Silent Movie Day • Live Musical Accompaniment
Boston Premiere of New 4K Restoration!

F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is often, and deservedly, recognized as the supreme achievement of the silent era cinema—and of all the eras that followed. For nearly one hundred years, critics, historians, scholars, and film lovers have recognized its artistry, emotion, and technical brilliance. The film’s excellence was recognized for Unique and Artistic Production at the first Academy Award ceremony, and the latest BFI Sight and Sound poll ranks Sunrise as #11 on its list of Greatest Films of All Time.

The great pioneer of German Expressionism (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, The Last Laugh, Faust), Murnau came to Hollywood in 1927 where William Fox provided budgetary and artistic carte blanche to create a cinematic masterpiece. Working with master cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, Murnau’s fluid tracking shots, superimpositions, and symbolic use of light helped redefine what film language could accomplish, achieving a level of visual storytelling that required no dialogue to communicate its eternal themes of guilt, forgiveness, and renewal. With its centenary nearing on the horizon, what better time to celebrate Murnau’s masterpiece with a renewal of its own.

San Francisco Film Preserve’s “Sunrise Project” is a fully realized endeavor to definitively restore all relevant motion picture materials related to Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The project centerpiece is a complete 4K restoration of the iconic Movietone version that was released in America. The best surviving elements were ultimately identified at the British Film Institute National Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, and Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. Sources were scanned at 4K resolution and carefully compared to create the master edit. The combined sources were digitally restored by SFFP. Two reels of a 1927 35mm nitrate print belonging to the George Eastman Museum—the only two reels from the original release that are known to survive—were used as reference to perfectly restore Murnau’s play of light, dark, and shadow. – San Francisco Film Preserve