A man wades through a moonlit marsh, fog clinging to the reeds, toward a woman from the city who is waiting for him. She kisses him and, almost in the same breath, asks him to drown his wife. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans stages this temptation as something closer to a fever than a plot — bodies pressed together in double exposure, the camera drifting after the farmer as if it too were being led astray — and in a few wordless minutes F.W. Murnau makes a moral catastrophe feel like weather rolling in.

It is, by some distance, one of the most beautiful films ever made, and arguably the moment the medium discovered what its camera could do. Murnau arrived in Hollywood a master of German Expressionism and was handed Fox’s resources to build whatever he could imagine; what he made was not a showcase but a fable pared to the bone — a Man, a Wife, a Woman from the City, no names given — told with a fluidity of movement and feeling that silent cinema had never managed and sound cinema would spend decades catching up to.

The unchained camera

The film’s reputation rests first on how it moves. Where its contemporaries planted the camera and let the actors come to it, Murnau set it loose: it tracks the farmer through the fog to his lover, it rides the trolley with the couple from the dark countryside into the blazing city in a single unbroken glide, it floats over crowds and traffic built on forced-perspective sets that made a modest lot look like a metropolis. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss lit and moved it so that light itself seems to carry the story — work the first Academy Awards recognised with the very first Oscar for cinematography.

A day that becomes a second courtship

Then the film does the thing that keeps it from being a mere exercise. The farmer takes his wife out on the lake meaning to drown her, and cannot — and her terror, once she understands, drives the rest of the picture. He chases her into the city, repentant, and the day turns into a second courtship: they stumble into a church and a stranger’s wedding undoes them both; a barber, a fairground, a photographer’s studio; terror melting into laughter, then into tenderness. Janet Gaynor, who would win the first Best Actress Oscar partly for this, plays the whole arc in her face alone.

George O’Brien gives the Man a hulking, stooped guilt that the camera follows like a shadow, and Margaret Livingston’s City Woman lingers in double exposure even after she is gone, the temptation that won’t quite dissolve. And then Murnau brings the storm: the lake turns on the couple on the way home, the boat breaks apart, and the film that began with a planned drowning ends searching the black water by torchlight for the woman the husband tried to kill and now cannot live without.

A still from Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), directed by F.W. Murnau — Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), directed by F.W. Murnau.

Why it still earns the score

The honest reservation is that the story is almost diagrammatic — sin, near-murder, reconciliation — and that the long city idyll runs lighter and more comic than the thunderous halves around it. But the simplicity is the design: Murnau wanted a fable anyone could feel, and then poured into it a visual intelligence that has barely a rival in the medium. The craft has not dated by a single frame, the emotion is direct enough to bruise, and almost a century of cinema has chased the camera he set free here without often catching it. It is, by the most demanding measure, very close to perfect.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans premiered in 1927, directed by F.W. Murnau for Fox from a scenario by Carl Mayer, adapted from Hermann Sudermann’s story “The Excursion to Tilsit,” photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss. George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor and Margaret Livingston head the cast. At the first Academy Awards it won the one-time honour for Unique and Artistic Picture, the first Oscar for Cinematography, and Best Actress for Janet Gaynor — and it has been counted among the greatest films ever made, and the supreme work of the silent era, ever since.