Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans - Archetypal Masculine Romance
Thoughts On: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)
A silent film behemoth about a husband falling back in love with his wife after being coerced to kill her.
This is one of my favourite films of all times, and something quite unfamiliar to modern cinema for its plainness and simplicity. This captures a true archetypal story of masculine romance and passion: wanting to kill your wife, but convincing yourself that you instead need to die for her. The inverse of this romance it what is more common today, and it is centred on the female perspective - which is also present in Sunrise. The female version of the archetypal romantic narrative generally suggest that a female need only persist in her nature - be true to herself - for love to transform her. This is why so many modern romances are about breakups or romantic loss, and women returning to men they should have loved from the beginning who truly accept them for who they are (my favourite manifestation of this, which is not the basic Hollywood narrative, is Amelie). We see snippets of this in Sunrise in the hairdresser scene. The man and his wife stumble into a store after she finds his stubble prickly. He uncomfortably falls into a chair and gets a shave. She also is sat down, but won't accept having her hair or face touched; the wife remains unchanged throughout the narrative, for she is already crystallised. What the narrative shows, and what modern romances have expanded upon, is that it is so often the woman's task in life to find out how to love herself and life; to let love transform her as a wife, mother or otherwise (which the wife has already done in Sunrise). The man, on the other hand, is tasked to find a reason to kill himself and die. This, you could say, is part of why it is so hard for men and women get along; we struggle with and forget these stories - especially in the modern day where we have slightly lost touch with a masculine notion of romance due to it being embedded mainly in the spectacle of comedy and action films (my favourite manifestation being Rocky). We see this general notion of male romance in the same barber scene of Sunrise, however, in which the wife is shown to be in no need of change for she accepts her image. The man changes his image as the wife desires and then pulls out a knife to defend her from another, putting his life and another's at risk. This set of actions repeat and complexify across the entire film.
For a man, women do not exist - especially if she is not his mother or sister. The woman, in a man's eyes and when he looks from his soul, is his sun or his moon. It does not matter what she does or how she looks, rather, if she is made by him the sun or moon: a guiding luminescence in the dark, or his source of life in the light. This is the more complex idea that is built over the archetypal narrative of Sunrise. Any wise man who has naively loved a woman could tell you of the sun and moon. In femininity there is a gravity and pull of two types for the masculine; toward the monster and darkness within them, and away from the monster and toward the light. Sunrise presents the woman of the moon as a city girl who awakens the husband's mind to his capacities to kill his wife and destroy his current life for sexual and financial gain. The woman in the sun is his wife, who has provided him life: a son and family.
The mistress, the woman of the moon, gives some shade of hope to the man who is in darkness in his depression: the city where money can be found. His farm is failing and money is hard to come by, and so the man is almost convinced to turn away from what he has for dark hopes of a new start. The immorality in this is plain: the man is breaking commitments to a good family through murder. Alas, from the darkness comes what saves the light. The man realises the monster he can be, presents that to his wife, but hears the ringing of church bells; a call to and from the heavens reminding him of his moral and sacrosanct commitment in marriage. This happens when they venture over the lake, a body of water encapsulating, classically, the unconscious mind. After traversing the dark unconscious and finding a call from a higher power, the man convinces his wife to not fear the monster he discovered in darkness. He instead is lead to discover the city with his wife; again, this was in the call from darkness made by the city girl: to seek a world beyond the farm. The man does this in union with his wife, as opposed to breaking his bond for this adventure. He then guides her through the city, transforming them in the rediscovery of their marriage.
A key moment in the city comes the couple hear wedding bells again and watch a man and woman marry. The man is told she is young and experienced and therefore he must guide her: he is also young and inexperienced, nonetheless it is his task to lead and protect her. The husband understands here that this is to love a wife; to put her life ahead of his. He thus makes a promise to re-commit to his role with new understanding. An iconic moment follows this: they wonder into traffic in each others' arms. With this promise, they are both then shown to be capable of navigating danger blindly, seeing only the ideal; and they are protected, perhaps by a force higher than themselves despite their stupidity and inexperience. In this we begin to see the importance of the man venturing into the dark; through his self-discovery and acceptance of his role as husband and protector, he becomes a moral being, protected himself by God and fate. The couple submit to marriage, and in doing so are granted grace. Such is one of the key beliefs anyone in love holds: that their bond is good, and therefore given and guarded by an entity or nature more powerful and righteous than themselves.
With this discovery of romance, the couple can become like children again - as they were when they first fell in love. Guarded by a high power, they can be vulnerable, venturing out into the world to learn. They enter the city and have fun together, going to the funfair. Here they play a game in which they must 'hit the hole make a piggy role' - possibly a euphemism for having a sex or a child. Having played this game, the wife wants to dance, to again be herself and engage a peasant dance with her husband. The man chasing the pig leads them to the dance floor. More could be unpacked in this scene, but a small detail is worth pointing out. The peasant dance scene demonstrates the difference between a euphemistic 'city girl' (the meaning of which has interestingly returned in recent years in full force, but in an entirely different context) and a rural or natural girl. It is in the city girl's nature to have her flesh exposed; comedically, the straps on her dress keep falling. A man, maybe her husband, tries to do his duty in hiding the flesh (to her thanks) that is automatically exposed, but it continually bares itself. When he bares it himself out of frustration, he is beaten by the woman. The game played with the city girl is stupid, but the peasant dance is meaningful. Such, you could say, is a commentary on the difference between modern 'city girl' and 'city boy' relationships and traditional marriage.
For the prettiness of this articulation and the skill with which this story is manifested by Murnau, I find it easy to say that this film is a masterpiece that forever deserves to traverse across time as a classic. If you have not seen it, please do. A version is on YouTube.
