Dracula's Daughter? Morticia Addams? Nah, it's just French actress Sarah Bernhardt, circa 1873. She's not yet 30 and, though seen here in a coffin, still had fifty more years to go. In her day Bernhardt was considered the greatest actress in the world, but she was probably less Meryl Streep and more a thespian Lady Gaga: The-Artist-as-Weirdo. That's no slight but exactly what she wanted people to think, the first celebrity to conclude that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Take the coffin. As Sarah herself told it, she was nursing her tubercular sister back to health, letting her sleep in her own bed, while the actress slept in a casket that she just happened to have lying around the apartment. A manicurist dropped by, saw Sarah in the box, and ran out of the apartment screaming. From then on "all of Paris knew." So what else could poor Sarah do but have her picture taken in the sarcophagus and try her damnedest to make sure every man, woman, and child in France got a copy? It recalls another Artist-as-Weirdo, Michael Jackson, who a century later made sure a photo of himself sleeping in an oxygen chamber fell into the hands of the National Enquirer. That didn't hurt his record sales any (though a later revelation about an entirely different set of sleeping arrangements clearly did, proving that there IS such a thing as bad publicity.) Getting back to Sarah, it was just one of many eccentricities that she indulged in that the French loved gossiping about, from a private menagerie kept in that same crowded apartment to a private army of lovers, usually but not exclusively male, kept in that same private apartment. She wore belts below her hips, so much jewelry that she chimed as she walked, and, as if sleeping in a coffin wasn't enough, sculpted a death head of her recently departed husband. However, what truly shocked the normally open-minded French public wasn't what she did offstage but on it. Not satisfied with mere portrayals of Cleopatra or Salome, Sarah decided to play the title role in Hamlet as well! Later she is said to have donned a beard to play Shylock (if not the same gender, they at least shared the same religion.)
Sarah sold tickets and continued to through the rest of her life, which included a major calamity in the 20th century portion of that life. Jumping upon an improperly placed mattress during a performance, she apparently broke her leg and didn't seek medical attention right away. It didn't happen overnight, but gangrene eventually cost her that leg. Still, she appeared on stage and now movies and on recordings. As is often the case with film footage from before World War I, her screen appearances look as though they were shot through a Coke bottle (because the print has disintegrated; contemporary audiences would have seen it clear as day.) In her 60s, she obviously can no longer play the ingenue, and there's the flailing of arms so often seen in silent pictures, as if Sarah herself was the manicurist who had just seen Sarah in a coffin. But that's all we have to go by. The 19th century part of her career, which so wowed contemporary audiences, only exists in photographs. What would 21st century audiences think of her? Given changes in acting styles, it seems unlikely she would still be considered the greatest actress in the world (George Bernard Shaw, 12 years her junior, found her exaggerated mannerisms to be "childishly egotistical") but that doesn't mean she wouldn't be fun to watch. We'll never know for sure, as Sarah Bernhardt is now Lost in Time...
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Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg but not her reputation. Tragedy is relative.
I don't think I ever heard of her but I love all her eccentricities. Meanwhile the"kept in that same crowded apartment to a private army of lovers, usually but not exclusively male, kept in that same private apartment. " I can sympathize with.
ReplyDeleteAnimals and lovers. It does sound a bit like your blog, Maddie.
DeleteI’ve always wondered what to do with the casket I just happen to have lying around the apartment. Now I know.
ReplyDeleteMitchell, you could fall asleep watching TV in one.
DeleteI think if she was around now, she would really push boundaries as she did in her time. I didn't know about the loss of her leg. Silent movie actors had to overact to get the drama across to the audience. No room for subtlety then.
ReplyDeleteAndrew, I agree that a bit of overacting was required in silent movies. After all, they were basically miming, and mines exaggerate. But there may have been technological reasons as well. Ever notice people move a lot faster in silent movies, as if everybody alive between 1890 and 1927 were on amphetamines? They weren't (well maybe some of them were.) A UCLA professor explains the odd movements you see in those movies:
Delete"Persistence of vision (which makes still film frames appear to be in motion) only requires 16 frames per second to fool the eye, so that was the speed used for early films. When sound was introduced, the
16-frame-per-second speed caused warbling, so the standard was increased to 24 frames per second. [Harris Minter claims that the standard silent film speed was 18 frames per second.]
"[Parenthetically, 16 fps means about 60 feet per minute. This is useful to know, since silent film lengths are often given in feet rather than minutes. Sometimes they are given in reels, which are 1000 feet. So a one-reeler would be about 16 minutes.]
"When you see a silent movie, shot at 16 frames per second, projected at the faster rate, it looks "faster" but only because there aren't many 16 frame-per-second film projectors around.
"To complicate matters more, the early cameras were hand-cranked: if the cameraman cranked too slow, the projector made the movie look too fast...and vice versa. Early cameramen had to keep a steady rhythm.
"However, this is complicated by the fact that in the silent era, there was no universally 'correct' film speed. The introduction of the 24-fps rate used today had to do with sound, as was said, not with the images. In the silent era, cameras were hand-operated, and so were most
projectors. In addition to the obvious difficulties of maintaining a perfect rate by hand, the ability to speed up or slow down the progress of the film through the camera and projector was used for artistic effect. By undercranking (turning the crank slower and thus taking
fewer frames per second) on shooting while projecting at normal speed, the action would speed up as more seconds of photographed time were compressed into a given number of seconds of projected time. Alternatively, overcranking would give the opposite effect -- slow
motion. By cranking faster, the projectionist could speed up the action, while cranking slower on projection would slow down the action. The classic example of projectionist overcranking is during chases or other exciting scenes, to make the fast action seem even faster. I have heard that some films were even released with advice about how fast to crank during certain parts of the film. Also, shooting film undercranked would be used for certain stunts and special effects,
giving the illusion of speed that wasn't actually present.
