Rising as the Sun Sets

This was written for the Muriel Awards Hall of Fame vote this month. This was among my nominees for inclusion, so I got the job of writing about it.

I always think of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans with a fair degree of melancholy. It’s one of the glories of the cinema, sure. But it’s also a kind elegy for silent films as they were about to be swept into the dustbin of history. Silent film had developed to a high degree of visual sophistication by the time Sunrise appeared and that sophistication is imprinted on every single frame of the film. Unfortunately, Sunrise appeared a month after The Jazz Singer. It was obsolete on arrival, arguably the last fireworks display of the era. The camera that Murnau had liberated from its moorings on the floor of the studio was remounted there as film had to learn everything over again to accommodate sound.

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American Landscapes

It took me a while to come around to F. W. Murnau. I've never really liked Nosferatu, which certainly brands me as a heretic in both horror spaces and among film critic types. I didn't much like the second film I saw by the director, either. That was The Haunted Castle, made a few years prior to Nosferatu. I liked Faust quite a bit. It had that grandiosity that only silent mega productions seem to have had and it was chock full of special effects. The young horror punk I used to be really dug all of this, but it didn't illuminate Murnau for me, not in any substantial way. Sunrise, on the other hand, blew me away. I came to Sunrise as an adult. I'm glad that I came to it after I had grown enough as a film-watcher to really "get" it, but even so, watching Sunrise was a surreal experience for me. All the while I was watching it, I was trying to reconcile the fact that this deliriously romantic reinvention of cinema was the work of the same man who made Nosferatu. I think the barrier was the fact that Murnau was a horror director in my then-insufficient understanding of film. I hadn't seen the quantum leaps the director was taking in films like The Last Laugh, because they were outside my tidy little personal taxonomy. In other words: in this as in many other things, the younger me was an idiot.

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