The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
F. W. Murnau · a film · 1927 · about 94 minutes · scenario by Carl Mayer, from Hermann Sudermann’s story Die Reise nach Tilsit
Mode
Silent fable of a marriage; the melodrama of country and city made into a song without names
Mythos
Fall and redemption: Eden as a farm by a lake, the temptress from the city of pleasure, a night of sin and a day of grace, the second marriage as a ritual repetition of the first
Phase
One day and two nights: the marsh under the moon, the crossing, the city by day, the night crossing and the storm, the search and the dawn
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 94 minutes in the Fox Movietone release, a near-square frame, few English intertitles, a synchronised track of music and effects; travelling camera, superimposition, built sets
Register
From a man’s stalk across a boat toward his wife to a drunken pig at a fairground; grief in a church, terror on black water, laughter before trust
Scale
Two humans, a farm and a city, one lake between them
Governing Proposition
A farmer, drawn by a woman from the city, agrees to drown his wife on a crossing of the lake, rises in the boat to do it and cannot; across one day in the city he courts her again, and on the night crossing home the storm carries out the plan he refused. The wager of the film is that a man’s passage from murder to love in a single day can be shown almost without words, by a camera that moves between his mind and the world, and that a fable whose figures have no names can belong to every couple.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a title that places its song “of no place and every place”, and then on a montage of holiday trains, the city going out to the country. The temptation comes from the city too: the Woman from the City, in a village by a lake. On a farm by the water live the Man, the Wife, a child glimpsed and a maid, and the household is sliding toward ruin. No one in the film has a name. They are the Man, the Wife and the Woman from the City, and the others are the Maid, the Photographer and the Barber, known only by what they do.
The fable comes from Hermann Sudermann’s story “Die Reise nach Tilsit”, and Carl Mayer wrote the scenario. F. W. Murnau directed it for the Fox Film Corporation. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss photographed it, and Rochus Gliese designed the village and the city alike to be seen as states of feeling. George O’Brien plays the Man, Janet Gaynor the Wife and Margaret Livingston the Woman from the City. It was first shown in New York in September 1927.
The work judged here is the 1927 American release as it survives in the Fox Movietone version, about 94 minutes in black and white, in a near-square frame, with English intertitles. That version went out with a synchronised track of music and effects, Hugo Riesenfeld’s arrangement, which is the release’s own accompaniment and is heard as such. The film is the work, not that track and not any score written for it since. The titles are few for a feature of its year, because the camera carries what words would have carried. The whole action takes one day and two nights, in five movements: the marsh, the boat, the city by day, the night crossing and the storm, and the search and the dawn.
Movement II
At night the Man walks out across the marsh under a full moon. The camera follows him, overtakes him and finds the Woman from the City waiting for him, powdering her face under the moon. Her plan is that he sell the farm and come with her to the city, and as she talks the city rises over the marsh: its dancers float above the reeds in superimposition. Then she gives him the rest of it, and the title that carries it moves on the screen. “Couldn’t she get drowned?” Its letters sink down the frame as if into water.
She binds bulrushes for him, so that the murderer will float when the wife goes down. Back in the house he lies awake, and the Woman from the City’s arms close round him out of the air. The film does not tell what he is thinking. It shows what has hold of him, laid over the room where his wife sleeps, and the image does the work a page of titles could not do.
Then the crossing. On the water the Man rises in the boat. He stalks toward his wife, shoulders hunched, and she shrinks and raises her hands and prays. The dog swims out after them. He cannot do it. The murder is planned on the marsh and refused on the lake, and the film’s first part ends in that refusal, with the rushes made for the drowning still in the boat.
Movement III
From the far shore the couple ride a trolley into the city, and its long run from the lakeshore to the streets plays as one movement. They sit apart, she flinching from him. The film needs no title to say that the country of the crime is being left behind; the change in him is felt as distance covered, and the distance is the camera’s.
In a café bread is set before the Wife and she cannot eat it for weeping. It is the lowest point of the day, and it is held. In the street the couple cross through traffic, and as they walk the cars dissolve into a meadow and back into horns: the world falls away round two people and returns.
Then the church, where a wedding is being held. The vows are spoken over another couple, and the Man breaks. He falls with his head in his wife’s lap. The plan of the night before is undone, not by anything said, but by a marriage seen from outside, and the bells that follow ring for both marriages.
Movement IV
What follows is a second courtship, made from the city’s ordinary pleasures, and it is slow. The Wife forgives across a day of bells, a photograph and a dance. At a photographer’s they sit for a portrait. At a barber’s there is a masher. Comedy enters the film here, and it is part of the reconciliation: laughter comes back before trust does, and the film gives it its time.
