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Beethoven's death mask dissolves to Séverin-Mars in grave close-up for the actor's introduction, a similar effect puts Emmy Lynn on a pedestal to lend arms and a head to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She's an heiress blackmailed by a cad (Jean Toulout) in the wake of a murder, she buys his silence and hopes to start anew with the composer, whose own daughter (Elizabeth Nizan) is wooed by the scoundrel. "Une vieille histoire," Abel Gance galvanizes it with a reminder of what "melo-drama" literally means. The musician at the piano hungers for inspiration and his muse materializes as a spectral miniature on the keyboard, an insert of a collapsing house of cards states an emotional pang. He mistakes his beloved's anxiety toward the interloper for infidelity, inflaming his artistry: "Pain kills or creates. I have just found the subject for my next symphony." The recital of his opus is the centerpiece, "old Ludwig Van" redivivus for a rapt audience, melodic splendor visualized as a scampering nymph boxed in by friezes in a proto-widescreen. ("Transfiguration" is the word, assuredly a sire to Ken Russell.) DeMille's The Cheat is the compositional mainstay, figures in a cluttered drawing room become silhouettes behind a frosted divider and a lamp is turned off prior to a dramatic announcement for high-contrast lighting. Letters like inky intertitles and portentous quotes from Berlioz and Guérin, the omen of a dog's bloody pawprint on the rug and the prank of a parrot's phone call to the stuffy suitor (André Lefaur). The gilded divinity impassively watching it all is a kitschy idol on the shelf. "Tais-toi, mon coeur!" Gance takes a bow at the close to clinch the director-conductor link. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |