Silent Film Performance: Dramatic Bodies on Screen 3030751023, 9783030751029

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Silent Film Performance Dramatic Bodies on Screen

Silent Film Performance

Elisabetta Girelli

Silent Film Performance Dramatic Bodies on Screen

Elisabetta Girelli Film Studies Department University of St Andrews St Andrews, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-75102-9 ISBN 978-3-030-75103-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the memory of Stefan Zweig, and to the Europe he held so dear.

Acknowledgements

This book was mostly written during the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic. I would like to thank the people who kept me from going insane: they know who they are. I thank Tony for sharing with me this book, this life, and laughter in Berlin in the hot, bewildering Summer of 2020.

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Contents

Introduction

1

Sign of the Uncanny: Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916, USA) References

7 24

Performing Loneliness: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Silent Soliloquy in Baryshnya i Khuligan/The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1918, USSR) References

25 44

Re-booting the Self: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Queer Failure in Feu Mathias Pascal/The Late Mathias Pascal (1926, France) References

47 70

‘Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier’: Pola Negri, Wartime, and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial (1927, USA) References

71 86

Silent Performance Beyond Silent Film: Harald Kreutzberg in Paracelsus (1943, Germany) References

89 104

Index

107 ix

List of Figures

Sign of the Uncanny: Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916, USA) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The unhinged-looking woman clenches her fists and bites on them Immersed in the Uncanny, Fenella seems to stifle an inner scream

8 22

Performing Loneliness: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Silent Soliloquy in Baryshnya i Khuligan/The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1918, USSR) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The Hooligan avidly plunges his face in the teacher’s coat The dying protagonist, his mouth open as if trying to speak, attempts to connect with the teacher

38 42

Re-booting the Self: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Queer Failure in Feu Mathias Pascal/The Late Mathias Pascal (1926, France) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Mathias once again throws his head back and shuts his eyes Wide-eyed, the visibly moved protagonist is seen through a gap in the partition

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LIST OF FIGURES

‘Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier’: Pola Negri, Wartime, and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial (1927, USA) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Negri’s body is tensed in anxious anticipation, and her eyes are hyper-alert Almasy looks concerned but never anxious

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Silent Performance Beyond Silent Film: Harald Kreutzberg in Paracelsus (1943, Germany) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The dancer appears wholly oblivious to the people around him Fliegenbein offers a grotesque, moribund-looking spectacle

90 100

Introduction

Performance lies at the core of cinematic art. While a film’s every component contributes to its overall text, the behaviour of human beings is a key factor in creating screen meaning and pleasure. Since the advent of sound, the allure of this human presence has relied hugely (though certainly not exclusively) on the spoken word. Providing content, style, and feeling at the same time, verbal acting shapes audience understanding of character and plot; equally, it strongly affects the speaking actor’s appeal or lack of it. Of course, the notion of speech is not alien to early cinema: silent actors do talk on screen, even if their words are not heard. Moreover, the insertion of intertitles provides the audience with specific, visualised utterances. Whether occurring frequently or rarely, all this implied diegetic speaking is part of silent film; yet actual speech is wholly absent in actors’ performances, whose effectiveness relies entirely on non-verbal acting. Despite a still-persisting view that silent film ‘lacks’ sound, there is in fact a growing appreciation of the self-sufficiency of silent features and of the work of its performers. A cinematic form in its own right, speech-free film is utterly complete, missing nothing: it just expresses meaning in a rather different way. Silent actors construct narratives, relationships, dialogues, monologues—that is to say, structures of events, feeling, and meaning—which are as valid as those produced after sound (or indeed as those displayed on the stage). And yet a silent performance is markedly unlike a sound one: it is more condensed for the performer and potentially more immersive © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Girelli, Silent Film Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6_1

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for the audience. Devoid of the burden, aid, delight, and distraction of voice and language, it is an extremely focused, undiluted, and, at its best, extraordinarily powerful experience. Silent actors can deliver super-dense performative feats, often requiring a high degree of sophistication. Spectators, on their part, are offered a compressed amount of information and nuance which, to be fully deciphered, needs to be placed in the system it inhabits: namely, a default cognitive structure where meaning is expected to be articulated through visibility. It is precisely this system of the visible which marks a divide between silent and sound films. To study silent performance is therefore to assess a purely visual, physical mode of communication, whose range is enormous. In other words, it means to appreciate the body’s ability to create individual narratives, in itself and in relation to costume, make-up, and external cinematic factors. Yet speech-free performance remains a vastly unexplored topic, despite some brilliant critical interventions in the field, and a renewal of commercial interest in silent cinema. Silent Film Performance: Dramatic Bodies on Screen thus contributes to the filling of a gap in film scholarship; its primary objectives are threefold. First of all, the book means to deepen and expand the analytical and theoretical understanding of silent film performance; this also includes challenging the boundary between silent and sound cinema, by identifying silent acting in a sound film. Secondly, this work intentionally brings into focus performers who have been scarcely or under-examined, despite their obvious significance in artistic and historical terms. Lastly, the book appears at a moment when ‘the archival turn’ has dramatically steered Film Studies towards documents-based research. While acknowledging the crucial value of archival work, Silent Film Performance casts its glance in the opposite direction: it wants to remind the reader that Film Studies does not exist without film. The screen, however removed it may be at times, is the basis of everything unearthed and discussed by film scholars. This project rests on the belief that whatever ends up on screen, what literally constitutes filmic discourse, remains of paramount importance for cinematic history. The approach and methodology chosen to pursue these aims are new and original, hinging on two cardinal points. One is the application of theoretical frameworks to very close textual reading; the other is a view of silent performance based on intermediality, understood not just as the overlap of different practices but also as the multiplicity of contexts and forms bearing on the performative moment. This book is guided by

INTRODUCTION

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passionate attention to what actors do on screen and to the practical and theoretical connections forged by their presence. This implies, for a start, to notice how performers use their face and body, what acting patterns they may present, and which layers of meaning they may thus create; such an analysis often rests on a frame-by-frame dissection of particular scenes or fragments. Equally, the employment of selected theories or concepts is used as a key analytical tool, helping to uncover the available readings of a given performance. This ‘uncovering’ is not a claim that motives, conscious or unconscious, should be ascribed to actors in choosing one gesture over another: production history, even the hypothetical kind, lies mostly outside the scope of this work. At the same time, the occasional striking parallel between performers’ work and their personal baggage is noted, to signal additional lines of potential signification; biographical links are especially acknowledged in the chapter on Vladimir Mayakovsky, yet their discussion is clearly marked as a coda to the textual analysis of his performance. This book is pledged to the product on screen, while recognising its connections with what lies beyond it; the final cut, therefore, is approached as a self-standing yet profoundly dynamic, intermedial object of meaningful scrutiny. Silent Film Performance mobilises an eclectic range of conceptual frameworks to support its analyses. Some of these critical texts are about performance itself: in the chapter on Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, discussions of the notion and conventions of stage soliloquy are addressed, considering their possible expansion and relevance to silent film. In the chapter on Harald Kreutzberg, theories of mime and pantomime are applied to his performance (usually categorised as ‘dance’) in a sound feature. Most of the other supporting works, however, are not linked to performance, and not typically associated with silent film: they include psychoanalysis, queer theory, disability studies, theories of loneliness and more. In opening up film texts to seemingly abstract ideas, this book hopes to show that the screen-as-anchor is not a limitation but an opportunity: performance is both tangible and evocative, and the mapping of bodies’ motion within the frame acquires meaning through interpretation. An inclusive approach to ‘silent film performance’ is one of the original aspects of this work and is of course reflected in the choices made for its case studies. Before outlining what readers may expect from each chapter, it is necessary to clarify the place of stardom in Silent Film Performance.

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This project deliberately covers film stars and non-film stars, precisely because it focuses on silent acting rather than silent stardom, while striving to broaden the range of performers considered worthy of study. At the same time, the choices made are implicitly informed by the notoriously elusive concept of ‘star quality’: that potent yet indefinable appeal, magnetically attracting the viewer’s gaze. All the five performers analysed were extremely famous when they appeared in these films, and if their prime area of fame was not cinema, they were nonetheless stars in their own artistic field. Even more importantly, each performance under discussion is an extraordinary tour-de-force, defined by an irresistible power of attraction. These are not just talented individuals: they are supremely charismatic figures, eclipsing everyone else on screen. Harald Kreutzberg is only present in a few scenes in Paracelsus , yet no-one in the film is as memorable as he is; his ‘Dance of Death’ is likely to be the first or only sequence lodged forever in the viewer’s mind. Conversely, the diminutive protagonist Anna Pavlova, present almost throughout The Dumb Girl of Portici, forcibly commands attention in that crowded, action-packed, sprawling epic which could easily overwhelm a different actress. If the five artists selected were less spellbinding and less dazzling, they would not be in this book, which hopefully rests on rigour yet is driven by passion. So while readers will not find a discussion of ‘star performance’ here, they will notice a continuity of performative power from one actor to the next. Two chapters are devoted to bona-fide film stars, Ivan Mozzhukhin and Pola Negri; indeed, they are also discussed in relation to their iconic star images. Mozzhukhin is approached via the most celebrated aspect of his screen presence: a multiple, contradictory, ‘shattered and neurotic’ identity. His performance in Feu Mathias Pascal is seen as developing this persona to an extreme, surreal level, while holding together a three-hour film through the magnetic force of his acting. Negri, on the other hand, counters her established ‘vamp’ image in Hotel Imperial , a fact duly noted by scholars who criticise her performance for it. This book argues that, on the contrary, Negri emerges stronger and more impressive than ever in her altered form. The remaining three chapters deal with personalities not commonly associated with film: the classical ballerina Anna Pavlova, the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg. Pavlova is one of the most famous names in ballet history. A global sensation, she possessed a distinctive image ‘brand’ which her first and only film, The Dumb Girl of Portici, both destroys and upholds: her persona is literally split in two here, and her performance is deeply affected

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by this ‘abnormality’ embedded in her image. Mayakovsky was massively popular in the USSR not only as a poet, playwright, and graphic artist, but also as a live performer of his own work: he was used to dominate a stage. His star status among his contemporaries is beyond discussion, and his mere presence in Baryshnya i Khuligan brings it a thrilling edge. Kreutzberg was a world-leading solo dancer and choreographer, who until World War II had enjoyed decades of fame both in Germany and abroad (and who would quickly reprise this international career after the war). His casting in Paracelsus was a masterstroke by director G. W. Pabst. Silent Film Performance thus consists of five case studies of screen personalities, taken from different decades, production contexts, and national origins. This diverse choice of actors is accompanied by a solid analytical continuity, as the chapters are linked by key factors such as close reading, the application of theory to text, and a broadly intermedial approach. The case studies appear in chronological order, starting with a film from 1916 and ending with one from 1943. This order has been favoured because of the neatness of temporal organisation, when faced by the need to place one chapter after another. However, there is no intention of charting performative developments across time, or indeed place; this book assumes a blurring of boundaries between its case studies. To separate 1910s and 1920s, acting is not very productive and arguably impossible, while the jump from 1927 to 1943 should settle any question of a gradual tracing or decade-by-decade hierarchy applied to these actors. There is no hierarchy. This work focuses on differences and variety between performances, not between decades or production backgrounds. Three of the five chapters share an important aspect, the focus on non-cinematic artists: Anna Pavlova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Harald Kreutzberg, respectively. In the case of Pavlova and Kreutzberg, their empathically intermedial presence is addressed not simply to widen the category of ‘silent performers’, but to challenge the boundaries between specific performative arts. The chapter on Pavlova discusses how she brings the sphere of ballet to her disturbing performance in The Dumb Girl of Portici. Pavlova’s profoundly unsettling, divided screen presence is analysed in the light of Sigmund Freud’s work on the Uncanny, of disability studies, and of theories of intermediality. While the film itself has been celebrated as part of the work of pioneer filmmaker Lois Weber, Pavlova’s central performance has been scarcely addressed. In Kreutzberg’s case, the separation between dance, acting, mime, and pantomime is challenged, as well as the divide between silent and sound

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films. The feature under discussion, Paracelsus , was made in Germany under the Third Reich; the few studies of it focus on its relation to Nazi ideology and on the subversion offered by Kreutzberg’s key sequence, while all but ignoring what Kreutzberg actually does in it. Mayakovsky’s leading role in his own script is an opportunity to appreciate a striking performance by someone linked mostly to the written word. Film scholars, with a few exceptions, have ignored the enthusiasm that Mayakovsky and his fellow-Futurists poured into the new cinematic medium. This chapter thus brings into focus an important moment in film history, while analysing Mayakovsky’s acting in the light of psychological theories of loneliness and of the conventions of soliloquy; it also looks at the afterlife of this performance through the retrospective lens of Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930. Two chapters deal with two huge stars of the silent era: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Pola Negri. Mozzhukhin is revered for being not only a star in pre-revolutionary Russia and later in France, but also an actor’s actor, a virtuoso of the screen since 1909. Feu Mathias Pascal sees Mozzhukhin at the peak of his fame and is thus an ideal film to consider. Queer Failure, the theoretical framework chosen for this analysis, is a crucial concept in Queer Theory’s ‘negativity’ field, and its application to a silent feature is highly novel. Pola Negri has a reputation greatly based on her sensational glamour and on a very successful career spanning her native Poland, Germany, and Hollywood. However, Negri’s bravura and nuance as a performer have not been sufficiently explored, as her ‘vamp’ persona has usually been privileged over her acting skills. Hotel Imperial provides an analytical re-appraisal of Negri’s cinematic performance and image, assessed through the work of Sigmund Freud and other key texts on anxiety and wartime, directly relevant to her role in the film.

Sign of the Uncanny: Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916, USA)

A woman stands in front of a wide stairway, which is strewn with discarded rags and clothing, swords, and pieces of furniture. Despite these signs of recent havoc, she is alone. Extremely thin, dressed in a loose skirt and blouse, with a mass of curly dark hair framing her mobile face, she is a striking sight. After anxiously looking around, she quickly crosses herself; she then locks the fingers of her hands together, pressing them against her chest. As her darting gaze becomes more frantic, she clasps her hands tighter, while her body sways in all directions. She unlocks her hands, now clenching them into fists: she brings the right one to her mouth and appears to bite on it (Fig. 1). Lifting up her other hand, she repeatedly hits her breast with both fists. Finally, in a sudden movement which is almost a jerk, she throws her arms rigidly in the air, and runs away. This seemingly unhinged creature, whose behaviour suggests somatic unruliness rather than mere distress, is Fenella, the protagonist of The Dumb Girl of Portici (Lois Weber, 1916). She is played by the famous ballerina Anna Pavlova. While this brief scene takes place one hour and twenty-three minutes into the film, Pavlova is on screen from the very start; indeed, she appears mid-way through the initial credits. Yet this first sight of her, coming after a title announcing ‘Mlle Pavlova’, shows a radically different woman from the one just described. Inexpressibly far from that randomly wild performance, Pavlova’s introduction is a dream of elegance and self-disciplined beauty. Wearing a flowing white dress and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Girelli, Silent Film Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6_2

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Fig. 1 The unhinged-looking woman clenches her fists and bites on them

ballet shoes, with her hair kept neatly in place by a headband, Pavlova appears at the right of the frame; behind her is a romantic backdrop of reefs on a lakeshore. She executes a series of delicate combinations en pointe, moving across the screen with a serene expression; her arms are softly curved, up to her fingertips. Tiptoeing in circles, gently bending her body at the waist, she then gracefully jumps up and lands down again, on a tightly-held pose on one foot only. Perfectly balanced and still, she airily supports her chin with her left hand. She repeats this bourrèe and arabesque pattern with some variations, alternating gliding above the ground with exquisite arm- and footwork. While Pavlova’s more gravity-defying moments here are achieved with the assistance of a partner, rendered invisible by black draping, she projects an unbroken display of bodily control. Equally, her performance shows a constant fluidity of movement, a perfectly measured occupation of space through ‘small steps and careful turns’ (Simonson 2013). This highly accomplished ballerina, seamlessly floating through enchanting yet demanding physical numbers, is of course Anna Pavlova’s own image, as it was known all over the world by 1916. The Dumb Girl of Portici, however, gives Pavlova only one minute and twenty seconds for this self-standing ballet scene, adding another two minutes and thirty seconds at the very end of the film. Bookended by these reminders of Pavlova’s extraordinary dancing career,

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there are nearly two hours when Pavlova is Fenella, and as such undergoes a drastic transformation. The woman seen biting her fist, beating her chest, and nervously jolting her arms is not only the film’s absolute narrative focus: she is also its regular and sole performer of physical chaos. As the mute heroine, Fenella carries a disability already labelling her as ‘abnormal’; this diegetic marking is underlined and greatly strengthened by Pavlova’s acting, which foregrounds an unstable physicality. An explicitly ‘different’ character, Fenella is placed at the core of the film’s turbulent plot, an epic of mass revolt in 1600s Naples. Shot against an often disorderly background, she may be seen as matching her setting: yet the excess and randomness of her physical energy are hers alone. While the entire cast shares the film’s violent context, no-one displays Fenella’s jumpy, uncoordinated bodily response; moreover, her unsettling performance is present in peaceful scenes too. In the title role, therefore, Pavlova stands out from the other actors as much as from her own established image. Strategically placed at the film’s beginning and end, the solo ballet sequences remind the viewer of the ‘original’ Pavlova. Haunted by this duality, and disturbing the film’s otherwise smooth dramatics, the protagonist of The Dumb Girl of Portici produces a threefold effect within its structure of meaning. She denaturalises her own ‘prior’, hugely familiar image; she delivers a troubling physical performance in itself, fracturing and complicating the film text; in doing this, she confounds and shatters orthodox expectations of bodies. Contemporary reactions to Fenella, Pavlova’s first and only screen venture, were duly baffled. As Mary Simonson (2013) quotes in her work on Pavlova, the New York Times warned its readers that ‘the Pavlova of film is not Pavlova’, while the Boston Globe found ‘incongruous and disturbing restlessness’ in a performance ‘marred by exaggeration’. Simonson herself echoes those early reviews, as she describes Pavlova’s movements as ‘ungainly’ and ‘utterly graceless’. The general consensus on the film’s self-standing ballet scenes, admired for their flawless beauty, seals the identity clash perceived in Pavlova/Fenella by past and present viewers. This dichotomy has been critically addressed as part of the challenges which cinema, a new medium in the 1910s, presented to a stage-trained performer (Simonson 2015); Pavlova’s role as Fenella has also been analysed in relation to the filmic and diegetic gaze (Simonson 2013). Furthermore, dance scholarship has focused on Pavlova’s ballet aesthetics, persona, and image branding (Fisher 2012). Most recently, growing interest in the filmmaker Lois Weber has brought The Dumb

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Girl of Portici into sharper view. But what should be made of Pavlova’s performance on its own merits? What does Pavlova actually do in this film? No close attention has been paid to her acting, to her performative patterns, and to the potential implications of her ‘ungainly’ appearance. This chapter aims to redress the critical vacuum surrounding Pavlova’s performance. Through a close textual reading, it proposes that Fenella reveals the body’s unhinged and deviational possibilities; specifically, with reference to the work of Sigmund Freud, it argues that Pavlova’s impression of an out-of-control body functions as a sign of the ‘uncanny’, a return of previously hidden elements to the realm of the visible and the known. Linking Freud’s discussion of the uncanny to disability scholarship and to theories of intermediality, the chapter claims that Pavlova’s ‘excessive’ movements cannot be contained by familiar notions of her body and of bodies in general. Suggesting the breakdown of an ostensibly stable physical order, Anna Pavlova is an uncanny reminder of the vulnerable, temporary nature of bodily control. The Dumb Girl of Portici was Pavlova’s choice of script, an adaptation of Daniel Auber’s 1828 opera La Muette de Portici, also known as Masaniello, with libretto by Germain Delavigne and Eugene Scribe. Loosely based on the 1647 Naples uprising, when a man called Masaniello led an overthrown of the occupying Spanish royalty, the plot (like the opera) hinges on a fictional protagonist, Fenella. A member of the local downtrodden fishing community, she is immediately introduced as a mute, as well as an exuberantly cheerful girl. While gaily dancing on the beach, she is shown interacting with her neighbours and with her devoted brother, Masaniello (Rupert Julian). The mood gets rapidly sombre, though, as the film reveals the Spanish rulers’ cruelly oppressive regime, which keeps the people in abject poverty. As Masaniello becomes involved in revolutionary scheming, Fenella instead falls for the suave Alphonso (Douglas Gerrard), a Spanish nobleman who seduces her under disguise. Engaged to Princess Elvira (Edna Maison), Alphonso quickly regrets his moment of passion with Fenella, and promptly deserts her, leaving her alone and distraught until she is rescued by her brother. Back home but heartbroken, Fenella is soon located by Alphonso’s father, who is intent on avoiding a scandal: he therefore has her thrown in jail, where she is brutally flogged. Meanwhile, the people have risen in revolt against the authorities, and violent chaos reigns. As prisons are stormed by the rioters, Fenella is freed into her now frenzied environment. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, she roams in horror around the severed

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heads of murdered nobility, displayed on spikes. After enduring yet more abuse, this time at the hands of Alphonso’s family and guards, Fenella nonetheless saves the lives of Alphonso and Elvira, by guiding them out of sight of the vengeful mob. At the same time, Masaniello has made some enemies among the people; he is tricked into drinking a potion which robs him of his sanity, precipitating his downfall and more political turmoil. As violence erupts again, Fenella is accidentally stabbed and dies in Alphonso’s arms. Thus the plot ends; but the film immediately cuts to a dreamy scenario of descending clouds, against which Pavlova, once again in her ballerina persona, gently dances. The optical effect conveyed is that she is moving upwards, towards the light, an obvious link to the just-deceased Fenella, who however remains alien to these images. Equally, the serene sky background in this final view of Pavlova, like the lakeshore of her initial ballet scene, is emphatically at odds with the rest of the film. The eventful plot of The Dumb Girl of Portici places its cast in gruesome situations, visually and narratively; Fenella is not only a witness to this dreadfulness, but also a victim. Her waif-like body is seized by sadistic guards, thrown in a dungeon, and tortured until her back is visibly covered in blood. Even the jail’s rats pose a threat. Outside the prison, Fenella is literally tossed around by crowds and armed soldiers alike. As for the inanimate world, her contact with it is mostly through a surface of stone and filth. The easiest context to navigate, the area around her home prior to the riots, requires her constant effort to plod in deep sand. In all this, of course, she cannot speak and must struggle to communicate. On top of specific episodes of harm, therefore, Fenella is physically hurt and drained on an ongoing basis; caught in a vicious circle, she matches her wild reactions and outbursts of energy with a palpable look of exhaustion. Through most of the film, her body is a site of discomfort and pain. However, physical suffering is hardly rare in this narrative, and indeed bodies are collapsing all around the heroine. From neighbours dying of illness and deprivation, to the barbaric violence between locals and authorities, including decapitation and even a baby killed in jail, The Dumb Girl of Portici is filled with bloodshed. Yet none of the characters undergoing these horrors appear intrinsically disturbing: only Fenella does. Jolting, swaying, extreme, and ultimately incomprehensible, her movements seem out of control. Juxtaposed to her opening ballerina scene, Fenella marks Pavlova’s shift from established conventions of beauty to ‘aesthetics of anxiety’ (Haughton 2003). It is through this aesthetic turn that Pavlova’s performance becomes uncanny.

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In a hugely influential essay published in 1919, Sigmund Freud uses the linguistic dynamics of ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’ (Heimlich/Unheimlich in German) to frame the concept of the uncanny. The terms are opposite poles along the same spectrum. At one end, there is the unfamiliar, which denotes two crucial elements of the uncanny experience. First, the unfamiliar as such is perceived as strange or weird; second, it is unfamiliar because its original familiarity had been concealed through repression. At the other end of the continuum, then, there is something once known, but subsequently forgotten or buried. The familiar turns unfamiliar, or uncanny, when it re-emerges after a stage of oblivion: it is an unwelcome return, which the conscious mind had tried to avoid. The uncanny is therefore the reappearance of an unpleasant or scary knowledge, previously and conveniently repressed: ‘everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open’ (Freud 2003). It is a negative, unsettling experience or quality, as Freud states clearly by placing the uncanny ‘in the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread’. The field of the bodily and the behavioural is, for Freud, a prime location of this kind of fright. He mentions ‘the uncanny effect of epilepsy or madness’, when ‘the layman sees a manifestation of forces he did not suspect in a fellow human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly perceive in remote corners of his own personality’. The fits and seizures of the epileptic, like the seemingly bizarre actions of the ‘insane’, are thus a reminder that one’s own, apparently fixed stability may also collapse. The notion that loss of control, or loss of order, is a key factor in the uncanny is strengthened by Freud’s next examples, all related to the body: ‘Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm […] feet that dance by themselves […] – all of these have something highly uncanny about them’ (2003). Freud’s emphasis on the physical sphere and his frequent references to literature and fairy tales point to another essential element of the uncanny: its ‘return’ happens through a detailed visibility, whether experienced directly or in the mind’s eye via description. This visibility is perceived as a disturbing twist on established parameters of reality: the uncanny cannot be visible, therefore cannot be, without this twist. In other words, the unfamiliar comes back through de-familiarisation; as theorised by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, a world ‘made strange’ is a world ‘made visible’ (van den Oever 2010). Just as Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie (‘making strange’) as a linguistic and artistic method in the service of new aesthetics, so Freud identifies the uncanny in the broader aesthetic field.

