#popculture27: “Sunrise” and the Rise of German Expressionism in Film

This Hollywood silent film was the product of a unique cinematic movement in Germany.

The early decades of film saw it developed in different ways in different countries.

In post-World War One Germany, the unusual style developed there led to an influential movement. It led to some of the medium’s greatest early films, such as the 1927 drama Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

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Silent movies

I probably first saw silent movies in college, when I took a film history class. I remember seeing Sunrise and Safety Last and liking them. Later on, I must’ve seen Chaplin and Keaton movies somewhere, if not in class. In April I saw a silent from Bolivia, with a live orchestra.

When I think of silents, I can’t help but recall my late friend Paddy, who was a huge fan. I learned more about them through her. She and her sisters adored the comedies, especially Keaton. They were regulars at a silent film festival in Toronto.

Don’t know if Paddy saw Sunrise. I like to think she did.

Another good friend, Le, loves silents. In her brand-new blog on film preservation, she discusses lost silents and her efforts at reconstructing some.

German Expressionism

German Expressionism in film attempted to visualize the anxieties and fears of German society in the years following the First World War. Unlike movies that portrayed realism, Expressionism sought to show subjective, individual reactions to it.

During WW1, the German government banned foreign movies, which meant German film developed in isolation. The 1920 release of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a reaction to the war. Its bizarre sets and cinematography, shadowy and distorted, were precursors to horror and film noir in later decades.

Later films from the twenties such as

• The Golem: How He Came Into the World,

• The Hands of Orlac,

• Waxworks,

• The Student of Prague, and

• Metropolis (also from 1927),

continued this theme.

Directors such as

• Fritz Lang,

• GW Pabst,

• Paul Leni, and

• Robert Wiene,

and actors such as Conrad Veidt and Max Schreck, defined this movement.

Sunrise director FW Murnau was part of it.

About FW Murnau

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was educated in both Berlin and Heidelberg. He did some acting. During the war he was both a company commander and a combat pilot. He spent time in a Swiss POW camp, where he first wrote a screenplay. After the war, he and Veidt started a film studio.

Murnau’s first big hit was the 1922 horror film Nosferatu, starring Schreck as a version of Dracula. Bram Stoker’s estate won a copyright infringement lawsuit and the studio went bankrupt, but a copy avoided destruction and was replicated worldwide.

Murnau followed it up with The Last Laugh and Faust, films where he introduced a subjective POV in his cinematography and dynamic camera motion.

In 1926, he came to America and Fox Films in Hollywood, where he filmed Sunrise.

He died in a car crash in 1931, only four years after making the film.

Sunrise: a huge set and sound on film

Fox head William Fox, after screening Laugh in New York, recruited Murnau, hoping for an Expressionist film from him. Fox offered a six-figure contract and complete creative control.

Carl Mayer’s screenplay, from a 1917 short story, concerns marital infidelity and reconciliation. George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor and Margaret Livingston star.

Production took five months. Murnau shot at Lake Arrowhead, California, but he also built an enormous set. The city street alone allegedly cost around two hundred thousand dollars. Fox would reuse it in future films. Murnau employed depth of field and chiaroscuro lighting to evoke mood and state of mind.

He didn’t like title cards. Laugh only had one throughout the entire film. Sunrise relies on them less in its second half, but the ones he does have are used creatively.

In the same year that The Jazz Singer popularized sound in motion pictures, Sunrise came with a synchronized, sound-on-film system. “Movietone” combined the visuals of the film with Hugo Riesenfeld’s score, plus sound effects. Fox Films bought the system the year before. Sunrise was the first to utilize it.

Sunrise splits Best Picture at the first Oscars

The first Academy Awards commenced in 1929, honoring the best films from August 1927 through July 1928. The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles hosted the private ceremony.

Wings won “Outstanding Picture,” but Sunrise, in the only time the top honor was divided, won “Best Unique and Artistic Picture,” a category similar to, but distinct from, Outstanding Picture. (Think of the difference, for example, between Avatar and The Hurt Locker.) The category has never been used since.

Gaynor won Best Actress, not only for Sunrise, but two other films, 7th Heaven and Street Angel. Sunrise also won for Cinematography, by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss.

In 1989, the film entered the National Film Registry.

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Also in 1927:

• Douglas Fairbanks founds the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

• Abel Gance’s Napoleon includes a sequence projected onto three screens at once.

• Clara Bow stars in It and Wings.

• Barbara Stanwyck and Mickey Rooney make their first films.

• Sidney Poitier and Janet Leigh are born.

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July 2: The year 1984 in pop culture.

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