One of the notable developments in 1920s Hollywood history was the importation of European talent. Postwar European cinema had produced a wealth of remarkable films, particularly in Germany, where the devastation of the war years inspired a wave of haunting Expressionist imagery on the screen. Hollywood studio bosses were quick to notice this dark, rich visual poetry, and successfully lured some of the top German directors and cameramen to work in American studios. One celebrated German import was director F.W. Murnau, whose international reputation rested on classics like Nosferatu and Faust. Murnau represented a significant catch for the Fox studio, and he arrived in America on a wave of high expectations.

Those expectations were utterly transcended by Murnau’s first American production: Sunrise, which emerged as one of the all-time cinematic classics of any country or any period. Produced with all the resources of a major Hollywood studio, this film seemed a climactic summary of the lavish visual poetry of contemporary German cinema—not surprisingly, for along with Murnau, it boasted a full complement of German film luminaries: scenarist Carl Mayer, art director Rochus Gliese, and Herman Bing and Edgar G. Ulmer as assistants to Murnau. Some of these men would go on to distinguished Hollywood careers of their own.

The sumptuous visuals of Sunrise were captured on film by Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, two of the top cameramen in the business. During the 1920s, the craft of visual-effects magic had come into its own in Hollywood, and Sunrise represents a triumph of studio artifice. Although some of the picture was filmed in natural settings, other parts of the story’s rustic environment were actually constructed on the Fox stages. A marshland setting, appearing to stretch away for miles, is one such studio set. Karl Struss later revealed that his camera was suspended from an overhead track to shoot the marsh scenes. As the farmer goes to meet his illicit lover, the camera travels with him in a smooth, sweeping movement that would have been impossible in a real swamp. Later the farmer and his wife travel to a bustling “city” that is actually another set, its buildings constructed with forced perspective to suggest great distances.

This wizardry exercised a profound influence on other Hollywood filmmakers of the late 1920s—not least Murnau’s fellow directors at Fox, who adopted some of his techniques, and even some of his standing sets, in their own productions. The filmmaking community at large registered its approbation of Murnau’s work at the first Academy Awards ceremony, honoring films of the 1927–28 season. For that first year of the famous awards, there was no “Best Picture” category; instead the Academy created two separate distinctions. The award for “Most Outstanding Production” went to the World War I aviation picture Wings, another feature in our series this weekend. Sunrise, with its surpassing visual poetry, won the award for “Most Artistic Quality of Production.”

Of course the technical virtuosity of Murnau and his crew, as impressive as it was, was not enough in itself to win this film the classic status it enjoys today. Sunrise is not merely an empty display of technique; instead its artistry is at the service of a compelling story—“A Song of Two Humans,” as the film’s subtitle has it. I’ll avoid spoilers here; suffice it to reveal that the story depicts a simple farmer and his wife, happy in their marriage until a woman from the city arrives to tempt the farmer away from his home. This of course is a common enough premise in

fiction and in film; what sets this film apart is the telling of the tale, suffused with Expressionist beauty and grounded in moving performances by its cast. By 1927 George O’Brien had established his star status as the breezy, likable hero of Westerns and other action pictures; here, cast against type, he delivers a haunting performance as the conscience-stricken farmer. Janet Gaynor’s quiet, luminous portrayal of the wife (along with two other performances, under the Academy’s original rules) earned her the first “Best Actress” Academy Award.

All these factors combine in Sunrise to create an unforgettable cinematic experience. This movie illustrates the superiority of silent film in telling an emotional story: its ability to lift its characters out of the commonplace and onto a higher symbolic level. Where spoken dialogue might have tied these characters to a specific time and place, their appearance here elevates them and their story to a universal plane, a shared expression of common human experience. Audiences, then and now, are frequently brought to tears by the ultimate resolution of the story. And when the picture ends with its final symbolic sunrise, it is, as one critic has written, “like the face of God bursting through the screen.”

Sunrise

Fox, 1927. Director: F.W. Murnau. Scenario: Carl Mayer, based on “The Trip to Tilsit” by Hermann Sudermann. Camera: Charles Rosher, Karl Struss. Film editors: Katherine Hilliker, H.H. Caldwell. Cast: George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston, J. Farrell MacDonald, Ralph Sipperly, Jane Winton, Arthur Housman.