DVD of the Week: “Sunrise”

In his first American film, “Sunrise,” from 1927 (which I discuss in this clip), the German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau creates some of the greatest images in the history of the cinema (which makes it both a particular delight and a special ordeal to select ones to discuss for this clip). The film came in at number seven in the last Sight & Sound poll, from a decade ago, of the ten greatest films; in 1958, it ranked at the top of the Cahiers du Cinéma all-time twelve-best list (albeit one that was assembled, as J. D. Copp explains, in a strange, distinctively auteurist way). It’s a mythic version of love, filmed in a mythic, Esperanto-like town and countryside, a forbearer to Jacques Tati’s polyglot conglomerates; if I didn’t put this work of absolute vision on my own list (Murnau’s 1924 film “The Last Laugh” is there instead), it’s because that earlier film, also a compendium of fantastic visions fantastically realized, smells of the real Berlin without sacrificing any of the director’s universal speculations (as suggested by the German title, “Der Letzte Mann”—The Last Man). Yet, with “Sunrise,” the temptation is simply to watch with awe—and, as for the trolley-car sequence seen here, it’s one of the handful of cinematic phenomena of which Jean-Luc Godard wrote, in 1965, “Who needs to talk for hours” about them? And yet, the greatness of Murnau’s work—maybe even the essence of beauty—is that it offers much to talk about, because it is neither emptily decorative nor devoid of ideas, but, rather, embodies ideas even as it surpasses them, and conveys, by the very fact of its being, emotions far beyond those arising from story, character, or situation. Perhaps the definition of beauty is this essential excess—the inseparability from an inkling of luxury, whether in actual sumptuousness or in the tastes of its creators—and this would explain something of the politics of criticism.