日出

第一次犹豫，叠化镜头直接展现人物心理感受，给出心理转变理由，下定决心行动。第二次，最后关头的转变，用内心的钟声传达。片中的第二次钟声响起则是宣告两人和解、重拾旧爱的时刻。大马路上旁若无人的吻。镜头拍的是水上的芦苇杆，却能传达出绝望与悲伤。无愧默片时代最佳之一。大概是影史上第一部从某种维度审视而呈现为完美形态的爱情题材影片？这个维度大概是保守、传统道德与家庭观念下的爱情价值取向。在这种可能更多是美好幻想的观念里，男主战胜了第三者的邪恶诱惑从而守住了忠诚，并且一定要设计这样一次最惊险的遭遇，使男女主经历生死的考验进而确证这份爱情的坚贞不渝。落水的女主角没有死却也如再生了一般，因为这种生死交际处的强烈情感波动无疑唤醒与更新了那可能随时间流逝与平庸生活而日渐显示其乏味的“真爱”。这便是我指其为幻想的原因，因为这样的高潮情节——生离死别之考验不太能在现实中发生，而且作为一部电影，它只能停留在这大悲又大喜的圆满结尾之处，它本来也明白，那其后的漫长岁月以及相伴而生的也许还会复苏的矛盾或裂痕，它是无力也根本不需要解决的。对于要讨观众电影喜欢或者编织幻想的电影来说，故事讲到这里就已经是全部，以后的世界本来是不存在的。这似乎便成为这部杰作的遗憾之所，一个童话故事般的结尾，放在现代理性地来看已不太能有说服力。当然在电影所给出的如此美妙的一百分钟充满真实感受的童话体验之后，我们也就不会苛责了。最主要还是茂瑙调动一切奇妙又美好的镜头所营造的这个光影迷梦太美好了，而且最妙的它还是一部黑白无声电影，使他免去了一些可能的艳俗之感（华丽的布景、粘腻的对白等）。在如今再制造这样一个朴素的爱情童话已很难获得所谓专业评论者的赞誉，但在1927年，默片时代的茂瑙（尽管掺入了一些明显迎合市场而破坏整体性的相对俗套的喜剧桥段）却是可以实现的。

由于感触太多，就把短评里超出的文字搬运到这里。

（个人影史十佳）A song of two humans—不寻常地被好莱坞给予完全的拍片自由的茂瑙用一部交响乐的结构拍了这样一部伟大的默片作品。

这位德国表现主义革新者将意象、结构、双重曝光等运用地出神入化。从男人受到象征着欲望和贪婪的城里女人的诱惑，计划制造妻子意外身亡的事故，到妻子知晓丈夫谋害的计划伤心与恐惧，去往城市电车上的两人，一人闪躲绝望，一人后悔内疚，虽然没有台词，所有的肢体语言、微表情都太生动。在城市里，两人经历了车流中穿梭追逐、教堂看到结婚典礼被感动、车流中亲吻（此处导演十分巧妙地安排了一刻的场景的转换，由马路上车流中心转换到乡村田野再回到现实）、造型店男人由面部到心灵都得到了洁净（这是两人关系新的节点）、照相馆里宛若热恋情侣的亲密羞怯……有太多要素，但都各在其位，并无堆砌之感。

值得一提的是，同样是二十世纪德国表现主义大作，《大都会》中的城市是压抑的、井然有序的、是属于少数统治阶级的，而《日出》中的城市极具娱乐性，有趣、纷繁复杂，又不乏人性。

还有值得一提的是，在片中发现被《低俗小说》、《泰坦尼克号》、《飞向太空》等作品致敬、借鉴的地方。

好一幅表现主义的《日出》，可与莫奈试比高。

第18届法罗岛电影节第5个放映日为大家带来《日出》，下面请看前线在屏幕中不发出声音却早就表达出满腔感情的男女之评价了！

果树：

各方面趋近完美，超出一切对于电影二字的期许。

风临：

"最好的默片“，把这五个字一个不动地给予这部电影。

Morning：

叠画的文学性，被这部电影尽收，好厉害，我甚至觉得它是某位名作的短篇杰作，短短94分钟，网罗婚姻的五味杂陈。夫妻俩去合照那一段我尤其喜欢，轻快也轻狂，两人甜蜜的一吻，等照片时又偷吃水果打翻了雕像，那雕像原本没有头部，残缺的才是美好的，太有意义的意象，他们将球代替头部插了上去，恶作剧的欣喜的跑掉，收获了二人真正的幸福，这是文学世界里才写得出来的丰富的层次，但被这部电影畅快淋漓的拍摄了出来，杰作。

