Sodom and Gomorrah: Notes on a Reconstruction, or Less Is More

Before Cecil B. DeMille became forever identified with big budget, overblown religious epics through films such as The Ten Commandments (1922) and King of Kings (1927), both the Italians and the Austrians had been in the business of producing Monumentalfilme, as German speakers called them. The first wave of films from antiquity had been produced by the Italians, after the international successes of Quo Vadis (1913) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1913). The second wave of epics commenced with a two-part extravaganza, Sodom and Gomorrah (1922), ¹ directed by Michael Curtiz for the Viennese Sascha-Filmindustrie A.G. Almost simultaneously, Alexander Korda released Samson and Delilah (1922), followed by Curtiz's Moon of Israel (1924) and Pierre Marodon's Salombô (1924), both again produced by Sascha. A hodgepodge of Old Testament and modern social critique, Sodom and Gomorrah starred George Reimers, Lucy Doraine, Kurt Ehrle, Walter Slezak, and Victor Varconi. ² Premiered a week apart in October 1922, the two parts of Sodom and Gomorrah had a combined length of 3,945 meters, cost more money than any Austrian film ever made, utilized over three thousand extras, and had sets that rivaled anything Griffith created for Intolerance (1916). The film was a huge success in Europe, but flopped in the United States where it was released in a reedited version under the title of Queen of Sin. ³

But time has not been kind to the film. No prints survived in Austria in any form, despite its legendary reputation for contributing to the birth of an Austrian national cinema and to its first international recognition. By the 1980s it had become impossible to create the complete two-part version because even prints existing in foreign archives were woefully incomplete. Instead of filling in the holes with intertitles to explain gaps in narrative logic, Filmarchiv Austria in 2002 decided to throw out some of the surviving footage and create a single feature film. Their reconstruction of the present version, after three previous attempts in the early and mid-1990s, is the subject of this essay. It is also a lesson in the pleasures and pitfalls of reconstructing films when source materials are less than complete, and reminds us that all film reconstructions are merely approximations, produced after the fact, with no guarantees that they are perfectly accurate renditions of the original.

Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the great problem children of Austria's film patrimony, despite the fact that more original material survives on this title than on any other silent Austrian fiction feature film.

Original nitrate prints can be found in the film archives of Moscow, Berlin, Prague, Bologna, and Milan. One would think, with such a rich vein of original material available, an easy reconstruction would be possible. What are the difficulties? First of all, there are general problems associated with any reconstruction of a silent film, especially in Europe, where print runs are much smaller than in the giant American market.

Essentially, silent film prints were not produced industrially en masse from a duplicate printing negative. The cinema, the primary example of an art in the age of mechanical reproduction, generated its artifacts, 35mm theatrical nitrate positive prints, as objects created by craftspeople.

No two surviving prints are quite alike, and often the differences between them can be substantial. Tinting, for example, is not only a process involving craftsmanship, but also was apparently handled in local foreign markets by regional or national distributors, and thus was very much more a product of tastes closer to local audiences than to those of the film's producers. The sales strategy of the producer or distributor also impacted a print's quality, since different versions—either shorter, longer, or even recut—were often created for specific markets. Likewise, exhibitors and their projectionists could substantially alter a given print. And finally, we shouldn't forget...