At night they go to Luna Park, the fairground. A pig gets loose, drunk, and there is a chase. There is a dance among the people. The fable’s own scheme had the city as the place that sent the temptation; here the city is where the marriage is made again, in public, among strangers, as a repetition of the first wedding with its bells, its portrait and its dance.
The middle of the film is its longest stretch and its broadest. The pig, the barber and the photographer are comic business, and some of it could be shorter. But the order holds: grief in the café, a breaking in the church, then laughter, then a dance. The church comes first, so the comedy is earned. When the day ends the couple set out for home across the lake.
Movement V
They cross by night, and a storm comes up on the lake. What the Man refused to do the storm now does: the drowning planned on the marsh and renounced in the boat is carried out by nature, with the boat and the water and the night. The bulrushes the Woman from the City bound for the murderer are the instrument of the turn. Meant to save the man who would drown his wife, they save the wife.
The village goes out to search with lanterns, and the lights move over black water. The night’s violence turns at last on the Woman from the City, in a strangling, and she is sent off in a cart. The fable closes on her quickly, faster than its world has, and the film does not stay to ask who she was.
At the end the Wife’s tight braids are loosened, and the sun comes up after the night. At the first Academy Awards, presented in 1929, the film was given the prize for Unique and Artistic Production, Rosher and Struss the prize for cinematography, and Gaynor, for this and two other films, the prize for best actress. Within two years sound had frozen the camera this film had set free. The critical return came late and in waves, and the film now stands near the top of the critics’ polls. What lasts is a shape: a drowning planned, renounced and carried out by the weather, and a bundle of rushes that saves the one it was meant to kill.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, since the words are few. The spine is required: the marsh gives the plan, the boat gives the refusal, the city gives the second courtship, and the storm gives back to nature the murder the Man renounced, using the bulrushes the Woman from the City bound for him. In the city the church is required, since it is where the Man breaks, and so is the café, the lowest point. There the subtractive test bites. The photographer, the barber and his masher and above all the pig chase at Luna Park could be shortened without loss; the holiday trains of the opening are a frame the film could do without; and the storm is compressed to the point of abruptness.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited in full, and what is disclosed holds: the wish to kill and the wish to love can live in one man in a single day, and a marriage is restored not by forgiveness spoken but by being courted again, step by step and in public, after the worst has been seen. The film shows how slow that is: the Wife flinching on the trolley, her bread untouched. And the city that sent the temptation is where the marriage is remade, so the fable refuses its own scheme. What holds it below the gate is the level of the telling: the Man’s turn is a fall and a waking, not a mind opened, and the Woman from the City is a function. The truth is true and simple.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Dread: the Man walking through the marsh under a full moon while the camera follows, overtakes him and finds the Woman waiting; his stalk across the boat toward his wife as she shrinks and prays. Transport: the trolley’s run from the lakeshore into the city, played as one movement, and a street of traffic dissolving into a meadow and back into horns. Grief: the church, where the Man falls into his wife’s lap as vows are spoken over another couple. Terror and rescue: the storm, the lanterns on black water, the dawn. Held below the top because the comic middle is long and level, and some height is pressed by music and set rather than earned by the action.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is built and bears load. The figures have no names. The structure is fall and redemption: Eden as a farm by a lake, the temptress from the city of pleasure, a night of sin and a day of grace, and a second marriage staged as a ritual repetition of the first, with bells, a portrait and a dance. Water carries the whole: the drowning is planned, renounced and then performed by the storm, and the bulrushes meant to save the murderer save the victim. The particular is kept by bodies and small things: O’Brien’s weighted walk, the Wife’s braids loosened at the end, the dog swimming after the boat. Held below the top because “of no place and every place” buys the archetype at some cost to the particular.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is double: the German chamber film, with Murnau’s own unchained camera proven in The Last Laugh (1924), and the American studio melodrama of rural virtue and urban vice. The departure is the transplanting: a European art film made inside Hollywood at full studio expense, with few intertitles, a camera that travels where American practice cut, superimposition as the language of thought, and a city built as a state of mind rather than a place. The stake was real: Fox put a great budget behind a prestige picture in a form its audience had not asked for. Held at the bar rather than above it because the grammar was already Murnau’s and Mayer’s, made in Berlin; the swerve is of place and scale more than of method.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a man can pass from murder to love in one day, which only a form moving between inside and outside without words can carry. The superimpositions are the Man’s mind, the Woman from the City’s arms closing round him as he lies awake, the city’s dancers floating over the marsh as she talks. The travelling camera turns a decision into a walk, and the trolley carries the couple in one movement from the country of the crime into the city of the courtship, so a change of heart is felt as distance covered. Told in speech, or as realist drama, it is an anecdote. The cost is the comic middle, where the form becomes a container for routines.