Film Review
Birth of the soundtrack
Innovation was the lifeblood of Marcel L'Herbier's early years as a film
director. Between 1918 and 1920 he had made five full-length films
and, in doing so, established himself as one of the leading lights of the
French Avant-Garde, a group of radical young screenwriters and filmmakers
that was committed to extending the poetic reach of the already staid medium
of cinema. L'Herbier's experiments with camera effects, lighting and
cinema technique introduced impressionistic tropes that gave his conception
of film art a distinctive visual look - one that took the spectator beyond
the hard outer world of appearances, into the much more malleable inner worlds
of his protagonists. There was one domain that remained stubbornly
out of his reach, however - that of sound. To realise his vision of
cinema fully L'Herbier saw the integration of sound and image as essential,
but as the problem of synchronizing the two remained, apparently way beyond
the capabilities of the technology of the time, it must have seemed a distant
dream. Many of L'Herbier's contemporaries believed that whereas colour
cinema was just around the corner, fully synchronized sound cinema would
be decades away - if indeed it was even a technical possibility.
For his sixth feature, the 33-year-old L'Herbier committed himself to achieving
at least a partial solution to the problem. His idea was to commission
a complete musical score that would be fully synchronized with the pictures
making up the film. It was not the first time that music had been written
for a silent film, but it would be - as L'Herbier insisted for the rest of
his life - the first attempt to fully integrate music and the moving image
into a single, coherent work of art. As the director conceived it,
El Dorado was to be a radically new kind of film - a
Mélodrame.
It was a melodrama not only in the present-day sense of the term (a sensationalised
piece of theatre), but also in the
original sense, a composition in
which music and drama would be harmoniously married. L'Herbier's brainchild
was effectively cinema's first ever musical - so essential is music to the
telling of its story.
In this task, the director enlisted the help of a talented 21-year-old composer,
Marius-François Gaillard (also a great pianist, renowned for his recordings
of Claude Debussy's piano music). Gaillard's brief was to compose an
original modern score that was in perfect alignment with the fully edited
film, following its constantly changing moods and assisting the narrative
flow. Six years before the release of the first talkie -
The Jazz Singer (1927) - L'Herbier's
film created a sensation and was his first major success. The first
public screening of
El Dorado on 20th October 1921 at the Gaumont-Palace
in Paris was an important milestone in cinema history - the arrival of the
film soundtrack. It marked the beginning of the end of silent cinema
and the start of a whole new era - sadly an era in which L'Herbier's reputation
as a great film innovator would rapidly dwindle to practically nothing as
a brand new generation of filmmaker rose up to take his place.
A Spanish interlude
El Dorado was the last but one of the six films that Marcel L'Herbier made
for Gaumont as part of its prestigious Série Pax range, a series of
experimental but polished works that included his first unqualified masterpiece
L'Homme du large (1920).
This latter film had benefited from an extensive location shoot in Brittany
and this was an experience that the director was keen to repeat in a more
exotic setting - southern Spain. Influenced by the important French
Symbolist writer Maurice Barrès, a noted Hispanophile, L'Herbier saw
the immense artistic possibilities for shooting a film in Spain. The
distinctive architecture, the colourful culture and the stunning countryside
vistas were all crying out to be captured on celluloid.
L'Herbier could hardly believe his good fortune when he was granted permission
to take a film crew into the famous Alhambra Palace in Granada, one of world's
greatest examples of Islamic architecture dating back to the early 13th century.
(L'Herbier was the first filmmaker to be accorded this immense honour, a
sign of his importance at the time.) With its elaborate arches and
ornate marble columns, set in stunningly geometric gardens laden with sculptured
shrubs and gushing fountains, the Alhambra was a gift of a location for any
filmmaker, but only a director with such a keen visual sense as L'Herbier
could capture on film its ageless grandeur, spiritual ambiance and haunting
mystique. Around this miracle of design and construction he weaves
a dream-poem worthy of its reputation as one of the world's true architectural
marvels.
L'Herbier's location filming extended to other areas around Grenada, Seville
and the Sierra Nevada, effectively contrasting the oppressive, morally draining
character of the dense urban settings with the more Elysian, spiritually
curative aspects of the surrounding Andalusian countryside. L'Herbier
took advantage of the Easter festivities to film the Holy Week processions
in Seville. This not only adds to the film's realism and visual impact,
it also provides a potent metaphor, connecting Christ's martyrdom with the
ultimate fate of the heroine as she endures her own personal Calvary of suffering,
humiliation and violent death.
