The History of Sex in Cinema

Part four: The Twenties--Europe's Decade of Decadence And Delirium

Back in silent days, American audiences were exposed to far more foreign movies than they are today. For one thing, there were no language barriers. Distributors merely inserted English subtitles to replace the original French, German or Italian, and advertised an "all-star cast" to obscure the fact that nobody in the film had ever been heard of before. Nor did such pictures play in tiny, tony art houses; on the contrary, the better ones opened in the largest theaters on Broadway, and a great many more found their way into the neighborhoods. As a result, the American moviegoer of the Twenties was quite unconsciously the recipient of two distinct and often conflicting screen moralities--Europe's and Hollywood's. With ever-increasing domination of the Hays Office over the homegrown product, it's small wonder that critics and intellectuals of the era, not to mention the public, found greater challenge and stimulation in those pictures that came from abroad.

Undoubtedly, they were correct. No American firm, for example, could possibly have produced The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the first of many films that established the German studios as the most creative in the world during the early Twenties. (Admittedly, Caligari was not the first to arrive here from Germany; but because of the recent hostilities, many German films had slipped into the country in the guise of "Swedish" or "Scandinavian" imports.) Superficially, Caligari is the story of a series of grisly murders that break out in a small town in Germany, murders that the police are unable to solve. When his best friend also becomes a victim, Francis, the hero, takes matters into his own hands. Suspecting that the criminal is a fairground charlatan named Caligari, who displays for the delectation of the crowds a wraithlike male somnambulist named Cesare, the young man spies on the doctor and his "cabinet," in which Cesare is supposedly sleeping. But even while Francis and the police watch Caligari, Cesare is attempting to knife Jane, Francis' fiancée, in her bed. Changing his mind, he abducts her instead, carrying the girl over angular rooftops and shadowy paths until killed by his pursuers. Caligari himself, learning of the death, escapes to an insane asylum, with Francis following after. The audience soon learns that Caligari is in fact the head of the asylum, that Francis is one of his charges--and so are Cesare and Jane.

For its time, the picture exuded an impressive profundity. Madness had been reflected on the screen before, to be sure. In Caligari, however, one actually saw the world through the eyes of a madman--Francis--a world that Sigmund Freud was just beginning to penetrate and explain. Moreover, the film was acted in the exaggerated style of the German expressionist theater, while its decor seemed related to the then-emerging designs of the Cubist painters. Obviously, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was art.

Although Siegfried Kracauer, author of the definitive history of the German film, From Caligari to Hitler, has discovered all sorts of sinister sociological implications in the film, for sophisticated minds there lurked in it even more sinister sexual overtones.

Clearly, what the film has shown is Francis' fantasy. But just before the picture ends, we are returned to reality. There is a shot of a very slender and ascetic Cesare delicately toying with a flower; and this is followed by a shot of Jane, alone in a white flowing dress. Now the story behind the story begins to fit together. If Cesare is still alive--after appearing to have been killed by his pursuers--then Francis must have fantasized his death. But why? The only reasonable explanation seems to be that Francis is wildly jealous of Cesare's imagined love for Jane. And yet, when we see Cesare at the end of the film, not only is he paying no attention whatsoever to Jane, but he actually appears to be the kind of young man who wouldn't be interested in any girl. Since Caligari himself is shown throughout as an archetypical representation of the hated, authoritarian father image, and the whole fantastic episode is triggered by the death of Francis' best friend, it is possible that--perhaps unconsciously--beneath the surface of their film, the authors are telling another story altogether, a story with homosexual implications. In any case, there is no escaping what one critic has termed its "dark neurotic tone," the morbid fascination with sick and twisted minds that suffuses its every image. Caligari has long been hailed as a film that broke new paths for the cinema. One of these paths led to an intense absorption with the depiction of perverse and abnormal personalities.

Never has the screen been more thoroughly pervaded with the darker side of the human soul than in those films that came from Germany throughout the Twenties. Caligari, Count Dracula, the Golem, Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper, the mad financier Mabuse, the mad scientist Rotwang--these were the creatures who populated major productions from Berlin's superbly equipped Ufa studios, monsters who tortured and tormented with all the enthusiasm and ingenuity of a Marquis de Sade. In such films as Nosferatu, Waxworks, Dr. Mabuse, and practically all the later silents by G. W. Pabst, abnormality was the norm. Vampirism, fetishism, flagellation and perversion in all its forms crowded the scenes of the biggest and most popular German films, catering to--and also reflecting--the tastes of what was probably the most thoroughly demoralized and dissolute nation in all of post-War Europe. And Berlin, notoriously the center of this corruption, was also the center of film production.

