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 openin

g 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 Cabine

t 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 Baileyhttp://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 character.

Peter Bradshaw http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,1141579,00.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=/20040411/REVIEWS08/404110301/1023

1.*John Bailey *superimposed images2.It's very broad melodrama, and the realism of spoken di

alogue 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.