El Dorado (1921)

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Movie
German title El Dorado
Original title El Dorado
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1921
length 2000 m, at 20 fps 87 minutes
Rod
Director Marcel L'Herbier
script Marcel L'Herbier, Dimitri Dragomir
production Léon Gaumont , Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont
music Marius-François Gaillard
camera Georges Lucas , Georges Specht
occupation

El Dorado is a French silent film - melodrams directed by Marcel L'Herbier from 1921 . It was based on a script that he wrote with Dimitri Dragomir for the Léon Gaumonts production company. It appeared in Gaumont's series “Pax”. The star of the French impressionist film Eve Francis played the main role .

action

Sybilla was abandoned by her lover, the citizen Esteria, and now has to hire herself out as a dancer in a third-class nightclub, the eponymous El Dorado, in order to support herself and the sick child she has from him. Esteria refuses to acknowledge and support them. Therefore she is also a model for the Swedish painter Hedwick. When she tries to initiate a discussion with Esteria, she is thrown out of his house. Then she decides to take revenge on him.

Esteria wants to marry off his legitimate daughter Iliana on an advantageous basis. But Iliana loves the painter Hedwick. They are about to meet on the evening when Iliana is supposed to become engaged to a wealthy aristocrat. This is Sybilla's chance to compromise Esteria by exposing Iliana and her lover. The engagement ends and Hedwick and Iliana seek refuge with Hedwick's mother, who lives in a house in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Before they flee, they offer Sybilla to take her sick child with her so that it can recover there in the healthy climate and under good care.

Sybilla agrees only reluctantly. But when she returned to her lonely room in El Dorado and was raped by the clown Joao, she was overcome by despair. She knows: she will never see her child again. Then she goes out one last time and dances for her life. For the dance, she receives furious applause from the drunken and lustful audience of El Dorado. But then she goes backstage and stabs the dagger in her heart.

background

The photography was in the hands of Georges Lucas and Georges Specht. Alberto Cavalcanti designed the costumes . The set was created by Robert-Jules Garnier and Louis Le Bertre. Outdoor shots were shot in Andalusia, in the cities of Granada and Seville, and in the Sierra Nevada; L'Herbier was the first to get permission to film in the famous Alhambra . He also captured the spectacular Easter procession in Seville and incorporated it into his film plot.

The interior shots were taken in the La Villette studios, Paris 19, Buttes Chaumont.

Marcel L'Herbier was aware of the unprecedented dimensions that suitable accompanying music would open up his film images. Therefore, he commissioned the young composer Marius-François Gaillard to create a frame-synchronous orchestral score.

El Dorado was premiered in Paris on October 28, 1921 at the Gaumont Palace, accompanied by a 70-man symphony orchestra. The film was also shown in Poland, Spain, Portugal and Finland, overseas even in Japan; there it had its premiere on February 12, 1926.

reception

"The in and of itself banal stirring piece wins through its refined visual implementation: The French film avant-garde Marcel L'Herbier (1888–1979) worked with blurring and double exposures to express the mental state of the lovesick dancer."

- Cinema

"The setting of lights and shadows, optical distortions, intentional blurring and double exposures visualize the psychological condition of the people, the wicked atmosphere and the violence of the emotional conflict in which the main character Sybilla, played by Eve Francis, finds himself ..."

- France 2, 1999

“All of these films are… nonconformist experiments exploring the new medium, and for the next decade L'Herbier will be astonishingly intuition to contribute to the cinematographic effort that is beginning to spread across Europe to translate the tried and tested linear narrative to an area where it becomes a gesture as parole vue and thus gains an exciting ambiguity. "

- Naumann : 2005, p. 232
International reviews

"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about El Dorado is how L'Herbier manages to take a conventional 19th century-style melodrama and transform it into an enthralling, inescapable dream-like fantasy"

- James Travers : 2002

El Dorado was made just three years after L'Herbier's first film and is a highly disciplined work with an eerie cohesion. It allowed L'Herbier to further refine his ambition to mix the poetic, artistic and architectural all in one cinematic experience.

- Ithankyou : June 1, 2013

“Virtually every camera shot in this film resembles a work of art, demonstrating as much craftsmanship as imagination on the part of L'Herbier and his photography directors. Particularly impressive is the way that light and shade are exploited to maximum effect to reinforce the states of mind of the film's protagonists, making dialogue not just superfluous but totally irrelevant. This is a film which takes place in the mind, a haunting, emotionally strained fantasy where the cruelty and injustices in the real world are distilled and coalesced into a simple portrait of desperation and suffering. "

- James Travers : 2002

“On a first viewing of El Dorado it seemed stilted and somewhat moralistic. On a second, after assistance from some of the accompanying material, the extent of L'Herbier's mise en scene started to reveal itself. I became more aware not just of the use of super-impositions, distortions and out of focus shots, but the meaning that L'Herbier was trying to impart through this to develop the psychology of the characters. The acting seemed less artificial than first and the employment of the Spanish landscape as a brutal background element became more apparent. The characters, overdressed and heavily groomed, were strangers to this terrain; they appear almost as mannequins acting out emotional crises in a bleak and unresponsive landscape. "

- Geoff Gardner

«Peu imports: ce qui compte, c'est l'énorme batterie d'effets mise en place par L'Herbier, qui semble découvrir les vertus du cinéma avec un enthousiasme communicatif. Il ose tout: fermeture à l'iris fait avec ses doigts, flou du personnage principal quand celui-ci est perdu dans ses rêveries, filmage à travers un voile de dentelle, montage épileptique (certains plans durent une demi-seconde), surexposition, écran dans l'écran… C'est un festival de trouvailles visuelles, et même si le film a tendance à se traîner un peu, on ne peut qu'applaudir devant ces audaces des premiers temps. »

