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SUNRISE or:

The dream of abolishing reality

What exactly is SUNRISE? Is it hallucination, a sensation, or a space? A song or a poem? Is it a vision? Or is it really a film after all?

Like most of Murnau’s work, SUNRISE is a dream on film. With all the highs and lows, all the breaks and shifts, all those irrational moments in time and space that make dreams so distinctive, yet so elusive and so hard to describe.

While NOSFERATU lead us into the world of nightmarish illusions, FAUST is more a magical hallucination, a child of the expressionist stage, ‘snatched’ from the pages of literature. THE LAST MAN comes across like a harbinger of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s poetic realism. By contrast, SUNRISE is continual emotion, an uninhibited dream of passion.

It’s not easy to write about SUNRISE in immediate terms, precisely because it really is like trying to recall a dream. A dream about love, of all things, one that echoes violently and is intensely remembered, but is much easier to reconstruct emotionally than as narrative. In order to reveal the film’s secrets perhaps it is necessary to ‘feel it out’ rather than try to relate it.

In other words, to try and retrospectively describe SUNRISE seems to make us veer off course. Even as one begins to discuss an apparently clear first impression, there’s the lurking suspicion that it’s probably impossible to convey the full effect of this film through the recollection of individual images and the story – which is quite easily related. Why is this? The narrative is clear enough. It’s about desire, betrayal, regret, forgiveness, love, loss, sadness and reunion – in that order. No drama could be more full of the fundamental human impulses than this.

But the real substance of SUNRISE lies in the detail; what at first seems to be ornamentation contains the essence of the film. Atmosphere is more important than image, which only emerges in the constant flow of interconnecting pictures. The motives of the characters, at first impelled by their flurry of actions and then by their conflicting bursts of emotion, are not psychologically plausible on their own. It’s the setting, the circumstances, the particular moment – the atmosphere, in other words – which causes people leave the tried and true paths and allow themselves to be drawn into unusual patterns of behaviour (negative and positive), to finally rediscover their true feelings. Murnau tries to visualize these ‘predicaments’ in SUNRISE. Not only do things constantly change at 24 frames per second but we are also drawn into a state of mental intoxication. We feel the intoxication of passion, destruction, desperation, reconciliation, self-sacrifice.
For me this film is the secret heart of those films that in later years dared to push the boundaries, to plumb the portrayable scope of feeling. A ‘cinema of the passions’, if you like. Cinema that skates along the mad fury of human emotion, not in the attempt to represent it, but to become it, to make the subjective experiences perceptible. A large field of similarly matched candidates joined Murnau’s ‘cinema of the passions’ down the years of film history. The influence of SUNRISE stretches from Dreyer and Ophüls to Jacques Doillon and Lars von Trier, where the emotional and analytical gaze coalesces into a large, unifying gesture.

On the other hand there is, of course, the story. A very clear one, in fact. That sensation of floating in the film’s wake is not due to the narrative. But then we remember that this is always the case; art that has a particularly powerful effect on us always has its feet squarely planted on the ground in order to then take off into dreams. When you wake from a dream you remember it as a crystal clear illusion. You then have to tease it out in front of you and rework it, and so internalize it. Then you are part of it and it is part of you.

SUNRISE begins with this text:

(1. Title)
This song
of the Man and his Wife
is of no place
and every place;
you might hear it anywhere
at any time.

(2. Title)
For wherever the sun rises and sets
in the city’s turmoil
or
under the open sky on the farm
life is much the same
sometimes bitter - sometimes sweet.

We know before the images reach us that it is about something fundamental. About archetypes, timeless things. Man and woman. Joy and sorrow. Love, life.

The construction of “This song“ indicates a narrative form that will run more along musical than prose lines. And in fact SUNRISE sometimes seems to flow like a piece of music, to sing, to branch into variations. The development of conflict shapes the verses, the frenzy of feelings forms the refrain. Again and again the film begins to create very clear images, premises of what is to come, only to then dismiss them in an iconoclastic visual flurry of emotions.

Nevertheless, what takes place? What’s the story?

“The man“– the name of the character (George O’Brien) is a farmer and lives with “the woman “ (Janet Gaynor), “the maid“ (Bodil Rosin) and “the child“ on the farm. Their humble but happy life threatens to disintegrate when the man falls in love with “the woman from the city” (Margaret Livingston). His passion for her leads him to the brink of insanity and he allows himself to be persuaded to murder his wife and start a new life with the vamp in the city.

So one day he invites his wife on a boat ride, where he plans to push her into the water and drown her. But when the moment arrives – there he stands in the boat, arms outstretched before his wife, who begs for mercy – he becomes aware of the extent of his mental confusion and breaks down. When they reach the bank the woman flees from him in horror and leaps into a passing tram. The man, in despair and as if possessed, is unable to let her go and follows her onto the tram. Incapable of speech they sit there side by side as the tram takes them into the city, a journey they scarcely seem to notice.

As they descend from the tram the turbulence of city life seems to explode around them. They experience the cars, crowds, the speed and the general hysteria as a menacing, hideous beast that threatens to crush them. And so begins their odyssey through the urban jungle, a journey that mutates into cathartic wishful thinking – enabling these two apparently lost souls the chance for a change of perspective and a reassessment of their relationship. The whirl of events has given our heroes a second chance, leading them back to one another and awaking new hope. In a church they witness the marriage of a couple who are complete strangers to them, and in this explicit way are reminded of the vows they once exchanged themselves. The man is remorseful, the woman forgiving. They rediscover the crazy happiness of their love and give themselves over to the heady pleasures of the big city.

