The Oxford History of World Cinema (75 page)

and on television. There is the 'modernist' Duhamel and Jansen version. And a laser disc

also exists of a further restoration with a recorded organ score by Carter. In the case of

Metropolis popular attention has been grabbed by the Moroder version with its synthetic

mix of disco styles and new songs performed by various pop artists, but the film has been

presented several times with a version of the original Huppertz score adapted and

conducted by Berndt Heller, and with semi-improvisatory scores performed live by avant-

garde ensembles. It is not possible to make hard-and-fast choices between the different

approaches taken in these cases. Anderson has argued persuasively in favour of the

presentation of a film like Intolerance in proper viewing conditions with the music

originally designed for it, but even she has admitted that such meticulous restorations can

have more historical than aesthetic interest. Meanwhile a case can also be made for the

enlivening use of 'anachronistic' music, particularly for unconventional films, though the

case of Metropolis shows that the use of trendy pop-music scores can make the film itself

look dated when the music itself begins to date and progressive styles of jazz and

minimalism can provide a more effective counterpoint to the film.

It is good to face so many possibilities, even if they stand in such confusing array. The

simple fact is that music for silent films was ever-changing, because live, and to be truly

'authentic' must continue to change. Moreover, it is probably futile to expect that the

musical traditions of silent cinema will ever be fully restored; for one thing, we simply

cannot watch the films in the same way as our ancestors, after so many decades of

experience with sound films, and after so much of the original repertoire has either been

forgotten or has lost any semblance of freshness. The best that can be hoped for, perhaps,

is that from time to time we will be able to return to the theatre to hear a live

accompaniment, whether old or new, that makes an effective match to the film and is

sensitively performed; when this happens, we are better able to imagine the silent

cinema's past glories, and to experience it as an art still vital, a century after it all began.

Bibliography

Anderson, Gillian ( 1990), "No Music until Cue".

Erdmann, Hans, and Becce, Giuseppe ( 1927), Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik.

Gorbman, Claudia ( 1987), Unheard Melodies.

Marks, Martin ( 1995), Music and the Silent Film.

Rapée, Erno ( 1924), Motion Picture Moods.

----- ( 1925), Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures.

Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947)

Marie Prevost and Monte Blue in Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle ( 1923)

The son of a Jewish tailor, Lubitsch joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in 1911 as

supporting actor, and had his first starring part in a film farce, Die Firma heiratet ( 1914).

The role, an absent-minded, accidentprone, and over-sexed assistant in a clothing shop,

established him as a Jewish comedy character. Between 1914 and 1918 he acted in about

twenty such comedies, the majority of which he also directed (among the ones to have

survived are Schuhpalast Pinkus, 1916; Der Blusenkönig, 1917; and Der Fall Rosentopf,

1918).

Lubitsch was the most significant (German film talent to emerge during the war, creating

a type of visual and physical comedy familiar from pre-war Pathé Films, but situated in a

precise ethnic milieu (the German-Jewish lower middle class) and mostly treating the

staple theme of much early German cinema: social rise. After 1918, Lubitsch specialized

in Burlesque spoofs of popular operettas ( Die Austernprinzessin, 1919), of

Hoffmannesque fantasy subjects ( Die Puppe, 1919), and of Shakespeare ( Romeo und

Julia im Schnee and Kohlhiesels Töchter, both 1920). Centred on mistaken identities

( Wenn vier dasselbe tun, 1917), doubles ( Die Puppe, Kohlhiesels Töchter), and female

cross-dressing ( Ich möchte kein Mann sein, 1918), his comedies feature foppish men and

headstrong women, among them Ossi Oswalda ( Ossis Tagebuch, 1917) and Pola Negri

( Madame Dubarry, 1919).

Working almost exclusively for the Projections-AG Union, Lubitsch became the preferred

director of Paul Davidson, who from 1918 onwards produced a series of exotic costume

dramas ( Carmen, 1918; Das Weib des Pharao, 1922), filmed plays ( Die Flamme, 1923),

and historical spectacles ( Anna Boleyn, 1920) which brought both producer and director

world success. The 'Lubitsch touch' lay in the way the films combined erotic comedy with

the staging of historical show-pieces (the French Revolution in Madame Dubarry), the

mise-en-scène of crowds (the court of Henry VIII in Ann Boleyn), and the dramatic use of

monumental architecture (as in his Egyptian and oriental films). But one could also say

that Lubitsch successfully cross-dressed the Jewish schlemihl and let him loose in the

grand-scale stage sets of Max Reinhardt.

Lubitsch's stylistic trademark was a form of visual understatement, flattering the

spectators by letting them into the know, ahead of the characters. Already in his earliest

films, he seduced by surmise and inference, even as he built on the slapstick tradition of

escalating a situation to the point of leading its logic ad absurdum. Far from working out

this logic merely as a formal principle, Lubitsch, in comedies like Die Austernprinzessin (

1919) or Die Bergkatze ( 1921), based it on a sharply topical experience: the escalating

hyperinflation of the immediate post-war years, nourishing starvation fantasies about the

American way of life, addressed to a defeated nation wanting to feast on exotic locations,

erotic sophistication, and conspicuous waste. What made it a typical Lubitsch theme was

the mise-en-scène of elegant self-cancellation, in contrast to other directors of exotic

escapism, who dressed up bombastic studio sets as if to signify a solid world. Lubitsch, a

Berliner through and through, was also Germany's first, and some would say only,

'American' director. He left for the United States in 1921, remaking himself several times

in Hollywood's image, while, miraculously, becoming ever more himself.

