范姜文杰
孫意婷
吳昀達
Movie Information
• Genre: Drama / Romance / Crime
• Director: Sunrise (1927) is German director F. W. Murnau's compelling American
debut - his first project for Hollywood's Fox Film Corporation (and William Fox),
but planned in Germany. It was the first feature film released with sound-on-film –
with a synchronized Movietone musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld. It appeared at
the very end of the silent era and came only a few days before the opening of
Warner Bros.’ famous “first talkie” The Jazz Singer (1927). The sensational opening
of Warners’ film overshadowed the release of Fox's most expensive silent film to
date, and it failed at the box-office due to its high cost.
• Plot Summary: A naive country man falls in love with a seductive woman from
city. To let the man all belongs to her, she persuades him to drawn his wife and sell
his farm and come with her to the city. The man struggles for a period of time and
finally gives up the evil thought. The plot twists at this time, the country man goes
to the city with his wife instead. They both taste kaleidoscope flavors of a city.
While they are on their way home joyfully, an abrupt storm rages. The climax of
the movie comes in the fierce storm and its aftermath.
City Representation
While the country man is chasing his wife, they both get on a city-bound tram. The
trolly arrives at the city square eventually, it is engulfed by other vehicles and crowded
pedestrians at once. The masses of pedestrians to streetcars, horses and cars seem to all
be absorbed in the activities of them. It clearly symbolize the bustle and of the city.
Afterwards, they both visit café, studio, barbershop, amusement park, dance hall ,and
restaurant. These modern construction are invisible in a rural area and provide the
farmer and his wife much pleasure. I think the image of the city is director’s
representation of an ideal city or specifically, an overarching notion of city.
Why is the city unnamed?
The city is depicted as everyplace, and a no-place. Like the caption at the beginning of
this movie, “The song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place;you might
hear it at any time.”
German Expressionism
德國表現主義
Expressionism in painting from 1910



heightened, symbolic colors and
exaggerated imagery
tend to dwell on the darker, sinister aspects
of the human psyche
reflect the artists's state of mind rather than
the reality of the external world
1919~1926 Expressionism in film


background
1919《The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari》---"first
brought expressionism
to the German cinema"




often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal,
and other "intellectual" topics
decline
1927 Murnau 《Sunrise》
Influence---horror film, film noir
Symbols





The marshes
The dog
The water
The church bell
The sun
Binary Opposition







Country / City
Wife / Vamp
Good / Evil
Day / Night
Nature / Culture
Labor / Pleasure
Peace / Violence
City girl vs. Country girl
dark, short hair / long, blonde hair
short dress / long dress
smoking / non-smoking
made up / not made-up
unmarried / married
undomesticated / domesticated
erotic / chaste
Matt Bailey
http://www.notcoming.com/reviews.php?id=210
1.What appears simple on the page,however,
is turned into an eloquent work of visual
poetry by director F.W. Murnau, who
successfully marries the unmatched
technical proficiency and deep pockets of
the Hollywood studio system with the
distillation of particularly German strains of
artistic and poetic Romanticism and
Expressionism.
2.



*the themes of the film are so universal and the
characters whose lives are subject to those themes
are archetypal — so much so, in fact, that they are
nameless.
*What makes Sunrise more than just a filmed
morality play or just a schematic tale of good vs. evil
is the way in which these oppositions bleed into one
another and overlap and also the way these
oppositions are not constrained into a strict moral
dichotomy.
*Sunrise owes its timelessness and stature as a
classic to the sensitive way in which it explores a
particular moral choice and to the way that
exploration occurs in the psyche of the main
Peter Bradshaw
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4
267,1141579,00.html
1.FW Murnau's classic 1927 silent is one of
the first movies with a really substantial
feature-length narrative: an exuberant
pioneer picture conceived on a big canvas,
blazing an inspirational trail for just about
everything Hollywood has done since.
2. Some scenes look very Hitchcockian :
 *the dog
 *the crowd scenes in the city
3.The movie is a virtual handbook-anthology
of classic Hollywood styles in embryo, but
looks stylised and almost expressionist in
some of its settings:
Roger Ebert
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200404
11/REVIEWS08/404110301/1023
1.*John Bailey
*superimposed images
2.It's very broad melodrama, and the realism of
spoken dialogue would have made it impossible.
But silent films were more dreamlike, and
Murnau was a genius at evoking odd, disturbing
images and juxtapositions that created a
nightmare state. Because the characters are
simple, they take on a kind of moral clarity, and
their choices are magnified into fundamental
decisions of life and death.