O grande, polémico e revolucionário fresco histórico de Griffith.
O filme é apresentado em duas partes divididas por um intervalo. A primeira parte apresenta duas familias pré-guerra da Secessão: os abolicionistas do Norte Stoneman, que consistem no congressista Austin Stoneman (baseado no real senador da reconstrução, Thaddeus Stevens), os seus dois filhos e a filha Elsie; e os esclavagistas do Sul Camerons, uma família que inclui duas filhas (Margaret e Dora) e três filhos. Os filhos da família Stoneman fazem uma visita aos Cameron na propriedade deles do sul. O mais velho dos Stoneman apaixona-se por Margaret Cameron, e o filho Cameron idolatra uma fotografia de Elise Stoneman.
Quando a Guerra Civil começa, os rapazes unem-se aos seus respectivos exércitos. Uma milícia negra (com um líder branco) saqueia a casa dos Cameron, e quase desvirginam as Cameron, que são salvas quando os soldados confederados derrotam a milícia. Enquanto isso, o mais novo dos Stoneman e dois dos Cameron são mortos na guerra. Ben Cameron é ferido e levado para um hospital do Norte onde ele reencontra Elsie, que trabalha lá como enfermeira.
A guerra acaba e Abraham Lincoln é assassinado no Teatro Ford, permitindo que Austin Stoneman decida com outros congressistas radicais punir o Sul pela secessão, deixando-os com a difícil tarefa da reconstrução.
A segunda parte começa descrevendo a reconstrução do Sul. Stoneman e o seu mulato guarda-costas Silas Lynch vão a Carolina do Sul para observarem pessoalmente os negros a perderem as eleições por fraude. Enquanto isso, Ben Cameron, inspirado por crianças a brincar aos fantasmas, formula um plano para reverter a situação de perda de poder dos brancos sulistas perante a emancipação dos negros. Ele forma então a Ku Klux Klan.
Gus, um assassino profissional, antigo escravo que sente atracção por brancas, pede Flora Cameron em casamento de maneira rude. Ela foge para a floresta, sendo perseguida por ele. Encurralada num precipício, Flora prefere suicidar-se a deixar um homem negro tocá-la.
Em resposta a esse incidente, o Ku Klux Klan persegue Gus e lincha-o, deixando o seu corpo à frente da casa do tenente Silas Lynch. Em resposta, Lynch ordena a perseguição do Klan. Os Cameron, temendo a formação de uma nova milícia negra escondem-se numa pequena cabana, lar de dois soldados da União, que concordam em ajudar os teoricamente inimigos sulistas a defender o seu direito ariano.
Enquanto isso, com Austin Stoneman fora, Lynch tenta forçar Elsie a casar-se com ele. Transtornados, os homens do Klan descobrem e vão à procura de reforços. Os homens do Ku Klux Klan vão em socorro de Elsie. Silmultaneamente, a milícia de Lynch cerca a casa de campo dos Cameron, mas são retaliados pelo Klan. Vitoriosos, os homens do Klan celebram nas ruas e o filme mostra na próxima eleição o Klan a sair vitorioso sobre os votantes negros. O filme conclui com a dupla lua-de-mel de Phil Stoneman e Margaret Cameron e Ben Cameron e Elsie Stoneman.
sexta-feira, 10 de dezembro de 2010
"The Birth of a Nation", D.W.Griffith (1915)
"Carmen", Cecil B. DeMille (1915)
"Carmen" não é um dos clássicos de DeMille, mas evidencia a vontade que este pioneiro tinha de trazer as grandes peças de teatro (neste caso a ópera de Bizet) do palco para o cinema. "carmen" é mais um passo no caminho que faria de DeMille o grande cineasta do cinema popular.
quarta-feira, 8 de dezembro de 2010
Evgenii Bauer
A titan of the early Russian cinema, Evgenii Bauer was born in Russia in 1865. His father was a renowned zither-player, while his sisters became actresses. Bauer graduated from the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Over the years, he was an amateur actor, a caricaturist for magazines, a newspaper satirist, a theatrical impresario, and an artistic photographer. He was especially recognized for designing sets for theatrical productions, a talent that eventually brought him into the cinema when he designed the sets for Drankov and Taldykin’s commemorative historical film, Trekhsotletie Tsarstvovaniya Doma Romanovykh (The Tercentenary of the Rule of the Romanov Dynasty), released in 1913. Encouraged by Drankov and Taldykin, Bauer, then 48 years of age, graduated to directing for their company. After making four films for them, he went over to Pathé's Star Film Factory for whom he made an additional four films. Then in late 1913, he moved to the Khanzhonkov company where he remained for the rest of his career. As an artist, he quickly came to the fore, with his films proving very successful with Russian audiences and critics. He worked in a variety of genres including comedies, patriotic subjects, social dramas, and tragedies of psychological obsession.
