Old Yorker

  • Sunrise:  A Song of Two Humans

    Old YorkerFilm review

    F W Murnau (1927)

    A powerful, lovely and charming film.  Sunrise appeared in the Sight & Sound top-ten-of-all-time for the first time in 2002 – this year it’s up from seventh to fifth.  Its lofty position in the S&S poll – which is why it’s currently showing at BFI – is, I think, pushing it but Isabel Stevens makes a clear and, as far as I know, accurate case in this month’s S&S for the film’s place in cinema history:

    ‘Sunrise was an example – perhaps never again repeated on the same scale – of unfettered imagination and the clout of the studio system working together rather than at cross purposes.  Murnau had a new Fox studio to transform into moonlight marshes and dazzling gargantuan cityscapes …’

    A prologue explains that the story isn’t set in any particular place, could happen anywhere, anytime.  The human emotions that fuel and shape the story of Sunrise – ambition and treachery, lust and love – give credibility to this claim (although the plot of any drama made in Hollywood on the cusp of the move from silent to sound film  is liable to be contrived to an extent that arguably deprives it of true universality).  The two humans of the title are a young farmer and his wife (none of the characters is named).   When this pair travel to the city, it’s pretty clear from the costumes and from the social excitements and architecture that combine to enthrall them that it’s a big American city of the 1920s.  Even so, the fact that Murnau had emigrated from Germany as recently as the previous year and the yoking of his European techniques and style with the technical possibilities offered by a thriving American studio combine to create a locus that’s hard to pin down, and to give Sunrise a mid-Atlantic quality of a very extraordinary kind.

    I’ve known of this movie (without the ‘A Song of Two Humans’ part of the title) for forty years.  Her performance in Sunrise was one of three for which Janet Gaynor won the first ever Best Actress Oscar in 1927-28.  (The other two performances were in Seventh Heaven and Street Angel:  Gaynor is the only actor to have won an Oscar for multiple roles – within a couple of years of the inception of the Academy Awards, actors could be nominated only for a single performance.)  Janet Gaynor has a purity and simplicity of acting style which is not only appealing but also chimes with the deeply sweet-natured woman she’s playing.   Gaynor is pretty rather than beautiful and this too seems right and is effective – it means the spiritual beauty that she transmits is more salient.  If all this makes the character sound tiresomely idealised the actress’s truthfulness and humour ensure that doesn’t happen.  George O’Brien is the husband who is tempted by a city woman holidaying in the lakeside area near where the young couple farm, and is encouraged by this vamp (excellent Margaret Livingston) to drown his wife in what will be meant to look like a boating accident.   O’Brien is more uneven than Gaynor:  when he does shifty or remorseful his stylised acting isn’t either surprising or expressive.  But he certainly has his moments and, when the husband is relaxed or seen in repose, the effect is remarkable. O’Brien too is nice-looking rather than strikingly handsome.  When he’s not obviously acting, this makes him seem more real – and gives you the sense of watching someone really going about the business of living in a time before you were born.  However often you see news footage of the world that existed before you did, its impact is quite different in the context of a poetic melodrama.

    After the attempted uxoricide in the lake fails, the wife escapes from her husband and desperately hails a tram, bound for the big city.  The tram’s driver slows down and picks her up.   The husband, in pursuit, manages to jump on too.   Fear, weeping and recrimination eventually give way to a forgiving thaw and the rebuilding of trust:   although all this happens in the space of a tram ride and a few screen minutes, it feels a convincingly lengthy process.   The visits paid by the couple, once they’re in the big city, to its various attractions all provide them with things to enjoy and briefly to worry about, and bring them closer together.   They go into a church and watch wedding vows being exchanged.  They visit a professional photographer (J Farrell MacDonald), then a barber’s-shop-cum-beauty-parlour (the hairdresser is played by thin-as-a-rail Ralph Sipplerly, who’s a cross between T S Eliot and Kenneth Williams), then a fairground, then a dance.  Late in the evening, the man and his wife, exhausted and happy, take the tram back to the lake and get back in their rowboat to cross the water.   A violent storm blows up and the boat capsizes.  The day had started with the husband trying to drown the wife; now that that’s the last thing he would want to happen, nature steps in to do the job.  But the film’s title hints at a happy ending-cum-new-beginning and so it proves.