- Shangols : January 19, 2009

L'Herbier remembers the film music in an interview he gave to JA Fieschi in 1968:

“El Dorado was, I believe, the first film to have a synchronous symphonic score, which was composed by Marius-François Gaillard (…) Gaillard's music had the exact duration of the film, and at the Gaumont-Palace, where it was shown , the orchestra was composed of seventy musicians… It was a permanent musical counterpoint which gave the film a quite special and unprecedented dimension. Anyway, I am one of those who think that a totally silent film is difficult to bear without accompaniment. If this accompaniment does not accompany [El Dorado], it would definitely be necessary to remake the editing of the film: certain shots seem much too long without the support of the music (...) ”

Touve R. Ratovondrahety, organist and pianist from the Opera de Paris , who performed the original music by Marius-Francois Gaillard for the performance of Marcel L'Herbier's “El Dorado” at the Festival Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone on October 3, 2011 Performed piano solo, writes about the composition:

“In“ El Dorado ”and its music, despite its drama, I find a certain French 'champagne' spirit: subtlety, lightness, elegance, symbolism and poetry. [...] Marius-François Gaillard favors a style of orchestral effects with complex chords and often superimposes melodies with completely independent rhythms, rhythms often in 5 or 7 time. It is easily accomplished with an orchestra of 70 musicians, but I admit that it is a little more complicated with a piano. "

- Touve R. Ratovondrahety
Technical aid

Henri Colpi reports on the experiences that were made with an apparatus with which the conductor could regulate the film speed if necessary to better match music and film.

Re-performance

Gaumont had the film restored in 1995 by the Service des Archives du Film des CNC in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art MOM in New York , the Cinémathèque française and the Swiss Film Archive. The work was under the direction of Pierre Philippe and Philippe Esnault . Gaumont launched a DVD based on this restoration work in 2002.

El Dorado was broadcast by the cultural broadcaster Arte on March 18, 1999 at 11.10 p.m. on German television. The original music was performed by the Brabant Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the conductor Arie van Beek.

literature

  • Ian Aitken: European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Illustrated edition. Edinburgh University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7486-1168-1 , pp. 69, 72, 75–76, 78, 84, 87, 177. (English)
  • Jaque Catelain: Marcel L'Herbier (= Les Grands créateurs de films. Volume 1). Ed. J. Vautrain, Paris 1950. (French)
  • Henri Colpi: Defense et illustration de la musique de film. SERDC, Lyon 1963. (French)
  • Oliver Fahle: Beyond the Image - Poetics of the French Film of the Twenties. Bender, Mainz 2000.
  • Gero Gandert: A cinema orchestra conductor remembers. Gero Gandert in conversation with Werner Schmidt-Boelcke. In: Silent film music yesterday and today. Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation. Verlag Volker Spiess, Berlin 1979, pp. 35-50.
  • Marcel L'Herbier: El Dorado. Edition originale de ce mélodrame cinématographique. Editions de la lampe merveilleuse, Paris 1921. (French)
  • Jean-Claude Mari: Quand le film se fait musique: Une nouvelle ère sonore au cinéma (Audiovisuel et communication). Editions L'Harmattan, 2007, ISBN 978-2-296-16571-7 , pp. 56–58 and 228, 234. (French)
  • Barbara Naumann: Rhythm - traces of an interplay in the arts and sciences. Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3056-7 , pp. 232-233.
  • Josef Nagel: El Dorado. In: film service. (Germany), Volume 55, Number 4, February 12, 2002, p. 34.

Web links

Illustrations

items

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Roy Armes: "He came to prominence in the years 1919–1922 with a series of films made for Léon Gaumont's" Pax "series. Among the half-dozen films made for Gaumont, two at least stand out as artistic and commercial successes: L 'Homme du large , a melodrama shot partly on location on the Brittany coast, where the director's interest in visual effects and symbolism is very apparent; and El Dorado , a Spanish drama in which L'Herbier's use of cinema to convey the mental and psychological states of characters finds perfect expression. El Dorado achieved a success to match that of Gance's La Roue the following year. " filmreference.com
  2. ↑ cf. alhambra-patronato.es : “Another early figure of the cinema such as Marcel L'Herbier filmed in 1921 one of the masterpieces of French cinema, El Dorado, with the monumental complex as the setting of a melodrama between impressionism film and an emerging folk Movie."
  3. ↑ Large Parisian cinema in rue Caulaincourt in the 18th arrondissement , built in 1899 by the architects Cambon, Galeron and Duray, called Gaumont Palace since 1911, torn down in 1973. See fr.wiki fr: Gaumont Palace
  4. ↑ a b c Antti Alanen: El Dorado. In: Film Diary. Monday, October 3, 2011. Accessed September 6, 2018.
  5. ↑ cf. Cinema.de
  6. ↑ Interview, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 202, 1968. See filmreference.com
  7. ↑ cf. Program at cinetecadelfriuli
  8. ↑ cf. kineartefacts.com ( Memento of the original from September 15, 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 / www.kineartefacts.com
  9. ↑ cf. “Defense et illustration de la musique de film” (SERDC, 1963): “The installation d'un appareil qui permettait, in certain conditions, de régler la vitesse de défilement de la pellicule afin de mieux synchroniser images et sons” . Similar facilities have also become known from German cinemas, cf. Gero Gandert in conversation with Werner Schmidt-Boelcke, pp. 46–47.
  10. ↑ cf. Fitzcarraldo, 2 Sept. 2005, on divxclasico.com : “sous la direction de Pierre Philippe et Philippe Esnault”
  11. ↑ cf. Worldcat.org