Today was less stressful than yesterday, and it was also easier to figure out what to watch. I still can’t get over the fact that I couldn’t watch “Foolish Wives” because of “3 Bad Men”, and this line of sadness will continue with “Dr. Caligari” vs. “The Crowd”, “Intolerance” vs. “Häxan” and “Greed” vs. “Der Golem”. Oh well, such is the movie theater I love to hate.
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
France 1928, Carl T. Dreyer, 110?
As one of the critics’ favorites, I have always meant to see this film, especially after I have fallen in love with “Vivre sa Vie”. But every picture I have seen of this movie was Maria Falconetti’s sad face, and felt like the movie must be dreadful to watch.
For some reason, this was totally not the case, yet I don’t know why. Perhaps it was precisely because I didn’t feel too emotional when I saw the film; in fact, it felt extremely artificial to me, in a similar way as Goethe’s “Iphigenie auf Tauris” did. For precisely that reason, I find both “Iphigenie auf Tauris” as well as “Jeanne d’Arc” very beautiful. I found Maria Falconetti’s performance extremely impressive, especially for a woman who was not trained to be an actress. I was also surprised by the depiction of the other characters, the evil clericals. Everybody else commented how funny and poignant they looked, and I must admit that I agree. They gave quite a nice picture of religious terror.
As always there were aspects of the film I disliked, namely that the events in the film weren’t even close to the historical truth: In reality, there was no revolt at the end of Jeanne’s death (ugh “You have burned a saint!”), there was no good man trying to help her and of course her trial was nothing like it was depicted in the movie. I also don’t believe that Jeanne’s true character was so jesus-like. Of course this was all intended and contributes to the film’s beauty, but ugh.
All in all, I was positively surprised by this film that I expected to be rather boring to watch. The atmosphere of the film was absolutely gripping (perhaps helped by the beautiful and large theater as well as the professional musical accompaniment), and I “enjoyed” it very much. I found myself glued to the screen, although I didn’t cry like Nana. As a woman, I guess I don’t suffer much in life.
By the way, the whole movie was shown in French without any translation whatsoever. I was very amused.
Queen Kelly
USA 1929, Erich v. Stroheim, 101′
The only unfortunate thing about the film itself was this absolutely dreadful Africa scene, where Kelly was to be married to some old ugly guy. It shows how much longer the film would have been when just a scene like that was this long. The most unfortunate thing about the whole event were the obnoxious girls sitting behind us. They managed to laugh at the most stupid moments (and not laugh at good moments), and commented on the film loudly the whole time… Amazing, really. It made me think of the day when I watched “To be or no to be”. It was in the main theater in the Babylon and whenever something funny happened, the whole audience was roaring with laughter. Back then, I loved laughing with that audience as much as I hated having to see “Queen Kelly” with this audience today.
Poor Stroheim, of course he was an evil maniac, but the resulting film didn’t deserve to be seen by such simple-minded women. It’s not even like “Queen Kelly” was intellectual or anything, but it did have quite a lot of great jokes. (Horizontal profession! Hahaha.) The majority of the film was a feast for the eye and the comical mind. Before I saw this film (my first Stroheim that is), I was a little doubtful of all the frivolity and generous spendings, but now that I see it, I must admit that I find it very enjoyable to look at, and Stroheim’s love for details is exactly what I love about his films.
I’m not so sure what I think about the length though. The Africa part was incredibly long-winded and from the stills we can only guess that it was intended to be something like 3 times longer. In comparison to that, the movie (Kelly’s affair with the prince) is perhaps just an introduction to the story. How amazing and scary at the same time. It is a piece of irony that the combination of Stroheim’s mad direction and other people’s mad cutting have ‘created’ these masterpieces.
As always, a silent also lives by the fact and acting skills of its main character, and Gloria Swanson had plenty of both. I don’t find her to be an outstanding beauty (and actually think that she looks a little bit like Adele Sandrock, hahaha), but oh wow she was good. I felt like I recognized some of her facial expressions from “Sunset Boulevard” and in retrospect, it was very fascinating to see one of the silents where her skills were exposed in such different way. She was absolutely perfect in this role of innocent yet smart and slightly precocious girl, and made the movie so much better for me. The queen herself was a delightful contrast to it – I loved how she threw her poor cat to the floor! Just lovely.
Since I enjoyed “3 Bad Men” very much, I am not too sad that I wasn’t able to see “Foolish Wives”, but I definitely want to see every other Stroheim now. I think I love my crazy film directors too much…