Journal of Film Preservation N° 56 - FIAF

care, tragic and already so distant, and Les ombres qui passent (1924) that
shows beautifully Mosjoukine’s amazing range as his Zelig-like character
handles all kinds of situations, from the milking of a cow to exhibiting all
the artificialities of a dandy. Then, there was the ‘usual’ bonus that we
have come to expect from the programmers of the festival: the extraordinary
Le sergeant X (Wladimir Strjewsky, 1931) a rare example of
Mosjoukine in a sound film. This foreign legion movie (which ironically
justifies his accent) uses Mosjoukine’s great silent era visage and his identification
as an emigrant and cultural nomad to create a resonant European
character between an enigmatic past and an anonymous death. The
narrative of the film is of course generically linked to Europe’s long historical
past, but is also modern, almost existential in its stress on the
deracinated central figure who moves from displacement to secular sacrifice.
Perhaps the most original programming concept this year (probably the
inspiration of Vittorio Martinelli, Bologna’s greatest link with the historical
culture of the cinema) was the presentations of the films of Mittel-
Europa. Most of these films, extremely rare and never seen in an
ensemble until Cinema Ritrovato, were products of the Russian diaspora,
and taken as a whole seemed to provide a catalog of stylistic experimentation
(especially in the use of sound and music), unusual qualities of
tone and mood, and a general psychology of distress and uncertainty.
This diverse group of filmmakers had very different careers. Anatol
Litwack (represented by Cette vieille canaille of 1933) became a studio
director in America. We saw two films each from Victor Trivas, Alexei
Granowsky, Alexandr Razumnyi, and Fedor 0zep. Victor Tourjansky,
(whose splendid Michel Strogoff was the best-known film of this series),
Fedor Ozep, and to a lesser extent Aleksandr Razoumnyi (who evidently
returned to the Soviet Union to make several more films) all continued to
have cinema careers. Other figures in this group remain obscure.
The Trivas double bill consisted of the silent Aufruhr des Blutes(1928) and
Dans les rues. Aufruhr des Blutes, a pessimistic study of a small group of
people, fraught with sexual and class tension and culminating in violence,
reminds us in many ways of both Abram Room’s antecedent masterpiece
Bed and Sofa, and the later Menschen am Sonntag. Dans les rues
(1933 - with music by Hanns Eisler) is a film whose precise grasp of
social realities, put me in mind of the work of Jacques Becker. Both
Trivas films seemed to me more remarkable than his much better known
Niemansland, and extremely resonant in their construction of social reality
and incorporation of the populist materiel of mass culture.
Ozep’s well-known Der lebende Leichnam (1928) is always a wonderful
viewing experience, especially this time with the original score synchronised
by Martin Korber. Amok (1934) with its hot tropical erotic triangle,
the presence of Frehel and a musical score (should we say “jungle
music?») by Hanns Eisler, is one of the eccentricities which constitute the
specificity of this period of Mitteleuropean filmmaking. The program
note mentions that Amok was written by Boris Barnet. This brings to
mind a story I heard from Sergei Jutkevitsh. Barnet visited Paris and went
42 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998