Aberystwyth musicFest & Gwrandewch present ...
The 1927 film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, will be shown with spontaneous music from Lyndon Owen and Aidan Thorne.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is one of the great achievements of American silent cinema. The film finds F. W. Murnau, 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, bringing his expressionist visual style from Germany to Hollywood for the first time. In so doing, Murnau tells an incredibly moving and visually rich story
Sunrise starts off within the dark thematic terrain Murnau was best known for, but in traversing through this darkness the film ultimately finds a restored faith in the good of people.
Perhaps his greatest achievement, Sunrise exhibits Murnau’s stunning ability to express the range of human emotion through very few words.
The resulting film features enormous stylized sets that create an exaggerated and 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.
Full of cinematic innovations, the groundbreaking cinematography (by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss) features particularly praised tracking shots. 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 the original, he claimed that Sunrise was a poem, whereas his realistic Die Reise nach Tilsit was a film.
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