Among his comedies were several starring his wife Lina Ancharova, whom he had met when she was a dancer in one of the theatre groups that employed him. She demonstrated genuine talent as a comedienne in her films for Bauer. In Tysiacha v toraia khitrost’ (The 1002nd Ruse), filmed in 1915, she plays a flirtatious wife who successfully outwits her husband’s attempts to thwart her infidelities by hiding her lover in the closet. Lina Bauer’s delightful facial expressions and roguish, knowing manner perfectly matched the mood of this well-crafted bedroom farce.
Bauer’s series of patriotic war pictures were made in response to the conflict with Germany and included Slava Nam, Smert’ Vagram (Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy), produced in 1914 with the great star of the early Russian cinema, Ivan Mosjoukin, in the lead. Perhaps the most outstanding of these topical films is Revoliutsioner (The Revolutionary), made in 1917 just after the February Revolution overthrew the Tsarist regime. It deals with a revolutionary who is sent into Siberian exile in 1907 and is liberated a decade later with the fall of the Romanov dynasty. He returns to a hero’s welcome but finds himself at odds with his son, a Bolshevik who opposes Russia’s involvement in World War I. Eventually, the father is able to persuade him that a successful prosecution of the war will aid the revolution and the two enlist. The film was ground-breaking because it was the first Russian production to dramatize the tyranny of the Tsarist secret police and the harshness of Siberian prison life. It also demonstrated Bauer’s technical virtuosity, as in the interior scenes between father and son in a darkened room with chiaroscuro lighting illuminating their faces, or the shots of the two in Moscow on a parapet looking out over the city.
However, it is in the fields of social dramas and tragedies involving psychological obsessions that Bauer reached his peak. These brooding works seemed to strike deep chords in Russian culture and offer penetrating insights into the mood of late imperial Russia. One of the earliest of these films, Sumyerki Zhyentsina Dusha (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul), made in 1913, straddled these genres and is permeated with the melancholy despair of the time. It concerns a noblewoman who tries to break from her idle class by helping the poor and unfortunate. She is attracted to a handsome laborer who rapes her when she visits his slum dwelling. Defending herself, she kills him but is rejected by her fiancé, a prince, when she tells him of the incident. Later, she becomes an opera star but refuses to reconcile with the prince. Experimenting with lighting and design to develop his narrative, Bauer uses this film to comment on the gulf between the classes while exploring the psychology of his tormented heroine.
Bauer’s dramas of social realism include Ditya Bol’shogo Goroda (A Child of the Big City) (1914), Nemye Svideteli (Silent Witnesses) (1914), and Leon Drey (1915). Ditya Bol’shogo Goroda’s female protagonist is a young woman whose soul has been tainted by grinding poverty. Orphaned from birth and toiling in a sweatshop, she escapes when a wealthy young man falls in love with her and makes her his mistress. But once his money runs out, she leaves him, spurning his suggestion that they live a modest life together. In the end, she has climbed her way to the top. When her former lover shoots himself on the doorstep of her mansion, she steps over him on her way to a fashionable restaurant, the final shot being a close-up of his body. In Nemye Svideteli, it is the callousness of the aristocracy that is exposed. The story relates the seduction of a maid by a wealthy idler in an upper class household who abandons her when he renews his relationship with a society woman. Leon Drey is concerned with an attractive Jewish man who uses his charms to advance in society.
This vein of social comment also appears in Bauer’s lavish 1916 drama of high life, Zhizn’ za Zhizn’ (A Life for a Life). Although based on a French novel by Georges Ohnet, the film, adapted to a Russian setting, perfectly conveys the decadence of the late Tsarist era. A fortune-hunting prince marries the wealthy daughter of a female industrialist while carrying on an affair with his wife’s foster sister who is married to a businessman she does not love. After spending much of his wife’s money, he forges promissory notes and is about to be arrested when his mother-in-law shoots him.
