Sunrise- Jess S.

I think that the story behind this one shot from the film focuses on one main issue, and that is that here we can fully experience the rush of emotions brought on to The Man by The Woman from the City; not only because it is at this point that he believes his wife to be dead, but also for the trouble she has caused him with his wife and his own psychological well-being. In the beginning of the film when we see him sitting rather despondently at the kitchen table, he is already visibly disturbed in some sense, even though we may perceive it as a feeling of agitation and annoyance. We watch throughout the shots with the Woman in the beginning that he is rendered totally submissive to her will, and thus allows her to manipulate and persuade him into murdering his wife and saving himself solely for her. When he returns to his wife after being with the Woman, he seems like he is left in a daze to where he doesn’t remember what exactly happened with her; only that he must remember how to rid himself of his wife.

However, this shot shows us that the man-possibly because of his depressed, grieving state- is in a sort of trance and thusly is able to overcome the Woman’s power over him, giving him the strength to unleash all of those built up feelings she imposed on him through her convincing and conniving, and he is conveying those suppressed emotions through physical anger in this shot. He is essentially ‘cutting his ties’ with her and those feelings of madness she brought to him.

It’s important to notice the lighting of this scene, because it looks as though he is half-shrouded in shadow and darkness while the other half is forced into the light from the corner of the shot, and it’s as though while choking her he is also pushing her into the light, (going along with the good/evil, light/dark assumption) forcing himself to leave behind the darkness she carries around and stay in the good light. The low-key/high contrast type of lighting for this scene really emphasizes the ‘light is good, shadows are evil’ concept for the story of The Man’s psychological deterioration brought about by The Woman, and I think it applies to the film’s themes because it imposes The Man’s mental state throughout the film as he goes from an agitated, stressed, and worried individual back to the carefree, stress-free, and less-distant man he was before The Woman from the City, where he is not only less distant from his wife and child, but also from the world itself in which he is now (by the end of the film) able to move in freely and act according to his own will.