The Big Screen by David Thomson Page A

crystallization of movie atmosphere and as a gesture to the system’s desire for class.
    Murnau had not long to live. He tried other films at Fox, without recapturing the status of Sunrise . His reputation sank as swiftly as it had risen. He found himself pleading a case now to a William Fox no longer smitten by German genius. For City Girl (or Our Daily Bread ; 1930), Murnau said, “I should like to make a tale about wheat, about the sacredness of bread, about the estrangement of the modern city dwellers and their ignorance about Nature’s sources of sustenance.” He never quite realized that Fox dealt in corn.
    In search of a purer existence and an elemental fable, Murnau took off for the South Seas on a sixty-foot yacht (skipper as well as director) with the documentarian Robert Flaherty. There they made Tabu (1931), with such burnished images of Polynesians you might guess Murnau was homosexual. It is a rhapsody to sunlight on the water and the perfection of young native bodies in which the central figure, Murnau thought, was like “a model for the Olympic Games” (to be held in Los Angeles in 1932).
    Back in California, he hired a reckless chauffeur, an attractive Filipino, and was killed in a car crash in March 1931, days before Tabu opened. (So many car crashes—the battle between liberty and discipline on the new roads?) He was only forty-two, and more of a master than William Fox ever realized. Eleven people attended his funeral, one of them Garbo. If he had lived to find an American idiom, and worked with her, he might have reached authentic tragedy in which sound let her heave a last sigh. As it is, Sunrise hovers on the horizon still, and asks whether we really prefer Janet Gaynor’s wife to the excitement of the city and the allure of the City Woman. Perhaps the ultimate message is the white lie that we can have both in our dark.

The Cinema of Winter
    The years immediately following the First World War were strange ones in Germany. The German mind had difficulty in adjusting itself to the collapse of the imperial dream; and in the early years of its short life the Weimar Republic had the troublesome task of meeting outside demands (the onerous terms imposed on Germany at Versailles) while at the same time maintaining equilibrium internally (the Spartacist revolt of 1919, the un successful Kapp Putsch of 1920). In 1923, after Germany had failed to pay the war reparations laid down at Versailles, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, and inflation, which had always been a serious danger, could not be stopped. The material conditions which resulted led to a general decline of values, and the inner disquiet of the nation took on truly gigantic proportions.
    â€”Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen , 1965
    A cold, somber atmosphere pervades the opening scene of the film. Francis and an older man are sitting on a bench by a high forbidding wall which curves away into shadow. The leafless branches and twigs of a tree hang down above the heads of the two men: dead leaves carpet a path in front of them, emphasizing the lifeless, still quality of the setting. On the opposite side of the path to the bench are a couple of stunted fir-trees: winter is in the air. Both the men on the bench are dressed in black; their eyes gape wildly from pale faces. The older man leans over towards his young companion to speak to him; Francis, apparently not very interested, responds by staring blankly skyward.
    â€”Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , the screenplay, 1919
    If Charlie Chaplin had lived in this sunless world, he might have killed himself, for surely the Tramp had a disposition toward sorrow or gloom. But the light on Chaplin’s street is the California light that inspires American cinema. If his pictures end on an iris into the Tramp and his girl walking into the future, then they are headed toward the sunlight, too, and it warms them and promises to