    Murnau superimposes images in dreams or nightmares or in waking life (like the reflections of the couple on the plate glass window of a city store they’re looking into).  This may have been innovative at the time Sunrise was made but it still seems wonderfully unusual now – because no one, thanks to the vastly increased technical sophistication of cinema, would any longer need to try to create such effects in this way.  The film thereby seems to conjure up a magical past.  (It reminded me very much, in this respect, of Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), for all that enchantment is so much more integral to the story in the latter.)   Murnau’s orchestration of street scenes is impressive.  The lighting is sophisticated and expressive.  The climactic storm is spectacular and frightening both in the city and the country, and the dark waters in which the farmer’s neighbours search for his missing wife bring to mind the awesome calm of the nocturnal river journey in The Night of the Hunter some thirty years later.   Sunrise also won an Oscar for cinematography for Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, as well as a once-only-awarded prize for ‘Best Unique and Artistic Production’.

    The soundtrack wasn’t explained in the BFI programme note and what happened at the start of this screening makes it all the more of a mystery.   In the opening sequences, as we see a train pulling into a station, the music was distorted and dissonant to an extent that made me wonder if I could stand ninety minutes of it.   Then the screen went blank and we were informed there was ‘a slight technical hitch’.  After the film resumed the strange music never returned.   (What’s unmistakeable at one point in the score is the Gounod music, used as the theme for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.)    That train at the start is bringing the polluting presence of the city woman to the countryside; when she returns to the station at the end, she’s still smartly dressed but seated in a horse-driven buggy, as if to add rustic insult to injury.   The animals in Sunrise also include a dog, which helps save the wife’s life when the husband tries to do away with her, and a pig, which escapes from the fairground and into the kitchens of a city hotel.   I wasn’t sure the pig was being treated humanely in the comedy routines it was put through but there’s no denying that it gives a very good performance.

    18 September 2012

  • Summer with Monika

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sommaren med Monika

    Ingmar Bergman (1953)

    Melvyn Bragg, in his appreciation of The Seventh Seal in the BFI Film Classics series, describes the impact of the first Bergman films that he saw in the late 1950s and highlights one film in particular:

    ‘Summer with Monika spoke to the condition of many adolescents in the 50s:  it could have been my story or that of thousands of others.  The nerve of it was that somehow and for the first time, I think, a film tapped itself into the real root of what I knew I had in some measure or would [sic] in some measure or wanted in some measure to experience.  The bait was Harriet Andersson.’

    The twenty-year-old Andersson plays the film’s title character, a working-class girl in early post-war Stockholm.  Monika works in a greengrocer’s shop and loathes it.  She meets and starts a relationship with Harry (Lars Ekborg), a young man who is also stagnating in humdrum work in a local glassworks.  They quit their jobs and leave the city, in a motor boat owned by Harry’s father, who is currently hospitalised.  The couple head for the Stockholm archipelago, where they spend the summer and exult in freedom from drudgery and freedom to have sex.   When they return to Stockholm, Monika is pregnant.  The couple marry and their baby daughter is born soon afterwards.   Harry gets another job and trains to be an engineer.  Monika, who, from the day the baby is born, shows next to no maternal instinct, is oppressed by their lack of funds and by a renewed sense of imprisonment.  She starts a relationship with another man and walks out on Harry and their child.

    In the 1950s, Summer with Monika was controversial for its sexual aspect – in particular, the eroticisation of Harriet Andersson, who is naked in one sequence (reprised, as part of Harry’s memory of their happy time together, near the end of the film).  Its cachet as the exemplar of a new freedom in film-making and in the treatment of sexuality on screen tends to obscure the fact that one of Ingmar Bergman’s main themes here is constraint and that his realisation of this theme too is remarkably expressive.  The claustrophobia of the various Stockholm interiors is finely conveyed through the cameraman Gunnar Fischer’s spatial compositions and lighting.  When Monika undresses, you’re struck by what a cumbersome process is involved in undoing suspenders, removing stockings and taking off a skirt to reveal pants that are by no means briefs.  By the time she meets Harry, the heroine has already had relationships with enough men for her to be known in her neighbourhood as ‘mucky Monika’ – and she looks not only slovenly but unwashed.  Bergman in this film seems to pay uncharacteristically close attention to the consequences of being hard up – except that the script, which he wrote with Per Anders Fogelström[1], isn’t entirely clear about why Harry, from a comfortably-off middle-class family, appears at the start to be doomed, as much as Monika, to a menial job.

