3:00 p.m.	Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans F. W. Murnau (U.S., 1927)

Murnau’s American masterpiece was written while the director was still in Germany. It is set in a weatherworn hamlet that is not America, perhaps Middle Europe, more like Middle Earth; and a city a world away, just across the lake. A trite situation—happy marriage of peasant couple invaded by big-city seductress—is immediately stripped of melodrama, ultimately to become film poetry. The director’s famously “invisible” tracking shots and the fluidity with which he moves through double exposures create an extraordinary moving palette from which we can project story, psychology, and a horrifyingly genuine involvement with the characters. Here is America’s sweetheart couple, George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor, in medias infidelity: O’Brien, distracted, almost gothically depressed by his affair as he plots a Dreiser-like boat accident for Gaynor, his wife. The very thought hovers and dances like moonlight over the rest of the film, which gaily tries to dodge it.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Carl Mayer, based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Hermann Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher, Karl Struss. With George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston, Bodil Rosing. (95 mins, Silent with original soundtrack, B&W, 35mm, From Criterion Pictures/20th Century Fox)