Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2003 (review)

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto is well known for its ability to present the silent aspects of marginal national cinemas (such as, in this year's case, Thailand and Macedonia), in addition to its ongoing preservation and exhibition projects, such as the Griffith Project and the films of Mitchell and Kenyon. Those ongoing projects were as strong as ever this year, with the Griffith team showing the whole of Griffith's 1913 corpus, and lots of wonderful moments of rich documentary realism being exhibited at the Mitchell/Kenyon programs. But certainly the biggest sensation this year was work that was relatively well-known to film historians and taken mostly from Gosfilmofund and the Cinémathèque Française. Ivan Mozhukhin, Czarist superstar, French striver, and, in-between, Kuleshov experiment-subject, was unexpectedly the talk of Sacile in 2003, and his films actually ended up evoking a lot of the aesthetic and geopolitical issues at work in the Giornate's program. Internationalism, the play between modernist and realist impulses, the emergence and then very fast burnout of genius figures, were all problems that informed the films on display this year; that's a lot of weight for one expressive Russian face to carry, but somehow, Mozhukhin seemed to pull it off.

One of the threads of the Mozhukhin program was his work with Yakov Protazanov (sometimes credited as Jacob Protazanov). Although Protazanov is probably best known in North America for Aetlita (aka Aelita, Queen of Mars, 1924), these Czarist-era and French-exile productions show a very different side of him. The earliest Protazanov/Mozhukhin collaboration on view at Le Giornate was Pikova Dama (The Queen of Spades, 1916), adapted from the famous Pushkin novella. Yuri Tsivan writes in the catalog notes that "Protazanov aimed at out-Bauering Bauer in terms of style" (45), referring to Evgeni Bauer, central figure in Czarist cinema and no stranger to Giornate audiences, who saw his work in the 1989 program of prerevolutionary Russian film, "Silent Witness." That is surely true in terms of set design, costumes, and general opulence. But like the other Protazanov films on display here—especially Otets Sergii/Kniaz Kasatskii (Father Sergius/Prince Kasatski, 1918)—there is also an ever-present sense of composition over montage, photographic realism over plasticity. Otets Sergii/Kniaz Kasatskii makes use of some odd visual effects, but there is also frequent use of deep-focus composition and elaborate mise-en-scène; much the same is true of Pikova Dama. This realist sensibility is slightly less visible in Protazanov's Chlen Parlamenta/Morfii, Ten Lorda Shilokotta (The Parliamentarian/Morphia, Lord Chilcott's Shadow, 1919-20) a doppelganger story about the rise and then slow descent of a young English member of Parliament. Protazanov relies more heavily here on both photographic effects (such as double exposures) and Mozhukhin's own extremely expressive face. This film was a sort of transitional piece for Mozhukhin, being shot around the time of the Revolution, apparently in the Crimea (David Robinson writes in the catalog that "The record of Yermoliev's production Chlen Parlamenta has been permanently obfuscated by the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution" [48]).

The second period of Mozhukhin's oeuvre consists of work made in France by artists exiled from postrevolutionary Russia. The French material at Le Giornate had a similarly realist feel to it; this was particularly visible in the films that Mozhukhin directed himself. L'enfant du carnival (1921), for example, relied heavily on the conventions of melodrama, but it also integrated carefully composed imagery of city life (in this case, Nice). At times, then, the film has a semidocumentary feel, looking a bit like French poetic realism avant la lettre. This sensibility did not define Mozhukhin's entire career in French, as was clearly seen by Michel Strogoff(1926), Viatcheslav Tourjansky's adaptation of Jules Verne's novel about a rebellion in Russia's eastern possessions. This was a sprawling epic, filmed partially in...