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Not only he begins his essay by outlining his plan to ‘engage in aesthetic investigations’, he also clarifies a priori where, aesthetically speaking, the uncanny lies: ‘when aesthetics is not restricted to the theory of beauty, but described as relating to the qualities of our feeling’ (2003). Discussing Freud’s essay, Laura Mulvey quotes his statement ‘We should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life’ and sees it as a reminder that ‘for Freud, the category “beautiful” and the category “uncanny” seem to be incompatible’ (2010). Going back to Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici, the uncanny quality of her performance is heralded by the reactions it elicits, which place Fenella in the realm of the ugly: ‘ungainly’, ‘utterly graceless’, ‘incongruous’, ‘disturbing’, and so on. Lastly, Pavlova in the film is literally framed by an uncanny structure: her image split between ballerina and Fenella creates a veritable ‘double’. The idea of the double or doppelgänger was considered uncanny by Freud (2003) ‘in all its nuances and manifestations’, including the sight of two persons who ‘lookalike’ and who share ‘the same facial features’. Originating in the child’s early stage of mental development, the double becomes ‘an object of terror’ for adults. The uncanny doubling of Pavlova/Fenella is evident from her first appearance in the film. After the initial credits have rolled on screen, and Pavlova’s ballet dancing has been seen in its familiar beauty, the narrative starts by introducing Fenella. Announced by an intertitle as a mute, as well as ‘the lightest-hearted slip of thistledown girlhood in the world’, Fenella is shown outside her home, on the beach: she is looking and smiling at something in the distance, while conspicuously swaying her arms around. She repeatedly bends down and springs up again, as if she meant to jump yet failed to do so. Her movements are almost frantic. A cut to a boat coming ashore reveals the object of her smiles, her brother Masaniello. The camera then moves back to Fenella’s domestic environment, the people living in the nearby huts; here she merrily goes from one neighbour to the next, with a bouncy gait resembling more a hop than a walk. Suddenly realising her brother is getting nearer, she leaps towards the sea, waving and rotating her outstretched arms at random. Now Pavlova performs a dance of sort: playfully holding a fishing net, she runs to and fro, up and down, in circles, at times placing her weight on one foot and then on the other. Some of her moves look slightly jerky; for one fleeting moment, she looks about to trip in the sand. Vivacious and radiant as she is, she also suggests incoordination; there is a haphazard quality to her movements, and her arms seem to be everywhere all the time. The overall

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impression is one of excess, of too much agitation in that tiny body, of no practical or aesthetic goal for her motion. Coming only a few minutes after Pavlova’s ballet solo, Fenella’s antics on the beach show the same person in a disorientingly altered form. It is crucial to notice that while Fenella’s use of her body is unusual and puzzling, no trace of ambiguity colours her facial expression, which is one of joy and merriment. This is not the representation of a madwoman, only of a devoted sister with a happy disposition; her physical presence, however, indicates a baffling lack of order. This incongruity may at first appear an indication, or a function, of her inability to speak. Fenella’s speech disability is stressed from the beginning, it is even included in the film’s title, and in several scenes she will point to her mouth to explain that she is mute. This major difference between the heroine and the other characters is not removed by the silent film medium: the audience, here aligned with everyone in the diegesis, knows that she alone is incapable of verbal expression. The ‘exaggeration’ of her movements could be taken as an attempt to communicate. Pavlova’s seemingly random performance, however, does not suggest an effort to convey specific meanings; in this scene, as in the others to be analysed in the chapter, Pavlova’s physical acting defies interpretation, and the one meaning arising from it is that Fenella’s body moves and functions this way per se. This is far from detaching Fenella from disability readings. On the contrary, her ‘jerkiness’ as the mute protagonist underlies her known physical issue, while amplifying and transforming its resonance into a presence of bodily chaos. Disability scholarship has related established views of the disabled body to aesthetics of shock, through which disability appears as a version of reality that is both disturbed and disturbing. According to Ato Quayson, the perceived aberration of bodily ‘difference’ comes across as ‘an “excessive” sign that invites interpretation, either of a metaphysical or other sort. […] the category of the “metaphysical” is dissolved into that of an aesthetic problematic, something figured in the form of an interpretative difficulty or impasse’ (2007). The impression of Fenella’s body is precisely one of aesthetic excess and semantic impasse—in other words, of disabled physicality—and rests primarily on her movements. Muteness is only an implicit part of the cumulative disarray in Pavlova’s performance, where excess of motion is the dominant factor. If this excessive element links Fenella to notions of disability, then disability brings her back to the uncanny. Just as Freud noted the unsettling effect of epilepsy, which reminds the non-epileptic of ‘forces’ potentially inherent in their

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own bodies, so ‘the disabled body sharply recalls to the nondisabled the provisional and temporary nature of able-bodiedness’ (Quayson 2007). A body deviating from expectations and rules, seemingly out of control, is an uncanny body; its uncanniness is chiefly perceived as baffling excess. When reality is ‘made strange’, its detection is triggered by a quality exceeding known categories: something extra has appeared, which eludes logic and classification. Laura Mulvey discusses Freud’s account of a disturbing experience of his, which he describes as defined by a sense of unreality, ‘estrangement’, and ‘double consciousness’: he felt that what he was seeing (the Acropolis) was not real, yet he simultaneously knew it was. Mulvey summarises Freud’s uncanny incident as involving ‘an excess of reality, untranslatable and “strange”’ (van den Oever 2010). In The Dumb Girl of Portici, Pavlova is defined by excess through the dual prism of the uncanny and the disabled; however, excess and strangeness also pertain to her strongly intermedial presence. Part dancer, part actor, yet not quite fitting either role because straddling both, Pavlova is an intermedial performer in several ways. As a ballerina acting for the screen, her duality is spelt out by her two ballet sequences. As Fenella, she dances randomly throughout the film, in a style which is markedly ‘weird’ by Pavlova’s habitual standards: this weirdness suggests interference, something unfamiliar encroaching on classical dance. This feeling is increased by the contrast provided by Pavlova’s own ballet company, cast as a group of dancers performing for Alphonso’s family. Lastly, a disorienting blur between walking and dancing characterises a lot of Fenella’s movements. According to Ágnes Peth˝ o, filmic intermediality may be ‘conceived as a kind of excess, a surplus in the cinematic image’ (2011). Indeed, Pavlova’s dual presence in the film does not function as a split, but rather as an overlap which adds something strange to ballerina and actor alike. As in the doppelgänger, a single individual is not divided but replicated, literally added to, in a highly disturbing fashion. Intermediality here has therefore an uncanny potential. Peth˝ o discusses the deliberate placing of paintings in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, arguing that this intermedial practice has ‘the potential of opening up an abyss, a rupture in the “texture” of classical narrative’ (2011). Fenella’s uncanny movements, ostensibly part of a dance or walk yet exceeding narrative and aesthetic motivation, do indeed ‘rupture’ the text: even when they only last a few seconds, they fracture the film’s flow. This performative effect can be especially observed in two scenes involving Alphonso, both working as a prelude to one of the plot’s turning points, his seduction of Fenella.

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The first scene, featuring once again Fenella on the beach, is preceded by two lengthy dance sequences not connected with her; these dances are set in the palace of the Spanish rulers and staged as entertainment for them. One dance is performed by an all-female cast: seven ballerinas, dressed almost identically to Pavlova in her first ballet scene, move beautifully across the floor, in marked harmony and grace. The next dance features a large mixed-gender group, arranged in couples; their picturesque costumes, and some resemblance to flamenco in their moves, classifies the spectacle as a ‘folk’ number. Through its elegant coordination and precise execution, the performance sets up an obvious contrast for what is to follow: namely, a genuine ‘folk’ dance, with Fenella as its main figure. This sequence begins with Alphonso, unseen, closely spying on Fenella, who at first is merely watching her friends dance. She soon joins them, which means she must cross quite a distance in the sand, from Masaniello’s boat to the dancers, at the forefront of the frame; no-one else does this, and so Pavlova is alone in negotiating an expanse of somewhat swampy ground, while approximating dance steps and playing a tambourine. Her progress looks rather precarious, and it is unclear whether she is dancing or running. Meantime, everyone else has stopped to watch Fenella, who now openly performs for an audience. Although some of her movements are certainly graceful, a lot of them are not; the difficulty of keeping stable in the sand, combined with the rigid swaying of her arms, produces a jolty, angular effect. An often-repeated set of moves, in which Pavlova jumps from one foot to the other, with her arms outstretched, looks abrupt and slightly wobbly. The rapid pace of her performance, in which seemingly random gestures interfere with measured steps and poses, creates an impression of intermittent excess, and thus of confusion. Fenella’s exuberance draws attention to itself as wildness, rather than nimble beauty, and has the same puzzling effect of her first scene. For all of Pavlova’s skill and charisma, the most salient feature of these moments is a muddled, unstable physicality. Chaotic vulnerability is what chiefly gives Fenella form and meaning, and unsettles the viewer; it equally affects the narrative, as this scene of light-hearted enjoyment acquires a vague sense of potential dread. Indeed, Fenella’s look of instability also complicates what happens next. As she concludes her dance and moves away from the others, she sees Alphonso, whom she had met before; within seconds, she blissfully falls into his arms for a kiss. It all seems romantic and passionate, yet Fenella’s uncanny quality lumbers her with a subtext of bodily unease: her display of desire trails an

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uncomfortable feeling. The progression from joyous dancing to joyous embrace has been fractured along the way, through Fenella’s revelation of something odd, irregular, jarring. An uncanny ‘force’ is at work in the body that languidly gives itself to Alphonso’s kisses. The sense of an anomalous physical element, inherent in Fenella’s presence, is transferred to her next rendezvous with Alphonso. When the two meet again on the beach, Fenella indicates her wish to go somewhere else and leads him to a secluded place away from the seashore. To do this she runs, or rather hops, ahead of him, and he rushes to follow her. It is impossible to tell if Pavlova is dancing or running, because she is actually doing both at the same time. To this motional blur, she adds a brief moment of gestural chaos, as she randomly flutters her arms in the air: even her wrists and hands appear disjointed and stiff. By contrast, Alphonso’s movements, as he runs after her on the same sandy ground, do not suggest any faltering. Fenella alone transmits a sense of incoordination, breaking the lovers’ smooth trajectory and adding an extraneous element to their playfulness. Once they have reached a location among the trees, Alphonso embraces Fenella, but she recoils from him with a smile; signalling the need for a pause, she then performs a dance for him. Pavlova dances on, and there is now a lot of grace and charm in her movements; nonetheless, these still include some fractural instants of unbalance, of slight disorder. Something is present which ought to stay hidden: the uncanny, deviational power of the body. When the dance ends and Alphonso holds her close, Pavlova responds wholeheartedly, with a look of ecstasy on her face. Her baggage of uncanniness does not diminish her show of desire, nor does it make the love-making implicitly about to happen less credible: but it does make it ‘strange’. The physical disquiet associated with Fenella is unique in The Dumb Girl of Portici. While this uniqueness is evident throughout, it is markedly emphasised by the contrast between Fenella and Elvira, Alphonso’s other love interest. Elvira’s introduction comes approximately ten minutes into the film, immediately after Alphonso has entered the narrative. Fenella, of course, has already been seen at length, notably while greeting her brother with her impromptu beach dance. Now an intertitle explains that ‘A marriage had been arranged between Alphonso and the gentle Princess Elvira’. The Princess is then shown, beaming with pleasure, meeting her fiancée who has come to visit her. Sumptuously dressed, her shapely figure highlighted by a full skirt and tailored bodice, Edna Maison stately advances towards the camera and Alphonso. While clearly alive to the

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attentions of the gentleman, on whom she bestows adoring glances, she appears calm and comfortable, even placid. Slowly and gracefully trailing her dress behind her, she walks and sits down, next to Alphonso. With soft and measured gestures, she shows him a scarf she has embroidered for him. Her behaviour is literally unremarkable. The polar opposite of Fenella’s baffling excess, Elvira’s bodily presence is one of uncomplicated torpor. Indeed, Maison’s performance does never significantly deviate from this first display, remaining entirely readable and predictable. Even through the plot’s later developments, when she is surrounded by murder and violence, the terrified Elvira does not look out of control, or in any way odd: she just looks terrified. In other words, her appearance is exactly as it would be expected to be. In her total adherence to the familiar, and in her prior, socially sanctioned claim to Alphonso, Elvira is an almost didactic example of how Fenella ought to behave, yet does not. Elvira’s body, contractually allotted to her betrothed, has an official seal of ‘normality’ that is matched by its performance. At the same time, Elvira is perfectly inserted in the physical order shared by the film’s large cast, irrespective of gender and context. Fenella’s deviational quality, instead, separates her from the other characters, in spite of narrative bonds. Pavlova’s uncanny signs are strikingly evident in the first part of the film, where diegetic horror is wholly absent. Once the plot dives into grimness, Fenella’s inherent chaos is simultaneously heightened and singled out by its placement in dreadful scenarios. In a world turned horrible, the heroine brings an additional element of disturbance: her uncanny body. The imprisonment and torture of Fenella mark the crossing of a narrative boundary. Her preceding desertion by Alphonso, who deceives her by posing as a fisherman, is still fully contained by emotional drama: no violence or brutality, mental or physical, mars the heroine’s distress and the context in which she grieves. Fenella here presents a spectacle of shattered dreams, and cries dejectedly, in Masaniello’s company and alone; with a broken heart in intact surroundings, all remains essentially as it should be. At around forty-nine minutes into the film, however, Fenella is literally thrown in jail: effortlessly grabbed by a guard, she is dumped in a cell, on a heap of rugs. From this moment onwards, she is caught in a current of growing unrest and horror, as the film’s mood and rhythm change spectacularly. Almost as if given a prompt by the swift action against Fenella, mise-en-scene and narrative progression shift, to suit a thematic plunge into mass violence. The plot now chiefly advances through decisive, brutal acts committed or enabled by

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groups, while the screen is dominated by the constant movement of crowds. Until now, the film’s text had been marked by the alternation of domestic joys and sorrows, which had flowed without a glitch: only Fenella’s uncanny turns had rippled its surface. The new tone and scale of the action tear this homely fabric apart, yet the film quickly re-composes itself into a smooth arrangement of motion and terror. The frame teems with rapidly moving bodies, traversing the screen in a frenzy of murder and arson; horses often add to the crowding, their riders being dragged off and killed. Amid fire, smoke, and clouds of dust, the deadly action spills off-screen. In this newly frantic context, Pavlova continues to add a discordant element; her bodily expression still separates her from the norm, even a norm defined by wild excess. It is precisely in the meaning of ‘wild’, and in the location of ‘excess’, that Pavlova and the rest of the cast diverge. The collective flow around Fenella is composed of three, nominally distinct groups: the people in revolt, the Spanish nobles they revolt against, and the soldiers called in to squash the uprising. While narratively bound to their own direction and purpose, so that one group may be seen attacking the other or fleeing away from it, the very possession of direction and purpose is exactly what they all share. The mob’s unhinged quality is found in the unbridled violence of its actions, not in a lack of aim or logic; equally, there is no baffling weirdness in the crowd’s component bodies. Excess here is moral and practical, rather than visual and semantic: each individual gesture and collective move is clear and deliberate, with no surplus factor. This obviousness also defines the soldiers, whose brutal reprisal looks unethical yet fully readable; similarly, the nobles’ performance of fear and grief is extreme and dramatic, but never confusing. Despite the vast increase in movement on screen, the depiction of horrors, and the performers’ high emotional pitch, there is no ‘untranslatable’ excess here for the viewer. Indeed, the plot’s mayhem highlights Fenella’s uniquely uncanny presence. A particular aspect of Pavlova’s use of her body, her jerky and seemingly random arm movements, is now directly contrasted to the arm action of the others. As it has already been discussed, Pavlova’s acting is punctuated by a striking, puzzling gestural pattern: she throws her arms upwards, often keeping them rigid or bent at the elbows, while swaying them at the same time. This angular, jolty motion of her upper half is now put in sharp relief by the rest of the cast, who are also using their arms with great vigour; there is, however, a profound difference between their performance and Pavlova’s. The rioting people, swept by revolutionary fervour, are shown

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raising their arms for two reasons: as an unmistakable sign of defiance and victory, or to hold torches and weapons with menacing intent. At times the two meanings coincide. This is a constantly repeated sight on screen, as the masses to and fro between locations and targets. Individuals also empathically raise their arms when they take aim, to knife or shoot an opponent. Terrified members of the nobility, especially female ones, dramatically bring their arms to their heads or faces in consternation. Against these widespread arm histrionics, Fenella presents a baffling deviational spectacle. A notable instance occurs after her flogging ordeal, when she is back in her jail cell; outside, the people’s revolt has started, leading to violent confrontations with the authorities. Fenella pulls herself up to the small window in her cell, from where she sees the two guards below getting drunk and abandoning their post. Getting down to the floor again, Fenella looks excited and joyous, having seen an opportunity to escape; she jubilantly throws her arms in the air. Her behaviour is so far entirely predictable and familiar. However, what had looked as a simple gesture, a clear upwards expression of triumph, soon turns into something else: her arms and hands change both direction and movement, shifting to an odd rotating motion, while also moving away from her body. Bending slightly backwards at the waist, Fenella then stands with her right arm high up, almost diametrically opposed to her left one, which is lowered. After briefly holding this diagonal stance, she seems to falter and be on the verge of falling; but she remains on her feet and runs away. Only a few seconds in length, Pavlova’s performance has twisted a recognisable pose into an obscure, unstable physical display. The plot moves hurriedly on, and the protagonist is carried on a stream of tumultuous, yet coherently flowing events. Captured and jailed a second time by order of Alphonso’s father, she is then freed again when rioting masses storm the prison. As she joins the throng of people pouring out of the jail, Fenella is inserted in a constant, powerful human motion: highlighted by a static camera fixed on the open gates, frenetic men and women emerge and run out, their weapon-yielding arms raised in the familiar gesture of victory. Once she appears among the others on the jail’s threshold, however, Fenella breaks the scene’s rhythm, leading the viewer to an extraordinary sight. While driving the film to its single moment of contextual uncanniness, she will seal her own link with aesthetics of dread and anxiety. This key sequence begins with the exodus of prisoners in full swing. After a few seconds, Fenella becomes visible at the far depth of the frame, rushing towards the exit; she quickly reaches and traverses the

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steps leading outside. Here, instead of running off-screen like the rest, she stops. The striking effect of Pavlova’s sudden halt is aided by the camera, which lingers on her, and equally by the framing: she is placed in the foreground and is miraculously alone. Thus provided with a pause and a stage in the midst of relentless action, Pavlova gives a highly dramatic performance; as well as abruptly changing the film’s pace, she ushers in a frightening shift of mood. In contrast to the crowd’s perfectly choreographed run, she remains outside the prison gates: here she moves from the left to the centre and stands in the middle of the screen. Her eyes look fearfully around, soon focusing on a point in the middle distance; convulsively bringing her hands to her head, and maintaining the direction of her gaze, Pavlova then grabs her face on both sides, her expression aghast. She next detaches her hands, and points with the right one ahead of her, towards some unknown sight; with a terrified appearance, she turns her pointing gesture into a sweeping movement, ended by clutching her head again. Pavlova’s acting here is not uncanny, but it does take the viewer on an unsettling plane. Instead of preserving and adding to the established collective motion, Pavlova brings in an extraneous element: the signalling of a still-unrevealed new horror. There is a Cassandra-like intensity to her gestures, and in fact their meaning can only be understood retrospectively, if very soon. With her eyes glued to the vision she alone can see, Fenella now quickly exits the frame; an immediate cut to a point-of-view shot discloses the object of her dread. In a seemingly deserted square, littered with rags and partly filled with smoke, a circle of tall spikes displays the heads of decapitated nobility. There is a head on top of each spike, with locks of hair eerily cascading over faces and napes. This is not just a ghastly, grotesque spectacle: it is also a vivid representation of what Freud explicitly lists as a ‘highly uncanny’ sight, the ‘severed head’ (2003). Cut off and cast to lie on their own, severed heads are indeed a most extreme instance of bodily uncanniness. Linked to markers of human identity such as the mind, and facial or verbal expression, a mutilated head is a reminder of something awful and best forgotten: the easily shattered wholeness of the self. For the first and only time in The Dumb Girl of Portici, the uncanny is external to Fenella, yet she alone is associated with its disclosure. Guided by her eloquent gestures, the viewer is first alerted and then faced with the grim scene she has discovered. The square containing the heads is initially devoid of living beings; only Fenella soon arrives on the spot, running in from the far right of the frame towards the core of the scene. The uncanny manifestation she identified and located now contains

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Fig. 2 Immersed in the Uncanny, Fenella seems to stifle an inner scream

her too; no-one else is present as she roams, in evident shock, from one spike to the other. Slightly hunched, she stops in front of a head, reaches out with her arm as if meaning to touch it, and then recoils in horror; she repeats these gestures with the next head. Clenching her hands into fists, she brings them up to her mouth, as if to stifle an inner scream (Fig. 2). Her performance conveys a palpable sense of hysteria, of being close to a breakdown; far from being scattered, however, her attention is wholly focused on the heads. Through an advance-and-retreat pattern, suggesting an irresistible attraction–repulsion, Fenella takes the viewer on a tour of the dreadful. Signalling, revealing, witnessing, and sharing in the presence of uncanniness, she confirms herself as its signifier. Her privileged relation with aesthetics of anxiety is further corroborated by the next development, which follows her departure from the scene: a large group of people arrives at the square and is met of course by the same awful sight. In direct opposition to Fenella’s reaction, these late-comers greet the decapitations with joy and amusement; cheering and dancing around the heads, they effectively normalise a spine-chilling spectacle. The realm of uncanny aesthetics, which Freud sees as ‘relating to the qualities of our feeling’ (2003), has vanished with Fenella; in its place, there is an ordinary show of blood-thirst and victims.

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The film now reaches the scene described at the opening of this chapter. Having run away from the severed heads, Fenella finds herself again surrounded by crowds, who are looting as well as rioting; a frenzied-looking Masaniello appears, leading a huge mob armed to the teeth. There is nothing, however, to explain Pavlova’s bursting into the unhinged, chest-beating performance already discussed. In returning to the nervous use of her fists shown in front of the spikes, Pavlova vastly expands on it and takes it beyond a readable meaning: there is no external horror related to her behaviour, no semantic key to her movements, and her bodily excess remains a baffling, self-contained display. The scene epitomises Pavlova’s uncanny presence in The Dumb Girl of Portici. In a context of deliberate, targeted chaos, where the breakdown of political and social order is a structural aim of the plot, the protagonist inserts unexpected disorder. As the film’s visual magnet and narrative pivot, Fenella puts the instability of the body in prime position, over the turmoil of events; she reveals that bodily order is also temporary, subject to mysterious ‘forces’, and this notion disrupts the text. Fenella’s uncanny moments are not as distressing as the film’s general bloodbath, but they are vastly more disturbing. As the plot reaches its last sequences and final abuse of the protagonist, held ransom by murderous guards while the viewer is informed that ‘Masaniello sacrifices his sister to the cause of liberty’, the effect is upsetting rather than unsettling. Similarly, the sudden and fatal stabbing of Fenella, who collapses on the floor in Alphonso’s arms while her killer commits suicide, is saturated with pathos but devoid of weirdness. And yet: the cut from the dead Fenella to a sky suffused with light, where Pavlova the ballerina gently and beautifully moves, is an abrupt reminder of the uncanny doubling underpinning the film. The flawless grace of Pavlova’s dancing is indelibly joined to Fenella’s ‘jerkiness’, precluding the stability and wholeness of this vision of perfection. Imagining a ballet performance in 1916 St Petersburg, the author Paul Russell describes it thus: ‘I watched the dancers sail across the stage, witnessed the holy simplicity of human gesture highlighted, drawn out, lovingly adored…’ (2011). It is precisely the ‘holy simplicity of human gesture’ that, in The Dumb Girl of Portici, Anna Pavlova shutters into the unholy, disordered, complex presence of the uncanny.

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References Fisher, Jennifer. 2012. The Swan Brand: Reframing the Legacy of Anna Pavlova. Dance Research Journal 44 (1): 50–77. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny, 123–162. London: Penguin Books. Haughton, Hugh. 2003. Introduction. In The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud, xli. London: Penguin Books. Mulvey, Laura, and Annie van den Oever. 2010. Conversation with Laura Mulvey. In Ostrannenie, ed. Annie van den Oever, 185–203. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Peth˝ o, Ágnes. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Quayson, Ato. 2007. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press. Russell, Paul. 2011. The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. Berkeley: Cleis Press. Simonson, Mary. 2013. Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 161–188. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Simonson, Mary. 2015. Dance Pictures: The Cinematic Experiments of Anna Pavlova and Rita Sacchetto. Screening the Past 44: 1-1. Accession No. 110226859 van den Oever, Annie. 2010. Ostranenie, “The Montage of Attractions” and Early Cinema’s “Properly Irreducible Alien Quality”. In Ostrannenie, ed. Annie van den Oever, 33–58. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Performing Loneliness: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Silent Soliloquy in Baryshnya i Khuligan/The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1918, USSR)

A brief, dramatic scene of The Young Lady and the Hooligan (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yevgeni Slavinsky, 1918) sees the two protagonists meeting in a wooded path. The Hooligan (Vladimir Mayakovsky), standing at a distance from the Young Lady (Alexandra Rebikova), addresses her with a few words. Shot in medium close-up, the Hooligan’s face strains through the hint of a smile, immediately followed by a sinking expression of dejection. His eyes, fixed on the Young Lady, dilate with sorrow, while his mouth turns downwards with a slight tremble. A cut to a medium-long shot now frames both characters: the woman’s posture is rigid and aloof, her face barely visible under her hat, as she curtly nods to the man. He takes off his cap in a respectful gesture, making way for her to walk on. She takes a few steps and then turns towards him, while he speaks again. Suddenly, with extreme rapidity, she starts to run away. He grabs her forcefully, but after a brief tussle he lets her go, falling on his knees instead and raising his arms in supplication. A cut to the woman’s face shows her expression of fear, quickly shifting to disgust: she wrinkles her nose while looking down at the man, as if physically repelled by him. She then begins to move away, while he maintains his imploring attitude, even crawling on his knees to follow her. He finally stands up, just as she runs off and disappears from the scene. Now alone, the man appears bewildered, moving almost at random; one moment slowly spinning on himself, the next leaning against a tree trunk as if seeking support, he © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Girelli, Silent Film Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6_3

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suggests a state of acute distress. Lastly, he returns to the tree, first resting his head against the trunk and then laying the weight of his whole body on it. In a scene entirely motivated by the pursuit of a specific love-object, Mayakovsky’s performance is not as straightforward as it may be expected. Through his facial and bodily expressions, he combines ardent desire and self-abnegation with a sense of painful isolation. His desperate need for this woman, driving the action and crystallised in his frenzied behaviour, reverberates throughout with loneliness. Vainly he searches Rebikova for a response, acknowledging her lack of connection in his sad, stunned gaze; after begging for her attention insistently and pointlessly, he can only find comfort in a tree. No other people are present. Mayakovsky is seemingly engaged in an exchange with a woman, but he is in fact acting in a vacuum and to a vacuum; solitude, as much as unrequited love, defines his rendition of the Hooligan. This dual characterisation, which dominates the film’s narrative, is consistent with scholarly understandings of loneliness. According to Roger Frie, ‘Neither loneliness nor love can be defined through exclusion of the other’ (2012), while Amira SimphaAlpern talks of ‘loneliness and its concomitants – longing and desire’ (2012). Evelyn T. Hartman argues that ‘an unrequited love relationship confronts the lover with love’s “twin”, loneliness and longing’ (2012). In The Young Lady and the Hooligan, the meaning of Mayakovsky’s protagonist is given by his unfulfilled need for Rebikova’s character: this structuring lack is expressed through his strong sense of isolation and equally intense passion. However, this subjective expression, conveying such essential information, does not reach its ostensible target, the Young Lady. Whenever Rebikova is on screen with him, with the exception of the film’s last seventy seconds, she denies Mayakovsky a dialogue; and when she is absent, his torment is displayed in a wholly solitary context. A marked continuity thus links Mayakovsky’s key performative moments: they are all devoid of a meaningful interlocutor. On screen, the Hooligan’s revelation of his inner drama bounces back at him; off-screen, of course, it is communicated to the audience. Mayakovsky’s performance, and its function in the film text, can be fruitfully analysed through a reconsideration of the notion of soliloquy, traditionally associated with speech and physical solitude. This chapter provides a close reading of Mayakovsky’s acting, in the light of critical discussions of the soliloquy’s conventions and scope, and of definitions of loneliness. The chapter argues that Mayakovsky’s presence as the Hooligan achieves coherence as