Even before the War had ended, a few of the German producers had begun turning out what were frankly sex films, blatantly prurient in both content and intent. Under the sponsorship of the Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, Richard Oswald directed a vivid dramatization of the woes of the syphilitic, depicting as a matter of course the sources of infection. His Let There Be Light (Es werde Licht) was so successful that Oswald continued his enlightenment through three more episodes, with an appendix titled Prostitution for good measure. In 1918, the august Emil Jannings lent his presence to Germinating Life (Keimendes Leben), also on the subject of sex hygiene--this one bearing a seal of approval from an important medical officer in the government, Dr. Paul Meissner. Without question, these high-sounding sponsorships were obtained for the sole purpose of getting the films past Imperial Germany's official censor board, for as soon as the War was over and the new Council of People's Representatives abolished all forms of censor control, the number and variety of sex films increased enormously--but now without the slightest pretense of official or scientific sanction. Their mask of moral uplift abandoned, the producers turned with unabashed enthusiasm to the task of depicting debauchery in all its forms and guises on the screen.

In many instances, the titles were self-explanatory: The Seducer (Die Verführten), Free Love (Freie Liebe), Hyenas of Lust (Hyänen der Lust), Demi-Monde (Halbwen), Miss Mother (Fräulein Mutter), Paradise of the Prostitutes (Das Paradeis Der Dirnen), and many more. In these, nudity was incidental to the graphic delineation of fleshly pleasures and excesses. The camera lingered upon scenes of seduction like a hot-eyed voyeur, panting over every detail of amorous play preceding the moment of triumph, at which point there was generally a reluctant fade-out. In the numerous films featuring prostitution, the ladies left no doubt as to their profession, exhibiting their wares promptly, provocatively and repeatedly. Homosexuality was, quite openly, the theme of films like A Man's Girlhood (Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren); transvestitism was the subject of Prince von Pappenheim (Der Fürst von Pappenheim); while in Opium, the drug was held responsible for every conceivable form of eroticism and perversion. The Steinach Film, prepared with the authorization of the noted Austrian surgeon, presented on celluloid his experiments in the sexual rejuvenation of animals and man. It included not only shots of the sexual organs, but also of copulation--all in the interests of science, of course.

Since the motion picture often acts as a seismograph for changes in society's moral climate and social conventions, the emergence of these conspicuously sex-oriented films in Germany at the end of World War One is not particularly strange. What places them apart from films made anywhere else in the world at that time, however, is their morbid absorption with pathological sex--sex not as an affirmation of life, but as a crippler and destroyer. Symptomatically, many were presented as dire warnings to adolescents of both sexes, stressing the dangers rather than the delights of sensual gratification--a particularly profitable way to have your cake and eat it, too. In any case, these pictures were notably successful for a year or two, despite the mounting protests from every shade of German opinion from the Socialist Party to the Boy Scouts. And no doubt they were a major consideration when, in May of 1920, the National Assembly of the infant Weimar Republic voted a full return to state censorship of motion pictures.

Surprisingly, however, the German censors seemed remarkably unconcerned with the morality of their movies, centering their attention instead on films that were in any way politically suspect--a practice that was maintained, with some shift of emphasis, throughout the Hitlerian era. As a result, not only was there considerable nudity on the German screen, but also considerable latitude in depicting relations between the sexes--the greater "realism" that critics are fond of referring to when making comparisons between European pictures and our own. In the original German version of Variety, for example--a film that enjoyed enormous success in this country in the middle Twenties--Emil Jannings is seen as a man who abandons his wife and child and gives up his carnival side show when he falls under the spell of Lya de Putti, a sexy trapeze performer who later betrays him with another man. Jannings goes to jail for the murder of her lover. When the film was prepared for American distribution, however, the abandoned wife was edited out and the titles were rewritten to suggest that the aerialist was Jannings' wife instead of his mistress, thus creating a situation at once more conventional and more readily condoned by the average audience.

Despite such alterations, critics and audiences alike sensed the advent of a more human, more psychologically valid form of cinema in the sumptuous productions that issued from the German studios in such awesome profusion during the early Twenties. First to catch the public's eye and fancy was a long, elaborate series of films that "humanized" history by concentrating on the sex lives (usually unsavory) of historical figures. In Deception, a typical example of this "humanizing," Emil Jannings as Henry VIII plays hide-and-seek with the ladies of his court through the hedges of a formal garden, then ardently massages their bosoms when he catches up with them.

