CF01
Sunrise
7th Heaven
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Resources
F.W. Murnau in America - (Koszarski, Richard, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). pp.253-255.)
"The camera is the director's sketching pencil," F.W. Murnau wrote in 1928. "It should be as mobile as possible to catch every passing mood, and it is important that the mechanics of the cinema should not be interposed between the spectator and the picture." Long before Alexandre Astruc, Murnau was aware of the principle of the caméra stylo. He articulated the doctrine of the long take, and seemed to recoil from the lavish studio fabrications that marked the early days of the German expressionist film. While other directors working in Hollywood, even von Stroheim or Lubitsch, built their work around scenarios of substance, Murnau approached his art from another direction. With the camera as his pencil, he wrote the essential elements of his films directly on the screen.1
Murnau was brought to America by William Fox in 1926. He made three films for the Fox Company, none of which was commercially successful. Yet the impact of his method of working changed the entire direction of the American cinema in this period. Hollywood had absorbed and Americanized such talents as Lubitsch, Seastrom, and Benjamin Christensen, but Murnau proved to be the one European filmmaker of the era who succeeded in changing Hollywood.
Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) had been a great critical success in America, though a box-office catastrophe ("The last laugh was on me" for having distributed the film, quipped Universal's Carl Laemmle). William Fox, eager to enhance his industry position and be seen as the peer of Adolph Zukor, signed Murnau to a luxurious four-year, four-picture contract. The salary began at $125,000 and rose in annual increments to $200,000. Fox had acquired a German director as costly as Lubitsch, although without that earlier import's box-office record.2
But in signing Murnau, Fox had not just bought himself a German director; he had acquired a substantial segment of the Germasn film industry as well. For the first film, Sunrise (1927), a script came in from Carl Mayer, scriptwriter of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh. To build the sets, designer Rochus Gliese was imported, and so were Herman Bing and Edgar G. Ulmer, who acted as Murnau's assistants and intermediaries. Even one of the film's American cinematographers, Charles Rosher, had just spent a year with Murnau in Germany. A vast city set was constructed in diminishing perspective on the Fox lot. Inside the stages was built a great marsh, with the camera suspended from tracks in the studio ceiling. As it moved with actor George O'Brien through the bullrushes,Karl Struss, Rosher's associate, had to hang from the ceiling with one eye glued to the inverted image in his Bell & Howell viewfinder. Most elaborate of all was the village set, constructed at Lake Arrowhead. "I crawled over it for a day and a half," remebered director Clarence Brown. "It was wonderful." 3 Brown did not even work for the Fox Company. Directors, designers, and cameramen from all over the industry trooped through Murnau's sets and stages. Sunrise became a demonstration project of German film techniques applied with Hollywood budgetary resources.
Soon even those directors most closely associated with cozy Americana subjects, men like Brown, Frank Borzage, and John Ford, had absorbed the lessons of Murnau and his style. Ford actually shot much of Four Sons (1928) right on the old Sunrise village sets. Too costly to be profitable, too arty to be popular, Sunrise made no money but left a deep mark on the final few years of silent film in Hollywood. Shadows, camera movements, artfully stylized settings and gestures, all became the mark of true film art in Hollywood during 1927 and 1928. The studios had flirted with, and rejected, the hard-edged expressionism of the Caligari tradition a few years earlier, but from Murnau they learned that it was possible to style and design "the real world," and to match their own predilection for plastic realism with European notions of gestural and architectural stylization.4 Only when sound changed the rules did Hollywood filmmakers begin to let go of this new style.
Murnau failed to benefit from the impact of his work. His next film, The Four Devils (1928), caused little stir, and his final effort for Fox, Our Daily Bread, shot largely on a farm outside Pendleton, Oregon, in 1928, was not even released in the form he left it. Remarkable mainly for its sensuous tracking shots sweeping through fields of wheat, City Girl (as it was called on its release in 1930) at least moved Murnau off the back lot again. When he broke with Fox, he teamed with Robert Flaherty, a pairing that some critics damned as a mismatch of documentarist and expressionist.5 But the Murnau-dominated film that emerged, Tabu (1931), remains the last great achievement of the silent cinema.
Notes
1. F.W. Murnau, "The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles," Theatre, January 1928, p. 72; Alexandre Astruc, "Le caméra-stylo," L'Ecran francais, 30 March 1948, p. 144.
2. Lotte Eisner, Murnau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 198.
3. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By..., (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1968), p. 152.
4. For the influence of expressionism, see, for example, the use of distorted settings to represent drug-induced visions in Human Wreckage (1923) and dreams in Beggar on Horseback (1925).
5. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 83-85.
A 10 minute clip from Kevin Brownlow & David Gill's 1980 Thames Television series "Hollywood" documenting the history of American silent cinema. This section, from the episode "The Man with the Megaphone" focuses on the making of "Sunrise" and its influence upon Hollywood filmmaking.
"SUNRISE" - A FOX FILM DIRECTED BY F.W. MURNAU. (The Times, Wednesday, Jan 25, 1928; p. 12; Issue 44799; Col B)
The terms of criticism in all the arts are notoriously vague and inexact, and films regarded, as they must be, as an art, give more bother in this respect than is generally recognized. This picture of Mr. Murnau's who has already directed two or three of the most impressive of German films, is remarkable as both an achievement and as a promise. Here is a definite enough suggestion of screen technique, of the right use of the moving picture, of a method of planning and presenting a film so that it is entitled to the consideration one ordinarily gives to an established art like the drama or - dare it be said? - to painting. There are imperfections, of course, some of them serious; there are the usual lapses into emphasized sentiment, the usual lingering over a pictorial effect, the usual missionary zeal for "uplift." But the film does achieve in its own way - in its peculiar medium, that is - what cannot be achieved in any other way.
It is difficult to say in so many words what that is. The movement of the film, its rhythm, the play of pictorial suggestion, the super-imposition of one pictured idea upon another - these may be invoked in the attempt to define the technique of the screen, but they are at best only borrowings from the conventional imagery of art criticism. They cannot convey to the person unfamiliar with the experimental trend of several recent films the effect aimed at here by Mr. Murnau. The producer of a stage entertainment seldom counts for very much besides the dramatist, but nine-tenths of the making of a film is the work of the director. All that is best in this film is the work is clearly owing to the director's conception of what a film should be. The elaborate and costly "sets" make an impression, no doubt, by the mere photography, but the whole point of their use here lies in the brilliant manipulation of scenic contrasts. And so with the acting; Mr. George O'Brien and Miss Janet Gaynor are extraordinarily moving at times, but only because they take their part in little incidents contrived with great imaginative delicacy.
And the story? It is better than many, but, as in worse films, it scarcely matters. It appears to be an adaptation of a novel by Sudermann, and tells of a young rustic couple whose peace was threatened by an urban hussy. She, poor wretch, tempted the husband to drown his wife. (The psychology is curiously akin, during several scenes, to the climax of Mr. Dreiser's "An American Tragedy.") He very nearly did so, but changed his mind at the last moment, and instead took her to the city in search of amusement.
An artless tale, though in the telling of it there are moments of understanding which are sheer inspiration. But these belong to the film, not the story. There is a moment when, dazed, and stricken dumb by remorse, the husband guides his wife, bewildered by pity for him, across the enormous city square. The traffic bears down on them from all directions, shrieking and hurtling across their path, but they cross in safety without for a moment turning their eyes from one another. The picture here is marvellously well created, and it is memorable.
