La Cigarette is an oddity, a rare film made in 1919 by Germaine Dulac. The movie was broadcast as part of a series of movies by women directors adjunct to Mark Cousin's 14 hour documentary, Women make Film (shown on Turner Classic Movies). It's hard to evaluate La Cigarette because the 52 minute movie is in ruinous condition. About a third of the film is disfigured by whirling vortices of decay that are positioned in the center of the image. (Many old celluloid films have zones of rot running down the outer frames of the pictures -- a flickering decomposition encircles the images but doesn't ravage their centers; this is how much of the footage found in Dawson featured in Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time documentary looks.) The viewer is beset by turbulent cameo-shaped storms of decay in La Cigarette that seem malevolently placed to impose maximum illegibility -- the damage is right in the center of the frame. Adding to a viewer's frustration is the fact that the film's intertitles are in French and have not been translated. This is particularly problematic since this movie has lengthy titles and, further, involves plot points that are conveyed by the main character writing letters and notes that are also unintelligible unless you can read the language. The film is exhausting to watch and, ultimately, not worth the effort.
La Cigarette has an utterly bizarre plot. A Parisian Egyptologist welcomes the mummy of an Egyptian princess into the collection of his museum. (The mummy is a ghastly-looking thing with a strange leathery and impassive face in which slit-eyes glint.) The Egyptologist, who seems to be some kind of scholar, brings home for his wife the mummy's necklace. His wife thinks it's a gift, but, in fact, he has just brought the artifact for her to examine. The professor's wife is much younger and wears diaphanous, classically modeled garments -- she flits about on the model of the Gish sisters, cuddling some turtledoves that live in the backyard next to a strange fountain with a single ejaculatory jet of water shooting up into the air. The professor is anxious as to whether he still appeals to his young wife. And, it doesn't help matters that he has brought the mummified corpse home and seems (in one shot at least) to install the thing in his bedroom. (Long titles provide some kind of backstory for the mummy; I have no idea what they communicate except that it has something to do with a forbidden love affair, a slave, and poison.) The professor's wife is current, a sort of Parisian flapper, and a bit frivolous. She tries to get the staid scholar to dance with her but he declines. A handsome young boulevardier seems to be flirting with young woman -- she's called Denise. He turns out to be golf pro or something on that order and takes Denise out to the links. Returning to the clubhouse (or some such place), the golf pro makes a pass at Denise; he nibbles on her wrist like Gomez in the old Addams Family shows. The professor is lurking around and sees this happen. This causes him to doubt his wife's fidelity. The next day, she goes to a sort of housewarming party to which the golf pro is also invited. The professor has tailed his wife in a horse-drawn hansom and sees the golf pro entering the party after his wife has gone into the apartment. (In the apartment, the three women there lavishly attend to the golf pro who is apparently hot stuff -- they wait on him like handmaidens; this is a couple years after Verdun and men were in short supply in France.) Enraged by jealousy, the husband contrives a weird sort of revenge -- he injects poison into a cigarette and, then, mixes it into a batch of about forty fags in a box. He plans to commit suicide by some kind of ciggie Russian Roulette.. One by one, he smokes the coffin-nails but without drawing the fatal fag. (Throughout this part of the movie everyone is always smoking: cigarettes, cigarillos, cigars, pipe tobacco, you name it.) The jealous husband gets down to a last cigarette. This must be the one charged with poison. In the corner, the mummy eyes the professor and his wife maliciously -- a beam of light makes the dead princess' jewelry spangled and brilliant. The professor lights up the cigarette and inhales deeply -- then, his wife snatches it from him and begins smoking herself. A tedious flashback reveals that she somehow figured-out that her husband had engineered the death by poison cigarette plot. She has removed the poison cigarette, but, amazingly, not discarded it -- she just put it with another thirty fags in another box. The cigarette that they are smoking isn't toxic. We get an insert of the turtledoves happily bathing in the fountain and, then, husband and wife hold hands by the strange spurting fountain, both of them merrily smoking their fags. (Interestingly, the Russian roulette aspects of this plot, albeit with a real gun, are reprised in Dulac's much more well-known La Souriante Madame Beaudet ("The Smiling Madame Beaudet) made in 1923.
The plot is idiotic and the direction strangely noncommittal. The movie reminds us that suspense has to be manufactured by close-ups, montage, and strategic withholding of information -- techniques of which the filmmaker seems to know nothing at all. The smoking scenes are completely nondescript, shot without any kind of emphasis at all -- one can only imagine the mosaic of huge close-ups and delay tactics that someone like Hitchcock would have exploited in this context. The attractive heroine is rim-lit and has a fine halo of luminous hair and the eerie mummy's jewelry glints (the thing gets sent in a crate back to the museum at the denouement)/. In one scene, the heroine enters a bathroom and, in the gloom, the medicine cabinet (where they are storing poison for some inexplicable reason) glows with a weird and fatal sheen.