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the articulation of a specific meaning, narratively and subjectively developed through a soliloquy mode, despite the silent film medium and the intermittent presence of other characters with him. Lastly, the afterlife of The Young Lady and the Hooligan is briefly examined, in the light of Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930. The film is based on a short story by the Italian author Edmondo De Amicis (1996), The Young Teacher of the Workers , published in 1895, adapted for the screen by Mayakovsky himself. The script at times deviates from the original source, notably in its narrative focus: this is shifted from the female teacher (the Young Lady) to her chief male counterpart (the Hooligan). The plot follows the protagonist in his unrequited passion for the teacher, who is horrified by his attentions and refuses to interact with him. Initially presented as a rogue, the Hooligan soon turns into an anguished, chivalrous figure, whose experience of hopeless love is increasingly frantic and almost deranged. In two scenes, entirely added by Mayakovsky, he is hallucinating and believing he is seeing the teacher. One hallucinatory episode takes place in a crowded tavern, where of course noone else shares his delusion; he is left alone with it, troubled, and plagued by self-doubt. He next declares his feelings to the teacher, by handing her a love note in class; she reacts with revulsion, tearing up the message while he watches in distress. The Hooligan again tries to appeal to the woman, but his efforts achieve nothing; he becomes more and more engulfed in his own pathos. Whether kneeling down to kiss the hem of her dress, or using his jacket as a rug for her to walk on, he is not even acknowledged by the teacher. His despair and devotion escalate together. When a gang of bullies starts to pick on the woman, he single-handedly defends her and is consequently fatally stabbed by the gang. Lying in his deathbed in agony, not heeding his mother and the priest by his side, he manages to lift himself up when the teacher arrives at last. He seemingly tries to speak but cannot, and collapses again on the bed. At this point the teacher bends down, caresses his head and kisses him, while also holding his hand. Appearing to relax, he accepts the crucifix from the priest and brings it to his lips; a second later, he dies. The Young Lady and the Hooligan ostensibly centres on two characters, yet provides the audience with a single emotional anchor: Mayakovsky’s tragic hero. Through a personal journey ending in closure, in a plot

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greatly shaped by his inner developments and concluded by his death, the Hooligan eclipses Rebikova’s monolithic Young Lady. If this screen dominance is aided by the script, it is nonetheless chiefly due to Mayakovsky’s mesmerising performance. Commanding attention with his intense, mobile face, and nervous physical energy, Vladimir Mayakovsky is replete with subjective meaning the moment he appears on screen; on the prior force of this star quality, he actively crafts a poignant, self-standing portrayal of suffering. Rebikova, on the other hand, despite having more screen time and more close-ups than her co-star, does not generate interest or identification. As the teacher pursued by the Hooligan, she does not counter his turmoil with any depth or development of her own: purely reactive, depending on Mayakovsky’s actions for her projection of fear and disgust, she remains a cipher. Mayakovsky’s role in the film thus works as a self-contained, self-reflective conduit of emotions; only the audience forges a relationship with the Hooligan. In essence, Mayakovsky’s performance is an act of staged self-explanation, carried out in solitude while imparting information to the audience. In her essay ‘Outward Bound Soliloquies’ (1977), Ruby Cohn argues that the soliloquy is best understood in terms of its functions, rather than its established conventions. These conventions, originating in the theatre, expect the soliloquy to be a speech given by an actor ‘as though alone and unheard’, in line with classic dramatic traditions where ‘a character, believing himself to be alone, talks aloud under stress’ (Duckworth 1971). Unlike the monologue, which may consist of a summary of external events, the soliloquy articulates subjective thought processes. In practical terms and stage directions, it implies the speaker’s complete solitude, or at least the belief in this solitude. In a play’s structure, the soliloquy fulfils three important functions. Firstly, it allows a character to think aloud, self-debating his or her predicament, inner conflicts, and options, thus aiding plot development. Secondly, it reveals these reflections to the audience, providing crucial and privileged knowledge about the character. Thirdly, and as a result of all the above, a soliloquy is used to create ‘a more intense emotional relationship’ between audience and character (Van Laan 1970). Cohn proposes that these key functions may also be achieved through externally-targeted performative acts, whose ostensibly dialogic form may be a mere surface device. Cohn develops her argument through an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s plays; she quotes Andrew Kennedy’s assessment of specific works by Beckett (1975), which are described as ‘subtle transformations of an interior monologue into the

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semblance of dialogue’. Expanding on Cohn’s discussion, this chapter analyses Mayakovsky’s performance through the notion of soliloquy, challenging the latter’s orthodox limitations of stage, speech, and literal aloneness. Film scholars have at times invoked the soliloquy in relation to silent cinema. Perhaps most famously, Béla Balázs claimed that the cinematic close-up was the modern equivalent of the soliloquy, and cited silent films as examples, notably The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). According to Balázs, the close-up allows a face to ‘speak with the subtlest shades of meaning’, arguing that ‘In this silent monologue, the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited that in any spoken soliloquy’ (1970). Balázs’s use of ‘soliloquy’ and ‘monologue’ is suggestive yet imprecise, effectively a shortcut for the concept of wordless self-expression: the notion that a mute face may be more eloquent than a thousand words. More recently and specifically, scholars have referred to the ‘gestural soliloquy’ in silent film performances. In her exploration of the Biograph films by G. W. Griffith, Roberta Pearson (2004) charts the development of acting styles from ‘histrionic’ to ‘verisimilar’, placing the gestural soliloquy in the first category and identifying it as ‘an actor emotes while alone in the frame’. In Pearson’s view, this class of performance is defined by an unusual amount and repetition of gestures, marking a character’s ‘emotional catharsis’ yet remaining ‘narratively redundant’. Pearson adds that while plot developments may be aided by the gestural soliloquy, the results are not very effective, and likely to depend on the use of props. Rebecca Swender (2006) explicitly builds on Pearson’s work, with an analytical discussion of acting styles in The Indian Tomb (Fritz Lang, 1919). Swender finds that gender plays a role in the performances here, with the gestural soliloquy pertaining mostly to the female repertoire. She points out that male ´ leads Olaf Fønss and Conrad Veidt use exuberant poses, and interact with other characters through body language; in contrast, female heroine Mia May performs a soliloquy centred on small-scale gestures, while alone on screen. May’s performance here, Swender argues, conveys subjective thoughts and feelings to the audience. While all these examples are useful and important, insofar as they inscribe the soliloquy in silent film, they also limit the scope of the former. Swender’s work suggests the unlikelihood of a male character engaged in soliloquising, while Pearson’s largely dismisses the soliloquy’s potential to advance the plot. Both scholars approach the topic as a matter of style in discrete cinematic moments,

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rather than as a structural mode of performance: this perspective fits conventional views of the soliloquy, which see factual or perceived solitude as indispensable for it. Paradoxically, it is Balázs’s more abstract attitude that raises the possibility of a soliloquy unrelated to visible aloneness: ‘The poetic significance of the soliloquy is that it is a manifestation of mental, not physical, loneliness’ (1970). It is precisely in the context of such ‘poetics of loneliness’ that Mayakovsky, in The Young Lady and the Hooligan, conveys to the audience his intense isolation. As loneliness is described as ‘a largely invisible condition which can only be exposed to others by oneself’ (Morrison and Smith 2018), it is indeed apt to be expressed through a soliloquy. By developing his character through self-reflective moments of awareness, indicating his private turmoil and solitude, while emphatically being ‘under stress’, the Hooligan forges ‘an intense emotional relationship’ with the viewer alone; he thus fulfils key functions of the soliloquy. Critical work on The Young Lady and the Hooligan has highlighted its focus on the hero’s predicament, noting that Mayakovsky’s script centres on the inner conflicts of the protagonist, who is usually seen on his own (Cazzola 2009). This narrative privilege is nonetheless greatly intensified by Mayakovsky’s performance, which the rest of this chapter will analyse. The protagonist’s journey through the plot begins, significantly, wholly outside of soliloquy mode: this suits the introduction of the Hooligan prior to his personal development, and before he has set eyes on the teacher. On a busy street, a young man comes out of a tavern. Very tall, with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, and displaying an arrogant swagger, he immediately starts to hassle the people around him. He first takes away another man’s food, then he pinches the leg of a boy playing on the pavement; his face is set to a sneer, his movements are edgy. He stops in front of a group of youths, shares some of the stolen food with them, and walks away with one of the girls on his arm. Through his external behaviour, the scene has established the man’s identity as the Hooligan, a bully and a nuisance; yet his very presence thickens this portrayal with a slightly disturbing aura. While his height alone attracts the viewer’s attention, Mayakovsky also projects a nervous, menacing quality, which is compelling even in the absence of a single close-up. The film next moves to the teacher, who is starting work in the mixed-age male school which the Hooligan attends. When she is shown a photo of this troublesome pupil by a giggling colleague,

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she appears unaffected by it. However, Rebikova soon assumes her reactive role, defined by the unchanging expression of fear and disgust; these feelings are initially evoked by the whole classroom, until the Hooligan becomes their only trigger. The teacher’s generic dread of her students is shown soon after her arrival at the school. Looking out of the window, she sees giant alphabet letters, carried by the students in a threatening manner; she next sees herself outside, aggressively encircled by the group. While this vision is clearly an externalisation of the teacher’s state of mind, it does not lead to any self-reflection or character development: Rebikova simply looks scared, and breathes heavily. This reaction establishes fear as one of her two defining moods, the other being physical revulsion. Nothing else will exude from her throughout the film. The Hooligan also experiences hallucinations, but their quality and function are very different from the teacher’s. Rather than visual articulations of a single basic feeling, his hallucinatory episodes are self-reflective riddles, which cause him angst-ridden pondering. The Hooligan’s delusional visions are preceded by his initial, seemingly uneventful encounters with the teacher. The protagonists first cross each other as they both walk along the same country path. Once they get closer, they show contrasting behaviours: the teacher looks at the Hooligan with frightened distaste, even clutching her collar tighter around her chin as if shielding herself from the sight. The Hooligan, maintaining the brash mood of his introductory scene, greets the unknown woman with a mocking salute; in this attitude, he stops to look back at her, while she hurriedly walks on. As his gaze lingers on Rebikova, Mayakovsky inserts something new between ironic grins and strutting postures: for a fleeting yet clear moment, his smile vanishes and his eyes widen in sombre melancholy. There is no obvious reason for this mood shift, which will reappear at their next meeting, this time in class among the other pupils. Sitting prominently at a desk near the teacher, the Hooligan again shows brief disruptions in his roguish confidence: first his face becomes serious and frowning, and later his nervousness mounts until he spasmodically beats on his leg with a stick. These momentary, slight fractures in his smooth bullying display are a sign of impending change; his two hallucinatory spells, succeeding each other without narrative break, will fulfil this intimation in an unsettling extended sequence. The Hooligan is shown walking in the usual wooded lane, merrily hitting tree branches as he passes them, when he suddenly stops and rubs his eyes; this gesture is explained by a cut to what he sees. In the clearance

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in front of him, peeping from behind the trees is the teacher, but she is not alone: there are three identical replicas of her, all laughing at him in a taunting manner. The Hooligan, his gaze fixed on this sight and his feet on the spot, briefly sways with his upper body in all directions, straining to see better; as he takes the cigarette off his mouth, his face expresses astonished concern. He then quickly reaches the trees, where no trace of the woman remains: the vision has gone. Slowing down again, he moves disoriented from one tree to the next, placing his hand on their trunks; he then gradually leaves the trees behind and stands in the foreground of the frame. Staring blankly, with a grave look, he appears engrossed in his bizarre experience; he slightly tilts his head to one side, as if considering options in his mind. After a final baffled glance at the trees, he resumes his walk. Unlike the teacher’s own hallucination, which illustrated her feelings about a generic group, the Hooligan’s visual disturbance is about a specific individual he has recently met. Multiplied into three copies, the teacher is brought into absolute focus while being strikingly defamiliarised: it is a drastic alteration in the Hooligan’s perception, a moment of ostranenie (‘making strange’) that marks a shift in his consciousness. The film moves on to the interior of a tavern, crowded with young men drinking and playing cards. After a few seconds, the Hooligan comes in, walks past the others, and sits down alone at a table, in the front right corner of the frame. After ordering and sipping a drink, he restlessly gets up, exchanging some laughs with a group behind him; he then goes back to his lone position. At this point, Mayakovsky completely turns his back to the room and the people in it, and directs his gaze at the camera: it is a piercing, preoccupied look, which those around him are unable to see. He then shifts his attention to the door and brusquely stands up; as if in shock, he holds himself to the table, looking unsteady, and watches the teacher glide into the tavern. She has the semi-evanescent appearance of a ghost, and carries flowers which she throws at the punters, who seem wholly unaware of her presence. She floats through and disappears. Mayakovsky sits down, takes his hat off, and runs his hand backwards through his hair: his gestures look mechanical and unconscious, as his eyes still search in the direction of the vanished teacher. He then once more turns his back to the people behind him, resuming full eye contact with the camera. Now deliberately performing to the audience, he looks simultaneously stunned and concentrated: his wide-eyed, bewildered expression is accompanied by a repeated stroking of his chin, as if he was following a line of thought. An emotional dilemma seems to have taken hold of

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him. Just as in a traditional soliloquy, ‘his deepest feelings emerge even as they take shape in his own consciousness’ (Cohn, 17). There are no close-ups, yet his position as the only character in the foreground, who is actively sustaining the camera’s gaze, makes Mayakovsky the obvious focus of the viewer’s attention. Prolonging his expression of astonishment and deep thinking, he keeps the audience involved in his subjective experience, shared by no-one around him. This solitary, intense attitude is interrupted by another mood change: he puts his hat back on, gets up, and addresses the young men sitting behind him. A bully once again, the Hooligan grabs one of them by his cap and pulls him off his seat, threatening him with his fist afterwards. Yet the roguish spell does not last: he quickly returns to his lone table, looking at the camera first and then bowing his head despondently. The Hooligan’s hallucinatory experience, virtually unbroken for two consecutive scenes, creates meaning both in itself and through the protagonist’s reaction to it. Articulating an inner drama centred on the teacher, the two episodes reveal to the Hooligan his own muddled feelings. At the same time, reality undergoes a radical change, although this change exists only for him. The dual alteration of emotion and perception thus plunges the Hooligan into new territory, irrevocably modifying his connection to everyday context. Not unlike Hamlet after seeing his father’s ghost, he appears to suffer painful doubts and self-questioning after his visions of the teacher. This drastic shift in consciousness is also reflected in the fading dominance of his bully identity, now subject to the stronger force of his attraction for the teacher. These important personal developments, however, are shared only with the audience. The teacher’s first bizarre apparition takes place in a deserted place; the second, flower-carrying display remains unseen by a whole crowded bar, apart from the protagonist. In fact, in this latter episode, even the teacher herself is oblivious to the Hooligan, reserving her flowers and gaze for the others. Equally unseen, of course, is the Hooligan’s reaction to the teacher, performed for the sole benefit of non-diegetic viewers. The solitariness of these shattering, revealing moments is therefore complete, turning the sequence into a soliloquy; Mayakovsky’s interpretation greatly strengthens this aspect, acting out a troubled subjectivity for and to the camera. In terms of narrative progress, this soliloquy lays the foundations for the Hooligan’s loneliness and love, therefore advancing the plot. The protagonist’s isolation from external reality, on which his hallucinations rest, is a prelude to his open expression of lonesomeness; his affected mental and emotional

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state, entirely due to the teacher’s presence, heralds his obsessive need for this woman and the way it will shape the course of events. The film continues in increasingly dramatic tones, as Mayakovsky builds a self-contained portrayal of desperate longing. The next scene, showing the Hooligan’s declaration of love, is a pivotal moment: it unequivocally reveals the protagonist’s feelings for the teacher, as well as her refusal to hear of them. Alienation is thus established as the defining structure of their rapport. At the same time, the Hooligan’s confession of love and desire remains hidden from the crowd present, and it is literally thrown back at him by its intended recipient. Once again in a lone position, the Hooligan is left to process the meaning of his distressing experience. The scene takes place in class, with Mayakovsky seated alone in the front row, in the foreground of the frame; he faces the teacher’s desk, momentarily empty as she walks among the pupils while dictating. Alternately slouching with his back to the wall and sitting up straight facing the camera, the Hooligan shifts restlessly in his place; at one point, he stops writing in order to skirmish with another student, in an apparent reprise of his roguish behaviour. Suddenly, however, he gets up and walks to the teacher, who is now sat at her desk; he presents her with the notebook in which he has been writing. As she begins to read it, he stands next to her in a confident pose, with his hands in his pockets and sticking his chest out. The camera leaves Rebikova to focus on Mayakovsky in a medium close-up: smiling faintly through pursed lips, he repeatedly nods, clearly to himself as the teacher’s gaze is on the page she is reading. He then imperceptibly bites his lip, while his increased nodding suggests a slight tremble; there seems to be some mental stress behind his self-assurance. A cut to Rebikova shows her perusing the notebook, until the Hooligan’s written words come up on screen: ‘Miss, I love you, please let me shower you with kisses’. Now Rebikova, also shot in medium close-up, seems to gasp for breath, with her face distorted in a wildly repelled expression. She tears up the notebook and throws it away, shouts in the Hooligan’s direction, and bursts into tears. The film cuts back to Mayakovsky, who is still standing there; his half-smile has begun to disappear, soon replaced by a shocked and upset look. Wide-eyed, he contemplates the hysterical teacher with sad astonishment. Alternately raising his eyebrows and frowning as if to seek a clearer view of her, he only once looks away, his anxious gaze darting randomly. He finally returns to his desk, stopping first to pick up his notebook from the floor. Sitting down again,

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followed by the baffled looks of the other students, he crosses his hands together and stares at the teacher. He is giving his back to the class. The camera stays on Mayakovsky for ten seconds, showing his facial performance in medium close-up: his eyes shift from a narrowed, concentrated look on Rebikova to a blank, untargeted gaze, suggestive of an inward mental drift. Once he looks down, his mouth nervously twitching, then he looks up again: he blinks, frowns, all the while maintaining a serious and pained expression. Through this mute speech, the Hooligan manifests his acknowledgement of rejection and of the emotive predicament he is in. As in the previous scene in the tavern, he is in a crowded space from which he deliberately, physically turns away, to process an experience he has not shared with the group: his love message remains unknown to the other pupils, and the modality of its delivery points to his distance from the teacher too. Mediated by words written on paper, which the film reveals after a shot of Rebikova and not of Mayakovsky, the protagonist’s declaration is highlighted through its lack of direct address: not a single word is uttered by the Hooligan, minimising his outward interaction and pointing to his self-reflective position. If the crucial information in this missive supports Pearson’s claim, that a silent soliloquy requires props to advance the plot, the way this particular prop is used reinforces the soliloquy’s solitary function. The written message is a distancing device, and it advances the plot through disconnection, separating both protagonist and message from the teacher. The Hooligan’s subjective meaning, attached to his written words, remains unheeded by the woman he loves: she does not meet his declaration on shared semantic territory. In an intensification of her former repulsion and fear, the teacher literally sends the message back to the sender; there is clearly no hope of meaningful interaction, and the Hooligan’s isolation is complete. The protagonist now embarks on a futile quest for the teacher’s affection. Soon he is loitering, pathetically drunk, around the house where she lives; after trying in vain to spot her through a window, he falls on the stairs below and remains lying there between sleep and stupor. The teacher happens to look outside, sees him, and in horror she immediately runs for help. Meantime, the Hooligan has got up, and standing on tiptoes he spies, unseen, into her empty bedroom; he then starts to slowly walk away, only to stop again for no obvious reason. He appears sobered up and pensive. With his back turned to the house, he stands as if transfixed, in a pondering attitude; not even the arrival of the caretaker, sent after him by the teacher, ruffles his concentration. His inner life is clearly

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run by his preoccupation with this woman, an all-enveloping emotional cage where he is confined alone. The Hooligan’s extreme mental rumination continues in his next scene: he is sitting on his own by some trees, his chin resting on his hand, and his head bowed, as if absorbed in thought. Then, in a suddenly restless move, he stands up and distractedly fiddles with tree branches, lights a cigarette, leans against a tree trunk, shifting his position all the time. He looks twice in the direction of the incoming path, otherwise turning his back to it; maintaining a steady yet blank gaze, he seems again focused on an internal vision. Wholly in excess of plot requirements, alternately stunned and febrile, the displays of self-absorption in these scenes reveal a subjective rather than narrative motivation. From his increasingly alienated context, the Hooligan is signalling his obsessive torment to the audience, while going through it hopelessly in his mind. This self-reflective condition is not broken by the next development, the arrival of a young boy to whom he entrusts a written note. The film then cuts to the teacher, sitting with her younger pupils far away from the scene; when she is handed the Hooligan’s note by the boy, a title shows that it contains the words ‘I urgently need to talk to you, it’s very important’. But the author of these words is again removed from what he has written: with no cross-cutting between him and the text, and not even in sight of the recipient, he is once more being mediated to his unresponsive, uncomprehending object of desire. The film now reaches the scene discussed at the beginning of this chapter: the meeting in the woods between the protagonists, resulting in the Hooligan’s pointless begging on his knees, and in his solitary anguish afterwards. Taking place after his written declaration in class, when the teacher had torn up his message in frenzied disgust, this new confrontation is another key step in the Hooligan’s desperate, lonely trajectory. As previously mentioned, psychology and sociology scholars understand loneliness as an experience of suffering caused by unfulfilled emotional needs. Most importantly, loneliness, love, longing, and yearning are seen as being firmly interdependent. Evelyn T. Hartman observes that ‘at times falling in love […] brings more reality about one’s loneliness than one can bear’ (2012), while R. S. Weiss describes loneliness as ‘being without some definite needed relationship or set of relationships’ (1973). In The Young Lady and the Hooligan, Mayakovsky performs loneliness as a state of acute distress caused by the unrequited need (longing) for a specific relationship, in a context of no meaningful (set of) relationships. The

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Hooligan’s isolation in his environment is emphasised in the next classroom scene, which begins to pave the way for the film’s tragic finale. Shown in his usual place, alone at a desk in the front row, the protagonist is sitting still with a gloomy expression; he soon gets up, however, to retrieve the teacher’s notepad, which a rowdy student has deliberately knocked off her desk. He returns the writing pad to the teacher, while the class laughs mockingly at his courteous gesture; after shaking his fist at them, he sits down again. The camera shows his face in close-up: with a furrowed brow, and slightly tilted to the right, it rests on his hand as if in deep concentration. However, the deadly fury of Mayakovsky’s gaze, directed at the class through a sideways stare, indicates a development in his ruminations. Rage against the disrespectful pupils, a function of his all-devouring concern for the teacher, has altered the structure of his predicament: his quest for love is now also a mission to defend his love-object. A situation of antagonism, which will soon escalate, is thus added to his hopeless solitude. The film now cuts to a view of the whole class, showing the teacher bending down to read a student’s work, while another seizes the opportunity to encircle her waist with his arm. Jumping up in mad outrage, Mayakovsky grabs the boy by his collar and starts to drag him towards himself, but he is stopped by an older student: this man is armed with a knife and looks ready to use it against him. The teacher and a caretaker intervene, temporarily stopping the impending fight. Now the entire class regroups behind the older man, leaving the Hooligan on his own. The headmaster arrives, and the incident appears to be over; yet the Hooligan, shot in medium close-up, looks at his enemy in a wildly menacing way. His neck is aggressively strained forward, his face tensed up, with a deep frown showing; as he threatens the man with his fist, he widens his eyes to an almost maniacal effect. The overall impression is of wrath and pent-up frustration, close to the point of explosion. The Hooligan then puts his cap on and leaves the classroom. In all this, he has had no acknowledgement whatsoever from the teacher, whose only concern has been to avoid a brawl; his repeated intervention to assist and protect her has remained completely ignored. Bound to a violent inner pledge to defend the teacher’s honour, the protagonist now waits for the others after school. Standing alone on a wooden bridge, he sees them approaching and springs up to confront them; at first he only gesticulates and scuffles with the older man, but finally he takes a knife out of his pocket. At this point, however, the sight of people coming towards them stops once again the fight. The film

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Fig. 1 The Hooligan avidly plunges his face in the teacher’s coat

moves to the teacher, seen in worried conversation with colleagues and headmaster; she then goes out, walking along a path until she reaches a large crucifix, which stands in a stone altar among the woods. She kneels down, bowing her head to touch the stone plinth, and remains perfectly still as if absorbed in prayer. Now the Hooligan appears on the same path and sees her from a distance. He gets nearer, pausing a few steps away; he then also kneels down, unheard and unseen, behind the immobile woman, takes the hem of her coat and kisses it. Rebikova does not register this; only the audience witness this act of adoration, which replicates in its pose the teacher’s religious prostration on the cross. There is, however, a great difference between the two worshippers. Rebikova is inert, her arms falling stiffly by the sides of her body, her head static, and her face hidden; Mayakovsky instead looks intensely alive, moved by an emotion which is sensual as much as devoted. Shot in close-up, he raises the hem of her coat with both hands and plunges his nose and mouth in its folds (Fig. 1).

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Almost in slow motion, he keeps pressing and delicately rubbing the fabric against his face; then gradually, still holding the hem in one hand, he looks up with an avid, piercing gaze at her motionless person. Rebikova does not seem to feel or sense any of this. The audience, on the other hand, is being provided with new information: the Hooligan’s love for the teacher contains a strong erotic element, whose ritualistic expression strengthens and blends with the obsessive connotations of his attachment. Yet his multi-layered passion is ignored as such, and this moment of sensual abnegation remains self-contained. Now Mayakovsky raises his arms and grabs Rebikova by the waist, a move which provokes her sudden turn to face him; he stands up and tries to embrace her, but she pushes him off. This all happens extremely quickly, in stark contrast to the previous fetishist display: now the teacher only perceives a sly attempt to harass her and reacts accordingly. As she holds him away from her by pushing against his shoulder, she remains in this position for a few seconds and speaks to him. Although her words are not reported on screen, they do not seem to bring involvement or progress, as shown by what happens next: the Hooligan, while listening with his eyes downcast, retreats away from her, and after speaking briefly he takes his hat off in a gesture of deference. She remains impassable. He then moves further to the back, motioning with his arm as to make way for her; she runs away, echoing her behaviour on their previous meeting. The Hooligan stands for a moment, looking dejected, then he runs after her; he sees her from the back, as she is struggling to cross a ditch in the muddy ground. Without pausing, he rapidly takes off his jacket and lays it over the ditch for her to walk on. She steps on it, crosses to the other side, and runs off, without having once acknowledged his presence or even his jacket under her feet. Now alone in the frame, the Hooligan moves slowly; he picks up his soiled jacket, looks in the teacher’s direction, then turns on himself and stands still. His expression is pensive and distressed. While faithful in mood to De Amicis’s text, whose male protagonist swings between submissive chivalry and erotic frenzy, this sequence is Mayakovsky’s invention: the hem-kissing and jacket-trampling details do not exist in the original story. Separated by a few seconds of awkward physical and verbal contact, which only result in more alienation, the hem and jacket scenes reinforce the protagonist’s loneliness. Kneeling down to kiss the teacher’s coat, rather than the teacher herself, the Hooligan is once again acting through displacement. The invisibility of his gesture, performed through a mixture of sensuality and abnegation, inherently

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prevents its layered meaning from reaching the teacher. The distance thus accrued between the protagonists is countered by the Hooligan’s closeness to the audience, who alone are privy to his intimate feelings. In the next episode of mediation, the protagonist gives his jacket, in lieu of his body, for the teacher to use: as this usage can only mean stamping on it and leaving it in the mud, his behaviour speaks of selfhumiliation, foreshadowing his self-destructive course. At the same time, the correspondence between the protagonist and his jacket, coupled with the teacher’s complete indifference to both, strengthens the reflective quality of his actions and interactions. The Hooligan’s bond with his own garment, rather than with the teacher, turns the scene into a moment of lonely self-reiteration; this aspect is strengthened by Mayakovsky’s acting, which suggests unhappy ruminations throughout. Equally, in the hem-kissing scene, Mayakovsky’s facial and gestural performance lends it complex meanings, implicitly unavailable to the teacher: the Hooligan’s delicate balance of passion and worship remains self-contained. The film now unhurriedly moves on towards its brutal climax. The next scenes, in which the teacher is seen conferring with the headmaster and some students, are slow and uneventful. When the Hooligan appears on screen again, he is standing alone near an open fence, in an aggressive stance: legs wide apart, chest puffed out, he nervously shakes his walking stick as he looks keenly at the incoming path. He seems to be waiting for a tense encounter. The film cuts back to the school, where the teacher’s lesson is ending; as the pupils start to leave together, a group of them heads in a different direction. The Hooligan is now shown pacing up and down by the fence; suddenly, he seems to spot someone in the distance and begins preparations which clearly prelude to a fight. He takes off his wrist watch and puts it in his jacket pocket, then he checks something fastened to his belt, which turns out to be a knife. Soon he will also take off his jacket and roll up his shirt sleeves. The group of students arrives, lead by the older man who had previously challenged the Hooligan. The two adversaries, both armed with knives, are about to lurch against each other when one of the pupils stops them, forcing them to drop their weapons. Fighting with their fists only, they roll on the ground in a violent struggle. Just as the Hooligan has immobilised his enemy, and lies with his own back exposed, the others pounce on him in a concerted knife attack. It is a gruesome sight: as even the older man retrieves his knife and joins in the carnage, the Hooligan disappears under

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eight people furiously stabbing him. When they finally stop, they immediately run away, leaving him on the ground and close to death. Alone in the frame, Mayakovsky repeatedly contorts his upper body, trying to lift himself up; clad in a bright white shirt against the all-grey mise-enscene, his torso twitches in a disturbing performance of agony. He then collapses and lies still, his eyes closed. The film cuts briefly to the teacher, who appears anxious while looking out of a window, and then returns to the Hooligan: he is now stretched on a bed, his face hidden by a blanket, with an older woman and a priest by his side. When they offer him a crucifix, he takes the blanket off his face and refuses the offer with his hand, while shifting restlessly. The teacher is called to the deathbed and duly arrives; now Rebikova and Mayakovsky play a most unequal duet in the film’s last scene. As the woman who has unwittingly caused this tragedy, and is face to face with a dying man who loves her, Rebikova gives an especially weak performance. Having relinquished her usual mood of fear and repulsion, wholly inappropriate at this stage, she looks vaguely perplexed. Mayakovsky instead delivers a powerful, highly moving death scene, concluding his performance in the film with a feat of ‘extraordinary emotional power’ (Cazzola 2009, my translation). With great difficulty, Mayakovsky partly raises himself up, by grabbing the edge of the bed with one hand and the partition wall with the other. The camera frames him in close-up: he looks dishevelled, gaunt, distorted by pain. His face and neck are strained in a single tense motion, as he attempts to get closer to Rebikova, who stands opposite. With dilated eyes, circled by dark shadows, he keeps a fixed gaze on her. Most strikingly, his mouth is open; he appears to be trying to speak, yet obviously cannot (Fig. 2). He stays in this attitude for several seconds, with his lips widely parted, and manages to move forwards; then his strength fails him and he starts to fall back, as the camera widens its focus to include all the others. The essence of Mayakovsky’s soliloquy is all there in his final close-up. Surrounded by three people, he alone expands in eagerness, urgency, and even energy. Trapped in a dying body and a hopeless love, the Hooligan shows a desperate need to articulate: his strained posture reveals a supreme effort to be acknowledged, yet his panic-stricken eyes suggest he knows he won’t be. There will be no sharing of his mental and physical suffering, anymore than of his impending death. Pain reverberates back to him. When Rebikova at last holds and caresses him, he shows the hint of a smile and looks at her; but his eyes are glazed at this point, and he dies with, literally, a last-minute closure.

