Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

20th Century Fox DVD screen capture

WHO: William Fox produced this film and F.W. Murnau directed it.

WHAT: One of those rarities of cinema: a technical marvel with a living, beating heart. As I wrote in my 2009 essay on this film when it screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Valentine's Day event:

Charles Rosher, one of the top cinematographers in Hollywood, had spent time with Murnau in Berlin serving as an unofficial consultant on Faust, the director’s most effects-laden film to date. Rosher worked alongside Murnau as a student as much as an advisor, learning about the innovative German camera methods that amazed American critics and filmmakers. 

Rosher recruited Ben-Hur cinematographer Karl Struss to help him shoot Sunrise on Rochus Gliese’s elaborate sets. Gliese built a vast indoor city set designed to appear even larger through the use of forced perspective. It cost $200,000—nearly the entire budget of a typical program picture of the day. He also created a studio-bound marsh with an uneven floor that could not accommodate a dolly setup. Instead, tracks were attached to the ceiling and Struss filmed upside-down, a maneuver Rosher had observed on the Faust set. It was only one of many radical techniques used in Sunrise. Nearly every shot in the film involves a striking effect, whether from an unusual light source, a superimposition, or a complex camera movement. Yet each is motivated by allegiance to the story and its emotions. Murnau told an interviewer, “I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on screen.”

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Stanford Theatre at 3:50 PM.

WHY: The Stanford is halfway through its most appealing and ambitious program in at least the past 18 months: a tribute to the twenty year reign of the Fox Film Corporation, which began releasing films in 1915 and ceased in 1935, when it merged with the lesser-known upstart Twentieth Century Pictures. So far the series has brought little-screened films featuring stars such as Clara Bow, Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Janet Gaynor, the luminous star of Sunrise who rose from her roots in San Francisco (where she went to Polytechnic High School and was employed by the Castro Theatre) to become the first Best Actress Oscar winner for this film as well as Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. All three of these masterpieces will be screened at the Stanford in 35mm prints as part of its Silent Sunday series, and I can hardly imagine a better introduction to most of these films if you've never seen them before, or to the Stanford if you've never traveled to Palo Alto to visit it before. Gaynor also features in The Johnstown Flood, the rarest of the Stanford's Silent Sunday offerings (on a double bill with Seventh Heaven December 6th) and Lucky Star, which screens with Murnau's lovely final film made in the United States, City Girl, to close the Fox Film Corporation series December 20th as the Stanford moves into its traditional Christmastime screenings: The Shop Around the Corner, It's A Wonderful Life, etc.

Dennis James, Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire, has been performing live music to all the Stanford's Silent Sundays screenings thus far, and will continue to do so for the final three Sundays of the series. Today he gets a week off, as the Stanford has elected to screen Sunrise not with live music but with the pioneering sound-on-film Movietone score that was prepared for the film's original 1927 release in the United States. This score is beloved by many fans of Sunrise but I find it merely adequate and more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an artistic statement. I'm swayed by Janet Bergstrom's research that indicates it was quite possibly not, as is frequently assumed today, prepared by famous composer Hugo Riesenfeld, who definitely composed the musical score for Murnau's swan song Tabu: a Story of the South Seas. To me, it sounds like a mostly-pedestrian compilation score whose tendency to be overwhelmed by non-musical sound effects destroys some of Murnau's poetic treatment of soundless sound in the film (such as in the scene of George O'Brien reacting to an off-screen dog bark, as pictured above). I always found it interesting that Dennis James has so frequently spoken of his insistence on performing originally-composed scores to silent films for which scholars have found them, but often ignores his own rules when it comes to Movietone or Vitaphone soundtracks, having played his own scores to Sunrise and to West of Zanzibar when at the SF Silent Film Festival in 2009. In the case of Sunrise, perhaps he feels (and if so, I agree) that the Movietone score that premiered in New York is less sacrosanct than the live score performed in Los Angeles would be were it not lost to the sands of time.

In fact more notable on today's Silent Sunday docket is the presentation of the almost universally beloved Movietone score to John Ford's heartbreaking, Sunrise-esque World War I picture Four Sons, which was to the disappointment of many excluded from the 2007 DVD release of the film. Rarely screened in any form, Four Sons will be for many attendees today the real gem of the program; I've only seen it once myself and never in a cinema, but still I can imagine myself being among them despite my deep, abiding love for Sunrise.

