Stars: George O'Brien (The Man), Janet Gaynor (The Wife), Margaret Livingston (The Woman from the City)
Director: F. W. Murnau
Awards / Honors
- 3 Oscar wins - Oustanding Picture (Unique and Artistic Production), Best Actress (Janet Gaynor), Best Cinematography
- 1 Additional Oscar Nomination - Best Art Direction
- #63 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions list (2002)
- #82 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list (2007)
- In 1989, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.
Genre: Romantic Drama (Silent)
Running Time: 1 Hour, 35 Minutes
Format: DVD, Blu-ray (see below)
Odyssey Rating: 4 1/2 Stars (John - 5 Stars, Beth - 4 Stars)
John's Take
It wouldn’t surprise me if a large number of you have never heard of this movie. I didn’t recognize it at first when I started compiling this list. Once I finally did recognize it, the only thing I would have been able to tell you about it was it is the film that Brad Pitt watches near the end of An Interview with a Vampire. Considering that the movie is 83 years old, wasn’t a huge box office hit, and despite being one of the first movies with synchronized sound effects and musical soundtrack, was overshadowed historically by the dialog and singing of The Jazz Singer, perhaps it is a bit understandable that it isn’t the most recognizable movie on this list. That is unfortunate since Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is not only a really excellent movie, but it is historically very important as well. The following quote is first portion of Robert Ebert’s review of this film:
The camera's freedom to move is taken for granted in these days of the Steadicam, the lightweight digital camera, and even special effects that reproduce camera movement. A single unbroken shot can seem to begin with an entire city and end with a detail inside a window – consider the opening of "Moulin Rouge!" (2001). But the camera did not move so easily in the early days.
The cameras employed in the first silent films were lightweight enough to be picked up and carried, but moving them was problematic because they were attached to the cameraman, who was cranking them by hand. Camera movement was rare; the camera would pan from a fixed position. Then came tracking shots – the camera literally mounted on rails, so that it could be moved along parallel to the action. But a camera that was apparently weightless, that could fly, that could move through physical barriers – that kind of dreamlike freedom had to wait until almost the last days of silent films. And then, when the talkies came and noisy sound cameras had to be sealed in soundproof booths, it was lost again for several years.
F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" conquered time and gravity with a freedom that was startling to its first audiences. To see it today is to be astonished by the boldness of its visual experimentation. Murnau was one of the greatest of the German expressionists; his "Nosferatu" (1922) invented the vampire movie, and his "The Last Laugh" (1924) became famous for doing away altogether with intertitles and telling the story entirely with images.
Summoned to the United States by William Fox to make a film for his new studio, Murnau worked with the cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss to achieve an extraordinary stylistic breakthrough. The Murnau admirer Todd Ludy wrote: "The motion picture camera – for so long tethered by sheer bulk and naïveté – had with 'Sunrise' finally learned to fly."
(You can read the entire review here.)
So, how does such an important, award winning, and critically acclaimed movie end up becoming relatively obscure? I partially blame The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for this. Despite being, to quote their website, “dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures”, occasionally it does fall victim to its most common criticism: that the Academy and the Awards exist to simply stroke Hollywood egos and that the results reflect how well each studio manipulated the voting more than a real effort to reward great artistic merit. How the Academy has handled Sunrise bears that out a bit.
To illustrate this, we need a little history lesson concerning the Oscars. T he very first Academy Awards were presented 81 years ago, on May 16th, 1929. It was not nearly the extravagant a production we are now accustomed to. The very first event was actually just a private dinner. The award ceremony itself was only about 15 minutes long and it wasn’t broadcast in any fashion. In fact, the winners had been announced months before. Since it was the very first award ceremony, films released during the two pervious years were eligible, unlike the modern awards which are only given to movies released the previous year. Thus, despite being released in 1927, Sunrise was eligible for the very first Academy Awards.
There were a number of other differences as well, but the one that applies to this film was the fact that there were not one, but two “Best Picture” awards – Outstanding Picture (Production) and Outstanding Picture (Unique and Artistic Production). Outstanding Picture (Production) was won by the film Wings and the Outstanding Picture (Unique and Artistic Production) award was given to Sunrise. But if you go look at Wikipedia or any number of other sources you will find that only Wings is listed as the winner of Best Picture. Why is that? It seems that even the first Academy Awards were not immune to Hollywood hubris.
You see, the producers and studio heads were far more interested in who won the Outstanding Picture (Production) award. That was the award they would receive. It was the award that said “Mr. Producer, you did the best job this year”. The powers-that-be really didn’t care that much who won the award for the most “artistic” film. In fact, MGM head Louis B. Mayer (who helped found the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences by the way), disliked his studio’s nominee for the Unique and Artistic Production award, King Vidor's The Crowd, and cared so little about the award itself that he pressured the judges not to honor his own studio's film, and to select Sunrise instead.
Due in part to the extreme interest in the Production award and the lack of interest in the Unique and Artistic Production award by the movers-and-shakers of the day, the next year a single “Best Picture” award was instituted. It was decided retroactively that the award won by Wings had been the equivalent of that award. Thus, Wings almost always listed as the winner of a sole Best Picture award. Even the Academy’s own website lists only Wings. In other words, the organization that claims to promote the artistic merits of film doesn’t openly acknowledge the only time they gave a “Best Picture” award that was supposedly based only on artistic merit. Something is wrong with this.
Sunrise just seems to forever be the perpetual runner-up. It was runner-up historically to The Jazz Singer on technical merits. I t was runner-up to Wings as far as the Oscars are concerned. It even tends to be runner-up to its director’s other films like Nosferatu. Forever destined to languish in “art house film” purgatory – a fate it doesn’t deserve.
Its story is rather simple – fable-like would be a better description – and it is a definitely a “chick flic”. That being said, it is one of those rare occurrences in Hollywood where entertainment and art combine to form something really outstanding. The film is currently only available in the U.S. on DVD, however, if you want to check it out on Blu-ray, it was released in that format in the UK and you can buy it on Amazon.uk. The British Blu-ray disc was produced unregionalized so it will work in most American Blu-ray players (check your player’s documentation to be sure). I own it, and I am very happy with it.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is currently running neck and neck with A Night at the Opera for “surprise hit” of the list so far and it receives a ranking of 5 Stars from me.
John
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