Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
- Saturday, October 12, 2024 / 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (95 minutes)
- With Nicholas Baer (author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism)
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Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston
Directed by F.W. Murnau, one of the silent era’s most accomplished filmmakers, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is a stylish, atmospheric drama that expresses potent anxieties over the corrosive effects of modernity. The story follows a married farmer who falls under the spell of a woman from the city. When she hatches a plot to have the farmer kill his wife, he struggles with the swirling temptations of the modern woman and the city she represents.
In line with the anxieties of its time, Sunrise‘s town-and-country drama also rhymes with our own, saturated as it is with panicky discourses over the sinister influences—political, sexual, criminal—supposedly lurking in major cities and sanguine appeals to the imagined security of rural life. Featuring the dazzling, kinetic cinematography of Charles Rocher and Karl Struss, and originally released with a synchronized orchestral score, Sunrise is a technical and aesthetic landmark of silent cinema.
Nicholas Baer (author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism) joined moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.
Biographies
Nicholas Baer (German, UC Berkeley)
Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Critical Theory; Film & Media; Jewish Studies; and Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).
Moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest US professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
CWC Classics
The CWC Classics program celebrates cinema’s rich history, bringing classic films back to the big screen for critical viewing and discussion. These events feature filmmakers, academics, and professionals who can contextualize the production and historical impact of the films. The series occasionally presents classic films in their original 16 or 35 mm formats. CWC Classics events celebrate the history and significance of cinema’s enduring legacy.