La Cigarette is a minor work by an estimable woman director, Germaine Dulac (1882 - 1942) -- it's her first work to survive and she probably made far better movies than this thing. (She is most famous for a erotic surrealist film, The Clergyman and the Seashell, based on a script by Antonin Artaud and released in 1928). The film is part of a series of 100 movies directed by women shown on Turner Classic Movies as accessories to Mark Cousin's Women Make Films, a New Road Movie through Cinema (2019) Cousins, although born in Coventry England, was raised in northern Ireland and makes documentaries about film history. His most well-known picture, The Story of Film, an Odyssey is a 15 hour roughly chronological history of the movies that differs from most accounts of this sort by emphasizing little-known movies from Asia, Central Europe, and places like Australia, South American and Canada. The 2011 film is a revelation and exposes viewers to literally hundreds of interesting movies by directors unknown in the United States. Women make Films attempts the same feat with respect to under-appreciated female directors -- the idea is to introduce the viewer to moviemakers who have been unfairly ignored in the United States (and, perhaps, England as well). The program is immensely long (14 hours) and features hundreds and hundreds of film clips, but it is perversely designed. Cousins organizes the movies by themes -- such as "The Meaning of Life", "Conversations", "Endings", "Meet Cute", "POV", etc. In total Cousins has about 40 subcategories into which he sorts his film clips, generally snippets of film one minute to three minutes long. Between categories, the movie rather inscrutably shows us footage from the windshields of vehicles driving through various picturesque landscapes. The programs are rather cloyingly narrated by women's voices, people like Jane Fonda, Tilda Swinton, who is a producer, and Debra Winger (as well as famous female directors from India, Asia and Africa.) Cousins writes the narrative that is, generally, uninformative -- he identifies the director and, then, proceeds to praise her or, in the alternative, he simply narrates the scene that we are seeing, describing how it is shot and framed. He has a literary tic: he tends to add a phrase to his narration when you expect the sentence to have ended: for instance, "Most of the movies in the world have been made by men. But on all six film-making continents, women have made movies -- sometimes the very best movies." The way that Cousins' sorts the film clips is confusing and baffling -- it's impossible to figure out why a given clip is part of "Staging" as opposed to "Editing", or "Sex," as opposed to "Bodies". Ultimately, his organizing categories turn out to be completely arbitrary and, in almost all cases, the filing of film snippets under one heading as opposed to another makes no sense at all. The series would have been far better if Cousins had simply focused on his favorite ten women filmmakers unknown to Turner Classic Movies' audiences and educated us about them. (We know that Cousins is a fanatical admirer of the great Russian filmmaker Kira Muratova to the point of having her name tattooed on his arm -- I would like to know more about this director and her films and not waste time trying to unravel how Cousins' selections of films illustrating "Conversations" is different from from "Life Inside" or "Reveal.") I faithfully7 watched every episode principally to learn the names of female directors hitherto unknown to me and because many of the clips were fascinating in themselves, although presented in such a way as to make the content more or less meaningless.. Edith Carlmar, for instance, was an ingenious and brilliant Swedish director in the forties and fifties, now unknown except in her homeland. The Russians produced lots of women who seem to have shot impressively pictorial rural epics -- I knew about Larisa Shepitko (whose movies are almost unwatchably morose) but was unaware of the redoubtable Yuliya Solnitseva, Dovhenko's wife, and obviously a major lyrical voice in cinema. So the series has value, but, ultimately, is too confusing in its structure and weirdly capricious to be of interest to anyone but cinephiles. The movie also demonstrates something that should be obvious by now -- there is no such thing as a distinctively female film sensibility and, certainly, no "female gaze" that is counterpart to the equally illusory "male gaze." Cousins also has an irritating habit of praising films made by Communist directors, full of noxiously overt ideology, while denouncing poor Leni Riefenstahl, certainly one of the greatest of all female directors, but, alas, a Nazi (or Nazi sympathizer). Cousins is so enamored by Communist filmmakers that he fails to point out that one of the pictures, made by an Albanian director, Tompto and his Friends, features children recruited into terrorist attacks on occupying German soldiers and is a particularly virulent form of Stalinist propaganda -- it takes critics from the former Soviet bloc to comment on this; TCM host, Alicia Malone brings up this criticism in her interview with Cousins who seems a little embarrassed but not too much. (TCM showed the series in hour-long installments with interviews with Cousins. He has hair dyed bright blonde and speaks with a beautiful accent and wears colorful ties with his sleeves open to show the mass of tattoos disfiguring his arms; he's an engaging guy and a true film enthusiast). TCM's movies broadcast as exhibits to the documentary are generally disappointing -- heavy on pictures by Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arznour, and the dismal Katherine Bigelow. For some reasons, the most important films mentioned by Cousins are inaccessible -- for instance, although Cousins speaks reverently of Kira Muratova, none of her pictures are broadcast. Nonetheless, a number of films shown with the series are of great interest and, even, a lousy picture like La Cigarette is sufficiently rare and unusual to be worth glancing at.
No comments:
Post a Comment