[Another source reported that a PBS documentary series said films were sometimes undercranked to save film costs.]
"One side effect of this method of shooting silent films is that any serious film guide that discusses silent films will not give running times for them, as that time could vary depending on the talent and mood of the projectionist. While the difference might be only a couple of
minutes out of a couple of hours, printing a particular number of minutes as a running time for a silent film is misleading and can cause confusion. Typically, lengths are given in number of reels, or, when they really want to be careful, number of feet of film."
All this should explain why Laurel and Hardy move a bit faster in their silents than in their talkies, in case you thought that maybe the two gentlemen developed arthritis around 1930 or so.
I've just been informed my comment is too long, so I'll have to break it up.
Also, there are no "closeups" in that Bernhardt clip, which dates from 1912. Birth of a Nation was still two years away. While there's some dispute as to whether that film's director, D.W. Griffith, invented the closeup, he certainly popularized it, revolutionized film with it, and achieved bits of artistry that still impresses today (yes, I know BOAN is racist, but I'm not talking about that.) For instance, there's a scene early on where a Confederate mother pleads with (an actor playing) Abraham Lincoln to spare her son's life, as he's about to be hung for spying. We see the mother and Lincoln at the beginning of the scene and at the end, but in-between, the camera focuses on the mother's friend, played by Lillian Gish. The whole scene SUBTLY plays out on Lillian's pretty face as it becomes apparent that Honest Abe is indeed going to grant clemency. It's an impressive bit of acting on Gish' part. Would Sarah Bernhardt have been capable of such subtlety? I don't know.
DeleteFinally, some people are just more emotionally demonstrative than others. It may just have been an artistic decision on Bernhardt's part.
She had it all, baby, she had it all.
ReplyDeleteIndeed she did, Debra.
DeleteHi, Kirk!
ReplyDeleteHappy 178th birthday in heaven (yes, I checked, she's dead) to the iconic French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt! Sarah actually died almost 100 years ago, but her name was quite familiar to me. When I was a boy, I occasionally heard comedians and other entertainers make reference to her in remarks such as "You are (or she is) a regular Sarah Bernhardt," an indication of the actress's enduring fame and popularity long after her demise.
This is a marvelous tribute to the drama queen referred to as The World's First Celebrity. I didn't know any of those interesting tidbits about her quirky, kinky lifestyle She sounds like my kinda gal, the type of woman you eagerly take home to meet mother.
We can't help wondering how well Sarah's flamboyant style, on and off stage, would be received in the 21st century. Seems like she would fit right in but, at the same time, might get lost in the crowd as more and more celebrities and celebrity wannabes use shocking behavior, publicity photos, videos, texts and tweets for self-promotion.
Thanks for a very informative tribute to Sarah Bernhardt, notably the earliest born person on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Have a safe and happy weekend, good buddy Kirk!
Shady, one point I try to and wish I could make better on this blog is how the advent of mass media, i.e., pop culture, enlarged, but also in some ways diminished, the notion of "celebrity" If Sarah Bernhardt was seen as the greatest actress in the world back in the 1870s, people would have been comparing her to at most maybe a dozen actress, all seen nowhere else but live on a stage. Certainly nobody was using a scale of a 130 years of moving images, everyone from Lillian Gish (read my second comment to Andrew) to Meryl Streep to Lady Gaga (read the first paragraph of my post) to make such a comparison. If someone could do so, Bernhardt may lose out on BOTH the acting and flamboyance fronts. Or maybe she would have won both. I tend to think she still would have put on a good show, if not necessarily the best show.
DeleteI enjoyed reading your reply to Andrew and learned a lot from it.
DeleteInteresting.
ReplyDeleteMike, I'll take that as a yes vote.
DeleteExtremely interesting. The eccentricities that some people perceive as interesting could ruin a person's reputation. However, for some (like a celebrity), people find fascinating and often imitate.
ReplyDeleteEccentricity is but one of the many perks of fame, JM.
DeleteI am surprised, I haven't heard of her! I see she died aged 78...that must have been considered REALLY old back then in 1923!
ReplyDeleteAnanka, mass media--movies, TV, etc.--didn't really come into being until towards the end of Sarah Bernhardt's career, so there's not much of a record of her performances. You're not likely to come across her channel surfing. But like P.T. Barnum, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and Harry Houdini, her name persists as a symbol of a certain kind of entertainment.
DeleteWe read a lot about the short lifespans of people who lived in the past, but that's not because the aging process occurred at a much quicker rate than today. People weren't getting "old" at an earlier age. It was because of the prevalence of infectious diseases, which could take anyone at any age, including, much of the time, children. Penicillin changed all that. But even in the dark days before penicillin, there were plenty of people, a large minority, who managed to dodge the infectious-disease bullet, and when they did, there's no reason to believe that they were that different from elderly people today. Benjamen Franklin attended the Constitutional Convention when he was in his 80s!
That is a very valid point! Penicillin was a game changer for sure and Scottish!
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