Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F. W. Murnau (1927)

The plot of this film is typical of nineteenthcentury domestic melodrama, involving the temptations held out to a young farmer, living happily with his wife and child, by a city vamp, who consumes his small financial resources and finally suggests murdering his wife. The iconography of the domestic drama is everywhere. This iconography contributes to the extreme polarities between which the man is pulled, and which are intensified by non individualisation of the protagonists, designated only as the man, the wife and the woman from the city. While much of the film s iconography, melodramatic structure and mise en scène looks back to nineteenthcentury theatrical melodrama, it also looks forward in style to the full development of cinematic melodrama. Notable in this respect is, first, the influence of German Expressionism that Murnau brings to Hollywood, particularly in the distorted perspectives of the interior sets, the stereotyping of the woman from the city, the dramatisation of typography