Once the exterior filming had been completed, L'Herbier returned to Paris
to shoot the interior scenes at Gaumont's Buttes-Chaumont studios, with sets
designed by Robert-Jules Garnier. An incredibly prolific designer,
Garnier's career spanned four full decades, his main claim to fame being
his impressive work on the
Fantômas
series of films directed by Louis Feuillade for Gaumont in 1913-14.
Garnier's design for the nightclub in
El Dorado conveys perfectly
the alcohol-sodden seediness of this
maison de plaisir and has the
dank, claustrophobic feel of an underground burrow frequented by all manner
of vermin. At the same time, it occupies a vast space - large enough
for L'Herbier to show us the full range of clientele that is drawn to this
popular haven of sin and debauchery through his customary deep-space mise-en-scène.
A model martyr
Intense burning passion is so much a part of the Spanish psyche that without
it any cultural reference to Spain would be as dead and hollow as a dried-up
husk. From the poetry of Lorca to the paintings of Picasso and the
music of Rodrigo - to cite just three defining examples of Hispanic culture
- extreme emotions are what drive the native Spaniard's soul, so full-on
melodrama was the natural choice for L'Herbier's florid Spanish interlude,
despite its unfortunate reputation as 'low culture' in Europe's more temperate
countries. (Pedro Almodóvar had the same instincts as L'Herbier
and managed to turn Spanish melodrama into a fine art, making it the lustrous
core of his oeuvre sixty years later.)
El Dorado is almost the exact antithesis of L'Herbier's earlier, far
more naturalistic drama
L'Homme du large. Its heroine Sibilla
is a faded beauty who is forced to perform as an exotic nightclub dancer
so she can buy the medicine she needs for her chronically ill infant child
after being abandoned by her vile lover. Temperamentally and physically,
Sibilla is a close cousin of Bizet's Carmen, just as capable of arousing
the fieriest of lust in the men who fall under her spell, but just as prone
to self-inflicted torment as her wild passions take possession of her.
Through Ève Francis's blazingly intense portrayal of her, Sibilla
is one of French silent cinema's most memorable protagonists, the template
for the host of female martyrs stoically bearing the cross of betrayal and
rejection in countless subsequent film melodramas, most notably the classic
American weepy of the 1940s and '50s. The agony and injustice experienced
by a strong and passionate woman in a world dominated by cruel, selfish men
is evoked with an almost unbearable pathos by Ève Francis, as it would
later be done in Hollywood classics featuring (among others) Bette Davis,
Joan Crawford and Olivia de Havilland.
L'Herbier's decision to cast Éve Francis in
El Dorado's lead
role was no accident - at the time, no other actress was more closely associated
with the Parisian Avant-Garde. For one thing, she was married to Louis
Delluc, the highly influential film critic who became one of the movement's
leading proponents, contributing a series of significant impressionistic
films before his untimely death in 1924. Francis starred in his best
films -
Fièvre (1921),
La Femme de nulle part
(1922),
L'Inondation (1924) - but before this she had lent her immense
talents to another trail-blazing star of the Avant-Garde, Germaine Dulac.
In the 1930s, the Belgian actress sallied forth to the other side of the
camera and became an assistant director, working with L'Herbier on several
of his films of this decade, including
Le
Bonheur (1934),
La Route
impériale (1935) and
Forfaiture
(1937).
The two faces of Galatea
El Dorado's lead male role - that of the romantic Swedish painter
Hedwick - was an easy shoe-in for Jaque-Catelain, L'Herbier's friend, protégé,
collaborator but, most importantly, his principal muse. Catelain's
boyish, androgynous features and almost female sensitivity made him the perfect
jeune premier for L'Herbier's modern conception of masculinity, although
what set him apart was an acting style that was quite revolutionary for its
era - so subtle and understated that he scarcely seems to be acting at all.
It was with the director's blessing that Catelain was able to develop not
only his acting skill (allowing him to become one of France's most prominent
film stars within just a few years) but also his wider artistic talents -
as film editor, assistant director, make-up designer and film director (
La Galerie des monstres).
For
El Dorado (as he would later do on
L'Argent) he tried his hand at set
design, contributing the sets inhabited by his own character.
Given the importance of Jaque Catelain in both his private and professional
life, L'Herbier's decision to romantically link him in the film with the
other great love of his life, Marcelle Pradot (soon to become his wife),
is hardly a surprise. Pradot had previously played Catelain's brother
in
L'Homme du large and his object of desire in
Le Carnaval des
vérités (1920), but it is as the delicate Iliana in
El
Dorado that L'Herbier - the most accomplished actor-moulding Pygmalion
in French silent cinema - was most successful in deploying her acting skills
and aristocratic beauty. Pradot's real-life mother Claire Prélia
also appears in the film, in the part of Catelain's on-screen mother - as
she had done in
L'Homme du large and would later do on the director's
subsequent melodrama
Le Vertige
(1925).
