Albert Capellani

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Albert Capellani

Albert Capellani (born August 23, 1874 in Paris ; † September 26, 1931 ibid) was a French theater actor, film director, screenwriter and producer.

Life

Capellani learned acting at the Paris Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique , among others with Le Bargy . He began his career as a theater actor at the Théâtre Libre d'Antoine and later also worked at the Odéon . Due to his organizational talent , he soon became the stage manager of Firmin Gémier and in 1903 took over a managerial position at the Alhambra variety theater in Paris .

In 1905 Albert Capellani came to film. At Pathé Frères he worked as a director under Ferdinand Zecca and created short dramas and set films. In 1908, Pathé founded the Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres (SCAGL) and made Capellani its artistic director. The new company in the Pathé Group was intended to address a wealthy middle-class audience with scripts by well-known playwrights and the filming of works of literature. This movement became known in France under the term Film d'Art . The directors overseen by Capellani included Georges Denola , Georges Monca , Michel Carré and Henri Estievant .

Capellani, who already had experience with short and medium-length films, took over the directing of important productions himself and, because of the complex actions of the literary models, switched to feature films. It emerged L'Assommoir (1909), Notre-dame de Paris (1911), Les Mysteres de Paris (1911), Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge (1912), La Glu (1913) and Germinal (1913) and the two-hour Les Misérables (1913), which are considered the high point of Capellani's work in France and which were internationally successful. Through his connections to the Parisian theater scene, he was able to persuade numerous stage actors to appear in film, including his brother Paul Capellani , Berthe Bovy , Jacques Grétillat , Henri Krauss and the vaudeville artist Mistinguett .

With the beginning of the First World War in 1914 Capellani went to the USA. One of his first works there was a film adaptation of Dumas' Lady of the Camellias with Clara Kimball Young in the title role in 1915 . In the years that followed, the actress frequently took on leading roles in Capellani's films. Until 1918 he shot for various film companies, most recently several films for the Metro Picture Corporation and Nazimova . From 1919 to 1920 he had his own production company, Albert Capellani Productions. In his company's first film, Oh Boy! (1919) after a stage musical with music by Jerome Kern , Capellani probably had his only film appearance. He worked in the USA until 1922, then went back to France, where he tried unsuccessfully to import American methods of filmmaking.

The last years of his life were marked by serious illness and financial uncertainty. He suffered from paralysis and died at the age of 57.

reception

Albert Capellani's work is essentially attributable to the film of the 1900s and 1910s. For a long time, this early phase has received little attention from film historiography and film studies research. It was seen as a phase of primitive and clumsy filmmaking, from which only a few figures such as David Wark Griffith , Charlie Chaplin or Victor Sjöström emerged , who heralded a mature understanding of film as an independent artistic medium. It was only in the last decades of the 20th century that the film scholarly view began to turn to the particularly neglected first two decades of film up to the First World War under the heading of New Film History .

In older films about the history of film, Capellani is seen, if he is mentioned at all, as a representative of a kind of filmmaking that has rightly been forgotten. Georges Sadoul, for example, in his much-read History of the Art of Film (French orig. 1955) attributes some merits to Capellani, for example "sobriety of acting and directing", but the overall judgment is devastating: Capellani makes use of the "aesthetics of the photographed Theater ", and in his feature films Sadoul" discovers nothing but a long series of 'living images' ". Ulrich Gregor and Enno Patalas judge even more negatively in their history of film (first in 1962): There Capellani is introduced as a representative of "a genre that is as unreal as it is academic: the film d'art ". This genre is further characterized by Gregor / Patalas as follows: "The main attraction was always the participation of an actor known from the stage. The stage also determined the style of the films: theatrical conventions prevailed in direction and decoration; the actors declaimed ' in front of the camera."

The judgments of the older film historians, however, were shaky, as they were usually not based on a sufficient knowledge of the films, which were largely inaccessible. Even Richard Abel , who in his Capellani The Ciné Goes to Town. French Cinema 1896-1914 (1994) recognized comparatively extensively, had only access to a handful of early short films and incomplete copies of the feature films. The judgments of older film historians such as Sadoul and Gregor / Patalas reflect a negative attitude towards Capellani, which originated in the early 1920s. Capellani's longer feature films from 1908 onwards had been shown to great public success, especially after the cinemas based on the model of bourgeois theater had established themselves as venues around 1912/13. After the First World War, however, the Film d'Art was increasingly sidelined. The film historian Mariann Lewinsky has suggested that criticism from the surrealist movement contributed significantly to this fact. Out of their anti-bourgeois stance, the surrealists rejected the Film d'Art, which was based on bourgeois educational ideals, and instead admired "the breaches with conventions, everything unclean, grotesque and the freedom to twist anything" that they see in US slapstick cinema or discovered in the serials by Louis Feuillade . In the avant-garde French post-war cinema and its advocates, the Film d'Art and with it Capellani's work were considered theatrical, pompous and outdated. Because Capellani's films were soon no longer accessible, any opportunity to subject the negative judgment to a review also disappeared.