Bauer’s films on psychological themes brought a new maturity to the cinema and anticipated such later developments as German expressionism. At the same time, they have a uniquely Russian flavor, a brooding attitude linking sex and death. David Robinson, in his article on Bauer for Sight and Sound, points out it should not be assumed that these films with themes including necrophilia are projections of Bauer’s personal character. But they clearly reflect the Symbolist "Decadence" of Russia’s "Silver Age" of literature in the early 20th century, a time when, under the banner of sensualism, Russian artists sought to immerse themselves in describing any kind of thought or activity, no matter how shocking, as a means of liberating the individual from convention. Thus, in Bauer’s adaptation of a Symbolist story, Smert’ na Zhizn’ (Life in Death), released in 1914, a man (played by Ivan Mosjoukin) is so obsessed with the beauty of his wife that he murders her and keeps her embalmed body in his cellar. Grezy (Daydreams) (1915), one of Bauer’s finest works, relates the story of a widower who searches for a substitute for his beloved late wife. He finds an opera singer who resembles his spouse and marries her. But the singer becomes jealous of his insane worship of his first wife and begins taunting him. When she dares to desecrate his beloved’s braids he reverently keeps in a box, he strangles her with the sacred hair. Posle Smerti (After Death), also produced in 1915, was adapted from Turgenev’s story, "Klara Milich." It deals with a man who becomes obsessed with an actress he casually meets several times. When she commits suicide during a performance, he travels to her town to learn from family members the details of what had happened and to obtain her photograph. Returning to his home, he spends a terrifying night repeatedly dreaming of her and seeing her apparition before the shock finally kills him. Umirdyushchi Lyebyed’ (The Dying Swan), released in 1917, relates the story of a ballerina and her crazed admirer, an artist who keeps a human skeleton in his studio. He wishes to paint her in the role of the Dying Swan and, to achieve the perfect pose, he ends up strangling her.
To develop his narratives, Bauer created a specific visual style that paid careful attention to scenic design and lighting effects while employing camera movement and dramatic close-ups. The sets he designed, famous for their columns, were spacious but freed from the overly ostentatious decorations of earlier Russian films. Ivan Perestiani, who played leading roles in many of Bauer’s films, said that "A beam of light in his hands was an artist’s brush." In film after film, the director demonstrated his innovative mastery of lighting for dramatic effect, as in the opening shot of Posle Smerti with light illuminating the face of the brooding hero sitting alone in his parlor reading a book. Bauer continually used gauzes and curtains to alter the image on the screen. Appearing in a number of his films is what could be termed a signature shot with dark curtains on both sides of the frame and, in the center, a glimpse of the actors and scenery in the background. In Nemye Svideteli, he uses the split screen to show the society girl and her clandestine lover, a baron, talking on the telephone, while the scene depicting the girl’s engagement party is taken entirely from a high angle shot looking down on the throng of guests below.
Bauer also made effective use of the moving camera and close-ups throughout his work. In Nemye Svideteli, when the maid is humiliated by the society girl having her remove her boots in the presence of her seducer, the camera intensifies the mood by tilting down to reveal this action. In Posle Smerti, Bauer continually tracks with the camera to depict the crowded reception in which the hero first meets the female protagonist. Later, when he attends her dramatic recital, Bauer intercuts long-shots of the theatre with close-ups of the hero and heroine, including a huge close-up of her face filling the entire screen. In Umirdyushchi Lyebyed’, he uses the moving camera for a remarkable psychological effect, tracking back from the heroine sleeping restlessly on her bed during a storm as flashes of lightning plunge the image into alternating lightness and darkness. This shot then cuts to a dream sequence in which her own death is anticipated by her encounter with a spectral figure, and she is seen in a close shot being menaced by many outstretched human hands.
Despite Bauer’s incorporation of theatrical techniques into his films, his style and those of other pre-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers like Yakov Protazanov were uniquely cinematic in contrast to such stagy early features as Sarah Bernhardt’s 1912 Queen Elizabeth. At the same time, Bauer’s work was distinctly different in tempo from his American contemporaries. In his Biograph years, Griffith was in the forefront of those who sought to break with the first primitive narrative films by positioning the camera closer to the actors for a new cinematic and naturalistic style of performance. Russia’s pre-Revolutionary filmmakers like Bauer built on Griffith’s early Biograph experiments to create an alternative cinema of their own with a slower pace of acting and editing as they explored in depth the tortured psychology of their characters and the decadent social milieu. Bauer effectively used cutting within scenes and striking close-ups throughout his career but always within the context of a style that placed primary emphasis on detailed mise-en-scène and measured performance rather than the blending of rhythmic, dramatic editing with dynamic acting characteristic of Griffith’s films.
At the beginning of 1917, Bauer was at the top of Russia’s film world. He was earning the extraordinary salary of 40,000 rubles and was a major shareholder in the Khanzhonkov company. In the spring, he went to the Crimea to shoot on location and oversee a new studio planned by his company. Bauer intended to act the part of a lame artist in a forthcoming film--one he was destined never to make. While practicing his limp near Yalta, he slipped and fell from an embankment onto the shore, breaking his leg. Despite being confined to a hospital bed, he was brought out to the set to direct Za Shchast’em (For Happiness), the tragic story of a frail girl who falls in love with an attorney. Unknown to her, the man is courting her widowed mother. When the girl learns the truth about the relationship and that she can never marry him, she is so overcome with despair that she loses her sight. Under Bauer’s sensitive direction, the acting in this scene is heartbreaking in its poignancy. The melancholy beauty of Za Shchast’em seems to convey a foreboding of Bauer’s own imminent fate. After completing the film, he began work on Korol Parizha (The King of Paris), but when his bedridden condition caused him to develop pneumonia, the direction was taken over by the actress Olga Rakhmanova. On June 9, 1917, by the traditional Russian calendar (June 22 in the West), Evgenii Bauer died of his illness at the age of 52.
