Peter von Bagh on Lilith

Lilith with Peter Fonda, Jean Seberg.

Peter von Bagh:

Lilith

The psychiatrist in Lilith tells us that in Shakespeare’s days ecstasy was a reference to madness. The association has not lost its meaning since love still belongs to the realm of the forbidden like insanity. Which is why one of the modern cinema’s finest love stories takes place in an insane asylum. The protagonist Lilith is sensual, voracious, nymphomaniac. She embraces life in a holistic way and possesses a preternatural ability to catch overtones beyond regular communication. She even has a language of her own.

Losing one’s mental balance was a key theme in the cinema of the 1960s internationally, a reaction to the prevailing confusion and alienation of the times.

Lilith was Robert Rossen’s last film and entirely different from all others he had written or directed. The polemical, “engaged”, aggressive talent of All the King’s Men turned out in the last instance to be a poet and a sensualist. Insanity which would become a fashionable theme and a key reflection of the social condition (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) was here an expression of a life reduced to extreme privacy and a symbol of human sensitivity.

Jean-André Fieschi compared Lilith with Vertigo. To him only these two works had found a cinematic form for something undefinable and unattainable.

Jean Seberg claimed that Rossen understood precisely that in this film he would penetrate the external towards something deeper, to a zone between clairvoyance and a state called madness.

“I remember the Jewish Passover celebration spent among Rossen’s family, the Jewish dinner and the thousand candles that burned in the room, while Rossen chanted the ritual songs with his sons, and I had the impression that there was in Rossen, and his film, something very precious and very secret that I would never find again”. (Jean Seberg: “Lilith and I”, interviewed by Jean-André Fieschi, Cahiers du Cinéma in English 7, January 1967).

– From: Peter von Bagh: Kaipuun punainen hetki. Suuret rakkauselokuvat. [The Red Moment of Desire. The Great Love Movies]. Helsinki: Otava 1991/2001. Unused translation by Antti Alanen for Il Cinema Ritrovato (2019): the film was not scheduled, after all.