A rediscovery of Capellani did not take place until after the turn of the millennium. As part of the Cento anni fa program , which is part of the annual silent film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna , its curator Mariann Lewinsky has shown successive films by Capellani since 2006, before a comprehensive retrospective took place there in 2010, which focused on that part von Capellani's work, which was created in France between 1906 and 1914. A DVD with an accompanying book was produced for the retrospective, which was soon followed by two further DVD releases in France and Belgium, so that it is now possible to get a representative overview of Albert Capellani's work independently of screenings in film museums or at film festivals . The films available on DVD are usually in restored versions. The DVD publications were flanked by a first academic monograph on Capellani.

The opportunity to view Capellani's films in all their diversity and on the basis of integral versions also initiated a re-evaluation of the work. The assessment of earlier film historians that Capellani was essentially stuck with the aesthetics of the theater has meanwhile been heavily questioned. Richard Abel already pointed out in 1994 that Capellani used a genuinely cinematic narrative style in his feature films. The film scholar Kristin Thompson also asserted that Capellani had an innovative role in shaping the tableau style, which was common in Europe at the time. At least for the period between 1908 and 1913, she states that Capellani was ahead of his time and anticipated developments in film aesthetics that are usually only ascribed to film in the years after the First World War.

Films (selection)

literature

  • Richard Abel: The Ciné Goes to Town. French Cinema 1896-1914 . University of California Press, Berkeley et al. 1994, ISBN 0-520-07935-3 .
  • Richard Abel: "Albert Capellani, cinéaste Pathé frères, 1906". In: Albert Capellani (= booklet for the DVD box Coffret Albert Capellani: Les films restaurés d'un pionnier du cinéma (published by the Cinémathèque française, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux and Fox Pathé Europa)), Pathè, Paris 2011, p. 10-16.
  • Christine Leteux: Albert Capellani: Cinéaste du romanesque. La tour verte, Grandvilliers 2013, ISBN 978-2-917819-22-7 . (English translation: Albert Capellani: Pioneer of the Silent Screen. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2015, ISBN 978-0-8131-6643-8 )

DVD publications

  • Albert Capellani: Un cinema di grandeur 1905-1911 (edited by Mariann Lewinsky). Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna 2011.
  • Coffret Albert Capellani: Les films restaurés d'un pionnier du cinéma (edited by the Cinémathèque française, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux and Fox Pathé Europa). Pathè, Paris 2011. (Contains 4 DVDs L'Assommoir , Germinal , Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge , Quatre-Vingt-Treize and various short films)
  • To Dazzle the Eye and Stir the Heart - The Red Lantern, Nazimova and the Boxer Rebellion . Cinematek, Brussels 2012. (DVD with book, contains Capellani's The Red Lantern )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Thomas Elsaesser: "The New Film History as Media Archeology." In: Cinémas , 14 (2-3) (2004), pp. 75-117. doi: 10.7202 / 026005ar
  2. ^ Georges Sadoul: History of the cinematic art . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 82.
  3. ^ Georges Sadoul: History of the cinematic art . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 83.
  4. ^ Georges Sadoul: History of the cinematic art . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 83.
  5. ^ Ulrich Gregor, Enno Patalas: History of the film 1: 1895-1939 . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1976, p. 16.
  6. ^ Ulrich Gregor, Enno Patalas: History of the film 1: 1895-1939 . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1976, p. 16.
  7. ↑ See Richard Abel: The Ciné Goes to Town. French Cinema 1896-1914 . University of California Press, Berkeley et al. 1994, pp. 40-41, 247-248, 302-308, 321-325.
  8. ↑ See Observations on film art: Kristin Thompson: Capellani ritrovato (2010), accessed on January 17, 2018.
  9. ↑ See Richard Abel: The Ciné Goes to Town. French Cinema 1896-1914 . University of California Press, Berkeley et al. 1994, chapter 6.
  10. ↑ See Observations on film art: Kristin Thompson: Capellani ritrovato (2010), accessed on January 17, 2018.
  11. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede: The Art of Surrealism. Painting, sculpture, poetry, photography, film . CH Beck, Munich 2006, p. 194.
  12. ↑ Homepage of the film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato , accessed on January 17, 2018.
  13. ↑ See Observations on film art: Kristin Thompson: Capellani ritrovato (2010), accessed on January 17, 2018.
  14. ↑ Albert Capellani: Un cinema di grandeur 1905-1911 (edited by Mariann Lewinsky). Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna 2011.
  15. ↑ Coffret Albert Capellani: Les films d'un restaurés pionnier du cinéma (ed française of the Cinémathèque, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux and Fox Pathé Europa.). Pathè, Paris 2011 and To Dazzle the Eye and Stir the Heart - The Red Lantern, Nazimova and the Boxer Rebellion . Cinematek, Brussels 2012.
  16. ↑ Christine Leteux: Albert Capellani: Cinéaste you romanesque . La tour verte, Grandvilliers 2013.
  17. ↑ See, for example, with reference to Capellanis Germinal (1913) Richard Abel: The Ciné Goes to Town. French Cinema 1896-1914 . University of California Press, Berkeley et al. 1994, p. 345 ff.
  18. ↑ Observations on film art: David Bordwell via Tableau staging , accessed January 17, 2018.
  19. ↑ See Observations on film art: Kristin Thompson: Capellani ritrovato (2010), accessed on January 17, 2018.
  20. ↑ The Red Lantern on the homepage of the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, accessed on January 12, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Capellani, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French stage actor, film director, screenwriter and producer
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1931
Place of death Paris