Le brasier ardent

Magnificent and surprising film, unfortunately little known. One of the relatively obscure jewels of silent cinema. In the midst of the effervescence of the French avant-garde, the talented Ivan Mozzhukhin came up with this hilarious, inventive and extravagant fantasy, a mixture of the most diverse genres: mystery, comedy, crime, melodrama.

The premise seems to be to disconcert and misplace the viewer, with infinite visual and narrative ideas, but at the same time, and despite the avant-garde and playful tone, to be interested in some characters and a story. In the first half that balance is achieved in a prodigious way. The second part drifts more towards the sentimental side.

To highlight the extravagant decorations, the setting that can be childish and fun, or dreamlike and threatening, and above all the interpretation of Mozzhukhin, between acrobat, clown and gallant.

I saw "Le brasier ardent" in Paris last fall on the Cine Cinema Classic channel on French cable television. This intriguing film combines several genres including romantic comedy, surrealism, and the secret society serials that were popular at the time. Produced in Paris, the film offers some great location shots of the city in the early 20s, including a car chase along the Champs-Elysées. Directed and starring Ivan Mosjoukine as a detective simply named Z, the plot involves an investigation to return an emotionally drifting young wife to her older husband. The film expertly uses the physical agility of the three stars, particularly the male leads, who jump, run, slide, and fall as the plot demands. The story continually surprised and delighted me with its plot turns and its forays into surrealism and breakneck comedy. Do yourself a favor and see it.

I just saw this film in Paris. The showing was accompanied by a band that played wonderfully. The film is very interesting. Some of the scenes seemed a little long and were not particularly innovative. I also wasn't that taken with the female protagonist-- not with her personality or the acting. However the film also includes couple of scenes that are mesmerizing. In particular the scene in which the husband goes into a mysterious building and encounters a roomfull of men, who are all potential detectives, is one of the most remarkable I've ever seen. Together with the music, the film is delightful.

For a film that combines so many elements of avant-garde European film-making (surrealism, expressionism, futurism) and is a feast of different non-realistic styles, 1923 is a very early date and, although both expressionism and futurism had a following in Russia, there is not much in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema that would lead one to expect this. In Italy there had been the futurist film Thaïs as early in 1916; in Germany Richard Oswald had already produced The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Genuine in 1920 but in France Marcel L'Herbier's major films (L'Argent and L'Inhumaine) were still a few years in the future although he had already made the much less impressive Le Bercail (1919) and the short Prométhée….banquier (1921) and, although she was already a known film-maker, Germaine Dulac's first really memorable film (La souriante Madame Beudet) did not appear until this same year, 1923.

So the fact that Mozzuhkhin, freshly arrived from Russia and with no experience as a director (apart from the rather conventional comedy L'Enfant du carnaval also made in France in 1921)should have directed such an imaginative feast as this in 1923 is really rather remarkable. One should add that the set-decorator, Pierre Schild was also at the beginning of his career (he would later work on the Dali/Buñuel films Le Chien andalou and L'Age d'Or).

Perhaps the previous film most similar in style to this was Artur Robison's Warning Shadows which had been first shown in Berlin just the month before (even if the moral of this Mozzhukhin film turns out to be rather different).

Nathalie Lissenko,Mozzhukhin's actress-wife was by no means "hideous", but it is true that she does "look a fright" (more or less literally) and it is worth observing that this was itself an element in the art nouveau/art déco style of the period. One finds the same look with Navratilova in one the extremely rare US examples of an avant-garde film (Salomé, also 1923) and again with Jean Renoir's wife (Catherine Hessling) who appears in some of his early films even though she was reputed a beauty and had been one of his father's models. To appreciate the style, it might help to think in terms of some modern equivalent ("punk" is the obvious one). The style was already outdated by the 1930s and Elsa Lanchester's "look" as the Bride of Frankenstein might be considered a parody of the style.

Nathalie Lissenko, whoever said she could be a leading lady in a film? She is so ugly the idea of two men falling in love with her is ridiculous. Even a rat or a snake would not fall in love with such a creature. On top of that (and on top of her), she has the most ridiculous hairdo in the entire history of the world. I can't believe that frump made 38 films. However, it appears that she was the wife of the writer and director of this film, Ivan Mosjoukine, or Mozzhukin, or however you want to spell it, so all one can do is feel sorry for him. This is a such a deeply weird film, it is not really enjoyable, but anything of that age which is weird qualifies for the category of 'interesting'. The film begins with an interminable dream sequence which lasts for several minutes, and one thinks the tedious images will never end. It was probably very daring for 1922, and audiences may have been spellbound at the time, or at least let us hope so. The film then has a silly story pursued in a surrealistic manner, with echoes of the hit serial 'Fantomas', that is, with mysterious detectives who can do the impossible, and who pose for the cameras so that we can admire their profiles. The leading man is called 'Detective Z', and he never stops showing us his profile, his powerful gaze, and whatever else he thinks makes him special, though he is very yawn-inducing. But wait! It turns out that this very boring man is none other than the writer and director and husband of the frump! So he had clearly had years of practice in looking at his wife without falling over in a fright. There is rather a lot of glaring from everyone in the film, which was obviously fashionable in such films then, or at least amongst the White Russians of Paris at the time. The action is set in Paris, and there are some interesting shots of Paris in 1922, though all on the Right Bank, which is pretty much what one would have expected then, just about what it is like today with less traffic, some old cars, and some men in top hats. One curiosity is that people repeatedly jump in and out of moving cabs! There are a few dramatically composed shots which have truly remarkable depth of field (one shows the leading lady in the foreground and far away a man walking away from her down a street, both in focus; another good one is on a grand staircase). I don't know why this film is called 'The Burning Cauldron', as the only thing burning from my point of view was my time going up in smoke.