MovieChat Forums > Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) Discussion > So, what this film is 'saying'....

So, what this film is 'saying'....

posted 11 years ago by cookiela2001
6 replies | jump to latest

Considering practically no one went to see it...would we still say this film had messages that spoke to society at that time?

Obviously, the official message is "Life is made up of bitter and sweet experiences"...though I wonder if the deeper message is "STAY MARRIED NO MATTER WHAT!!!"

I guess that fits into the late 1920's, considering "traditional"/Victorian families were fragmenting at the time...people could run off to have unchaperoned visits in cars, where they could have sex...the industrial revolution had tilted the routine of what the usual married household was...so maybe the film is putting the brakes on that....saying, "Yeah, it looks bad, and he tried to kill you, but KEEP HIM! Stay!! Who knows what other, WORSE wickedness is out there??"

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[–] 11 years ago

[deleted]

[–] cookiela2001 11 years ago

<< Ironically enough, Murnau's film turns into one of the great visual paeans to modern city life, as Man and Wife's bewilderment away from home is nevertheless played out against an invigorating and dazzling urban landscape in which they are at all times treated with kindness and in which their love renews itself. >>

Yes. My first thought was that since The Woman from The City starts all the discord, the film was warning people away from the temptations of newfangled cosmopolitan life, and its shifty inhabitants.

But then, the husband and wife have a nice time in the Big City...so I'm not sure it's warning people in 1927 away from living there.

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[–] bwisialo 11 years ago

But then, the husband and wife have a nice time in the Big City...so I'm not sure it's warning people in 1927 away from living there.

Good point. But I think it's a certain sort of decadent and immoral city life that is be warned against. What the couple does in the city isn't that. On the on hand, the movie isn't so one-sided as to say, the city corrupts all things. On the other hand, the couple are visitors from the country: they don't live amongst the corrupting influences.

And yes, the characters of the wife and the mistress, and the man's relationship to them, are partly symbolic of these city-country tensions.

[–] checkerouterofthings 11 years ago

"So, what this film is 'saying'.... "

At first the characters threw me with their fickle melodramatic behavior. Then it occurred to me that this is merely a fun way to present the narrative. Strip all that away and what do you have? A bare-bones tale that is, at its heart, an essay on the nature of love. This is my first silent movie and I gave it a thumbs up.

[–] Tetra123 11 years ago

It seems like a requiem for a way of life, a fond farewell to an era, with all its warts and charms, that would soon be over and over for good. It makes me think of the break before and after The Internet, The Automobile, The Telephone, the shift from a Victorian and Edwardian perspective and concept of time, to something newer, faster, closer and forever different.

Even the mores, the things people romanticized and were willing to put up with -- operatic violence tied to passion, agrarian sustenance and homesteading, with little help from an outside World -- were rapidly changing. We look at this now and think it's incredulous that the wife stayed with her husband. But that was a different time and on the cusp of rapid, extreme change and cultural progressiveness, the husband and wife made the choice, together, to be left behind. They returned to their idyllic bubble, to pluck out an existence without having to "modernize", even though Society would move on without them. It's a wistful and touching concept. They chose to make it just about the two of them and their child and small circle of local friends, all living the same life as they did. They shut the World out for the sake of their, however wonderful or dysfunctional, love.

[–] zoolzool 11 years ago

So, what this film is 'saying'....

don't say nothing you gotta watch it.

Give me an inch, and I'll make the best of it