No attempt to write about the new DVD of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) can avoid sounding like an advertisement for Fox Studio Classics, the home video line that released it with a devious promotional campaign. So I might as well set down the details right up front and as plainly as possible, fully aware that I am shilling for a corporation that could easily afford proper advertising. At present, the only way to get Sunrise is through mail-order, by sending in proofs-of-purchase from three other volumes in the Fox Studio Classics series, whose growing list of titles you can easily look up yourself. The only official cost is a modest shipping charge. This offer is set to expire in early 2004 and no future plans to release the disc commercially have been announced. Also, in the sake of fairness, I should point out that we at Reverse Shot do not yet receive promotional material from anyone, so we had to patiently wait 4-6 weeks for Sunrise to arrive in its padded envelope just like everyone else.

I call the campaign devious because Sunrise is precisely the kind of film that is bound to generate mountains of writing from critics, scholars, and cinephiles once they become aware that it’s out there—writing that must now necessarily turn into free advertising for a promotional offer. Fox clearly knew what it was doing by making this film so difficult to get a hold of, and it can’t be written off to economic necessity or disc quality. Is Elia Kazan’s stodgy Gentleman’s Agreement (one of the other titles in the Fox line) really expected to sell more copies than Murnau’s masterpiece? Neither is this disc itself the cheapo platter one would expect from its cereal box-top origins, but is in fact a full-blown special edition with excellent picture and sound and a host of worthwhile special features. It simply doesn’t make any sense that the studio would be so greedy with one of its key historical films, and it’s a cynical calculation indeed that turns one of the cornerstones of cinema—an achievement that belongs to everyone—into a specialist’s “collector’s item” to be hoarded by trainspotters.

Aside from this distribution scandal, looking at Sunrise again in its new digital incarnation only enhances my deep ambivalence about viewing films (especially silent films) on a television screen, regardless of the many improvements that DVD has brought. This may not exactly be a new debate, but neither is it one that’s going away anytime soon. For most of us, this is a battle that was lost a long time ago; we’ve either accepted home video as a necessarily evil (at one end of the spectrum) or so completely embraced it that it seems as natural and fulfilling as going to the cinema once did (the other end). For cinephiles living outside of major cities with good programming, the latter seems like the only option, and this fate has probably been sealed thanks to Netflix. But one need only experience a few minutes of Sunrise (which, thanks to Fox, you won’t be able to get on Netflix) on even the largest flat-screen home theater behemoth to be reminded of what has been lost. “Movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water,” wrote David Thomson, and we can see this in Murnau’s celebrated camera movements: The City Woman’s dark evening stroll through the village; The Man’s lumbering trudge through the marsh to meet his lover, the trolley’s resuscitating journey from countryside to town. These moments may retain their aesthetic interest on the small screen, but there’s no question that their power to move us—physically and emotionally—cannot be duplicated. Furthermore, Murnau’s mastery of perspective and scale in a film famous for its gigantic exterior sets (that pretend to be even greater than they really are) and expressionistically distorted interiors gets squashed into nothingness in the cathode ray porthole. Though this might in some way apply to most films made before television homogenized film visuals, we can’t remind ourselves of this often enough, and it’s poetically apt that it come while watching the film that now stands as the apex of all that was Good and Pure and even Innocent (despite its tremendous sophistication and complexity) in purely visual cinema.

Then again, who am I really kidding? When was the last time you screened a print of Sunrise as good as the one transferred here? The economics of film preservation and exhibition are as constrained as those determining what gets carried at Blockbuster, so a worn out 16mm classroom print is about the best we can hope for these days and even that’s asking a lot. Meanwhile, the special features on this disc do raise hopes that the DVD might one day truly become a medium for teaching, preserving, and enhancing cinema. First, one couldn’t hope for a more informed audio commentary than the one provided by veteran cinematographer and frequent Paul Schrader collaborator John Bailey. In fact, his photographer’s eye for detail and expert knowledge of the individual styles of Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise’s joint directors of photography) help to put back some of the visual concentration that the small screen takes away, while his strictly technical and historical focus doesn’t relieve the viewer of the burden of interpretation. Bailey can also be heard over the bonus reel of outtakes, which provide alternate versions of many of the film’s most famous shots. Ironically, while these outtakes have survived in reasonably good condition, Murnau’s next American film, Four Devils (1928), is entirely lost, but a synopsis, production notes, and the complete screenplay can be found here, along with Sunrise’s original Carl Mayer treatment and Murnau’s screenplay. If you’re as skeptical as I initially was about the usefulness of viewing a screenplay on your television set, keep in mind that any books containing this material are long out of print and gathering dust in university libraries. So in their rush to fill up discs with marketable bells and whistles, the makers of DVDs may be inadvertently inventing a new type of historical cataloguing. As Lucy Fischer’s BFI monograph explores at great length, Sunrise marks a transitional moment in the history of cinema, fusing together silence and sound, European and American styles, artisanal and industrial production, and now, to a certain extent, even the celluloid and digital eras. —Erik Syngle