子夜无人：

大概是目前看过的默片里气质最为灵动的，呆板感几近于无，从田野水乡到十里洋场，从晦暗人心中勾连的欲望一直到满眼被风吹散的繁华，一切可视的、可以被捕捉感受到的质感像是浮在纸面上，清晰又易于破碎。到最后他仍然要践行至少一次将人扼杀的贪念，恶的成分一旦被人唤醒之后就是这样，无论是作为惊涛骇浪中翻然悔悟的浪子，还是结尾沐浴在爱的圣光里，底色已然黯淡，劫后余生的转危为安里，也有覆水难收的悲戚。

北阳向暖：

确实可能是最美的默片，甚至有些感觉不到是默片。故事具有很强的普遍性，这是电影的价值之一。

我略知她一二：

也许从未爱过一个人，比想象更深，比海洋更深。或许对你来说我更像是埋藏在海底，深不可测。如若这就是事情发展的必然，那我选择敞开强烈的直觉，因为一切还不算太坏，让我可以爱上你，这个看似不可能的人，我曾在原地打转，几乎在原地腐烂。 "你是我温暖的手套，冰冷的啤酒，带着阳光味道的衬衫，日复一日的梦想。你是甜蜜的，忧伤的，嘴唇上涂抹着新鲜的欲望，你的新鲜和你的欲望把你变得像动物一样的不可捉摸，像阳光一样无法逃避，像戏子一般的毫无廉耻，像饥饿一样冷酷无情。——《恋爱的犀牛》"

苍山古井空对月：

丈夫欲向妻子行凶失败后我就在想下面的故事该怎么讲，没想到这个开头有点黑色的故事居然转变为喜剧。虽然故事有点俗，但是茂瑙的各种电影手法不俗，跟《最卑贱的人》一样，用了许多对比：妻子抱着孩子哭泣和丈夫抱着情人幽会，城市的灯红酒绿和乡村的纯朴优美，城市人和村里人对猪的反应的差别，进城和出城夫妻二人的关系变化。除了视觉的手法，还在声音上进行了探索，模拟自然音、有源音，并且赋予了钟声象征意义。

#FIFF18#第5日场刊评分将于稍后释出，请大家拭目以待了。

原文取自Patrick Keating的《THE DYNAMIC FRAME Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood》。本书在讨论《日出》这部电影时，是以20s中期德国电影对美国电影的影响为背景，以及美国电影人把摄影机运动视为鬼把戏（trick shots）的态度：是滑稽喜剧的专长而不符合严肃戏剧的高雅。在德国电影《最后一笑》《杂耍班》中，摄影机运动和角度让美国电影人大为震惊，这些创新的贡献不仅仅是技术上的，更深层的是从文化上的干预。移动摄影机不再是一个滑稽的把戏，而是成为艺术雄心的一种表达。静态戏剧和动态喜剧之间的对立也被打破。

以下为原文：

Sunrise

A great deal was riding on Sunrise—not just Fox’s investment but also Hollywood’s ever-evolving identity as an industry both American and international. Would Murnau assimilate to the American style, devising unusual angles to add “kick” to the story? Or would the German director continue to explore the semisubjective realm with a style that had inspired critics to reach for comparisons to Cezanne and Picasso? Murnau had promised to make a film with American virtues: speed, pep, initiative. The finished film belies this promise: Sunrise is slow and serious, with characters notably lacking in drive. The story is about a rural couple, simply called the Man and the Wife (George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor). The evil Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston) convinces the Man to kill his wife in a staged boating accident. He cannot go through with the murder, and, overcome with guilt, he follows his wife to the city, where he slowly regains her trust. Whereas many Hollywood films emphasize external action, the conflict here is almost entirely internal: the Man must rediscover his love for his wife, and the Wife must recognize that his conversion is sincere. This minimal plot leaves ample room for emotional expression.

