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:
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)