Upon the news of his passing, the Russian film journals of the period published many tributes to the prolific artist who had directed 82 films in four years, becoming Russia’s most renowned director. But a few months after his death, a second, far more radical revolution began sweeping away the remnants of the old society whose agonizing decline Bauer had so powerfully chronicled in his works. The emerging Soviet cinema sought other cinematic models more in keeping with the revolutionary fervor of the new epoch. Ironically, the films produced by the Soviet Union’s capitalist rival, the United States, with their rapid editing style and usually positive outlook on life, seemed a more appropriate example than the despairing, often mystical filmic narratives made during the old regime. While Bauer’s mastery of cinema left its mark on those of his co-workers, Lev Kuleshov, an actor and art director on Za Shchast’em, and Ivan Perestiani, both of whom continued on as directors in the Soviet era, for the most part, Bauer and the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema were identified with the former Tsarist period. In the 1920s, with the exciting new Soviet silent montage classics introducing a style that was the diametric opposite of Bauer’s, the earlier artist’s work was largely forgotten. During the succeeding Stalinist era, Bauer’s work was even more out of step with the prevailing trends. His depiction of a societal corruption that warped members of all classes from the highest to the lowest would have been inherently anathema to a regime promulgating the heroic style of "Socialist Realism" celebrating peasants, proletariats, and national leaders as paragons of virtue. Similarly, Bauer’s exploration of disturbed psyches was far removed from an official policy which despised introspection, denounced Freud, and banned the second part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, the most Baueresque of the later Russian master’s works in its dark mood and emphasis on psychology.
Among his comedies were several starring his wife Lina Ancharova, whom he had met when she was a dancer in one of the theatre groups that employed him. She demonstrated genuine talent as a comedienne in her films for Bauer. In Tysiacha v toraia khitrost’ (The 1002nd Ruse), filmed in 1915, she plays a flirtatious wife who successfully outwits her husband’s attempts to thwart her infidelities by hiding her lover in the closet. Lina Bauer’s delightful facial expressions and roguish, knowing manner perfectly matched the mood of this well-crafted bedroom farce.
Bauer’s series of patriotic war pictures were made in response to the conflict with Germany and included Slava Nam, Smert’ Vagram (Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy), produced in 1914 with the great star of the early Russian cinema, Ivan Mosjoukin, in the lead. Perhaps the most outstanding of these topical films is Revoliutsioner (The Revolutionary), made in 1917 just after the February Revolution overthrew the Tsarist regime. It deals with a revolutionary who is sent into Siberian exile in 1907 and is liberated a decade later with the fall of the Romanov dynasty. He returns to a hero’s welcome but finds himself at odds with his son, a Bolshevik who opposes Russia’s involvement in World War I. Eventually, the father is able to persuade him that a successful prosecution of the war will aid the revolution and the two enlist. The film was ground-breaking because it was the first Russian production to dramatize the tyranny of the Tsarist secret police and the harshness of Siberian prison life. It also demonstrated Bauer’s technical virtuosity, as in the interior scenes between father and son in a darkened room with chiaroscuro lighting illuminating their faces, or the shots of the two in Moscow on a parapet looking out over the city.
However, it is in the fields of social dramas and tragedies involving psychological obsessions that Bauer reached his peak. These brooding works seemed to strike deep chords in Russian culture and offer penetrating insights into the mood of late imperial Russia. One of the earliest of these films, Sumyerki Zhyentsina Dusha (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul), made in 1913, straddled these genres and is permeated with the melancholy despair of the time. It concerns a noblewoman who tries to break from her idle class by helping the poor and unfortunate. She is attracted to a handsome laborer who rapes her when she visits his slum dwelling. Defending herself, she kills him but is rejected by her fiancé, a prince, when she tells him of the incident. Later, she becomes an opera star but refuses to reconcile with the prince. Experimenting with lighting and design to develop his narrative, Bauer uses this film to comment on the gulf between the classes while exploring the psychology of his tormented heroine.
