The tenth symphony

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title The tenth symphony
Original title La Dixième Symphony
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1918
length 1955 meters, after shortening 1885 meters, at 18 fps 95 minutes
Rod
Director Abel Gance
script Abel Gance
production Le Film d'Art
music Michel-Maurice Levy
camera Léonce-Henri Burel
cut Marguerite Beaugé
occupation

The Tenth Symphony is a silent film drama about an unfortunate musician, which Abel Gance realized in France in 1917 for the company Le Film d'Art of the producer Louis Nalpas based on his own script. It is considered the first full-length silent film in France for which its own, continuously image-synchronous symphonic accompanying music was composed.

action

Eva, a young wealthy orphan , falls victim to Fred, a vicious bon vivant and adventurer, and his sister and kills them while trying to free themselves. Then she is blackmailed by him and has to buy his silence dearly. A year later she married Enric, a famous composer and admirer of Beethoven who knew nothing about all of this. When her stepdaughter Claire from Enric's first marriage is secretly courted by Fred and finally wants to marry him, she tries to prevent the wedding. Her husband, however, believes she is in love with Fred, finds out his wife's dark past and occasionally comes to terms with his suffering of the engagement of his daughter in the creation of a masterpiece: the “Tenth Symphony”. Her theme describes what he feels: "At the feet of his master Beethoven, someone who is desperate about the infidelity of women tries to forget and to express his grief".

background

The film was produced by Louis Nalpas and distributed in France by Pathé Frères . Filming began in the summer of 1917 and the film was released on November 1, 1918. The photography was done by Léonce-Henri Burel , the editing by Marguerite Beaugé . The film images were viraged .

According to a production note from August 1917, Gance originally intended to illustrate the film with 'recorded sound', but then had Michel-Maurice Levy compose his own symphonic score for the film; However, due to the effort required (a full symphony orchestra in the cinema), only a few movie theaters were able to perform them. So the film remained relatively unknown.

Indeed, the film images do not show the performance of a symphony in the concert hall, as would be suggested by the accompaniment of the symphony orchestra in the cinema, but only the composer, who plays it to a selected audience on the piano. The music is illustrated by a dancer in an idyllic garden, which is overlaid with a wall frieze on which dancers, flowers and grapes can be seen.

A viraged copy of “La dixième symphonie” is now in Paris in the Cinémathèque française .

reception

The film was reviewed by:

  • Louis Delluc  : Notes pour moi, in: Le Film 99 v. February 4, 1918, pp. 3-4.
  • Henri Diamant-Berger  : La dixième symphonie, in: Le Film 135-36 v. October 21, 1918, p. 18.
  • Émile Vuillermoz  : Devant l'ecran: La dixième symphonie. In: Le temps v. November 6, 1918, p. 3.
  • NN in DER SPIEGEL 48/1971
  • NN in Berliner Zeitung, Friday, March 10, 2006
  • William M. Drew: Abel Gance (1889–1981) at gildasattic.com
  • Count Ferdinand von Galitzien at blogspot.de

Henri Langlois called the film "Abel Gance's first masterpiece".

“Sublime melodrame, La dixième symphonie contient déjà la quintessence d'Abel Gance. La naïveté de l'inspiration n'a d'égale que l'inventivité des formes. " (Avis sur des filmes, January 16, 2012)

“The most interesting aspect of the story is the study of the relation between suffering and artistic creation, with the character of Enric who is only able to create a masterpiece, his Tenth Symphony, because of his wife's betrayal. This is introduced by a quotation from Berlioz: "I am about to start work on a great symphony or my infernal panics will take over." Gance found the music was an important part of the film and commissioned an original symphonic score from Michel-Maurice Lévy to accompany it. The title "Tenth symphony" evokes a mythical perfect work impossible to reach. In 1917, no musician had composed more than nine large symphonies, Beethoven or Schubert's 10th symphonies being hypothetical or never completed works. ”(Jean-Eric de Cockborne)

La Dixième Symphonie was broadcast for the first time on German television with the original music on July 7, 1996 by the cultural broadcaster ARTE with French subtitles and German subtitles .

