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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2003 |
Mozhukhin: The Paths of Exile |
| Film Title |
FEU MATHIAS PASCAL |
| Alternative Title 1 |
IL FU MATTIA PASCAL |
| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
France |
| Release Date |
1925 |
| Production Co. |
Cinégraphic / Films Albatros |
| Director |
Marcel L'Herbier |
| Format |
|
Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
18 |
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| Footage |
|
Time |
| 3495m |
|
170' |
| Archive Source |
Cinémathèque Française |
| |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in francese / French intertitles. |
| Cast |
| Ivan Mosjoukine, Marcelle Pradot, Lois Moran, Pierre Batcheff, Jean Hervé, Michel Simon, Isaure Douvan, Marthe Belot, Pauline Carton, Georges Térof |
| |
| Other Credits |
| sc.: Marcel L'Herbier, based on the novel by Luigi Pirandello (1904); ph.: Jean Letort, Paul Guichard, Fedote Bourgassoff, Jimmy Berliet; art dir.: Alberto Cavalcanti, Lazare Meerson |
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| Other Information |
| released: 7.8.1925 |
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| Program Notes |
Though they made for very strange bedfellows, Ivan Mosjoukine and Marcel L'Herbier were a winning tandem with their eccentric adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's early novel, about a young man who allows family and friends to believe him dead, and begins a second life under a new guise. By all odds, the collaboration of two such diametrically opposed temperaments should have ended in confusion, conflict, and failure (even if the passionately expansive Mosjoukine often held up the coldly cerebral L'Herbier as one of his two French directing models, along with Abel Gance). One only had to look at the vehicle Mosjoukine made just before Feu Mathias Pascal - the dire Le Lion de Mogols. Young Jean Epstein, just hired by Albatros to replace Viacheslav Tourjansky (who had defected to the new Russian émigré studio enclave in Billancourt), struggled in vain with both a ludicrous screenplay by Mosjoukine and his mercurial star. Though a box-office success, the film marked the nadir of both these two artists' careers, and its production remained a sore memory for Epstein. (So long as she lived, the director's sister, Marie Epstein, a long-time collaborator of Henri Langlois, refused to allow the film to be screened, even at the Cinémathèque Française!)
No doubt L'Herbier, who had bought the screen rights with Pirandello's blessing and personally sought out Mosjoukine to star, was a more flexible filmmaker than the actor-indifferent Epstein, and cannily understood how he could channel the actor's wide emotive range into his artistic design. There is exhilarating interplay of realism and fantasy, gravity and playfulness in both L'Herbier's mise-en-scène and Mosjoukine's performance that makes this more than just an elegantly carpentered star vehicle (among the film's contemporary detractors, Noel Burch, who pioneered re-evaluations of L'Herbier as one of the great silent directors, called the film retrograde.)
Feu Mathias Pascal was Mosjoukine's final film under his contract to Alexandre Kamenka's Films Albatros (which co-produced with L'Herbier's own production firm, Cinégraphic). Upon completing it, the actor packed his bags and left Montreuil to move across town to Billancourt, where Kamenka's former associate Noë Bloch had just created Ciné-France-Film, the French affiliate of a new European production consortium, Westi. The spanking-new studio at Billancourt was to be home base for Abel Gance's upcoming Westi production of Napoléon, and Gance was seriously considering Mosjoukine to play the title role. In the end Mosjoukine backed off and instead made Michel Strogoff under Tourjansky's direction. For many critics and historians, this move into big-budget international commercialism marked the beginning of Mosjoukine's artistic decline... - Lenny Borger
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