Other upcoming Stanford screenings of particular note include the wonderful Me & My Gal this Wednesday and Thursday, my favorite Janet Gaynor talkie (heck, one of my all-time favorite films as well) State Fair on December 18-19, and most unusually a December 4-5 triple bill of the rumored-excellent Zoo in Budapest along with Seventh Heaven/Street Angel/Lucky Star director Frank Borzage's bizarre 1930 version of Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom as well as Fritz Lang's 1934 version (which I have yet to see). The last of these is a real surprise to see on a Stanford calendar, as it's not a Fox film at all but Lang's sole film made in France on his way out of Germany and into Hollywood. In my fifteen years or so of following the Stanford calendars I'm positive this is the first time I've seen a French film booked for a theatre that in my experience focuses exclusively on classic Hollywood and British productions with the two notable auteurist exceptions of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Given that I have to stretch to imagine any other currently-operating Frisco Bay cinemas willing to book a 1934 French film in 35mm, I welcome this development wholeheartedly.

Luckily, although the Liliom/Zoo in Budapest/Liliom bill screens on the same day as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's December 5th "Day of Silents", it also screens the day before, so it won't be necessary to miss a rare 35mm screening of the Anna May Wong vehicle Piccadilly, or the other offerings at the Castro Theatre that day. I'm excited to revisit Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate, this time with Alloy Orchestra accompaniment and introduced by Tracey Goessel, whose new Fairbanks biography The First King of Hollywood I'm in the midst of devouring. Also to see rare documentary footage of China and a Harry Houdini feature The Grim Game. And if you've never seen Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine on a cinema screen it's worth it for the set design alone. Alloy Orchestra takes on musical duties for that one as well; the rest go to the terrific pianist Donald Sosin.

The Day of Silents is just the first cinephile-catnip program on a December full of goodies at the Castro Theatre. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre with Michael Mann's The Keep, Noir City Xmas pairing The Reckless Moment and Kiss of Death, December 17th Stop Making Sense and Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave and a twisted Christmas booking of Brazil and Eyes Wide Shut are some of the more enticing all-35mm double-bills there this month. The venue also hosts the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco show December 9th and will ring in January with a set of Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces. But even more than all of those, I'm finding myself most excited for a digital presentation of a San Francisco cult classic that deserves to be far better known than it is. I'm speaking of course of Curt McDowell's Thundercrack!, starring (and scripted and lit by) the great underground film icon George Kuchar. It screens twice with director McDowell's sister Melinda and his frequent collaborator Mark Ellinger on hand at (I'm told) both shows, but only the evening show will be hosted by the one and only Peaches Christ. Even if you have no awareness of Thundercrack!, the most entertaining "Old Dark House"-style quasi-pornographic art film ever to get Fox News in a tizzy, this is a rare opportunity to see a Peaches Christ show for less than $20. Mark December 11th on your calendar- in ink!

There's a lot more happening in December at other Frisco Bay venues, but for now I'd better sign off. But in case I don't have time to put up another post before this Tuesday, December 1st, I want to point out that, with the help of other Artists' Television Access volunteers, I'll be helping to present a free 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's untoppably topical 1983 documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel at the Noe Valley Public Library, and I hope you can make it out that evening.

HOW: Sunrise screens on a 35mm double-bill with Four Sons.

Man's Castle (1933)

WHO: Frank Borzage is still underrated. Given his importance to Hollywood during the 1920s and 30s (he was the first person to win two Academy Awards for Best Direction), and his distinctive mastery of the medium, his name should be as recognizable as Frank Capra's or Ernst Lubitsch's, but for some reason none of his films have entered our cultural memory like some of those directors' have.

WHAT: My friend Ryland Walker Knight wrote a fine appreciation a few years back, that included these lovely sentences:

Man's Castle takes on characteristics of its male lead, a young Spencer Tracy, unspooling with patient bemusement and gruff shades of guile. Tracy plays Bill, a man who lives clean and free, taking whatever job will feed him, living most nights under the stars.

Bill and Trina (played by Loretta Young) represent two very different outlooks (gendered, perhaps) on poverty during the worst year of the Great Depression; their struggle to reconcile their philosophies as they form a family unit is at the heart of this film (the heart is always at the heart of a Borzage film), and as Ryland notes, makes this story a universal one applicable to any era or area.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:00 tonight only at the Roxie.

WHY: This week's Pre-Code series is not only an opportunity to see American society reflected in a mirror unclouded by the paternal haze of the censor, but a chance to see how some of the best Hollywood filmmakers responded to the rapid changes in available technology during the first several years of sync sound-on-film. Already we've seen how experimenters with cinematic language like Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Florey, Josef Von Sternberg, and William Wellman responded to the challenge of making images that could keep up with the provocative dialogue their actors were speaking, and tonight we get to see another confident hand at work on this problem.

