Tag Archives: early cinema

Erotikon

erotikon
Erotikon

Seen at Barbican, London as part of ‘Made in Prague/Cheap Thrills’

Format: Cinema

Director: Gustav Machatý

Writer: Gustav Machatý

Cast: Ita Rina, Olaf Fjord

Czechoslovakia 1929

85 mins

This silent Czech tale of seduction continues to mesmerise with its sensual portrayal of female sexuality.

Erotikon tells the tale of first love – the mad kind that makes a good girl throw away all caution. Andrea (Ita Rina) is living a quiet life with her old father at a country railway station. One stormy night, a suave stranger appears and her father kindly invites him to spend the night, only for the man to seduce his daughter while he’s out on his shift. Naturally, the stranger departs the next morning, leaving Andrea with an unwanted pregnancy and an irrational devotion to the slippery playboy. When their paths cross again in the city, will she give up her secure, conventional marriage to risk everything with this womaniser, even as he’s being pursued by another lover’s angry husband?

Gustav Machatý’s film was famous for its edgy portrayal of sexuality, female sexuality in particular. When Andrea goes to bed after first meeting the stranger and is in the throes of torrid dreams, we observe her through the camera’s (male) gaze, which takes in her upper body, with its erotically extended neck and arms thrown wildly above her head, as well as her bare calves sticking out from under the covers. But when she is actually seduced, the crucial part of the action takes place from her perspective, with delirious point-of-view shots of the man’s intense kohl-lined gaze as he advances on her, and diagonal whip-pans across the walls and furniture as she falls back onto the bed.

Our sympathy centres on Andrea, while the stranger is a caricature of a vain, opportunistic hedonist with little to recommend him apart from matinee idol looks. Accordingly, it’s Andrea’s actions that are the backbone of the film’s drama, while the stranger’s antics and their effect on jealous husbands are a source of comic relief.

One of the peculiarities of silent storytelling is the importance it lends to objects. The ‘Erotikon’ of the title fits the overarching theme of passion, but only appears in the film on the label of a bottle of perfume that the stranger gives to Andrea, the first step in his seduction – and how interesting that a film that can only directly appeal to one of our senses, sight, uses scent as a catalyst to advance the story. The stranger initially tries to apply the perfume to Andrea’s neck himself; she at first refuses both the gesture and the gift, but finally accepts the bottle. She tries the perfume when she is alone in her room, and we wonder whether it has some kind of magic effect on her, inspiring her wild dreams. When she emerges from her room to answer the phone, the stranger intercepts her, and recommences his seduction by smelling the finger she used to apply the perfume.

Later, the narrative continues to revolve around objects: Andrea and her husband are thrown together with the stranger when they meet in a piano shop where the stranger befriends her husband by allowing the couple to take the last model of a piano. When Andrea is on the point of deciding between her lover and her husband, the story ricochets between two objects: the goodbye letter that Andrea has instructed a servant to give to her husband at a set time, and the compact that another woman has left on her lover’s bed: one object threatens her conventional life, and the other her dream life of romantic passion.

The 20th ‘Made in Prague’ Festival offered a rare opportunity to see this film on 35mm (recently restored by the Czech National Film Archive), with flawless live accompaniment by pianist Thomas Ang, and Lydia Kavina on theremin. One of the earliest electronic instruments, the theremin has a ghostly sound and wonderful range: Kavina (who studied under the instrument’s inventor, Léon Theremin, himself) was able to evoke the deep rumble of a train, piercing notes to accentuate moments of high emotion, and even play jaunty dance tunes – no easy task when you have no physical contact with the instrument you’re playing. The theremin is an instrument whose vibrato seems very much of its time and perfectly suited to the melodrama of silent film, yet it also feels contemporary: not only is it electronic, but effectively a wireless form of music.

Alison Frank

Spione

Spione
Spione

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 24 November 2014

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Fritz Lang

Writers: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou

Based on the novel by: Thea von Harbou

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch

Germany 1928

145 mins

Fritz Lang’s Spione starts with a bang and rarely lets up. Documents are stolen, couriers assassinated, there’s a motorcycle chase and all hell breaks lose at the Ministry of War, yelling and shouting that something must be done. The frenetic excitement of the opening minutes and much of the unflagging two and a half hours of glorious entertainment that follow suggest a conscious need to please, divert and thrill.

For Lang, the film was a return to familiar territory. Following the grandiose and financially disastrous Metropolis, the 38-year-old director found himself besieged. His studio, UFA, wanted to dump the blame for the disaster onto him and get rid of him, and there was undoubtedly the anxiety that he had lost his touch, lost his ability to pull in an audience. Harking back to his earlier work, Spione was ‘a small film, with plenty of action’ as Lang himself described it. Based on a screenplay by his wife Thea von Harbou, the story revolves around a Mabuse-like super-criminal, Haghi (played by Mabuse actor and Harbou’s former husband Rudolf Klein-Rogge). Haghi sports a Lenin beard, smokes cigarettes that must taste of brimstone and perfidy, and sits in a wheelchair in his secret lair located in an important bank.

Ranged against him are the inept and bureaucratic government agencies, who are largely played for laughs with red-faced confusion and a lot of harrumphing from Jason (Craighall Sherry), the head of the agency tasked with bringing Haghi to justice. If anything is to be done it will be thanks to the agent known only as Number 326 (Willy Fritsch). Initially a streetwise tramp, 326 quickly sheds his disguise to become a dapper gentleman, but his cover is already blown and Sonja Baranilkowa (Gerda Maurus), one of Haghi’s agents, has been sent to seduce and compromise him. However, Haghi didn’t bank on Sonja and 326 falling in love.

Lang keeps everything going at a hell of a pace and there are a number of stunning set-pieces. His universe is one of detail, and he litters the film with scraps of information, numbers and names, a puzzle to be unpicked, but the meaning of which, or even the existence of meaning, remains unclear. Haghi’s power is facilitated by the corruption of the society he seeks to destroy. Not only is its elite ripe for extortion – a wealthy society girl is blackmailed because of her opium habit, inscrutable Japanese spy Akira Masimoto (Lupu Pick) falls for a rain-sodden waif – but its institutions are inept and blustering and deskbound. Whereas Haghi has a nicely minimalist control panel and a telephone, Jason et al are buried under mounds of paperwork. Haghi himself, though, represents a paradox, one perhaps that lies at the heart of all conspiracy theories. If this master criminal is so powerful, with his massive infrastructure and his metaphorical tentacles stretching, his obvious wealth and endless resources as the director of a bank, then what does he hope to gain by all this convoluted plotting? This point is made all the weirder when he reveals that he doesn’t even need a wheelchair. Why go to the bother and discomfort of pretending to be an invalid? As William S. Burroughs might have observed, we are all controlled by our need to control.

Ultimately, Fritz Lang’s film is a thrilling entertainment, whose inventiveness is evident in every scene, almost every shot. Twists can happen on every level, from the narrative to something as simple as a location. A brutal fight in a boxing ring is revealed to be incongruously and brilliantly taking place in a nightclub. The details – a bloody hand print on a stolen document – tell a whole story, and his characters are drawn with a variety of techniques, from naturalism to heightened theatricality. As Adrian Martin notes in his brilliant essay on the film, everyone smokes in a highly individual way. Of course it is difficult to watch pre-war German cinema without glimpsing foreshadowing and prophecies for what is yet to come, but this restored and re-mastered version will now allow everyone to experience this world at its darkest and brightest.

Eureka’s Masters of Cinema dual format release of Spione comes with a 69-minute documentary on the film and a 40-page booklet including new and exclusive writing by critic Murielle Joudet and an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

John Bleasdale