    The heart of Summer with Monika is the couple’s time on the boat and the Swedish archipelago.  (Bergman and his film crew were based on Ornö, an island in the southern part of the archipelago.)  Monika and Harry’s euphoric light-heartedness when they escape there is invigorating for the audience too but Bergman’s use of the landscape and changes in the weather ensures that the lovers’ sense of liberation is never oversimplified.  Monika and Harry may, temporarily, be children of nature but it’s a nature whose awesome features underline the fragility of their idyll.  Besides, their times of pleasure are interrupted by crises.  Fed up with a diet of mushrooms, Monika goes to steal food from the garden of a house on the island on which they’re staying and is apprehended by the bourgeois owners of this holiday home.  While her theft from under their noses – and ravenous eating from – a joint of meat is both a dramatic and a comic highlight, an attempt to set fire to the motorboat is shocking in its arrant maliciousness.  The arsonist is a youth who is one of the few weaknesses of the film.  This is no fault of the actor (John Harryson) but the character, Lelle, is improbably ubiquitous in the story.  He becomes a virtually symbolic bad penny – incongruous in a largely naturalistic setting.  Lelle is introduced as one of Monika’s previous boyfriends in Stockholm.  He then turns up to assault Harry in the yard outside the housing block where Monika’s family lives – and it’s Lelle with whom Monika is unfaithful after the baby has been born.  It’s too much that he also happens to be camping on the same part of the archipelago as the lovers.

    The boat’s-eye view of its journey under Stockholm bridges and out into more open water is an especially eloquent sequence in Summer with Monika.  Bergman inevitably shows the return journey to the city, and the sounds of the city, from the same perspective.   Although this back-to-the-real-world sequence has a melancholy pull, the film isn’t fatuously anti-urban.  Later, as the newly-married Harry and three senior colleagues return from an out-of-town work assignment, one of the older men looks out of the train window and describes how seeing Stockholm again always raises his spirits.  By now, though, Harry’s relationship with Monika is falling apart.  Marriage and parenthood, which bring out in him a new sense of responsibility, make her frustrated and resentful.  It’s possible to read Monika’s abandonment of husband and baby as censure – by a film-maker from a decidedly middle-class background – of working-class fecklessness but perhaps Bergman recognises too, in dramatising her impatience for material comforts, that Monika has been waiting all her young life for these.

    Harriet Andersson creates exceptionally natural shifts between cafard and exuberant freshness.  When she’s working in the greengrocer’s, the ‘slut’ Monika has a shopsoiled quality that serves to intensify her excitement and vitality once she and Harry are away on the boat.  Lars Ekborg’s Harry, sexually inexperienced compared with Monika, seems much younger than her in the first part of the story.  (Ekborg was actually in his mid-twenties, several years older than Harriet Andersson; he was only forty-three when he died.)  When the couple return to Stockholm Harry has more noticeably grown up but it’s the achievement of both lead actors, with the help of Bergman and Gunnar Fischer, that their faces age and are rejuvenated according to the mood or meaning of particular points in the story.  For example, when Harry first sees his baby daughter in the hospital maternity ward, Bergman keeps the camera on Lars Ekborg’s face.  You see in it both a recognition that he has a child to care for and how young a father this is:  the effect is very touching.  A few screen minutes later, Monika, who’s gone out to enjoy herself, sits in a bar and looks straight into the camera.  Bergman holds this close-up for even longer and Harriet Andersson’s confronting, defiantly brazen gaze is extraordinary.  She stares the viewer out.

    17 February 2015

    [1] According to Peter Cowie’s biography of him, Bergman considered Summer with Monika to be ‘in the first instance a film treatment.  Per Anders Fogelström and I met on Kungsgatan, and he told me the plot in ten words.  And I said, we have to make a picture out of this; and then we started to write the script.  And subsequently he wrote the novel’.   Cowie notes that the film’s producer, Allan Ekelund, had a different recollection – of forwarding Fogelström‘s novel Summer with Monika to Bergman.   The Swedish Wikipedia page on Fogelström suggests that Ekelund may have been right and Bergman wrong:  it gives the novel’s publication date as 1951.

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