日出

原文取自Patrick Keating的《THE DYNAMIC FRAME Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood》。本书在讨论《日出》这部电影时，是以20s中期德国电影对美国电影的影响为背景，以及美国电影人把摄影机运动视为鬼把戏（trick shots）的态度：是滑稽喜剧的专长而不符合严肃戏剧的高雅。在德国电影《最后一笑》《杂耍班》中，摄影机运动和角度让美国电影人大为震惊，这些创新的贡献不仅仅是技术上的，更深层的是从文化上的干预。移动摄影机不再是一个滑稽的把戏，而是成为艺术雄心的一种表达。静态戏剧和动态喜剧之间的对立也被打破。

以下为原文：

Sunrise

A great deal was riding on Sunrise—not just Fox’s investment but also Hollywood’s ever-evolving identity as an industry both American and international. Would Murnau assimilate to the American style, devising unusual angles to add “kick” to the story? Or would the German director continue to explore the semisubjective realm with a style that had inspired critics to reach for comparisons to Cezanne and Picasso? Murnau had promised to make a film with American virtues: speed, pep, initiative. The finished film belies this promise: Sunrise is slow and serious, with characters notably lacking in drive. The story is about a rural couple, simply called the Man and the Wife (George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor). The evil Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston) convinces the Man to kill his wife in a staged boating accident. He cannot go through with the murder, and, overcome with guilt, he follows his wife to the city, where he slowly regains her trust. Whereas many Hollywood films emphasize external action, the conflict here is almost entirely internal: the Man must rediscover his love for his wife, and the Wife must recognize that his conversion is sincere. This minimal plot leaves ample room for emotional expression.

To tell this tale, Murnau used almost every cinematic device available, from set design and acting to lighting and camera movement. As in The Last Laugh, Murnau explored the ambiguous territory of the semisubjective. In one celebrated seTuence, the Man walks through the marshes to visit with the Woman from the City. Cinematographers Rosher and Struss placed the camera on a platform suspended from tracks specially built into the studio’s ceiling, using motors to aid the shot’s operator, Struss, by lifting the camera platform up and down as it moved forward. 58 For all the shot’s technical bravado, its real interest lies in its shifts from external to internal and back again. The camera starts out by following the Man from behind and then tracks with him in profile after he makes a turn to go through some trees (fig. 1.7a–b). Here, the mode is external but attached—we observe the Man from the outside, but we discover the space as he discovers it. When the Man approaches the lens (fig. 1.7c), the camera pans to the left and dollies forward, pushing through some branches to discover the Woman from the City (fig. 1.7d). 59 For a brief moment, it appears that the film has entered a subjective mode, representing what the Man sees through his own eyes. The Woman turns her head. Perhaps she will look directly at the camera, as if welcoming the Man’s arrivalbut, no, her gaze crosses past the lens, and the bored look on her face indicates that the Man has not yet arrived. First attached and then subjective, the mode becomes nonsubjective and nonattached, showing an event that the Man cannot see yet. A moment later the Woman looks offscreen again, this time recognizing that the Man is approaching. When he enters the screen from off-left, it is a further perceptual surprise: the last time we saw him, he was off-right. The Man and the Woman kiss, and the shot comes to an end. In a lecture in 1928, Struss described this shot in terms that reflect its ambiguity. His statement, “Here we move with the man and his thoughts,” evoked a subjective interpretation of the image, but later he claimed, “We seem to be surreptitiously watching the love scenes,” as if the camera had adopted the perspective of an unseen observer. 60

1.7 In Sunrise, the camera follows the Man as he walks through the marsh; later, the camera appears to look through his eyes.

Other shots extend this semisubjective approach. In The Last Laugh, Murnau had placed his camera on a rotating platform to create the effect of the world spinning around the porter. In Sunrise, Murnau designed an ingenious variation on this strategy, depicting the twists and turns of a trolley ride. The first part of the seTuence was photographed on a trolley path built alongside Lake Arrowhead; the rest was shot on another constructed line that circled into Rochus Gliese’s enormous false-perspective city set on the Fox lot. 61 One shot shows the Wife huddling in the corner of the car. We can barely see her face, but the trolley veers right and then left, showing us tracks, a worker on a bicycle, a factory, and other images indicating that she is reaching the edge of the city (fig. 1.8a–b). The unpredictable swaying of the trolley expresses her emotional state—her terrified confusion about her husband’s newly revealed capacity for violence and betrayal. Meanwhile, Murnau uses the trolley’s movement to comment on the inevitability of modernity: these two peasants have no control over the trolley car, and they must stand by passively while the background changes from the countryside to the city, a change in landscape that will render their peasant lifestyle obsolete.

