ozep 121 mackenzie soviet

8/12/2019 Ozep 121 Mackenzie Soviet

1/6

CINE FORUM

Editor s Nole: This introduction to the international career of Fedor Ozep inauguratesa newfeature in OFSRCEC ; Cine-Forum will provide a space for information, discussion, debates, and pedagogical issues that may not be suited to full-scale scholarlyarticles, but should be of interestto the journal s readers and relevant to scholarshipin film and related media. Detailed information about the form and possible contentofsubmissions to Cine-Forum can be found on the journal s website:www.film.queensu.ca/fsac/cjfs.html.

SCOTT MACKENZIE

SOVIET EXPANSIONISMFedor.Ozep s r nsn tion l Cinema

Resume La carriere du cineaste emigre Fedor Ozep iIIustre fa fac;on par laquelleI esthetique cinematographique transnationale est souvent marginaJise par fes discours qui theorisent les cinemas nationaux.

Ozrp.. rrpresents all those refugees nomads and exiles whom fate drove from one coun-try and era to another and who regularlyget passed over in criticism either becausethey fit none of the patterns or because they disappear into the diversity of themRaymond Durgnat1

Fedor O z e ~ (b. F Y ~ d o r l e x a ~ d r o v i t c h Otsep is one of the great footnotes of cmema hlstory-a filmmaking version of Woody Allen s character Zelig. In Quebec and Canada, Ozep is best-known-and for th emost part, only known-as the Hollywood .filmmaker imported toQuebec in order to direct three of th e first sound features produced in th eprovince: e Pere Chopin (1944), Forteresse (1947) and its English-languagecounterpart, Whispering ity(1947). Yet before his arrival in Quebec, Ozep

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE D I:TUDES CINI:MATOGRAPHIQUESVOLUME 11 N O , 1 SPRING. PRINTEMPS 1 0 0 3 . PP 92-104

was lurking in the shadows of many of th e great early Eastern an d WesternEuropean nat ion al ci nema movemen ts, maki ng films in th e USSR,Germany, I ta ly , the UK, Spain an d France, before relocating toHollywood, and then Quebec. His invisibility in film history is aided notonly by near-continuous immigration, bu t also by the plethora of spellingsof his name: in Russia and the USSR, Fyodor Otsep, Fyodor Otzep, andFjodor Otsep (all transliterations of the Cyrillic); in Western Europe andNorth America, Fedor Ozep; in Spain, Pedro Otzoup. (For consistency ssake I will use the surname Ozep throughout this article.)

Th e present work is as concerned with th e reception of Ozep s films indifferent nations an d historiographical contexts as it is with the actualfilms themselves. Th e r eason for thi s is that the process of cinematiccanonisation relies no t only on questions of quality that surround certainfilms and cinematic movements, bu t also on the critical discourses whichare deployed to interpolate films into th e canon at anygiven time. Beyondthe historical interest in his work as it pertains to early feature filmmakingin Quebec and Canada, Ozep also represents an under-analysed aspect ofth e histories of national cinemas: his films deploy narrative and stylisticdevices hybridised from th e different film movements and national cuItures in which he worked. To this extent, his work represents a trepd inEuropean cinema that has often been marginalised, precisely because it isseen as a threat. As Tim Bergfelder notes,

Discourses on u r o p ~ a n cinema have traditionally focused less onth e inclusive or cross-cultural aspects th e term European mightimply, b ut o n notions of national specificities, cultural authenticityand indigenous production contexts, In order to establish a nationalidentity for a particular film culture, features which transcend orcontradict these identity formations have been either neglected ormarginalised, bu t also viewed as threatening.

Ozep s transnational cinema demonstrates that th e stylistic intertextuality,so celebrated in contemporary, post-modern cinema, can in fact be tracedback to the silent era. Along with Ozep, Hitchcock, in his early silent filmssuch as The Lodger (UK, 1926) an d The Ring (UK, 1927), can be seen as partof this development, as can Kuleshov s The ExtraordinaryMr West in the Landof the Bolsheviks (USSR, 1924). Given this history, it becomes paramount toretrace the formation of transnational cinemas and cinema styles. Throughan examination of Ozep s marginality and the ways in which his films have

CINE-FORUM 93


2/6

been historised, critiqued and compartmentalised, it is possible to questionhow national aesthetic movements are categorised and to suggest Ozep stransnationality points to a relatively unexplored area of the stylistic histories of national cin;mas.

Born in 1895 (he died on 20 June 1949)3, Ozep was associated with anumber of key Soviet f ilmmakers in his ear ly career. Unlike most of hiscontemporaries, he worked in both the radical art cinema tradi tions ofVsevqlod Pudovkin and Lev Kuleshov and in the popular cinema, epitomised by the works of Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet. While stillattending the University of Moscow, Ozep b eg an his film c are er as ascriptwriter, adapting Pushkin s The Queen of Spades for Protazanov sfilm of the same name (Russia, 1916). Pushkin s short story andProtazanov s fi lm in many ways epitomised the kind of narrative thatOzep would come to favour throughout his career: melodramatic adaptations of literary works. He wrote as many as twenty screenplays in theear ly years of Soviet cinema, and h e seemed to work in Virtually everygenre. Along with avant-garde and popular scripts, he wrote a scr ip t foro ne o f W1 adyslaw Starewicz s early films, Stella Maris (USSR, 1918). Healso acted in some films, including a small part in Pudovkin s Chess Fever(USSR, 1925).

