silver nitrate notes

Murnau's Sunrise and the Unchained Camera

23 mar 2011

F.W. Murnau (1888-1931) arrived in Hollywood in 1926 as a prize. William Fox had seen The Last Laugh (1924) and Faust (1926) and offered him whatever he wanted to make a film in America. What Murnau wanted was Charles Rosher (1885-1974) and Karl Struss (1886-1981) on the camera, a script from his German collaborator Carl Mayer, and the freedom to spend Fox's money on a story about a farmer who almost murders his wife.

The result was Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). At the first Academy Awards, Rosher and Struss shared the cinematography prize, Janet Gaynor took Best Actress in part for her work here, and the film won the one-time-only "Unique and Artistic Production" award. It is, by most measures, the apex of late silent cinema.

What I want to write about is the camera. Murnau brought a German concept to the Fox lot that he and his cinematographers called the entfesselte Kamera, the unchained camera. The phrase had been kicking around since The Last Laugh, where the camera ran on tracks, mounted on a bicycle, suspended from cables. Sunrise extended the practice on a scale Hollywood had not seen.

Look at the marsh sequence. The Man (George O'Brien) walks from the farmhouse to meet the Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston) for what is implicitly a planning meeting for his wife's murder. The camera does not cut to him at the meeting point. It follows him. Tracking dollies were laid through the studio marsh set. In places the camera lifts and crosses the water on a crane arm built for the production. We move with the Man through reeds, around trees, past pools. The shot is not just an unusual movement. It is a moral journey rendered in space. By the time we arrive at the Woman, the audience has walked the road of his temptation.

There are double exposures throughout, mostly handled in-camera by Rosher and Struss working in tandem. The Woman from the City appears as a half-transparent figure embracing the Man. A vision of city lights overlays the marsh. The trolley sequence in the second act overlays the city itself, with painted miniature backings sliding past a tram on a treadmill set. The technique is older than Murnau, but the integration of multiple exposure with mobile camera and emotional logic is his contribution.

Lotte Eisner, in The Haunted Screen (1952), reads Murnau's American films as a continuation of the German romantic tradition rather than a break from it. She is right that Sunrise is closer to Faust than to anything else made on a Fox soundstage in 1927. What the move to Hollywood gave Murnau was a budget large enough to extend the ideas he was already working on.

A new restoration appeared at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival and reached home video soon after. If you have not seen Sunrise on a clean print, the marsh scene alone is reason enough.

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sources
[1] Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. University of California Press, 1969 ed. of 1952 original.
[2] Eisner, Lotte. Murnau. University of California Press, 1973.
[3] Fischer, Lucy (ed.). Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Rutgers Films in Print, 1998.
[4] AFI Catalog of Feature Films, entry for Sunrise.