To tell this tale, Murnau used almost every cinematic device available, from set design and acting to lighting and camera movement. As in The Last Laugh, Murnau explored the ambiguous territory of the semisubjective. In one celebrated seTuence, the Man walks through the marshes to visit with the Woman from the City. Cinematographers Rosher and Struss placed the camera on a platform suspended from tracks specially built into the studio’s ceiling, using motors to aid the shot’s operator, Struss, by lifting the camera platform up and down as it moved forward. 58 For all the shot’s technical bravado, its real interest lies in its shifts from external to internal and back again. The camera starts out by following the Man from behind and then tracks with him in profile after he makes a turn to go through some trees (fig. 1.7a–b). Here, the mode is external but attached—we observe the Man from the outside, but we discover the space as he discovers it. When the Man approaches the lens (fig. 1.7c), the camera pans to the left and dollies forward, pushing through some branches to discover the Woman from the City (fig. 1.7d). 59 For a brief moment, it appears that the film has entered a subjective mode, representing what the Man sees through his own eyes. The Woman turns her head. Perhaps she will look directly at the camera, as if welcoming the Man’s arrivalbut, no, her gaze crosses past the lens, and the bored look on her face indicates that the Man has not yet arrived. First attached and then subjective, the mode becomes nonsubjective and nonattached, showing an event that the Man cannot see yet. A moment later the Woman looks offscreen again, this time recognizing that the Man is approaching. When he enters the screen from off-left, it is a further perceptual surprise: the last time we saw him, he was off-right. The Man and the Woman kiss, and the shot comes to an end. In a lecture in 1928, Struss described this shot in terms that reflect its ambiguity. His statement, “Here we move with the man and his thoughts,” evoked a subjective interpretation of the image, but later he claimed, “We seem to be surreptitiously watching the love scenes,” as if the camera had adopted the perspective of an unseen observer. 60

1.7 In Sunrise, the camera follows the Man as he walks through the marsh; later, the camera appears to look through his eyes.

Other shots extend this semisubjective approach. In The Last Laugh, Murnau had placed his camera on a rotating platform to create the effect of the world spinning around the porter. In Sunrise, Murnau designed an ingenious variation on this strategy, depicting the twists and turns of a trolley ride. The first part of the seTuence was photographed on a trolley path built alongside Lake Arrowhead; the rest was shot on another constructed line that circled into Rochus Gliese’s enormous false-perspective city set on the Fox lot. 61 One shot shows the Wife huddling in the corner of the car. We can barely see her face, but the trolley veers right and then left, showing us tracks, a worker on a bicycle, a factory, and other images indicating that she is reaching the edge of the city (fig. 1.8a–b). The unpredictable swaying of the trolley expresses her emotional state—her terrified confusion about her husband’s newly revealed capacity for violence and betrayal. Meanwhile, Murnau uses the trolley’s movement to comment on the inevitability of modernity: these two peasants have no control over the trolley car, and they must stand by passively while the background changes from the countryside to the city, a change in landscape that will render their peasant lifestyle obsolete.

In her insightful analysis of the film, Caitlin McGrath has situated Murnau’s shots within a longer tradition of camera movement stretching back to the cinema of attractions, as in Bitzer’s subway film in 1904 (fig. 1.1). 62 Another proximate comparison is the trolley scene from girl Shy. There, the Boy treats the world as a series of obstacles to be overcome, commandeering a trolley car to get to his destination as Tuickly as possible. In Sunrise, the movement of the trolley does little to advance the goals of either character, who are merely passengers on a journey they cannot control. In one sense, girl Shy does a better job integrating story and shot: the action on the trolley serves to advance the protagonist’s goal. In another sense, Sunrise is the more fully integrated of the two. girl Shy briefly abandons the Boy to deliver a gag about the drunkard’s confusion. Sunrise lingers on the passage of the trolley because its swaying motions serve to express the Wife’s state of mind. Every swerve is expressive.

1.8 The Wife stands Tuietly on the trolley as the landscape changes behind her.

The latter film further develops its characterization of the modern city in a pair of seTuences showing the couple crossing the dangerous street. In the first seTuence, the camera is on a dolly following the Wife (probably a stunt double) as she walks from the trolley to the curb; halfway through the shot, the Man grabs the Wife and walks with her the rest of the way. Several cars zip by in the foreground and background, just missing the couple—and the camera, which is crossing the street as well (fig. 1.9a–b). In the second seTuence, the Man and the Wife have reconciled, and they gaze into each other’s eyes as they cross the busy street again (fig. 1.10a). They are utterly oblivious to the traffic, which dissolves away to become a pastoral meadow, as if this peasant couple has rediscovered the country in the heart of the city (fig. 1.10b). Whereas the first seTuence unfolds in fast motion as if it were a slapstick stunt, the second seTuence is a composite, using a traveling-matte effect that combines three distinct layers in a single shot: a foreground layer with cars passing by closely; a background layer dissolving from the city to the country; and a middleground layer showing the lovers walking while the camera follows on a dolly. Each layer was shot separately, then printed onto a separate piece of film. 63

1.9 The camera follows first the Wife as she begins to cross the street and then the Man and the Wife as they scramble across it.

