SarahBernhardt was the world’s most famous stage actress at the turn of the lastcentury, perhaps the first true superstar. Unlike most American thespians ofthat era, the French actress didn’t look down on the movies but eagerly threwherself into the nascent medium. However, even by the time of her death in1923, critics marginalized her role in film, declaring her gestural acting as uncinematicand relegating her to a failed line of evolution in film history.
Australianfilm historian Victoria Duckett brings a new perspective to the subject inSeeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film (University of IllinoisPress). For Duckett, Bernhardt “embodied art nouveau” on film through costumesas well as gesture. The author shows how 19th century theaterbackdrops and staging often replicated well-known illustrations and thatBernhardt carried the practice into her films. The reasons for rejecting thosefilms by the 1920s are easily identified. A casualty of World War I, ArtNouveau was already old fashioned, replaced by the less organic, moremachine-tooled geometry of Art Deco. Narrative films telling stories in anostensibly naturalistic mode supplanted the uncertain if bracing experiments ofthe earliest movies.
