Sunrise

Though F.W. Murnau’s 1927 silent Sunrise – A Song of Two Humans won the very first Academy Award (for “Best Unique and Artistic Picture”), it was a commercial failure, having the misfortune to debut mere days before legendary “first talkie” The Jazz Singer. Sunrise came to represent both the crowning achievement and the last gasp of a format bound, in the wake of talkie fever, to inevitably die. Murnau himself died in a car crash not long after, and, these days, he’s remembered by a new generation mainly via Shadow of the Vampire, which crassly “re-imagines” him as a murderous megalomaniac who – get this! – cast an actual vampire in that old movie Nosferatu! Slighted by the American Film Institute, whose recent list of “The 100 Greatest American Movies” made no mention of the first Oscar-winner (though it found slots for both Forrest Gump and Dances with Wolves), Sunrise has now become video-store treasure, buried somewhere in the “classics” section, waiting to be rediscovered and marveled at. The film’s love-triangle storyline (involving a farmer, his wife, and a murderously seductive flapper) is, while powerful, as paper-thin as a folktale, and its simple framework is the perfect vehicle for Murnau’s stunning visual inventiveness, which fills every frame with gorgeously intricate sets, sweeping pans, and extensive use of 1920s eye-candy like cross fades and rear projection. As Murnau’s camera gracefully swirls, glides, and dissolves, his film begins to take on the rhythm of a dream: the seduced farmer melts into roiling black waters, a busy street transforms into a dusky grove when the lovers step into it, the starry sky reels with glittering lights and a frenetic band as the flapper rapturously describes “The City!” At its best moments, Sunrise reaches a fever pitch of ecstatic visual poetry never quite equaled since. In fact, with the advent of talkies, the poetic, hypnotized flow of silent films – which barely required any dialogue at all – instantly became beside the point. Today, the elegant choreography of actors and cameras that Murnau perfected is a lost art with no living disciples, and Sunrise, his masterpiece, remains a romantic, enthralling dead end.