This moment of joy does not mean that the film endorses the city and its values of consumerism, pleasure, and distraction. The urban citizens constantly remind the Man and the Wife that they are peasants; it is their acceptance of this identity that allows them to reaffirm their values. When they kiss in the middle of traffic, their love provides an escape from the modern city, even as the traffic bears down upon them. The visual contrast between the bumping dolly of the first seTuence and the traveling matte of the second develops the thematic shift. When the camera follows the Wife and the Man as they scramble across the street, their movements are so erratic that the couple never stays in the center of the frame. There is instead an oscillation from right to left as the couple jogs back and forth to escape the traffic. Later the traveling-matte effect locks the couple in the center of the frame, even though they are walking the whole time. The city around them buzzes with activity; the couple has become a symbol of stability.

1.10 Later, a traveling matte shows the Man and the Wife in traffic; the urban background dissolves into a pastoral scene.

Far from making a film with speed, pep, and initiative, Murnau tells a story criticizing those very values. Instead of delivering the occasional nonnarrative “kick,” the moving camera expresses the characters’ emotions while commenting on the ephemeral delights and the disorienting emptiness of modern life. The director’s longtime booster Maurice Kann raved about the film, seeing it as the fulfillment of The Last Laugh’s promising experiments with the representation of subjectivity: “Murnau has succeeded in boring his camera lens into the very brain of his players and shows you in picture form the thoughts that surge through their heads.” 64 Other critics commented on the film’s internationalism—its hybrid mixture of European aesthetics with a Hollywood budget. Pare Lorentz—then a film critic, later an esteemed documentarian—thought that the German–American mixture was a failure. He praised the “breathtaking photography” and the “perfect” first fifteen minutes, but he argued that the extended seTuence in the city contained too many gags, which had been added to entertain the “chocolate-sundae audience.” 65 European artistry had given way to slapstick trickery. Variety’s critic wrote more favorably that the film was “made in this country, but produced after the best manner of the German school.” 66 Moving Picture World noticed the film’s “continental flavor,” while commenting wryly on the association between national style and cultural status: “Coming from abroad, this production would be hailed by critics as a triumph. Even with the American label they are forced to give it grudging praise.” 67 Whereas Lorentz denounced the film for including too many concessions to the American audience, Variety and World positioned the film as a fascinating hybrid, a European artwork made in Los Angeles.

In the end, Sunrise struggled at the box office, and Murnau’s own career at Fox took a downward turn. 68 He experienced less support and more constraints on his remaining two films for the studio: the lost film Four Devils (1928) and the smaller-scale film City Girl (1930), both designed as nondialogue pictures, and both turned into part-talkies with added seTuences not directed by Murnau. 69 But Murnau’s impact was undeniable. As Janet Bergstrom reports, “[A] sign of William Fox’s appreciation of the artistic Tuality of Murnau’s films was that he encouraged his top directors to work in the same dark, visually expressive style.” 70 She lists several examples of Fox films made in Murnau’s style, including 7th Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928) by Frank Borzage, Fazil (1928) by Howard Hawks, The Red Dance (1928) by Raoul Walsh, and Mother Machree (1928) and Four Sons (1928) by John Ford. Other examples from the studio might include East Side, West Side (1927) and Frozen -ustice (1929) by Allan Dwan as well as Paid to Love (1927) by Hawks and Hangman’s House (1928) by Ford.

