Film Screening: Panic!: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Directed by F.W. Murnau, one of the silent era’s most accomplished filmmakers, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is a stylish, atmospheric drama that expresses potent anxieties over the corrosive effects of modernity. The story follows a married farmer who falls under the spell of a woman from the city. When she hatches a plot to have the farmer kill his wife, he struggles with the swirling temptations of the modern woman and the city she represents.

In line with the anxieties of its time, Sunrise‘s town-and-country drama also rhymes with our own, saturated as it is with panicky discourses over the sinister influences—political, sexual, criminal—supposedly lurking in major cities and sanguine appeals to the imagined security of rural life. Featuring the dazzling, kinetic cinematography of Charles Rocher and Karl Struss and originally released with a synchronized orchestral score, Sunrise is a technical and aesthetic landmark of silent cinema.

Nicholas Baer (author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism) will join moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.