SUNRISE

The Making of Sunrise

Photography

Shot By Shot

Continuity Script

Promotional Material

C.A. Lejeune 1928 The Year in Retrospect

P.S. Harrison on public reaction to the film in 1927. And more(External Link)

Music and Motion Pictures. By the film's composer, Hugo Riesenfeld (External Link)

The Trimbin

Nineteen twenty-eight strikes about the average with five outstanding films: Chaplin's The Circus, Lubitsch's Student Prince, Murnau's Sunrise, Ruttmann's Berlin, and Starewitch's Magic Clock. These pictures are pure cinema, rightly conceived and executed, each in its way completely satisfying to the most fastidious film-goer…. The prime importance of 1928 to the cinema, however, is not that it has produced any particular film or group of films, but that it marks the arrival and establishment of the talking picture in Europe and America. At the moment the talkie is a crude business at best. Amongst the various long dramas and short vaudeville turns that the sound-cinema has brought us, there has not yet been one to which we could apply any standards of art. To satisfy imagination and a desire for good cinema we must go to the silent productions of the year - to Berlin - The Student Prince, The Magic Clock. The talkies are still concerning themselves with the quality, not the content, of their speech. They are still marvelling at having found a tongue. But the important point is that they have found a tongue - that the millions of picture-goers who are willing to pay for personality have discovered a new way of getting value for money. Six months ago the talkies were a supposition. Today they are a fact of two continents. They have carried the cinema a definite step towards perfect mechanization, and in an age of pace and economy that step will not be retraced.

30 December 1928