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Fig. 2 The dying protagonist, his mouth open as if trying to speak, attempts to connect with the teacher

There is a necessary coda to the analysis offered in this chapter. The soliloquy performed by Vladimir Mayakovsky has accrued an extra layer after his suicide in 1930; it is difficult to watch the Hooligan die and not do so through the lens of retrospective knowledge. At the age of thirty-six, Mayakovsky ended his life with a shot through the heart; he left behind a trail of self-reflective works, centred on unreturned love and on loneliness. The result of his desperate and violent death has been captured in photos, taken shortly after his body was found: an especially disturbing detail, the fact that he lies with his mouth open, recalls more than anything else his final scene as the Hooligan.1 Mayakovsky lived for about five minutes after shooting himself (Jangfeldt 2014), and something is known about his last moments. According to the prime eyewitness to the scene, his lover Nora Polonskaya who heard the gunshot and rushed to his room, ‘Mayakovsky looked at her and tried to lift his head, he seemed to want to say something, but, Nora recalled, “his eyes were already dead”. Then his head dropped’ (Jangfeldt 2014). All this factual and visual information, which uncannily echoes Mayakovsky’s 1 This particular photo can be found in Beng Jangfeldt’s biography of Mayakovsky, listed at the end of this chapter.

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screen death, is amplified in its resonance by his very strong authorial presence in the film. Considering his decisive interventions in the plot, his sole authorship of the script, his co-direction with Slavinsky, and even the fact that he refused to wear make-up throughout (Shklovsky 1974)—all elements bearing on his performance—it seems feasible to see a connection between film and biography. Mayakovsky does not just bring his un-retouched face to the role, with his own dark circles under the eyes; his presence also carries a thread of isolation and unrequited longing, the axis of his literary self-representation. Marina Burke comments on Mayakovsky’s involvement with film by saying ‘as in his other work, Mayakovsky is often Mayakovsky’s own subject’ and argues that his scripts ‘with a central, romantic male role’ are ‘highly autobiographical’ (2007). This is indeed the opinion held by Beng Jangfeldt, the world’s leading Mayakovsky scholar and biographer. Discussing The Young Lady and the Hooligan, Jangfeldt remarks that ‘just as in many of Mayakovsky’s poems, the hero perishes at the end’ (2014); he links this film to the other script penned by Mayakovsky in 1918, based on a Jack London novel and entitled Not Born for Money, which also features a male protagonist unhappily in love with a woman, and is ‘strongly autobiographical work’ (2014). In Not Born for Money, the male hero considers suicide, but decides to change his life instead. Both scripts were written in a period of enforced separation between Mayakovsky and his muse Lili Brik; he wrote to her that writing those scripts was the only way of overcoming his longing for her (Jangfeldt 1986).2 This is not at all to claim, let alone ‘prove’, that the Hooligan should be read as a conscious or unconscious replica of Mayakovsky’s life experience. It is rather to observe that a biographical tint has washed over the film, adding a dramatic postscript to its available meanings. As a possible result of this addition, The Young Lady and the Hooligan may be seen as gaining an extra layer, a semantic re-visitation that strengthens its central soliloquy. The Hooligan, like Mayakovsky, feels unwanted and unbearably alone; although he does not kill himself, he meets a violent, self-sacrificial end because of a woman who does not care for him. Like Mayakovsky, he presents himself as a suffering subject, brought to the agony of death through a lonely trajectory of longing.

2 Letters from Vladimir Maykovsky to Lili Brik, March and April 1918, 52.

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References Balázs, Béla. 1970. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. New York: Dover Publications. Burke, Marina. 2007. Mayakovsky: Film: Futurism. In Avant-Garde Film, ed. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann, 133–151. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Cazzola, Pietro. 2009. Da un racconto di De Amicis a un film con Majakovskij. Studi Piemontesi 38 (2): 373–381. Cohn, Ruby. 1977. Outward Bound Soliloquies. Journal of Modern Literature 6 (1): 17–38. De Amicis, Edmondo. 1996. La Maestrina Degli Operai. In Edmondo De Amicis : Opere Scelte, ed. Folco Portinari and Giusi Baldissone, 497–586. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Duckworth, George E. 1971. The Nature of Roman Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frie, Roger. 2012. The Lived Experience of Loneliness: An ExistentialPhenomenological Perspective. In Loneliness and Longing: Conscious and Unconscious Aspects, ed. Brent Willock, Lori C. Bohn, and Rebecca A. Coleman Curtis, 29–37. London: Routledge. Hartman, Evelyn T. 2012. Twins in Fantasy: Love and Loneliness. In Loneliness and Longing: Conscious and Unconscious Aspects, ed. Brent Willock, Lori C. Bohn, and Rebecca A. Coleman Curtis, 93–100. London: Routledge. Jangfeldt, Bengt, ed. 1986. Love Is the Heart of Everything: Correspondence Between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915–1930. Edinburgh: Polygon. Jangfeldt, Bengt. 2014. Mayakovsky: A Biography. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kennedy, Andrew. 1975. Six Dramatists in Search of a Language. London: Cambridge University Press. Morrison, Philip S., and Rebekah Smith. 2018. Loneliness: An Overview. In Narratives of Loneliness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from the 21st Century, ed. Olivia Sagan and Eric D. Miller, 11–25. London: Routledge. Pearson, Roberta E. 2004. The Histrionic and Verisimilar Codes in the Biograph Films. In Movie Acting: The Film Reader, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, 59– 69. New York: Routledge. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1974. Mayakovsky and His Circle. London: Pluto Press. Simpha-Alpern, Amira. 2012. “I Hate to Choose…You Choose”: On Inhibition of Longing and Desire. In Loneliness and Longing: Conscious and Unconscious Aspects, ed. Brent Willock, Lori C. Bohn, and Rebecca A. Coleman Curtis, 29–37. London: Routledge. Swender, Rebecca. 2006. The Problem of the Divo: New Models for Analyzing Silent-Film Performance. Journal of Film and Video 58 (1): 7–20. Van Laan, Thomas F. 1970. The Idiom of Drama. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press.

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Weiss, Robert S. 1973. Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Re-booting the Self: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Queer Failure in Feu Mathias Pascal/The Late Mathias Pascal (1926, France)

A crucial sequence of Feu Mathias Pascal /The Late Mathias Pascal (Marcel L’Herbier, 1926, France) sees the protagonist deal with a horrific double loss: the death of his mother and baby daughter, the only beacons of love and hope in his otherwise blank existence. Watching through a window from outside, Mathias Pascal (Ivan Mozzhukhin) sees his mother’s lifeless figure in bed, surrounded by candles and grieving women. Realising the awful meaning of this sight, he first moves away from it, his eyes dilated in horror; framed in close-up, he then bends forwards again, his gaze now keen and alert, expressing a strained effort to comprehend. Slowly, calmly, he closes his eyes, throwing his head backwards; he keeps this pose for a few seconds, slightly wavering, eyes shut, as if tossed around yet simultaneously finding an inner balance. The image of his sick daughter’s face next appears on screen, signalling his changing train of thought. Opening his eyes with an expression of renewed fear, he turns and runs back to his own house. The film cuts to Mathias’s arrival there, entering a room where people are kneeling and weeping around a cradle. Understanding that his baby has also died, Mathias completely loses the self-control he had achieved: distraught and incredulous to the point of hysteria, he alternately grimaces, cries, and laughs, unable to cope with this new blow. Mozzhukhin’s disturbing performance of almost insane grief lasts two and a half minutes, lending the scene a quality of chaotic

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Fig. 1 Mathias once again throws his head back and shuts his eyes

pathos; after this, however, he takes the dead baby in his arms, swaddled in blankets, and with growing steadiness, he proceeds to leave with her, despite the protests of the household from which he has long been estranged. Walking against the wind, along a wooded path in the dark night, Mathias retraces his steps towards his mother’s home. The whole journey is shot in close-up. Now expressing remarkable composure, his face is also acquiring a determined expression; his eyes first blink repeatedly, then squint, tensely focused on what appears to be an internal vision. Blinking again, walking slowly forwards, Mathias holds the baby tight and kisses her, then looks ahead: his gaze has become wide-eyed yet lucid, devoid of terror. Moving on, he repeats the gesture made outside his mother’s window, by forcefully throwing his head back while closing his eyes (Fig. 1). After the unhinged reaction on discovering his baby’s death, he has clearly undergone a powerful re-adjustment. With this newly-found calm, Mathias approaches his mother’s deathbed. The women kneeling in

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prayer make room for him, as he advances with the baby, careful and entirely controlled; slowly, deliberately, with the utmost attention, he places his little daughter next to his mother, adding a flower to the arrangement. When this ritual has been accomplished, he also kneels down by the bed. He looks around for a few seconds, distressed but without any frenzy, then checks and adjusts his neck tie. With extreme pacing, almost in slow motion, he bends his head sideways and finally hides his face in the bed covers. Rich in narrative and emotional turns, this sequence will trigger momentous plot developments. Having accepted the loss of his mother and daughter, Mathias will face the resulting void and loneliness, and the failure of his previous attempts at domestic happiness; he will consequently abandon his hopeless marriage and non-existent career, and leave his hometown. This leap into the unknown will culminate in the effective murder of his former identity, which in turn will set him off towards a new life, full of surprising and dramatic events; he will eventually kill off this second identity too. The key sequence of the death of his mother and baby, therefore, simultaneously shows and foreshadows two overlapping threads in the film, both centred on Ivan Mozzhukhin’s role and performance. One is the dynamics of defeat and re-start, which motivates the plot and defines its protagonist; the second is the performative process by which this protagonist is created on screen, shaping in turn the narrative cycle of loss and renewal. With the aim to analyse the mutual relationship between these two aspects, focusing on a legendary performer of the silent era, this chapter takes a two-sided approach: it adopts the notion of ‘queer failure’ as a useful frame of reference for plot and performance, while offering a new assessment of Mozzhukhin’s acting as a cyclic, self-retuning, non-normative spectacle. In his seminal work The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam introduces the idea that ‘alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal’ (2011). Arguing that failure, in particular, may provide a way out of the harsh rules regulating human behaviour and development, and of the compulsory route leading ‘from unruly childhood to orderly and predictable adulthoods’, Halberstam suggests ‘forgetting, losing, looping’ as subversive paths to a freer existence. Once the shackles of a linear, forcibly positive, success-oriented life trajectory are broken, the failed subject may find that ‘the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts’. Examining Mathias Pascal in this light, a

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first observation is that few human experiences seem as ‘counterintuitive’ as death, whether our own or others’; yet in the film it crucially aids renewal. The plot’s intricate web of demise, re-birth, re-failure, restart; its literal demolition of ‘predictable adulthoods’; and the narrative and visual reliance on ‘forgetting, losing, and looping’ make a queer failure framework the ideal conceptual tool for analysing Mathias Pascal. The other, indispensable methodological approach, which may be seen as intimately linked to the former, is a close scrutiny of Mozzhukhin’s performative patterns. The most famous film star in pre-revolutionary Russia, Ivan Mozzhukhin fled the Bolsheviks to settle in France in 1920, where he attained even greater fame with both audience and critics, under the francophone name of Ivan Mosjoukine. One of the most brightly-shining stars of French silent cinema, with a remarkable Russian career behind him, Mozzhukhin/Mosjoukine has been the subject of interesting, if scarce, critical analyses. As these studies share the general consensus on Mozzhukhin as one of film history’s finest actors, they unsurprisingly focus on his performance; here, too, there is notable agreement between scholars, who highlight Mozzhukhin’s signature acting feat, a shift in his screen identity. Whether playing different roles in the same film (as in Le Brasier Ardent , 1923, which he also scripted and directed), or the same character undergoing dramatic physical and/or psychological changes (as in Father Sergius , Iakov Protazanov, 1918, or in Michel Strogoff , Victor Touriansky, 1926) or adopting disguises (as in Casanova, Alexandre Volkoff, 1927)—just to make a few examples— Mozzhukhin’s acting is discussed in terms of its chameleon-like quality. François Albera finds a fundamental split or dualism in the actor’s persona, which he terms as a ‘dialectic’ underpinning Mozzhukhin’s presence, and specifically mentions Mathias Pascal as ‘dead body and living corpse’ at the same time (1995, my translation). Richard Abel remarks on the ‘multiplicity’ embedded in Mozzhukhin’s ‘consistently neurotic’ roles (1991), and Oksana Bulgakova states that the actor ‘specialized in characters with shattered identities’ (2005). While these observations are very helpful in framing Mozzhukhin’s distinctive persona and career choices, they focus on just one aspect, if not on the surface, of the star’s astonishing performative powers. Going a little deeper into an assessment of Mozzhukhin’s talent, David Robinson quotes from an unspecified source and claims that the star’s ‘contemporaries’ praised his capacity to ‘show the feelings hidden by the expression of an apparently different emotion’, an achievement defined as ‘expression in two tones’ (2003). This description, again

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pointing to a dualism of sorts, certainly fits Mozzhukhin’s complexity as a performer, though it is still quite generic: as Andrew Klevan has shown (2005), great acting often includes the insertion of different layers of meaning in a single scene or moment. While all these observed factors are therefore at play in Mozzhukhin’s performance, the dazzle of nuances it conveys merits closer exploration. In the specific case of Mathias Pascal, Mozzhukhin’s creation of the fluctuating Mathias is not defined by a mere ‘dialectic’ between life and death, or past and present; nor it is simply a ‘shattered’ or ‘multiple’ identity. Not even an invocation of Mozzhukhin’s ‘expression in two tones’, though pointing to his crafting of ambivalent feelings in the film, is sufficient without ample qualifying. With reference to the sequence previously discussed, which typically shows Mozzhukhin acting out acknowledgement and re-adjustment, and in the light of the broad notion of queer failure, this chapter argues that Mozzhukhin’s presence is sustained and held in tension by a performance of wipe and re-start, crucially linked to the acceptance or instigation of loss. Furthermore, this personal un-doing and re-booting is marked by the fracture, or perversion, of orthodox adult selfhood. Through a range of unconventional performative patterns, Mozzhukhin builds an overarching coherence for his otherwise ‘shattered’ identity; holding together an elaborate plot and three-hour film, and resting on the paradox of constantly re-assembling himself, Mathias nonetheless displays a unity of agency, embracing defeat and change by a process that, paraphrasing Halberstam, may be called ‘wilful unbecoming’. The film introduces Mathias through an episode of spectacular failure. First shown in his study, smoking while working on a ‘History of Liberty’, he is disturbed by something happening outside, in the park surrounding his ancestral home. He discovers that trees are being cut down, on the orders of a Mr Maldagna. Rushing to his mother’s quarters, he finds that the widowed and impoverished parent has just sold their property, for an outrageously low sum, to the treacherous Maldagna (uncredited actor), who is still sitting there. The sale was carefully accomplished behind Mathias’s back. Beside himself with fury, too late to prevent the deed and yet devoted to his mother, Mathias is now shaped by Mozzhukhin’s striking performance, a combination of gestural emphasis and nuanced expression. His eyes darting with rage, he raises his fist as if to strike Maldagna, but is stopped by his mother (Marthe Mellot), who pulls imploringly at his sleeve; pausing, he keeps a piercing look on the man, narrowing his gaze to a steely focus. He stands motionless for a moment

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and then suddenly launches himself at Maldagna and violently grabs him with both hands, prompting his aunt Scolastica (Pauline Carton) to restrain him. He lets her intervene, yet continues to angrily turn the sale paper in his hands, while keeping a wild look on Maldagna. At this point, an intertitle reports the aunt’s speech, a plea to respect his mother’s recent grief. On hearing this, Mathias instantly turns calmer. He looks downwards and then at Scolastica, with a milder, almost resigned expression; casually picking some fluff off her dress, and so indicating a return to everyday alliance, he then turns to face his mother. He places the paper back on the table, carefully positioning it straight in front of her, then takes her hand and kisses it; finally, with firm deliberation, he lays her hand on the sale deed. Having failed to save his patriarchal home and ancestry from disgrace, Mathias thus ritualises his acceptance of complete defeat and changed status quo. Leaving the room, he allows the cut trees to be driven away; he then returns to his study in agitation. Standing by his desk, he looks towards the window with increasingly steady eyes, then throws his head backwards, and resumes the exact position he had at the beginning of the sequence: sat down, semi-hidden by piles of books, smoking. Literally looping after losing, he has also re-adjusted to failure and change; the backward tossing of his head, a trademark move of his in the film, adds a note of insubordinate strength to his downfall. Defeated by life, he is ready to keep going, even if it means going backwards to move forwards. Although the whole sequence is devoid of close-ups, Mozzhukhin’s shifting body language, highly visible gaze, and poignant gesturing have narrated a process of loss, acceptance, and re-start. According to Halberstam (2011), the social imperative to achieve ‘success’ is linked to oppressive normativity and to ‘specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation’; to be free from the tyranny of success, the subject may have to lose or give up claims to ‘lineage, family, tradition’, a feat often accomplished though failure. In The Late Mathias Pascal , normative success is something the protagonist sensationally fails at. In the film’s first part, the initial loss of property and family honour will be followed by Mathias’s failure as lover, husband, and head of household, and by his literal non-recognition in the workplace. This situation will enable him to move on to the second part of the narrative, after multiple deaths, including his own nominal demise; in this latter phase, he will indeed find wealth, but this will be conspicuously deviant, in line with his distance from ‘maturity’ and ‘predictable adulthood’. Precipitating yet more drastic endings and re-starts,

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and culminating in an ambiguous finale, this second half of the film will continue to pose challenges to Mathias’s normative progress. The marriage of Mathias and Romilde (Marcelle Pradot), occurring shortly after the traumatic scene with Maldagna, happens almost accidentally, as the two meet when Mathias, as a favour to his shy friend Mino (Michel Simon), agrees to ask her hand on the latter’s behalf. Astonished to find out that Romilde is in love with him and not with Mino, Mathias instantly falls for her; however, a hideous mother-in-law follows him to his married home, dashing any hope of domestic bliss. Even before the birth of their baby, Romilde turns into a cold, indifferent wife, entirely dominated by her hateful mother. A key scene shows Romilde begging her to stay, as the woman threatens to leave after the latest row with Mathias, who is watching them unseen from behind a door. Romilde’s behaviour reveals, once and for all, her betrayal and the end of their love. Intercut with shots of wife and mother-in-law, Mozzhukhin’s face, brightly lit in close-up and medium close-up, suggests again a complex internal process. Shutting the door after witnessing Romilde side with his enemy, Mathias slowly turns to face the camera, yet looks away from it. His sad, wide-eyed gaze is not directed at anything external; his frown and raised eyebrows suggest intense concentration, while anxiety is shown through his rapid breathing, visibly making his shoulders go up and down. After blinking several times, he slightly tilts his head backwards, his eyes narrowing, as if focusing on an ongoing mental development. Mozzhukhin is literally acting out Mathias’s thoughts. His gaze finally becomes a cold squint, and he nods several times, in acceptance of the facts. The whole performance has lasted a mere twenty seconds. The realisation, acknowledgement, and self-steeling undergone by Mathias, embracing the total failure of his married life, have been eloquently expressed by Mozzhukhin through what Abel calls ‘the silent mask of his face’ (1991). In contrast to the dramatic scenes discussed so far, Mathias’s catastrophic attempt at a new job is shown through comedy. Displaying his versatility as an actor, Mozzhukhin here performs defeat by combining perfect comic timing with almost tragic solemnity: using to advantage the film’s stunning set design, he crafts a portrayal of huge and surreal disappointment. The protagonist’s hope for a self-fulfilling career is spelt out by an intertitle: ‘Mathias arrives at work full of enthusiasm: “Work means liberty”’. These words are immediately countered by the setting, designed to belittle and bewilder. A cavernous edifice with extremely high ceiling

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and a massive, unyielding door, the library employing Mathias is a hostile space, saturated with rats, dust, and gigantic piles of books on the floor. With his smart work clothes instantly soiled, Mathias tries to go forwards, but is hampered at every step by his chaotic surroundings. Stumbling over volumes and rodents, half-chocked by dust clouds, he vainly tries to overcome these obstacles; humiliated and helpless, he is shown coated in grime, a rat brazenly perched on his shoulder. Mounts of decaying paper fence him off on all sides. His gaze, quickly shifting from a crushing pile of books to a scurrying group of rats, is serious and alarmed; the slapstick of his movements, in tune with his collapsing environment, only enhances his face’s reflection of the dismal reality of his job. Getting up from the floor after chasing a rat, Mathias now sees his boss, the Chief Librarian, sat on a stool on a high platform and absorbed in reading: the arrival of his new employee seems to have escaped him. Directly in front of the Chief, Mathias bows repeatedly, while attempting to straighten his dishevelled appearance; he looks anxiously at the man, who remains oblivious to his presence. Having failed to catch his eye, Mathias calls out, but is evidently not heard, as the boss does not stir. With growing irritation he claps his hands, yet still nothing happens; exasperated, he shouts, but again the Chief does not turn. To all appearances, Mathias’s existence is not even registered. At this point, Mozzhukhin’s performance shifts abruptly: his expression, which had seamlessly progressed from disorientation to anger, changes to resignation in a second. He tilts his head sideway, keeping a calm gaze on the man. Simultaneously raising his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders, he then bows slightly in the Chief’s direction; after glancing around, he stands on his footsteps looking up at the platform, in a last desperate effort to gain attention. Finally, in a gesture of acceptance, he raises and drops both arms. Turning his back to the Chief, who remains visible and oblivious behind him, Mathias now surveys the place: his grave eyes set on the books and become wholly focused on them, suggesting a desolate acquiescence to the situation. His body, which had been quite still while he was trying to win the Chief’s attention, springs into motion: rapidly taking his coat off, and putting on some sleeve-covers, he also adjusts his tie and spits on his hands, rubbing them together, before moving towards the nearest pile of volumes. With great physical effort and grim determination, he lifts the books and carries them across the floor, starting to clear some space. Accepting his non-recognition and the literal wreck of his career hopes, Mathias has adapted to his failed status.

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The plot moves on, reaching the deaths of the protagonist’s mother and baby. Having already acknowledged defeat at home and work, and thus re-adjusted to a situation of loss, the grieving Mathias is left with nothing. He is therefore free to literally leave the past behind, boarding a train that will take him from Sicily to Monte Carlo. Through a brief flashback scene, entirely veiled by the superimposition of railway tracks, the film shows the final trigger for Mathias’s departure. He is seen slowly walking home, opening the door, and glimpsing his wife merrily laughing with the odious Maldagna. A cut to Mathias in close-up reveals him frowning, his face completely still, his eyes glued to the treacherous sight. Wide open at first, his gaze becomes narrow and focused; finally, Mathias lowers his eyes and slowly closes them. Distilled to some essential elements—gaze shifting from dilation to squint, followed by eyes closing—this is Mozzhukhin’s prime facial pattern to express failure, acceptance, and re-boot. Indeed, in a literal re-start, he next turns his back to the door and walks in the opposite direction while checking the money in his pocket. His pace is slow, yet his clear-eyed expression suggests a resolution to move away. This change of course is concretised in the next shot, which shows Mathias arriving at Monte Carlo station. One hour and ten minutes into the film, he presents a markedly new appearance: he seems fazed, disoriented, almost lost. He retains, however, the slowness of movement from the flashback scene, as he uncertainly steps off the train. Surveying the place with a tired, anxious gaze, Mathias looks vulnerable and lacking direction. An intertitle says: ‘Still grief-stricken, he saw everything as in a dream’. In the sequence about to follow, dreaming will rapidly overtake grieving, as Mathias will increasingly display a fuzzy, looser connection to reality, thus wiping the slate clean for a drastic rebirth. Halberstam claims that ‘under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’ (2011). At this stage of Mathias Pascal , with the protagonist poised between an ‘unusable past’ and a draconian break with it, Halberstam’s list begins to fully define him. In the extended Monte Carlo sequence, Mozzhukhin gives a remarkable performance of a man whose consciousness has gone adrift, in limbo, less and less burdened by memory or anticipation. Queerly failing even as he wins at the Casino, he both follows and shapes the narrative, providing a needed transition to the film’s pivotal re-boot: his own death.

