Last night, Spence, Viv, and I attended the first of four Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount this month. The film was F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The film’s plot tells of a married village couple. The husband is tempted into an affair by a seductress from The City, and she encourages him to murder his wife. He sets out to do so, but doesn’t carry through the plot, and they are reconciled.

The film was, for me, odd. There are passages of great beauty and innovation throughout the picture. Overall though, as much as I admire Murnau’s filmmaking, a particular clunkiness that affects nearly all of his work remained present.

Over the past few years, the Paramount’s silent series has really done a great job bringing Murnau’s best-known films to the screen, and I have seen, I think, every one that they have chosen to exhibit. Each one displays great visual inventiveness and distinctly underdeveloped, nearly symbolic characters. These ciphers are generally deployed in order to propel plots that can more accurately be described as theories about the human condition.

I’m too ignorant about the context of this style of drama to speak knowledgeably about it, but I suppoes, to an extent, it’s what we mean when we use the word ‘melodrama.’

At any rate, it was worth seeing.

On the way to Draginfish to meet Viv, I passed a young woman sporting a striped scarf and white iPod headphones who I think was Samantha. She was walking toward the Market, directly facing the setting sun, and so I would have appeared as one of a host of anonymous silohouettes.

Also worthy of note was the amazing service we recieved at the bar at Dragonfish – the funny, middle-aged man tending the facilities appeared to place our orders via telepathy, so swiftly were they placed and filled.