When the man was looking for his wife by boat after the storm, the man kept calling his wife affectionately. "Sunrise" is a no-dialog movie. We can't hear his shouting and anxiety. Instead, the sound synchronized with his performance is the horn sound blended with the background music, as if the man’s mouth is the horn. . The sound of the horn is extremely vivid, and its rhythmic and frustrating rhythm is like an affectionate cry. If such a technique appears in a movie now, the audience may seem to be accustomed to it and even find it unpleasant to play mystery, but in the context of the time, this was definitely not the case.
The sound technology of "Sunrise" has just appeared at the time of production, and it is neither mature nor popular. Sunrise's director FW Murnau was a famous German director at the time, and "Sunrise" was the first work he transferred from Germany to Hollywood. At that time, the German film industry was probably at his most worthwhile moment in film history. Due to its superb technology and engineering capabilities, Germany's independent research and development of film recording technology has made German films worldwide distribution rights the only film industry that can compete with Hollywood during the transition from silent to sound. And Marnau's German background and Hollywood prospects put him at the forefront of this kind of film ideological confrontation.
Before the center of the American film industry was transferred to Hollywood on the West Coast in about 1905, American filmmakers had realized that if they wanted to make films alive for a long time, they had to increase the appeal of this art form to the middle class. To put it bluntly That is to improve the compulsory standard. Therefore, the mainstream of the movie at that time began to transition from being based on the Spectacle similar to Mélières to being based on the Narrative similar to Griffith. The reason is that the art forms popular with the middle class—drama and literature—are narrative. This transformation established the narrative tradition of Hollywood movies. From this narrative tradition, Hollywood slowly developed the Central Conflict Theory they have been using today. The so-called Central Conflict Theory is the most common plot structure or screenwriting technique we see. His basic template is that something breaks the balance of the protagonist’s life, the protagonist has a strong inner desire to restore balance or make changes, and in the process of change, he has gone through various difficulties and obstacles, and finally reached an irreversible result. . Almost all Hollywood movies and Hollywood-influenced narrative movies basically follow this template, because it has its irreplaceable advantage: it catches people. Central Conflict Theory emphasizes the confrontation between the protagonist and the outside world as well as his own inner heart. In this way, as the plot develops, the audience will have more and more emotional investment in the protagonist, so that the protagonist's life and death are always at ease. This way the audience will sit in the cinema for two hours and willingly come back next time. Such movies are open to the public and resonate with everyone's emotional experience, so they are popular all over the world. And his question is also very obvious: When you wake up every morning, what is the uncontrollable desire in your heart that drives you to cause an irreversible result? The answer for most people must be no. So what he is talking about is not life, but drama. The play is fake, it removes all non-narrative elements, and it also entrains personal ideology.
In order to fight against Hollywood’s Central Conflict Theory, European countries have also developed their own film styles: French impressionism, Soviet montage and so on. In my opinion, these European film styles are more significant to film art than Hollywood. This will be discussed below. German films also have their own unique qualities: Expressionism, expressionism. The general feature of Expressionism is the exaggerated action makeup setting and expression. People think that such exaggerated expression is an emotional and stylized expression of social trauma and anxiety after the war, and the role of realism in such expression is greatly weakened. This style is also reflected in many aspects in "Sunrise", such as the unnatural movements of the male protagonist when rowing a boat, the eye makeup of the mistress, and the narrative line that cannot be carried.
At that time, due to the development of recording technology, the world's film industry was in a transitional period from silent to sound. However, whether or not sound films are more profitable is a matter for businessmen and artists do not necessarily buy it. This is not to blame the artists, because the recording technology of the recording film at that time is simply primitive from now on. It has several problems: 1. The recording technology at the time did not support multi-track mixing, so if you want a soundtrack in the movie scene, you must ask the symphony orchestra to perform at the shooting site, which greatly increases the inconvenience of shooting. 2. At that time, whether it was a 16mm camera or a 35mm camera, their noise was far beyond the tolerable range of live radio (there was no directional microphone at that time), so the camera had to stay in a heavy soundproof booth for shooting. This makes the movement of the lens almost impossible, and all lenses become fixed lenses. 3. Moreover, due to the uncontrollability of the symphony orchestra's live performance, single-camera multi-angle repeated shooting makes it impossible to make the sound of different shots smooth in the later stage, so the commonly used shooting method has changed from a single-camera to a multi-camera. And due to the limitation of the axis relationship, all the positions must be placed on the same side of the actor. Coupled with the fixed lens limitation just mentioned, the initial audio narrative film became extremely similar to the drama (a single fixed perspective and audible storytelling).
