My second and last session at the Lincoln Center Film Society's 15th annual New York Jewish Film Festival consisted of a pair of French films made in 1912, La Dame aux Camélias and Les Amours de la Reine Élizabeth (English titles: Camille and Queen Elizabeth). Question: What are these doing in a Jewish film festival? Answer: They starred Sarah Bernhardt. Question: How does that make them Jewish? Answer: Though she went to a convent school, and was a practicing Catholic most of her life, Bernhardt was born Jewish--at least on paper. She never made any mention of her mother ever practicing Judaism, only that her grandmother was an "Israelite," as the French called Jews back then. I call this the "Jewish Museum Syndrome." There, even the most remote connection to Judaism is a valid reason for including something an exhibition--or even mounting an entire exhibition about it. And indeed, the Jewish Museum is currently showing Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, and the showing of these films was connected to it.
In reality, Bernhardt's connection to Judaism was not quite as tenuous as that. Regardless of her religious practices, she endured a great deal of anti-Semitism at the hands of the popular French press. While she downplayed her Jewish ancestry most of the time, Bernhardt did use it to her advantage when it was convenient: During the Franco-Prussian War, she reminded people of her Jewish roots when she was suspected of being disloyal to France, just on the basis of her Germanic name. (Actually, she had changed it from Bernard, though it's not clear just when.) She was also a staunch defender of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer wrongfully convicted of espionage--not that one had to be Jewish to support him.
Anyhooski (as Namoli Brennet wants everyone to say--I think it's Namoli), tenuous connection or not, Bernhardt was in the NYJFF, and I wanted to see her. Also, I wanted to hear the live piano accompaniment (by Donald Sosin) that was presented--just the way silent films were originally shown. I don't think I had ever seen one that way before. For my college film course we just sat in silence--even for the 3 hours of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. And I saw a couple of silents in Radio City Music Hall with a full orchestra accompaniment: Abel Gance's Napoléon, and Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo. But never the old-fashioned way.
The program had the co-curators from the Jewish Museum exhibition to introduce the films and take questions from the audience afterwards. Carol Ockman, Professor of Art History at Williams College, and Kenneth E. Silver, Professor of Fine Arts at NYU, explained some of the Bernhardt's history, as well as film's role as a fine art a century ago.
Sarah Bernhardt was the superstar of her time--without being the best actress or the most beautiful. She promoted herself ceaselessly, always looking for publicity--her temper tantrums were trumpeted, her private life was a public affair. She endorsed all sorts of products, and served her country in both the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, and was inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1914. Besides acting on the stage (while producing her own plays, often in her own theaters), she was a writer and sculptor.
She was always on the forefront using the latest in technology. Born in 1844, just five years after the invention of photography, she used it to disseminate her image far from the theaters where she appeared. When Edison invented sound recordings, she was there in Menlo Park, NJ to have her voice preserved. And in 1900, she filmed the brief duel scene from Hamlet, as she was touring Europe playing the title role. It was more of an experiment than a serious effort, but she was obviously intrigued by the possibilities. Six or so years later she made a two reel Tosca, a role written for her for the stage. (A two-reeler ran roughly 25 minutes, depending on how fast the projector was cranked.) She disliked the results so much she tried to buy up all the copies to destroy them--fortunately she wasn't completely successful.
It was several more years until she was lured in front of the motion picture cameras again. $30,000 was a big enough lure. Camille, another two-reeler, was a great success, and made film into more than a cheap popular entertainment mainly for the working class. Bernhardt, as a serious stage actress, changed all that. Within a few months she followed it up with a four-reeler of Queen Elizabeth, which proved to be an even bigger success. As big as it was in Europe, it was even more important to the American film industry. Adolph Zukor brought it to the Lyceum Theater here in New York, and made a fortune on it--enough to bankroll what became Paramount Pictures.
All this is background, of course, most of which was related by the two professors doing the introduction. I think they were a tad over-enthusiastic for the films, particularly Ockman. The films may have changed the history of the medium, but that doesn't mean they were all that good, certainly not by contemporary standards. Intertitles, full screens of text, were used to explain each scene, but they rarely contained the dialogue. It was filmed pantomime, basically.
In 1912 Bernhardt was 68 years old. She had been playing the Lady of the Camelias on stage for decades--maybe 3,000 times by that point. It took a ton of make-up, and no close-ups, to make her the least bit believable as a young courtesan. Her over-acting, while not totally ridiculous, was a bit excessive, though from what I understand was the way she was on stage also. Her death scene was not overdone, and it did show her acting abilities, as Ockman had said.
Bernhardt was more believable as Queen Elizabeth. In this film I was impressed by the costumes and scenery, which were, the film noted, from Bernhardt's own company--this was what they used on the stage. Since the film was nearly twice as long as Camille, it had time to really develop the story.
The films are fairly well preserved, though there are a few parts with significant deterioration. One intertitle was visible so briefly it couldn't be read. The piano accompaniment was not nearly as important as I expected it to be. It was fine as background music, but I don't think it really added very much.
Although I think one can get an appreciation for Bernhardt's acting from the films, I don't think one gets a notion of her beauty, nor (of course) her personality. The films are certainly more important to the history of the medium than to the history of her. I do want to see the exhibition at the Jewish Museum--I think I'll learn a lot more about her there than what I learned at the film festival.
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