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With his oversized
fan in Le Merveilleux
éventail vivant (1904),
Méliès’s identified
another excellent opportunity
to create a
living screen. As the
fan opens, it obscures
completely the perspective
view of the gardens
at Versailles painted as
the scene’s backdrop,
effectively asserting
itself as a curtain, a
surface on which to exhibit
miraculous acts.
Once open, the fan’s
ornamental branches,
decorated in the style
of Louis XV, turn into a gallery of seven arcades with women “in gala attire” who
then undergo a series of transformations of dress and accessories. When the fan
mounting eventually disappears and gives way to a star-studded globe, the women
simply emanate from it like a “human fan,” forming a sculptural tableau vivant.
Méliès’s inspiration for this film came from a hugely successful féerie extravaganza
at the Théâtre du Châtelet, The Sun Prince (1889), which boasted a living fan number
in its apotheosis scene, a view that was described by The Era as “superb ...
formed of nude fairies over whose forms stream rays of electric light.” 20 The theme
was again re-worked later at Pathé with some remarkable results.
It is impossible to divorce the fascination with material
splendor in cinema’s “aesthetic of opulence” from the
highly saturated visual culture of the late nineteenthcentury
metropolis, where luxury and abundance could
be seen in the context of the everyday. The modern city
was its own machinerie théâtrale, generating with the
surplus of commodities and images the neurasthenia
and phantasmagoria theorised by Georg Simmel and,
later, Walter Benjamin. The late nineteenth century
was also a time when distinguishing oneself through
nuanced consumer “knowledge” and appearances had
become paramount. Disinterest in—or a lack of—such
urbane sophistication was now more likely to signify
provincialism than moral repugnance. Vis-à-vis this
grown-up (and increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized)
comsumerism, the cinematic marvelous offered
an alternative discourse. It championed a deliberately
old-fashioned and naïve world order, and emphasized
that acquisition of wealth or status was only possible
through supernatural intervention, or dream. In this respect
it subverted the contemporary discourse of social
mobility, offering a “retreat from the constraints of the
real or the present, … an alternate plane onto which the
real can be transposed and reimagined.” 21
Frame enlargement from Le Merveilleux éventail vivant, dir. Georges
Méliès, 1904. Courtesy of Lobster films.
engenDering FAust:
tHe veileD lADY in nino oxiliA’s
RApSODIA sAtAnicA
Eugenia paulicelli
Rapsodia satanica, by the Turin-based writer and director
Nino Oxilia, is a true masterpiece whose value deserves to be recognized and
positioned in the wider context of the history of cinema in Italy and beyond. It is
especially crucial to see how this early Italian film can be re-read today through
the lens of dress and fashion so as to capture the philosophical underpinnings of
Oxilia’s reinterpretation of the Faust legend, its gender implications, and its aesthetic
folding and unfolding of his “dance of human passions.” 1 Unlike other versions
of Faustian narratives, in Rapsodia it is an elderly woman, Alba d’Oltrevita
(whose name we could translate as Dawn beyond Life), played by the Italian diva
Lyda Borelli, who makes the pact with the Devil. The price she is asked to pay to
regain her beauty and youth is to give up love. Youth and beauty are exchanged
for a life devoid of emotion, passion, and sensuality—almost a contradiction in
terms. This is especially so because in the beginning of the film, Alba unfolds herself
into younger skin and becomes a femme fatale.
Rapsodia satanica foregrounds themes of the fragility of
human actions, emotions, the impossibility of divorcing love from youth and life,
the transience of human existence and actions and, above all, time and its inherent
slipperiness. All are themes quintessential to this film and perhaps also to
film in general, especially at the time of experimentation and advancement in the
arts and sciences in which Rapsodia was made. And this is another reason why
Oxilia’s film is so rich. Time is embedded in the cinematic machine in its kineaesthetic
multi-dimensionality. The composer Pietro Mascagni wrote the score for the
film, signalling artistic collaboration between the relatively new cinematographic
art and the world of high art, theater and opera. Rapsodia is a big production
conceived as an opera totale of the Rome-based production house, Cines. In its
very title, the film offers itself as a challenge to the tradition of the art of storytelling
in the age of mechanical reproduction.
In the castle of illusions where Alba lives, anything can
happen. It is as if the castle itself were a movie theater
in which acts of magic and illusion are performed on
the screen, like a painting of Mephisto coming to life
and jumping into the room where Alba sits, reaching
out not only to her but also to the spectator. There is a witty cinematic allusion
to technology and the transformation of the self that is incarnated on screen by
the performance of the diva especially, as she changes through dress and movement.
However, this metamorphosis from one scenario to another, through the
film’s rhythms and interruptions, does not prevent her inevitable death. It only
postpones it. The dances and masquerades defer death; there can be no salvation
for Alba. The price she pays for youth is loneliness of the heart. Alba appears
as the veiled lady, and as such she is both the author and the vehicle of
transformation. The veil, in fact, accompanies all her rituals of dressing, redressing
and addressing; a piece of fabric covers and uncovers, envelops and exposes
her body and her face. It is Alba’s habitus.
As a recurrent element in the whole film, the veil is also
what binds the several threads of Rapsodia together in its narrative and nonnarrative
moments. But Alba’s is a veil that is never stitched. In Oxilia’s film, the
binding fabric that holds together its different acts always flows, never losing its