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WORK TITLE: Seeing Sarah Bernhardt
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Melbourne
STATE: VIC
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/victoria-duckett * http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/46rck5nx9780252039669.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia, director of entertainment production, lecturer; Australian National University, Canberra, visiting fellow, 2014. Has served on editorial boards of Feminist Media Histories and the Journal of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.
MEMBER:Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Women and Film History International, American Society of Theatre Research, Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema (AIRSC), Melbourne Screen Studies.
AWARDS:Ian Potter Foundation Grant and MacGeorge Fellowship, both University of Melbourne, both 2013; Melbroune Social Equity Grant, 2013; Publication subsidy, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2015; Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 2016, for Seeing Sarah Bernhardt; international visiting researcher stipend, Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, 2017; research fellowship, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including Studies in Documentary Film, Literature-Film Quarterly, Journal of Historical Biography, and Cinema Journal. Contributor of chapters to books. Coeditor of a 2016 issue of Feminist Media Histories.
SIDELIGHTS
Victoria Duckett is a writer and educator based in Melbourne, Australia. She is a lecturer and director of entertainment production at Deakin University. Duckett has also served as a visiting fellow at Australian National University in Canberra. She has been a member of the editorial boards of Feminist Media Histories and the Journal of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. Duckett has written articles that have appeared in scholarly journals, including Studies in Documentary Film, Literature-Film Quarterly, Journal of Historical Biography, and Cinema Journal. She has also contributed chapters to books. Duckett is the coeditor of a 2016 issue of Feminist Media Histories. She has received grants, stipends, and fellowships from organizations, including the University of Melbourne, Australian Academy of the Humanities, the University of Exeter, and the University of Texas, Austin.
In 2015, Duckett released her first book, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film. The volume was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2016. In it, Duckett discusses the life of Bernhardt, an actress celebrated internationally during the silent film era. She explains that Bernhardt began her acting career in the the theatre and later crossed over into film. Duckett describes Bernhardt’s most important film roles, including one in which she played Hamlet. She also includes images of Bernhardt, articles about her, and advertisements featuring her.
C. McCutcheon, reviewer in Choice, asserted: “Well written and insightful, this is required reading for those interested in theater, film, or women’s studies.” McCutcheon categorized the book as “essential.” Writing on the Sage Journals website, Jon Burrows called it a “conceptually ambitious and highly stimulating new study of Bernhardt’s film work.” Burrows also noted: “In her conclusion, Duckett stresses that much more research remains to be done to properly acknowledge and understand Bernhardt’s wide international celebrity and appeal. It should be noted that one of the striking achievements of this book is the way it avoids what the author cautions against as ‘our tendency today to compact film history into a single narrative of historical reception’ (p. 92) by paying equal attention to the promotion and critical reception of Bernhardt’s films in France and the United States.” Burrows concluded: “Perhaps we are still only just beginning to understand the role played by Sarah Bernhardt as a nexus point for the stimulation of global film commerce and finance in the feature film era.” David Luhrssen, critic on the Milwaukee, WI Shepherd Express website, remarked: “Australian film historian Victoria Duckett brings a new perspective to the subject in Seeing Sarah Bernhardt.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2016, C. McCutcheon, review of Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film, p. 213.
ONLINE
Deakin University Website, http://www.deakin.edu.au/ (August 23, 2017), author faculty profile.
Sage Journals Website, http://journals.sagepub.com/ (February 12, 2017), Jon Burrows, review of Seeing Sarah Bernhardt.
Shepherd Express Online (Milwaukee, WI), http://shepherdexpress.com/ (December 7, 2015), David Luhrssen, review of Seeing Sarah Bernhardt.*
Dr Victoria Duckett
STAFF PROFILE
Position
Lecturer In Screen and Design
Faculty
Faculty of Arts and Education
Department
SCCA Arts & Ed
Campus
Melbourne Burwood Campus
Contact
victoria.duckett@deakin.edu.au
+61 3 924 46961
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Biography
Dr. Victoria Duckett is the Director of Entertainment Production and Lecturer in Screen (Film and Media) in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University.
READ MORE ON VICTORIA'S PROFILE
Career highlights
Career highlughts since joining Deakin, 2014:
2017: Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment), University of Texas at Austin.
International Visiting Researcher Stipend, The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter (December 2017).
