The Dawn is the first American film by Murnau, and it also one where the German Expressionist filmmaker is brought to its critical level. It is by playing the light that dangled illusions and feelings shine. Love looks like in the eye of Murnau in existential questions and photographs on the presence and absence of the other or oneself.
Love superimposed The Aurora is haunted from the outset by the battle between the city lights and the austerity campaign. First incarnation of urban sophistication: the character of the brunette who just sow discord in the honest couple. His clothes, his hairstyle, his body - his dance which calls for the vortex picture of the city - is an infiltration of modern disorder in the traditional countryside and peaceful. Everything leads us to an opposition clean and sober Puritan between the true - happiness - and the glitz, the fake - discord.
This opposition soon yet moralizing is bypassed, node feelings shifted: the tortured peasant that we follow, adulterous love is somehow absent. Physically - in her little escapade with her lover - but especially, and at any moment, mentally. The use of the overlay, absolutely essential in this film is one way among many to question the real presence of character in the plan. More room for the present, in all senses of the word, our peasant is caught between what he was - flashback featuring a happy couple - and what that it would be - light of the city and embrace of the vamp overlay.
To love and be loved From this, the genius of Murnau will divert the moral question, to the feelings of our character a marital affair aesthetic and existential. When he sketches the act of killing is the real presence of his wife who needed him as evidence of the eyes and flesh. And this is the beautiful paradox of this Dawn that this gesture, then this lawsuit, leads naturally to the darkness toward the lights and heavy fumes of the city. Instead, therefore, fertile dialogue of love renewed, between being and aspirations, between reality and wonder.
Love in Dawn is literally photographic: it has beautiful reproduce reality, it feeds on dreams, light, changes of plan and background - as our couple in the town photographer, poses in front of a bucolic. Suddenly, drunkenness and eddies of the city are not vectors of chaos, the overlay is no longer an escape, but form the fabric of the present moment, because the feelings deeper and more air. The city lights are no longer sources of ambiguity and ubiquity, they give instead to life a particular place and a specific horizon - a plane and a depth of field.
Aurora in question is safe nun now of truth, fear of the package to commit, the prayer of the wife and soon quit, the sound of bells ring out as an act of contrition. This aurora is the movement of love that renews all things, take a hand in things unseen presence and frees them from the realm of gravity. In this, Murnau like the dawn of the movies a lot.
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