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.

Tabu (2012)

WHO: Miguel Gomes directed this.

WHAT: I have not yet seen this Portuguese-made film which takes its title and, apparently, much more, from F.W. Murnau's 1931 South Seas swan song, but I'm very excited to. Perle Petit has written a piece comparing the two films.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 6:00.

WHY: Increasingly, film festivals are not a place to see 35mm prints, especially of new films, even those that cry out to be seen that way. Of the eight current and upcoming local film festivals on my sidebar, I believe only one is planning to screen anything on film: the Another Hole In the Head genre festival which plans to show 35mm prints of Jaws and The Shining in December at the Balboa, which recently installed new digital projection systems but has been lucky enough to be able to retain 35mm projection capability. The San Francisco Film Society's Fall Season included 35mm prints in one of its festival showcases: the retrospective-minded Zurich/SF weekend. And the highest-profile local Fall festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, showed only two 35mm prints this year, one of them for a thirteen-year-old title (Lumumba), and the other for a remake of a 60-year-olf film (Tokyo Family). This is down from the dozen or so titles at the 2012 festival, a dozen that did not included its showings of Tabu despite it having been shot on film and appealing greatly to a good portion of those last cinephiles who still make an effort to support film-on-film screenings.

The upshot of all this is that tonight's PFA screening is not only the first theatrical showing of Tabu in Berkeley, and the first in the Bay Area in over a year when it played MVFF, but the first-ever local showing of the film in 35mm (not to mention the only 35mm screening as part of the PFA's New Portuguese Cinema series). I know it's available on DVD now, but I'm planning to head to Berkeley to see it tonight the way I'm sure it was meant to be shown.

HOW: As noted above, 35mm

City Girl (1930)

WHO: F.W. Murnau directed this, his final of three films he shot in the United States of America.

WHAT: Originally intended by Murnau to be entitled Our Daily Bread, this film was substantially altered by the Fox Studio without the director's involvement, and released as City Girl, in both part-talkie and silent versions. Only the silent version remains extant, and although it's certainly the Murnau film that feels the most like other Hollywood films (it fits snugly into a tradition of films involving women uprooted by marriage and placed into a more traditional, rural setting, also including Mantrap, The Canadian, The Wind, and A House Divided, just to name a few from the late twenties or early thirties that I've seen or written about in the past several months) it retains quite a bit of the director's inherent poetry. It's not that strange that a certain minority Murnau fans even prefer it to his canonized masterpiece Sunrise, which it invites comparisons to as it reverses the latter's scenario in a few crucial ways.

WHERE/WHEN: Program starts 7:30 PM tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont.

WHY: If you were among the several hundred people who watched the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of Faust a week ago, your reaction to Murnau's final film shot in his homeland of Germany, may have been something along the lines of "More! Now!" (Yes, that's basically how the director's name is pronounced). If so, you didn't have to wait too long. 

HOW: With a pair of short comedies, the animated Big Chief Koko and the live-action Isn't Life Terrible, all on 16mm prints, with live music by Jon Mirsalis (a great podcast interview with Mirsalis is found here by the way).

Faust (1926)

WHO: F.W. Murnau directed this four years after making what is now his most famous film, the original vampire movie Nosferatu. 

WHAT: The tale of the silent film figure whose career died because he or she couldn't make the transition to talking pictures is all too commonly told. Even more tragic are the stories of those whose lives were cut short too soon, and therefore never were given the opportunity to transition or to fail. For some the absence of a significant sound-era career seems to intensify the iconic status of their silent work: think of acting legend Lon Chaney, Sr, who died in 1930 after making just one talking picture (a remake of his silent-era tour-de-force The Unholy Three) or comedienne Mabel Normand, who died the same year and whose voice was never recorded on film. Murnau, who died in a car accident in 1931, just after putting the finishing touches on one of the last silent films released by Hollywood (Tabu) is another such figure. His status as one of the greatest masters of silent film language solidifies with each passing decade, perhaps partially because his silent masterpieces do not have to compete for attention with the talkies that he never filmed. Last year his 1927 film Sunrise rose to fifth place in Sight & Sound Magazine's influential poll of the greatest films of all time. Faust received some votes in that poll, too, from prestigious sources such as curator/historian/critic Pierre Rissient and director Shinji Aoyama. 

