Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

cassandra3.5

Mood: sobbing while eating bread next to my husband who just tried to murder me five minutes ago to live with the City girl he's been cheating on me with

Mike D'Angelo4.5

88/100What a truly odd structure this film has. In theory, it should end at roughly the midpoint, following the scene in the church—everything is resolved, both narratively and emotionally, once the Man essentially renews his vows by proxy. Instead, the second half depicts one glorious night in the couple's happily ever after, followed by a climactic crisis that not only isn't directly related (except symbolically) to the Man's prior faithlessness, but concludes with the Woman being ironically saved by his careful preparations for same. It shouldn't work at all, and if I force myself to take a few steps back, it really doesn't, gestalt-wise. (Hence the missing half-star.) Hard to focus on the big picture, though, when the actual pictures right in front of you are so unfailingly spectacular. There's scarcely a non-stunning frame in the entire movie—at one point, I gasped aloud at a simple shot of the Man and Woman being seated at a restaurant table, which looks like something Roy Andersson might have spent six months painstakingly designing and constructing. Masterful continuity editing is perfectly balanced with jawdropping long shots that employ...actually, I don't know what Murnau did to achieve the illusion of deep focus here. (In the case of the dog racing after the rowboat, he lets movement do the work in the blurrier background plane. Still extraordinary, if only because just about every one of his contemporaries would have tossed in a closer shot of the dog in an effort to generate excitement.) Don't get me wrong—I'm glad people have continued to make movies for the past 90 years. Not really sure that they needed to, though. Formally speaking, Sunrise is a mic drop for the medium if there ever was one.

aleph beth null1.5

watching this immediately after le bonheur sure was a trip. i’m convinced murnau thought of this as humanist but it comes across as resoundingly opposed—premeditated acts of domestic violence are easily forgiven and brushed over by people everywhere! wow. it’s… the circle of life?i mean. the man buries his sobbing face in the woman’s lap and she reassures him with every maternal image possible and she gives and gives and gives of herself… i don’t know. i was sobbing by the midpoint reconciliation not in relief but in sheer terror for her safety. apologies, even desperately tearful ones, change nothing. the man actually CUTS ANOTHER PERSON in the coffee shop for flirting with his wife. he tried to choke the woman from the city before his epiphany; he tries to choke her again well after. i just… that’s a pattern of behaviour that doesn’t get turned around by a single decision in a church pew. that’s the lie in the standard evangelical christian testimony. and i… can’t overlook that in favour of these admittedly transcendent images. because this might be just about the most dazzling formalism but it’s in service of horrifically enmeshed decision theology and genuinely dangerous understandings of forgiveness. i wish i could separate the two. but expressionist tone poems are built on emotional resonance so it’s kind of important that they’re careful with it, you know?