Invited presentation, Columbia University Film and Media Studies Colloquium, Columbia University.
2016: Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film named a 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Invited keynote lectire, Society for Theatre Research, Swedenborg Hall, London.
Director of Entertiainment Production, Deakin University
2015: Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy.
2014: Visiting Fellowship, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra.
Try Walking in My Shoes: Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness on Screen. National conference co-convenor held at the University of Melbourne in partnership with the Dax Centre and the Australia Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe1100-1800).
Research interests
Early Film, New Media, Performing Arts, Digital Archives, Film and the other arts, intermediality, feminist historiography, transnational culture and celebrity, gesture.
Affiliations
Professional Memberships
AIRSC (Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema)
American Society of Theatre Research
Melbourne Screen Studies
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Women and Film History International
Teaching interests
Film, Performance, Historiography, Digital archives.
Knowledge areas
Performance, intermediality, film and the other arts, archives and archivists, early film, feminist historiography.
Expertise
I am a scholar whose is trained to research and teach interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. My work stands at the nexus of film studies, theatre studies, art history, gender studies, cultural studies, and the digital humanities. It is particularly focused on transnational cultures and questions of generational style and expression.
Conferences
A selection of recent presentations includes:
“Performing in pairs: Sarah Bernhardt and Gabrielle Réjane, c. 1911.”
Columbia University Film and Media Studies Colloquium, Columbia University, April 3, 2017.
“Guglielmo Giannini, un artigiano nel fabbrica del cinema”. La Fabbrica del giallo: Guglielmo Giannini, Università Statale di Milano, January 20, 2017.
“Screening Sarah Bernhardt: Reinterpreting Acting on Silent Film.”
Society for Theatre Research, Swedenborg Hall, London, January 19, 2016.
“A public precedent: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and the early French double feature film”. Femmes Créa(c)tives: The Life and Work of Francophone Women in the Arts and Media, University of Exeter, June 13, 2016.
“Reinterpreting acting in Mothers of France (1917) online.” History, Cinema, Digital Archives Conference, Australian National University, 23 July, 2014
“Polyphony and performance: Integrating the theatre into cinema’s modernity.”
Humanities Research Seminar, Australian National University, 21 July, 2014.
“Medically Modern: Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Elizabeth, and the moving pictures.” Try Walking in My Shoes: Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness on Screen Conference, University of Melbourne and The Dax Center, 2014.
Professional activities
Feminisms, Medias, Histories Journal
University of California Press, Founding Editorial Board member, 2014–
Journal of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
University of Manchester press, Editorial Board, 2010–present
Women and Film History International Steering Committee, 2010 – 2015
External referee, Assessor of Creative Works and Other Non-Traditional Research Outputs for Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2012–2014.
International referee for the Italian National Agency ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes), 2011–present
Global Digital Humanities Program Committee Referee, 2014-2016
External Assessor, Research Foundation–Flanders (National Fund for Scientific Research: Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek– Vlaanderen, FWO), 2016.
ARTICLE/BOOK MANUSCRIPT REFEREE
Cinegrafie
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Feminist Media Histories
Immagine (Journal of the Italian Association for Research in Film History)
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
Palgrave MacMillan (Victorian Studies)
Popular Entertainment Studies
Senses of Cinema
Screening the Past
Media appearances
For Seeing Sarah Bernhardt (book) 2016
Interview on “Film Buff’s Hour” with Paul Harris on national radio (3RRR, May 7, 2016), http://www.rrr.org.au/program/film-buff-s-forecast?an_page=2016-05-07.
For Women and Silent Screen VII, 2013
Interview. “On Screen”. 3CR with Melinda O’Connor. Sat. 21 September, 2013.
Interview. “Feminist Focus.” 3CR, Thursday 26 September, 2013.
For Setting the Table: A Dinner Party (201art exhibition, film program, seminars)
Interview. “Get Cereal.” Syn FM, 29 August, 2012.
Interview. “Spoke.” 3RRR, 5 September, 2012.
Megan Backhouse, “Festival of short and girlies to pique interest in feminism.” The Age, September 5, 2012.
Research groups
Deakin University:
Member, School of Communication and Creative Arts Executive Research Committee, 2016-
Participant, Persona, Celebrty, Publics research group.