literature

  • Richard Abel: French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1939. Volume 1: 1907-1929. Princeton University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-691-00062-X , pp. Vii, viii, xix, 103, 106, 112, 120-121, 123, 143-146, 160-161, 168-170, and the like. 444. (English)
  • Richard Abel (Ed.): Silent Film. A&C Black Publisher, 1996, ISBN 0-485-30076-1 , pp. 33-35. (English)
  • Herbert Birett: Silent film music. Material collection. Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin 1970.
  • Noël Burch: Life to Those Shadows. translated by Ben Brewster. University of California Press, 1990, ISBN 0-520-07144-1 , pp. 75, 114, 290. (English)
  • Jean-Eric de Cockborne: La dixième symphonie (1918) (The tenth symphony). (online) (English)
  • Hans Emons: Film - Music - Modernism: On the history of a changing relationship. (= Art, music and theater studies. Volume 14). Verlag Frank & Timme, 2014, ISBN 978-3-7329-0050-3 .
  • Rosalind Galt: Pretty - Film and the Decorative Image. Columbia University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-231-52695-1 , p. 106. (English)
  • Roger Icart: Abel Gance. (= Histoire et théorie du cinéma. Volume 6). Verlag L'Age d'homme, 1983, pp. 272, 446, 483. (French)
  • Norman King: Abel Gance: a politics of spectacle. BFI books, ISBN 978-0-85170-136-3 , pp. 181, 192, 237. (English)
  • Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Film directors: biographies, work descriptions, filmographies. Edition 2, Verlag Reclam, 1999, ISBN 3-15-010455-6 , p. 263.
  • Steven Philip Kramer, James Michael Welsh: Abel Gance. (= Twayne's Theatrical Arts Series - Filmmakers Series). Twayne Publishers, 1978, ISBN 0-8057-9254-6 , pp. 20, 30, 31. (English)
  • Marcia Landy (Ed.): Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama. (= Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media / Contemporary film and television series / Contemporary film and television studies and readers). Great Lakes Books, Wayne State University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8143-2065-1 . (English)
  • Dominique Nasta: Setting the pace of a heartbeat. The use of sound elements in European melodrama before 1915. In: Richard Abel, Rick R. Altman (Eds.): The Sounds of Early Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-253-10870-5 , p. 106. (English)
  • Brian R. Pritchard, Motion Picture, Film Archive Consultant: Tinting and Toning of Motion Picture Films. (on-line)
  • Horst Schäfer, Walter Schobert: Fischer Film Almanach. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996, p. 425.
  • Tami Williams: Germaine Dulac. A cinema of sensations. (= Women and Film History International). University of Illinois Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-252-09636-5 , pp. 94, 300, 303. (English)
  • Friedrich von Zglinicki: The way of the film. History of cinematography and its predecessors. Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1956, p. 478.

Web links

items

  • “The tenth symphony” at kabeleins [10]
  • La dixième symphonie with Jean-François Houben: Films about Beethoven [11] (English)
  • La dixième symphonie at NN in myfrenchfilmfestival.com [12] (English)

Illustrations

  • Still photo from “The Tenth Symphony” [13]
  • Still photo (dissolve) [14]
  • Still photos, viraged, at blogspot.de [15]

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ born 1884 in Izmir / Smyrna, came to Paris in 1909, worked at Film d'Art from 1911 : it is said of him “n'était point, à proprement parler, un homme d'affaires; c'était un poète d'affaires ” - cf. revues.org [1] (French)
  2. ↑ “tinted and toned” , cf. Brian Pritchard: “Tinting is carried out by dyeing the film emulsion or, in the past, by buying film stock where the film base was colored. All the major manufacturers supplied a range of colored base stocks ”. and “Toning is carried out by converting the black and white silver image to another, usually metallic, element to change the color. Tinting and toning was used to give a combination of colors. " [2]
  3. ↑ cf. Abel, Silent Film p. 34 and Note 8
  4. ↑ 1883–1965, compositeur, aussi humoriste et chansonnier , cf. BÉTOVE [3] (French)
  5. ↑ NN in Frankfurter Rundschau, fr-online.de archive link ( memento of the original from January 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  : “His [Gances] films became more and more demanding and experimental. For the film "The Tenth Symphony" (1918) he had his own music composed - which was by no means normal at the time - which on the one hand promoted the success of the film and on the other hand inhibited it, since many cinemas were simply unable to play it "live" to perform. " See also Abel, Silent Film p. 34: “many cinema orchestras could not cope with an symphonic score” @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www2.fr-online.de
  6. ↑ cf. Abel, Silent Film p. 34.
  7. ↑ cf. Landy, Imitations Of Life p. 566 note 61
  8. ↑ cf. spiegel.de [4]
  9. ↑ cf. berliner-zeitung.de Archive link ( Memento of the original dated December 14, 2014 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 / www3.berliner-zeitung.de
  10. ↑ cf. gildasattic.com [5]
  11. ↑ cf. blogspot.de [6]
  12. ↑ cf. Abel, Silent Film p. 33 Note 7
  13. ↑ cf. wordpress.com [7]
  14. ↑ cf. worldcat.org [8]