Rapt (1934)
Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff

Film Review

The author of some of the most sublime examples of silent cinema, Dimitri Kirsanoff deserves to have his name listed alongside the other great film pioneers of the 1920s, but Fate, as fickle as ever, seems unwilling to grant him much more than a terse footnote in the history of cinema.  No one who has seen Ménilmontant (1925) or Brumes d'automne (1929) can fail to be moved to tears by the exquisite artistry and originality of Kirsanoff's early work.  Like his equally gifted contemporaries Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier and Jean Epsein, he was a natural master of the cinematographic art who revealed just how beautiful and expressive a medium cinema could be when it passes through the hands of a creative genius.

Born in Estonia, Dimitri Kirsanoff fled to Paris after the Russian Revolution with the intention of making a career as a musician.  It was by playing the cello at film screenings that he acquired an interest in cinema and soon began making experimental films on his own account.   For his early films, he was influenced by the impressionist style of Gance and L'Herbier, and he also appropriated the aggressive montage techniques that Gance had pioneered on La Roue (1923).  The films that Kirsanoff made in the 1920s - all shorts - are astonishingly fresh and vivid visual poems that capture the essence of life just as vigorously as the French impressionist painters of the 19th century.  Kirsanoff was the definitive impressionistic filmmaker, and it is a tragedy that he is not recognised as such and still languishes in obscurity, one of the unjustly overlooked auteurs of the seventh art.

Kirsanoff's reluctance to make commercial films, or indeed films for anyone other than himself, was probably the main reason why he failed to achieve lasting recognition.   It wasn't until 1934 that he directed his first feature-length film, Rapt, which was also his first sound film.  Based on a 1922 novel by the Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz entitled La Séparation des races, Rapt is a fairly conventional melodrama for its time, but one filmed in a wholly unconventional manner. Virtually all of the film was shot on location, in some of the most breathtaking Swiss countryside, and this immediately sets the film apart from most francophone cinema of the time.  From the stunning landscapes that adorn the film, it is apparent that Kirsanoff was taking his inspiration from the picturesque work of the Scandinavian filmmakers of the previous decades - notably Victor Sjöström (The Lass from the Stormy Croft, The Outlaw and his Wife) and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Bride of Glomdal).

Rapt was made at a time when French cinema was enjoying a brief flirtation with neo-realism, the result (maybe) of the popularity of Marcel Pagnol's early Provençal films.  Pagnol's Angèle (1934), Marc Allègret's Sans famille (1934) and Jean Renoir's Toni (1936) were notable examples of early neo-realism where French film directors reacted against the studio-bound conventions of the day and sought to develop a more naturalistic style of cinema.  Kirsanoff had the same objective in mind with Rapt and, of all the attempts at French neo-realism in the 1930s, this is probably the most successful.  Nothing in this film appears staged or manufactured - the characters, their setting and their experiences are as real as you could ever hope to find in a film of this era, and you cannot but be impressed by its charm and modernity.

Rapt is far more than a melodrama.  It is an astute, blisteringly honest study in human frailty and also a powerful morality play on the futility of revenge.  Made at a time when there was great political uncertainty in Europe and another major war looked highly likely, Rapt was almost certainly intended as a cogent allegory - one that anticipates the terrible conflagration that would rain down if enmities between the ideologically divided communities of the world were allowed to grow and build to an all-out war.  Why else would Kirsanoff have departed so dramatically from the ending of Ramuz's original novel, which allowed the heroine to escape to safety after her abductor had received his just desserts?  No such happy ending awaits the watcher of Kirsanoff's film.

There is no hint of the terrors that lie in store when Rapt begins, casually passing itself off as a gentle rural idyll with happy folk leading a contented life in the Swiss mountains.  But it isn't long before the first discordant note is sounded.  A dog is seen pursuing sheep.  A man grabs hold of a rock.  The dog is killed.  And so the war begins.  The tit-for-tat cycle is soon set in motion, mistrust of 'the other' turning into contempt and then outright hatred.  And it ends, predictably enough, a nice pretty tableau from the Apocalypse.  Only when the game has been played out and everything is consumed by fire will man learn to forgive his fellow man.  Rapt presents a terrifyingly prescient vision of the fate that would befall the world before the decade had run its course.  Or maybe it is a future yet to come?

So powerful are Rapt's visuals that it could have worked perfectly well as a silent film, but, ever the innovator, Kirsanoff gives it even greater power by some inspired use of sound.  The visuals are striking but it is the blend of sound effects and music that gives the film its uniquely eerie feel and lends such a nightmarish intensity to its final sequences.  Arthur Honegger's unconventional score contains a passage that is spookily redolent of the famous love theme that Bernard Hermann later composed for Vertigo (1958), and as in Hitchcock's film the music is hauntingly evocative of unquenched desire and unattainable love.  Dialogue is used parsimoniously and is hardly needed - so much is expressed by the strong images and noises that accompany them.

In the film's most dramatic sequence (a grim prelude to its horrific climax), the sudden, surprising violence of a night-time storm anticipates a brutal rape.  Through some creepily expressionistic lighting, the sympathetic kidnapper Firmin is transformed from an impetuous innocent into a wild animal, a thing consumed by lust.  We hardly need to see the recurring image of a bucket overflowing with water to realise Firmin's intent as he moves purposefully towards his captive.  The howling winds, screaming like a hoard of demons, seem to glory in this bestial release, but on this occasion the woman triumphs and the beast is subjugated.  It is hard to mistake the look of contentment on Elsi's face at the end of this sequence.  The tables have been turned and she knows now that it is Firmin, not she, who is the prisoner, ensnared by the mysterious power that nature has granted to her sex.

Rapt is hardly subtle in its depiction of sexual desire - in fact, it positively revels in it, dwelling on this aspect of human experience more brazenly than perhaps any other film of this time.  Even before its Production Code came into force (in the early 1930s), Hollywood was never as candid about the male-female attraction as this film is.  There's nothing remotely pornographic or lubricious about Rapt (save the one fleeting glimpse of Dita Parlo's exposed bosom).  All that needs to be said is conveyed by the all-too-revealing close-ups of the protagonists and a relentless slew of visual metaphors, which become more explicit as the film progresses.  Is there any other film of the 1930s that expresses with such intensity and such naked bravado that most violent and tempestuous of forces - the one that ensnares the sexes, imprisons them and hurls them into the hottest volvano?   But there is another urge that we seem to be equally susceptible to - the urge to destroy.  Rapt's final image - a madman laughing triumphantly amid the all-consuming destruction he has brought upon himself - is one that will stay with you forever.  Is this to be our ultimate fate?

Film Synopsis

High up in the Swiss mountains, two close-knit village communities sit opposite one another, separated by language and a wide valley that neither is inclined to cross.  Firmin, a young man from the French-speaking village, is heartbroken when he finds his dog has been killed by a shepherd in the other, German-speaking village.  He takes his revenge by abducting the shepherd's fiancée, Elsi, and carrying her back to his own village, where he imprisons her in his house.  Elsi's younger brother goes looking for his missing sister in the mountains, but slips and falls to his death.  Firmin soon has second thoughts about keeping Elsi prisoner, but persuades himself he cannot release her as, owing to the onset of winter, it is now unsafe to make the return journey across the mountains.  The real reason why Firmin cannot let Elsi go is that he has fallen in love with her - his fiancée Jeanne knows as much, as does his reproachful mother.  News of her brother's death reaches Elsi via a peddler, and she resolves that before leaving Firmin's village she will have her revenge.  To that end, she befriends the village idiot, Manu, and plans to use his love of fire for an evil purpose...