In the minds of most knowledgeable filmgoers
today, Ernst Lubitsch's name is mainly associated with sophisticated
comedies of the early sound era like The Love Parade (1929) and
Trouble in
Paradise (1932) as well as Ninotchka
(1939), one of the two incontestably great
films made by Greta Garbo in this country--the other one being George Cukor's
Camille (1937). Nevertheless, the Lubitsch filmography, particularly before the
arrival of sound, does not consist exclusively of comedies--although Lubitsch made
them from early on--but offers a surprisingly diverse range of works, including
in Germany the important historical spectacles Madame Dubarry (1919) and
Anne
Boleyn (1920),as well as the oriental fantasy Sumurun (1920), in which the
director also played one of the main roles.
After coming to this country, the director suffered a setback when his first production,
Rosita (1923), was rejected by its
star and producer, Mary Pickford, as incongruent with the image of "America's
Sweetheart." A mildly ribald tale set in eighteenth century Spain,
Rosita
boasts some striking decor by Sven Gade and William Cameron Menzies, effective cinematography by
Charles Rosher, and costumes by Mitchell Leisen. But with The Marriage Circle in
the following year, the "Lubitsch Touch" enjoyed its first real
triumph on the American screen.
Although movies like The Marriage
Circle,
Forbidden Paradise (1924), and Lady Windermere's Fan (1925) all reinforced
Lubitsch's reputation as a worldly cynic when it came to matters of the heart,
he directed a remarkably lyrical adaptation of Sigmund Romberg's operetta The
Student Prince, In Old Heidelberg (1927). As much a Proustian remembrance of the
pre-World War I Central European milieu of petty courts and high life in which
Lubitsch always seems to have been most at home as it is a screen
adaptation of Romberg's hit, In Old Heidelberg concludes
with a rapturous scene--one of the greatest evocations of irrevocably lost love
in the history of the cinema--in which Prince Karl Heinrich (Ramon Navarro),
having ascended to the throne, returns to the now deserted Heidelberg inn in
search of Kathi (Norma Shearer), only to realize to realize he can never be reunited with
her.
But nothing could have prepared
me for Eternal Love, a curiosity that might well be shown on a double bill with
Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (1932). A late silent film with a synchronized
musical score and effects, this production followed The Patriot (1928), one of
the most tantalizing of all lost films, starring Emil Jannings as the mad Czar Paul
I. Josef Von Sternberg later used a few brief clips of crowd scenes from the
movie in The Scarlet Empress (1934), a malicious prank that may have cost
him his job, since Lubitsch fired Von Sternberg the following year when the
former became head of production at Paramount. Eternal Love has been
recently put out on a DVD by Image, made from a version restored by the UCLA
Film and Television Archive, and in spite of the Archive's disclaimer
about the inferior quality of the materials, the picture quality is better than
that of many silent films available on videotape.
Set
in a small Swiss village in the Alps during the Napoleonic Wars, Eternal
Love--written by Lubitsch's longtime collaborator Hans Kraly,
who adapted a novel by Jakob Christoph Heer--recounts the saga
of a local mountaineer, the stormy, passionate Marcus (John Barrymore), in love
with Ciglia (Camilla Horn). Unfortunately, during a local festival the
intoxicated Marcus tries to force himself on Ciglia, with the result that she
agrees to marry another man. All too late, she realizes she really loves the
tumultuous Marcus, and nothing remains except for the two lovers but to take
their lives by plunging into a nearby waterfall.
Although
Eternal Love boasts
some attractive location photography of the Canadian Rockies by Oliver T. Marsh,
nothing could redeem a dreadful piece of melodramatic kitsch like this.
John Barrymore was still in reasonably good shape at the time he made Eternal
Love, but the great profile already seems to have taken on a few jowls, and
he hardly gives the impression of being comfortable scampering about in peasant
garb. (Anyone who wants to see how ably he could handle a "men in
tights" role a couple of years earlier should check out the video of Don
Juan [1927], Warner Bros. original venture into the wonders of Vitaphone
sound recording.)
What
could have made Lubitsch take an alpine hike like this? Eternal
Love may well be the only mountain film ever made on American soil. A
characteristic manifestation of the unsettled Weimar period, the mountain film
has been rightly described by Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler as
"a film genre which was exclusively German". According to Kracauer's
incisive commentary, the genre was mainly the creation of Dr. Arnold Fanck,
whose first productions date back to the early 1920s, but it really came into
its own with the appropriately named Peak of Destiny (1924) about the time
Lubitsch emigrated to the United States.
It
is hardly difficult today to understand the incredible popularity of the
mountain film genre
during the period. In the first place, they offered a cheap celluloid escape
from the problems of contemporary German life by allowing viewers to identify
themselves with the exploits of heroic figures who dwelt in the clouds. Kracauer
points out how mountain climbing enabled its aficionados long before the end of
the Wilhelminian Reich to "look down on what they called 'valley
pigs'--those plebeian crowds who never made an effort to elevate themselves to
lofty heights."
Nor could these movies
have failed to appeal to the members of various youth groups like the
Wandervogel--groups whose significance for the rise of Nazism has been examined in
detail by Jean-Pierre Faye in his monumental work Langages totalitaires.
Just as
their strongly nationalistic orientation represented an attempt to return to the
good old days before the signing of the Versailles treaty, these youth groups often
saw in outdoor sports an "authentic mode" of recovering the pure
German-ness which had been sullied by the Weimar regime.
Although
the overtly fascistic implications of the genre only came explicitly to the fore
somewhat later, in The Blue Light of
Riefenstahl--who had risen to fame as the
star of several Fanck productions--and in the films of Luis Trenker, these
implications were always present in the treatment of landscape. To quote
Kracauer once more: "the idolatry of glaciers and rocks was symptomatic of
an antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize." In these movies,
landscape never figures--even in Eternal Love--as mere background for the
action, but is itself a major player in the drama.
