Stereoactive Movie Club - Ep 5.2 // Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Ep 5.2 // Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

10/20/22 • 59 min

It’s Jeremiah’s 5th pick: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 film directed by F.W. Murnau.

Based on a 1917 short story called “The Excursion to Tilsit,’ written by Hermann Sudermann, the film was Murnau’s first in the United States, after he was brought over from Germany by William Fox to make something for Fox Film Corporation like the expressionist work he’d produced in his home country – Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, and Faust among those. As with his previous work, the art design is exaggerated or even distorted to represent the emotional and symbolic tone being strived for. Add in innovative camerawork and one of the first synchronized soundtracks featuring a specifically composed score and sound effects, and the technical achievements alone begin to make it clear why the film had been popular and influential.

The film was hailed as a masterpiece by many critics of the day. And it also holds the distinction of being the only film to ever win Best Unique and Artistic Picture at the Oscars – an award that only existed in the ceremony’s first year. More recently, AFI listed Sunrise at number 82 in the 2007 version of their 100 Years... 100 Movies list of the greatest American films.

As for our purposes, Sunrise has appeared in the top 10 of Sight & Sound’s critics survey twice – at number 7 in 2002, and then at number 5 in 2012. Also in the 2012 polling, it was ranked #22 by directors; among the filmmakers who had it on their top 10 lists were Francis Ford Coppola and the Dardenne Brothers. And one more thing worthy of noting: Sunrise was released on September 23rd, 1927... Two weeks later, on October 6, is when The Jazz Singer was released, ushering in the beginning of the sound era for motion pictures.

Produced by Stereoactive Media

It’s Jeremiah’s 5th pick: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 film directed by F.W. Murnau.

Produced by Stereoactive Media

Previous Episode

Ep 5.1 // Round 5 Picks!

Listen up as we reveal our picks for what we’ll be watching in Round 5 of the podcast!

Spoiler alert: we have two bonus picks this time around, so we’ll be watching 7 films total.

And, as referenced in the episode, here is the list of all movies released after 1980 that appeared in the top 100 of the Sight & Sound critics and directors surveys in 2012:

1982 - Blade Runner (Ridley Scott / USA)
1982 - Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France)
1982 - Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
1983 - L’argent (Robert Bresson, France)
1985 - Come And See (Elem Klimov, USSR)
1985 - Shoah (Claude Lanzmann (France)
1986 - Blue Velvet (David Lynch, USA)
1990 - Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)
1990 - Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, USA)
1991 - A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
1994 - Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, Hungary)
1988-1998 - Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean Luc Godard / France)
1999 - Beau Travail (Claire Denis / France)
2000 - In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
2000 - Yi Yi (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
2001 - Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, USA)
2005 - Caché (aka Hidden, Michael Haneke, France/Austria)
2007 - There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

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Next Episode

Ep 5.3 // The Grapes of Wrath

It’s Mia’s 5th pick: The Grapes of Wrath, the 1940 film directed by John Ford.

The film is based on John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, which was also the best-selling novel of that year and was cited as a major part of the basis on which Steinbeck was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The politics and story of the book were potentially thorny enough that Daryl F. Zanuck, the famed producer at 20th Century Fox, sent investigators to witness just how bad the situation in Oklahoma actually was so he’d know whether he’d feel equipped to defend the film against any criticism for being potentially pro-Communist. That said, the aforementioned politics and story were still softened somewhat as compared to the book.

Ford was coming off a banner year, having directed 3 films in 1939: Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk – the latter two both with Henry Fonda, who himself had additionally been in 3 other movies in 1939.

The film received plenty of rave reviews and accolades including this incredibly laudatory one from Frank Nugent for the New York Times:

In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is one small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which by dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to be recalled not merely at the end of their particular year but whenever great motion pictures are mentioned.

To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century-Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath...

John Ford won a Best Director Oscar for the film, while Jane Darwell won Best Supporting Actress. It was also nominated for Outstanding Production (or what is today called Best Picture), Best Actor (Henry Fonda), Best Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Recording. In more recent years, The Grapes of Wrath was on AFI’s 100 Years... 100 Movies list, ranked at #21 in 1998 and then at #23 in 2007.

As for our purposes, the movie has never actually appeared in the top 10 of Sight & Sound’s critics or directors surveys, but it was a runner up on the very first list back in 1952. In the 2012 polling, it was ranked #183 by critics and #174 by directors – and among the filmmakers who had it on their top 10 lists that year was Lawrence Kasdan.

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