Director: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Script: Carl Mayer (from the short story Die Reise nach Tilsit by Hermann Sudermann)

Camera: Charles Rosher, Karl Struss

Cast: George O`Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

Film was screened in Riga, St. John’s church September 13 at 18:00
and in Liepaja, Church of the Holy Trinity September 16 at 19:19 by the musical accompaniment of Aivars Kalējs (organ).

USA, 1927, 95 min, F

The sun rises in the closing scene of the film Sunrise – like a halo, it wraps around the head of a young woman who has lost and regained the love of her husband. The all-embracing light is the happy end to this symbolic tale of a battle between day and night, love and passion, tradition and modernity, the country and the city; at the same time the decorative rays of the sun symbolise one of the most famous and significant films in the history of world cinema.

In its time rejected by the public and with conflicting reviews by the critics, today Murnau’s film has matured to become an icon of 20th century art, a model for visual expression and artistic possibilities in film.
The film, the storyline of which is based on melodramatic oppositions, also was itself created as a controversial artistic text. Murnau was one of the most prominent representatives of German expressionist cinema, who surprised the world with his brilliant black and white sketches in a natural setting in the film Nosferatu (1922), and, particularly with his ability to use the camera like a pen in the film The Last Laugh (1924), demonstrating that cinema without words can describe not only the outer world, but can also become a mirror for the thoughts and feelings of a person.

In the 1920s, Hollywood actively enticed famous masters of German cinema in an attempt to add artistic depth to a perfectly-built entertainment industry. Sunrise, Murnau’s first film in the USA, became FOX studios’ most expensive production, with the director allowed total creative freedom, while his crew was provided amazing technological opportunities – alongside the filming of complex models and sets in various scales, mobility of the camera and multiple exposures, the film was also one of the first which had a musical accompaniment recorded as a sound track. Although the film did not cover costs (and Murnau’s creative freedom ended along with this), Hollywood producers were nevertheless proud of Sunrise as a real work of art, as proof that the poetics of film are just as rich as those of music and literature, and that this can also be found in American cinema.

Inga Pērkone