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After the brief scene on the train platform, the film cuts to Monte Carlo’s gambling rooms, shot from above and densely crowded. Rows of elegant men and women, seen from the back, stand around tables and crane their necks to observe the playing; the visual effect is of thick human walls, impeding access or view to anyone wishing to join. As Mathias appears in the bottom left of the frame, timidly advancing with the ‘History of Liberty’ manuscript under his arm, it is clear that the location and its laws are alien to him. He moves forwards only to stop again, aimlessly going from one table to another, failing to get close or even have a peep. At last, after many attempts, he manages to insert his head through the crowd. The players nearer to him move as one in their chairs, reacting in balletic unison to the roulette’s changing fortunes, and writing down numbers. Clearly bewildered, yet frowning in the effort to understand, Mathias moves to another table, only to be turned away by the croupier; standing alone with his manuscript, his head slightly tilted, his gaze concentrated, Mathias ‘slowly feels the temptation’, according to the intertitle. Making his way back to the table, he struggles to grasp the rules, until he is given a chip to play with. His number wins, but the man next to him takes the money in his place and walks away with it, despite the protestations of Mathias, whom nobody is paying attention to. Robbed of his first Casino win, Mathias nonetheless stays on and continues to gamble. Another title explains that it is now midnight, and the protagonist is on a winning streak. After several long shots of the packed rooms, where Mathias is swamped by the crowd and difficult to identify, the camera moves closer to him: he sits unsmiling, his winnings a disarray of coins and banknotes in front of him, his arms stretching to place his bets. He then gets up to leave, clumsily holding his money and trying to make his way through, but he is met with a solid barrier of people, effectively impeding his exit. He looks at them with a disconcerted expression and immediately sits back in his chair. Adjusting his tie and throwing his head backwards, he rejoins the game with raptness, continuing to win. This perceptible re-adjustment, however, is complicated by Mozzhukhin’s astonishing mastery of nuances, which makes his character not the portrayal of a winner, but of a stranded loser. As he places a bet with his right arm, he bends wearily on the table and almost lies on it, while his eyes sorrowfully follow his move: rather than excitement, he expresses a stunned, depressed relation to the present. Marked as a misfit by his confused entry to the Casino, accepting the theft of his first win, and staying on because people stop him from leaving, Mathias

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remains wholly alone; he is wedged in the crowd yet isolated from its greedy interest. At times, his vacant look suggests a trance. However, with no sign of joy or triumph at his constant winning, this is not the trance of addictive elation: his glazed eyes point instead to a suspension, to a connection with events coming not from a place of full self-awareness, but from some blank inner region. When new piles of money are pushed in his direction, he mechanically places them inside his manuscript, with a stressed manner that is entirely devoid of glee or thrill. As closing time approaches, Mathias’s winning is followed with spellbound absorption by the crowd, yet the winner himself shows a fatigued responsiveness. At some point, as he is shovelling banknotes inside his History of Liberty, he looks up in clear, if inexplicable distress. Achieving a colossal win with his last bet, he stares in apparent stupor, his body slightly swaying; he then shuffles this fortune in his overflowing manuscript and pockets, with no detectable feeling on his face, his gaze now wholly inscrutable. Finally getting up and leaving the Casino, he is engulfed by the admiring crowd, but he heeds no-one. The whole sequence has been shaped by Mozzhukhin’s performance, which creates a deviant millionaire: serious to the point of sadness, robotically present yet very remote, alone and vaguely distressed, Mathias is an aberrant winner. Normative expectations of sudden wealth include euphoria, cockiness, and a frenzied identification with power and luxury; Mathias clearly does not experience these feelings, and his bewildered, almost tragic looks subvert traditional notions of ‘success’. In his discussion of queer failure, Halberstam argues for ‘the perspective of the loser in a world that is interested only in winners’: this seems exactly Mathias’s perspective of his own winning, a ‘counterintuitive’ viewpoint which keeps him linked to failure, yet simultaneously frees him of the burden of conformity. According to Halberstam, the legacy of failure is a productive confusion, a disturbance of ‘the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers’. In Monte Carlo, Mathias disrupts all these boundaries, as his losing approach to winning is also a negation of normative adulthood. While loss and win arbitrarily fall on Mathias, seemingly outside his control, his queer failure does certainly not imply a lack of agency. On the contrary: highly reactive, Mathias chooses his response to each event life throws at him, and frequently expresses it through a process of re-adjustment. Far from being mere resignation, his re-boot functions as empowering self-renewal, directed by none other than himself.

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This subjective force, clearly visible in the film’s earlier part, is just as evident in the Monte Carlo sequence, when Mathias appears somehow disconnected, unjoyful, and almost in a trance. Such a peculiar reaction, conspicuously unsuited to the context and its established modalities, can have its origin in Mathias alone. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam invokes a Nietzschean approach to the notion and practice of individual action, an approach linked to forgetting or undoing, and distilled as ‘act or nonact’. By writing these two terms concomitantly, indeed interchangeably, Halberstam erases their difference, highlighting their shared source instead. The presence of a unique subjectivity behind ‘act’ and ‘nonact’ is stressed throughout Halberstam’s text, as queer failure is aligned with ‘wilful forgetting’, ‘desire for oblivion’, and ‘art of unbecoming’ (2011). All these terms can be meaningfully applied to The Late Mathias Pascal , not least as the protagonist’s isolation emphasises the independence of his reactions and interventions. Above all, however, it is Mozzhukhin who unequivocally shapes a distinct internal agency, by expressively crafting his character’s mental and emotional work. This performative feat is employed with dramatic effect in the next sequence, which sees Mathias dealing with his alleged death; as resuscitation lies wholly in his power, he will make a very deliberate choice. Mathias’s reaction to his own demise is the film’s pivotal point, a narrative turn after which nothing will be the same. Building on the deviancy shown in Monte Carlo, the protagonist rejects the pulling force of habit, to instead pursue an aberrant trajectory that explicitly and wilfully rests on ‘oblivion’. After the fazed Mathias has left the Casino, an intertitle says: ‘Now a wealthy man, Mathias almost subconsciously feels the lure of house and home’; the film cuts to Mathias on a home-bound train, having breakfast while reading a newspaper. In the shortest of time, Mozzhukhin gives a multifaceted performance, creating a state of suspension where alternatives coexist. Vigorously eating croissants, he looks up from his reading between morsels, with a dreamy gaze. After greeting a new passenger who has sat opposite, he returns with gusto to his food, yet he looks away again, absorbed by some unknown thought or vision; he is smiling faintly. This variance of moods continues as he hands his newspaper to the other passenger. One moment fixed on the present, the next moment strangely distracted, Mozzhukhin never stops munching forcefully on his croissants. Though his overall countenance is relaxed, there are clearly diverse priorities, different modes of being claiming his attention. Soon,

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however, a single element makes him utterly focused: his eye is caught by a news item in the newspaper, held in front of him by the passenger. It reads: ‘By wire from Miragno: last Saturday, the body of a man in a state of advanced decomposition was found drowned in a millrace. The body is thought to be that of the librarian, Mathias Pascal. This suicide is believed to be the result of grief and debt’. Grabbing the paper in disbelief, the protagonist looks horrified, as his words appear on screen: ‘This is awful! I’m dead!’. Now Mozzhukhin enacts again a cycle of panic, acceptance, and re-start, with the strongest possible deliberation. In a state of frenzy, he gets off the train at the first stop, rushing to a post office on the platform ‘to set the distressing record straight’. As the camera gets closer to him, he is shown composing a telegram while keeping an eye on his train, which is about to depart. But after writing ‘I’m not dead. Home tomorrow’, he suddenly pauses. Raising his head, he is framed in profile in medium close-up, as he remains still, pen in hand. His gaze is concentrated, his motion arrested. A blurry image of his mother-in-law appears on screen. He blinks, nods briefly while tilting his head, with the hint of a smile on his lips; then he reads again the telegram. The camera has changed side, showing him in close-up, looking out through a large gap in a wire partition; his eyes widen, becoming shiny and moist. Mozzhukhin appears genuinely moved, on the verge of happy tears (Fig. 2). Seen behind the partly opened wire, he gives the impression of a jailed man to whom freedom has unexpectedly loomed, causing him great emotion. Indeed, the titles announce that Mathias realises how ‘being dead means escaping all earthly woes’, mother-in-law, wife, job, all the distress waiting for him at home. Now dry-eyed, Mozzhukhin slowly assumes a defiant, triumphant attitude, while still inclining his head sideways, in his typical gesture of considered acknowledgement. He then straightens himself up in a victor’s pose, smiling excitedly; tearing up the telegram in many little pieces, which he flicks in the air in front of the clerk, he touches his hat in a goodbye gesture, and leaves. His expression and posture have visibly changed, as he looks supremely confident. After removing the initials M P from his hat, he strides along the platform with total self-possession. As a railway guard rushes up to him, pointing to the train which has just left, Mathias grabs the man by his clothes and looks at him sternly, while his words come up on screen: ‘I’m changing trains!’. Stepping forwards, he walks in a straight line, pauses, turns on himself to face the opposite way, and proceeds steadily on: through this bodily re-direction, he has performed an explicit re-start. Indeed, Mozzhukhin’s

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Fig. 2 Wide-eyed, the visibly moved protagonist is seen through a gap in the partition

presence in the whole sequence has been sustained by subjective patterns of change. Specific aspects of this subjectivity deserve attention, as they provide both contrast and continuity with Mathias’s previous moments of re-boot. The sensational news glimpsed on the train brings the film its third death, after those of the protagonist’s mother and daughter. As before, this death is externally inflicted, as it was not orchestrated by Mathias, and is anchored to a factual event: there is a real corpse, even if ‘in advanced decomposition’, behind the notion of his passing. Uninvited as they are, all three deaths are nonetheless usefully processed by Mathias, in essentially similar ways, by fostering a productive ‘critique and refusal’ of his current situation. This time, however, death falls on him, as while he is physically still alive, his living identity is no more. Unlike before, Mathias has the power to reverse this decease, yet he declines to do so. Presented to him as a suicide, and thus as a personal decision to die,

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his death remains unrevoked through another suicide, his own ‘act or nonact’ of ‘wilful oblivion’: accepting the situation by doing nothing to resuscitate himself. Until this pivotal moment, whenever the protagonist had faced loss, failure, or defeat, he had re-adjusted to a new status for his unbroken selfhood; now, instead, he forges a whole new identity through his embracing of self-deletion, and consequent attempt at self-reinvention. The intensifying of Mozzhukhin’s wipe-and-start cycle is expressed through a dramatic shift in performance: as he arrives in Rome, full of the buoyancy first shown in the post office, he begins to craft a fresh persona for the late Mathias. This phase, however, will again culminate in a drastic end, thus necessitating yet another re-birth. Mozzhukhin’s creation of a new character dimension rests significantly on his changed relation to space. In contrast to his previous navigation of interiors and exteriors, marked by tentative or peripheral occupation, his handling of Rome’s topography is defined by spatial assertiveness. Aided by camerawork and settings, he masters forbidding or grandiose locations through an irrepressible physicality. From his arrival at Rome’s station, where his puffed-up chest literally invades space, to his vertiginous running down majestic public steps, to his manic jumping on the bed in his room, Mozzhukhin’s ‘man without a past’ dominates his surroundings. Even when faced with the hidden treachery of hotels and apartments, the former Mathias Pascal, now self-renamed Adrien, retains control of his environment. This is all the more remarkable as, in this section of the film, he is often placed in an oneiric or visionary realm, subject to extreme states of disorienting transformation, and faced with rapidly cascading defeats. As his power of re-adjustment is tested and stretched, it also adapts to a faster-moving narrative; the unremitting pace of events befalling him is matched by his own changed tempo, adding a new relation to speed to his altered presence in space. The protagonist’s entering of a previously unknown stage is stressed at the beginning of the Rome section. A single word appears on the bluetinted screen: ‘ROME’, followed by a landscape shot of the city’s skyline, gracefully arching behind a fountain. The film lingers on this image, initially blurry yet quickly becoming sharper, until the fountain’s flowing water is limpidly visible in the frame’s centre. As previous locations were not emphasised, and even Miragno’s beautiful towers1 felt incidental to 1 In reality, the towers are those of San Gimignano, Tuscany, standing for the fictional Sicilian town of Miragno.

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the action, this newly deliberate, stand-alone framing suggests the sudden importance of place and space. Rome’s unknown quality, moreover, does not imply a lost protagonist: unlike in Monte Carlo, Mathias’s arrival in Rome is defined by lively curiosity, and by self-confidence expressed through his upright posture and keen gaze. Unfazed by the crowd of porters and hawkers at the station, he takes in his surroundings, soon resting his eyes on a pretty girl, Adrienne (Lois Moran), who will play a crucial role in the plot. Instantly deciding to follow her, Mathias starts his first run down Rome’s landmarks. As Adrienne descends from the hilly top to Spanish Steps, Mathias sprints behind her, moving quickly to the side when he gets near her, only to renew his playful downward chase. Framed in long shot, zigzagging towards the bottom of the huge stairs, shifting to and fro as if playing with the ground itself, Mozzhukhin gives a brief, unprecedented show of freedom. At the end of his run, having lost sight of Adrienne, he finds himself by the Trevi Fountain, while two policemen observe him. An intertitle explains that Mathias now decides to ‘dress less conspicuously’, and we next see him coming out of a tailor’s shop, looking immaculate. Adjusting his hat with a pleased expression, pausing for an instant in self-admiration, Mozzhukhin then strides on, his right hand carrying a briefcase, his left hand nonchalantly in his pocket; lasting only a few seconds, his performance outdoes his outfit in creating a strong, novel impression of elegance. Newly confident and sartorially fashionable, Mathias however remains distant from normative forms of belonging. This is evident from his arrival at the Hotel Excelsior, a Rome landmark of wealth and luxury, where he heads to after his change of clothes. A sumptuous building, whose interior echoes the ornate vastness of a cathedral, it immediately dwarfs the protagonist. The carpeted staircase is graced by swarms of glamorous beauties, barely glancing in his direction, while the hotel porter, taller and bigger than Mathias, poses a difficulty by asking for his non-existent luggage. Clutching his small briefcase, Mathias braves his way to the counter and obtains the keys for a room, only to be surrounded by bell boys waiting to register his name and address. Unable to provide either, and with another intimidating porter barring access to the lift, Mathias eyes his escape: a sign indicating the toilets. Stepping inside the bathroom, he reaches a window and tumbles out, onto massive steps which expand rapidly downwards. Skilful editing creates an endless descent for Mozzhukhin, who runs on and on in giddy abandon, wholly in excess of narrative motivation. Indeed, Mozzhukhin’s performance here subverts

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the film’s preferred meaning, as the intertitles say that Mathias is fleeing ‘in utter confusion’ and thinking that ‘freedom has something bitter about it’: but there is nothing confused or bitter in his exuberant liveliness, his zigzag motion suggesting a playful intent to cover the widest possible space. He rather appears to have full, if eccentric, control of his direction and movements, and of any portion of ground he chooses to occupy. In stark contrast to previous scenes in the film, where the protagonist’s shifting mood had been signalled by subtle facial expressions and minute gestures, now Mozzhukhin lets his whole body lead his performance, expressing radical change through the simple activity of negotiating steps. The sense of dizzy adventure projected by this scene continues in the next ones. Having chanced to rent a room in a vast apartment, Mathias finds that the attractive girl he has been vainly chasing around Rome is the landlord’s daughter, Adrienne. This stroke of luck seems to complete the happy freedom of his situation, and as soon as the smiling Adrienne leaves him, Mathias gives in to unbridled joy. In an explosive performative turn, Mozzhukhin interacts with his new bed in a manic display of euphoria: after sitting on it and jumping up and down several times, he stretches fully and, grabbing the headboard, performs a number of headstands, frantically waving his legs in the air. He then sits down again and starts wrapping himself in the duvet, rolling over the bed in this fashion, with only his head and feet visible. This unusual approach to a banal piece of furniture defies conventional adult behaviour, while also suggesting dominance of interior space and a heightened sense of vitality. The author Jesse Lee Kercheval, in a poem addressed to Ivan Mozzhukhin, writes about this scene: ‘I have never felt as alive / as you look on that screen’ (2009). In fact, Mozzhukhin’s impressive energy is all the more striking as it defines the ex-Mathias as a powerfully living being. As he has reached this ecstatic moment through the ‘counterintuitive’ acceptance of his nominal death, of his original failure to remain in his allotted time and space, his exuberant delight is markedly transgressive. Halberstam argues that queer failure productively disrupts boundaries by preserving ‘some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood’ (2011), and Mathias’s child-like bliss is indeed linked to a series of narrative blurs: between life and death, past and present, winning and losing. It is just at this moment, however, that the protagonist’s jubilation is brusquely halted by a new, potentially insidious setback: his own failure to cohere. While still cavorting on the bed, he notices a book entitled ‘Spiritualism: How to Communicate with the

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Dead’. Instantly sobered up, Mathias sits with the book in his hands, his eyes wide open and anxious: slowly turning his gaze to the side, he is met with a chilling sight. On the sofa, two men seem to have materialised: one is his present self, wearing his smart new clothes and a supremely confident expression. The other is his old self, slightly dishevelled, keeping his hands in the pockets of his worn jacket, and with a determined look on his face. What had been a semantic blur has now become a three-way sensory split, as the evocation of Mathias’s ‘dead’ self has produced competition with his new identity, while his detached subjectivity looks on aghast. This chaotic self-haunting reveals that his controlled failure, the ‘wilful forgetting’ of Mathias Pascal, has itself failed, and the disruption of ‘clean boundaries’ is escalating out of control. Mathias’s reaction to this major defeat is to keep a steady gaze on his two doubles, even as, with extreme slowness, he turns his body away; he finally looks down at the book in his hands. Neither negating nor addressing his vision, the protagonist instead absorbs, for the moment, this crack in reality. If his presence in Rome had been defined by a changed relation to space and speed, it is now also sustained by a connection to experiential chaos. The muted acknowledgement of hallucinatory self-fragmentation is another ‘act or nonact’ carried out by Mathias, sealing the failure of his inner coherence. But his customary re-boot in the face of catastrophe is here delayed by the plot, which immediately brings interruptions through the busy life of the apartment. Dealing first with a drunken tenant and the distress she causes to Adrienne, Mathias is next visited by the landlord, who has come to introduce his daughter’s fiancé, the sinister-looking Terence (Jean Hervé). All hope for a fresh beginning thus wrecked, as the now forbidden, budding love for Adrienne is added to the late Mathias’s return, the protagonist decides to flee. Holding his briefcase, tip-toeing down to the corridor till he has safely closed the door behind him, Mozzhukhin then rushes madly down the staircase, spiralling headlong in a formal counter-echo of his carefree outdoor runs. While again focused on speed, his performance reworks his earlier reactive cycle through a panicked response to defeat. At the bottom of the stairs, however, he collides with Adrienne returning from her errands. In a seemingly instinctive gesture, he hides the briefcase behind his back and starts chatting with her; yet he soon stops smiling and adopts a grave expression. Wide-eyed, Mozzhukhin tilts his head to one side, keeping his gaze on Adrienne. He then looks away and, appearing almost grim, he adjusts the position of his hands, still hiding the briefcase; turning again towards Adrienne, he carefully studies her

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face. Very slowly, without shifting his penetrating stare, he turns his body in the direction of the apartment. As Adrienne begins to walk upwards, he matches her ascent with deliberately crawling movements, negotiating half a step at a time; suddenly he accelerates his motion, thus showing that he is following her. In this brief scene, Mozzhukhin’s emphatic inversion of direction and speed, combined with his facial signs of focused acknowledgement, indicate a crucial re-boot. The film’s plot now thickens and hurries on, placing Mathias in an increasingly hostile environment: his fellow-tenants scheme against him, steal his money, attempt to keep Adrienne away from him, and even stage a séance where ‘spirits’ confirm the girl’s future marriage to Terence. The protagonist’s ‘dead’ self also interferes, reappearing to spoil things just as Adrienne has confessed she hates her fiancé. All these developments, marked by narrative and visual mayhem, maintain the note of chaos which had crept in Mathias’s reality; Mozzhukhin’s performance strengthens the deviancy of context and character. In the next key scenes, he changes from lucid to hallucinating, hopeless to hopeful, loser to winner, and then back again; linear, normative progress is now entirely absent, as he both shapes and adapts to fast-changing states of consciousness. Alone in his room, having just learnt that Adrienne hates Terence, Mathias is framed in medium close-up. His bodily stillness is broken only by a slight nervous twitching in his jaw; frowning, with eyebrows raised and narrowed eyes, he is clearly processing the unexpected news. Almost imperceptibly, he nods. He then crosses his arms on his chest and raises his head high, looking increasingly defiant, recalling the moment in the post office when he had glimpsed his freedom; he appears set for a major re-tune, this time unusually triggered by a positive event. Walking to the balcony, he closes shutters and windows, and here his mode of behaviour changes: with extreme slowness he leans against the wall, looking curiously trance-like in body and expression. His fazed presence visually anticipates the next gap in reality, as Adrienne is suddenly, inexplicably conjured up from nowhere. After the briefest show of surprise, Mathias rushes to greet her, taking her hands in his and rapturously kissing them, then laying his face on them as if to get her caress; looking up again, he now slowly touches and kisses her fingers, seemingly unable to let go of her. His gaze is passionate. It is an unprecedented show of desire in Mozzhukhin’s performance and destined to remain a fleeting one, making its interruption all the more poignant. Facing him across the room, the late Mathias is sitting in an armchair, observing his every move; just as

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the hand-kissing resumes, his ‘dead’ self interrupts him, slamming his hands on the armrests, forbidding the kisses, mocking him. Mozzhukhin exploits the film’s doubling of his character, by placing his two identities in active relation to each other and turning his split presence into a battle. While Adrienne runs away terrified, the protagonist, as Adrien, faces himself as Mathias: the two at first stand side by side. Mathias looks savagely gleeful. Adrien attacks him, but Mathias has now enormously grown in size, and laughs spitefully at the other’s futile blows. In the next surreal development, Adrien vainly runs after him with a gun in his hand, while a wedding carriage containing Terence and Adrienne passes by. Not one, but two giant Mathiases now flank Adrien, whose distressed face is superimposed by the malicious, distorted features of his redoubled late self. The ‘dead’ Mathias cannot be defeated, which means that the protagonist has defeated himself, in a stunt of colossal self-sabotage. Once again, the plot’s frenzied rhythm means that Mozzhukhin’s usual re-booting is delayed; when it does take place, it will be in a blurred dimension, between hallucination and solidity. This growing instability of experiential boundaries suits his cyclic presence in the film. Transitioning from incoherence to sober clarity, via a hybrid in-between space, Mozzhukhin convincingly links these phases and builds an overall unified subject, through the recurring un-doing and re-programming of Mathias’s cognitive status. The latest haunting visions disappear as quickly as they arrived, leaving the protagonist dejected after seeing Adrienne married to Terence. Quickly, however, he realises the two Mathiases have also gone, and he himself has returned to his initial lone position in the room. Blinking, frowning, then suddenly agitated, Mozzhukhin rushes to the closed blind of his balcony, peering behind it and clearly straining to hear. A cut to Terence shows him plotting with the other tenants and calling Adrienne to his own bedroom. When the girl reluctantly arrives, he starts to manhandle her. The noise of the ensuing commotion reaches Mathias, as does her desperate cry, which comes up on screen: ‘Monsieur Adrien!’. Now Mozzhukhin rushes to Terence’s room and opens its shutters, thus appearing in the exact centre of the door frame; he looks sternly in. Adrienne and Terence, with their backs to the camera, are standing still and apart at each side of the room, neatly bordering his entrance. This arrangement highlights the commanding effect of the protagonist, whose erect posture and piercing gaze suggest resolve, authority, and total self-possession.

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A series of shot-reverse-shots, all in close-up, now establish simultaneous plot developments: Mathias’s firm alliance with Adrienne, his open challenge to Terence, and his decisive re-tuning into a clearly driven identity. The man who had just experienced a treble split in his own self, now goes through the briefest yet unmistakeable re-start: looking at Adrienne, he tilts his head to one side and nods several times. His expression is reassuring yet firm. She returns his look with wide-eyed, grateful tenderness. Mozzhukhin then turns his face towards Terence, stiffening his jaw as if he was grinding his teeth in rage, while his eyes dart with contempt. His whole countenance has become a cold mask of hatred, and he remains motionless, with only a twitching in his left cheek signalling an imminent, calculated explosion. The film then shifts to slow motion, as Mozzhukhin leaps into the air and launches himself onto Terence, grabbing him at the throat and violently shaking him, dragging his body around. Adrienne laughs merrily at the spectacle. As Terence collapses, seemingly unconscious or even dead, two policemen materialise next to Mathias, asking for his identity papers, which he doesn’t have of course; he has just managed to turn the police away, when he suddenly starts blinking, looking around in disorientation. Terence is standing in front of him, completely unruffled, and extending his hand in greeting: the slow motion attack had clearly been a private vision. Mathias’s eyes stop roaming, becoming calm and steady, just as Adrienne’s father walks in to invite him to a séance organised by Terence. Looking attentively at each person in the room, the protagonist nods slowly, narrowing his gaze in renewed focus and self-assurance. Having moved smoothly through alternating realities, as one state of consciousness wiped out and replaced the previous one, the identity of the now re-assembled Mathias contains mutually exclusive realms, informing his frantic pace of re-adjustment. In terms of performance, Mozzhukhin has maintained strategic continuity of the patterns established at the film’s beginning, while adapting them to wildly different narrative contexts. Alongside his creation of an increasingly aberrant subject, his overarching system of wipe and restart has crafted a distinct site of agency, countering any ‘shattering’ brought by the plot. This unified subjectivity is evident in the next crucial scene, which sees Mathias ‘killing’ Adrien in a fake suicide. Another instance of ‘unmaking, undoing, unbecoming’, Mathias’s elaborate staging of his death by gunshot is all the more poignant in the light of the film’s mounting confusion. Intertitles explain the protagonist’s ‘suicide’ by his

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frustration with the lack of a legal identity, which he needs to marry Adrienne. Yet this motive looks tenuous when, after his drastic action, Mathias returns to Miragno to reclaim his former life, only to change his mind, pay homage to his own grave where ‘Mathias Pascal’ is buried, and head again to Rome. The plot’s escalating disregard for logic highlights Mathias’s single-mindedness, which is further strengthened by Mozzhukhin’s deliberately ritualised ‘murder’ of Adrien. Drawing on his performance in the post office scene, when he had carefully removed the initials MP from his hat, Mozzhukhin acts out a ‘looping’ to that pivotal moment: the failure of one identity in favour of a re-birth, visualised and symbolised through the role of his hat. Approaching the riverbank in Rome, the protagonist first stops and looks at the flowing water; taking up his point of view, the camera shows the deep, rapid-moving Tiber below. Mathias walks down to the shore and stands there, again staring at the water, then slowly looks away. Wide-eyed yet entirely controlled, he takes off his hat with his left hand, while simultaneously drawing a gun out of his right pocket: he looks solemnly into the barrel. He then moves the gun upwards, in the direction of his temple, as the hint of a smile appears on his face. Moving the gun away from himself, he also stretches out his other arm, bringing the hat directly next to the gun; turning his face the other way, his eyes tightly closed, he shoots the hat. Grinning with satisfaction, he then carefully enlarges the bullet hole and throws the hat into the river; after placing the gun on a nearby stone, he watches the hat float into the distance. Mozzhukhin now shows the triumphant expression he had in the post office. With an emphatic nod and a last look at Adrien’s hat, he grabs his briefcase and walks away. Failing, losing, looping, undoing, unbecoming: the film’s ending sees the protagonist go through all of these queer nonacts, culminating in an ambiguous finale which precludes normative closure. After Adrien’s ‘suicide’, Mathias travels to his hometown, Miragno, the location of his past hopes and sorrows. Entering his old house, he is immediately faced by his mother-in-law, quickly followed by Romilde and by his best friend, Mino: the two are now married to each other. Stunned and anxious, the couple explain that their wedding took place after Mathias’s ‘death’, and that they now have a baby. The infant is then brought in for Mathias to see, causing great emotion to the protagonist: painful memories of his daughter mix with sympathy for the new baby’s parents, despite having just asserted that he has first rights to Romilde and the house. In yet another massive failure, Mathias has not managed to recover a ‘usable

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past’, being instead out of synch with time that moves on without him. His acknowledgement of this new defeat takes the form of a literal loop. In a strikingly composed scene, Mathias stands between Mino, who still believes he is being thrown out, and Romilde holding the baby. Moving nearer to Mino, Mathias takes him by the arm, while using his free hand to bring his hat forwards, partly hiding his face with it; in almost balletic response, Mino executes the same move with his own hat. The two friends now mirror each other, as they whisper under cover of their hats, out of reach of Romilde’s hearing. This conspiratorial pose held by Mino and Mathias replicates exactly a much earlier scene, when the latter had agreed to the other’s request to ask for Romilde’s hand on his behalf. On that occasion, the two had been sitting at a table, yet in a virtually identical posture. In this later instance, Mathias is telling Mino he will leave him to Romilde and family happiness, while he himself will go back to Rome alone. Looping to a simulacrum of his former life, while his wife is again holding a baby in his house, Mathias thus enacts a physical loop to seal his acceptance of the status quo: the past he returned to is indeed ‘unusable’. Mathias’s final nonact of ‘wilful unbecoming’ is his decision to honour his own grave. Before boarding a train to Rome, he makes his way to Miragno’s cemetery, soon reaching a large tomb whose inscription reads: ‘Here lies Mathias Pascal, assistant librarian’. Standing in front of this selfdefying monument, he takes his hat off in a respectful gesture, casting his eyes downwards as in meditation. Nonetheless, his overall attitude is ironic, as he looks up again with a grin and shrugs his shoulders. He playfully makes a deep bow in the tomb’s direction and starts to leave; but he quickly turns back, looking for a flower to place on his grave. Having found one, he puts it in a convenient spot on the headstone, takes his hat off in a last salute, and rapidly moves away. The scene is defined by Mozzhukhin’s singular attitude, a gently mocking behaviour which plays with Mathias’s death yet formally validates it. On the same vein of ambiguity the film now ends, showing as its very last image a snapshot of the protagonist with Adrienne, both resplendent in wedding clothes: arm in arm, they face the camera as in a formal photo, and indeed, the word ‘Souvenir’ appears at the right bottom frame. The normative potential of this finale, however, is precluded by the previous scene, as the man shown marrying Adrienne has no clear identity and no clear living status. Thus, the film brings down the curtain on a protagonist who has died several times, failed constantly, and always re-booted himself across multiple realities and temporalities. Sustained by Ivan Mozzhukhin’s self-wiping,

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self-restarting performance, The Late Mathias Pascal leaves speculations open for his ‘unpredictable’ and ‘un-orderly’ character, in the so-called future that awaits him.