Throughout the Twenties, the German studios continued to produce titillating superepics--chief among them being The Loves of Pharaoh (Das Weib des Pharao), the two-part Nibelungen and Metropolis. In Metropolis, Fritz Lang's protracted glimpse into the world of the future, a scientist creates a robot woman in the image of the leader of the workers; unlike most movie ventures of this sort, she emerges from the test tube totally en déshabillé. Perhaps the most famous of the Ufa Kulturfilme, a long series of science-oriented educational pictures produced for theatrical exhibition, was Ways to Health and Beauty (Wege zu Kraft and Schönheit), a feature-length documentary that sang the praises of sports and calisthenics in elaborately staged recreations of Roman baths and ancient Greek gymnasiums. Although the screen was crowded with naked youths and maidens leaping, running, dancing and just posing, film historian Siegfried Kracauer reports that "the bodily beauties [were] so massed together that they affected one neither sensually nor aesthetically."

On the other hand, the morbid strain in the German soul, adumbrated by Caligari, found expression in a long series of pictures that linked sex unmistakably with sadism, torture and death. In Vanina, the daughter of a feudal lord learns that her father has jailed her lover, the leader of an aborted uprising. On her pleading, the father releases the young man and agrees to their wedding, then whimsically orders him hanged during the ceremony. With Vanina looking on, the execution is carried out, whereupon she dies as well--on the spot, of a broken heart--as the sadistic tyrant cackles over his macabre joke on the two lovers.

This atmosphere of sinister sexuality reached its apogee in Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett), which impregnated each of its three episodes with the mounting horror of lusts unbridled. The opening sequence is a disarming burlesque in which Harun al-Rashid, played by the ubiquitous Emil Jannings under an enormous turban, uses his position to seduce a baker's wife and to cut off the head of anyone who happens to displease him. As one critic noted of this dubious comedic romp, it was a bit like "trying hard to laugh boisterously around a sickbed." What follows is sicker by far. In the second episode, Harun's tongue-in-cheek seductions give way to Ivan the Terrible forcing himself upon the bride of one of his courtiers on their wedding night, and gleefully devising the most ingenious torments for the prisoners in his torture chambers below until madness overtakes him.

These nightmares had their counterparts in the daily life of Germany during the first hectic years of the Weimar Republic. Political murders were common. The tyrants behind the scenes of government--including Hitler--were dispensing justice as quixotically, and as cold-bloodedly, as any of the celluloid monsters on the screen. To the average German, understandably, the world was filled with intangible menace. Reflecting this insecurity was a spate of films, beginning as early as 1920, that focused the camera upon the anarchic street life of a major city.

The plots of these so-called "street" films were remarkably similar, invariably depicting the adventures of an ordinary, middle-class citizen alone in the city at night. Also invariably, they included sex adventures--generally with a prostitute. Prototype for this genre was a picture titled, appropriately enough, The Street (Die Strasse), written and directed by Karl Grune in 1923. In it, the somewhat (continued on page 126)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 120) stuffy hero is lured from his safe apartment by the razzle-dazzle of lights and speeding cars outside his window. Once on the street, a display of nude paintings in an art store whets his appetite for an illicit romance. A streetwalker soon obliges, leading him to a gaudy night club where she is joined by her pimp and a friend. In the course of the evening, they pick up--and murder--a rich bumpkin just arrived in the city, then make the bourgeois appear to be the guilty party. He is arrested and carted off to jail, attempts suicide, and is released only after the real killer confesses. He staggers home at dawn through empty streets; as his wife silently sets his plate of warmed-over soup before him, the implication is that he has had enough adventuring to last him a lifetime. Home is the only place where he can find shelter from the maelstrom outside.

This theme was reiterated in many ways. In Husbands or Lovers? (Nju), it is a married woman who leaves her bourgeois home and husband (Jannings again) to become the mistress of a sexually stimulating stranger. In this instance, however, when the adventure is over and the lover suggests that she go back to her husband, the woman prefers suicide. For some, the refuge of the home was no more attractive than the chaos of the streets.

