Film Buffs Get Up For Sunrise On Friday Night
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 24, 2012 7:40PM
Did the critical success of The Artist mean that people will be more interested in silent movies? We're already seeing a few reports that more silent films are being exhibited in theaters, and LOVEFiLM (a Netflix-like rental service in the U.K.) claim rentals of silent titles are up as much as 40 percent.
All silents are not created equal, of course. If you called Sunrise the greatest silent movie ever, you would find a lot of company. In fact, we wouldn't hesitate to even call you crazy if you removed "silent" from that sentence, but that's just because you would obviously be our kind of crazy. Once you have seen the 1927 masterpiece, there is no denying its power. And if you thought the winking hamminess of George Valentin and Peppy Miller reflected what the true artists of the silent era were capable of creating, you are in for a treat.
German master F. W. Murnau was lured to Hollywood to direct Sunrise for Fox and given both popular stars George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor and a huge budget to build massive stylized sets. The result was the most expensive silent film the studio ever produced, an investment paid off with three Academy Award wins, including the first award given for Best Picture (the Academy famously gave two awards that year, one to the blockbuster Wings and one to Sunrise, designating it "Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production).
The plot is so deliberately elemental as to resemble a fairy tale that the characters are not even given names, just "The Man," "The Wife" and "The Woman From the City." Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Man is tempted away by one and then reconciled with the other, with the twists and turns of erotic desire, attempted murder and tragic loss along the way.
The performances are rendered with enough naturalism to win over any modern viewer, and the predictability of the emotional arc does not dampen its enjoyment. Murnau gracefully tugs the threads of this simple story through striking and impossibly intricate sets, and uses precious few title cards to tell us all we need to know. This is a visual expression of the highest order, a union of Murnau's consummate ability and ambition to universal storytelling with the industrial wizardry of Tinseltown.
Friday's screening will feature live musical accompaniment by veteran performer and scorer of silent cinema Matti Bye. We adore live accompaniment for silent movies, but we always scratch our heads a bit when there are original performances for Sunrise. The film was the first feature to have an audio (principally musical) track included right on the film, and Hugo Riesenfeld's score is memorable and effective. Bye isn't the only one tackling the idea this year, so we may be the only ones who find this at all peculiar.
Sunrise is a masterpiece of twentieth century art, and a movie we would recommend to anybody. Selected for the National Film Registry in its very first list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films" back in 1989, it clocks in at #7 on the Sight and Sound critics' poll (a poll that has a special place for a lot of film buffs). If The Artist made you realize that a lack of dialog is nothing to be afraid of, Sunrise will blow you away.
Sunrise with live musical accompaniment by Matti Bye plays Friday, April 27, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. at Block Cinema at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive in Evanston.