The three-wing mirror

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Movie
German title The three-wing mirror
Original title La Glace à trois faces
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1927
length 4 acts, 1200 meters, around 45 minutes at 24 fps
Rod
Director Jean Epstein
script Jean Epstein
production Films Jean Epstein
camera Marcel Eywinger
cut Jean Epstein
occupation

The three-winged mirror is the German title of the French silent film drama La Glace à trois faces , the Jean Epstein 1927 after a literary model of Paul Morand , which he adapted for the film in his own company Films Jean Epstein realized.

action

A wealthy young businessman is in love with an elegant English woman, a Russian sculptor and a naive working-class girl. Weak as he is, he does not fulfill the obligations that arise from his relationships, but instead of keeping his appointments he sits down in his sports car to slip away to the glamorous Deauville lido . On the way, however, there is a fatal encounter with an approaching swallow.

The last shot shows the man in the social toilet in front of the eponymous three-winged mirror, which only reflects him. None of the three women can be seen in it.

background

The shooting took place in the French community L'Isle-Adam in the Val-d'Oise department . Marcel Eywinger stood at the camera ; the stage set was designed by Pierre Kéfer ; Maurice Morlot assisted the direction . The distribution was organized by the Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique in the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, where it was premiered on November 22, 1927.

The press - namely Jean Dréville in his monthly magazine Cinégraphie - reacted extremely benevolently, despite the thoroughly experimental character and novelty of the film.

The French composer Jean Schwarz, born in Lille in 1939, wrote a new piece of music to accompany La Glace à trois faces in 1981 .

In 2014 the film was restored by the Cinémathèque française on the occasion of the Jean-Epstein retrospective, which it held there from April 26th to May 30th of this year.

Re-performances

The culture channel Arte broadcast “Der dreiflügelige Spiegel” on November 18, 2014 at 1:10 am repeatedly on German television.

The film is included in the DVD edition Avant-garde: experimental cinema of the 1920s and '30s , which was published in 2005 by Verlag Kino International, New York as a deluxe two-disc edition . The film originals were taken from the collection of Raymond Rohauer .

In America there was a retrospective of Epstein's work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAMPFA in Berkeley (CA) from March 4 to April 10, 2016 , which was curated by Kathy Geritz .

The HFA (Harvard Film Archive) in Cambridge (MA) commemorated Epstein's films with the Young Oceans Of Cinema show from January 29 to March 5, 2016.

reception

“The three-wing mirror” comes from the time when the filmmaker Jean Epstein was just starting his own production company. Although this should not prove to be profitable, it allowed him an enormous artistic freedom, which is unmistakable in his avant-garde film at the time. Its aesthetics are still fascinating today.

"The mirror that gives its title to this film binds together three separate narratives which dovetail when we realize that all three women of different classes have been disappointed by the same lover. This tripartition depicts the manner in which each woman mirrors the man's desires. "(Maureen Turim: Looking back at the mirror, p. 174)

The film is divided into three sections, each of which contains the events that happened to each woman. These sequences are embedded in scenes in which each of the three women remembers their love affair and talks about it. The past, present and future mix and can no longer be clearly distinguished. The merging of different levels of experienced and remembered, narrated and shown time was identified as the source of inspiration for Alain Resnais , whose film “ Last year in Marienbad ” ( L'Année dernière à Marienbad ) is to a certain extent prefigured by Epstein's film. (Hans Winter)

Marco Spiess writes about Epstein's work: “This is certainly not his most innovative film (for the widely used title of an avant-garde director, it is certainly not enough), but Epstein uses ideas that are successful in both dramaturgical and staging terms: for example, the three-way division of the story that allows it to perceive the somewhat heavily made-up man with no name from three different perspectives. It's the same man, but filtered through the eyes of different women, he always appears a little different. "

literature

  • Ian Aitken: European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Indiana University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-253-34043-8 , pp. 77-78.
  • Olivier Bitoun: Cycle Jean Epstein: La Glace à trois faces. In: DVDclassik , June 16, 2014 (French)
  • Alan Goble: The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film . Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 1999, ISBN 3-11-095194-0 , pp. 332, 780.
  • Christoph Hesse, Oliver Keutzer, Roman Mauer, Gregory Mohr: Filmstile. Film, television, new media . Springer-Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-531-19080-8 , pp. 69, 73.
  • Selina Lau-Schmidiger: Masterpieces of the silent film. at teleboy.ch
  • Tijana Mamula, Lisa Patti (Eds.): The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2016, ISBN 978-1-5013-0286-2 , p. 96.
  • Paul Morand: L'Europe galante. [Paris] 1925. (German Lazy Times, ISBN 3-921499-63-1 )
  • Joachim Paech: Represented movement as a medial form. In: Elize Bisanz (ed.): The image between cognition and creativity: Interdisciplinary approaches to pictorial thinking . transcript Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8394-1365-4 , p. 253 Fig. 8 and 9.
  • William B. Parrill: European Silent Films on Video: A Critical Guide . McFarland Verlag, 2006, ISBN 1-4766-1021-5 , pp. 388-389.
  • Maureen Turim: Looking back at the mirror. In: Peter L. Rudnytsky, Andrew Gordon (ed.): Psychoanalyses / Feminisms (= SUNY series in feminist criticism and theory / SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture ). SUNY Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7914-4377-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Morand: L 'galante. (Europe): Chronique du XX ° siècle, Paris 1922. (2nd edition 1925)
  2. ↑ for performances of the cinematographic avant-garde famous art cinema in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, named after the location in 10, rue des Ursulines .
  3. ↑ cf. Olivier Bitoun - le 16 juin 2014: “ Tout aussi expérimental et novateur qu'il soit, 'La Glace à trois faces' est très bien reçu par la presse, notamment par Jean Dréville qui en fait l'éloge dans sa review Cinégraphy. Comme c'était déjà le cas pour 'Six et demi, onze', le film est distribué par La Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique qui l'exploite en exclusivité au studio des Ursulines, alors la salle la plus réputée pour ce qui est de l'Avant -garde cinématographique. "
  4. ↑ La glace à trois faces, 40 min., Création: 06/03/1981 - Ensemble instrumental d'Angers, direction Guy Reibel. France, Angers, Festival cinématographique. Sonorisation du film de Jean Epstein , cf. asso.fr
  5. ↑ cf. cinematheque.fr
  6. ↑ cf. arte.tv and ard.de as well as S. Lau-Schmidiger: "The Dreiflügelige Spiegel (November 17th) is by the French surrealist Jean Epstein and, like all other restored films, will be broadcast for the first time on a German channel."
  7. ↑ cf. Parill p. 388 and worldcat.org ; on Rohauer cf. Obituary by Andrew L. Yarrow: Raymond Rohauer, Archivist of Classics From Silent Film Era. In: New York Times. November 19, 1987.
  8. ↑ BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94720, see. frenchculture.org and bampfa.org/program ; here the film ran together with The Fall of the House of Usher on Thursday, April 7th, 2016. Judith Rosenberg accompanied the screenings .
  9. ^ HFA, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; here the film was shown on Friday, February 26th, also together with The Fall of the House of Usher . Martin accompanied Marks on the piano . See harvard.edu ( memento of the original dated December 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / hcl.harvard.edu
  10. ↑ cf. somethingverpasst.de
  11. ↑ at IMDb plot summary ; Parill p. 389 also mentions Fellini's La dolce Vita .
  12. ↑ at & Testing February 10, 2015