The other notable name in the cast list is Philippe Hériat, who makes
an impact in one of his earliest screen roles as the genuinely frightening
lecherous clown Joao. It wasn't long after this that Hériat
embarked on a career as a writer and soon become one of France's most distinguished
novelists.
El Dorado marks another important cinema debut, that
of Alberto Cavalcanti, who would start his impressive directing career in
France with an influential city symphony
Rien que les heures (1926),
before going on to become one of the leading directors at Ealing film studios
in England in the 1940s - helming such classics as
Went the Day Well? (1942)
and
Champagne Charlie (1944).
Before becoming a director, Cavalcanti worked as a set designer on two of
L'Herbier's finest silent films -
L'Inhumaine
(1924) and
Feu Mathias Pascal
(1926) - but before this he claimed his first screen credit as costume designer
on
El Dorado, for which he provided Sibilla's stylish dance costumes.
Distorting reality
The sensational subject matter of
El Dorado and the passionate nature
of its central protagonist gave L'Herbier ample scope for further developing
his distinctively oneiric and subjective style of cinema. Most striking
are the bold optical effects which are employed throughout to stress the
emotional turbulence experienced by the characters as feelings of resentment,
hatred, desire, fear and dejection take hold. A sublime example of
this occurs in the sequence in the nightclub near the start of the film,
where Sibilla becomes partially blurred whilst her surroundings and the people
around her remain sharply in focus. This effect is intended to show
the character losing touch with reality as her mind strays elsewhere - to
her sickly bedridden son in an upstairs room.
One man who was singularly unimpressed with this innovation was L'Herbier's
boss, Léon Gaumont, who took the director to task for what he believed
was an unacceptable flaw in the photography. Relations between the
golden boy of the Avant-Garde and his indulgent patron were already strained
by this point and the fact that
El Dorado went over-budget by 300,000
francs (on an initial budget of 92,000 francs) did not help matters.
L'Herbier's lack of financial restraint on his next film -
Don Juan et
Faust (also partly filmed in Spain) - resulted in the director being
deprived the opportunity of completing the film as he intended and precipitated
his hasty exit from Gaumont. L'Herbier's blasé attitude towards
money would soon take a pasting when he started making films for his own
production company Cinégraphic, a road to freedom that quickly led
him to a humiliating bankruptcy.
Léon Gaumont may not have appreciated L'Herbier's artistic flights
of fancy but without them
El Dorado would occupy a far less significant
place in his oeuvre. The trippiest optical effect is found at the end
of the film for the sequence in which the clown-dancer Joao pounces on the
heroine in a pretty brutal attempt to rape her. Sibilla's horrified
reaction to this savage assault is palpably conveyed to the spectator through
a dramatic distortion of the image, which elongates the already unusually
tall Joao into the shape of a long, thin, slithering giant serpent. It's
a truly gruesome dive into nightmarish spectacle.
In a previous scene showing Hedwick looking at pictures of Spanish architecture,
the images are similarly distorted to show the buildings as he sees them
and presumably intends to paint them. More subtle but no less effective
are the huge close-ups in which the faces of the spectators in the nightclub
are slightly transformed into sinister leering masks of inebriation and lust.
El Dorado's most terrifying images are undoubtedly the grotesque massive
close-ups of Joao as his gaze falls on the unwitting Sibilla, his lascivious
craving so nakedly exposed that it almost knocks you out of your seat.
Lasting impressions
In developing his optical effects and other camera techniques L'Herbier benefited
greatly from his collaboration with Georges Lucas, a staff cinematographer
who worked with him on all of the films he made for Gaumont. Both men
deserve credit for pioneering the use of the subjective camera, which is
another of
El Dorado's striking innovations. The best example
of this are the point-of-view shots showing what Sibilla sees as she spies,
unseen, on Hedwick and Iliana as they wander like lovers in a dream around
the eerily beautiful grounds of the Alhambra at dusk. The dancer's
voyeuristic thrill at what she sees acquires a subtle hint of malevolent
intent, preparing us for the nastier turn the character takes a short while
afterwards.
In a later scene, Hedwick's violent confrontation with his reluctant future
stepfather Estiria takes on a surprisingly comical form when shown to us
from the point of view of the butler who clearly revels in his employer's
long overdue comeuppance. This perspectival shift is all the more dramatic
as it comes immediately after a scene consisting almost entirely of short
portrait shots of Hedwick and Estiria. The fast inter-cutting between
the two men as they exchange heated words not only underlines the aggressive
nature of the confrontation, it also shows the huge emotional and moral separation
of the two characters, leaving no doubt that reconciliation between them
is impossible. Throughout the film, point-of-view shots are employed
to emphasise the motives and intent of the characters, whether they are driven
by tenderness, concern, lust or a burning desire for revenge.
