Arguably the consummate director of the silent era, FW Murnau created the iconic expressionist nightmare Nosferatu (1922) and the fantasy Faust (1926); an eloquent modern parable in The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924); and prefigured the film noir in the transcendent love story Sunrise (1927). Murnau brought unparalleled visual sophistication to motion pictures.
Murnau was schooled in art history and sometimes modeled his compositions after specific paintings. Like other German filmmakers of the WWI era he was influenced by the lighting and staging techniques of Max Reinhardt (he was part of Reinhardt’s company for a time), and embraced the Expressionist effects of chiaroscuro and distorted perspectives. But more importantly, Murnau made the leap to re-imagine space in terms of the mobile camera; his films have a fluidity and dynamism that still feels modern to this day. Murnau’s fluent articulation of expressionist devices like superimposition, camera angle and especially traveling shots, all in a naturalistic drama, proved an international sensation, and he was soon offered a Hollywood contract with Fox.
The first fruit of that contract was Sunrise, which Cahiers du Cinéma would one day declare to be “the single greatest masterwork in the history of cinema”. The story could be described as slight: a villager is seduced by a city vamp, and comes to the brink of murdering his wife before he finds redemption. Murnau’s virtuoso technique doesn’t dress up the material, rather, his sublime images are the heart and soul of this essential film. Like Orson Welles in 1940, Murnau enjoyed unparalleled privilege on the strength of his pedigree as an artist and innovator, someone who would bestow quality and prestige to the business.
In many ways it represents the apogee of the silent era, a synthesis of filmic devices including dissolves, tracking shots, expressionist acting and lighting and breathtaking set design – plus a Movietone score and effects track.
John Ford, for his part, called Sunrise “the greatest motion picture ever produced”, and at the first Academy Awards, it was singled out as “Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production” (as opposed to Wings, “Best Picture, Production”).
Sunrise came =11 in the 2020 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will be preceded by a 15 minute introductory lecture and feature a book club-style discussion afterwards.
Jun 16: Introduced by Mike Archibald, writer, editor and filmmaker
Born and raised in Vancouver, Mike Archibald is a writer, editor and filmmaker. He studied film at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and has worked with various festivals in this city, including DOXA and VIFF.
The summit of the then-new artform. Since then, in so many ways, it’s been a downhill road for American filmmaking.
Joseph McBride
The film is electric: overwhelmingly passionate and sexual.
Antonia Quirke, London Evening Standard
Reckless, romantic, and extravagant.
J Hoberman, Village Voice
F.W. Murnau
Janet Gaynor, George O’Brien, Margaret Livingston
USA
1927
No Dialogue
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Credits
Producer
William Fox
Cinematography
Charles Rosher, Karl Struss
Editor
Harold D. Schuster
Original Music
Hugo Riesenfeld, Ernö Struss
Art Director
Rochus Gliese
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