In her insightful analysis of the film, Caitlin McGrath has situated Murnau’s shots within a longer tradition of camera movement stretching back to the cinema of attractions, as in Bitzer’s subway film in 1904 (fig. 1.1). 62 Another proximate comparison is the trolley scene from girl Shy. There, the Boy treats the world as a series of obstacles to be overcome, commandeering a trolley car to get to his destination as Tuickly as possible. In Sunrise, the movement of the trolley does little to advance the goals of either character, who are merely passengers on a journey they cannot control. In one sense, girl Shy does a better job integrating story and shot: the action on the trolley serves to advance the protagonist’s goal. In another sense, Sunrise is the more fully integrated of the two. girl Shy briefly abandons the Boy to deliver a gag about the drunkard’s confusion. Sunrise lingers on the passage of the trolley because its swaying motions serve to express the Wife’s state of mind. Every swerve is expressive.

1.8 The Wife stands Tuietly on the trolley as the landscape changes behind her.

The latter film further develops its characterization of the modern city in a pair of seTuences showing the couple crossing the dangerous street. In the first seTuence, the camera is on a dolly following the Wife (probably a stunt double) as she walks from the trolley to the curb; halfway through the shot, the Man grabs the Wife and walks with her the rest of the way. Several cars zip by in the foreground and background, just missing the couple—and the camera, which is crossing the street as well (fig. 1.9a–b). In the second seTuence, the Man and the Wife have reconciled, and they gaze into each other’s eyes as they cross the busy street again (fig. 1.10a). They are utterly oblivious to the traffic, which dissolves away to become a pastoral meadow, as if this peasant couple has rediscovered the country in the heart of the city (fig. 1.10b). Whereas the first seTuence unfolds in fast motion as if it were a slapstick stunt, the second seTuence is a composite, using a traveling-matte effect that combines three distinct layers in a single shot: a foreground layer with cars passing by closely; a background layer dissolving from the city to the country; and a middleground layer showing the lovers walking while the camera follows on a dolly. Each layer was shot separately, then printed onto a separate piece of film. 63

1.9 The camera follows first the Wife as she begins to cross the street and then the Man and the Wife as they scramble across it.

This moment of joy does not mean that the film endorses the city and its values of consumerism, pleasure, and distraction. The urban citizens constantly remind the Man and the Wife that they are peasants; it is their acceptance of this identity that allows them to reaffirm their values. When they kiss in the middle of traffic, their love provides an escape from the modern city, even as the traffic bears down upon them. The visual contrast between the bumping dolly of the first seTuence and the traveling matte of the second develops the thematic shift. When the camera follows the Wife and the Man as they scramble across the street, their movements are so erratic that the couple never stays in the center of the frame. There is instead an oscillation from right to left as the couple jogs back and forth to escape the traffic. Later the traveling-matte effect locks the couple in the center of the frame, even though they are walking the whole time. The city around them buzzes with activity; the couple has become a symbol of stability.

1.10 Later, a traveling matte shows the Man and the Wife in traffic; the urban background dissolves into a pastoral scene.

Far from making a film with speed, pep, and initiative, Murnau tells a story criticizing those very values. Instead of delivering the occasional nonnarrative “kick,” the moving camera expresses the characters’ emotions while commenting on the ephemeral delights and the disorienting emptiness of modern life. The director’s longtime booster Maurice Kann raved about the film, seeing it as the fulfillment of The Last Laugh’s promising experiments with the representation of subjectivity: “Murnau has succeeded in boring his camera lens into the very brain of his players and shows you in picture form the thoughts that surge through their heads.” 64 Other critics commented on the film’s internationalism—its hybrid mixture of European aesthetics with a Hollywood budget. Pare Lorentz—then a film critic, later an esteemed documentarian—thought that the German–American mixture was a failure. He praised the “breathtaking photography” and the “perfect” first fifteen minutes, but he argued that the extended seTuence in the city contained too many gags, which had been added to entertain the “chocolate-sundae audience.” 65 European artistry had given way to slapstick trickery. Variety’s critic wrote more favorably that the film was “made in this country, but produced after the best manner of the German school.” 66 Moving Picture World noticed the film’s “continental flavor,” while commenting wryly on the association between national style and cultural status: “Coming from abroad, this production would be hailed by critics as a triumph. Even with the American label they are forced to give it grudging praise.” 67 Whereas Lorentz denounced the film for including too many concessions to the American audience, Variety and World positioned the film as a fascinating hybrid, a European artwork made in Los Angeles.

