The Love of Zero

The experimental nature of this fairytale-style short (by a couple of notable craftsmen) means that the technique on display swamps what little plot there is – in fact, it was part of a DVD collection of American avant-garde films.

In any case, we get a dapper-looking artist in love with a girl: she returns his affections, but is promised to someone else; undaunted, he tries to impress another woman but she just laughs in his face…after which he breaks down and is haunted by demons!

The film is actually intrinsically bizarre: not just in its marvelous CALIGARI-inspired Expressionist look, but the appearance and mannerisms of the lead character (which are no less stylized – particularly the speeded-up dance routine he occasionally engages in). The rest is made up of clever camera tricks which, though having little point in themselves, still manage to delight.

A fifteen-minute Impressionist film somewhat in the manner of Expressionism, The Love of Zero (1928) tells the tale of Zero (pantomime artist Joseph Marievski) who falls in love with Beatrix (Tamar Shavrova).

They live a blissful life upon a stage of abstract furniture & trapazoid windows & doors, with Zero periodically serenading Beatrix with a trumbone while perched on his highchair.

Gloomily parted by fate when Beatrix is recalled to the castle, Zero falls into a forlorn pose.

After long loneliness he finally falls for another woman (Anielka Elter), but she mistreats him with laughter & disdain, leaving him for two other men.

News arrives of the death of Beatrix. Thus there is no chance of Zero ever recovering his lost happiness. The world has become dark, ugly, irksome. Demons surround him, & he is finally destroyed, like a doll snatched away from a toy stage by the hand of a child.

This little film was famously made for only $200, pretty cheap even for 1928. The filmmakers got plenty for their money, too, as this is visually a masterwork, thanks in the main to the gorgeous set design by William Cameron Menzies.

An experimental film released during 1927 that had a big impact in the avant-garde community was Robert Florey's 15-minute film, "The Love of Zero." The short was one of Florey's earliest films. The French-born journalist journeyed to Hollywood as a film reporter with Cinemagazine in 1921 and soon was brought on by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford as their foreign publicity director. Hired as an assistant director for MGM in the mid-1920s, Flory hit his stride in the 1930s and 1940s as one of Hollywood's more prolific directors with over 50 films,. His specialty was mostly low-budget movies for Paramount and Warner Brothers.

Florey set aside a miniscule $200 to produce "The Love of Zero," which depicted a love affair between a trombone player, Zero, and woman of wealth, Beatrix. Noted set designer William Cameron Menzies built the spartan stage for his colleague.

In the short film, Zero, a member of the high arts with his lofty ladder, realizes he's lost the love-of-his-life companion, the royal Beatrix, when she is called back to her palace. The sadness of Zero is shown by images of nightmarish ghouls superimposed in front of him. The musicians feels his music, his life, and his love all add up to the sum of nothing.

To show the emotional complexity of the trombone player, Florey set his camera angles everywhere except straight. Every distortion in the book is seen to symbolize the distraught inner turmoil of the two lovers. The artsy community loved Florey's short. Unfortunately, such pictorial innovation isn't seen in the director's feature films. The film studios' supervision restricted him in his inability to create highly imaginative sequences, an unfortunate development as Hollywood became more conservative in displaying its films visual scenes, unlike in its silent movies.

Robert Florey broke into the mainstream with films like 'Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932),' but even then remained strongly indebted to the stylisation of German Expressionism, particularly 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).' His silent short 'The Love of Zero (1927)' references Wiene's classic horror film extensively, even down to the grotesquely- distorted geometric windows, doors and walls. The plot of the film can be reduced to a single sentence – "man meets and loses the love of his life" – yet it's how the film narrates this story that is most fascinating. Just as 'Dr Caligari' used its set design to recreate the twisted annals of a deluded mind, Florey here uses similar architecture (as well a number of creative optical tricks) to reproduce the euphoria of true love, and the wretched heartbreak of romantic tragedy.

A musician named Zero (Joseph Marievsky), while playing the trombone from his balcony, falls for a beautiful woman (Tamara Shavrova) who is entranced by his music. The pair fall in love: Zero presents Beatrix with the paper cutout of a heart, a literal representation of his love, and she unites it with an identical cutout of her own. This fusion of shapes is a prominent visual motif for Florey, who often uses split- screens to emphasise that, through their love, Zero and Beatrix have become one {in a particularly breathtaking shot, Florey fuses the two faces into one, an image that must have inspired Ingmar Bergman's 'Persona (1966)'}. Later, Zero presents this same cutout to another woman (Anielka Elter), who simply laughs at his earnestness. The humiliated musician discards the heart, now flimsy and two-dimensional in its solitariness, onto the dirt.

Robert Florey's Loves of Zero is, as we are told by an opening placard, "an impressionist film made for less than $200.00." And that it is! Great-Grandpappy was right, though. You used to get a heck of a lot for your money back in the good old days. This is mostly just a few friends having a ball on film, playing with the potentialities. It's reminiscent of Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou in that way, except it's not meant to piss us off. The film is goofy, and it knows it, but it is also very beautiful and, ultimately, very poetic. It's certainly a short film that deserves to be more widely known. Just think of how many small masterpieces - or even large ones - from this time period have been lost. Loves of Zero has not been lost, but it might as well be. 10/10.