Perhaps the most realistic of all the street films was The Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), which numbered among its distinctions the appearance of Greta Garbo in her first major role outside her native Sweden, and Marlene Dietrich in a bit part. A low-key study of the social disintegration brought on by inflation, it was directed by Austrian-born G. W. Pabst, soon to become the greatest of all German directors of films on sexual themes, if not, indeed, one of the greatest in the world. In The Joyless Street, he paraded the entire gamut of Depression-bred types: war profiteers and black marketers, kept women and prostitutes, and a middle class forced to choose between corruption and starvation. So forthright was his treatment of this moral upheaval that the film has rarely been seen in its entirety; in country after country, the censors have made their cuts--although rarely concurring on just what should be eliminated. Missing from the version shown in the United States, for example, was all the action centering on Asta Nielsen as a prostitute who sends her lover to the gallows; while the Italians cut out scenes of Garbo being recruited for a brothel by a procuress--despite the fact that she was saved from this fate worse than death by the intercession of a handsome young American Red Cross officer.

Shortly after The Joyless Street, Pabst joined forces with two of Sigmund Freud's collaborators, Dr. Hanns Sachs and Dr. Karl Abraham, to turn an actual psychoanalytical case history into a motion picture. Since German films--including his own--had always been particularly rich in visual symbols, Pabst saw in the dream imagery of the subconscious an appropriate extension of the domain of the camera. Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele) was the first serious attempt to demonstrate Freud's methods on the screen; and if the process, in view of present-day knowledge of psychiatric treatment, seems ridiculously oversimplified, it must also be admitted that to date no one has remotely rivaled the multilayered symbology with which Pabst depicted the dreams and hallucinations of his tormented hero. The man, a college professor, has long been sexually impotent, but becomes acutely disturbed after a dream in which he attempts to cut his wife's throat with a dagger--an act which he comes close to duplicating in real life a few days later. Afraid now to even touch a knife, he seeks psychiatric help; and the remainder of the film summarizes his sessions on the couch, during which the ordinary objects that surround him in everyday life--gates, ladders, bells, doors, trains, knives--become transformed into sexual symbols of impotence and frustration, virility and fecundity. To illustrate the success of the Freudian method, the film ends with the professor proudly dandling his newborn baby, as the sun glows on distant mountain peaks.

More than any other director, Pabst was aware of the affective power of things as symbols, of objects charged with emotional overtones while still retaining their ordinary significance in the context of a scene. In the final years of the silent era, Pabst used this technique to shape a series of films that remain unique in their revelation of eroticism and their awareness of sexual appetites. The opening of The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney) is masterly in this regard. To establish clearly the scabrous character of the Russian spy Khalibiev, the camera silently surveys his filthy room--empty liquor bottles, overflowing ashtrays and, tacked to the walls, nude pictures torn from magazines. No more need be said; and it comes as no surprise when later, as Khalibiev proposes to the blind daughter of a well-to-do businessman, he is simultaneously pawing at Jeanne Ney. His insidious brand of symbolism is seen again toward the end of the film when, in preparation for raping Jeanne in a railway compartment, Khalibiev slowly, suggestively, opens his tie. A master realist as well, Pabst staged another sequence for the picture, an orgy, by simply hiring a hundred or so White Russian officers, plying them with vodka and women, and filming the uninhibited results.

Pabst went on from here to create a trio of films--Crisis (Abwege), Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) and Diary of a Lost One (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen)--centered wholly upon the sexual drives of their neurotic heroines. Lulu, the heroine of Frank Wedekind's two plays on which Pandora's Box was based, was in the words of one commentator "a forthright and earthy vampire who had to have the innocence of a child in her face, the instincts of a black widow spider and the beauty of Semiramis." If patent-leathery Louise Brooks filled the bill--and she did--it was because her director knew how to articulate her every smile, gesture, movement or moue of petulance into his over-all pattern of deadly erotic fascination. Both Lulu and Thymian (the "lost one") were innocents; their hold over men was not calculated--but neither were they concerned when, after they had drained them of both their riches and their vitality, they left behind a shattered hulk. Amoral, driven by an insatiable hunger for sexual experiences of every sort, both women seem to pass through life unscathed--at least until, in Pandora's Box, Lulu meets an almost inevitable fate at the hands of the sex murderer Jack the Ripper. Brigitte Helm, the woman in Crisis, was far less innocent, but no less driven by her appetites. Bored with her wealthy husband, she sets off on a round of cheap affairs and premeditated debauchery.