But, as Matt Elrin notes in his chapter on Faust for the book Weimar Cinema, Murnau's film was not well-received in Germany upon its 1926 release. It was considered a faulty adaptation of Goethe's literary masterpiece by the majority of German critics, and failed with audiences as well, making back not much more than half of its enormous production cost for the Ufa studio. Elrin makes an interesting case that Murnau was not interested in representing Goethe's classic for the screen, however, but repurposing it as a metaphor for German culture in general and cinema in particular, with Mephisto representing the seductive "director" figure and Faust himself representing Germany's literary tradition, the soul of which is being contested by those who would use or misuse it for their own purposes. 

Whether Murnau had all this on his mind at all while making the film or not, I've always wondered if he knew while making it that Faust would not be well-received in its day. By the time he started production on the film, he had already proven himself one of the world's greatest directors with his 1924 The Last Laugh. He had already secured an unprecedented deal with the Fox Film Corporation to come to the United States to make films (the first of which would be Sunrise). Mary Pickford's favorite cinematographer Charles Rosher was brought to Berlin to serve as an unofficial consultant on the film, but Murnau's interactions with him revealed a man with his mind already on what he might be able to do with the resources of Hollywood at his disposal. Did Murnau sense that his fortunes might not be tied up with the success or failure of Faust, and therefore feel free to make a film without regarding how it would be understood in his homeland?

Regardless, Faust was more successful in the international market than in Germany, and it wouldn't be so long after his death that it began being cited at one of Murnau's greatest achievements. Elrin translates a passage from critic/director Eric Rohmer, who asserted that with this film Murnau "was able to mobilize all the means at his disposal to ensure total mastery of [cinematic] space." This is typically how Faust is typically seen by cinema lovers today.

WHERE/WHEN: 9:00 PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre

WHY: Faust screens as the capper on a big day of silent cinema at the Castro, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Full previews of the festival have been written by the stalwart Michael Hawley and Thomas Gladysz, but I'll give a brief run-down as well. Prior to Faust the festival screens (in order of appearance on the screen) a 1916 version of Snow White that is said to have inspired Walt Disney to make Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs 20 years later, a trio of two-reel comedies by the can't-go-wrong Buster Keaton, the classic Douglas Fairbanks adventure film The Thief of Bagdad, which I hope is a harbinger of more films directed by Raoul Walsh that I know are currently making the rounds internationally, and Mary Pickford's final silent film My Best Girl. As strong as this program promises to be, especially with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra or pianist Donald Sosin providing live musical accompaniment, Faust is the one I'm most excited to see on the Castro screen for many reasons, one of which is that it gives a week's preparation for another rare opportunity to see a Murnau film in a cinema, as his penultimate film City Girl plays next Saturday at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont.

HOW: Faust will screen from a 35mm print; for more information about its restoration, and details on the other festival films, do read what Carl Martin has dug up. Faust's sound will be provided live by Christian Elliott at the controls of the Castro's beloved Wurlitzer organ. This marks Elliott's first appearance at the SF Silent Film Festival since 2005, when he played wonderfully for the underrated Harold Lloyd comedy For Heaven's Sake, and for the World War I drama The Big Parade. I unfortunately missed the latter show, and have only heard Elliott playing for Keaton comedies at the Stanford in the meantime, so I don't know how well-suited he is to accompanying dramatic material like Faust. But I'm curious. I also missed Dennis James when he played the score to Faust at last year's Cinequest to much acclaim, so I hope I have an opportunity to hear that someday. I'm crossing my fingers that James will reappear at the Castro for the festival's July program; I'd especially love to hear his collaboration with Sosin on a piano/organ duet score for another German expressionist horror film: The Hands of Orlac.