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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2003 |
Mozhukhin: The Paths of Exile |
| Film Title |
LE BRASIER ARDENT |
| Alternative Title 1 |
IL BRACIERE ARDENTE |
| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
France |
| Release Date |
1923 |
| Production Co. |
Films Albatros |
| Director |
Ivan Mosjoukine |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
18 |
| |
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| Footage |
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Time |
| 2152m |
|
105' |
| Archive Source |
Cinémathèque Française |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in francese / French intertitles. |
| Cast |
| Ivan Mosjoukine, Nathalie Lissenko, Nicolas Koline, Camille Bardou, Huguette de la Croix |
| |
| Other Credits |
| sc.: Ivan Mosjoukine; ph.: Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, Nicolas Toporkoff; art dir.: Alexandre Lochakoff, Edouard Gosch |
| |
| Other Information |
| released: 1.6.1923 |
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| Program Notes |
The first half of 1923 was a heady time for Mosjoukine. His long-delayed serial vehicle, La Maison du mystère, finally began to keep audiences on weekly tenterhooks as of 23 March. In the meantime, Mosjoukine and Volkoff had begun shooting Kean. And on 1 June, Mosjoukine's second and last solo directing venture, Le Brasier ardent, shot in the later summer and fall of 1922, opened a first-run engagement at the celebrated Marivaux theatre.
By all accounts, the film surprised, shocked, and divided contemporary audiences. In an article published 15 years later (as Mosjoukine lay dying in a clinic outside Paris), Jean Renoir recalled a screening of the film, and its effect on him: "One day at the Colisée cinema [sic?] I saw Le Brasier ardent, directed and acted by Mosjoukine and produced by the courageous Alexandre Kamenka. The audience howled and whistled, shocked by a film so different from their usual fare. I was ecstatic... I decided to abandon my trade, ceramics, to try to make films." (Le Point, December 1938). Critics, on the whole, were more admiring, if perplexed. Ricciotto Canudo didn't mince his words, declaring Le Brasier ardent as "stunning as the first ballets of Diaghilev."
Seen today, the film remains fascinating, at times strikingly original, though finally unsatisfactory, less than the sum of its heterogeneous parts. It was not innovative, in the sense that La Roue, for instance, was that same year, but, as Carl Vincent would later point out, it "popularized the strokes of inspiration and the purely cinematic experimentations in expression of the French avant-garde group of the time: Epstein, Dulac, and those of the other bold filmmakers, from Delluc to the German expressionists."
As a personal showcase for his acting range, Mosjoukine outdid himself. Richard Abel writes: "Mosjoukine's original scenario ... may seem slapdash and wildly inconsistent, a recipe of oddly contradictory ingredients that do not really blend. But it was written, in part, as a vehicle for his own mercurial presence as an actor. His penchant for eccentric fantasy and comedy made him a Protean master of disguise, a synthesis of character types... In the opening nightmare alone, he plays a heretic burning at the stake, an elegant gentleman, a bishop, and a beggar. In the rest of the film, he shifts among a series of contradictory personae - a brilliant detective, a silly buffoon, a cruel dancing master, a shy lover, and a mama's boy."
More than in his other films of the period, Mosjoukine was particularly indebted to his chief collaborators, set designer Alexandre Lochakoff and chief cameraman Joseph-Louis Mundwiller. (Contrary to another Mitry legend with a long life, Volkoff did not co-direct the film, though he most certainly was on hand to offer technical advice to Mosjoukine.) A contemporary journalist visiting the studio during production described the sheer imagination and economy of means with which Lochakoff conjured up the opening nightmare's canal street in the courtyard of the tiny studio. (Yet again, another Mitry claim must be laid to rest: Boris Bilinsky and Pierre Schildknecht were not assistants to Lochakoff on this film - Bilinsky, in fact, didn't arrive in France until the following year.)
As for Mundwiller, this great Alsatian master of light began his career at Pathé's Russian affiliate in Moscow before the Great War. In addition to being the first to capture the ageing Leo Tolstoy on film, he pioneered cinematography in the nascent Russian film industry. Returning to France after the war, he served as chief cameraman at the Montreuil studio, before going on to work for Abel Gance (especially on the first part of Napoléon) and Raymond Bernard (Le Joueur d'échecs / The Chess Player).
Unfortunately, Mosjoukine's directing career ended with Le Brasier ardent, which was a resounding commercial failure. Yet at the same time it is obvious that Mosjoukine was actually the co-director of most of his subsequent films, especially those directed by Volkoff, whose career also would go into a rapid decline once separated from his friend and chief source of inspiration. - Lenny Borger
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