-Devdutt Trivedi
Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau is perhaps the most influential film maker in the history of cinema. His ability to transform the visage of a narrative to pure image through a succession of movements which at the same time pointed out the non-denotational temporality underneath the surface of the image is unmatched. There is no better example of this balance between surface and depth in cinema through equal development of the spatial and temporal aspects of film than his first film in Hollywood, Sunrise: A Story of Two Humans(1926).
The film was written by Carl Mayer and Hermann Suderman and completed in July 1926. The setting of the film was an anonymous town with anonymous characters. Both the writers and the director wanted this to reinforce the universal quality of the material. The generic characters would not allow subjectivities to creep in so that it could be enjoyed outside the realms of cultural specificity.
However the film itself is extremely specific in its aesthetic as it is a marriage between the Art deco style of European silent film with Hollywood’s mass populism. This tradition of film was known as International style, which began in the mid 1920s and beginning with the Hollywood works of (especially) Ernest Lubitsch and followed by the works of a number of European expatriates in Hollywood ranging from Fritz Lang and Eric Von Stroheim to William Wyler and Billy Wilder. This international style would also be seen in the films of homegrown American directors such as King Vidor and Howard Hawks.
Sunrise combines the aesthetic of German Expressionism with its jagged, pointed forms in architectural designs and landscapes underlined the split between the inside and outside world of the German masses and their lack of expression for their repressed post-war trauma and the impressionist tradition of early 19th Century German Impressionist paintings. Perhaps the most important aspect of this technique is the immaculate set designs by Walter Rohrig, who had worked with Murnau on his previous three films.
Murnau himself was deeply influenced by painting and was a painter before he moved to cinema. His cinema fitted Expressionist painter Alfred Kublin’s dictum of films being moving paintings. Murnau was born as Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe and changed his last name to Murnau which was the name of an artist city around Bavaria, where a set of painters known as The Blue Writers emerged. Perhaps the most important of these painters was Kandinsky who embodied their struggle to transform the German countryside into a metaphysical form.
Carl Roscher and Karl Struss shared the Cinematography credits to reproduce the signature Murnau languorous, moving camera in an American landscape recreated at Willam Fox’s studio. The visual technique is perhaps the most outstanding, since the absence of sound does not allow for any dialectic with the sound, the light and shadow itself is instrumental in creating visual form and opposition. The use of point source lighting in indoor sequences to create an effect reminiscent of Paul Wegener’s films or
Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) is contrasted with Karl Struss’ outdoor photography. Struss was a still photographer known for his location photography in the city of New York. The frames are split along horizontal and vertical partitions and find their source in the paintings of the 17th century Dutch painter Vermeer and the German Romanticists such as Kaspar David Freidrich.
In several of the city sequences, according to veteran photographer John Bailey, the recreation of the city were done with disproportionate set objects i.e. buildings and props that were smaller than their actual sizes using midgets instead of full size men. The scale model approach is best denoted in the first shot of the city, in which a train model finds its background in midgets, whose small height provides the scale of the city on a miniature model.
The film works on the dualities between the idealized portrayal of the countryside reflected against the fragmented and upper class city, between interiors (of the countryside) and exteriors (of the city) all captured through the duality between movement and stasis. Murnau splits the spiritualized with the sensual, in the opening sequence where The Man is attracted by snakeskin-dress clad character of The Woman from the City. The sensuality of the city girl is neutralized by The Wife’s rather bland and asexual wig. In this way Murnau seems to provide a concrete split between the spiritual and the sensual which is later dissolved when it unites in the character of The Wife.
Murnau stretches the spatial representation by his long take technique, shooting in the opening fog sequences as much as 200 feet of film equivalent to 3 minutes to patiently observe the transformations in character, very often reflected by the change in landscape. When the man returns dejected from the city girl, the oppressive nature of the fields is brought out by their crooked architecture. The lack of individual space is denoted by the bare walls. On their way to the city the couple catches a boat and Murnau refuses to shoot The Man and The Wife in the same frame to denote the disconnection between their worlds. Murnau shoots down to compress space and capture the oppressive nature of space in which the characters are trapped, a trademark film technique of Murnau and the other Expressionist film makers. The Expressionist techniques are also effective as they capture the visual field of an echo.
Murnau shows his mastery of the movement image in a number of sequences. Movement-image, a Deleuzean term to refer to spatial movement in cinema can be specifically defined as that portion of the story where the movement of the character and the movement of the story meet to produce resonance. The shot of the dog moving towards the boat as the couple head out to the city is a shot which is detached from its narrative causality so that it becomes a pure movement devoid of cause. Another example of movement-image is when the couple causes a traffic jam. Murnau cuts to a number of cars stopping responding to the cause, the couple halting proceedings after which Murnau cuts to a cyclist unable to break and thrown off his cycle, so as to confront the audience with movement i.e. the movement of the cyclist removed out of its causal boundaries.
Murnau shows a variety of influences in his shooting of internal spaces which would all be trademark characteristics of the International Style. The café sequence shows an influence of the Bauhaus style of Mies van der Rohe to represent American city with obviously European characteristics. Murnau dollies into the actor from behind. The requirements from the actors are to do as much with their physical properties as with their exaggerated expressions. For example, George O’Brien was made to wear heavy boots to make his walk into a depressed slumber. Very often the scene begins with actors moving in one direction and then changing their direction.
Murnau uses either the 55mm lens or the wide angled 35mm lens. Although made a good 15 years before Welles’ Citizen Kane, the film does consist of sequences that use deep focus predating Citizen Kane like in the sequence where the Woman from The City is asleep with a glass with a spoon on the table. This use of past and present i.e. the glass of fluid as being an act of the past would be perfected in the attempted suicide of Susan Alexander Kane where the glass with the spoon depicts the actor preceding Susan’s present state.
The train marks the location of transformation. The first time the characters enter the train it denotes the low point of their relationship. When they return to the train after the party it denotes their euphoria. According to John Bailey it can be thought of as the longest tracking shot in the history of cinema, which would be only matched later by Kiarostami’s endless car tracks in his Koker Trilogy (1988-1994). The train becomes a tool for pure rhythm that transcends the constantly changing moods of the characters.
The city is read as a dangerous space where the euphoria of the idyllic characters is broken by an encounter with reality. Murnau seems to side with class hierarchy as being the prime reason for this imbalance as seen in the restaurant sequence where the couple dances to Midsummer’s Peasant Dance. Whereas their movements represent the oneness with nature in the countryside, their reception by others at the restaurant reinforces this class divide.
The penultimate sequence at the studio overthrows Murnau’s languidly paced camera to overthrow the classical movement-image with Hollywood’s action-image. Spatial movement is undone with the action of characters that limits movement as well as spectatorial perception. The sequence consists of dynamic fast cutting and inserts. Several of the other sequences such as the sequences in the restaurant with the pigs and the intertitles were done by a second unit team on the directions of not Murnau but producer William Fox to try and make the film suit a large audience. This is most evident in the last sequences, which culminates the split between the spiritual and the sensual through a climax, breaking the aesthetic of the sequence with that of event, with the recovery of the drowned wife and the return of the city woman to her home. Having restored order the couple kiss and Murnau takes a remarkable shot to depict the pure source of film: light represented through text through the title of the film: Sunrise.
Courtesy:
John Bailey, Twentieth Century Fox