Professional affiliations:
Women and Film History International
Chief Investigator: Guglielmo Giannini: film, theatre and political activism in twentieth century Italy
Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal, University of California Press, Founding Editorial Board member, 2014–
Journal of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
SAGE, Editorial Board, 2010–present
Awards
From 2013 onwards:
2017: International Visiting Researcher Stipend, The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK.
Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film named a 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
2016: Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment), University of Texas at Austin.
Central Research Grant Scheme Award, Deakin Research, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University.
2015: Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy.
2014: Visiting Fellowship, “History, Cinema, Digital Archives.” Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra.
2013: Ian Potter Foundation Grant, University of Melbourne.
University of Melbourne MacGeorge Fellowship (to facilitate international scholar residencies).
Projects
Current:
A female peerage: The Nineteenth–century stage actress and silent film (monograph). This project explores a generation of celebrity actresses who overlapped with and performed in early twentieth century film but who have been ignored in histories of modernism and rarely, if ever, discussed in histories of film.
Guglielmo Giannini: film, theatre and political activism in twentieth century Italy (Chief Investigator). Guglielmo Giannini was an Italian journalist, playwright, scriptwriter, film director, and politician active in Italy between the 1920s and 1960. I have digitized and organized his archive (over 5000 pages of theatrical plays, film scripts, letters, and political manifestos). I have built a team of international scholars and together we are developing workshops, an international conference, a film program, as well as an edited book. Our first seminar was held at the Università Statale di Milano in January 2017 (“La fabbrica del giallo: Guglielmo Giannini tra cinema e teatro”[“The Thriller Factory: Guglielmo Giannini between cinema and theatre”]). Our first publication is a dossier in Bianco e Nero (June 2017).
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Try Walking in My Shoes: Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness on Screen. Conference co-convenor. University of Melbourne in partnership with the Dax Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe1100-1800), 2014.
Women and Silent Screen Conference (VII). Conference co-convenor, University of Melbourne, 2013. Academic & Film programmer. Films sponsored by the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia, and the New Zealand Film Archive.
Screening Italy: Cinema and Change in Post-War Italian Film. Series of public lectures organized in collaboration with Co.As.It and the Museo Italiano. Convenor, 2013.
A Dinner Party: Setting the Table (exhibition, seminars, screenings). Co-curator and Academic programmer. West Space art gallery, Melbourne, 2012. Organized free public film programmes. Sponsored by the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia.
Paul Cox: Miracle Maker. Conference co-convenor and film programmer. Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2009. Included: Asher Bilu, Paul Cox, Paul Grabowsky, Rodney Hall, Chris Haywood, David Wenham, Wendy Hughes. Event sposored by Film Victoria. Film programme sponsored by the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia.
Performing Passions: Sarah Bernhardt and the Silent Screen. Film programmer. Introduction to public screenings. Bologna: Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, 2006.
Digital Madness. Curator and participant. With Vivian Sobchack and Fabiam Wagmister, School of Film & TV, UCLA, 1996.
PUBLICATIONS GRANTS SUPERVISIONS
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All years
All types
2016
Editors? introduction: archives and archivists
V Duckett, J Matthews
(2016), Vol. 2, pp. 1-5, Feminist media histories, C1
JOURNAL
An introduction to the interviews
V Duckett
(2016), Vol. 2, pp. 87-92, Feminist media histories, C1
JOURNAL
Her Majesty moves: Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Elizabeth and the development of motion pictures
V Duckett
(2016), pp. 111-131, British monarchy on screen, Manchester, Eng., B1
CHAPTER
2015
The silent screen (1895-1928)
V Duckett
(2015), pp. 25-48, Acting, New Brunswick, N. J., B1
CHAPTER
Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film
V Duckett
(2015), Champaign, Ill., A1
BOOK
Introduction: Women and the silent screen
V Duckett, S Potter
(2015), pp. 1-1, Screening the past, C1
JOURNAL
2014
Unwinding the film spool: Hugo, Méliès, and our return to early film
V Duckett
(2014), Vol. 8, pp. 33-42, Studies in documentary film, C1
JOURNAL
Letting Lolita laugh
