Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Before it arrived, this archive held only five silents, four of them from the 1920s, and not one about an ordinary married couple. Sunrise fills that gap — and picks up the question The Piano leaves behind: what do you do with someone who cannot say what they want?

湖边有个小农场，农夫和妻子住在那儿，养鸡、种地、带孩子。夏天，一个从城里来度假的女人住进村里，她比这里所有人都更懂得怎么说话。她教他划船到湖心，教他把船弄翻，教他怎么让这件事看上去像一场意外。他答应了。 第二天一早，他跟妻子说要进城办事，两个人上了船。湖很大，雾很重，桨在水里划了很久。

At the first Academy Awards in 1929 the Academy handed out two top prizes: Outstanding Picture and Unique and Artistic Picture. Sunrise took the latter — a category that existed only once. Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress award, granted for her work across Seventh Heaven, Sunrise and Street Angel combined; Charles Rosher and Karl Struss won Best Cinematography. Its standing has only hardened: eleventh on the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll, thirty-third on the directors' poll, eighty-second on AFI's tenth-anniversary list, and added to the National Film Registry in 1989. Technically it was a gamble. Murnau brought German Expressionist staging to Fox, which gave him enormous stylised sets — the city street alone reportedly cost over $200,000 to build and was reused in later Fox productions. Much of the exterior work was shot at Lake Arrowhead. He chose the new Movietone sound-on-film system and used it for a synchronised score and effects rather than dialogue: in 1927, when sound was still a novelty act, he made the environment speak and kept his people silent.