Style
Sunrise was made by F. W. Murnau, a German director who was one of the leading figures in German Expressionism, a style that uses distorted art design for symbolic effect. Murnau was invited by William Fox to make an Expressionist film in Hollywood.
The resulting film features enormous stylized sets that create an exaggerated, fairy-tale world; the city street set alone reportedly cost over US$200,000 to build and was re-used in many subsequent Fox productions including John Ford's Four Sons (1928). Much of the exterior shooting was done at Lake Arrowhead, California.
Full of cinematic innovations, some have called it the Citizen Kane of American silent cinema. The groundbreaking cinematography (by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss) featured particularly impressive tracking shots that influenced later filmmakers, including the longest continuous tracking shot made up to that point: over four minutes in one take. Titles appear sparingly, with long sequences of pure action and the bulk of the story told in Murnau's signature style. The extensive use of forced perspective is striking, particularly in a shot of the City with normal-sized people and sets in the foreground and smaller figures in the background by much smaller sets.
The characters go unnamed, lending them a universality conducive to symbolism. Veit Harlan compared his German remake Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939), pointing to the symbolism and soft focus of Sunrise he claimed that it was a poem, whereas his realistic Die Reise nach Tilsit was a film.
Read more about this topic: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“I concluded that I was skilled, however poorly, at only one thing: marriage. And so I set about the business of selling myself and two children to some unsuspecting man who might think me a desirable second-hand mate, a man of good means and disposition willing to support another man’s children in some semblance of the style to which they were accustomed. My heart was not in the chase, but I was tired and there was no alternative. I could not afford freedom.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)