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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2003 |
Mozhukhin: The Paths of Exile |
| Film Title |
CASANOVA |
| Alternative Title 1 |
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| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
France |
| Release Date |
1927 |
| Production Co. |
Ciné-Alliance / Société des Cinéromans |
| Director |
Alexandre Volkoff |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
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20 |
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| Footage |
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Time |
| 3600m |
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158' |
| Archive Source |
Cinémathèque Française |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in francese / French intertitles. |
| Cast |
| Ivan Mosjoukine, Diane Karenne, Rina de Liguoro, Suzanne Bianchetti, Jenny Jugo, Olga Day, Rudolph Kleine-Rogge, Paul Guidé, Carlo Tedeschi, Nina Kochitz, Raymond Bouamerane, Albert Decoeur |
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| Other Credits |
| sc.: Alexandre Volkoff, Ivan Mosjoukine, Norbert Falk; ph.: Léonce-Henri Burel, Nicolas Toporkoff, Fedote Bourgassoff; art dir.: Alexandre Lochakoff, Vladimir Meingart, Edouard Gosch |
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| Other Information |
| released: 13.9.1927 |
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| Program Notes |
Lavish, light-fingered, and lilting with wit and imagination, Casanova was Mosjoukine's farewell present to Europe as he embarked on his abortive American career. In 1927, Mosjoukine was riding the crest of the wave of his popularity: Michel Strogoff was not only a smash hit across Europe, it had even been picked up for American distribution (by Universal, which at the same time offered Mosjoukine a multi-picture Hollywood contract that proved worse than a pact with the Devil).
Critical response was another matter: many admirers sniffed at the sight of Mosjoukine wasting his talents on such crowd-pleasing pap as Strogoff. Casanova only aggravated the case. Here was a super-production that was even more spectacularly vain (and just as long!) as Strogoff (which at least boasted Jules Verne as a literary alibi). For high-minded critics such as Léon Moussinac, Casanova failed because it was not "a critical description of social decomposition in 18th century Venice and an indictment of an era of crass sensual pleasure and foul cruelty."
But the makers of Casanova never made any claim to high purpose. Audiences rightly took the film for what it was: a divertissement, one of the biggest, funniest, and most stylish ever produced in France - indeed in Europe. Casanova wasn't a "biopic", it was a historical fantasia, an epic comedy based on a real-life historical rogue which exploited all the resources of the costume studio spectacular even as it poked fun at its very conventions (e.g., the marvellous gag involving Catherine the Great's impossibly long royal train). Volkoff, at his most stylish, outdid himself with scene after scene, blending high comedy and farce, eye-popping spectacle and close-quarters marivaudage, picaresque chases and nostalgic dallyings (even more than Strogoff, Casanova was an opportunity for Volkoff and his fellow émigrés to conjure up their lost homeland - in the French Alps and on the banks of the Seine!).
For Mosjoukine, the role of Casanova was a pure moment of comic détente, even of self-parody. He visibly has a grand old time sending up the great movieland seducers, himself included. Casanova was the anti-Kean, and one of Mosjoukine's best comic performances. Ironically, one of the film's and Mosjoukine's supporters was Jean Mitry, who wrote warmly of both film and star in a 1927 review. Forty years later, he was to dismiss both in his monograph on the actor, reducing Mosjoukine to the role of an "elegant model, a stage manager of elegant manners".
Casanova was the silent-era template for what is today disdainfully called "Europudding" - but this pudding had plenty of flavor. Producers Noë Bloch and Gregor Rabinovitch created their new Ciné-Alliance out of the ashes of Ciné-France-Film, and with financial backing from the Société des Cinéromans and UFA, set out to achieve the dream of a European cinema that could resist the Hollywood juggernaut. The credits of Casanova read like a Who's Who, with Russian, French, German, and Italian collaboration in key production and cast posts - from top UFA screenwriter Norbert Falk to Russian diva Nina Kochitz. Unfortunately, with Mosjoukine gone, Ciné-Alliance faltered. Their next extravaganza, the Arabian Nights fantasy The Mysteries of the Orient (aka Sheherezade), was a feeble follow-up to Casanova. Worse, it suggested that Volkoff's talents needed Mosjoukine's presence and artistic input. By the time Mosjoukine returned from Hollywood to fulfil the rest of his Universal contract in the studios of Berlin, it was too late. Manolescu and The White Devil, directed by Tourjansky and Volkoff respectively, were a partial return to form. But the talkies had arrived, and for Mosjoukine and many of his émigré companions, the parade had gone by. - Lenny Borger
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