References Abel, Richard. 1991. The Magnetic Eyes of Ivan Mozzhukhin. Cinefocus 2 (1): 27–34. Albera, François. 1995. Albatros: des Russes à Paris 1919–1929. Milano: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque Française. Bulgakowa, Oksana. 2005. The “Russian Vogue” in Europe and Hollywood: The Transformation of Russian Stereotypes Through the 1920s. The Russian Review 64 (2): 211–235. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Kercheval, Jesse Lee. 2009. Cinema Muto, 33–45. Carbondale: South Illinois University Press. Klevan, Andrew. 2005. Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. London: Wallflower Press. Robinson, David. 2003. Mozzhukhin: The Paths of Exile. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2003: Catalogo. Pordenone, 37–58.

‘Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier’: Pola Negri, Wartime, and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial (1927, USA)

Pola Negri is one of the most iconic stars of the silent era, with a remarkable body of work produced in her native Poland, Germany, and Hollywood. A woman of great beauty and sensational glamour, she was also a very fine actress, whose performative skills could alone carry a whole film. This chapter focuses on Negri’s performance in Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927), a Hollywood production and star vehicle for Negri, whose undisputed screen dominance allows her acting to vastly shape the narrative. Negri’s star presence here is strongly defined by her physical crafting of a specific mental state: productive anxiety. As the only female character in an all-male wartime setting, and the only performer of this particular shade of feeling, she presents a gender-specific brand of anxiety; her privileged star status, not shared by any other actor in the film, makes her female anxious agency the main drive behind the plot. Through her strong performance in Hotel Imperial, Pola Negri gives form to a unique female subjectivity, imbuing her star image with new meaningful layers. An important sequence of Hotel Imperial sees the protagonist Anna Sedlak (Pola Negri) in a highly dangerous situation. In the middle of World War I, employed as a hotel maid in an Austro-Hungarian border

An early version of this chapter was published in Film-Philosophy 23 (2). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Girelli, Silent Film Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6_5

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town, she is trapped in the bedroom of a man who plans to rape her. This is an officer of the invading Russian army, General Juschkiewitsch (George Siegmann), who has established his headquarters and soldiers at the hotel, and is currently drinking in the adjoining living room. As Anna looks out from the bedroom, she sees him asleep in a drunken stupor. She advances towards him, visibly holding her breath and wringing her hands in agitation. Scared yet rapid and skilful, she finds the door key in his pocket and takes it, then turns towards the exit: her back and neck are hunched in tension. As she steps outside she is faced by a Russian sentinel; she slips the key inside her dress, straightening herself up with confidence, and tells the Russian that the General must not be disturbed. She now runs towards a flight of stairs, but she is stopped by the old receptionist Elias (Max Davidson): he gives her alarming news of her lover, Lieutenant Paul Almasy (James Hall), whom Anna has been hiding in the hotel in the guise of waiter, after he got separated from his army unit. Elias says that Almasy has gone to the room of the Russian spy Petroff and has not returned. Anna springs up the stairs. The film cuts to Petroff, who is preparing to take a bath, after carefully laying nearby the strategic Austrian maps he has stolen. In the corridor outside, Anna meets Almasy, on his way to shoot Petroff. Fearing for Almasy’s life, Anna tries in vain to disarm him, and runs after him. Almasy goes into Petroff’s bathroom and shoots him dead, while Anna listens from outside; she then opens one of the many doors lining the corridor and enters a room adjoining the bathroom, meeting again Almasy who has also repaired there. Anna gets out a key and locks their door, while her lover explains he had to prevent the maps from getting into Russians hands; he adds that he is now ready to die. While he remains still, with the maps in one hand and looking utterly bewildered, Anna shows her furious thinking through her restless movements and shifting gaze. She then takes maps and gun from Almasy, and opens the door into Petroff’s bathroom. Careful and quick, she stages a suicide by leaving the gun near the spy’s hand, while simultaneously throwing the maps in the fire. Going back to Almasy, who is still frozen and rooted to the spot, she gently moves him towards another room; once they are inside, she pushes a bed against the door, hides it with a curtain, and locks it all behind them. Meanwhile, in the corridor, a Russian soldier knocks repeatedly at their door. When he finally leaves, Anna checks there’s no-one else outside, instructs Almasy on how to reach his own room, leads him out, and locks this last door too.

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This tense sequence foregrounds Anna as a pivotal agent in the film’s plot, while pointing to crucial aspects of her role and narrative context. The only woman in a crowd of men (Almasy, Juschkiewitsch, endless soldiers, and the hotel’s other staff), Anna also stands out through her behaviour: protective and proactive, she navigates with assurance the spatial complexities of the hotel, and this topographical mastery aids her rescuing of both herself and Almasy. By contrast, male conduct is erratic and awkward: the Russians are ineffectively aggressive, drunk, or unaware, while Almasy’s daring feat remains a lone moment of military prowess. As soon as he has killed the spy, Almasy is back to his state of non-fighting, camouflaged soldier in a hotel, miles away from the front or even from his own army: the result is bewilderment, together with emotional and spatial disorientation. Anna shows a far superior capacity to think rationally and act tempestively; yet these accomplishments are not matched by calm and sang froid. On the contrary, through Negri’s performance, Anna displays a high nervous charge, a constant anticipation of possible dangers, and an extreme level of alertness. In other words, Anna exhibits a great deal of anxiety, a very different emotion from the static worry, freezing uncertainty, and muddled urge to act which define Almasy in these scenes. This chapter will argue that Anna’s successful actions, ultimately leading to saved lives and the retreat of the Russian enemy, are achieved not despite her anxiety, but because of it; furthermore, this anxiety can be framed and understood as ‘female’, and carries an empowering function for the heroine. With its World War I setting, enemy-invaded location, and a plot hinging on the ever-present threats of sexual assault and death, Hotel Imperial is obviously drenched in anxiety; doubling as the film’s title, the hotel’s name connotes a chronotope where various apprehensions are knotted together. Arne Lunde (2010) sees Hotel Imperial as a typical work of director Mauritz Stiller, whose authorial stamp finds expression in ‘highly destabilized, claustrophobic, and anxiety-ridden border spaces’ (p. 66). Claustrophobia indeed mixes with disorientation in the film, as while focusing on dramatic events happening in the heavily-guarded Hotel Imperial, this tightly-structured plot is set amid the general, fearful uncertainty defining home fronts in wartime. However, if anxiety pervades the film at its narrative, affective, and atmospheric levels, it is not part of the whole cast’s performative style: the only markedly, incessantly anxious character is Anna. This article will refer to critical works on emotions at times of war, and on anxiety in particular; specifically, by

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engaging with selected texts by Sigmund Freud, and with Lindsey Stonebridge’s research on the writing of wartime anxiety, it will argue that Pola Negri, as Anna, productively unblocks and mobilises the inherent anxiety of the film’s time and place. Positioned in traditionally female locations, the home front and the domestic space, Anna acts upon the former by controlling the latter, enabling not only her own rescue, but also that of her menfolk: her lover Paul Almasy and, indirectly, the whole Austro-Hungarian army. In 1915, writing from war-torn Vienna, Sigmund Freud described the psychic effects of wartime as experienced on the home front: ‘The individual who is not himself (sic) a combatant – and so a cog in the gigantic machine of war – feels bewildered in his orientation, and inhibited in his powers and activities […] stands helpless in a world that has grown strange’ (2001). Like so much of Freud’s writing, these words suggest a self-referential component. Freud was almost fifty-nine at the time: unable to fulfil orthodox expectations of manhood, he was not a soldier but a ‘non-combatant’, and as such he felt powerless. The inability to function as a ‘cog’ in the structure of fighting produced great disorientation, even a suspension of his ‘powers’; so severe were these symptoms that Freud specified again his concern with ‘the mental distress felt by non-combatants’. It is notable that while using strong terms such as ‘bewildered’, ‘helpless’, and ‘inhibited’, Freud does not refer to anxiety. It was not for lack of interest: his research on anxiety bears significantly on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published five years later, and will be further expanded in 1926 in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. If anxiety is missing from Freud’s World War I account of ‘the distress of noncombatants’ it is because this distress was not, in his view, anxious: it was instead catastrophically self-limiting, it was paralysing. These nefarious attributes are not those he will later associate with anxiety; indeed, they are rather the opposite. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1991) claims that anxiety works as a protective shield against fright and traumatic neurosis. In 1926, however, he writes that while he had previously believed that anxiety arose from repressed instinctual impulses, he now believes that anxiety arises mostly from situations of danger (1936). Anxiety has, according to Freud, ‘an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word ‘fear’ [Furcht ] rather than ‘anxiety’ [Angst ]’. Freud proceeds to state that not all reactions of anxiety to traumatic situations are neurotic: indeed, some can be quite

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‘normal’. He terms the first reaction ‘neurotic anxiety’ and the second ‘realistic anxiety’ and he proceeds by saying that: ‘Real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger’ (1936). Individual reactions to situation of real danger can vary between ‘affective reactions’, such as an outbreak of anxiety, and ‘protective actions’; the latter response forms a mechanism allowing the individual to stay in control. Such as protective shield is nothing less than the ego ‘hoping to have the direction of [trauma] in its own hands’ (1991). To steer the direction of trauma is clearly at odds with ‘bewilderment and disorientation’, and it hinges on the power of anxiety to ‘foresee and expect a traumatic situation of this kind entailing helplessness instead of simply waiting for it to happen’ (1991). Yet in 1915, caught in a global conflict at home in Vienna, Freud could not summon this productive, protective anxiety: he could only ‘stand helpless’, a male surplus to war requirements, out of place in a world he did not recognise. Was this, would this necessarily be the emotional reaction of ‘non-combatants’ during a war? According to Lindsey Stonebridge (2007), who has researched British accounts of the home front experience in World War II, it would not. Although examining a different national and temporal context, Stonebridge identifies anxiety as a prime civilian response to wartime, and as a constructive and self-protective emotion. In the face of horrific, incomprehensible news from abroad, and of domestic bombing and fear, anxiety allowed the subject to fill the gap ‘between reason and imagination’. A major coping strategy, anxiety thus kept the individual safe, rather than helplessly stuck between the unreasonable and the unimaginable. If the war produced stunned disorientation, anxiety offered a counter feeling, a mode of participation which simultaneously preserved distance: it was ‘a way of staying in relation to history without being consumed by it’. In other words, and in explicit agreement with Freud’s view of anxiety as protection against trauma, Stonebridge conceptualises the anxious subject as someone able to connect to external upheavals (thus replacing disorientation with relation) while achieving a degree of selfpreserving detachment. This precarious, yet enabling psychic combination would allow the subject to function from a position of proactive anticipation. Stonebridge does not consider gender as a differentiating factor, and it is obviously impossible to claim that anxiety would be rigidly separated along gender lines. However, for the sake of locating the primary

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emotions linked to wartime triggers, it seems feasible to see the ‘inhibition of powers’ discussed by Freud, emphatically ascribed by him to the ‘non-combatants’, as a default male position on the home front. Women, despite the new tasks brought to them by the war, remained firmly entrenched in their traditional, socially sanctioned place: the domestic sphere, far away from the front where male soldiers were fighting. Yet in a context of civilian warfare or bombing, not to mention potential or factual enemy invasion, women were de facto combatants, and highly skilled at that, on their own turf: the home, now transformed into the home ‘front’. If the war news were stupefying and hard to make sense of, as Stonebridge reminds us again and again, their effect was partly offset by home front anxiety, an emotional anchoring to time and place, to familiar topographies and everyday activities. As declared by one of the first intertitles in Hotel Imperial : ‘Thrones and empires may be tottering – but there were still floors to be swept in the Hotel Imperial’; the film then cuts to Anna, shown energetically sweeping a staircase. As Anna lives in the hotel, which is threatened by a foreign invader, this is a poignant representation of a woman dealing with her allotted tasks in her endangered home. Gaston Bachelard (1994) claims ‘…all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’; it is worth reflecting on the stress on ‘inhabited’ and ‘essence’ here. The act or condition of inhabiting a certain space is clearly not the same as simply occupying it: indeed, the etymology of ‘habité’ or ‘habiter’ in French, the language of Bachelard’s text, has its roots, via Old French, in the Latin ‘inhabitare’, itself derived from ‘habere’ which means ‘to have’. A space, then, becomes a home when human beings are not merely inside it, but they ‘have’ it: the place-as-home is a core property of their being, as indeed ‘having’ a certain place bestows what Bachelard calls the ‘essence’ of home on it. In Hotel Imperial , the invading Russians are defilers of this precious essence, which is itself a core part of Anna, the hotel’s rightful inhabitant. It is therefore hardly surprising that anxiety should drive her so powerfully, as the home being violated is her core possession, while the terrifying possibility of sexual assault is an extension of this first violation. Anna is thus literally and symbolically a home guard, in relation to her own self, her living quarters, and the nation which contains them. Paul Almasy, Anna’s co-protagonist, is also her narrative foil: practically and metaphorically displaced, a soldier forced to act as a waiter, in a domestic space he does not know, he is the film’s prime example of a bewildered ‘non-combatant’. If Almasy felt any anxiety (and nothing in Hall’s performance points to it), it would be secondary to the

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sense of redundancy, frustration, self-doubt, even identity crisis experienced by a non-soldiering soldier. After killing the Russian spy, Almasy is effectively paralysed by his own action, and literally unable to find a direction: just like Freud in 1915, he is ‘inhibited in his powers’. Gender, therefore, and gender-marked anxiety, is key to appreciate the film’s structure of feeling; it is equally crucial to the understanding of Pola Negri’s narrative and performative function, and thus of the meanings accrued by her star presence. The different relation of men and women to the home front is set up at the film’s beginning, beautifully depicted in the sequence showing the unlikely convergence of Anna and Almasy in the hotel. After being thrown off his horse, during a night-time charge by the Russian cavalry, Almasy seeks shelter in the unknown, deserted town he finds himself in; he breaks into the first available building, which is the Hotel Imperial. Once inside he finds a bed and, giving way to exhaustion, immediately falls asleep on it. Almasy’s sleep is populated by vivid dreams: dreams of war. The power and lure of the front are so strong, that its images keep Almasy from being woken, even when forcefully shaken by the hotel staff grouped around him. Across Almasy’s sleeping face, the film stages a haunting montage of cavalry, fires, marching soldiers, drums, and flags, as the dreamer’s visions take over the screen. This oneiric spectacle is intercut with shots of Almasy laying on the bed, restlessly stirring, his facial expressions a mixture of ecstasy and torment: it could almost be an erotic experience. He is clearly both comforted and troubled by his war dreams, reliving and craving his defining identity: what Freud calls ‘a cog in the gigantic machine of war’. But he finally wakes up: the noise of the Russian army outside has penetrated his sleep. Brought back to consciousness in an unfamiliar room, in an anomalous position in regard to the enemy, Almasy now appears stunned and frightened. From the window, he watches the invading Russians with dismay. The very same spectacle is being observed by Anna in another room, and though she nervously fidgets with her apron strings, she also takes charge of the situation, just as the Russians enter the hotel and declare it their headquarters. The two male staff are scared for their lives, while Almasy, trapped in the bedroom upstairs, can only grab his now useless gun: he has no way out. Rapid and nervous, Anna tells him that she will disguise him as their waiter, who fled in fear of the Russians. With this proposal, the only possible solution to keep Almasy free and alive, Anna brings him into her own field of action,

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the domestic sphere; at the same time, she enters the fight with the (male) enemy on her own (female) terms. This sequence highlights two key aspects of Anna’s role: the ability to think productively on her feet, and the capacity to take command of a difficult situation. At the same time, these scenes introduce another, crucial attribute of her character: a remarkable and constant anxiety. Pola Negri’s performance builds an anxious thread through her every action and reaction, in stark contrast to the film’s other actors. As Anna’s male co-protagonist and love interest, James Hall provides the most poignant comparison, opposing Negri’s proactive anxiety with a mixture of stunned fear, ashamed dejection, and compulsive action. Since he wakes up in the Hotel Imperial, till the moment he is told to dress up as a waiter, Hall presents his trademark performative pattern in the film, which can be fruitfully analysed against Negri’s radically different, and more wide-ranging style. Roused from his dreams by the clamour of the invading Russians, Almasy is first seen completely immobile, head still on the pillow: his eyes appear dilated in terror. Without changing expression, he lifts himself up, unblinking, head slowly turning towards the window; he then gets up to look out, his face now expressing both sorrow and bewilderment. He has thus established a stunned and helpless consciousness of danger. The film cuts to Anna, who is also watching the invaders: rather than frightened, she initially seems attentive and vigilant, absorbed by what she sees. She then turns away from the window, her gaze rapidly shifting upwards as to follow a train of thought, then returning to the Russians outside. These rapid eye movements are accompanied by her arms and hands, the left one raised to almost form a fist and the right one gesticulating towards her inept male colleagues, Elias and Anton (Otto Fries). Indeed, Anna’s whole person is agitated and in motion. Quickly she leaves the room, making her way to the trapped Almasy. Although quite brief, the meeting between the two is layered with meaning, because of the actors’ vivid performances. Seeing the door handle being turned, Almasy automatically reaches for his gun, standing up against the wall in a curiously hunched, virtually frozen posture: it is a terrified, yet almost robotic appearance, the look of a man scared out of his wits but still compulsively performing a learnt military gesture— not unlike his shooting of the spy Petroff later on. When he sees Anna entering the room, he does not alter his expression, his wide-open eyes now fixed on her; while relaxing slightly one shoulder, he remains with his back against the wall, moving stiffly and as little as possible. Anna,

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after a first exchange of looks, advances towards him and pulls down the blind on the window. She is an endless source of motility: fidgeting with her clothes, pinching her arms, restlessly moving her hands over her fingers, while her eyes are constantly darting away from Almasy, to then focus again on his face. A cut shows the invading Russians being obsequiously greeted by Elias, while Anton runs to hide. The film returns to Anna and Almasy in conversation, although it is mostly Anna who speaks: while Almasy wipes his brow, she nervously plays with her apron strings, becoming increasingly animated, her body almost swaying as she bends at the waist, nervously gesticulating as she explains the situation. Intercut by shots of the Russians, the scene between Anna and Almasy grows in intensity, although the quality of their intensity could not be more different: Almasy has shifted from stunned apprehension to ashamed dejection, lamenting that he was left to sleep while he should have rejoined his army. He appears drained and upset. Anna, with her whole body tensed towards him, her arms and hands moving restlessly, shakes her fists, her eyes now glued to his in a concerted effort to gain his cooperation. But the lieutenant seems crashed by the events, and only reacts when he hears Elias and Anton coming in: he then again reaches for his gun, uselessly waving it in the air. As the hotel’s male staff, looking almost hysterical, communicate the news that the hotel is now the Russians’ headquarters, Almasy’s desperate position is clear to all. In a posture which he repeats throughout the film, Almasy keeps his body rigid almost like a puppet’s, while turning a lost, expectant gaze on Anna, mutely asking her what to do. Immediately explaining her plan, and with the help of Elias, Anna starts to turn Almasy into a waiter lookalike. Her movements are very rapid, almost convulsed, as she clasps her hands together in nervous wringing; but this bodily frenzy contrasts with her face, where a triumphant smile is only slightly clouded by her edgy physical energy. Anxious to the core, yet supremely capable, Anna has rescued Almasy for the time being. As previously mentioned, Lindsey Stonebridge sees home front anxiety as ‘filling a gap between reason and imagination’. This definition, used by Stonebridge to elucidate on anxiety as a coping strategy, can be usefully expanded upon by envisaging this strategy as the filling or bridging of a gap—that is, of a blank, unproductive place in the psyche—and making it not only safe, but open to a range of possibilities. The mental vacuum caused by the war is replenished by potential actions and solutions, and the anxious subject is enabled to behave productively. Unlike the nonfighting men in Hotel Imperial , the anxious Anna retains a significant

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Fig. 1 Negri’s body is tensed in anxious anticipation, and her eyes are hyperalert

degree of control over space, her own actions, and those of others: the exercise of this control is performed by Negri in conjunction with another performance, the performance of anxiety. It is remarkable that hardly anything has been written on the acting out of anxious feelings on screen. An analysis of Negri’s presence in this film, therefore, may be seen as a step towards a mapping of the expression of feelings for the camera, all the more salient in this case because devoid of the aid of speech. As well as the gestures and facial expressions already observed in Negri’s acting, it is striking that her commonest posture in the film is a slight stoop forwards, a tensing of the body in anticipation, a prelude to springing into action: this is accompanied by a searching, hyper-alert gaze (Fig. 1). In this habitual pose, Negri literally embodies Freud’s description of productive anxiety: ‘to foresee and expect a traumatic situation […] instead of simply waiting for it to happen’. It is notable that, once her action is undertaken to prevent or cope with the traumatic situation

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Fig. 2 Almasy looks concerned but never anxious

arisen, Negri straightens herself up like a dart, suggesting decision and strength. As an essential checklist for performative signs of anxiety, I would suggest primarily ‘muscular tension’ and ‘gaze pattern’; specifically, the tensing of back and neck, eyes held on something too long or too briefly, and the hands’ incapacity to manage stasis.1 It is evident that Negri’s performance, in Hotel Imperial , is consistently defined by these features; while their absence in the acting of her co-actors, and especially of James Hall, is equally obvious. As Paul Almasy, Hall shifts from dejection to frustration to stunned, frozen awareness, but never to anxiety (Fig. 2). Because of the specificities of the film’s narrative context, Anna’s anxiety is a direct response to historical developments, contemporary to the film’s temporality: these developments are the very foundations of 1 Many grateful thanks to Professor Sue Harper for her crucial help and suggestions with these specific points.

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the plot. If, as Stonebridge claims, anxiety on the home front is ‘a way of staying in relation to history without being consumed by it’, I would argue that, in Hotel Imperial , anxiety is Anna’s way to stay in relation to the plot without being consumed by it. This conceptualisation of Anna’s role in the film brings us again to gender issues, as a central aspect of the plot is the male sexual threat hanging over the heroine. Anna’s managing of men’s sexual voracity, and of her own sex-appeal, is in line with her anxiety-powered functioning: she is anxious about the sexual dynamics of her situation, and anxiety gets her through them. We have seen how Anna’s initial escape from General Juschkiewitsch was accomplished in the grip of high anxiety; in that occasion, and for the rest of the film, she avoids to be literally ‘consumed’ by the Russian enemy. Her anxious performance, present almost at all times, is markedly evident whenever sexual menace follows her; what is also remarkable is that this anxious handling of sex-related issues is a radical departure from Negri’s previous, established star image, which may be summed up by the term ‘vamp’. Pola Negri’s arrival in Hollywood in 1922 was preceded by her reputation as a femme fatale, men-eater, and intense performer. This image rested on her striking work in films such as Carmen (Ernst Lubistch, 1918), Madame DuBarry (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919), and Sappho (Dimitri Buchovetzki, 1921). American publicity for Madame DuBarry (renamed Passion) mentioned Negri’s ‘…strange personal magnetism, which […] makes all men vie for her smile’ (quoted in Delgado 2016, p. 31), while Photoplay described her as ‘A tiger woman with a strange slow smile’ (quoted in Frymus 2017, pp. 294–311). The vamp image was to remain closely associated with Negri throughout her Hollywood career, despite the relative range and unevenness of her Paramount films; it was also corroborated by the ample press coverage of her alleged diva tantrums, and of her much-debated love affairs with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, among others. Negri’s early Hollywood roles, and her own performance in them, tended to uphold the vamp identification: even in a sophisticated comedy such as A Woman of the World (Malcolm St. Clair, 1925), Negri exudes dangerous and knowing seductiveness, wrecking sexual havoc on the inhabitants of a conservative, respectable mid-west town she happens to visit. A lot is made of the fact that, in her role as a glamorous European countess, she not only smokes but has tattoos on her body.