Outside Fox Studios, there is evidence that the trend toward unusual angles started well before Sunrise was released. In The Eagle (1925), the camera, suspended from a bridge stretched between two dollies, moves backward across a table, appearing to pass through several solid objects along the way. Director Clarence Brown explained, “We had prop boys putting candelabra in place just before the camera picked them up.” 71 An article in Film Daily in 1925 reports that cinematographer J. Roy Hunt used a handheld gyroscopic camera, inspired by The Last Laugh, to photograph The Manicure *irl, a lost film directed by Frank Tuttle. 72 The following year Maurice Kann spotted the influence of Variety in two other Famous Players–Lasky films: Victor Fleming’s MantraS and William Wellman’s You Never Know Women. Kann even gave credit to the cinematographers: Jimmy (James Wong) Howe and Victor Milner, respectively. 73 Less fortunate was Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian-born director beginning his long career at Warner Bros. His American debut, The Third Degree (1926), earned a skeptical review from Gilbert Seldes, who worried that directors were abusing the innovations of Variety. 74 PhotoSlay also denounced Curtiz’s film, noting that it was “filled with German camera-angles that don’t mean a thing.” 75 Another fan magazine complained, “The German films have caused our directors to become excited over the odd effects to be obtained by photographing scenes from unusual angles.” 76 An article in Motion Picture Classic declared that camera angles were “the bunk” and blamed the critics for heaping praise on European films when they employed the same “trick photography” that Americans had been doing for years. 77 The critics gave voice to a widely shared worry. Hollywood studios had the resources to copy the latest techniTues, either by hiring European personnel or by imitating their manner; what they needed to do was prove that they could use those techniTues in a meaningful way.

NOTES

58. Richard Koszarski discusses this shot in “The Cinematographer,” in New York to Hollywood: The PhotograShy of Karl Struss, ed. Barbara McCandless, Bonnie Yochelson, and Richard Koszarski (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1995), 177.

59. Struss claimed that the suspended dolly had a “wedge shaped thing” on the front to push the foliage out of the way (interview in Scott Eyman, Five American CinematograShers [Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987], 9).

60. Karl Struss, “Dramatic Cinematography,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 34 (October 1928): 318. 61. Susan Harvith and John Harvith, Karl Struss: Man with a Camera (Bloomsfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1976), 15.

62. Caitlin McGrath, “Captivating Motion: Late–Silent Film SeTuences of Perception in the Modern Urban Environment,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010, 222.

63. For more information on this shot, see Murnau, Borzage, and Fox, DVD box set.

64. Maurice Kann, “Sunrise and Movietone,” Film Daily, September 25, 1927, 4.

65. Pare Lorentz, “The Stillborn Art” (1928), in Lorentz on Film: Movies, 19271941 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 25.

66. “Rush.,” “Sunrise,” Variety, September 28, 1927, 21.

67. “Sunrise,” Moving Picture World 88, no. 5 (October 1, 1927): 312.

68. Donald Crafton reports that Sunrise “sank like a stone” in New York after a strong opening. Its run at the Cathay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles was more successful (The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 192–1931 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 525–527).

69. Janet Bergstrom carefully details the making of both films in “Murnau in America: Chronicle of Lost Films,” Film History 14, nos. 3–4 (2002): 430–460.

70. Bergstrom, William Fox Presents F. W. Murnau and Frank Borzage, 10.

71. Clarence Brown, Tuoted in Brownlow, The Parade’s *one By … , 146. A decade later, the director repeated the trick in Anna Karenina (1935).

72. “The Gyroscopic Camera and Future Production Possibilities,” Film Daily, June 7, 1925, 5.

73. Maurice Kann, “Fred Thomson,” Film Daily, July 14, 1926, 1, and Maurice Kann, “More Pictures,” Film Daily, July 15, 1926, 1. Elsewhere, a fan commented on the fact that You Never Know Women copied its angles from Variety (Richard Roland, “What the Foreigners Have Done for Us,” PicturePlay Magazine 26, no. 1 [March 1927]: 12). Largely conventional, MantraS (1926) featured one spectacular montage showing a dynamic trip from the country to the city.

74. Gilbert Seldes, “Camera Angles,” New ReSublic 50, no. 640 (March 9, 1927): 72–73.

75. “The Shadow Stage,” PhotoSlay 31, no. 4 (March 1927): 94.

76. Ken Chamberlain, “Camera Angles,” Motion Picture 23, no. 3 (April 1927):

25. The tone of the article is mocking, accompanied by four cartoons depicting four bizarre techniTues.

77. Harold R. Hall, “Camera Angles—the Bunk,” Motion Picture Classic 24, no. 6 (February 1927): 18, 79.