The women Pabst depicted, motivated by their sexual needs of the moment, found lasting incarnation in Marlene Dietrich's flaunting and forthright Lola Lola, the heroine of The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel). The first of the German sound films (albeit directed by an American, Joseph von Sternberg), it traced the degradation of a middle-aged professor (Jannings again) caught in the cobweb of a beautiful but predatory cabaret entertainer. Why does this eminently desirable woman give herself to the stuffy but respected Doktor? Simply because, for her, he represents a new kind of sexual experience, an interesting change from the adoring youths and blasé night-club performers who habitually cluster about her. And why, later, does she marry him? Obviously, for no reason other than the status of his position. But when, because of this marriage, the professor is dismissed from the school, Lola Lola promptly reduces him to her menial and resumes her affairs with other men. The crowning indignity comes as the troupe returns to the professor's home town. Dressed in a clown's costume, an outsized collar draped around his neck, his "act" is to crow like a rooster while a magician breaks eggs against his brow.

If this willful degradation of the male is just a bit reminiscent of Theda Bara in A Fool There Was, of the vamp as femme fatale, there is one significant difference. The vamp actively and deliberately exerted her charms to lure men to their destruction; while no small part of the attraction of these latter-day sirens was their total unconcern as to whether they were loved or not. As Dietrich sings in The Blue Angel, nonchalantly displaying her gorgeous legs:

"Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame,

And if their wings burn

I know I'm not to blame ..."

Nor is she. In The Blue Angel, she goes no further than to peel off a black stocking or to expose a naked shoulder. The desire is in the men; and when that desire no longer excites her own, it is time for her to move on to someone else who will. Perhaps these wanton women of the German film at the close of the Twenties bear some resemblance to the femmes fatales of earlier years in that they, too, leave behind a trail of human wreckage. But it is worth noting that by the end of the decade, the femme fatale had completely disappeared from the German screen--and in her place, triumphant, stood the wanton woman.

• • •

Films flourished in Germany throughout the Twenties because, beginning with the War years, they enjoyed the support and subsidy of the German government. Elsewhere in Europe, moviemakers were not so fortunate. World War One had literally devastated the industry, creating a shambles that took the better part of a decade to clear away. Among the Allied nations, studios had closed down for lack of heat and power. The War over, the Americans pressed their advantage, buying into theater chains and potentially competitive studios and, above all, buying up whatever European talent reared its lovely head. Revolution in Russia brought the films of that nation under the control of the Commissariat for Education and Propaganda; and its directors did little more than reiterate the rightness of the Communist cause in a series of propaganda pictures that were technically advanced, morally pure and deadly dull. The new Soviet hero would rather attack the Winter Palace than molest a female.

The rise of fascism in Italy had its own curiously puritanical effect upon Italian film makers--except where they could exhibit nudity under the guise of historicity, as in the popular Maciste movies and in the Gargantuan Quo Vadis?, coproduced with Germany in 1924. Shortly after the War, however, film makers in England sought to regain audiences with a series of blatantly sexy pictures. The Honey Pot, for example, purporting to be a story of theatrical life, featured a theater manager who was little more than a procurer of men for the women of his company, who were all too willing to be procured for. "The stage door of the Diadem Theater," read one of its subtitles, "where voices and figures are bought and virtue is sold." The film was called in by the censors, as were The Door That Has No Key, Love Maggie, Tell Your Children, and the few others produced in a similar vein. Harassed by censorship and economics, film activity in England remained negligible in quantity and quality throughout the Twenties.

But not in France. Although after the War the French industry was so thoroughly demoralized that Charles Pathé, the leading producer, was forced to sell his studios and equipment, a new element had entered the scene. The young French aesthetes--writers, poets, painters--had suddenly discovered the cinema. Throughout the War years, these avant-gardists, under the leadership of critic Louis Delluc, had written essays, criticisms and even cinépoèmes to publicize their enthusiasm for the new "art form." Now, the War over and studios up for grabs, would-be producers were willing to gamble on anyone with a script and the conviction to see it through for little or no money. Film theoreticians suddenly became film makers.

For their models they chose American and Scandinavian pictures in preference to the mannered, theatrical style of their own film d'art tradition. They preferred their more realistic themes and settings, their use of nature and the out-of-doors --but, Delluc added, "the French cinema must be French." As much out of theory as out of economic necessity, they carried their cameras into the Paris streets and the French countryside, to the Marseilles waterfront and the Rhone valley. Their pictures were populated with sailors, working-class types, and that most durable of French literary inventions, the goodhearted prostitute. And while their plots were frequently little more than an excuse for visual effects, somehow not only the effects but the characters and the stories themselves still smacked of literature. In one film, for example, a charming seducer hands a rose to his victim; a close-up reveals a black caterpillar inching along its stem.

