Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2006 Sommario / Contents

affirm, that Genina is an author whose work is readable from its conclusion
(the great final films, or even some unrealized projects), which does not
signify however that pearls are not to be found in all phases of his career.
Genina’s cinema is different from that of his cousin Mario Camerini, whose
beauty is already intact in his debut (as revealed in Kif tebbi [1928], and
as would probably be confirmed by his lost first film, Jolly [1923], produced
by Genina).
Genina is an author at whose origins is a very powerful image, which does
not belong to cinema, but to reality: the scene, witnessed in his childhood, of
a child suddenly caught and destroyed in a blaze, a scene which marked his
cinema, obsessed with catastrophes, and which ever increasingly became a
challenge to death, from the sequence of the execution (a true overturned
cosmogony) and that of the explosion of the fortress in L’Assedio
dell’Alcazar (1940) to the confrontation of the negative (the sterility of the
marshes, love as violence) of Cielo sulla palude (1949) to the re-evocation
of the childhood trauma in Maddalena (1954), and to that great
comprehensive film, Tre storie proibite (Three Forbidden Stories, 1952).
Genina’s cinema lives the irruptions of reality – or more precisely, what
appears one of the indispensable points of his cinema, is that it feels the
force of reality and the burden of death upon it (only Rossellini, Dreyer,
Rossen, and Minnelli feel the relationship with reality with the same force).
Among the irruptions of reality in his work, that of sound – or, to be precise,
of the voice – is fundamental. La voce umana is also the title of a 1948
work by Rossellini (inspired by Cocteau). Like Rossellini (and with traits of
Cottafavi), he weaves into Italian cinema secret correspondences, based
principally on feminine fascination. It is just to admire the rediscovered silent
version of Prix de Beauté, the beauty of its images not amputated by the
space of the soundtrack, and the theoretical linearity of a corpus of film in
which at the end the voice intrudes. But this version is not going to be
admired differently from how much we may admire, if found, the version
with the original working track of Fellini’s La dolce vita, that is something
more explicit (for Fellini in the babel of tongues and sounds, for Genina, in
the irruption of the voice in a silent universe), but in respect of which the
directors’ subsequent interventions have complicated the fascination.
The spurious character of the sound version of Prix de Beauté – or, to be
more precise, of one of its four sound versions, in this case the French, which
is the only one that has survived, and which is moreover one of the two in
which Louise Brooks is dubbed – does not detract from the beauty of the
film, but rather connects and elaborates it.“Once I heard the voice” – to use
the words of the director, which was after having conceived and directed his
finale – Genina felt the need to unite all the images of the film with the
broadest variety of possible sounds, from the realistic to the abstract in an
avant-garde style, from direct, live sound (anticipating Renoir and Vigo) to
the manipulation of dubbing. In the body of this sound version are
concealed, as in the most fascinating works of Genina, the secrets of the
relationship between the human presence and images.
The cinema of Genina tends to something further: to a passion beyond
death, like that experienced by the protagonists of his last films. The
paradise of which these protagonists dream does not belong to any religious
confession, but only to the fragile utopia of the cinematographic image.The
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moment in which this paradise introduces itself into the image and the
finale of Prix de Beauté is that of the manifestation of a voice no less
surprising than that which was heard by Joan of Arc. Because Prix de
Beauté certainly appears miraculous: the insuperable fascination of Brooks,
discovered by Pabst and here immersed in a great invention of Clair, finds
precisely in the stupefying direction of Genina its own nature, that of a
crucial masterpiece of the history of cinema. – SERGIO GRMEK GERMANI
LOUISE BROOKS: LOOKING FOR LULU (Timeline Films, US
1998)
Regia/dir., mo./ed: Hugh Munro Neely; prod. esec./exec. prod. (Turner
Classic Movies): Hugh M. Hefner, Carl H. Lindahl; prod: Elaina B.Archer,
Hugh Munro Neely; scen: Barry Paris; f./ph: John C. Lucker II; mus:
Nigel Holton; interv: Louise Brooks, Margareth Brooks, Roseanne
Brooks, David Diamond,Adolph Green, Bill Klein, Jane Sherman Lehac,
Kaye MacRae, Francis Lederer, John Springer, Roddy McDowall, Dana
Delany, Paolo Cherchi Usai; narr: Shirley MacLaine; DVD, 60’,
sonoro/sound, Timeline Films, Culver City, CA. Produced in association
with Turner Classic Movies.
Versione inglese / English dialogue and narration.
“Questo ritratto di Lulu/Louise Brooks, sceneggiato dal suo massimo
biografo, Barry Paris, riesamina la sua leggenda” (così Lorenzo Codelli
nel catalogo delle Giornate 1998). Il documentario viene ora
ripresentato in occasione del centenario dell’attrice. Combinando
brillantemente citazioni dai film, dal primo The Street of Forgotten Men
(1925), all’ultimo Overland Stage Raiders (1938), passando attraverso
It’s the Old Army Game (1926), The Show Off (1926), Love ’Em and Leave
’Em (1927), Beggars of Life (1928), Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), Prix
de beauté (1930) e The Canary Murder Case (1929), con approfondite
interviste a testimoni e a storici e con materiale iconografico di
grande suggestione, Looking for Lulu continua ad essere affascinante
come il suo soggetto. Fra le assolute rarità, un’intervista con la Brooks
settantenne filmata a Rochester nel 1976. Uscito in Inghilterra come
extra del DVD Pandora’s Box special edition. – LIVIO JACOB
“This portrait of Lulu/Louise Brooks, written by her definitive biographer,
Barry Paris, re-examines the legend,” wrote Lorenzo Codelli in the
catalogue of the 1989 Giornate del Cinema Muto. The Giornate now
revives the documentary to mark the centenary of the actress’s birth.
Brilliantly juxtaposing extracts from her films – from her debut in The
Street of Forgotten Men (1925) to her last appearance, in Overland
Stage Raiders (1938), taking in It’s the Old Army Game (1926), The
Show Off (1926), Love ’Em and Leave ’Em (1927), Beggars of Life
(1928), Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), Prix de Beauté (1930), and
The Canary Murder Case (1929) – along with in-depth interviews with
witnesses and historians, and richly evocative iconographic materials,
Looking for Lulu remains as fascinating as its subject. Among the most
precious documents is an interview with Brooks at 70, filmed in
Rochester in 1976.The film was issued in Britain as an extra on the DVD
special edition of Pandora’s Box. – LIVIO JACOB