V Duckett
(2014), Vol. 42, pp. 528-540, Literature-Film quarterly, C1-1
JOURNAL
2013
The ?voix d?or? on silent film: the case of Sarah Bernhardt
V Duckett
(2013), pp. 318-333, Researching women in silent cinema: new findings and perspectives, Bologna, Italy, B1-1
CHAPTER
Kaleidescope: women and cinematic change from the silent era to now
V Duckett
(2013), pp. 2-11, Researching women in silent cinema: new findings and perspectives, Bologna, Italy, B1-1
CHAPTER
2012
A dinner party: setting the table
C Phillips, V Duckett
(2012), Melbourne, Vic., J1-1
WORKS
2011
La 'voix d'or' al cinema: l'eco di Sarah Bernhardt in Italia
V Duckett
(2011), Vol. 570, pp. 74-81, Bianco e Nero, C1-1
JOURNAL
Pictures and prizes: Le Grand Prix de Rome and Grand Prix
V Duckett
(2011), pp. 129-142, A little solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American film, New Brunswick, N.J., B1-1
CHAPTER
The stars might be smiling : a feminist forage into a famous film
V Duckett
(2011), pp. 161-181, Fantastic voyages of the cinematic imagination : Georges Méliès's trip to the moon, Albany, N.Y., B1-1
CHAPTER
Women and the silent screen VI
V Duckett
(2011), Vol. 50, pp. 102-105, Cinema journal, C1-1
JOURNAL
Who was Sarah Bernhardt? Negotiating fact and fiction
V Duckett
(2011), Vol. 10, pp. 103-112, Journal of historical biography, C1-1
JOURNAL
2010
Investigating an interval: Sarah Bernhardt, Hamlet, and the Paris Exposition of 1900
V Duckett
(2010), pp. 193-212, Reclaiming the archive: feminism and film history, Detroit, Michigan, B1-1
CHAPTER
The European actress, the Liberty style, and the diva on the silent screen
V Duckett
(2010), pp. 126-136, Not so silent : women in cinema before sound, Stockholm, Sweden, B1-1
CHAPTER
2009
Reworking romanticism: Paul Cox's 'Man of flowers'
V Duckett
(2009), Senses of cinema, C1-1
JOURNAL
2007
Reflections on a feminist future: cooking cakes and baking biscuits in an early documentary film
V Duckett
(2007), Vol. 2, pp. 178-187, Comunicazioni sociali, C1-1
JOURNAL
2006
The moving pictures : Sarah Bernhardt and the theatrical film
V Duckett
(2006), pp. 314-326, Cinegrafie : the comic and the sublime, Bologna, Italy, B1-1
CHAPTER
2000
Beyond the body: Orlan and the material morph
V Duckett
(2000), pp. 209-223, Metamorphing : visual transformation and the culture of quick-change, Minneapolis, Minn., B1-1
CHAPTER
1998
Digitized dreamtime: the case of 'From Alice to Ocean'
V Duckett
(1998), Vol. 25, pp. 27-37, Iris: a journal of theory on image and sound, C1-1
JOURNAL
Biography
Dr. Victoria Duckett is the Director of Entertainment Production and Lecturer in Screen (Film and Media) in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University.
Author of over 40 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and professional publications, she has co-ordinated and convened major national and international conferences, curated film programs for major film festivals, and curated nationally significant art exhibitions. Her most recent book,Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film, was published by the University of IllinoisPress in 2015 and in 2016 was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently working on a book about historical gesture and generational performance on screen.
In 2016 Duckett was awarded a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin to develop this project. This project will be further devleoped with a Visiting Researcher Stipend awarded by the Bill Douglas Center (University of Exeter) for research to be conducted in December, 2017. Recent awards also include the Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy (2015) , a Visiting Fellowship to the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University (2014), an Ian Potter Foundation Grant, University of Melbourne (2013) as well as a University of Melbourne MacGeorge Fellowship (2013) and a Melbourne Social Equity Grant (2013).
In addition to the historical examination of performance, celebrity, and interdisciplinary media, Dr. Duckett's research focuses upon digital media archives. She recently co-editied an issue of Feminist Media Histories, entitled ‘Archives and Archivists’ (2016) where she interviewed six of the world's leading female archivists, programmers and curators of early film. In addition to her focus on film archives, she is also leading a project on Guglielmo Giannini. Giannini-an Italian journalist, playwright, scriptwriter, film director, and politician active in Italy between the 1920s and 1960-is a key figure in twentieth century European culture and politics. During the past 3 years in Milan, Italy, Dr Duckett has digitized family holdings. In 2017 Dr. Duckett and a team of international scholars inaugurated their research in 2017 with a seminar entitled "Guglielmo Giannini: A Digital Archive of Film, Theatre, TV and Political Activism" (Università Statale di Milano), forcoming as a mini-dossier in “Giallo all’italiana,” Bianco & Nero, June 2017.
