Emotionally captivating, visually wonderful, and technically marvelous, F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS is a fitting swan song for the silent era.
Released in 1927, the same year THE JAZZ SINGER heralded the dawn of the talkies, SUNRISE proved that you don't need words to expound upon the human condition. The film tells the story of a marriage in crisis: the man, once happy at home, has fallen in love with another woman; one with expensive tastes. He's been selling the livestock to finance the affair, and now his mistress is really putting the screws to him. "Why," she asks, "doesn't your wife have an 'accident'? Then you could sell the farm and we could move to the city." It's a tempting offer. I'm not going to tell you if he takes her up on it or not.
What I will tell you, however, is that Murnau's touch is never more assured. He helps his actors and actresses sell their roles and, in the process, plays the human heart like a master. We laugh, we cry, we bite our nails, we're wholly lost in the story of these people and wholly vested in their fates. From perfectly timed comic touches like the reactions of a very proper gentlemen to the wardrobe malfunctions of the hapless woman standing beside him to scenes filled with a dark foreboding as rich as any in cinema, this is a film that knows how to work its audience.
Murnau supplements the cast's efforts through an extraordinary collaboration with cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, men who figured out how to make their camera glide through space, use multiple exposures to create heightened realities, and even pull off some kind of trick that looks just like a modern green screen. These men's collective eye for composition and technical expertise combine to create a world sometimes simple, sometimes extraordinarily dazzling, and ever interesting. There's always something happening in every corner of the frame in SUNRISE, and I look forward to teasing out more details in subsequent viewings.
No kidding, folks: this movie has everything. It's a flat-out masterpiece, and well deserving of its Academy Awards (Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production; Best Cinematographer; Best Actress in a Leading Role). What a gem.
No comments:
Post a Comment