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.

由于感触太多，就把短评里超出的文字搬运到这里。

（个人影史十佳）A song of two humans—不寻常地被好莱坞给予完全的拍片自由的茂瑙用一部交响乐的结构拍了这样一部伟大的默片作品。

这位德国表现主义革新者将意象、结构、双重曝光等运用地出神入化。从男人受到象征着欲望和贪婪的城里女人的诱惑，计划制造妻子意外身亡的事故，到妻子知晓丈夫谋害的计划伤心与恐惧，去往城市电车上的两人，一人闪躲绝望，一人后悔内疚，虽然没有台词，所有的肢体语言、微表情都太生动。在城市里，两人经历了车流中穿梭追逐、教堂看到结婚典礼被感动、车流中亲吻（此处导演十分巧妙地安排了一刻的场景的转换，由马路上车流中心转换到乡村田野再回到现实）、造型店男人由面部到心灵都得到了洁净（这是两人关系新的节点）、照相馆里宛若热恋情侣的亲密羞怯……有太多要素，但都各在其位，并无堆砌之感。

值得一提的是，同样是二十世纪德国表现主义大作，《大都会》中的城市是压抑的、井然有序的、是属于少数统治阶级的，而《日出》中的城市极具娱乐性，有趣、纷繁复杂，又不乏人性。

还有值得一提的是，在片中发现被《低俗小说》、《泰坦尼克号》、《飞向太空》等作品致敬、借鉴的地方。

好一幅表现主义的《日出》，可与莫奈试比高。

（原刊于公众号：21世纪赛车手。本文在原刊文基础上略有修改）

不知是什么原因，让在德国乌法电影公司（Ufa，Universum Film AG，又译为“全球电影股份公司”）发展得顺风顺水的弗莱德里希·瓦·茂瑙（F. W. Murnau）接受美国福克斯电影公司总裁威廉·福克斯（William Fox）的邀请，参与到于1927年上映的《日出》的制作当中。当时的德国电影和美国好莱坞电影，有着迥然不同的风格。茂瑙在自己的家乡，早已因“吸血鬼德古拉”电影《诺斯费拉图》（1922）、《最卑贱的人》（1924）、《浮士德》（1926）等作品明确了自己伤感而又技巧感充沛的个人风格。而彼时的美国本土电影，尤其是好莱坞商业电影，大多都是欢乐而保守的。可能是美国艺术自由的风气感染了他，也可能是美国电影工业的成熟和资金充足引诱了他，也可能是像格里菲斯一般被加州烈日迷倒（可以到户外取景拍摄），也有可能他只是听从了好莱坞经验丰富的旅德英国摄影师Charles Rosher的游说。不论如何，茂瑙选择离开德国委身于好莱坞片场制度，拍摄出了这部德美两国风格融合感强烈的《日出》。

《日出》在影史上的伟大毋庸置疑。无数次入选影史“必看”、“推荐”电影并名列前茅，也是第一届好莱坞奥斯卡金像奖“最佳女演员”“最佳摄影”以及“最佳艺术质量”奖的获奖电影。电影因它独特的美术设计和摄影成就而闻名——大量的奇特透视感的场景、梦境般的叠影画面以及著名的轨道摄影录制的“出轨”夜戏。《日出》这部无声电影可以有无数个理由被欣赏，穿越影史永不失其价值。

丈夫与“第三者”幻想城市美好生活的叠影画面（电影截图）

但即便在美学和技巧上颇有建树，电影却有一个容易被人忽视的潜文本，也是电影或者旅美导演茂瑙在影片中无意透露出的矛盾或冲突。主角三人的三角恋故事，流转在“城市”与“乡村”之间。乡村是丈夫的“出轨”直至对妻子“谋杀”的场所。而当谋杀未遂，夫妻一同辗转来到城市，城市的五光十色便迅速让二人和好如初、信守当初婚姻许下的诺言。电影为描刻“城市的夜景”此刻达到前所未有的极致斑斓和理想。然而这一夜过后，电影又急转直下——返回乡村的夫妻二人遭受到生与死的灾难。电影这几下生硬的转折、明显的分裂感，一直持续直到影片最后朦胧的日出。

“夫妻”二人在代表着“乡村”的家中（电影截图）

城市的极致精彩与透视感奇特的艺术设计（电影截图）

这种分裂可以有一种解释。1920年代的美国，城市化进程飞速前进，而美国人渐渐认为生活在城市要比在农村更加快乐刺激。更多本来生活在农村的人向城市迁移，城乡人口差距开始逐渐拉近。而放眼当时美国的电影制作以及电影市场，首先，由于电影院毋庸置疑都是位于城市当中，其中播放的电影理所应当要歌颂城市。而“明星制”刚刚萌芽的电影产业，大多都靠“色诱力”强的女星来拉拢观众和票房。于是乎电影少不了要安排一两个“危险的女性角色”，最好是“来自城市的危险而又风光的女性角色”。

“第三者”、来自城市的女性角色（电影截图）

《日出》当中，Margaret Livingston饰演的女性来自城市、穿着时髦、打扮艳丽，但同时她也是破坏婚姻“危险”的化身，不断挑逗着观影者的神经和欲望。据说在茂瑙和编剧Carl Mayer的第一稿故事里并没有“城市女子”这样的身份，这样的身份是老板福克斯建议并修改的。同样的观感出现在占据影片一半时长的“城市风貌”当中，这里面几乎看不到丝毫悲伤的情绪，或者说几乎看不到茂瑙的个人风格。这也极有可能是福克斯有意干涉为之，可能害怕过分消极的“德国风格”会影响到影片发售情况。于是乎，《日出》当中所有最阴暗的人物冲突都在乡村里，所有场景诡谲、情绪哀伤的茂瑙个人风格也都在那个破败而多灾多难的城市之外。仿佛只有加州的烈日落山后，昼伏夜出的“诺斯费拉图”才会开始行动。

即便电影分裂如此，《日出》给当时美国影坛的印象仍然是独特的、“艺术造诣高”的。不论从什么角度，我们都很难去质疑《日出》的杰出，尤其是置于无声电影坐标当中，让所有看过它的人都不停感叹电影无声也能如此美妙，相较之下有声电影却苍白许多。著名女性影评人Molly Haskell曾经说过（一个大概的意思）：茂瑙的城市与乡村的对立，正如有声电影与无声电影的对立，可更多的，后者是前者经常去追寻的一种理想的避难所。

（部分史实资料来自于David Thomson所著《The Big Screen》和维基百科）