As I listened to Bailey, it occurred to me that the best commentary tracks are often by experts who did not work on the film but love it and have given it a lot of thought. They're more useful than those rambling tracks where directors (notoriously shy about explaining their techniques or purposes) reminisce about the weather on the set that day.
The power of "Sunrise" comes precisely through its visual images, and Bailey makes a good case that Struss, who got second billing after Charles Rosher, made the key contribution. He had purchased his own camera, powered by an electric motor, which set it free to glide through space and give "Sunrise" its peculiar dreamlike quality. And he devised techniques to create some of the effects; looking at stills taken on the set, Bailey takes hints from such details as a black back cloth that was used to obscure part of an image so it could be replaced with another.
The story, as I said, is very simple, but it has power. The woman from the city persuades the man to drown his wife so they can run away together. The film has few titles, but they are dramatic: the word "drown" swims into view and then appears to run down the screen and disappear.
As the man and his wife begin their boat journey across the lake, Bailey notes that the camera always regards him from a high angle, even when he is towering over his wife and the natural angle would have him looking down at the camera. This strategy keeps him subservient to the camera and emphasizes the pressure he's under; and Murnau underlines his tortured psychological state by making the actor, O'Brien, wear shoes with lead weights in them, so that he steps slowly and reluctantly.
He does not after all drown his wife. In the city, which is constructed from fanciful sets that suggest the "city of the future" often seen in silent films, the man and wife fall back in love -- and then, as they return across the lake, a tempest overturns the boat and it appears she may have been drowned by chance.
It's very broad melodrama, and the realism of spoken dialogue would have made it impossible. But silent films were more dreamlike, and Murnau was a genius at evoking odd, disturbing images and juxtapositions that created a nightmare state. Because the characters are simple, they take on a kind of moral clarity, and their choices are magnified into fundamental decisions of life and death.
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