Bauer’s dramas of social realism include Ditya Bol’shogo Goroda (A Child of the Big City) (1914), Nemye Svideteli (Silent Witnesses) (1914), and Leon Drey (1915). Ditya Bol’shogo Goroda’s female protagonist is a young woman whose soul has been tainted by grinding poverty. Orphaned from birth and toiling in a sweatshop, she escapes when a wealthy young man falls in love with her and makes her his mistress. But once his money runs out, she leaves him, spurning his suggestion that they live a modest life together. In the end, she has climbed her way to the top. When her former lover shoots himself on the doorstep of her mansion, she steps over him on her way to a fashionable restaurant, the final shot being a close-up of his body. In Nemye Svideteli, it is the callousness of the aristocracy that is exposed. The story relates the seduction of a maid by a wealthy idler in an upper class household who abandons her when he renews his relationship with a society woman. Leon Drey is concerned with an attractive Jewish man who uses his charms to advance in society.
This vein of social comment also appears in Bauer’s lavish 1916 drama of high life, Zhizn’ za Zhizn’ (A Life for a Life). Although based on a French novel by Georges Ohnet, the film, adapted to a Russian setting, perfectly conveys the decadence of the late Tsarist era. A fortune-hunting prince marries the wealthy daughter of a female industrialist while carrying on an affair with his wife’s foster sister who is married to a businessman she does not love. After spending much of his wife’s money, he forges promissory notes and is about to be arrested when his mother-in-law shoots him.
Bauer’s films on psychological themes brought a new maturity to the cinema and anticipated such later developments as German expressionism. At the same time, they have a uniquely Russian flavor, a brooding attitude linking sex and death. David Robinson, in his article on Bauer for Sight and Sound, points out it should not be assumed that these films with themes including necrophilia are projections of Bauer’s personal character. But they clearly reflect the Symbolist "Decadence" of Russia’s "Silver Age" of literature in the early 20th century, a time when, under the banner of sensualism, Russian artists sought to immerse themselves in describing any kind of thought or activity, no matter how shocking, as a means of liberating the individual from convention. Thus, in Bauer’s adaptation of a Symbolist story, Smert’ na Zhizn’ (Life in Death), released in 1914, a man (played by Ivan Mosjoukin) is so obsessed with the beauty of his wife that he murders her and keeps her embalmed body in his cellar. Grezy (Daydreams) (1915), one of Bauer’s finest works, relates the story of a widower who searches for a substitute for his beloved late wife. He finds an opera singer who resembles his spouse and marries her. But the singer becomes jealous of his insane worship of his first wife and begins taunting him. When she dares to desecrate his beloved’s braids he reverently keeps in a box, he strangles her with the sacred hair. Posle Smerti (After Death), also produced in 1915, was adapted from Turgenev’s story, "Klara Milich." It deals with a man who becomes obsessed with an actress he casually meets several times. When she commits suicide during a performance, he travels to her town to learn from family members the details of what had happened and to obtain her photograph. Returning to his home, he spends a terrifying night repeatedly dreaming of her and seeing her apparition before the shock finally kills him. Umirdyushchi Lyebyed’ (The Dying Swan), released in 1917, relates the story of a ballerina and her crazed admirer, an artist who keeps a human skeleton in his studio. He wishes to paint her in the role of the Dying Swan and, to achieve the perfect pose, he ends up strangling her.
To develop his narratives, Bauer created a specific visual style that paid careful attention to scenic design and lighting effects while employing camera movement and dramatic close-ups. The sets he designed, famous for their columns, were spacious but freed from the overly ostentatious decorations of earlier Russian films. Ivan Perestiani, who played leading roles in many of Bauer’s films, said that "A beam of light in his hands was an artist’s brush." In film after film, the director demonstrated his innovative mastery of lighting for dramatic effect, as in the opening shot of Posle Smerti with light illuminating the face of the brooding hero sitting alone in his parlor reading a book. Bauer continually used gauzes and curtains to alter the image on the screen. Appearing in a number of his films is what could be termed a signature shot with dark curtains on both sides of the frame and, in the center, a glimpse of the actors and scenery in the background. In Nemye Svideteli, he uses the split screen to show the society girl and her clandestine lover, a baron, talking on the telephone, while the scene depicting the girl’s engagement party is taken entirely from a high angle shot looking down on the throng of guests below.
Bauer also made effective use of the moving camera and close-ups throughout his work. In Nemye Svideteli, when the maid is humiliated by the society girl having her remove her boots in the presence of her seducer, the camera intensifies the mood by tilting down to reveal this action. In Posle Smerti, Bauer continually tracks with the camera to depict the crowded reception in which the hero first meets the female protagonist. Later, when he attends her dramatic recital, Bauer intercuts long-shots of the theatre with close-ups of the hero and heroine, including a huge close-up of her face filling the entire screen. In Umirdyushchi Lyebyed’, he uses the moving camera for a remarkable psychological effect, tracking back from the heroine sleeping restlessly on her bed during a storm as flashes of lightning plunge the image into alternating lightness and darkness. This shot then cuts to a dream sequence in which her own death is anticipated by her encounter with a spectral figure, and she is seen in a close shot being menaced by many outstretched human hands.