From 2010–2015, Dr. Duckett served on the Women and Film History International Steering Committee, bringing the Women and Silent Screen conference to Melbourne in 2013.She is a member of the FAScinA (Studies of Cinema and Audiovisual Media, Edizioni ETS, Pisa) Book Series Board, is on the founding editorial board for Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal, and since 2010 has served on the editorial board of Journal of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.
QUOTED: "Well written and insightful, this is required reading for those interested in theater, film, or women's studies."
"essential."
Duckett, Victoria. Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: performance and silent film
C. McCutcheon
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.2 (Oct. 2016): p213.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Full Text:
Duckett, Victoria. Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: performance and silent film. Illinois, 2015. 231 p index afp ISBN 9780252039669 cloth, $95.00; ISBN 9780252081163 pbk, $30.00; ISBN 9780252097751 ebook, contact publisher for price
54-0573
PN2638
2015-12975
CIP
Bernhardt (1844-1923) was one of the finest actors of the 19th century and also the first major international film star. Duckett (media studies, Deakin Univ., Australia) examines Bernhardts "crossover (from theater) into film and [provides] an analysis of what her films can reveal ... today." Duckett devotes chapters to Bernhardt's acting in silent film and her appearances in the short Le duel d'Hamlet (1900), in which she appears as Hamlet; Camille (1912), which made her a film star; the short Queen Elizabeth (1912), which is considered her most famous film; the celebrity documentary Sarah Bernhardt at Home (1915); and Mothers of France (1917), a French propaganda film made to encourage US involvement in WWI. (The title characters in Camille and Queen Elizabeth were two of her stage roles.) The text is enhanced by advertisements, newspaper and periodical articles, photographs of Bernhardt on stage, and images from her films. The book includes extensive notes, but readers would have benefited from a bibliography. Although it does not discuss all of Bernhardt's films, Duckett's excellent book is the first full-length treatment of Bernhardt's silent films. Well written and insightful, this is required reading for those interested in theater, film, or women's studies. Summing Up: **** Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.--C. McCutcheon, University of South Carolina Upstate
McCutcheon, C.
QUOTED: "conceptually ambitious and highly stimulating new study of Bernhardt’s film work."
"In her conclusion, Duckett stresses that much more research remains to be done to properly acknowledge and understand Bernhardt’s wide international celebrity and appeal. It should be noted that one of the striking achievements of this book is the way it avoids what the author cautions against as ‘our tendency today to compact film history into a single narrative of historical reception’ (p. 92) by paying equal attention to the promotion and critical reception of Bernhardt’s films in France and the United States."
"Perhaps we are still only just beginning to understand the role played by Sarah Bernhardt as a nexus point for the stimulation of global film commerce and finance in the feature film era."
Victoria Duckett (ed.), Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film
Jon Burrows First Published February 12, 2017 Book Review
Download PDFPDF download for Victoria Duckett (ed.), Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film Article information
Free Access
Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film
Duckett Victoria (ed.), Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 248 pp. HB. £79.00. 9780252039669
Sarah Bernhardt – arguably the most celebrated theatre actress in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – starred in ten fiction and four non-fiction films made in cinema’s silent era, between 1900 and 1924. Generations of scholars have predominantly tended to view Bernhardt’s high-profile migrations from the stage to the screen as deeply regrettable wrong-turns in film history. The relevant volume of the most authoritative multi-part history of American cinema concludes that Bernhardt ‘didn’t understand what was appropriate to the new medium’, and that because ‘Her stage style was that of the old school, larger than life, deliberately artificial and stylized… a new audience, knowing only modern film acting, didn’t understand it’.1 Victoria Duckett’s conceptually ambitious and highly stimulating new study of Bernhardt’s film work references many similar judgements and dates this critical trend back to a polemical 1925 obituary of the actress written by the young avant-garde French film director René Clair. Duckett’s book seeks to reframe Bernhardt’s films as important and influential experiments in creating an intermedial form of ‘cinematized theatre’ and to thereby ‘recuperate a cinema that has been lost to us, not materially (because the films… are available in archives) but perceptually’.2