Lighting is another way that the film suggests evil intent. For the
sequence where Sibilla is seen wandering around the gardens of the Alhambra,
she is shot from a distance as an anonymous figure in black like a solitary
bird of prey - a harbinger of doom steeped in brooding menace. It is
only when the camera moves in closer that the extent of Sibilla's poisonous
malignancy becomes apparent, in shadowy profiles that make her resemble some
twisted fiend in a Gothic horror movie. This echoes an earlier sequence,
in which the tiny black outline of Sibilla is seen despondently drifting
down a street bordered with a huge expanse of white wall. Here, the
character has our full sympathies after being brutally ejected from the house
of the former lover who, through vanity, refuses to have anything more to
do with her. By the time the dancer has formed her plan of revenge
she no longer stirs fond feelings within us. As she moves in on the
unsuspecting lovers, her solid black form scuttling in the semi-darkness
becomes a manifestation of pure evil, taking the film to its first dramatic
peak when she entombs her victims in the ancient Palace.
Grim though this sequence is, it is nothing compared with the truly horrific
spectacle that occurs right at the end of the film. As Sibilla succumbs
to her self-inflicted stab wound, the silhouetted outline of her former tormentor
Joao is seen magnified to terrifying proportions on the backdrop behind her
as he performs his comic prances on stage. Not content with shocking
his audience with an explicit self-mutilation, L'Herbier plunges us into
unadorned visceral horror for Sibilla's final agonising moments as she releases
her grasp on her crushed mortal coil. There is nothing romantic about
this screen suicide - it is about as cruel, ugly and painful as a piece of
celluloid could render it, its impact heightened immeasurably by Marius-François
Gaillard's extraordinarily well-matched score.
After
L'Argent (his unsurpassed masterpiece),
El Dorado is
Marcel L'Herbier's most visually impressive film, and what makes the visuals
so incredibly powerful is Gaillard's accompanying music, which is so perfectly
married with the images on the screen that you cannot imagine the one being
separated from the other. Sibilla's emotional excesses, her immense
suffering and brief excursion down the darkest of paths - these are so powerfully
underscored by the music that you really do feel that you have taken a traumatic
roller-coaster ride across the jagged undulations of her tormented soul.
The sequence that follows the final separation of the dancer from her infant
son is almost too painful to watch, with Sibilla's broken heart shown on
her face as she stands in a quiet empty street, a few steps away from a street
guitarist strumming a suitably melancholic air on his instrument. As
the full orchestra cuts out abruptly to leave the plaintive melody of a solitary
guitar the sense of abandonment that Sibilia suddenly experiences hits us
like a gratuitous face-punch. This remarkable scene - probably the
most moving of any Marcel L'Herbier film - ends ominously with a dramatic
fade to white, sending us unsuspectingly into the next grisly passages which
provide even greater assaults on our already frayed emotions - an attempted
rape and suicide.
The golden legacy of an impressionist masterpiece
On its first release in October 1921,
El Dorado was acclaimed by the
French critics and went on to become a box office hit - one of L'Herbier's
few commercial successes in the silent era. Louis Delluc, a fellow
impressionistic filmmaker, may have been biased (as his wife was the lead
actress in the film), but he summed up the overall critical reaction to the
film pretty accurately with his remark:
Ça, c'est du cinéma!
As with all of L'Herbier's silent films,
El Dorado languished in obscurity
for many years until the resurgence of interest in early French cinema in
the 1950s, spearheaded by the committed archivist Henri Langlois. The
film was restored to its former glory in 1995 by the Service des Archives
du Film du CNC, meticulously reassembled with Marius-François Gaillard's
original score.
One of
El Dorado's most notable influences on later cinema was on
Alain Resnais's 1961 film
L'Année dernière
à Marienbad. The hauntingly lyrical quality of the sequences
of the Alhambra in L'Herbier's film is mirrored by similar dreamlike perambulations
around the no less striking garden vistas of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg
in Resnais's somewhat cooler meditation on love and mortality. It is,
however,
El Dorado's earlier impact that is perhaps of far greater
significance. Not only did it help to establish the melodrama as a respectable
genre in cinema of the 1920s (providing a welcome break from the over-formal,
over-respectful literary adaptations that had come to dominate the new medium),
it also showed how important sound - specifically a specially composed score
- was to cinema's expressive powers. Silence may have been golden but
it was not enough for the flourishing Seventh Art.
© James Travers 2023
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Next Marcel L'Herbier film:
L'Inhumaine (1924)