Despite Bauer’s incorporation of theatrical techniques into his films, his style and those of other pre-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers like Yakov Protazanov were uniquely cinematic in contrast to such stagy early features as Sarah Bernhardt’s 1912 Queen Elizabeth. At the same time, Bauer’s work was distinctly different in tempo from his American contemporaries. In his Biograph years, Griffith was in the forefront of those who sought to break with the first primitive narrative films by positioning the camera closer to the actors for a new cinematic and naturalistic style of performance. Russia’s pre-Revolutionary filmmakers like Bauer built on Griffith’s early Biograph experiments to create an alternative cinema of their own with a slower pace of acting and editing as they explored in depth the tortured psychology of their characters and the decadent social milieu. Bauer effectively used cutting within scenes and striking close-ups throughout his career but always within the context of a style that placed primary emphasis on detailed mise-en-scène and measured performance rather than the blending of rhythmic, dramatic editing with dynamic acting characteristic of Griffith’s films.
At the beginning of 1917, Bauer was at the top of Russia’s film world. He was earning the extraordinary salary of 40,000 rubles and was a major shareholder in the Khanzhonkov company. In the spring, he went to the Crimea to shoot on location and oversee a new studio planned by his company. Bauer intended to act the part of a lame artist in a forthcoming film--one he was destined never to make. While practicing his limp near Yalta, he slipped and fell from an embankment onto the shore, breaking his leg. Despite being confined to a hospital bed, he was brought out to the set to direct Za Shchast’em (For Happiness), the tragic story of a frail girl who falls in love with an attorney. Unknown to her, the man is courting her widowed mother. When the girl learns the truth about the relationship and that she can never marry him, she is so overcome with despair that she loses her sight. Under Bauer’s sensitive direction, the acting in this scene is heartbreaking in its poignancy. The melancholy beauty of Za Shchast’em seems to convey a foreboding of Bauer’s own imminent fate. After completing the film, he began work on Korol Parizha (The King of Paris), but when his bedridden condition caused him to develop pneumonia, the direction was taken over by the actress Olga Rakhmanova. On June 9, 1917, by the traditional Russian calendar (June 22 in the West), Evgenii Bauer died of his illness at the age of 52.
Upon the news of his passing, the Russian film journals of the period published many tributes to the prolific artist who had directed 82 films in four years, becoming Russia’s most renowned director. But a few months after his death, a second, far more radical revolution began sweeping away the remnants of the old society whose agonizing decline Bauer had so powerfully chronicled in his works. The emerging Soviet cinema sought other cinematic models more in keeping with the revolutionary fervor of the new epoch. Ironically, the films produced by the Soviet Union’s capitalist rival, the United States, with their rapid editing style and usually positive outlook on life, seemed a more appropriate example than the despairing, often mystical filmic narratives made during the old regime. While Bauer’s mastery of cinema left its mark on those of his co-workers, Lev Kuleshov, an actor and art director on Za Shchast’em, and Ivan Perestiani, both of whom continued on as directors in the Soviet era, for the most part, Bauer and the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema were identified with the former Tsarist period. In the 1920s, with the exciting new Soviet silent montage classics introducing a style that was the diametric opposite of Bauer’s, the earlier artist’s work was largely forgotten. During the succeeding Stalinist era, Bauer’s work was even more out of step with the prevailing trends. His depiction of a societal corruption that warped members of all classes from the highest to the lowest would have been inherently anathema to a regime promulgating the heroic style of "Socialist Realism" celebrating peasants, proletariats, and national leaders as paragons of virtue. Similarly, Bauer’s exploration of disturbed psyches was far removed from an official policy which despised introspection, denounced Freud, and banned the second part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, the most Baueresque of the later Russian master’s works in its dark mood and emphasis on psychology.
Louis Feuillade
"It has been said that in cinema there is both a Méliès and a Lumière tradition. I also think that there is a Feuillade school, which makes marvelous use of Méliès' fantastic and of Lumière's realism.", Alain Resnais.
Louis Feuillade was born on February 29th 1873 in Lunel (Herault - France) in a family of modest wine merchants. Just beyond adolescence, he showed a deep interest in literature and created numerous drama and vaudeville projects. His excessively academic poems were occasionally published in local newspapers. He also acquired a reputation as a critic of bullfighting. He came to Paris in 1898 to acquire literary fame. Famished journalist, he would suffer miserably for a long time.
