An interview with Bertrand Bonello
Truffaut talked about Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans as the most beautiful film in the history of cinema. A film extremely analyzed, lauded, and defied. To put things trivially, isn’t this a sort of jubilation connected to techniques invented here?
I don’t think so because Sunrise comes from a period in cinema when invention was constant. Everyone was looking for a way to tell a story with images. What is particular here is the arrival of a German director in the United States who is given disproportionate means. William Fox had seen The Last Man filmed by Murnau in Germany. He invited Murnau to the United States and gave him unlimited means for Sunrise. In this film there is a combination of German expressionist invention and American financial and industrial resources. This enabled Murnau to try exactly what he wanted. He could follow through with his ideas and each scene is an invention, and a successful invention at that.
© Droits réservés / Collection Cinémathèque Suisse
Is there a “polyphonic” element that interests you in this film, in the interweaving of the elements?
We see brunette and blonde, city and country, day and night, good and evil, etc. All of this can seem a little “clumsy” and yet, every time, it becomes magical. This is grace!
What seems unique about this film to me is that each scene is extremely “solid”, successful, framed and thought out. But, at the same time, we feel an omnipresent quivering, a trembling every second of the film. In this way, this film represents a beginning. With each scene, we have the almost mystical impression that there was nothing before it and that there will be nothing after it. It is as if each image came from nowhere and will die immediately. A succession of quick changes of events.
Today, we produce films with a huge quantity of images, but not with as many ideas. How many ideas were there in the films by Murnau, Chaplin, or Keaton because they didn’t have any choice? Without words, the image had to convey the story and meaning. Today, dialogues stretch time and films have become much slower narratively than they were in the 1920s. Even “cut” editing doesn’t mean that something is rapid! Quite often, we use this type of editing to give a feeling of speed when in fact it is not moving quickly. The element that signifies speed for me is surprise: not knowing what is going to happen. In Sunrise after each scene, we are taken in by the following one that is totally unexpected.
© Droits réservés / Collection Cinémathèque Suisse
If you had to imagine the music for Sunrise, what do you think would be the most pertinent choice given works of this type already carried out?
I’ve watched this film several times with different types of music. Recently, for example, I watched it listening to a Plastikman album. I really enjoyed the experience. There is something about the beat, not at all a beat that breaks the time, but imposes itself on a different, almost internal, rhythm.
What is complicated when we compose music for a silent film today, is knowing when we are going to react and underscoring that moment. At the time the film was made, that was the practice and it worked very well. But today, those codes don’t work any more. So, how do we avoid this trap? I think that I would leave silences, 40 seconds of silence. The film does very well without any accompaniment for short amounts of time. Then, it is important to find a sonority. How to understand the strong sensation of shivering? I would try t work on this shivering, with unfixed notes, sonorous aggregations, without it being a sound montage.
Cinema and music, the effect of one on the other has always been a subject that has interested you. For you, producer, what is the function of music?
I often say that music should never be used to illustrate, but to tell. It is a narrative, and not an illustrative, element. The question is simple: when do we think, do we make, do we have music? When it happens during the editing stage, the most common scenario, it becomes illustrative. When we integrate it in the scenario – and this is what I always try to do – it acquires a narrative function. If you know that at such and such a time there will be music, it is not necessary to tell another part of the story, the music takes care of it. We can then show something else. I always try to include music in the script because I maintain the idea that it tells something.