What a thrilling discovery that this film was actually available to watch, and in its complete version of 93 minutes!
I was beaming with joy throughout - one of my favorite filmmakers, a keen theorist at the time, directing one of the most interesting actors of the era, in a film that superficially seems to be about movie-like excess and indulgence, conceived on a lavish scale, - the Grand Khan, throngs in costumes outside the palace, cavalcades, danger and intrigue - but is actually about shatters of a fabricated story falling from the mind.
This interests me doubly, triply, because I've been keeping track of the Russian cinematic trail into Paris. Perhaps the single most important missing link in this endeavor is L'angoissant Aventure, actually filmed on the run from the Soviets over a period of months as the Ermolief troupe, the Russian cinematic aristocracy before Eisenstein, was forced to relocate to Paris, where it made acquiantances with the new generation coming into film. I have not been able to find that film, so if any reader has information I would be grateful to know.
Thankfully we have this; incidentally also about an aristocrat, a Mongol prince, forced into exile in France and bumping into a film production en route there. No wonder Mozzhukhin wrote the script. His next film would be for L'Herbier.
The joys in this are manifold. If you are one of those who labor under the impression that silent film was all about pantomime, theatric setups, simplified emotion and gross ahistoricity, you will have the chance to smirk at the exotic movie Tibet portrayed here and the melodrama of forbidden princely love, then have the rug pulled from under your feet as the film washes up in France and turns unerringly modern. The acting is subdued, the camera captures amazing views from a car in motion, a new geography unknown before the camera, the relationship between prospective lovers is ambiguous. Epstein beautifully renders the confrontation of the two cinematic worlds, as the furious Prince breaks up a scene of the woman being strongarmed by a villain on the ship, acting honorably only to be told they're shooting a movie so it's all make-believe.
More cool stuff ahead. So the Prince turns into an actor and starring in a movie as himself, presumably a wild adventure like the opening of the actual film. Is this the first film about a film being made in the history of the medium? If not, it's certainly the first intelligent one, and perhaps the only one until Sternberg four years later.
See what Epstein does. We know that the Prince was exiled and the throne usurped from him by an impostor, passing as the king in the king's place, so we have an actor on that end that looks like a movie but is supposed to be real calling the shots that produce the chain of events. Back in France, we are among actors, our character one, and spend time on the backlot of film sets.
So it's no surprise that the finale is an actual marvel of cinematic deception, inside an upscale hotel, where police are waiting for the Prince outside the glass facade with couples faintly seen dancing inside the lobby as though projected on a movie screen. There is a ball masque where confetti rains on our masked lovers, on par with anything Sternberg conceived and predating him by a good number of years.
More clues; a one-eyed pianist, the monocle on the banker that makes his one bulging eye look like a lens, the dreamy finale obviously a deathbed hallucination.
And something else. Music is of a high importance here, all through the film we can see violinists accompanying the production - but of course the film-within is naturally going to be silent, the score performed live in each theater as was customary. We can only presume they are playing to set the mood for the actors. Epstein superimposes at one point violins being fiddled over the lull of waves at sea.
So we have something invisible, in our case inaudible, that serves only to cultivate the space around the normally fabricated art. Say a melodrama filmed as a poem. This was Epstein's innovation, the music all in the roaming eye fiddling across the world.
