Le Vertige (1926) / The Living Image

Marcel L'Herbier: Le Vertige / The Living Image (FR 1926) with Jaque Catelain in a double role, here as Henri de Cassel. Décors: Robert Mallet-Stevens, Lucien Aguettand, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Lurçat, Pierre Chareau.

La vertigine / US: The Living Image, or The Lady from Petrograd / Lemmen hurma.

    FR 1926 regia/dir: Marcel L’Herbier. scen: Marcel L’Herbier, dalla piece di/based on the play by Charles Méré (1922, Paris). photog: Hans Theyer, Jean Letort. scg/des: Robert Mallet-Stevens, Lucien Aguettand, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Lurçat, Pierre Chareau. cost: Jacques Manuel, Sonia Delaunay. 

    cast: Jaque Catelain (Lieutenant Dimitri Dimitrieff; Henri de Cassel), Emmy Lynn (Natacha Svirsky), Roger Karl (General Svirsky), Claire Prélia (Madame de Cassel), Gaston Jacquet (Charançon), Alexis Bondireff (Louis), Andrews Engelmann (Petroff), Léo da Costa (revolutionary leader), Marcelle Pradot.

    prod. mgr: Eric Allatini. prod: Cinégraphic / Films L’Herbier. dist: Pathé Consortium Cinéma. uscita/rel: 9.7.1926. copia/copy: DCP, c. 117' (da/from 35 mm, orig. l: 2694 m, 20 fps); did./titles: FRA. fonte/source: Lobster Films, Paris

    Helsinki premiere: 28 March 1927 Arkadia, Bio-Bio, released by Adams Filmi.

    Remake: Le Vertige (FR 1935), D: Paul Schiller, C: Alice Field, André Burgère, Jean Toulout.

    Grand piano: Stephen Horne.

    Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Sonia Delaunay, 11 Oct 2023.   

Hilde D’haeyere, Steven Jacobs (GCM 2023): " One of the early key texts on art direction, Robert Mallet-Stevens’s 1928 book Le Décor moderne au cinéma comprises no less than six full-page photographs of the sets that he designed for Le Vertige, made two years earlier by director Marcel L’Herbier, who had already collaborated with Mallet-Stevens and Fernand Léger on L’Inhumaine (1924). Apart from Mallet-Stevens, who developed into one of the leading Art Deco architects in France, L’Herbier gathered for Le Vertige other prominent French modernist art and design talents, including Pierre Chareau, who designed the furniture; Jean Lurçat, who contributed paintings and carpets; and Robert Delaunay, whose 1911 painting of the Eiffel Tower features centrally in the film. Last but most prominently, Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes, as well as fabrics for the furniture, cushions, and curtains that appear throughout the film. "

" Opening in Russia during the turmoil of the October Revolution, with the protagonists fleeing to France, Le Vertige tells the story of a woman who, years later, thinks she recognizes her dead lover in a debonair young man on the French Riviera. The film shares the uncanny return of the dead, the fascination for doubling, and a fear of falling (in love) with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), unfolding a plot of seduction, attraction, and revenge between the partying young man, the unhappily married woman, and her jealous husband. "

" Though Delaunay specifically created garments for women throughout her career as a fashion designer, in Le Vertige she designed almost exclusively for the male protagonist, the double role of Dimitri Dimitrioff and Henri de Cassel, both played by matinee idol Jaque Catelain. Situated in an emphatically modern environment, he is either dressed in sharp suits made by L’Herbier’s regular costume designer Jacques Manuel, or draped in a fluid dressing gown and easy-to-wear pieces such as silk scarves and neckties in striking “Simultaneous” patterns made by Delaunay. "

" The austere but luxurious modernity that surrounds the character of Henri de Cassel also marks his fictional Paris residence. A “cozy corner” in the living room of the Mallet-Stevens set is padded with cushions and curtains made from Sonia Delaunay’s furnishing textiles. All the elements of the room are visually tied together by a circular carpet in medium gray with a lighter rim, on which white playing cards are laid out in straight lines. In fact, the entire home is staged as a modernist domestic environment, in which avant-garde architecture, painting, music, furniture design, carpets, sculptures, and decorations merge in a comprehensive synthesis of art and design on film. Illustrated in a seminal 1926 article on art direction and costume design in film written by Léon Moussinac, the set piece is a perfect example of the way the film medium enables the encounter between Art Deco interior design with pieces of modern art and vanguard fashion design, a modern equivalent of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. "

