Die Augen der Mumie Mâ / The Eyes of the Mummy (FWMS print)

Ernst Lubitsch: Die Augen der Mumie Mâ / The Eyes of the Mummy (DE 1918). Pola Negri. Poster design: Josef Fenneker. Please click on the image to expand it.

Les Yeux de la momie.

Ernst Lubitsch / Allemagne / 1918 / 58 min / 35 mm / INT.FR. deutsche Zwischentitel / Copie unique.

Avec Emil Jannings, Pola Negri.

Film issu des collections de la Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung à Wiesbaden.

Grand piano: Abel Saintbris (classe d'improvisation de Jean-François Zygel)

Sous-titres français n.c.

Vu lundi, le 14 avril 2025, La Cinémathèque française, Rétrospective Ernst Lubitsch, Salle Georges Franju, 51 Rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris, M° Bercy Lignes 14, 6

La Cinémathèque française: " Les péripéties exotiques d'une jeune danseuse retenue prisonnière dans un tombeau égyptien. Le premier long métrage réalisé par Lubitsch révèle son sens du récit dramatique, tandis que Pola Negri et Emil Jannings accèdent à la célébrité. "

Taglines from IMDb: " Bewitching Pola Negri as an Oriental dancer who comes from the burning Sahara to capture London society by storm. All the charm and mystery of the East caught into a passion-swept romance of irresistible appeal. "

AA: Revisited Ernst Lubitsch's first feature film and his first collaboration with Pola Negri.

On display was a Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung print, of fair visual quality, a complete version, with lovely sepia toning. The last time I saw this film it was also a fair FWMS print of Die Augen der Mumie Mâ that we screened in our 2008 programme. My first viewing had been of a bad print in the 1981 Lubitsch retrospective in Stockholm.

Orientalism is rampant in The Eyes of the Mummy. It is beyond offensive.

The Eyes of the Mummy was Lubitsch's first experiment outside comedy, and the aim was for grand, exotic entertainment. This is a film of apprenticeship, of a director eager to try something new. Commercially, he succeeded, but for a viewer of a later generation the movie is clumsy and awkward.

The film is well cast, but Emil Jannings (already a Lubitsch regular) overacts horribly. Harry Liedtke (another Lubitsch regular) is molto simpatico as the painter who marries Mâ. The reliable Margarethe Kupfer also belonged to the director's stock company. Max Laurence as Prince Hohenfels in his sole Lubitsch role is another force of normality in counterweight to the overwrought main couple.

The revelation is of course Pola Negri, who changed the cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. They soon achieved world fame together. None of this is evident in The Eyes of the Mummy, but it all started here. It is fascinating to see Pola Negri before her mannerisms had set. At times she is unrecognizable, a stranger to us and herself. She overacts and rolls her eyes. But there are moments of touching interiority, a sadness out of this world. She performs ancient sacred dances in commercial Europe. Her sensuality is genuine and natural. But are we worthy?

I like the laconic force of some of the intertitles. "Die Augen leben, die Augen leben" in the beginning. "Zu spät" in the finale.

The Eyes of the Mummy is sometimes classified as a horror film. I don't object, but I hesitate to use the label. It is certainly a film of "das Unheimliche". It belongs to the wild growth of the fantastique. 

Last year in the Ben Carré retrospective of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto I revisited Maurice Tourneur's Trilby (US 1915). It made me think of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (DE 1920). Gerald du Maurier's novel Trilby (GB 1894) and the eponymous play (1895), whose protagonists Svengali and Trilby became concepts of culture, have also an affinity also with The Eyes of the Mummy. The priest Radu (Jannings) wields telepathic power over the dancer Ma (Negri), and Ma's eyes inside the mummy of the ancient Queen Ma make the spectator lose his mind.

There is also magic power in the portrait of Ma that the painter Alfred Wendland (Liedtke) has created. There are affinities with the lineages of works of authors as different as Edgar Allan Poe (The Oval Portrait), Honoré de Balzac (Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu), Oscar Wilde (The Portrait of Dorian Gray) and even Leo Tolstoy (Mikhailov's portrait of Anna Karenina, which upsets Lyovin's mental balance).

There are fascinating power fields at play, but Lubitsch does not quite know what to make of them. He does not completely abandon them either. He revisits them in untypical films like Eternal Love and The Man I Killed.