Borzage is generally less ostentatious than these others in this period, but there's no doubt his stylistic flourishes play a major part in the feelings he evokes from his scenario. The last time I saw Man's Castle, in the midst of a Borzage retrospective, I was inspired to write an article on his contributions to Hollywood style, later republished here; it's one of my most-frequently-referred posts, which I think says a lot about the paucity of writing on the formal qualities of this director's work. I've read and watched a lot more since, and am not sure if I'd take the same line of argument. Who knows what I might be inspired to say after another viewing tonight.

HOW: Tonight's double-bill of Man's Castle and Virtue (starring Carole Lombard) is all-35mm.

BANG BANG: Ryland Walker Knight

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Earlier this week my Indiewire ballot appeared. I still stand by it, I suppose, but even just a week after publication I itch to change things. In fact, the whole enterprise gives me hives to a certain degree. The whole idea of absolutes in general, in any context. If you take a look at that list, you'll see a collection of films, I'd wager, premised on contingency, or some form of mystery or mess or exuberance. Even the more "straight" narratives (Cronenberg's & Jacobs' portrait-films) exhibit an interest in how things do not fit, or ever fix into reliable—much less accepted, normal—forms. Perhaps the best term I can reduce this idea to is a favorite on this blog: navigation. Life's not a maze, but there are hurdles every day, including waking up, not to mention the unexpected tidal wave every so often. We're so used to the narratives we're given or that we give ourselves that eluding the unwanted can wreck a day, a month, a year. (Lucky me: my year saw hiccups and headaches but nothing got wrecked. Truth is, I had a fantastic year. And I'm grateful.) Naturally, I'm attracted to films about finding ways through life.
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Finding a way to make movie-going more a part of my movie-watching has been difficult this year, the past couple years. Granted, I got to attend Cannes. But the pleasures of that were certainly "extracurricular" as much as within the salles and theaters. The dinners, the new friends, the jokes over whiskey and rosé with Danny and Adrian after long days. But I still cherish movie-going.

Early last week, in fact, I had the supreme pleasure to take in one of the best double bills in recent memory at the Roxie Theatre (with Brian, yes): the early show was Borzage's Moonrise followed by Renoir's first H'wood venture, the insanely under-seen and apparently under-recognized Swamp Water. Two films about the south made by not-southerners that understand the south and southerners in ways you rarely see anymore. (Of course, I'm not a southerner; I'm a Californian. My Okie roots are roots and my relationship to GA/SC is tertiary at best.) But aside from any obtuse anthropological/ethnological reading I can offer, the films exist and excel simply as films. Borzage's at his Murnau best and Renoir is at his dollies-everywhere (and "people as people") best. And they spoke to one another in delicious ways the way a double bill is supposed to work. Steve Seid usually knows what he's doing but this was a special program. The swamp has different narrative functions in the films, but in both the swamp is a hunting ground, a space of violence, something untamable that few can master or at least negotiate (or inhabit!). Again, this speaks to how I see the world at large. Life takes skills we never anticipate requiring, but nonetheless accrue. True to this optimism I harbor—inside an unavoidable but I hope healthy cynicism w/r/t life's obstacles, including people (above all people?)—both protagonists of these films find ways to join the world by their stories' ends.

Then again, not every path is a success. The film I felt worst about leaving off my "official" top ten was Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. That movie's all about the disconnect we're forced to confront as we grow through adolescence. It's about a lot more, too, including light, but there's a violence in adolescence that it understands (something Haz and I talk about as he is a teacher). This is true of all the Yang pictures I've seen, but this one is obviously special. Its length affords its narrative the space for us to observe characters rationalize their way through choices good and bad alike (though mostly bad) all the way. This is what critics mean when they call a film novelistic: time affording space for character. Granted, that's a limited view of what "the novel" is or can be, but this film in particular, as with many likewise classified films, is after a Dickensian kind of scope forever grounded in place and details. This, too, is how best to think of something like Breaking Bad, which Jen talked about yesterday.

