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  • Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film by Victoria Duckett
  • Ruth Hemus
Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film. By Victoria Duckett. (Women and Film History International.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xii + 231 pp., ill.

When Victoria Duckett writes that 'the margins of film are central to my project' (p. 22)it is not just a throwaway claim but an expression of the paradoxes informing both her object of study and her approach. Her book addresses the chasm in criticism between a lionizing of Sarah Bernhardt's stage work on the one hand, and the dismissal of her filmed performances on the other. Turning on its head criticism of the actress's appearances on [End Page 302] film as mere 'filmed theater' or 'excessive theatricality', Duckett writes of them instead as bearing witness to 'unaccounted practices in early film' (p. 1). Her analyses of selected films aim not only to reposition Bernhardt but to relocate marginalized 'theatrical films', and 'to make sense of filmic practices that do not fit what we imagine the cinema to be and have been' (p. 12). An insistence on intermediality—on assessing theatre and film as related and intertextual, as opposed to separate and conflicting—underscores her approach. In chapters on La Dame aux camélias (dir. by André Calmettes and Henri Pouctal, 1911) and Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (dir. by Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton, 1912), she necessarily examines the relationship between theatre and narrative cinema in 'theater-to-film examples' that we 'presume to know' (p. 6), seeking to understand rather than overlook their popularity with contemporary audiences. Duckett's urge to take in the whole picture of visual culture extends to fine art and design. Instead of lamenting the absence of Bernhardt's celebrated 'golden voice' from silent film, she underscores the ways in which her gesture and action on screen—not least her 'signature spiral'—embody art nouveau. More remarkable yet are Duckett's readings of scenes from selected films as enactments of well-known paintings and sculptures, above all in the chapter on the documentary Bernhardt à Belle Isle (dir. by Louis Mercanton, Hecla, 1915), which Duckett reads not simply as self-promotion but as a cultural text that allows historical enquiry. Thus she pays close attention to its representation of the home as 'creative and expansive' for women (p. 139), 'publicly interesting', and 'linked to modern travel' (p. 141). This understanding of the film within its broader socio-political context is enhanced at a micro level by comparing scenic compositions with artworks by Manet, Millet, Renoir, and Gauguin that likewise acknowledge links between real and imagined landscapes. Duckett's final case study, the patriotic First World War film Mères françaises (dir. by Louis Mercanton and René Hervil, 1917), cements the chronological and stylistic span of this study, taking in art and politics, public and private, myth and complexity. Bernhardt is not a forgotten figure after all, but her reception has been limited according to material conditions (such as the availability of her films), and models of analysis (in film history). Duckett draws on various but well-defined critical frameworks to challenge entrenched perceptions of Bernhardt's films. She boldly states, 'I can think of no other example in any other media or art form where such popular success has been met with such sustained critical and intergenerational silence' (p. 20). It may well be that there are other such instances yet to be addressed.

Ruth Hemus
Royal Holloway, University of London
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