On the way home, tired and happy, a storm capsizes their boat and rips it apart. They lose one another in the surging waters.The man manages to struggle ashore, fearing he has lost his wife forever. And in fact the search for her is unsuccessful. In despair he is now aware that his original grotesque plan has actually come to fruition. Her death remains his doing, even when unwillingly. Then, just as all hope has vanished, as if by a miracle his wife is found alive. The vamp leaves the village, disheartened, and goes back to the city.

The all-too-sudden, unsatisfying ending is in total contrast to the decisively dramatic undertone of Murnau’s narrative style. It was (clearly even then a typical problem in Hollywood) a concession to the producer William Fox, who was dubious about the commercial potential of SUNRISE, with the ending that Murnau and scriptwriter Carl Mayer originally had in mind. This was closer in every respect to Hermann Sudermann’s “Lithuanian Stories“, where the man dies in the floodwaters and the woman becomes pregnant as a result of their last night of love.

However, this is pretty much the only compromise that Murnau had to make with this, his first American film. Otherwise the story behind SUNRISE was produced according to Mayer’s and Murnau’s concept and was the director’s most opulent and extravagant production. The film seemed to be bursting at the seams with visual imagery and imagination and perhaps it was because of the seemingly unlimited means available to him that Murnau felt able to try out so many new methods and possibilities of the medium for the first time. In fact, Fox had told him, “make me a great film, whatever it costs!” Murnau seems to have taken these words to heart.

SUNRISE is a studio film, no question. In other words, a film in which no visible element is coincidental. Even when shooting didn’t take place on the lot, the atmosphere had to match the controlled environment of the studio. The farmhouse, for example – very German in character by the way – where the protagonists live, was completely recreated in the studio. Part of the film, however, was shot near Lake Arrowhead and a section of the farmhouse was reconstructed by designer Rochus Gliese, to allow the camera to pan across it from the lake at dawn. And in the “city” locations, including a huge annual fair at its center, the border between studio construction and genuine city scenes blur completely.

But even small details demonstrate the richness of the new narrative possibilities available to Murnau. For example, he experiments with the optical presentation of intertitles in more diverse ways than ever before, preempting the visualized inner monologue that later became standard in the ‘talkies’. The farmer who rescues the ‘woman’ from the floodwaters, relates the experience to the ‘maid’ and from the explanatory title on the screen Murnau fades in a flashback that shows that very scene in an almost iconographic way, like a painting. By the same token, when the ‘vamp’ outlines the murder plan to the ‘man’ Murnau ‘previews’ the murder act, how he will push the woman into the water – working happily with flashbacks and ‘flash-forwards’ without any sign of confusion, long before it became cinematic convention.

Murnau’s optical aspirations become particularly apparent in the reluctance to leave the titles to do the narrative work. In no other film is it more obvious (with the exception perhaps of THE LAST MAN) how hard he tried to relate everything without recourse to titles.

Even the titles themselves, largely unavoidable, reflected Murnau’s desire to lend the film constant movement and an emotional dynamic. Some of the titles in SUNRISE fade away in distorted form and these deformed graphics serve to illustrate the horror of the thoughts they intend to convey. The cameramen Charles Rosher and Karl Struss developed countless new variations of dolly and hand-held camera work for the film, constantly looking for new and liberating techniques. ‘Grip’ – the dolly as a fundamental of filming technique – was at that time in its very early stages of development and SUNRISE is one of the most impressive examples of Murnau’s vision of the ‘free-roaming camera’.

All in all this combined to produce a visual potent film that appeared to almost burst its seams. It’s a film whose formal consistency (and excessiveness) is pretty much unique to Murnau’s career. It should be mentioned that SUNRISE also has moments of visual overload – no doubt thanks to the director’s unrestricted powers of decision-making and financial resources. Parts of SUNRISE are too long and it could have benefited from a more aesthetic or at least more modest approach at times, which would have made it even more convincing. In this way it is akin to such films as Selznick’s DUEL IN THE SUN, Cimino’s HEAVEN’S GATE, or Kusturica’s UNDERGROUND. But aren’t all these films so firmly anchored in our memory precisely because of their (dis)proportion? In this sense Murnau’s film, too, is a witness to how filmmakers can explode the bounds of their creativity when they are able to work without economic constraints.

SUNRISE remains, certainly, the mother of all melodramas – and marks the spectacular departure of the silent movie from the screen; SUNRISE was made in 1927, the same year that sound was introduced to movies.

Cinema is a wondrous magic box, and SUNRISE underscores this with every frame, every second, each moment. It’s a film that never stops trying to be everything, to extract meaning from its story, its characters, its images, its voice and its emotions, using the free-association language of dreams.

How close is cinema to a dream? SUNRISE responds that cinema is itself a dream. The dreamt retelling of a story derived from so-called reality. But what then is reality? In F.W. Murnau’s films at any rate, reality must first be abandoned so that, like a sleepwalker, he can truly draw closer to it.