About Money: A Documentary on 'L'Argent', Marcel L'Herbier's Film

L'Herbier in Excerpt

A very quick post, as '08 purges itself with one last heave, simply to draw attention to Jean Dréville's 1928 film — revised in 1971 so that it be accompanied by beautiful, distant, scratchy recordings of standard 'classical' movements, and a voice-over commentary by Dréville himself (which voix off serves, at the same time, as a proto-"audio commentary") — about the making of Marcel L'Herbier's 1929 L'Argent [Money]. Dréville's picture is possibly the first ever "making-of" film, and arguably greater even than the (great) L'Herbier film to which it's ostensibly appended.

The title in full: About Money: A Documentary on L'Argent, Marcel L'Herbier's Film [Autour de l'argent, un documentaire sur l'Argent, le film de Marcel L'Herbier].

Sample frames —

Autour de l'argent, un documentaire sur l'Argent, le film de Marcel L'Herbier [About Money: A Documentary on L'Argent, Marcel L'Herbier's Film] by Jean Dréville, 1928/1971:






The film is available as part of the recent two-disc standard-def Masters of Cinema Series release — which not only contains the above Dréville film, but his one-minute, 1928 preceding film, L'Arrivée à Paris de Brigitte Helm pour le tournage de l'Argent [The Arrival in Paris of Brigitte Helm for the Shoot of L'Argent, 1928]; also, L'Herbier's feature; and Laurent Véray's very interesting 2008 video film Marcel L'Herbier, poète de l'art silencieux [Marcel L'Herbier: Poet of the Silent Art]. Footage of L'Herbier's screen-tests of the actors is also included. The 80-page book that comes with the release contains a Richard Abel essay about L'Herbier's feature; translations of excerpts from two interviews with L'Herbier from 1968 and 1978; and excerpts from period (1929) critical notices composed on the occasion of the film's post-'28 recut and public release.



Here's a translation I did of a dazzling excerpt from L'Herbier's 1979 book La Tête qui tourne [The Turning Head / The "Shooting" Head], which didn't make it into the book:

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Today, across the deep eddies of time long since past, I still perceive, as on some dotted thread, the impalbable fragrances of that second Belle Epoque of 1925, année folle... And within me lingers that idea that by way of two paths extending in parallel toward the same goal (a film of L'Inhumaine [The Inhuman One, 1924], a "Deschanel" Interior), I had doubly fastened myself to the more or less flamboyant flank of French Art Décoratif.

If this march forward had the merit of bringing me multitudes of unexpected joys, neither did it neglect to point out, to an ignominious troupe of nay-sayers, the way toward my little corner of the world. Up to the day, already evoked, in which to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the "Arts Décoratifs", I will see enthroned at the Palais du Louvre — such sweet revenge! — certain objects and effects created by the best names in the art-world, and some simply of my own invention, which acted as the tender accomplices of my deeply rewarding life, and which such obliging aristarques as Vuillermoz and Chavance had admired at my house.

But to come back to the matter at hand — the filmic aesthetic — we might wonder, after all, whether the humble reality of the world of forms, when it has been transformed into film images, and which, in this event, manages to be nothing but a faithful reproduction of planetary appearances, is not, herein, similarly hostile to the decorative motifs that one creator, infatuated by transfigurations, purported to add to the arrangement? To have doubtlessly been, on certain occasions, one of that sort, I come now to wondering: is the cinematograph so imbued with congenital humility that it must strike into filmic ostracism the likes of [von] Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Cocteau, Visconti, Delvaux, Ken Russell, or even Patrice Chéreau, and, along with them, other (Russian, or Japanese) hobbyists of the baroque — all because, in paying honor to the cinematograph, at times in fictive (but such pathetically endearing) vestments, they have in some way come to mythify it? Here I put forward a profound question that brings us back, through certain assertions of Hermès et le silence [Hermès and Silence — L'Herbier's 1918 essay], to some of the very recent cogitations of one Marguerite Duras declaring the primacy of the recording of the Verb over the recording of the image. This restores some currency to those old jottings of mine, so that these pages might presently lead us back in their direction.

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