In the end, Sunrise struggled at the box office, and Murnau’s own career at Fox took a downward turn. 68 He experienced less support and more constraints on his remaining two films for the studio: the lost film Four Devils (1928) and the smaller-scale film City Girl (1930), both designed as nondialogue pictures, and both turned into part-talkies with added seTuences not directed by Murnau. 69 But Murnau’s impact was undeniable. As Janet Bergstrom reports, “[A] sign of William Fox’s appreciation of the artistic Tuality of Murnau’s films was that he encouraged his top directors to work in the same dark, visually expressive style.” 70 She lists several examples of Fox films made in Murnau’s style, including 7th Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928) by Frank Borzage, Fazil (1928) by Howard Hawks, The Red Dance (1928) by Raoul Walsh, and Mother Machree (1928) and Four Sons (1928) by John Ford. Other examples from the studio might include East Side, West Side (1927) and Frozen -ustice (1929) by Allan Dwan as well as Paid to Love (1927) by Hawks and Hangman’s House (1928) by Ford.

Outside Fox Studios, there is evidence that the trend toward unusual angles started well before Sunrise was released. In The Eagle (1925), the camera, suspended from a bridge stretched between two dollies, moves backward across a table, appearing to pass through several solid objects along the way. Director Clarence Brown explained, “We had prop boys putting candelabra in place just before the camera picked them up.” 71 An article in Film Daily in 1925 reports that cinematographer J. Roy Hunt used a handheld gyroscopic camera, inspired by The Last Laugh, to photograph The Manicure *irl, a lost film directed by Frank Tuttle. 72 The following year Maurice Kann spotted the influence of Variety in two other Famous Players–Lasky films: Victor Fleming’s MantraS and William Wellman’s You Never Know Women. Kann even gave credit to the cinematographers: Jimmy (James Wong) Howe and Victor Milner, respectively. 73 Less fortunate was Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian-born director beginning his long career at Warner Bros. His American debut, The Third Degree (1926), earned a skeptical review from Gilbert Seldes, who worried that directors were abusing the innovations of Variety. 74 PhotoSlay also denounced Curtiz’s film, noting that it was “filled with German camera-angles that don’t mean a thing.” 75 Another fan magazine complained, “The German films have caused our directors to become excited over the odd effects to be obtained by photographing scenes from unusual angles.” 76 An article in Motion Picture Classic declared that camera angles were “the bunk” and blamed the critics for heaping praise on European films when they employed the same “trick photography” that Americans had been doing for years. 77 The critics gave voice to a widely shared worry. Hollywood studios had the resources to copy the latest techniTues, either by hiring European personnel or by imitating their manner; what they needed to do was prove that they could use those techniTues in a meaningful way.

NOTES

58. Richard Koszarski discusses this shot in “The Cinematographer,” in New York to Hollywood: The PhotograShy of Karl Struss, ed. Barbara McCandless, Bonnie Yochelson, and Richard Koszarski (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1995), 177.

59. Struss claimed that the suspended dolly had a “wedge shaped thing” on the front to push the foliage out of the way (interview in Scott Eyman, Five American CinematograShers [Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987], 9).

60. Karl Struss, “Dramatic Cinematography,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 34 (October 1928): 318. 61. Susan Harvith and John Harvith, Karl Struss: Man with a Camera (Bloomsfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1976), 15.

62. Caitlin McGrath, “Captivating Motion: Late–Silent Film SeTuences of Perception in the Modern Urban Environment,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010, 222.

63. For more information on this shot, see Murnau, Borzage, and Fox, DVD box set.

64. Maurice Kann, “Sunrise and Movietone,” Film Daily, September 25, 1927, 4.

65. Pare Lorentz, “The Stillborn Art” (1928), in Lorentz on Film: Movies, 19271941 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 25.

66. “Rush.,” “Sunrise,” Variety, September 28, 1927, 21.

67. “Sunrise,” Moving Picture World 88, no. 5 (October 1, 1927): 312.

68. Donald Crafton reports that Sunrise “sank like a stone” in New York after a strong opening. Its run at the Cathay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles was more successful (The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 192–1931 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 525–527).

69. Janet Bergstrom carefully details the making of both films in “Murnau in America: Chronicle of Lost Films,” Film History 14, nos. 3–4 (2002): 430–460.

70. Bergstrom, William Fox Presents F. W. Murnau and Frank Borzage, 10.

71. Clarence Brown, Tuoted in Brownlow, The Parade’s *one By … , 146. A decade later, the director repeated the trick in Anna Karenina (1935).

72. “The Gyroscopic Camera and Future Production Possibilities,” Film Daily, June 7, 1925, 5.