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Ninety-nine years of return are evidence, though the critical attention came late and in waves. The readings disagree in ways that keep the film open: the ending as earned grace or as a fable’s convenience; the Woman from the City as a vamp, or as modernity itself, punished; the city as corrupter or as the place of renewal. Formally it yields without end, in its sets, the routes of its camera, its superimpositions and its light. Held below Tokyo Story at 9.1 because the semantic yield is narrower: the fable’s meaning, once grasped, is held rather than reopened, and most of the return is to the making.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1927, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the fullest statement of silent art cinema’s visual language at the moment sound ended it, and a union of German method and Hollywood resources that showed a studio picture could carry a camera as free as any in Europe. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate school at Fox, in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928) and John Ford’s Four Sons (1928); a prize at the first Academy Awards for artistic quality; a style of light and travelling camera that passed into the Hollywood of the 1930s. Sound froze the camera within two years, and much of the line was taken up only later. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival weighed in order. Form: the film as released survives whole in the Movietone version, and nothing in the action is missing. Presence: not continuous. The film was largely out of view for decades after the coming of sound, then restored to the centre of film culture, and it now stands near the top of the critics’ polls; its presence is within film culture rather than general. Surface: the silent idiom is fixed to its moment as a medium, and the fable has outlived it. Ninety-nine years of survival weigh heavily, and with the break in presence and the surface charged they would carry more; film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss photograph the marsh by moonlight and the lake by day and in storm. The travelling shots run on overhead rigs and tracks through sets built for them, and Rochus Gliese designs village and city alike as states of feeling. The superimpositions are precise and never decorative. George O’Brien is a heavy man made heavier by guilt, and Janet Gaynor’s face carries the café and the church without a title. The cutting is sparing because the shots carry. The costs: Margaret Livingston’s vamp is a type; the city’s comedy is broad, the pig chase broadest; some process work in the traffic and the fairground shows its means; the track sometimes underlines. Tokyo Story, more exact through its middle, stands at 9.3.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Man rising in the boat to drown his wife, and the drunken pig at Luna Park. One law is meant to govern both, the law of the song: in one day the world’s forces, city and country, night and day, water and land, act on two people who stand for every couple, and laughter returns before trust does. Much obeys it. The storm is nature carrying out the plan the Man refused, and the bulrushes turn the law round exactly. The strain is the comic middle, where the pig and the barber’s shop become routines another film could have held, and the swift end, where the Woman from the City is sent off in a cart and the fable closes faster than its world.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: marriage and the family at the centre, with a child glimpsed and a household; consciousness, in the Man’s guilt rendered in images; country and city as two orders of life, the farm and a metropolis of traffic, cafés and fairground; nature, the lake, the marsh and the storm, as an active power; the sacred, in the church and the vows that turn the Man; the village, in the search with lanterns. Money stands at the edge, in the plan to sell the farm. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history are absent by design, since the song is of no place; the city is one day’s pleasures; the village is a frame. Few orders are entered, and those are held with grace through one couple.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1, then The Living Form at 9.0, then The Sublime at 8.9, then The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 8.8. Photography, design and two performances that carry the film almost without words; a form that moves between mind and world so that a change of heart is felt as distance covered; elevation of several kinds, from the marsh walk to the dawn; a fall and a redemption built into the structure and carried by water; and a film that survives whole as released and has outlived its medium’s moment.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: marriage, consciousness, country and city, nature, the sacred and the village are held through one couple, but the state and history are absent by design, the city is one day’s pleasures and the village a frame. Below the rest, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 8.3: the comic middle could be shorter and the storm is abrupt, and what the film discloses is true at the level of fable, a fall and a waking rather than a mind opened.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls two tenths short of it: the film’s truth is disclosed as fable, the Man’s turn given as a fall and a waking and the Woman from the City as a function. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Unconcealment at 8.3 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in the 1927 American release as it survives in the Fox Movietone version, about 94 minutes, black and white, with English intertitles, from the prologue title to the dawn: directed by F. W. Murnau for the Fox Film Corporation, scenario by Carl Mayer from Hermann Sudermann’s “Die Reise nach Tilsit”, photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, designed by Rochus Gliese. The film is the work. Hugo Riesenfeld’s synchronised track of music and effects is the release’s own accompaniment and is weighed only where the making notes it; scores written for the film since, and other versions of it, are not the object. No print, script or title list was consulted. Intertitles are quoted only where their words are certain. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the exact date of the New York premiere, the ratio of the frame, the number of titles, the condition of the original negative and the generation of the surviving image, how the city set was built, the film’s returns at release, the dates of its critical revival and its place in particular polls, and the later use of its sets and manner at Fox, are not given.