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Hotel Imperial marks an abrupt shift in her image, as the archetype of the vamp—manipulative and threatening towards the opposite sex, and lethally self-assured—could not be more distant from Anna. No true vamp was ever anxious, of course, least of all in regard to lecherous men. Incidentally, in her next film, Barbed Wire (Mauritz Stiller and Rowland V. Lee, 1927) Pola Negri is also cast in a World War I background, as a French girl who falls in love with a German POW: while brave and defiant, she is again utterly removed from her previous vamp persona. Hotel Imperial first crystallised this shedding of vampishness which, coupled with the film’s happy ending as the lovers are reunited, has been severely judged by today’s film scholars, who have equated Negri’s changed image with a sell-out and with a weakened female identity. Diane Negra (2001) criticises Hotel Imperial as the film that ‘tamed’ Pola Negri, a deliberate move, she argues, to make Negri ‘meaningful in an American context’, stating that by the film’s end Anna has ‘accepted a more subdued and passive role in a coupling relationship’ (pp. 158–195). Arne Lunde (2010) sees the plot of Hotel Imperial as a ‘Cinderella-like’ story (p. 74), with Negri clearly playing Cinderella herself. I would argue that these critiques are missing a crucial point: far from being ‘tamed’ and ‘passive’, or a man-dependent domestic goddess, Pola Negri’s Anna is the main agency in Hotel Imperial , propelling the narrative forwards, unblocking the latent energy of time and place, and rescuing highly-skilled army men. All this is accomplished through productive anxiety. Being a vamp is not something Anna has need or interest for, and her defiant clinging to a non-vampish identity (a hotel maid sweeping stairs, a working-class woman with unglamorous clothes) is clearly spelt out in the film; most significantly, it is stressed in two key scenes which see Anna countering the sexual threat embodied by General Juschkiewitsch. A centrepiece of Hotel Imperial , the sequence in which Anna rescues Almasy for the last time, effectively freeing him from his entrapment and allowing to re-join the war, also marks the end of Anna’s sexual endangerment. Crucially, Anna’s own liberation is articulated through her rejection of fetishised female glamour, which she exposes as a creation of Juschkiewitsch, the film’s patriarchal and rapist figure. The scene shows Almasy surrounded by the whole Russian unit on the hotel’s ground floor, being accused of having killed the spy Petroff. Anna, beautifully clothed and bejewelled with Juschkiewitsch’s expensive gifts,

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runs anxiously down the stairs, looking at her lover: he returns a desperate gaze on her. The impromptu Russian military court asks Almasy for his alibi at the time of Petroff’s death: but the Lieutenant does not have one. The film cuts from Almasy’s terrified face to Anna’s hyperventilating countenance, to the Russian officer threatening to hang Almasy; at last Anna stands up, looking exceedingly nervous, and says that Almasy was with her in her room at the time Petroff was shot. While this declaration saves her lover’s life, it also provokes Juschkiewitsch’s jealous rage: turning his attention to Anna, he shouts that she has tricked him, and that if she belongs to a waiter she will not keep her expensive clothes and jewels. After some moments of simmering anger, Anna erupts in a magnificent display of liberating fury: she frantically tears apart her clothes and pearls, literally breaking them to pieces, and stands ragged and defiant in front of the Russian. In a sense, all the sexual anxiety felt by Anna throughout the film has prepared her for this dramatic catharsis: a fearless action which destroys irrevocably her chains of sexual servitude. Far from using her glamorous attire and sex-appeal to manipulate and control her sexual nemesis, she rejects the symbols of female seductiveness and throws them back at the enemy. The scene, however, does not end on this triumphant note, as the spiteful Juschkiewitsch seeks to humiliate Anna for what she has done. Throwing an ashtray on the floor, he orders her to clean up the mess of broken crockery and ash, while his words appear on screen: ‘You want to be a servant – then down on your knees where I found you!’. Still standing in front of him, Anna breathes heavily, her hands clenching and unclenching, her gaze increasingly downcast; at last, she bends down towards the floor. The film’s rapid editing cuts to the gleeful General, then to Anna’s hands collecting the dirt, and lastly to the outraged Almasy, who is being physically restrained from rushing to her defence. Finally, Juschkiewitsch tells his men to kick out the Lieutenant, who thus finds himself outside the Hotel Imperial, alive and able to flee: the goal Anna has worked towards for most of the narrative. Her humiliation at the hands of the General is a painful yet temporary defeat, and arguably not a defeat at all, as once it is over Anna has achieved a double victory: she has freed herself of Juschkiewitsch’s threat and has once again saved her lover. This complex sequence, in which Anna’s apparent servility brings independence from male oppression, recalls a brief scene at the beginning of

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the film, after Anna’s first meeting with the General. With her hair partly covered by a headscarf, and wearing the apron and peasant clothes befitting her servant status, the beautiful yet deceptively humble-looking Anna immediately catches Juschkiewitsch’s eye; she is therefore dispatched to light a fire in his bedroom, where he quickly joins her, with lecherous intent. As Anna is busy kneeling by the fireplace, the Russian gets very close to her and starts touching her hair. To Anna’s protests, his response appears on a title: ‘Wouldn’t you prefer a general in your hands – instead of a broom?’. Looking up with a fearless, ironic expression, she tells him ‘Thanks, your Excellency – I prefer the broom!’, and she leaves. Through this exchange, a traditional symbol of downtrodden womanhood has acquired a rebellious, liberating meaning. Similarly, in the face of the humiliation inflicted on her through the ashtray scene, Anna seemingly plays a game of submission, but is in fact free to move away from it, in unthreatened possession of her own person. She is now also able to help Almasy escape and rejoin his army. Repeatedly saved by Anna, who also burnt the stolen Austrian maps, the Lieutenant will be now instrumental in a surprise attack against the enemy, who will be forced to retreat. The film shows this key military event, before cutting to the AustroHungarian troops entering previously occupied areas, to the ecstasy of the local population. This momentous section of Hotel Imperial , from Anna tearing up her glamorous clothes to the town’s liberation, does not break the link between plot and anxious protagonist. On the contrary, a striking aspect of these developments is their intervention on Anna’s anxiety, which they effectively terminate. It is notable that Negri’s performance, consistently anxious for most of the film, changes dramatically in this last part. First in her defiance of Juschkiewitsch, then in her apparent humiliation at his hands, and finally in her last assistance to Almasy, whom she guides to safety and watches climbing a wall and disappear, Negri relinquishes any sign of anxiety: her character has no need of it anymore. Anna’s aims are achieved, or about to be achieved. Hotel Imperial now switches from claustrophobia to freedom, showing for the first time Anna outside the hotel, in the streets, greeting her victorious army; at the same time, the film explicitly validates the protagonist as a fighter, and as a pivotal agent in the favourable turn of the war. As Austro-Hungarian soldiers march through the town and the jubilant crowd, Anna is shown standing next to Elias, hoping to spot Almasy of whom she has had no news. Suddenly, he appears riding with the cavalry,

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smiling broadly at the people’s greetings. Anna, ecstatic with happiness, is seen in turn by Almasy, and the lovers exchange tender glances; their reunion is delayed, however, as a solemn decorating ceremony is about to take place. In a large square, at the presence of military officers and Church dignitaries, the army Commander announces: ‘And now – I must thank the men whose bravery and devotion are their lasting glory’. The very first man called to receive a medal is Almasy, who stands to attention while the Commander thanks him for ‘the great service rendered to his country’. At this point the Lieutenant looks in Anna’s direction, and the titles report his words: ‘If you please, your Excellency – I ask leave to present the one who made that service possible’. Beaming with joyful pride, in stark contrast to his performance in the entire film, Almasy rushes to Anna, who appears overwhelmed; he takes her hand and brings her in front of the Commander. There Anna stands, just as her lover had before, to receive the thanks of the army. The Commander begins: ‘My dear young lady, I am honored to thank you in the name of our country’, and at this point Anna automatically motions to kiss his hand, but the man stops her by saying ‘It is my privilege to salute our bravest and most beautiful soldier!’. He then shakes and kisses her hand. The film cuts to Almasy, who is observing the scene and bursting with satisfaction; his countenance attracts the attention of the Commander, who promptly grants him some time off duty, to marry his brave girlfriend. The two lovers kiss, yet this happy ending is not the film’s last image: as if to leave no doubt that this is a war narrative, and that war has been the defining context for the characters’ actions, the very last shot is of endless marching troops. This final military framing underlies Anna’s role as a warrior, fighting her own war against the Russian enemy. In contrast to the film’s men and especially to Almasy, inhibited most of the time by his position as a ‘non-combatant’, Anna has staged a home front, anxiety-driven defence/offence, bringing about a triumphant conclusion. Far from being a Cinderella figure, Anna is a soldier among equals, indeed she is even superior to the others: not just for being more beautiful, but for being braver, the ‘bravest’ of all.

References Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Delgado, Sergio. 2016. Pola Negri: Temptress of Silent Hollywood. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.

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Freud, Sigmund. 1936. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. London: The Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1991. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, 275–338. London: Penguin Books. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV 1914–1916, 275–300. London: Vintage. Frymus, Agata. 2017. “Ah, Love! It’s Not for Me!”. Off-Screen Romance and Pola Negri’s Star Persona. Celebrity Studies 8 (2): 294–311. Lunde, Arne. 2010. Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Negra, Diane. 2001. Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology. Camera Obscura 16 (3): 158–195. Stonebridge, Lindsey. 2007. The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in MidCentury British Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Silent Performance Beyond Silent Film: Harald Kreutzberg in Paracelsus (1943, Germany)

The scene is a crowded tavern in sixteen-century Germany. Closely seated together, without uttering a single word, spell-bound punters watch a man dancing to music. The performance is so entrancing, the dancer’s movements so powerful, as to give the impression that the potent musical rhythm takes its cue from the performer. Wearing a feathered cap and a cape over patched-up clothes, the man appears oblivious to his audience; as he moves forwards and backwards, and then spins on himself, his gaze remains lifted above the crowd (Fig. 1). Now he takes off his cape and throws it away with his right hand, which he immediately brings down on his left shoulder, behind his head: he spanks his shoulder repeatedly, while beating on his left thigh with his other hand. Without pausing, he then changes this self-striking action into an onwards shift. With his arms by his sides and bent forwards at the elbow, each hand’s fingers joined together as if clasping something, he pushes ahead with deliberate steps, his body slightly leaning backwards at the waist, his face eagerly pointing upwards. His next move is a retreat: without altering his forward-looking posture, he runs backwards, his eyes still looking up, as if he was pulled by invisible strings. A cut to the crowd shows them responding to the man’s movements: while remaining seated, their upper bodies go forwards and backwards in unison with the dancer. A stunned, almost frightened absorption grips the whole tavern, as everyone’s gaze is glued to the dance in troubled concentration. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Girelli, Silent Film Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6_6

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Fig. 1 The dancer appears wholly oblivious to the people around him

man repeats his advance/recoil motion, this time with his hands crossed together on his stomach; again he moves ahead while tilting back at the waist, staring in front of him. After he retreats once more, the crowd comes again into view: seemingly in a trance, and always in physical sync with the dancer, people start to leave their seats to join him on the floor. In a bewildering change of posture, the man now stands with his legs slightly apart, his arms stretched rigidly outwards above hunched shoulders, his head bowed and his gaze lowered. Recalling a crucifixion or someone in the stock, this disturbing pose does not preclude yet another move forwards: the dancer proceeds ahead through small, steady jumps, maintaining his bizarre position intact. His facial expression has been grave and anxious throughout. The scene just described is only a segment of a longer sequence, usually referred to as Totentanz (Dance of Death), which is an acknowledged centrepiece of Paracelsus (G. W. Pabst, 1943). The performer is

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the legendary Harald Kreutzberg, an Austrian-born dancer and choreographer who had first achieved fame as a key exponent of Weimar-era Ausdruckstanz (Expressive Dance), later pursuing a glittering international career. Cast in Paracelsus not as the protagonist but as a unique outsider, Kreutzberg shapes the film’s available meanings through his role and performance. Brief as the Totentanz fragment just depicted is (approximately sixty-five seconds), it highlights crucial aspects of his textual presence. Kreutzberg’s movements here are defined by ambiguity and disorder, in relation to space and to his own body; they are also staged as a profoundly affecting experience for a captive audience, from whom the performer, however, remains wholly detached. In this sample of Kreutzberg’s pièce de résistance in the film, three interweaving factors dominate. Firstly, a bodily display of confused distress; secondly, an energy alternating between lively and sickly; and lastly, the channelling of all these features into a prevalent advance/retreat pattern. Kreutzberg’s performance conveys an overarching suggestion: the notion that chaos is there, both inside the tavern and in the world the latter symbolically and literally represents. As will be discussed later, this revelation of chaos, and its doom-laden, hypnotic form, disturbs and complicates the film’s structure of meaning. For now, it is sufficient to note that a crucial piece of information, the presence of irrationality in the midst of order, is expressed without speech or its assumed presence in the diegesis. Kreutzberg’s non-verbal spectacle is self-reflexive, as the dancer utterly ignores the people around him; at the same time, his physical self-expression points to a fragmented subject, swinging between opposite directions and between vitality and self-castigation. According to the performance theorist Alexander Iliev, a bi-directional pattern is essential in creating individual meaning: ‘Every dramaturgical analysis begins with the question: ‘What does the character want?’ OK, he wants something and he struggles to achieve it. But how? In one way only – by attracting some objects and repelling others’ (2014). Pointing out that ‘Conscious nature, personified in the subject, has specific desires’, Iliev identifies the ‘push/pull’ pattern as the externalisation of these desires and as a key technique at the basis of pantomime. These ideas and definitions are most helpful to analyse Kreutzberg’s performance, where a push/pull motion is used to create a shattered character, whose ‘conscious nature’ appears split: he relates to the same spatial trajectory by both pushing and pulling, by attraction and repulsion. Unlike pantomime, however, this Totentanz does not offer outward expressiveness, being

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defined instead by deliberately unintelligible moves. The precise correspondence between movements and music does indeed suggest dance: yet orthodox dancing this is certainly not. The sequence affects the narrative through disruption, rather than interruption, by presenting new and unsettling information without any recourse to speech: and yet Paracelsus is not a silent feature. In fact, silent films do make frequent, at times constant use of implied or explicitly visualised spoken communication. Kreutzberg’s perfectly language-free, strongly intermedial presence blurs dance, pantomime, and acting; ultimately, it transcends them all. This chapter provides a close analysis of the film’s Totentanz, while arguing for a re-thinking of the notion of ‘silent performance’. Connections between film and other performative arts have often been drawn, especially in relation to early cinema. Unbound by the conventions of speech, silent film may appear ideally intermedial, easily overlapping with other non-verbal forms of expression. In the silent era itself, discussions of the new filmic medium frequently referred to a synthetical notion of physical spectacle, the basis of mime, pantomime, and dance. In an article called ‘The Magic of the Body: Observations on Acting in Film’ (1923), Friedrich Sieburg sees the body as consisting of ‘the face and the eyes, the limbs, and the form of the whole’. Pinning down screen acting to ‘the ability to make visible an invisible process by bodily means’, Sieburg concludes: ‘the new film performance functions through the material of the body’ (2016). Discussing the uniqueness of cinematic art in Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924, 2007), Béla Balázs also highlights the ‘visibility’ of film performance, differentiated through its relation with, rather than disconnection from, body-centric disciplines such as dance. Claiming the superiority of speech-free expression, which allows for a polyphony of tensions and thus conveys ‘the rhythm of our inner turbulence’, Balázs argues that a dancer’s gestures, unlike those of a speaker, ‘are the characteristic expression of a characteristic human being’. Although film actors do not dance, he claims, they are like dancers in being ‘not dependent on words’ and thus having ‘no part in the rational world of concepts’. In 1929, on the cusp of the advent of sound, Fritz Lang explicitly refers to mine with a short essay called ‘The Art of Mimic Expression in Film’. Contrasting cinema’s ‘eloquent silence’ to the theatre’s reliance on words, Lang praises silent performance for producing ‘all the more intense an effect the simpler and, as it were, the quieter it is’ (2016). If film was often conceptualised through an inclusive framework of non-verbal performance, the so-called ‘modern dance’ (prevalent

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in Germany and the USA since the late 1800s) would continue to be seen as an expansion of classic form, defying established categories. In a 1935 volume entitled Modern Dance and focused on key representative artists, a chapter devoted to Harald Kreutzberg describes dance as ‘expressive bodily movement’, stressing the importance of a ‘representational element’ in the dancer’s performance (Stewart 1935).1 Kreutzberg himself went even further in his professional self-assessment, opting for ‘storyteller and painter’ as descriptions of what he did on stage (Howe 1996). An interest in blurring the boundaries between discrete art forms is evident in all these statements. Much more recently, Tami Williams has discussed the link between early film and pantomime (2012). Focusing on cultural trends in 1910s Paris, most notably the ‘pure cinema’ of Germaine Dulac, Williams identifies a discourse which connected film to pantomime by emphasising performative stillness, and a restrained approach to acting. While this is an interesting connection, it pertains to a very specific time, place, and filmic style, and is therefore limited rather than embracive. Yet precisely because non-verbal expression resists containment to a single form, its broader implications deserve consideration. It is striking that mime and pantomime theorists are especially wide-ranging in discussing their arts, primarily conceived as meta-practices of staged human spectacle. R. G. Davis defines mime as ‘the motivating of external movement from an internal source’ (1962), while Thomas Leabhart insists that ‘mime is not some precious and separate discipline’ but rather ‘a multi-faceted form of expression […] of the creative actor who determines the synthesis of movement, text, music, lighting and décor’ (1989). The notion of synthesis is important for Iliev too, who brings it up specifically in relation to speech-free film: ‘If we take away speech, and add the focused brevity of expression in pantomime, we can create an extraordinary product […] guaranteed by the synthetic image built through the lightning-fast juxtaposition of sound and action’ (2014). While mime and pantomime are used mostly as interchangeable terms, Davis stresses that pantomime is closer to dance than mime is, as it implies muteness, movement to music, and deals with ‘nothing there’ rather than props. Consequently, Davis claims that Charlie Chaplin is a mime and Marcel Marceau a pantomimist, as the former uses 1 I am extremely grateful to Dennis Doros, who very kindly sent me a copy of this chapter.

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props by turning them ‘into symbols in a dramatic relationship’ (1962). This is a questionable distinction. It can surely be argued that pantomime and dance also produce symbolic meaning ‘in a dramatic relationship’: namely, in the dynamics between what Balázs calls ‘inner turbulence’ and its expression through movement. Returning to the Totentanz in Paracelsus , it seems obvious that its central performance, unlike that of the crowd, rests on the expression of an interior drama. This intimate narrative, however, hinges in part on the character’s relation to something external: the object of his push/pull motion. To this target outside himself, Kreutzberg adds his own body in an equally ambiguous relationship. As he proceeds through the sequence by ‘attracting and repelling’ the same ‘objects’ at the same time, he unveils the shattering presence of chaos. Paracelsus is loosely based on a historical figure, the eponymous SwissGerman scientist and healer, active throughout Europe in the early fifteen hundreds. The film is set during a plague epidemics, spreading towards the unnamed German town which Paracelsus (Werner Krauss) happens to visit. Welcomed by the common people as a medical genius, he is however met with hostility from local physicians and authorities, who see him as a threat, and who in their ignorance resent his instruction to isolate the town to keep the plague out, fearing it will only result in a loss of business. In this dialectal system, opposing Paracelsus’s quest for scientific truth to the authorities’ pursuit of wealth and power, with the plague as their common enemy, enters the itinerant jester Fliegenbein (Harald Kreutzberg). Casually referred to as a popular yet disruptive figure, as people ‘go crazy’ when he is around, Fliegenbein is present in several scenes; his pivotal moment, however, is the Totentanz. As the tavern’s customers hypnotically mimic his strange, cheerlessly wild performance, he unwittingly leads them into a growing delirium. At last, just as the whole crowd are manically shaking their heads, imitating Fliegenbein’s frenzied movements, Paracelsus’s sudden arrival puts an end to their antics. Order is immediately restored, but the stern influence of Paracelsus does not stop here. Interrogating Fliegenbein about his travels, he matches each town he visited with a plague outbreak; the jester is now visibly frightened, while Paracelsus proceeds to examine his fingers and finally declares him a plague carrier. Panic ensues among those present, and the horror-struck Fliegenbein likewise tries to flee, but loses consciousness and collapses instead. He is eventually cured of the plague by Paracelsus; the latter is however arrested by the authorities,

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yet manages to escape with the help of his supporters and of Fliegenbein himself. At the same time, a disturbing procession of self-flagellating people moves randomly through the town. The film ends with Paracelsus relocated in the countryside, tirelessly healing the sick; Fliegenbein, on the other hand, has vanished from the plot. The world of Paracelsus is held in balance by twin polarisations: Paracelsus the man of science versus the corrupt Establishment, and health versus illness. Upsetting these structural dynamics is the freespirited, plague-carrying, incomprehensible Fliegenbein, whose bizarre conduct has an explicit disruptive function. In the film’s preferred meaning, the problem posed by the jester is his hypnotic effect on the masses, led to break normative rules by copying his irrational, disordered behaviour. By having Paracelsus, the bearer of moral authority, swiftly putting an end to ‘abnormal’ proceedings, the unacceptable nature of the Totentanz is clearly stressed. In its overt text, then, the film constructs Fliegenbein as someone driving people to madness, and thus to unruliness; this alarming influence is neutralised by Paracelsus, who stops the Totentanz, and by the plague which literally floors Fliegenbein and, leaving him half-dead in Paracelsus’s hands, tames him. This is how the plot outlines and contains its odd man out, the unsettling and infective jester. Conversely, scholarship on Paracelsus has dealt with Fliegenbein not by focusing on his character per se, but on the people’s propensity to blindly follow an unhinged individual. This is hardly a surprising angle, as the film is inevitably assessed in the light of its production context: the Third Reich. Fliegenbein’s narrative function, when read as the exposure of mass delusion taken to insane ends, has been seen as subversive of Nazi ideology. Sheila Johnson (1991) locates this subversion in the reactions of the crowd, standing in for the German Volk, and represented as ‘grotesque and mindlessly manipulable masses’. While she considers Fliegenbein pivotal in the film’s subtext, as his actions ‘introduce the factor of subversion’, his importance lies outside himself, as the trigger unleashing a disturbing side of the German people. Taking an auteurist approach, and thus ascribing any subliminal anti-Nazism to director G. W. Pabst, Johnson states ‘…it is Pabst’s depiction of the Volk itself that lends the most ideological complexity to Paracelsus ’. More recently if more concisely, the same argument about the Volk’s representation is made by Rüdiger Suchsland in Hitler’s Hollywood (2017), a documentary on filmmaking in Nazi Germany. Suchsland, too, sees Paracelsus as a subtly fractured text, whose Nazi-compliant stance (the glorification of a

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Germanic hero who rescues his people) is compromised by the portrayal of the same people as crazy and herd-like in their automated, senseless actions. These critical assessments, highly pertinent as they are, leave Kreutzberg’s performance virtually unscrutinised. Yet the significance of the Totentanz, in relation to the overall film and to Nazi ideology, cannot lie solely or primarily in the crowd’s behaviour, but rather in Fliegenbein’s: after all, the crowd follow his movements. Intimating chaos rather than lack of meaning, Fliegenbein’s ‘dance’ is the prior subversive event, whose radical implications are absorbed by the people. The Totentanz precedes the revelation that Fliegenbein is a plague carrier, for both diegetic and non-diegetic audiences; whether Fliegenbein himself had any inkling of his condition remains unclear. While this discovery leads to retrospective assessments of the Totentanz, it is important to consider how Kreutzberg’s performance, as and when it happens, suggests a concern with malaise and even annihilation. Expressing anxiety or distress, often combined with a mortifying, sickly display of his body, Fliegenbein offers a troubling spectacle. Chaos does not stem from the evocation of illness or death, but from the performer’s relation to the spatial-symbolical structure that contains them. The sequence begins with a medium close-up of Kreutzberg, the sole object of the camera’s focus: people around him are a mere blur for now. With deliberate steps, swinging his arms in tune with his legs, he moves forwards; unsmiling and intense, he looks straight ahead with wide-open eyes. Having advanced a short distance, he then moves backwards in the same fashion, his posture and gaze unchanged. Back to his starting point, he executes a small jump on the spot, emphasised by lifting his shoulders, before going forwards again without pausing. Showing fluidity and continuity, this repeated onwards action nonetheless stands out, because Kreutzberg has stressed it through his jump and shoulder motion: he has signalled a renewed intention to move ahead. At the same time, his face is now turned upwards, with his gaze fixed above the level of the room, as if attracted by a mysterious sight. Retreating once more, his posture remains erect, while his eyes do not stray from their upward direction. On returning to his initial position, he opens his hands, which had been clenched into fists, and swings his arms rhythmically left and right, simultaneously contracting and extending his right leg outwards several times. In these initial fifteen seconds of the Totentanz, Kreutzberg’s body moves tightly and powerfully, expressing great energy; his face is deadly serious. This resolute motional drive, however, is contradictory: twice has

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Kreutzberg gone forwards only to retrace his steps, though keeping his transfixed gaze ahead of him. Now suddenly, without the hint of a pause, he turns to the right and spins on himself; as he completes a narrow circular sweep, the crowd come into focus for the first time, starting to move in synchrony with him. After being off-screen for a few seconds, Kreutzberg returns to the centre of the frame: standing upright, he takes off his cap and throws it away. Placing his hands on his waist just above the hips, and lifting his chin up in a defiant manner, he moves ahead once more, proceeding by small jumps with his legs slightly apart. Kreutzberg’s performance so far has been defined by two main features: a push/pull pattern, and an invisible point of reference towards which he gravitates. His forward motion, marked by strong movements and a firm stance, hints at meanings which hinge on internal and external factors alike: selfexaltation and the conquest of available room. His punctual and rapid move backwards, however, suggests the negation of those meanings. As for the invisible object he both wants and repels, it remains unknowable to the audience. In the total absence of visible targets or props, Kreutzberg’s mode of relating to blank space becomes the goal of his movements: the purpose of his ambiguous trajectory is found in the trajectory itself. Oscillation between advance and recoil is what Fliegenbein seemingly aims for. If movement is, as Iliev claims, the response to an impulse ‘to attack some kind of need’, as essential as when ‘the seed attacks the soil’ (2014), then Fliegenbein is attacking the need for an oblique relation to his surroundings. His self-expression rests on the necessity to both gain and reject. As a subject, the jester acknowledges opposites at the same time, advancing through attraction and retreating back in alarm. Applying this ambivalence to the space outside himself, and through the shifting of himself across that space, Fliegenbein shows motivational chaos as both his start and end point. Equally, through the deliberate precision of every movement, applied to the mapping of an illogical set of coordinates, his behaviour transcends the purely subjective: confusion is not Fliegenbein’s prerogative, but an assessment of the condition of being out there, in the world. Beyond the confines of the body, as much as inside them, chaos reigns. Until this moment in the Totentanz (twenty-four seconds into the scene), Kreutzberg’s presence has been one of grim strength; with no hint of deterioration, his movements show irrepressible vitality despite the gloom. The quality of his energy, however, is already disturbed.