At the beginning of 1905, he started to regularly sell screenplays to Gaumont, and soon got the chance to direct them himself. In 1907, he was appointed artistic director of the company. He would occupy this position until 1918, while at the same time continuing to produce his own films, so that by 1925, the year of his death, he estimated that he had made around 800 films. (At the time he started in cinema, a film rarely lasted more than ten minutes). He made films of all types: trick films at the beginning, copied on great Méliès, comedies, bourgeois dramas, historical or biblical dramas, mystery or exotic adventures … But he showed his genius most clearly in his unforgettable serial films. The "Fantomas" serial in 1913, the result of a long apprenticeship - during which the series with realistic ambitions "Life as it is" played a major role - was his first masterpiece. It is also the first masterpiece in what the modern critic, from both a literary and a cinematographic point of view, would later call "the fantastic realism" or the "social fantastic".
In effect, Feuillade - undoubtedly one of the greatest aestheticians in the history of cinema - knew how to make the most absurd characters and the most bizarre situations believable, by putting them in the heart of everyday reality.
For him, everyday reality is only a mask behind which another reality is hidden, a much stronger, much truer, much more real… much more beautiful reality: the one of the wonderful, the dreamy, the fantastic, in short, the reality of film.
"I admire in Feuillade, once again according to Resnais, his prodigious poetic instinct which allowed him to do surrealism as others breathe. We owe extraordinary sequences to his flair for arrangement, for example "a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table." In "Fantomas", the gunfight in the middle of barrels is as beautiful as the struggle with the boa. The garden filled by mad women in "Tih-Minh", is as unforgettable as the living room of the family inn, where the Big Vampire tells the story of his grandfather, or as the installation of the cannon by a clergyman in a hotel bedroom. And all those images of streets, deserted roads crossed by mysterious cars, those parks with their iron bars, those fronts of town houses…"
Louis Feuillade was one of the most famous filmmakers in the world after the World-War I. Thousands of spectators rushed to see his series of "Fantomas" (1913), and his serial films "The Vampires" (1915), "Judex" (1916), "Tih-Minh" (1918), "Barrabas" (1919), etc… etc… in which the heroes would quickly become important popular myths.
Although they are less known nowadays because many are lost and only known from the screenplays, we should not neglect his comedies and vaudevilles. These films show, in the comical mode and with the same efficiency, his sense of absurd situations and suspense which made him famous for adventure films.
Although the surrealists profess the most vivid admiration for him, Feuillade had been forgotten with the arrival of talkies. His rehabilitation began after the World-War II, thanks to Henri Langlois who saved his films starting in 1936 when the French Cinematheque was created, and to filmmakers like Georges Franju (co-creator of the Cinematheque), Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, and many others…
Louis Feuillade was born on February 29th 1873 in Lunel (Herault - France) in a family of modest wine merchants. Just beyond adolescence, he showed a deep interest in literature and created numerous drama and vaudeville projects. His excessively academic poems were occasionally published in local newspapers. He also acquired a reputation as a critic of bullfighting. He came to Paris in 1898 to acquire literary fame. Famished journalist, he would suffer miserably for a long time.
At the beginning of 1905, he started to regularly sell screenplays to Gaumont, and soon got the chance to direct them himself. In 1907, he was appointed artistic director of the company. He would occupy this position until 1918, while at the same time continuing to produce his own films, so that by 1925, the year of his death, he estimated that he had made around 800 films. (At the time he started in cinema, a film rarely lasted more than ten minutes). He made films of all types: trick films at the beginning, copied on great Méliès, comedies, bourgeois dramas, historical or biblical dramas, mystery or exotic adventures … But he showed his genius most clearly in his unforgettable serial films. The "Fantomas" serial in 1913, the result of a long apprenticeship - during which the series with realistic ambitions "Life as it is" played a major role - was his first masterpiece. It is also the first masterpiece in what the modern critic, from both a literary and a cinematographic point of view, would later call "the fantastic realism" or the "social fantastic".
In effect, Feuillade - undoubtedly one of the greatest aestheticians in the history of cinema - knew how to make the most absurd characters and the most bizarre situations believable, by putting them in the heart of everyday reality.
For him, everyday reality is only a mask behind which another reality is hidden, a much stronger, much truer, much more real… much more beautiful reality: the one of the wonderful, the dreamy, the fantastic, in short, the reality of film.
"I admire in Feuillade, once again according to Resnais, his prodigious poetic instinct which allowed him to do surrealism as others breathe. We owe extraordinary sequences to his flair for arrangement, for example "a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table." In "Fantomas", the gunfight in the middle of barrels is as beautiful as the struggle with the boa. The garden filled by mad women in "Tih-Minh", is as unforgettable as the living room of the family inn, where the Big Vampire tells the story of his grandfather, or as the installation of the cannon by a clergyman in a hotel bedroom. And all those images of streets, deserted roads crossed by mysterious cars, those parks with their iron bars, those fronts of town houses…"
Louis Feuillade was one of the most famous filmmakers in the world after the World-War I. Thousands of spectators rushed to see his series of "Fantomas" (1913), and his serial films "The Vampires" (1915), "Judex" (1916), "Tih-Minh" (1918), "Barrabas" (1919), etc… etc… in which the heroes would quickly become important popular myths.
