At around the time that the Vicomte de Noailles was dabbling in film finance with Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet and Buñuel's L'Age d'Or, another aristocrat, the Belgian duke Henri D'Ursel, adopted a pseudonym to direct and star in La perle (1929), a short surrealist fantasia owing much to the twin influences of Murnau's Nosferatu and Feuillade's Les vampires.
It's a charming and elegant (and slightly sinister) piece. We're told that the surrealists admired Feuillade partly because they saw his serials without the intertitles, which had been lost, so the plotlines, already oneiric and chancy, became even more opaque, transforming from linear thrillers into a random series of outrages. D'Ursel, following Murnau's lead in The Last Laugh, has only one letter and no intertitles at all, leaving us to more or less invent our own narrative to make sense of the dreamy events he depicts.
This much is certain...
It's a charming and elegant (and slightly sinister) piece. We're told that the surrealists admired Feuillade partly because they saw his serials without the intertitles, which had been lost, so the plotlines, already oneiric and chancy, became even more opaque, transforming from linear thrillers into a random series of outrages. D'Ursel, following Murnau's lead in The Last Laugh, has only one letter and no intertitles at all, leaving us to more or less invent our own narrative to make sense of the dreamy events he depicts.
This much is certain...
- 12/13/2012
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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