The book begins with a chapter which challenges the view that Bernhardt’s moving picture performances must have been irreparably compromised by the technical inability to reproduce her famous voice. It is argued here that Bernhardt was equally celebrated as an exponent of eloquent and aesthetic gesture, and that considered steps were taken ‘to ensure the legibility of her gesturing body on screen’ (p. 49) – not least, in the case of her 1912 film Queen Elizabeth, through the commissioning of one of cinema’s very first specially composed musical scores to provide a tempo for her gesticulatory rhythms. The rest of the book takes the form of discrete case study chapters, each dealing with a particular film. (It is not an exhaustive survey of her screen work, and several lesser known titles – some lost, some extant – are excluded from discussion altogether.) There is a chapter on Bernhardt’s first film, a short extract from her notorious production of Hamlet, produced using an experimental synchronised sound technology for demonstration at the 1900 Paris Exposition. This is interpreted as a revealing example of the actress’s commitment to innovation in performance and to a widely shared belief that photographic motion pictures might facilitate an expansion of the theatrical domain. This is followed by a chapter examining Bernhardt’s 1911 screen version of La Dame aux Camélias, which establishes that, far from slavishly replicating her celebrated stage production of the Alexandre Dumas play, significant changes in content, structure and pacing were made as part of a thoughtful process of cinematic adaptation. The next chapter focuses on Queen Elizabeth, Bernhardt’s most famous and commercially successful film. Duckett here suggests that Bernhardt managed to redeem what had been one of her biggest theatrical flops with the use of mise-en-scène that is carefully choreographed so as to visually reference a broad succession of famous paintings. There is a chapter dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt at Home (1912), a two-reel non-fiction film presenting glimpses of how Bernhardt’s leisure time was occupied at her summer residence on Belle-Île in Brittany. This is interpreted as a feminist challenge to dominant conceptions of domestic space, in which ‘Ideas about what constitutes “woman’s work” are accordingly challenged and revised’ (p. 150). The final chapter deals with Mothers of France (1917), a war propaganda film which is framed as an example of how Bernhardt – now severely disabled by the surgical amputation of her right leg – used the smoke and mirrors of cinematic editing to allow her to give a performance that she could no longer deliver on stage.
There are three particularly bold and distinctive ideas which underpin, and recur throughout, this study. It seems to me that all have clear value but also need moderating to some degree. In most of Duckett’s case studies a deep and meaningful connection between Sarah Bernhardt and art nouveau is claimed. The affinities are seen to predate the conventional chronology of the movement, and the actress is characterised as an ‘originator’ of the style (p. 9). This idea is premised upon the fact that Bernhardt became celebrated from the 1870s onwards for idiosyncratic spiralling turns that she performed on stage, through which her costumes flowed and coiled around the base of her body. This distinguishing feature was celebrated in a portrait of the actress reclining on a chaise longue painted by Georges Clairin in 1876, in which the tendrils of a long dress are draped across the floor beyond her feet, and an effect of long flowing curves is heightened by the fact that they seem to extend into the body of a faithful wolfhound curled up on the floor. Bernhardt’s connection with art nouveau obviously became more direct and tangible in the 1890s through the famous posters that Alphonse Mucha designed to promote her plays. The idea that Bernhardt’s influence on Mucha predated their professional association seems potentially valid and original to me, as does Duckett’s suggestion that Bernhardt’s personification of the style transcended its decorative dimension and presented it as ‘a way of inhabiting the home in a creative and expansive way’ and as a means of ‘affirming that traditional female culture is part of the new world and the new century’ (p. 139). I am inclined to demur, though, at the idea that Bernhardt’s film career ‘is the culmination of the art nouveau movement, perhaps even its greatest achievement in terms of its global, cross-class, and intergenerational exposure’ (p. 9). I don’t see sufficient evidence being presented to back up this claim.
Another key concept promoted throughout the book is the idea that Bernhardt’s films are ‘cinematized theater’ (p. 14). This phrase is evidently more helpful and productive than the traditional labels of ‘filmed theatre’ or ‘canned theatre’ in stressing the active processes of transformation which Duckett identifies in the adaptations of Bernhardt’s work for the screen. However, the idea of ‘cinematized theatre’ – particularly when it is stressed so insistently – has the limitation that it does not clearly connote influence in more than one direction. The author states at the outset that she is interested ‘in what Bernhardt’s films tell me about the cinema’ (p. 2), but answers to this question are conspicuous by their absence; there is only one brief reference to the idea of a ‘theatricalized cinema’ (p. 42).
