Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) [1080p] [Soundtrack: Timothy Brock & Olympic Chamber Orchestra]
Channel: The Cinema Cellar
Date: 2023-06-06

'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (also known as Sunrise) is a 1927 American silent romantic drama directed by German director F. W. Murnau (in his American film debut) and starring George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, and Margaret Livingston. The story was adapted by Carl Mayer from the short story "The Excursion to Tilsit", from the 1917 collection with the same title by Hermann Sudermann.

Murnau chose to use the then new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, making Sunrise one of the first feature films with a synchronized musical score and sound effects soundtrack. The film incorporated Charles Gounod's 1872 composition Funeral March of a Marionette, which was later used as the theme for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965). Frédéric Chopin's A minor prelude also features prominently in orchestral arrangement.

Sunrise won the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Picture at the 1st Academy Awards in 1929. Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in the film (the award was also for her performances in 1927's 7th Heaven and 1928's Street Angel). The film's legacy has endured, and it is now widely considered a masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. Many have called it the greatest film of the silent era. In 1989, Sunrise was one of the 25 films selected by the U.S. Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The Academy Film Archive preserved Sunrise in 2004. The 2007 update of the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films ranked it number 82, and the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll named it the fifth-best film in the history of motion pictures, while directors named it 22nd.

Although the original 35mm negative of the original American version of Sunrise was destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire, a new negative was created from a surviving print.

Cast
George O'Brien as The Man
Janet Gaynor as The Wife
Margaret Livingston as The Woman From the City
Bodil Rosing as The Maid
J. Farrell MacDonald as The Photographer
Ralph Sipperly as The Barber
Jane Winton as The Manicure Girl
Arthur Housman as The Obtrusive Gentleman
Eddie Boland as The Obliging Gentleman
Sally Eilers as Woman in Dance Hall with failing straps (uncredited)
Gino Corrado as Manager of Hair Salon (uncredited)
Herman Bing as Streetcar Conductor (uncredited)
Gibson Gowland as Angry Driver (uncredited)

Style
Sunrise was made by F. W. Murnau, a German director who was one of the leading figures in German Expressionism, a style that uses distorted art design for symbolic effect. Murnau was invited by William Fox to make an Expressionist film in Hollywood.

The resulting film features enormous stylized sets that create an exaggerated and fairy-tale world; the city street set alone reportedly cost over US$200,000 to build and was re-used in many subsequent Fox productions, including John Ford's Four Sons (1928). Much of the exterior shooting was done at Lake Arrowhead, California.

Full of cinematic innovations, the groundbreaking cinematography (by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss) features particularly praised tracking shots. Titles appear sparingly, with long sequences of pure action and the bulk of the story told in Murnau's signature style. The extensive use of forced perspective is striking, particularly in a shot of the City with normal-sized people and sets in the foreground and smaller figures in the background by much smaller sets.

The characters go unnamed, lending them a universality conducive to symbolism. Veit Harlan compared his German remake Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939); pointing to the symbolism and soft focus of the original, he claimed that Sunrise was a poem, whereas his realistic Die Reise nach Tilsit was a film.

Release
Sunrise premiered on September 23, 1927. It was accompanied by the first ever talking newsreels, which attracted much of the initial interest in the film.

Reception
Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times hailed Sunrise as "A Film Masterpiece". A reviewer for Time, however, called its story "meagre" while writing that the film overall "manages to remain picturesquely soporific for a long evening". Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is now widely considered by film critics and historians to be one of the greatest films ever made.'

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise:_A_Song_of_Two_Humans