Typical of the period was Delluc's own Fever (Fièvre), a purposeful attempt to capture the atmosphere of a waterfront bar. A group of sailors swagger in, just returned from a cruise to exotic lands. One of them has brought home an Oriental wife (or at least an Oriental girl--the film makes no positive identification). The room grows tense as the bar's hard-faced proprietress makes a play for the sailor. A fight breaks out, a man is killed, and as gendarmes clear the saloon, the Oriental, who has remained impassively curled up in a corner throughout, cautiously reaches for a flower on the counter, only to discover that it is artificial. The entire film has the feeling of being a symbol, and a somewhat literary symbol at that; but Delluc's real achievement lay in the infusion of his sordid settings with the frank sexuality of sailors ashore after weeks of enforced celibacy, and the cold jealousy of the woman behind the bar toward the little Oriental girl.

While it was technique that interested Delluc and his adherents far more than story, the content of many of their films was also breaking new ground for the French cinema. As in Germany, studies of everyday life became popular--although, being French, the touch was lighter and more provocative. In La Fête Espagnole, for example, a woman is loved by two wealthy, elderly men. When forced to make a choice, she tells them to fight it out between them; they kill each other, and she gaily dances off with a younger suitor. In Eldorado, the mother of an illegitimate child takes weird revenge on her seducer. When his own legitimate daughter is about to be married to a wealthy landowner whom the father has selected, the mother locks the girl in a building overnight with the young painter she really loves.

From such themes and characters, it was but a short step to the flowering of the French film in the late Twenties, with pictures like Jean Renoir's Nana and Jacques Feyder's Thérèse Raquin again emphasizing the combination of atmospheric settings and literary sources. Renoir, son of the great Impressionist painter, filmed Zola's story of an imperious cocotte in a style reminiscent of his father's canvases and the backstage lithos of Toulouse-Lautrec, accenting with youthful zeal the woman's merciless drive for absolute dominance over her retinue of lovers. Memorable is a scene in which a sedate nobleman humiliates himself at her whim, dancing and begging like a little dog in return for her favors. An atmosphere of fin-de-siècle eroticism pervades the entire film, from a torrid, sweaty cancan early in the picture to the interlude, as Nana lies dying of smallpox, when one of her servants plunges his hand into the bodice of her maid and pulls forth a large and shapely breast. Above all, there is the voluptuous presence of Nana herself, played by Catherine Hessling, whose enormous eyes and bee-stung lips set in a dead-white face were fully as disturbing to the ordinary moviegoer as they were to the wealthy nobles who flocked about her on the screen.

In Thérèse Raquin, another of Zola's "heroines" was simplified in Feyder's version to a woman motivated almost solely by lust. Married to a sickly shopkeeper, she takes a lover and together they murder the husband. Later, after they have set up light housekeeping in the rooms behind the shop, the paralytic mother of the murdered man contrives to murder them. As a study of unsatisfied sex, of the viciousness and sensuality of a passionate yet heartless woman, Thérèse Raquin stands remarkably close to Pandora's Box, with the difference that where Lulu portrayed the depravity of the haut monde, Thérèse demonstrated that it could flourish just as luridly in the most bourgeois of homes.

Feyder's next film, The New Gentlemen (Les Nouveaux Messieurs), was a comedy that lightly satirized French politics--but it brought him head on with the French censors. As in Germany, sex was not the censors' primary concern; nudity was rampant on the French screen in such thoroughly commercial items as Casanova and in innumerable films that had the Paris music halls for a background--such as Josephine Baker's Papitou, with its interminable parades of nudes à la Folies-Bergère. But The New Gentlemen centered on a young union leader who rises in politics, becomes a member of the French Parlement, and acquires a ballerina as his mistress. Formerly the mistress of a rightist deputy, she continues to change partners with the shifts in their political fortunes. A particularly bright sequence includes a vision of a Parlement session in which all the benches are occupied, not by the ministers, but by the actresses and ballerinas whom they are currently keeping. This seems to have particularly outraged the French censors, who hitherto had confined their activities to protecting their nation against such sinister foreign influences as Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World. When they banned The New Gentlemen outright, Feyder left France for Hollywood.

