Sunrise (1927)

Film: Sunrise

Director: FW Murnau

Country: Germany / USA

Released: September 1927

Runtime: 95 minutes

Genre: Romance

Studio: Fox Film Corporation

Influenced: John Ford, King Vidor, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles

"This story of a Man and his Wife is of nowhere and everywhere, you might hear it anywhere and at any time" 

So says the opening credit. It's a love story about a married couple from rural America who travel to the city, where the man is seduced by a temptress and persuaded to drown his wife. It's a romantic, dramatic fable told in a lyrical German style. Sunrise was adapted from one of Hermann Sudermann’s Lithuanian Stories, The Journey to Tilsit, by scriptwriter Carl Mayer and Murnau, and the screenplay and much of the film's planning was worked out in Berlin. In addition to the use of a German literary source, Murnau employed many of his European colleagues for the film, including set designer Rochus Gliese, who created the impressive artificial city that the farm couple visit.

Thanks to his reputation for directing films of genius like Nosferatu, Murnau was persuaded by William Fox to lend his arthouse prestige to Fox Film Corporation in the mid-20s, as part of a concerted effort by Hollywood producers to head off the strong competition from European competition, Fox offered Murnau irresistible working conditions: an unlimited budget and total artistic freedom. “I accepted the offer from Hollywood because I think one can always learn and because America gives me new opportunities to develop my artistic aims. My film Sunrise shows what I mean.”, Murnau said in a 1928 interview.

Sunrise was produced and first shown in the transition period from silent film to talking movies and its debut performance was overshadowed by the first talking movie (The Jazz Singer). Sunrise broke new ground as the first feature films with a synchronised musical score and sound effects soundtrack. All the key moments in the story are expressed acoustically, from the whistled call of the temptress to the telltale barking of the dog, the roar of the storm, and finally the voice announcing the good news of the miraculous rescue. Sunrise is more an artwork on the level of a sublime painting.

Karl Freund, the cameraman, and Murnau experimented with mobile camera techniques, which they already had developed and started to use in the making of The Last Laugh. Cameras in the early 1920 were very heavy and they came up with the idea of attaching the camera to a frame fixed to a rubber wheeled trolley to enable the camera to travel smoothly with the actors, creating the illusion of depth and vastness. The actor who played the man, George O’Brien, had to wear heavy weights in his shoes to make his steps and walk clumsy, heavy and down-to-earth – appropriate for simple farmer character.

As critics at the time commented, Murnau had made neither an American nor a European film, but something with a deliberately universal quality. Although Sunrise was not a financial success, it won an impressive number of awards – in a time where the Academy Awards were just started. Janet Gaynor won “Best Actress in a Leading Role", Charles Rosher and Karl Struss were given the Award for “Best Cinematography” and it also won the Award for “Best Unique and Artistic Production”. Rochus Gliese earned the Academy Award for “Best Art Direction”.