantoms dissolve, and the reconciliation of the second half is therefore realistic, O’Brien’s acting correspondingly naturalistic. The mood becomes humorous because the story becomes that of a simple peasant in love with his pretty wife.

Similarly, the happy ending, far from being the result of Hollywood tampering, was exactly what Murnau had planned in Berlin right from the beginning. True, the novella did have a tragic ending, but it was the husband, not the wife, who drowned; he could have saved himself, but to save her he sacrificed his own life.

Other critics have suggested that Murnau should have allowed Gaynor to drown, leaving O’Brien to face the bleakness of life without her, their child a reminder of her loss and his weakness. But to have chosen either of these endings, as Dorothy Jones pointed out in her 1955 analysis of the film, “would have negated the film’s underlying mood and theme and would have destroyed the remarkable unity of his work, for Murnau wanted above all else simply to make us feel the wonder of human relationships, with all their goodnesses and weaknesses. O’Brien’s affair with the city woman, even his attempt to carry out her plan for the murder of his own wife, brings the man and the woman a new awareness of their love for one another, thus enriching their lives. Good and evil are both part of life, our mistakes and our suffering need not ruin us.”

In 1967, Cahiers du cinéma named Sunrise “the single greatest masterwork in the history of the cinema.” Life goes on, Murnau tells us. Sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, there is always the promise of the Sunrise of another day.