Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema, Vito Adriaensens, Edniburgh University Press 2023
This is a guest post by Alex Barrett for Silent London. Alex Barrett is an award-winning independent filmmaker based in London.
All too often over the years, the term “theatrical” has been thrown at films as an insult, as if showing an influence from the stage is something to be deplored. Such a notion stems, perhaps, from the idea that if cinema is to be considered a true art form, it must distinguish itself through uniqueness, shedding any influence from the other arts.
The notion of medium-specificity is discussed early on in Vito Adriaensens’ refreshing take on film history, which argues for a different tack: in this engaging study of early European film, Adriaensens seeks to show how heavily the roots of Euro cinema were, in fact, entangled in other art forms and how, by associating itself with the established arts, the fledgling medium sought to legitimise itself in the eyes of its audience.
Drawing on the tenets of New Historicism, Adriaensens moves away from – or beyond – strictly auteurist and nationalist approaches to posit a wide-ranging “intermedial” approach focused on “the intricate web of cultural correlations that can be spun between visual arts, performing arts, and screen arts”, which, he argues, is necessary for us to be able to fully grasp the socio-cultural context of cinema history. If Adriaensens perhaps pushes his thesis a little too strongly at times (“I am convinced that the field of film and media studies would benefit enormously from a further investigation of the manifold relationships between the medium of film and painting, theatre, and photography”), he does so in a persuasive fashion.
Focusing mostly on the period between 1908 and 1914, Adriaensens makes his case by tracing the origins of the art film, from the French company Le Film d’Art through to Gaumont’s Grands Films Artistiques and Nordisk’s Dansk Kunstfilm series. In doing so, he demonstrates how the filmmakers of the period attempted to court a middle-class audience more at home in legitimate theatres than the early film houses, by tailoring their work towards bourgeois taste. As such, the book becomes an absorbing history of ‘prestige’ cinema, with a sideways glance at the development of film criticism and film journals, notably the work of early cultural commentator and film aesthetician Ricciotto Canudo.
By situating these early art films within the framework of bourgeois taste, Adriaensens views them not as works of modernism, but as belonging to the so-called long nineteenth century, defined as beginning with the French Revolution of 1789 and ending with the start of the First World War in 1914. In this context, such works – rather than being blazing explosions of avant-garde originality – belong firmly in the pan-European traditions of the Grand Tour, legitimate theatre and genre painting. Now often dismissed as kitsch, genre art focused on domestic scenes of everyday life, and was popular at the time because it allowed middle-class society to see their own lives reflected on canvas.
To demonstrate his ideas more concretely, Adriaensens includes two case studies. The first focuses on the Danish star Betty Nansen, who started her career on the stage, before transitioning to the screen. She worked for both Nordisk in Denmark and Fox in the US (after being courted by William Fox himself). A muse to Henrik Ibsen, who bequeathed manuscripts to her upon his death, she was a popular, established theatre star whose clout was used by filmmakers as a marker of quality. After just five years of filmmaking, however, she returned to the theatre, launching her own venue – the Betty Nansen Teatret – which remains the “only legitimate Danish theatre ever to be named after a person”. As just one of many stars from this era who moved smoothly between the two media, Nansen’s story perfectly exemplifies Adriaensens’ notion that there was much fluidity between stage and screen in cinema’s early years.
For his second case study, Adriaensens stretches the date range into the 20s, to show how the look of Victor Sjöström’s 1922 Vem dömer (known in English as both Mortal Clay and Love’s Crucible) bears the influence of genre painting, ‘Rembrandt’ lighting and Pictorialism, all of which Adriaensens expounds on at length in a fascinating chapter focusing on “the common ground that exists between” these art movements and early European cinema, and which “suggests a continuation of a certain style, or a set of visual strategies, from the former through to the latter” – as amply illustrated by his analysis of Vem dömer. Interestingly, Vem dömer was distributed in the US by Little Theatre Film, who believed that it would appeal to the same “discriminating” audience that they were reaching with their “modernist, anti-commercial” theatrical work – once again demonstrating how the strategies of art and theatre were used to reel in a discerning middle-class audience.
In some ways, the ideas at the heart of Adriaensens’ thesis are rather simple, and the book feels both slim and sprightly. It’s also richly fascinating, especially for readers whose interest in the arts stretches beyond the silver screen. In his conclusion, Adriaensens states that the “end goal has always been to better understand the driving cultural and artistic forces at play behind this formative period in film history” and, thanks to this excellent volume, interested readers have the opportunity to do just that.
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