Television, after all, is serialized much how the early money-making novels were; both are strategized as much as constructed with plot doled out in delimited chunks. But, as Jen noted, one of the pleasures of BB is just how digressive it is, how much air time is given to behavior and go-nowhere episodes of bickering. And it's not like this show's hopeful. It's got a pretty grim take on human desire and nature and intelligence. As I've said before, these characters are idiots. Walter White seems to have figured out a few things watching Gus operate, like the cost of survival in such a dangerous game as the drug racket, but he's still a bald, selfish, myopic stranger to himself and his oh-so-beloved family by the end of this last season. And the person he's closest to has every reason in the world to want to slit his throat.
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I've been using my tumblr more than this home base throughout the year. Part of it is simply ease of use. Another is desire. The last is time. I like the scrapbook/notebook feel of the microblog. It feels like a repository of reminders. And it usually takes very little effort. Writing here is more work. (Writing anything is work!) Not sure what the new year will bring, but I'm not quite ready to quit my baby. But I quit making zines to make this blog and I may wind up quitting this blog to wind up making more films. Even if they're just little goofs about the sounds of seagulls or odd poems about light and memory. The future has more answers than me.
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One thing I know for sure: though I've made some great friends via emails (cf. this week), there's a lot I'm proud of from this past year outside the walls and tubes of the internet. Thank you to everybody who helped make those realities real. You know who you are.

________________________________

Ryland Walker Knight is a writer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He has three names, which you can read above, at left, and all over this blog.

Frank Borzage and the "Classical Hollywood Style"

NOTE: THIS ENTRY, ORIGINALLY POSTED AT THE CINEMARATI SITE, HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM AN INTERNET CACHE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/12/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED. UNFORTUNATELY, COMMENTS HAVE BEEN REMOVED AND ARE CLOSED.

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The "Classical Hollywood Style" of the 1930s and 40s is often referred to as if it were a monolith. The achievements of Hollywood auteurs from the era, whether Chaplin or Welles, Hawks or Hitchcock, are usually illustrated in terms of their divergence from this so-called "invisible style". Less often discussed are the contributions individual directors (outside of D.W. Griffith) may have made to constructing the style.

The legacy of Frank Borzage, whose films have recently been on view in New York, Berkeley, California and elsewhere this summer, is perhaps an ideal battleground for some of these issues to be wrangled out. Borzage was certainly no "maverick" director like Chaplin or Welles; he earned the first and the fifth Academy Awards for Direction for his Seventh Heaven and Bad Girl, respectively. Rather, he was a crucial developer of the ways that talking picture melodramas might resemble and distiguish themselves from their silent film predecessors. He was one of the first successful importers of European movements like expressionism and the Kammerspiel into his films (surely it was no coincidence that for a brief while he shared a studio, Fox, and a leading lady, Janet Gaynor, with F.W. Murnau). A silent-era Borzage film, especially a collaboration with cinematographer Ernest Palmer and art director Harry Oliver, contains a far more sophisticated interplay between shadow and light than most other Hollywood releases of the era. The result: these films look years ahead of their time.

But it's also interesting to take a look at Borzage flourishes that did not become assimilated into the "Classical Hollywood Style." Take Man's Castle, a beautiful film in spite of an apparant technical crudity even for a film made at the low-budget Columbia of 1933. I say "in spite of", but is it in part because of certain now-crude-seeming characteristics that the film is such a masterpiece? Frederick Lamster, in his 1981 auteurist survey Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity points out that after an early scene in which Spencer Tracy's Bill has just dramatically revealed his shared bond of poverty with the homeless Trina (Loretta Young, who developed a real-life romance with Tracy during filming), the couple are visually separated from the street crowd by a scale-distorting back-projection. The technical effect would be unacceptable by the standards of realism demanded for Hollywood product only a few years later, but the emotional effect of showing the pair all the more isolated from the world around them adds resonance to the film's romatic themes. I also noticed numerous instances in the film of what could be eyeline mismatch, but which also lent a dreamlike outlook to Borzage's starry-eyed characters.

Films like 1937's History is Made at Night and 1940's the Mortal Storm might be examples of the "Classical Hollywood Style" at its pre-war epitome, but the films Borzage made after the war have been characterized as increasingly out-of-step. His 1948 Moonrise, which led to a ten-year absence from feature filmmaking, has been categorized with the films noirs of the time, but it doesn't deal with the hardened criminals and cold-blooded schemers they do, nor does it utilize much of the gritty realism associated with the genre. Instead the film looks like a set-constructed exterior manifestation of the Dane Clark protagonist's increasingly tortured mental state, the bucolic decaying into full-fledged paranoia exhibited through the use of entrapping camera angles and POV-shots. The result seems more at home compared to Night of the Hunter or certain RKO Val Lewton films of the mid-1940s, than lumped in with Hollywood's increasingly "real" noir films of the time.

A wealth of recent web-based writing on Borzage has recently arisen along with the touring retrospective; Reverse Shot and Slant are two of the best places to find it. If you have your own thoughts on this underdiscussed filmmaker, the "Classical Hollywood Style", or the relationship between the two, please add a comment below!