• • •

Along with the experiments that Delluc and his disciples were carrying out in the creation of the new French cinema, there were two other important influences that left their mark on the French film of the Twenties--the large colony of Russian émigrés and Paris' own considerable body of artists in residence. The artistic world of Paris being particularly closely knit at this time, not infrequently the three spheres met and overlapped, with a resulting interchange not only of ideas, but of personnel. In 1919, after the Russian Revolution had driven out of that country virtually its entire motion-picture industry, Paris became the unofficial headquarters for the émigrés--producers, directors and, perhaps most notably, the international favorite Ivan Mosjoukine. Mosjoukine, a fine actor, was cut in the style of a European John Barrymore--handsome, swashbuckling, romantic. In The Burning Fire (Le Brasier Ardent), which he directed himself, he called upon all these qualities to create a gallery of dream lovers for a lonely woman; the ones she favors soon materialize in her waking life. His greatest success, although certainly not his greatest picture, came with Casanova, the lavish Franco-Italian production that made life in 18th Century Paris, Moscow and Venice seem one long--and somewhat boring--round of orgies. As prototype of the artist-libertine, Casanova, Mosjoukine cut an elegant swath through droves of damsels (including Catherine the Great) who flung themselves, in varying states of undress, around his aristocratic neck. In the end, their very profusion worked against the film's deliberate attempt at eroticism. At the conclusion of one gigantic orgy, Casanova lies in his splendid tufted bed surrounded by better than a dozen naked beauties. Fully dressed and wigged himself, he stares glassily into space. Obviously, one can have too much of a good thing.

Among the émigrés, but very much his own man, was a young violinist who determined that he, too, would be a film maker: Dmitri Kirsanov. Working feverishly with whatever slim resources he could lay his hands on, he served as a spiritual link between the Russians and the French avant-garde movement. Although he belonged to neither group, Ménilmontant, his masterpiece, shares many of the characteristics of the Delluc school--but done with a force, a brio and an originality unmatched by Delluc's littérateurs The film begins with a horrifying montage as two young girls witness the hatchet murder of their parents. Moving to Paris, they become midinettes in an artificial flower factory. Soon both sisters have been seduced by the same young man, who is later killed in a knife brawl over a prostitute. The younger sister, pregnant, goes to a hospital to have her baby; when she is discharged, she discovers that her older sister has become a streetwalker. The two girls, both of them hardened by experience, take incestuous comfort in each other. All of this is set forth, without subtitles, in marvelously compressed, beautifully impressionistic images that suggest far more than they actually tell. When the young man, for example, leads the older sister to a cheap hotel, the camera remains on the street as they enter, then swings up to a window just as the light inside goes on.

With so much interest focused upon the aesthetics of cinema not merely by the youthful cinéastes, but by serious critics and intellectuals as well, it was inevitable that practitioners of the older, more established arts would also want to investigate the medium, even if only tentatively. It was also inevitable that the films they made would be the very antithesis of anything turned out by the commercial studios. They formed a third circle, tied closely to such then-current art movements as Dadaism, Surrealism and nonobjective painting; and their films reflected their common desire to disturb and shock the bourgeoisie. Sometimes these were mere pranks, as when René Clair in Entracte photographed from below the rising and falling tutu of a graceful ballerina, then ran his camera caressingly up the length of her body to reveal that she was in fact a handsomely bearded gentleman. The American photographer Man Ray, working in Paris, inserted into his first film, The Return to Reason (Le Retour à la Raison), along with flashing glimpses of pins, needles and collar buttons, the negative of a luscious nude. In Starfish (Etoile de Mer), in conscious parody of Hollywood movies, Man Ray has a young man take a girl to his room. When she has completely undressed and is holding out her arms to him expectantly from the bed, the young man tips his hat politely and says "Adieu." End of scene.

But Surrealism, appearing in the last half of the Twenties, was no joking matter. Armed with a new awareness of Freud and the symbolism of dreams, the Surrealists embraced the film medium with a special enthusiasm. In it, they realized, dreams could be arranged and photographed, and symbolic language could be used to tell what could not be stated directly. While Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le Clergyman), the first of the Surrealist efforts, suffered from an overly explicit, overly literal translation of story elements into symbolic images, nevertheless its very simplicity helped clarify the technique. The film leads us into the dream world of a repressed and impotent young priest, harassed on the one hand by such surrogate father figures as a general, a jailer and his superior in the order, and on the other hand by his thoughts of a beautiful woman who flaunts herself repeatedly before him, yet constantly eludes him. The symbols are obvious: the clergyman filling glass phials with water, then dropping them to the floor where they smash in slow motion; a hate dream in which the father-general's head is split down the middle through trick photography. And at one point, symbolism is abandoned completely as the priest is shown masturbating under his cassock. In the words of a contemporary critic, it is a "pseudoscientific statement, much more like a doctor's bill than a poem." Yet filmic poetry was what these artists had in mind.

