*Spoilers*
It is odd, from a modern standpoint, but I think that aspect was intended to give the story a fairy-tale darkness and simplicity; a sort of "what evil lurks in the hearts of men!" kind of vibe. "Sunrise" investigates the intensity of human emotion, what happens when feeling is carried over--or almost carried over--into action (how many of us have, at one point, felt such anger toward someone that you wanted something very bad to happen to them--only to be glad that, once "cooled off", that "something bad" never actually occured?) The farmer doesn't actually want to kill his wife, he wants to be rid of her presence so he can indulge in his lust for the city woman without distraction or, oddly enough, guilt. When the reality of what he was thinking of doing comes to light, he realizes the sheer horror of it---the horror of planning to kill someone who has trusted you with their safety and total intimacy (someone you live with, sleep beside, have children with, share food with).
Yes, I'm with you on having a hard time trusting someone again after they'd shown they'd even CONSIDER murdering me, but in the context of the story, it made sense. Also, there are some era-specific factors that are no longer relevant in an age of immunizations, unmarried partners of decades, women in the workforce, divorce, etc...how we define life and relationships has changed quite a bit. Death isn't lurking behind every corner, the smallest sniffle resulting in potential fatality. Most people are no longer of the impression that they are bound for life to a spouse. Women can define themselves outside of their familial duties. "Sunrise" is purposefully quaint in certain areas and strikingly modern in others; it's a contrast of the "new" and "old" world of human interactions and relationships. It's about the absolute cusp of change; the social moment when the old world faced the new and attempted to figure out how to interpret it. The farmer doesn't even know what to do with his situation, it's so strange and new to a man of his lifestyle. It's apparent he'd never encountered a woman before like the one of the city; for all he knew, the strange creature--with her disconcertingly seductive ways--could've been a wicked enchantress sent to secure his destruction. It's a kind of novelty he couldn't have imagined and it sends him into a confusing predicament. That sort of notion is almost unimaginable from a modern perspective; we're so surrounded by information, imagery and perspectives, that to imagine a time when people were totally isolated in villages (places they were born in and would die in) seems impossible. But there was a time when people--in particular, poor people--never ventured further than 30 miles from home or recieved constant, local and world news updates. Anything beyond that was connected by stories, travelers and mystery.
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stephen-morton
14 years ago
You make wonderful points that really illuminate the story there. I almost completely agree, but I would make this caveat: The people in 1927, when this movie was made, weren't stupid. People in America and the Western world were fairly well-educated and much less superstitious than they had been 100 years before. There are still lots of people alive who were born before this movie came out. So we shouldn't generalize those sorts of things about the audience. However, the movie is meant as a fairy tale or a fable. It is meant to evoke the old Grimm's Fairy Tales style, etc, and we can judge the actions of the characters through that lens. The characters in the film do have an innocence, a naivity, a simplicity that could easily lead to superstition and can perhaps be connected to rural European peasants from the 1600-1700s.
This movie isn't about realism, it's about love and haunting beauty in a world where magic and technology are one and the same. Saying the movie is unrealistic is just the wrong way of going about judging this film.
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Tetra123
14 years ago
I agree, stephen-morton, that the characters were romanticized to seem more fantasy-bound or classic--in the fairy tale sense--than their 1920's country counterparts would've been in reality; however, that doesn't diminish what I find to be a prevailing question posed by "Sunrise"; how do we re-evaluate our social reality (life philosophies, tradition and human relationships) when technology makes the world bigger, brings people closer and offers so many more options than those who lived before us, ever knew could exist?
The 1920's were a huge moment in human history when the social experience changed drastically for the lower classes in many societies, as better technology allowed them more opportunities to travel further and connect faster. Automobiles were beginning to gain ground in communities. Telephones were being installed inside households instead of just in public buildings. In America, women were given the vote in 1922 and fashion styles completely shifted to a new way of dressing that allowed for more activity and movement. Urban life and country life were increasingly crossing-over, when--just decades before--there would've been a huge difference between the lifestyles of city-dwellers, wealthy city-dwellers who occasionally visited the country and country-dwellers who rarely ventured out of their hometowns and villages (except for the most important of business). Populations were smaller, land between city and country towns was vaster and for so many people, there were constant opportunities for novelty. I didn't mean to say that the country folk of "Sunrise" were dim or totally, utterly isolated, just that they were busy going about their lives in their country village and rarely had reason to even think about city life, let alone have it interfere with their duties and daily routines. Visitors from the city were almost like alien life forms in their style of dress and behavior. The hustle and bustle of city life--and those creatures that adapted to it--was/were strikingly different from what they were used to. And strangeness/novelty is the stuff of seduction and fascination.
Since things were changing rapidly and drastically in the 1920s and 1930's, the last, lingering people who clung to the lifestyle displayed by the country "folk", as shown in "Sunrise", were fast becoming a novelty themselves (flappers were battling with their Victorian grandmothers while training for typist positions and young, male clerks were competing in a "Meritocracy" for jobs that would've never been available to their grandfathers because of class tradition, social expectation and limited opportunity). To borrow from someone who also crooned about evolving eras; "The times, they [were] a'changin'" --and how. "Sunrise" perfectly captured the conflict of big, societal changes against our most basic and timeless of human needs and desires. How do we marry the two--technology and humanity--without annihilating ourselves in the process? This theme was repeatedly evaluated by many Expressionistic and Art Deco artists.
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