Memory Work: French Historical Epics, 1926-1927

Memories. Renée Lichtig, the former editor and head of technical services at the Cinémathèque française responsible for restoring so many 1920s French films from the late 1970s through the 1990s, recently spoke of her own mother's encounter with the famous actor Ivan Mosjoukine during the last years of the czar's reign in Russia. 'When she was 17, she met him at a charity ball and got to dance with him. My mother admired Mosjoukine deeply-and she wasn't the only one.'¹ Because the first films collected by Henri Langlois for the Paris archive had been manufactured by Albatros, the Russian émigré company for which Mosjoukine starred in the 1920s, Lichtig chose his films as her initial restoration project. Kevin Brownlow, also responsible for restoring a good number of the major 1920s French films (and an important filmmaker in his own right), described his boyhood memories of collecting discarded film prints after his parents gave him a hand-cranked 9.5mm projector in the early 1950s. Among them were abridged versions of the French epics, Casanova (1927), starring Mosjoukine, and Joueur d'échecs (The Chess Player, 1927), which soon provoked what would become a long 'love affair with the French silent cinema'.² Decades later, Brownlow restored the latter film, aided by Lenny Borger (then a Variety reviewer based in Paris) who tracked down a more complete 35mm archive print in East Berlin. Nearly 25 years ago, as I myself was researching 1920s French films, Brown-low graciously invited me to his home to view his 9.5mm prints of Joueur d'échecs and Michel Strogoff (another film from 1926, that he had collected, starring Mosjoukine), as well as a striking 16mm reel of one scene from Casanova in stencil color. His enthusiasm, abetted by that of Lichtig, Borger and Marie Epstein (my 'fairy godmother' at the Cinémathèque française), augmented my own and greatly supported my writing what would become French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929.³

In the context of this special issue of Film History, the year 1927 arguably marks a climactic moment in silent French cinema.⁴ It was then, for instance, following the opening of splendid 'palace cinemas' such as the Impérial in Paris, that Paramount began building what quickly would become the premier Paris cinema, the Paramount-Palace. It was then, too, that the ciné-club movement reached a kind of apex with the Ciné-Club de France and Tribune libre organizing competing series of special screenings and lectures, Léon Moussinac and others founding Les Amis de Spartacus (the lone radical mass movement that preceded Ciné-Liberté in the late 1930s), Jean Mauclaire preparing to open Studio 28 (the third and last important specialized cinema in Paris), and Jean Dréville editing a deluxe specialized film journal, Cinégraphie. It was then that Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac released two of their more provocative 'avant-garde' films, respectively, La glace à trois faces and Le coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). It was then that French film comedy underwent a revival, somewhat ironically through Albatros productions, most notably with René Clair's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat). And it was then that French historical epics achieved a kind of apotheosis, most famously in Abel Gance's Napoléon, of course, but also in the less well-known films previously noted: Michel Strogoff, Joueur d'échecs and Casanova.⁵ At the time, they all faced competition in Paris from big American and German imports such as The Big Parade, Metropolis and Don Juan. Recently, Michel Strogoff and Casanova were the highlights of an impressive retrospective of 1920s Mosjoukine films at the 22nd Giornate del cinema muto in Italy, and Brownlow's extraordinary restoration of Joueur d'échecs was released on DVD as The Chess Player - both of which have provided the occasion for this essay. ⁶

Figure 1.

Michel Strogoff. The 'Magnetic Eyes' of Ivan Mosjoukine. [Photo courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.]

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