Far more successful artistically--indeed, perhaps the most successful avant-garde film ever made--was the Salvador Dali--Luis Buñuel Surrealist nightmare, An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou), which plumbed the depths of the subconscious mind to dredge up images at once compelling and horrifying. Although the film has no story in any conventional sense, it suggests the dichotomy between good and evil in every man, with death the ultimate victor. Visions of death recur: the death's-head pattern of a moth; the shooting of a man in a Corotlike forest who, as he dies, caresses with trembling fingers the naked back of a girl who materializes for an instant, then disappears; the final shot of two lovers propped up dead and desiccated in the burning sand. But more of the images are disturbing for what they show of life. Dali's recurrent image of putrefaction--ants crawling from a hole in a man's hand--is seen twice in the film; while the vision of a Lesbian toying with a severed hand sets off in the hero a chain reaction of naked lust. Turning to the woman he is standing with, hands cupped, he attacks her breasts. As she shrinks away, he pursues her, backing her against the wall until he can fondle her at will. Her dress magically disappears and the breasts are exposed, but they dissolve almost immediately into her naked buttocks. The man continues his caresses, and in a close-up we see a mixture of saliva and blood dribbling from his mouth, his eyes rolled back in their sockets. At another point in his pursuit of the woman, he struggles toward her dragging after him the symbolic accouterments of organized society: two grand pianos, each draped with the bleeding carcass of a donkey and, hitched together by ropes, a brace of clergymen and what seem to be the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.

As a prelude to Un Chien Andalou, Dali and Buñuel filmed a sequence in which a young man (played by Buñuel himself) steps out onto a Paris balcony and gazes calmly at the night sky; then, as a thin cloud cuts across the full moon, in extreme close-up, he takes a straight razor and slashes an eyeball of the girl sharing the balcony with him. It is a horrifying moment, but one fully consonant with the purposes both of the picture and of the Surrealists. In as direct a metaphor as has ever been put on the screen, the public's eye is opened to a new kind of vision, a new interpretation of beauty--and ugliness. But even as the film appeared, the era for aesthetes and aesthetics was rapidly drawing to a close. Germany's endemic depression was widening, soon to envelop the entire Western world. Ugly clashes between the extreme right and the extreme left spread from the political arena out into the streets, ultimately affecting all areas of life. The premiere of the second Dali-Buñuel collaboration, The Age of Gold (L'Age d'Or), for example, was halted not because of its extravagant eroticism, which included the extraordinary scene in which two lovers, inflamed by the music of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, roll in the gravel at a garden party, frantically biting and chewing at each other until blood comes; and which finishes with the woman, utterly frustrated, sucking on the toe of a marble statue. It was ended by a riot fomented by the Action Française, an extreme rightist group that objected to the film's anticlerical and antimonarchist implications.

But the final period to the entire movement was set neither by politics nor by aesthetics. By 1929, sound films had arrived; and by the end of that year, no one could doubt any longer that they had come to stay. No more could a young artist set off with a camera and a few thousand francs and make a picture. Now, studios were a necessity--and with them, all the costly paraphernalia of sound recording and reproduction. Even the smallest theaters were converting to "talkies"; a silent picture could scarcely be given away. At this juncture, Jean Cocteau, sturdiest of the Surrealists, elected to make his first film, producing--with sound--his quasi-autobiographical The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d'un Poète), filled with homosexual symbols, literary allusions and a maddening narcissism. Instead of a new beginning, it proved to be a last gasp. By the time the film appeared, the Thirties were already upon us--and with them, a new urge for realism created by the talkies, and demanded by audiences suddenly sobered by the great Depression. "Art for art's sake" was no longer a tenable position in the face of bank failures and bread lines. Now what the public wanted was entertainment--and, as Mae West was shortly to observe, "Goodness had nothin' to do with it."

This is the fourth in a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema." In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert dolly in for searching close-ups of the legendary sex symbols, male and female, who made the Twenties the golden age of the silent screen: Garbo, Valentino, Dietrich, Swanson, Gilbert, Negri, Bow and Barrymore.