If his furst cakkubg card was Rosita ( 1923), an underrated vehicle for Mary Pickford's

ambitions to become a femme mistaken identities. The Marriage Circle ( 1923),

Forbidden Paradise ( 1924), Lady Windermere's Fan ( 1925), and So This is Paris ( 1926)

are gracefully melancholy meditations on adultery, deceit, and self-deception, tying

aristocratic couples and decadent socialites together to each other, in search of love, but

settling for lust, wit, and a touch of malice. After some Teutonic exercises in

sentimentality ( The Student Prince, 1927; The Patriot, 1928), the coming of sound

brought Lubitsch new opportunities to reinvent his comic style. Prominent through his

producerdirector position at Paramount Studios, and aided by the script-writing talents of

Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson, Lubitsch returned to one of his first inspirations;

operetta plots and boulevard theatre intrigues, fashioning from them a typical 1930s

Hollywoodémigré genre, the 'Ruritanian' and 'Riviera' musical comedies, starring mostly

Maurice Chevalier, with Jeanette macDonald, or Claudette Colbert ( The Love Parade,

1929; The Smiling Lieutenant, 1931; The Merry Widow, 1934). Segueing the songs deftly

into the plot lines, and brimming with sexual innuendoes, the films are bravura pieces of

montage cinema. But Lubitsch's reputation deserves to rest on the apparently just as

frivolous, but poignantly balanced, comedies Trouble in Paradise ( 1932), Design for

Living ( 1933), Angel ( 1937), and Ninotchka ( 1939). Invariably love triangles, these

dramas of futility and vanitas between drawing room and boudoir featured, next to

Melvyn Douglas and Herbert Marshall, the screen goddesses Marlene Dietrich and Greta

Garbo, whom Lubitsch showed human and vulnerable, while intensifying their

eroticallure. During the 1940s, Lubitsch's central European Weltschmerz found a suitably

comic-defiant mask in films like The Shop around the Corner ( 1940) and To Be or Not to

Be ( 1942), the latter a particularly audacious attempt to sabotage the presumptions not

only of Nazi rule, but of all tyrantical holds on the real: celebrating, as he had always

done, the saving graces and survivor skills of makebelieve.THOMAS

ELSAESSERSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Schuhpalast Pinkus ( 1916); Ich möchte kein

Mann sein ( 1918); Die Austernprinzessin ( 1919); Madame Dubarry ( 1919); Anna

Boleyn ( 1920); Die Bergkatze ( 1921); Das Weib des Pharao ( 1922); The Marriage

Circle ( 1923); Lady Windermere's Fan ( 1925); So This is Paris ( 1926); The Love Parade

( 1929); Trouble in Paradise ( 1932); Design for Living ( 1933); The Merry Widow

( 1934); Angel ( 1937); Ninotchka ( 1939); The Shop around the Corner ( 1940); To Be or

Not to Be ( 1942)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carringer, Robert, and Sabath, Barry ( 1978), Ernst Lubitsch: A Guide to References and

Resources.

Prinzler, Hans Helmut, and Patalas, Enno (eds.) ( 1984), Lubitsch.

Weinberg, Herman G. ( 1977), The Lubitsch Tough: A Critical Study.

Greta Garbo (1905-1990)

Born Greta Gustafsson, daughter of a Stockholm sanitary worker, Garbo had an unhappy,

impoverished childhood. She entered films via advertising, and after making a comedy

short was discovered by Mauritz Stiller, who renamed her and cast her in Gösta Berlings

saga ( 1924). He also remoulded her. Her advertising films had shown a plump, bouncy

teenager, but stiller drew from her something cool and remote. She was touchingly

vulnerable as a middle-class girl reduced to prostitution in Pabst's Die freudlose Gasse

( 1925), after which she left for Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer had seen Berling and wanted

Stiller, reluctantly he signed the director's young protégée as well.

At a loss what to make of Garbo, MGM dubbled her 'the Norma Shearer of Sweden' and

put her into The Torrent ( 1926), a trashy melodrama that Shearer had turned down. With

the first rushes they realized what they had - not just an actress but a mesmerizing screen

presence. Stiff, bony, and awkward in everyday life, Garbo was transformed on screen

into an image of graceful eroticism. Stiller, his Hollywood career a disaster, returned to

Sweden and an early death while Garbo, distressed by the loss of her mentor, was

propelled to the heights of stardom.

Flesh and the Devil ( 1926), directed by Clarence Brown and co-starring John Gilbert,

confirmed her unique qual0 ity. The urgency of her love scenes with Gilbert (with whom

she was involved off-screen) conveyed a hunger bordering on despair, an avid, mature

sexuality never before seen in American films, and a revelation to audiences used to the

vamping of Pola Negri or the coy flirtings of Clara Bow. Borwn's cinematographer was

William Daniels, who shot nearly all Garbo's Hollywood films and devised for her a

subtle, romantic lighting, rich in expressive half-tones, that did much to enhance her

screen image.

Garbo's combination of sexual need and soulful resignation defined her as the archetypal

Other Woman, fated to play sirens and adulteresses. She twice portrayed one of the

greatest, Anna Karenina, the first time in Love with Gilbert as Vronsky. The rest of her

silent films were unworthy of her, though she had already proved her ability to transcend