I think the lack of attention paid to the issue of how Bernhardt might have helped to shape/consolidate the development of the cinema as a medium of expression and as a commercial industry is partly a consequence of the conception of the book as a work of ‘microhistory’, which, of course, means in practice that there is an intensive focus throughout upon a single individual. This is not to suggest that the research base is narrow; it is anything but, and encompasses a laborious excavation of decades of theatre and art history. The particularity of the central reference point does help to yield useful insights about the self-referential nature of her career, as clearly exemplified in the revelation that one of the many paintings visually replicated in Queen Elizabeth is the aforementioned 1876 portrait of Bernhardt herself! (Perhaps this is why one British film reviewer felt moved to observe that ‘it is curious, but many of the characteristics of the Queen are characteristics of the great tragedienne’.)3 But Bernhardt’s singularity is undoubtedly overstated at times. A greater awareness of how her films both initiated and replicated broader trends of intermedial exchange between the theatre and film industries in the 1910s might have helped to avoid the mistaken claim made on page 100 that Ellen Terry was insufficiently adventurous to follow Bernhardt’s lead and act in front of movie cameras. Also it is strange to find that a book which is so concerned to stress the significance of the staged realisations of famous paintings in Bernhardt’s films does not make a single reference to Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’ important 1997 study Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film.4
In her conclusion, Duckett stresses that much more research remains to be done to properly acknowledge and understand Bernhardt’s wide international celebrity and appeal. It should be noted that one of the striking achievements of this book is the way it avoids what the author cautions against as ‘our tendency today to compact film history into a single narrative of historical reception’ (p. 92) by paying equal attention to the promotion and critical reception of Bernhardt’s films in France and the United States. The transnational nature of her appeal is highlighted in the well-known story of how the Famous Players–Lasky–Paramount combine, the most powerful organisation in Hollywood’s studio era, effectively began life with Adolph Zukor’s lucrative decision to finance and distribute Queen Elizabeth as the launch project of his Famous Players Film Company. Duckett highlights ‘the international collaboration that this represents – in terms of an American company profiting from an “art film” proposed by a French company’ as evidence of the ‘extent to which Bernhardt was a commodity linking nations together’ (p. 39). The pan-European and Transatlantic nature of these transactions may be even more extensive than this; looking back on his career some years later, a leading British film distributor, J. Frank Brockliss, claimed that it was he who approached Bernhardt with the idea for the film and then commissioned the Éclipse studio (the French production subsidiary of the British Urban Trading Company, run by émigré American Charles Urban) to shoot it, backed by the security of a Stateside distribution guarantee negotiated with Zukor.5 Perhaps we are still only just beginning to understand the role played by Sarah Bernhardt as a nexus point for the stimulation of global film commerce and finance in the feature film era.
Notes
1Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990; repr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 92–93.
2Victoria Duckett, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), p. 188. For all subsequent quotations from this edition, page numbers will follow in brackets.
3Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 8 August 1912.
4Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
5Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 22 January 1920.
QUOTED: "Australian film historian Victoria Duckett brings a new perspective to the subject in Seeing Sarah Bernhardt."
Seeing Sarah Bernhardt
By David Luhrssen
Dec. 7, 2015
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bernhardt
press.uillinois.edu
Sarah Bernhardt was the world’s most famous stage actress at the turn of the last century, perhaps the first true superstar. Unlike most American thespians of that era, the French actress didn’t look down on the movies but eagerly threw herself into the nascent medium. However, even by the time of her death in 1923, critics marginalized her role in film, declaring her gestural acting as uncinematic and relegating her to a failed line of evolution in film history.
Australian film historian Victoria Duckett brings a new perspective to the subject in Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film (University of Illinois Press). For Duckett, Bernhardt “embodied art nouveau” on film through costumes as well as gesture. The author shows how 19th century theater backdrops and staging often replicated well-known illustrations and that Bernhardt carried the practice into her films. The reasons for rejecting those films by the 1920s are easily identified. A casualty of World War I, Art Nouveau was already old fashioned, replaced by the less organic, more machine-tooled geometry of Art Deco. Narrative films telling stories in an ostensibly naturalistic mode supplanted the uncertain if bracing experiments of the earliest movies.