Week #5: Released in 1927, directed by F.W. Murnau, 94 minutes. New to me!
LetterBoxd score: 5 stars
This was maybe the first movie on this list that was completely unknown to me; not only have I never seen it, I don’t think I had ever heard of it. Having watched it now, neither do I think I’ve seen any famous clips. And on paper, it sounds almost like a joke from 30 rock: a 1920s silent era film about The Man and The Wife? And its actual title is “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans”?! No surprise there were no takers to join me in watching this one.
But it’s fantastic!
The movie excels on nearly every dimension. The acting is wonderful. Over the course of the movie, the man goes from being a broken creature, to a monster, to a happy lover. The wife’s dynamism is a bit less, but she is for me even more evocative of the sadness of her situation. That scene when she’s bringing in dinner and finds her husband has left (to go be with his paramour from the city) and she sits despondently and hangs her head? Oof, you really feel it!
The soundtrack is great! Especially at the beginning, when it gives you these ominous dirge sounds. Dark and foreboding, should be copied!
But the best bit is the inventive visuals of the first half hour. I guess this is what they mean when they say this movie is kind of the perfect packaging of German expressionist ideas for popular consumption. The background changes to express hopes and fears (I wish more contemporary movies would be playful in this way), the shadowy ghost of the woman from the city, and how the man obsesses over her; and best of all, the haunting image of the protagonist knocking a body off the boat and into the water. It really feels like this was an era that took seriously the potential of this medium to convey inner obsessions and thoughts. I guess you still see this today, and maybe just as often as you did then, but I like it and would be happy with more!
The ending of the movie is a bit more grounded in reality, but works in other ways; the extreme closeups of their maid’s joy at learning the wife is alive is really infectious. You feel it, even though you basically know what’s going to happy.
The only part where the movie is a mixed bag is the story: in the space of 24 hours our protagonist goes from the brink of murder to happy love with his would-be victim. I’m not sure audiences today would be willing to overlook violence against women in the same way. I guess you just have to accept it as a fairy-tale (after all, we do have unnamed archetypal characters and non-realistic filmmaking).
But it’s not all bad: the basic idea of planning to commit murder by drowning, and to pack one flotation device for yourself, only to end the story by giving the one flotation device to your would-be victim, is the kind of primal storytelling element that would be made much of if this was a sacred text for our society.
Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest films ever made?
No doubt; it feels like the art form operating at near its pinnacle, especially given the constraints at the time. (On that front, it’s interesting to see the technology of filmmaking evolve; we now have sound that is roughly in sync with the images, so that we can have crowds and steam whistles, but not dialogue or discrete sounds) The movie flags a bit for me in the middle, where it goes from being riveting and super unique, to being merely a very well executed movie; but the finale is again very moving, despite it being pretty obvious where it’s going.
Next week: The Passion of Joan of Arc