From Chicago Film Society Wednesday, a ‘Sunrise’ you can’t afford to miss
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Movies come and go — I’m sure a few came and went during this dash clause — but there is only one “Sunrise.”
In his aspirational heyday, just as Hollywood studios were reckoning with the threat and revolutionary possibilities of talking pictures, studio mogul William Fox sought out the man he considered the world’s premier director, F.W. Murnau, to make a truly great silent feature in America. Ultimately it was to be accompanied by Fox’s newly invented Movietone soundtrack, featuring a bracingly experimental orchestral score with musical sound effects.
Fox lured Murnau, whose films included the startling vampire classic “Nosferatu” (1922) and the heart-shredding tearjerker “The Last Laugh” (1924), away from Berlin’s Ufa studio to “go Hollywood” with no production expense spared, and with serious ambitions for lasting cinematic wonder.
It actually worked out that way.
For the first of his grand, tragically short-lived American experiments, Murnau adapted a 1917 short story by the German dramatist and novelist Hermann Sudermann. Titled “The Excursion to Tilsit,” part of a collection known as “Lithuanian Stories,” the tale told of a provincial farmer, his careworn wife and the farmer’s mistress from the city. Egged on by the urban temptress, the man very nearly murders his wife for the promise of a new life. But fate and his tortured conscience intervene.
How does a marriage recover from that? A purifying, cathartic trip to the city — Tilsit in the original story, located in what is now the Russian-Lithuanian border. In “Sunrise,” subtitled “A Song of Two Humans,” the metropolis could be New York. But it has no name. Neither do the characters: They are simply The Man, The Wife and The Woman From the City. Like every gorgeous frame of Murnau’s film, the world is both real and metaphorical, both American and European.
A reportedly spiffy 35 mm print of “Sunrise” opens the winter season of the Chicago Film Society, with a one time-only screening Wednesday at the Auditorium of Northeastern Illinois University. In 1927 many considered Murnau’s film the pinnacle of an art form barely a generation old.
In 2023, for many, that hasn’t changed.
CFS co-founder Kyle Westphal: “Murnau shot it as a silent film; he wasn’t aware it would end up being a sound film.” Production began in 1926; “Sunrise” was filmed on massive soundstages and an entire storybook country village, complete with trolley line, was constructed on Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Hollywood. Fox wasn’t trying to compete with “The Jazz Singer,” a Warners release. “They were looking for prestige, and capital-A Art,” Westphal said.
With its wild swing from intensely stylized melodrama in its first half to raucous, slapstick-inflected rapture in the second, “Sunrise” was no box office smash. But people knew they were seeing something special. The inaugural edition of the Academy Awards handed “Sunrise” a prize for “unique and artistic picture.”
The “Sunrise” Movietone soundtrack, Westphal notes, “is not just underscoring. It’s quite extraordinary — a whole soundscape that sounds very modern to our ears, full of strange sound effects.”
Visually “Sunrise” captures the full, ecstatic range of camera movement and production design available on a big budget to actual geniuses working at their peak in the late silent era. There’s no effect, no miniature, no poetic dissolve Murnau and his inspired colleagues won’t try and don’t pull off, triumphantly. When one of the few intertitles in “Sunrise” appears on screen, in the scene where the woman from the city (Margaret Livingston, of whom it truly can be said: ha-cha!) taunts the farmer (George O’Brien) with the idea of drowning his poor wife (Janet Gaynor, the big star of the three), her on-screen words pictorially dissolve into liquid on screen.
The story is what it is: archetypal, folkloric, quaintly or, to some, comically fable-like.
“I’m sure some people seeing it for the first time will have a had time with the gender politics,” Westphal acknowledges. “Some of the simplistic ideas it has about what it means to be a man, or a woman, and what a Good Woman is expected to forgive … again, for some, not easy. But Murnau made an avant-garde work that’s also steeped in traditionalism.”
The dichotomies are endless with “Sunrise,” he says: “It’s a peak of silent cinema, but also a radical blueprint for sound cinema. Male/female; city/country; silent/sound: It’s all of these things fused together at a crucial moment in the history of cinema.”
For Fox, Murnau went on to make “4 Devils” (1928, now one of the medium’s most painful lost titles) and the 1930 “City Girl.” His final film, a year later: the South Seas collaboration with Robert Flaherty, “Tabu,” which was not an easy experience. Murnau died in an automobile accident that same year, 1931. By then Fox’s glory years had been well and truly erased financially in the 1929 stock market fiasco.
But those glory years, of which Murnau was a crucial part, will never be erased artistically. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s pseudonomyous reviewer, Mae Tinee, was right about “Sunrise,” writing in 1927: “As pictures go, it is just about as perfect a thing as you ever seen, or will see, probably, for a good, long while.”
“Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans,” 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.; tickets $10 at the door. For the full winter 2023 schedule, go to Chicagofilmsociety.org.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