This matter is absolutely not tolerated by film artists. Film was considered a derivative of drama when it was first born. Artists all over the world have gone through countless explorations and attempts to make film widely regarded as an independent visual art with its own expressive methods and specialties (yes Movies are a kind of visual art from the beginning. It is the dominance of Hollywood that makes people think that the essence of movies is narrative art). In order to add sound, the film loses its artistic characteristics and returns to a theater-like appearance. Of course, this kind of buying and selling film artists does not buy it.
Now I finally come back to the sound of the horn, because FW Murnau is one of such film artists. His use of the horn in "Sunrise" has at least the following three meanings.
1. As mentioned above, Murnau is a director from German expressionism. This method of replacing human voice with instrumental music simply defines expressionism (the most famous example of this technique should be the classic bathing section in Hitchcock's Terror. NS).
2. The technological advancement from silent to sound has allowed movie audiences to flock to the cinema to listen to their favorite actors speaking on the screen. This is understandable; film studios see the momentum and vigorously develop the production of sound films and use talking movies. The gimmick propaganda is also driven by the interests of businessmen, and it is natural; however, for film artists, the regression of the film art level brought about by the new technical restrictions is an oppression that cannot but resist. So although the production company Fox asked him to use simultaneous sound technology in the film, Murnau did not let the actors speak. This kind of rejection and fighting is certainly not as simple as it is on paper. The number of trade-offs and compromises in it may not be enough for outsiders, and this kind of resistance may now seem to be just a historical spiral or the pain of innovation, but His persistence is still touching.
It must be said that such persistence is not just stubborn conservativeness.
As mentioned above, European filmmakers have been fighting against the dominance of Hollywood. On the one hand, this kind of confrontation is for one's own film aesthetics to have a place in the world, and on the other hand, it is also an argument for the essence of film. Europeans insist that film is a visual art, a highly demanding Fine Art, while the United States has popularized film by letting film tell stories, and therefore dominated the world film industry. So while Hollywood is sending dramatic isolation of reality and ideological narrative films to every corner of the world, European film artists have been constantly exploring film aesthetics beyond narrative, pursuing the so-called "only film To realize the expression" and call it "The Essence of Cinema". These attempts have expanded the boundaries of film expression ability, and have also developed a large number of film expression methods and techniques that are still in use today. Therefore, as a European director, Murnau grew up in an environment that has always regarded movies as a visual expression rather than a narrative method. Under this kind of film aesthetics and philosophy, adding narrative dialogue to the film will interfere with the visual sense of the film is disastrous.
It is not difficult for a careful person to see that Murnau really values the visual dimension of the movie rather than the narrative dimension in "Sunrise". There are two examples. First, not to mention the shot scheduling of the same example, even the occasional subtitles were mobilized by Murnau. Let these letters be an exaggerated performance, it is really not letting go of the possibility of visual expression. Second, from a narrative point of view, "Sunrise" is definitely not a good story, let alone a Hollywoodized Central Conflict story. In the film, from the couple entering the city to returning home, the plot can be said to have not progressed at all, and many of the characters' reactions and motivations are also questionable. These are completely inconsistent with Hollywood screenwriting standards. In such a loose frame of the story, Murnau tried his best to express the beauty and joy of the process, while weakening the narrative as much as possible. This is how he de-Hollywood his films.
So there is only one meaning after saying so much: the sound of the horn is a manifestation of Murnau's opposition to Hollywoodized narrative films. What he adheres to is not a simple "film without dialogue" dogma, but a deeper principle: the essence of film is the aesthetic pursuit of expressing and feeling emotions with vision.
3. As mentioned above, European artists have been exploring "expression that can only be achieved by film", and Murnau has inherited such a tradition from such a tradition. His persistence and fighting and this silent pressure gave birth to the inspiration for his exploration. This way of using the sound and picture opposition to take into account the sound dimension of the film to meet the requirements of the producer on the one hand, while sticking to his own artistic pursuit and exploration of film expressiveness, it is like those who stiffly add dialogue in and in the film. The directors said, "I tell you, this is how the sound in the movie is used!"
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