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His unstoppable motion, devoid of a single pause and flowing seamlessly from one move to the next, does not transmit equilibrium. His apparently senseless bi-directional roaming, achieved through extremely tight or clenched muscular action, suggests a high level of nervous angst. According to Iliev’s theory of performance, movement in itself, reduced to its primary function of revoking stasis, is essentially a sign of discomfort: ‘…the inner comfort of the body must have been illusory if the body needs to move. This is a psychological imbalance that generates a physical one’ (2014). Harald Kreutzberg, for the whole duration of the Totentanz, provides an extreme example of this bodily and mental unease. The total absence of stillness in his performance shows that no illusion of comfort, however fleeting, has entered Fliegenbein’s experience. The jester moves because driven by constant imbalance, with no prior or final moment of deceptive respite: the end of his frenzied motion is forcibly achieved by Paracelsus. The unsettling implications of non-stop movement are, in the Totentanz, strengthened by Kreutzberg’s increasingly eerie and distressed presence. At the same time, the very lack of separation between moves and moods, as the dancer shifts from boldness to self-abasement, builds a continuum of chaos strongly marked by the negative. A closer link to physical and psychological stress, or to self-destruction, is articulated in his next movements. Having previously advanced on the tavern’s floor in an upright stance, jumping on wide-apart legs, Kreutzberg suddenly bends his knees and consequently shortens his height: from this position, he rapidly moves his head and anxious gaze in all directions, as if searching for something. Keeping his legs bent, he completes again a narrow sweep on himself; he then throws his cape away and starts to hit his shoulder and leg, as described at the beginning of this chapter. Kreutzberg’s selfstriking action consists of five repetitions of a dual gesture, targeting the left side of his body: he simultaneously spanks his shoulder with one hand and his leg with the other. With every blow, he partially lifts his right leg as if it was responding to a stimulus, be it force or pain; equally, this leg movement seems to impart momentum to his blows. With his face turned downwards throughout, he keeps his eyes hidden, adding to the inscrutable quality of his gestures. The glum weirdness of Fliegenbein’s actions cannot be overstressed. Odd as the sight of a man hitting himself is, it is given extra power by its dramatic staging: while never looking at the audience, Kreutzberg emphatically uses his whole body—arms, hands, and legs—to administer blows to his own flesh. Self-castigation, or self-harm, is sensationalised. The wilful quality of

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Kreutzberg’s movements lends them a confused sense of agency: consequently, the relationship between body and subject is made ambiguous. As the Totentanz progresses in a macabre crescendo, this ambiguity leans on the side of mortification. After spanking himself in the complex manner just described, Fliegenbein reprises a push–pull pattern; this time, however, his stance is much less stately, and a fearful attitude is creeping in his performance. He first advances with his arms bent at his sides, by rapid yet fairly loose steps; his upper body has also lost its former tight motion, and his shoulders move unevenly. His gaze is troubled, and when he retreats he is almost running backwards. The relative softness of Kreutzberg’s body here does not suggest relaxation, but rather a slackening of power. He moves onwards again, holding his lower stomach with both hands, and once more he scuttles back. Intercut with all this, the crowd have been shown, looking increasingly fazed; they are reacting with violent jolts to each of Fliegenbein’s movements. Now the jester adopts one of the strangest, most disturbing poses in the sequence. Twisting his body into a scarecrow position, redolent of deadly punitive situations, he drags himself across the floor by means of small jumps. His downcast eyes appear semi-closed. It is a grotesque and painful sight, evoking a man stripped of his life force: only half-alive, perhaps being killed, or under the spell of a nightmare or death wish (Fig. 2). Yet the suffering-looking creature stubbornly moves forwards. It is at this point that the tavern’s punters get up and start to follow him around the floor. Unstoppable, Kreutzberg transitions from his crucified spectacle to another odd posture: letting his shoulders fall and hunching his back, which he keeps in a slanted line in relation to the rest of his body, he also beats on his stomach with his hands. In this pose, he revolves twice on himself, on slightly bent knees, looking distressingly contorted. After the bold energy characterising the earlier part of the sequence, he has now built a strong feeling of doom into his appearance and movements. The smooth continuity of his performance seals the confusion between power and weakness, yet the newly prevailing meaning is one of downfall: the body, he seems to hint, is condemned. The crowd are now standing behind Fliegenbein, approximating his moves and marking each of his gestures with a backward jolt, as the Totentanz reaches a fever pitch. Again choosing a push–pull motion, the jester advances and retreats several times across the floor; his hunched shoulders and robotically stiff arms, coupled with the frantic shaking of his head, suggest an unhinged

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Fig. 2 Fliegenbein offers a grotesque, moribund-looking spectacle

state. Literally running through his steps, he transmits a sense of scared disorientation. His hands move up his chest in an agitated flurry, while a bewildered, frightened expression appears on his face. The screen is momentarily filled by the crowd, showing their mesmerised gaze as they move their heads up and down; then Kreutzberg, who is thinner and shorter than the others, heedlessly barges and crosses through them as if they were a shoal of fish. Emerging at the other end of the tavern, he turns himself into a new shape. With his knees bent, his upper body doubled up and his arms half-raised at the elbows, he moves on through rapid jumps; his eyes look upwards, and indeed he has never once looked at the people around him. Stretching his neck in one direction and his bottom in the other, Kreutzberg here faintly recalls the letter ‘z’ in his silhouette: he is extraordinarily compressed, yet moving at great speed. Obediently followed by the crowd, who had made an immediate u-turn to regroup behind him, he now abandons the relative precision of the push–pull pattern: he merely jumps onwards, never relaxing his posture, keeping to a sinuous trajectory with no obvious direction. Once only he performs an extra jump, while quickly raising his arms and waving them in the air. All these moves, despite their senseless appearance and comparative looseness of form, retain a deliberate quality; an inner logic, deranged

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and mysterious as it may be, remains implicit in Fliegenbein’s Totentanz. At the same time, the impression that the jester’s body is being put through a punishing course gains strength. Keeping his bent-double position, Kreutzberg criss-crosses the floor, always with his followers behind him, until they take up most of the frame; now barely visible, he arches his back like a frightened cat and disappears from view. The camera briefly lingers on the crowd, showing that even the few customers sitting down are shaking their heads in unison with the dancer. A rhythmic communion binds the whole tavern to Fliegenbein, despite his total lack of engagement with any of the people. Reappearing at the front of the group, he lifts up his arms only to lower them again, beating on his hips and stomach; while doing this he continues to jump on, before changing his motion to an actual run. After crashing once more through the crowd, he suddenly stops and remains standing: yet his upper body and head are shaking up and down, in a manic frenzy. It is at this point that Paracelsus appears and breaks up the Totentanz. Fliegenbein’s irruption in the film’s world is shattering. The society depicted in Paracelsus is organised along a dual system of meaning. One of these two strands, presented as historically determined, is itself a dialectics of opposing forces: the power tussle between the town’s authorities and Paracelsus. Although they vie for supremacy to different ends, they both seek order. The profit-driven Establishment aims at maintaining the status quo, based on corruption and ignorance; Paracelsus wants to take charge and impose the rule of science, to bring health to the populace. These two camps are mutually relevant and completely logical. The other, overlapping structure is circumstantial yet all-enveloping: the reciprocally exclusive relation between illness, specifically the plague, and health, or the absence of plague. Taken all together, these coordinates form a map leading to order (regardless of who holds the power) and in so doing achieve order already: life revolves predictably around these dynamics. The arrival of Fliegenbein and his Totentanz smash up this arrangement. The crux of the jester’s spectacle is its utter lack of order; by expressing ambivalence towards his surrounding space and his own body, Fliegenbein muddles differences between opposite directions, illness and health, life and death. Notions of authority equally crumble, as he is not remotely concerned with controlling the people, who imitate and follow him spontaneously. Far from being an alternative Führer, as claimed by Sheila Johnson (1991), the jester is entirely oblivious to his audience, being instead absorbed in his personal drama: he remains a free-standing,

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seemingly aimless bearer of chaos. Whatever his inner logic or motives, Fliegenbein is not interested in explaining them. His disturbing, apparently self-defeating moves often suggest a need to self-harm, or a physical and mental collapse, or even the incarnation of death itself, inexorably advancing; yet his frequent retreats and u-turns indicate the opposite. Life and its demise are not clearly defined or positioned in relation to Fliegenbein, whose ambiguity destroys this essential somatic order. No goal is discernible in the Totentanz, nor is there a coherent development; indeed, Kreutzberg’s performance is free from temporal markers, as it never reaches an obvious end point and never pauses. As previously mentioned, Iliev’s concept of movement as a response to discomfort can be usefully applied to Kreutzberg, whose tour-de-force sequence lacks even a single moment of stillness; yet stillness should logically precede and conclude all movement. Iliev stresses the body’s location in time in relation to stasis: ‘Stillness remains in the past when the body is shifting in space. In this case, movement is the present. What is then the future? Stillness again’ (2014). Accordingly, Kreutzberg’s Totentanz knows no past and no future, but only an ambiguous, unsettling present. There is no temporal, spatial, or health-related trajectory: there is only chaos, and the crowd eagerly embrace it. The social and cognitive stability of the film’s diegetic world is subverted; by extension, the demonic order of Nazi ideology, holding the narrative in a symbolical and literal vice, is subverted too. The abrupt termination of the Totentanz is immediately followed by a momentous disclosure: Fliegenbein, the wrecker of normativity, is also a plague carrier. This knowledge places the jester in a no-man’s land between sickness and health, thus reinforcing his ambiguity; at the same time, his association with death is strengthened by his link with the plague, which he carries, spreads, and ultimately falls prey to. The chaotic malaise running through Kreutzberg’s performance seems to find, in a deadly bacterium, an explicit destination; yet this medical burden cannot account for the incomprehensible actions just carried out. Indeed, a retrospective view can only add the plague to the list of obliquely tackled aspects, or symbolic figurations—spatial disorder, ongoing unbalance, physical and mental suffering—evoked by Kreutzberg in his pivotal sequence. This thread of disorder and self-abasement, which fractures the film’s smooth dialectics, is ostensibly ended by the suppression of the Totentanz; the unruly Fliegenbein is neutralised by both Paracelsus and the plague. Yet the film does not provide full closure to its revelation

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of chaos. Shortly after the jester’s recovery, the plot recalls or revisits what happened in the tavern, by introducing the procession of flagellants. Wholly in excess of narrative motivation, with no obvious role or function to play, this bizarre parade was apparently Pabst’s own idea, not present in the censor-approved script (Johnson 1991). Shown in two scenes amounting to a minute and a half, the flagellants are a very disturbing sight. A dishevelled, bleeding, uncoordinated mass, these men are stripped to the waist and walk unsteadily, incessantly flogging their naked torsos; they also perform an eerie chant about Christ’s torture on the cross. The townsfolk run away from them in fear, and their reaction is highlighted by this exchange: ‘Who are these awful people?’, ‘Flagellants. They think they can save the sinful world by yelling and lashing themselves’. Yet the flagellants are no outcast or foreigners, they are part of the people or Volk: this is carefully shown in their first appearance, when some of them crouch by the gates inside the town, waiting for others standing outside. As the gates are opened, they merge into a single group. Rather than following one special individual, as it happened in the tavern, this crowd achieve a high degree of unhinged behaviour on their own. In a trance-like state, hurting and humiliating their bodies, the flagellants are more than a link to the Totentanz, they are also a confirmation of its meaning: chaos is indeed out there. This notion is strengthened by the timing of their screen presence, coinciding with the end of lockdown after the plague. As the return of ‘normality’ is heralded by opening the town gates, the first human beings passing through them are the flagellants, immediately joining those waiting inside; together they start their baffling, spooky performance. Order, it would seem, is never guaranteed, whole, or lasting. The presence of irrationality in Paracelsus may be a coincidence or accident, but it is difficult to separate it from some production choices. If Pabst was responsible for the flagellants, he was also directly involved in a truly crucial matter: the casting of Harald Kreutzberg. Indeed, Sheila Johnson claims the director’s ‘major contribution’ to Paracelsus was to select Kreutzberg and create a role for him (1991). Kreutzberg was certainly not a random choice. A world-famous dancer and choreographer, whose reputation had led to his co-option in arranging spectacles for the 1936 Olympics, he also carried a specific artistic baggage. As a key exponent of Ausdruckstanz, the new ‘modern dance’ which had swept through Weimar Germany, Kreutzberg had honed a vision of his art that sat uncomfortably with Nazi doctrine: always in a free-form context, his

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stated aim as a performer was to focus on individual characters and subjective experience (Howe 1996). The kind of experience he was interested in was one of distress, often irrational and unsettling: he wanted to represent ‘frightening dreams and visions’ associated with ‘mad characters’ defined by ‘a disturbed spiritual life’ (Howe 1996). At the same time, he was fascinated by death as a theme, something to which he ‘kept returning throughout his creative life’ (Howe 1996). Combining such an artistic credo with outstanding talent, Kreutzberg seems uncannily perfect for the Totentanz, and it is tempting to speculate on how much control he had over the whole sequence. However, in the absence of material that may shed light on his input in the film, or indeed on Pabst’s intentions, his casting shall remain ascribed to prestige and ability. But the correspondence between Kreutzberg’s goals as an artist and his performance in the Totentanz is undisputable. Articulating a high level of irrational distress, a strong awareness of death and suffering, and a total absorption in his own drama, Fliegenbein is defined by his subjective experience and by a ‘disturbed spiritual life’. Rather than a mere catalyst for the Volk’s propensity to mindless acquiescence, the jester is a fully self-sufficient character, clearly marked by uniqueness. So crucial was individuality for Kreutzberg, that after the 1936 Olympics he was bold enough to turn down a request from the Nazi regime for another mass spectacle. In his diplomatic letter of refusal, he wrote: ‘There’s simply no room for the “individual” there, and I’m sure the overall impression will be 1,000 times better if you rely on your giant legions and aren’t “handicapped” by [a] little red flea dancing on a white screen’ (Stockemann 1997, quoted in Walsdorf 2015). In Paracelsus , Harald Kreutzberg creates a ‘little red flea’ of devastating power. Without any recourse to speech, he subverts the film text by inserting a personal, yet resonant piece of shattering information: the inescapable presence of chaos.

References Balázs, Béla. 2007. Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924). Screen. Intro. Erica Carter, 48 (1): 91–108. Davis, R.G. 1962. Method in Mime. The Tulane Drama Review 6 (4): 61–65. Howe, Dianne S. 1996. Individuality and Expression: the Aesthetics of the New German Dance. New York: Peter Lang. Iliev, Alexander. 2014. Towards a Theory of Mime. London and New York: Routledge.

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Johnson, Sheila. 1991. Ideological Ambiguity in G.W. Pabst’s “Paracelsus” (1943). Monatshefte 83 (2): 104–126. Lang, Fritz. 2016. The Art of Mimic Expression in Film. In The Promise of Cinema, ed. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, 141–142. Oakland: University of California Press. Leabhart, Thomas. 1989. Modern and Post-modern Mime. Houndmills: Macmillan. Sieburg, Friedrich. 2016. The Magic of the Body: Observations on Acting in Film. In The Promise of Cinema, ed. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, 124–126. Oakland: University of California Press. Stewart, Virginia. 1935. The Modern Dance, 29–33. New York: E. Weyhe. Stockemann, Patricia. 1997. Tänzer ohne Widerspruch. In Der Tänzer Harald Kreutzberg, ed. Frank-Manuel Peter, 118–134. Berlin: Edition Hentrich/Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln. Suchsland, Rüdiger (d.) 2017. Hitler’s Hollywood. Looks Filmproduktionene GmbH Berlin in coproduction with Arte and ZDF. Walsdorf, Hanna. 2015. Nudes, Swords, and the Germanic Imagination: Renditions of Germanic Sword Dance Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century Dance. Dance Research Journal 47 (3): 27–50. Williams, Tami. 2012. The “Silent” Arts: Modern Pantomime and the Making of an Art Cinema in Belle Èpoque Paris: The Case of Georges Wague and Germaine Dulac. In A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo, 99–118. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Index

A Abel, Richard, 50, 53 acting styles, 29 aesthetics, 9, 12, 14, 20, 22 affective reactions, 75 agency, 51, 57, 58, 67, 71, 83, 99 Albera, François, 50 alienation, 34, 39 anxiety aesthetics of, 11, 20, 22 gendered anxiety, 71, 75, 77, 82 Kreutzberg in Paracelsus , 91, 92, 94, 98, 103, 104 Negri and gendered anxiety in Hotel Imperial , 4, 6, 71, 73, 76, 80–83, 85 Pavlova and uncanny body, 10, 13, 15, 17–19, 21, 23 productive anxiety, 71, 80, 83 archival turn, 2 Auber, Daniel La Muette de Portici (Masaniello), 10

Ausdruckstanz (Expressive Dance), 91, 103

B Bachelard, Gaston, 76 Balázs, Béla Visible Man, or the Culture of Film, 92 ballet, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13–16, 23 Barbed Wire, 83 Baryshnya i Khuligan (The Young Lady and the Hooligan), 5 beauty, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 71 Beckett, Samuel, 28 Biograph films, 29 body film and other performative arts, 92 gestural soliloquy, 29 Kreutzberg in Paracelsus , 91, 93, 96–99, 101 Mozzhukhin in Feu Mathias Pascal , 4, 6, 47, 50–56, 58, 65, 66 Negri in Hotel Imperial , 71, 74, 80

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Girelli, Silent Film Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6

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108

INDEX

Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici, 4, 5, 7–10, 13, 15, 17, 23 speech-free performance, 2 Le Brasier Ardent , 50 Brik, Lili, 43 Buchovetzki, Dimitri, 82 Bulgakova, Oksana, 50 Burke, Marina, 43 C Carmen, 82 Carton, Pauline, 52 Casanova, 50 Cazzola, Pietro, 30, 41 chaos, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 23, 64, 65, 91, 94, 96–98, 102–104 Chaplin, Charlie, 82, 93 cinema challenges to stage performers, 9 film and other performative arts, 92 soliloquy, 27–29 claustrophobia, 73, 85 close-up, 25, 28–30, 33–35, 37, 38, 41, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55, 59, 65, 67, 96 closure, 27, 41, 68, 102 Cohn, Ruby, 28, 29, 33 comedy, 53, 82 D dance film stardom, 3, 4 Kreutzberg in Paracelsus , 93, 98 mime and pantomime, 3, 5, 91–93 Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici, 4, 5, 9, 11, 15, 17, 23 Dance of Death (Totentanz), 4, 90 danger, 73–75, 78 Davidson, Max, 72 Davis, R.G., 93 De Amicis, Edmondo

The Young Teacher of the Workers , 27 death Kreutzberg in Paracelsus , 96, 101, 102, 104 Mayakowsky in The Young Lady and the Hooligan, 25–27, 43 Mozzhukhin in Feu Mathias Pascal , 4, 47, 50–52, 68 Delavigne, Germain, 10 desire, 16, 17, 26, 34, 36, 65, 91 dialogue, 1, 26, 29 disability, 3, 5, 9, 10, 14 disability studies, 5, 10, 14 disorder, 17, 23, 91, 102 domestic sphere, 76, 78 doppelgänger, 13, 15 doubles, 15, 47, 64, 84, 101 dread, 12, 16, 20, 21, 31 dreams, 18, 77, 78, 104 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 29 DuBarry, Madame, 82 Dulac, Germaine, 93 The Dumb Girl of Portici, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 21, 23 E ego, 75 epilepsy, 12, 14 eroticism, 39, 77 F facial expressions, 63, 77, 80 failure, 6, 49–53, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 68 fairy tales, 12 fame, 4–6, 50, 91 familiar (Heimlich), 12, 18, 20, 76 Father Sergius, 50 fear, 12, 19, 25, 28, 31, 35, 41, 47, 74, 75, 77, 78, 103

INDEX

female subjectivity gendered anxiety, 4, 6, 71, 73, 75, 77, 80–83, 85 gestural soliloquy, 29 sexuality, 73, 76, 82–84 femme fatale, 82 Feu Mathias Pascal/The Late Mathias Pascal , 4, 6, 47, 51, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 68–70 film challenges to stage performers, 9 film and other performative arts, 92 soliloquy, 27, 29 film stardom, 4 film Studies, 2 folk dance, 16 ´ Fønss, Olaf, 29 forgetting, wilful, 58, 64 freedom, 59, 62, 63, 65, 85 French silent cinema, 50 Freud, Sigmund Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 74 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 74 Negri and anxiety in Hotel Imperial , 74 Pavlova and the uncanny in The Dumb Girl of Portici, 5 Frie, Roger, 26 Fries, Otto, 78 Futurists, 6

G gambling, 56 gaze, 4, 7, 9, 21, 26, 31–37, 39, 41, 47, 48, 51–59, 62, 64–66, 72, 78–81, 84, 89, 90, 96, 98–100 gender anxiety in Hotel Imperial , 4, 6, 71, 73, 75, 77 gestural soliloquy, 29

109

Germany, 5, 6, 71, 93, 95, 103 Gerrard, Douglas, 10 gestural soliloquy, 29 gestures, 16, 18, 21, 29, 32, 63, 80, 92, 98, 99 glamour, 6, 71, 83 grief, 19, 47, 52, 59 Griffith, G.W., 29 H Halberstam, Jack, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 58, 63 The Queer Art of Failure, 49, 58 Hall, James, 72, 78, 81 hallucinations, 31, 33 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 33 Hartman, Evelyn T., 26, 36 health, 95, 101, 102 Hervé, Jean, 64 Hitchcock, Alfred, 15 Hitler’s Hollywood (documentary), 95 Hollywood, 6, 71, 82 home front experience, 75 horror, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21–23, 35, 47, 94 Hotel Imperial , 4, 6, 71, 73, 76–79, 81–85 I identity, 4, 9, 21, 30, 33, 49–51, 60, 64, 67–69, 77, 83 Iliev, Alexander, 91, 93, 97, 98, 102 illness, 11, 95, 96, 101 The Indian Tomb, 29 inhabiting, 76 intermediality, 2, 5, 10, 15 intertitles, 1, 63, 67, 76 isolation, 26, 30, 33, 35, 37, 43, 58 J Jangfeldt, Beng, 42, 43

110

INDEX

Johnson, Sheila, 95, 101, 103 Julian, Rupert, 10

K Kennedy, Andrew, 28 Kercheval, Jesse Lee, 63 Klevan, Andrew, 51 Krauss, Werner, 94 Kreutzberg, Harald Paracelsus performance, 4–6, 90, 95, 102 stardom, 4

L Lang, Fritz, 29, 92 ‘The Art of Mimic Expression in Film’, 92 The Late Mathias Pascal /Feu Mathias Pascal , 4, 6, 47, 51, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 69, 70 Leabhart, Thomas, 93 Lee, Rowland V., 83 L’Herbier, Marcel, 47 literature, the uncanny in, 12 lockdown, 103 London, Jack, 43 loneliness, 3, 6, 26, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 49 longing, 26, 34, 36, 43 loss, 12, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 61, 94 love, 17, 26, 27, 33–37, 39, 41, 43, 47, 53, 64, 78, 82, 83 Lubitsch, Ernst, 82 Lunde, Arne, 73, 83

M madness, 12, 95 Maison, Edna, 10, 17, 18 make-up, 2, 43

male conduct, and wartime, 73 Marceau, Marcel, 93 marriage, 17, 49, 53, 65 Mayakovsky, Vladimir non-cinematic artists, 5 soliloquy in The Young Lady and the Hooligan, 25–27, 30, 36, 43 stardom, 3 suicide, 6, 27, 42, 43 May, Mia, 29 meaning, and performance, 26, 78, 83, 91 mime, 3, 92, 93 modern dance, 4, 92 monologue, 1, 28, 29 Monte Carlo, 55–58, 62 Moran, Lois, 62 movement, 7–11, 13–17, 19–21, 23, 54, 55, 63, 65, 72, 78, 79, 89, 92–94, 96–99, 102 Mozzhukhin, Ivan queer failure in Feu Mathias Pascal , 50, 51, 57, 63 stardom, 4 multiplicity, 2, 50 Mulvey, Laura, 13, 15 music, 89, 92, 93 Muteness, 14, 93

N Naples uprising, 10 Nazism, 95 negativity, 6 Negra, Diane, 83 Negri, Pola gendered anxiety in Hotel Imperial , 71, 74, 77, 82, 83 stardom, 4 vamp persona, 83 neurotic anxiety, 75 nonacts, 68

INDEX

non-verbal performance, 92 normativity, 52, 102 Not Born for Money, 43 O oblivion, 12, 58, 61 Olympics, 103, 104 order, 5, 10, 12, 14, 18, 20, 23, 34, 51, 84, 91, 94, 101–103 ostranenie (‘making strange’), 12, 32 P Pabst, G.W., 5, 90, 95, 103 paintings, 15 pantomime, 3, 5, 91, 93, 94 Paracelsus , 4, 6, 90, 94, 95, 101, 103 paramount, 2, 82 Paris, 93 passion, 4, 10, 26, 27, 29, 39, 40, 82 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 29 Pavlova, Anna ballet scenes, 4, 5, 7–9, 11, 13, 14, 16 non-cinematic artists, 5 stardom, 4 uncanny and The Dumb Girl of Portici, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 21, 23 Pearson, Roberta, 29, 35 performance case studies overview, 3, 5 film and other performative arts, 92 non-cinematic artists, 5 speech-free performance, 2, 92, 93 stardom, 3 Peth˝ o, Ágnes, 15 place, and home, 58 plague, 94–96, 101–103 poetry, 4, 30 Polonskaya, Nora, 42 Pradot, Marcelle, 53

111

production history, 3 productive anxiety, 71, 80, 83 props, 29, 35, 93, 97 Protazanov, Iakov, 50 protective actions, 75 pure cinema, 93 push/pull motion, 91, 94, 97

Q Quayson, Ato, 14, 15 queer failure, 6, 49, 57, 58 queer theory, 3, 6

R rape, 72 realistic anxiety, 75 Rebikova, Alexandra, 25, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41 Robinson, David, 50 Rome, 61–64, 68, 69 rupture, 15 Russell, Paul, 23 Russian silent cinema, 50

S Sappho, 82 screen acting, 92 Scribe, Eugene, 10 self, 21 self-harm, 98, 102 severed head image, 11, 12, 21, 23 sexuality, and vamp persona, 83 sexual threat, 82, 83 Shakespeare, William Hamlet , 33 Shklovsky, Viktor, 12, 43 shock, aesthetics of, 14 Sieburg, Friedrich, 92 Siegmann, George, 72 silent film

112

INDEX

analytical/theoretical understanding, 2 film and other performative arts, 92 soliloquy, 3 speech-free performance, 2, 92 silent stardom, 4 Simon, Michel, 53 Simonson, Mary, 8, 9 Simpha-Alpern, Amira, 26 Slavinsky, Yevgeni, 25, 43 slow motion, 67 soliloquy Cohn on, 28, 29 Mayakowsky in The Young Lady and the Hooligan, 25–27, 30, 43 silent cinema, 29 theatre, 28 solitude, 26, 28, 30, 37 sound films, 2, 6 space, 8, 35, 54, 61–64, 66, 74, 76, 80, 91, 97, 101, 102 speech, 1, 14, 26, 28, 29, 35, 52, 74, 80, 91–93, 104 stage soliloquy, 3 stardom, 3 star quality, 4, 28 St. Clair, Malcolm, 82 Stiller, Mauritz, 71, 73, 83 stillness, 65, 93, 98, 102 Stonebridge, Lindsey, 74, 75, 79, 82 Strogoff, Michel, 50 subjectivity, 33, 58, 60, 64, 67, 71 subversion, 6, 95 success, 52, 57 Suchsland, Rüdiger Hitler’s Hollywood, 95 suicide, 23, 43, 59–61, 67, 68, 72 Swender, Rebecca, 29

T theatre, 28, 92 Third Reich, 6, 95 Totentanz (Dance of Death), 4, 90, 91, 94–99, 101–104 Touriansky, Victor, 50 trauma, 75, 80 U unbecoming, 51, 55, 58, 67–69 Uncanny, 5, 10–19, 21–23 unfamiliar (Unheimlich), 12, 15, 77 V Valentino, Rudolph, 82 vamp persona, 83 Veidt, Conrad, 29 visions, 31, 33, 66, 77, 104 Volk, 95, 103, 104 Volkoff, Alexandre, 50 W wartime, 71, 73–76 wealth, 52, 57, 62, 94 Weber, Lois, 5, 7, 9 Weiss, R.S., 36 wilful forgetting, 58, 64 wilful oblivion, 61 wilful unbecoming, 51 Williams, Tami, 93 A Woman of the World, 82 World War I, 71, 73, 74, 83 World War II, 5, 75 Y The Young Lady and the Hooligan (Baryshnya i Khuligan), 5, 25