Fräulein Else
Okay, I admit it’s a little silly of me. There is this character called Adèle in Emma (who looks like this) and for some reason, I have always thought that Adele Sandrock would look like her. Or at least, have straight black hair. In fact, her hair was quite ondulated and while it doesn’t seem clear what color her hair was, I suppose it’s more a light brown. After a bunch of pictures of her as an old woman, the only decent picture (which looks like from the turn of the century) is probably this one.
Not really related to the movie.
She is far from being a beauty, and that must mean that her acting was better than she looked. I als She had a scarily small part in “Fräulein Else”, but who cares. It was worth the trouble to see her!
It also was worth it to hear a theatre organ with my very own ears, although that was not exactly a big pleasure. The guy who played the organ was absolutely great, but the instrument itself just sounds utterly miserable, nothing compared to a church organ in my opinion. It’s just… a funny little piece of silent film history in my opinion.
Now, there also is not much to say about the film, because I found it pretty horrid. Objectively, it might not have been too bad, and Pixelmatsch has also very aptly noticed how the film uses quite a few camera angles that look pretty modern. By those times’ standards, I suppose that the novel “Fräulein Else” was rather modern too and so the film is no more than a bad attempt at doing the novel justice. I have not read it, but I imagine it to be very similar to the “Traumnovelle”, and if “Fräulein Else” reaches the depth of the “Traumnovelle”, I suppose that a Kubrick really is necessary to put the complexity into a movie. Speaking of “Eyes Wide Shut”, of course it ends very differently to the original novel, but it adds a lot to it. In “Fräulein Else” however, the difference contributes to the story as well in the sense that it makes the film more understandable, but it does not add to its meaning at all.
Elisabeth Bergner plays Else in a rather cute way, but I must admit that I think she looks exactly the same as every other one of those 20s silent film women. They all have the same type of hair, the same type of thin mouth (which I really, really, dislike, by the way) and somewhat empty, creepy eyes. Is it just me?
The only scene I personally liked was the one in which Else pushes her head against the mirror and looks extremely emo. Even though that scene just cries “Freud, Freud, Freud!” to you, I think that it was quite nicely done and shows how the poor girl delves deeper into her doom. The rest… oh well. As I have said, I think it was absolutely worth seeing this film, even though it was probably the worst film I have seen since… uh, okay, the last one I disliked was “Requiem for a Dream”.