To
grasp the point of Kracauer's observation, it is only necessary to compare the
quite different role that natural settings play in the films of older American
directors such as D.W. Griffith or John Ford, or their contemporaries, in
which the glorification of nature has its roots in American
Romanticism, especially in the writings of Emerson, or even harks back
to the natural sublime--as it does in Ford's westerns. But in the German films
that Kracauer refers to, nature always seems charged with an ominous supernatural
force--a motif that continues right into the opening shots of Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will, with Hitler's flight to
Nuremberg through masses of clouds piled up like mountain peaks.
In
effect, what Kracauer calls "the idolatry of glaciers and rocks"
revives in a depraved form the Romantic idea of spirit of place--the genius
loci--an idea that also plays a conspicuous role in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger
contemporaneous with the vogue of the mountain film. Moreover, these same
writings fairly swarm with denunciations of the "rootlessness" (Bodenlosigkeit)
of modern life, a radical defect that Heidegger chalks up to the forgetting of
Being and the rise of "rational"--that is, technological--thought.
Jacques
Derrida, in his essay on Emmanuel Levinas, "Violence et métaphysique,"
is probably right to reject the philosopher's polemical assertion that
Heidegger's promotion of place would lead to a return to human sacrifice. Yet
the patent connection between the popularity of the mountain film and the rise
of Nazism, on the one hand, and Heidegger's abhorrence of everything that smacks
of urban--read: non-Aryan--culture, along with his incessant praise of the simplicities
of rural life, on the
other, should make clear how little there is of mere coincidence
here.
The big question, once
again, is: Why
did Lubitsch want to make this film at all? Possibly he was aware of the success
of the genre in Germany and wanted to show the folks back home he could do just
as well working in a Hollywood studio rather than in the hallowed halls of Ufa
in Neubabelsberg. An even more
intriguing possibility is that Lubitsch wanted to rival Friedrich Murnau, who had
distinguished himself with Sunrise, made for Fox in 1927. Although the film was
no hit at the box office, it had attracted a good deal of admiration among
reviewers and in the industry itself--a local tremor whose shock waves Lubitsch
would have hardly ignored.
In fact, there
was an evident strain of nostalgic archaism--which he shared in common with
members of the Blaue Reiter group, who were quite fascinated with
"primitive" art--in Murnau's work, from early efforts like Burning
Soil (1922) down to his last film, Tabu (1931). Moreover,
Sunrise, in which a
young farmer is seduced by a bad woman from the big city who wants him to kill
his wife and run off with her, might superficially appear to be preaching the
same moral as that of the mountain films: good nature, bad civilization.
But
Murnau's tragic vision of human alienation from nature--perhaps indebted to
J.-J. Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel--is as far removed from the reactionary
simplicities of the mountain films as the latter are from one of Lubitsch's
bedroom farces. The suffocatingly kitschy shot of the farmer with his wife and
child in the fields that appears in a flashback at the beginning of Sunrise,
when the neighbors relate how happy the couple was before the vamp came on the
scene, reveals the depth of this rupture: there never has been and never will be
a return to the state of nature in human history. The blatant falsity of
the image bears witness to the emptiness of this dream.
Murnau
gives no credence to the Christian myth of a felix culpa which holds open
the promise of a return to paradise at the end of time, and even less to the
depraved fascistic myth of a return to natural innocence by throwing off the
shackles of civilized life. The memory of a supposed in illo tempore when the
human species lived in a state of harmony with nature can only survive in marginal images
like the wreaths of flowers at the beginning of Tabu. Although the first part of
Tabu is deceptively
entitled "Paradise," the pastoral life it depicts is only a reverie
for Western audiences, an all too human one, of a paradise that has "always
already" been lost. It is the fate of the two young lovers to reenact that
loss in human time.
What a strange bridge
that joins The Patriot to Lubitsch's succeeding production, The Love
Parade,
going from a serious historical spectacle to a virtual travesty of the
historical spectacle by way of a back-to-nature romance. In comparison to the
rustic pieties of Eternal Love, the director's first sound film seems a virtual
glorification of artifice, in both subject matter and style. But what is
artifice if not the violation of nature? And what does the accusation of
artificiality imply if not the possibility of enjoying nature untainted by human
intervention?
Kracauer, for example,
makes the following incredible concession about the mountain films: "These
films were extraordinary in that they captured the most grandiose aspects of
nature at a time when the German screen in general offered nothing but
studio-made scenery." With these words and his ensuing raptures over the
visual magic of the mountain films, Kracauer profoundly compromises his
otherwise brilliant analysis of the dubious ideological content of the genre.
Good is the unadulterated nature of Dr. Fanck and bad the "studio-made
scenery."
This
argument is nonsensical. If the studio sets are somehow a "violation" of
nature, simply aiming a camera at any object whatsoever is a
"violation" of its "natural" integrity. The idea that movies ever
achieve an "innocent," "natural" rapport with physical
reality, an idea promoted by Kracauer which still lives on in good deal of
theorizing about the medium, is as much of a myth as the promised return to
pagan innocence of the mountain films.
It
is not always easy to find the boundary between artifice and artificiality,
which are often confounded today. But to reject
artifice as an act of violence directed against nature is to pave the way for
what Derrida in the same essay called "the
worse violence, that of primitive and pre-logical silence, of an unimaginable
night which not even be the contrary of day, of an absolute violence which would
not be the contrary of non-violence: nothing or pure non-sense."
This
DVD is available from Amazon.com
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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