" The second impressive set piece is the rooftop nightclub Le Transatlantic, designed in Mallet-Stevens’s characteristic geometric style, which turns the space into a site of spectacle: Cubist friezes border each shot filmed in the mezzanine restaurant; patterned elevator doors create new constellations as they open and close; a jazz band performs against a circular backdrop, etc. In so doing, the sets of Le Vertige are not only domestic or recreational spaces for the fictional characters, they also serve as showrooms for the newest trends in modern art and design. Not unlike modern-day product placement, the inclusion of Delaunay pieces is meant to signal her fashion enterprise. In transposing painting and fashion design to the medium of film, Delaunay demonstrated a keen business sense, reconciling her artistic ambitions with her commercial goals, and conflating spaces for living with those for displaying and selling. In a November 1926 review in the French feminist newspaper La Fronde, Germaine Dulac approved the film’s success, noting that earlier works by L’Herbier were mostly only screened in “cinémas d’élites,” while Le Vertige played in all types of movie theaters. In addition, Dulac described Le Vertige as “a very beautiful film, a film ‘de haute classe’ marked by ‘the sensibility of the images or light’ in which ‘lines and expressions play in harmony’.” " Hilde D’haeyere, Steven Jacobs

AA: Plenty of style, but a shortage of substance. 

It starts during the Russian Revolution. The violently jealous White General Svirsky (Roger Karl) shoots the beloved, Ltn. Dimitri Dimitrieff, of his wife Natacha (Emmy Lynn). In exile on the Riviera, Natacha meets a Doppelgänger, Henri de Cassel (Jaque Catelain in a double role). She actually believes he is Dimitri in disguise. When Henri realizes that Natacha does not love him but the memory of her dead beloved, he has second thoughts. But the General's mad jealousy only rises to new levels and leads to a final tragedy.

Le Vertige is a part of the Sonia Delaunay retrospective of the Festival, and the interior design by Robert Mallet-Stevens, Lucien Aguettand, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Lurçat and Pierre Chareau and the costume design by Jacques Manuel and Sonia Delaunay is superb and impressive.

Less impressive is what is inside those impeccable costumes. The acting is unconvincing, Jaque Catelain particularly cannot act in this film. Intriguingly, he was Marcel L'Herbier's acteur-fétiche and also in favour with Jean Renoir, from La Marseillaise to Docteur Cordelier. Not forgetting the casting as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier / Le Chevalier à la rose.

The connection between Le Vertige and Vertigo is superficial but not meaningless. The title Le Vertige is ambiguous. I would guess it is about the feeling of Natacha in the turmoil of the revolution, the exile, the arranged marriage, the ubiquitous jealousy and surveillance, and the meeting of the double, a dead ringer to the one who no longer exists.

Le Vertige also belongs to the works about the mysterious force of transference: Natacha falls in love with an unknown just because he is the double of her former beloved.

Of course there is a parallel with Vertigo. Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, a woman who does not exist, who is just a role created for the murder plan by Gavin Elster. But Hitchcock's psychological depth and passion is missing from L'Herbier's movie.

I have not seen all of L'Herbier's silent films. Of the ones I know, I find L'Argent a masterpiece, and I find much to admire in L'Inhumaine and El Dorado. Feu Mathias Pascal I found boring when I saw it in the 1980s, and I need to see it again. Of the sound films, also  L'Herbier's adaptations of Gaston Leroux's Rouletabille stories Le Mystère de la chambre jaune and Le Parfum de la dame en noir still continue in the grand current of inspiration in design. 

Stephen Horne adopts a Sturm und Drang approach to the revolutionary scenes on the grand piano, switches to the accordion and the flute in appropriate scenes, registers Borodin, Balakirov and Rimsky-Korsakov connections, as well as the enthusiasm of a Black jazz band.

A valuable restoration from apparently somewhat challenging sources. The visual quality gets better towards the end.