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Sunrise: A Song of Post-Expressionist Humans
Ryan Fordham

Many directors at some point throughout their career will shift their work stylistically.
F.W Murnau is noted and beloved as a father of the German Expressionism movement. In 1927,
he made the shift from German filmmaking to direct his first American film. The film was
Sunrise. With Sunrise, Murnau toned down his expressionistic roots, but did not forget them.
Sunrise acts as a sort of bridge between Murnau’s style and the style of the American silent era.
Murnau continues to use many of the stylistic flairs and techniques that were indicative of the
German Expressionist style, while toning some of them down to create a more easily digestible
film. For example, German Expressionism is often associated with horror and the macabre, but
Sunrise, at its core, is a love story. However, the love story features darker elements, plot points,
and tones than many of the genre. Murnau also combines more naturalistic settings with
expressionistic sets and set pieces. Due to its dual influences, Sunrise is an interesting look at
styles coming together and diverging in order to tell a story.

In the first part of his career, F.W. Murnau helped to set the tone for the German
Expressionist movement with films such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was
with films such as these that the visual and narrative style of the movement became widely
known. The movement had a lasting effect in cinema all over the world, with techniques that
began in the movement being mimicked and reused. The movement’s influence on set design
and lighting can be seen throughout cinema, possibly most notably in film noir. Many of the
narratives of the films involved in the movement told stories firmly rooted in dark emotions and
macabre imagery. This emphasis is reflected in the characters and in the sets in which the
narratives take place. Expressionism resisted a push towards naturalism and realism, instead

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