A Film Canon

City Girl turns on roughly the same premise as Sunrise, collapsing the distinction between city and country even as it presents a narrative that ostensibly affirms it. However, whereas Sunrise achieves this through a mobile, exploratory camera, and a concomitant enlivening of space, City Girl prefers a flatter, more painterly aesthetic, embodied in the postcard that stands as a synecdoche for everything that the protagonist hopes to achieve from her rural marriage. As a result, the connections tend to occur in symbolic, rather than spatial, terms, such as Murnau's conflation of diner counter with kitchen table to make the melodramatic point that men are equally lecherous everywhere. That said, this painterly aesthetic produces some extremely beautiful moments, especially whenever it focuses on the rural wheatfields themselves, rather than the mechanical-agricultural processes that form another common denominator with urban life. The final storm sequence is also spectacular, deflecting Murnau's German supernaturalism into a more American primality.