Although they are less known nowadays because many are lost and only known from the screenplays, we should not neglect his comedies and vaudevilles. These films show, in the comical mode and with the same efficiency, his sense of absurd situations and suspense which made him famous for adventure films.
Although the surrealists profess the most vivid admiration for him, Feuillade had been forgotten with the arrival of talkies. His rehabilitation began after the World-War II, thanks to Henri Langlois who saved his films starting in 1936 when the French Cinematheque was created, and to filmmakers like Georges Franju (co-creator of the Cinematheque), Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, and many others…
terça-feira, 7 de dezembro de 2010
"Les Vampires", Louis Feuillade (1915)
10 episódios sobre Irma Vep e o mito do vampiro e o proto-surrealismo de Feuillade.
"Les Vampires" produzido pela Gaumont foi criado para competir directamente com a série norte-americana "The Mysteries of New York", com Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline). "Les Vampires" foi escrito e realizado por Feuillade depois de "Fantômas" e antes de "Judex".
O sucesso de "Les Vampires" ficou-se a dever em grande parte à personagem de Irma Vep, cujo nome é um anagrama de "vampiro", interpretada por Musidora, uma volumptuosa actriz de "music-hall". Musidora e os seus cabelos negros definiu a beleza feminina daquela época, e a sua personagem Irma Vep, identificada pelo seu fato preto e justo e a esgueirar-se felinamente pelos corredores e telhados, definiu o arquétipo de super-vilã e de "femme fatale" das décadas vindouras.
A seguir ficam os 10 episódios:
1: La Tête Coupée (The Cut-Off Head)
Philippe Guerande (Edouard Mathé), a reporter working for "Le Mondial", and his friend Oscar Mazamette (Marcel Levesque), investigate the muder of Inspector Dural, decapitated by the sinister gang known as the "Vampires". The leader of the gang, the "Great Vampire" (Jean Aymé), is unmasked but manages to escape.
2: La Bague qui Tue (The Poisoned Ring)
Dancer Marfa Koutiloff (Stacia Napierkowska) tells Guerande she will reveal the secrets of the Vampires, but the Great Vampire kills her with a poisoned ring.
3: Le Cryptogramme Rouge (The Red Cryptogram)
Guerande meets cabaret singer Irma Vep (Musidora); he also attempts to decypher a mysterious notebook he stole from the Vampires.
4: Le Spectre (The Spectre)
The Vampires fight another criminal, Moreno (Fernand Herrman), who tries to steal their loot, but Guerande engineers Moreno's arrest.
5: L'Évasion du Mort (Deadman's Escape)
Moreno fakes death and escapes from jail. Guerande is taken prisoner by the Vampires but escapes as well. The Great Vampire organizes a deadly ball to steal his guest's valuables, but is outwitted by Moreno.
6: Les Yeux qui Fascinent (The Mesmerizing Eyes)
The Vampires are after a treasure in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Moreno hypnotizes Irma Vep into killing the Great Vampire. Then Moreno takes over the gang.
7: Satanas
The heretofore unknown Lord of the Vampires, Satanas (Louis Leubas), reveals his existence. He kills Moreno by bombarding the restaurant where he was eating. He then try to steal the fortune of millionnaire Geo Baldwin (Emile Keppens) but is thwarted by Guerande and Mazamette.
8: Le Maître de la Foudre (The Master of Lightning)
Irma Vep is captured by the Police but Satanas arranges her escape; however he, too, is caught. He kills himself in his jail cell.
9: L'Homme des Poisons (The Man Who Knew Poisons)
Enter the new Lord of the Vampires: Venenos (Frederik Moriss). He tries to poison Guerande but his plot fails.
10: Les Noces Sanglantes (The Bloody Wedding)
Guerande finally marries his girl-friend (Louise Lagrange). The Vampires plot against the couple, but are thwarted by Mazamette. The gang is killed or captured.
sexta-feira, 3 de dezembro de 2010
"The Patchwork Girl of Oz", J. Farrell MacDonald (1914)
"The Magic Cloak of Oz", J. Farrell MacDonald (1914)
"His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz", L. Frank Baum (1914)
25 anos antes do imortal "Wizard of Oz" com Judy Garland, o mesmo autor, Frank Baum, produzia estas jóias do Cinema Mudo sobre o mesmo imaginário.
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