73. Maurice Kann, “Fred Thomson,” Film Daily, July 14, 1926, 1, and Maurice Kann, “More Pictures,” Film Daily, July 15, 1926, 1. Elsewhere, a fan commented on the fact that You Never Know Women copied its angles from Variety (Richard Roland, “What the Foreigners Have Done for Us,” PicturePlay Magazine 26, no. 1 [March 1927]: 12). Largely conventional, MantraS (1926) featured one spectacular montage showing a dynamic trip from the country to the city.

74. Gilbert Seldes, “Camera Angles,” New ReSublic 50, no. 640 (March 9, 1927): 72–73.

75. “The Shadow Stage,” PhotoSlay 31, no. 4 (March 1927): 94.

76. Ken Chamberlain, “Camera Angles,” Motion Picture 23, no. 3 (April 1927):

25. The tone of the article is mocking, accompanied by four cartoons depicting four bizarre techniTues.

77. Harold R. Hall, “Camera Angles—the Bunk,” Motion Picture Classic 24, no. 6 (February 1927): 18, 79.

剧情很简单，很适合默片，不需要多少文字提示，就能看进去，也便于影片传播。

2020了，应该很多人跟我一样对剧情的逻辑性上还是会细思极恐。不过侧面也反应出了当时对于女性的主流价值观，告诉你怎样的女人才有好结果。

通片女主的基调也都是一致的，温柔似水，俏皮可爱，遇事没主见，丈夫为天。1，明知道自己的丈夫在外面有女人，只是自己伤心难过，也不吐露自己心声，不主动解决问题；2.在第一点的前提下，丈夫邀请出去游玩，欣喜若狂，没有任何疑问，当然更不会去想丈夫为什么要约我出去；3.在知道丈夫有杀自己的心后，只是害怕，没有任何自救行动，丈夫在最后幡然醒悟上岸后，也只是害怕，撒腿就跑，也没有任何其他行动，哪怕上车后求救都没有；4. 在丈夫哀求下（给她买吃的，送花，甜言蜜语），原谅了丈夫；5.在理发店里，坐在旁边的男人对她动手动脚，只害怕退缩，没有任何行动，最后躲在丈夫身后 ；6. 晚上坐船返程回家时遇到暴风雨，醒后害怕，没有任何自救行动，反而抱住丈夫，当时丈夫正在使劲划船自救呢。

女性柔软似水是贯穿了整个影片。

对比当今女性的价值观，可窥见一二女性的自我成长史。

茂瑙，德国表现主义大师，20年代拍摄《诺斯费拉图》，与编剧卡尔梅育合作拍摄室内剧《最卑贱的人》，海外放映后广受好评，也因此被好莱坞发掘。本片是茂瑙与福克斯签订合约后拍摄的第一部影片，据《世界电影史》评述，是该公司1927年成本最高的影片——上映后却获利平平。

但《日出》的影响无疑是深远的，不仅使得约翰·福特等人深受鼓舞，也将德国电影的独特风格引入好莱坞。尽管经典电影史读本往往会归纳出风格和特征来区分各个国家的电影，以便进行历史分期，但不论是技巧或是技术，融合都显得更为普遍，并且无可避免——打破范式又深入其中，甚至早于新浪潮导演对希区柯克的评价。以本片为范本，不仅可以发现德国表现主义的阴郁、构图，早期喜剧默片的肢体运动和表情设计，好莱坞情节剧的流畅剪辑、必不可少的大团圆结局。这些特征相得益彰，让这部默片显得动人至艺术，时至今日依旧如此，将默片的魅力最大化。

1、电影技巧

叠印，不断在表现心理活动的时刻出现，用绝对外化的画面的方式使观众理解。收放自如剪切进字幕中间，仿佛调节情绪的按钮。其中值得一提的是夫妻进城之后走出结婚礼堂——仿佛又结了一次婚，他们高兴的像走入了幸福深处，花朵、辽阔、明媚，直到喇叭声渐起，却发现原来不自觉已经闯入路口中央，这个段落的表现方式是在胶片上做文章，人物与背景贴合，再分离，幻想打破滑落进现实，余韵却已经使我们都明白，丈夫已经痛改前非，他们的心彼此相连。

景别交错，移动摄影，为了突出人物淡化周围环境，特写表情，雨夜那一段的光影交织，泰坦尼克号借尸还魂。

2、默片美感

每当看到心动的默片，我就会想起巴赞说的“完整电影的神话”，曾经在无声向有声时代迈进时坚不可摧的理论，而时光流转，当电影技术已经摧枯拉朽，vr、120帧层出不穷且从不止步，回看1927年的默片，却以他的“残缺”使观众完全沉浸其中，重新回到20年代。不管怎样，未来一直来，偶尔向过去投取一瞥，总依依不舍。