The exact extent of his ear ly work is hard to determine, both becauseof the lack of key historical sources and because of what can be seen asOzep s selE:mythologisation. For instance, Durgnat notes t ha t O ze pclaimed he wrote Pudovkin s t Mother USSR, 1926), yet as Durgnatgoes on to point out, there is no further proof that this is the se-perhaps this bi t of revis ionist his tory on Ozep s part was in response toclaims that Pudovkin edited Ozep s Zhivoi trup The liVing Corpse USSR,1929). (For a brief description of this and other films directed by Ozepsee the filmography at t he en d o f this article.) Nevertheless, all availableevidence indicates tha t the young writer was prodigious. And while writing script s, he also worked as an assi st ant editor on film producer JosefYermoliev s newsreels.4 s early as 1914, he planned (but never completed) a book on American, European and Russian cinema aesthetics.5

n the 1920s, Ozep was part of the collective Mezhrabpom-Rus studio,which consisted of filmmakers Protazanov, Pudovkin, Barnet, VladimirGardin and Konstantin Eggert. His contributions included scripting orco-scriptingfilms such as Alexander Sanin s adaptation of Tolstoy s Russianpeasant tale Polikusbka (1919) and the Soviet Union s first science fictionepic, Protazanov s AeUta (1924). These two films are interesting artefacts of

9 S TT M CKENZIE

popular Soviet cinema, as they revolve around melodramatic n ~ t i v s(and, in the case ofAeUta comedy: a t t he conclusion of the narratIve, theMartians stage a proletarian revolution) at a t ime when both at home andabroad, the radical formalism of Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin andKuleshovwere a t t he forefront of Soviet proletarian cinema.

After a few years of screenwriting, Ozep turned his hand to directing.His Earth in Chains (USSR, 1927) was the closest he would come to theSoviet avant-garde of the 1920s. His comparatively non-didactic approachto his material meant that Earth in Chains was one of the few Soviet films tobe in general release in Western Europe and North America. the late1920s, he directed one of the first USSR/German co-productIOns, TheLiving Corpse starring Pudovkin. .

Because of this tendency toward the popular and the melodramatIc,film critics and historians both inside and outside the USSR dismissedOzep s early work as too popular and not radical enough in its aesthetics.n The Film T ll Now Paul Rotha s judgement of Ozep s Russian work is assuccinct as it is dismissive:

He is not a director of any standing his work being uneven andlacking in any dramatic quality. The Living Corpse which was oneof t he few films exemplifying Soviet technique to be generallyshown in Britain, was of interest principally for the playing ofPudovkin as Fedya Protasov, and for the editing, which was inthe hands of the la tte r?

While the actual edi tor of the film is in dispute, it is interesting to seeRotha intent on undermining any aspect of the film that might constitutea successful cinema aesthetic attributable to Ozep.Rotha also dismissed the works of Protazanov and Barnet (with whomOzep co-directed the popular serial Miss Mend [USSR, 1926]), ~ m o n -strating the biases o f t he time against the Soviet popular entertammentfilm. Par t of this dismissal comes from what could be seen as the hybridnature of the film s style, in which Soviet montage techniques are combined with a melodramatic narrative. Within the USSR, Ozep s films werealso not seen as radical enough. For instance, Sergei Eisenstein s onlyrecognition of Ozep s films in his published work is a dismissive o ~ m n tabout the director s use of montage in The Living Corpse which he claims Sderivative of his own in October (1927); moreover, he argues tha t Ozepswork imitates Eisenstein s own failures:

CINE FORUM 9


3/6

Such a means [ofmontage] may decay pathologically if the essentialviewpoint--emotional dynamization of the subject-is lost. As soon asthe filmmaker loses sight of this essence the means ossifies into lifelessliterary symbolism and stylistic mannerism. The sugary chants of compromise by the Mensheviki at the Second Congress of the SOViets

d ~ r i n g the storming ofthe Winter Palace-are intercut [in October]WIth hands playing harps. This was a purely literary parallelism that byno means dynamized the subject matter. Similarly in Ozep's LivingCorpse church spires (in imitation of those in October and lyrical landscapes are intercut with the courtroom speeches of the prosecutor andthe defence lawyer. The errm was the same as in the harp sequence.8

~ z e p therefore, found himself in the unenviable position of being critiCIsed for both his debasement of montage and his commercialismDespite the changing landscape of Soviet culture and politics w h e r ~melodramatic ~ a r r a t i v e devices Within Socialist realism was o n t he rise),Ozep was obvIously on the margins of Soviet film cUlture.

After making The Living Corpse Ozep immigrated to Weimar Germanyand adopting Fedor Ozep as the official spell ing of his name directedDer Marder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931). The film was wel l receiv:d by theGerman press at th e time. Herbert Ihering, for example, wrote that theadaptation rivalled Dovzhenko s Earth (USSR, 1930) and Renoir's Sous estoits e P a r ~ s (France, 1930).9 Yet, after the war, Siegfried Kracauer arguedtha t the frlm was authoritarian in nature, foreshadowing the rise of Nazicinema. O Indeed, Kracauer sees Ozep s Karamasoff as one of the earlyexamples o f wha t he calls the national epic, in which concerns aboutsocial formations are subordinated to themes of individual rebellion. Asrebellious indiViduals take control of destiny, they also embody the needfor an authori ta rian f igure. Kracauer a rgues t ha t Ozep avoided Sovietmontage, despite the Russian theme of the story, as the SOViet aesthetic

at odds with the themes of the film. For Kracauer, the aesthetics of anatIOnal cinema movement are intrinsically tied to a given nation-state'spolit ics: I t was a story which had l it t le in common with Dostoievsky orWith S O ~ i e t m e n t ~ l i t y . Ozep seemed to sense it; for he refrained from using

R ~ s s I a n montage methods, except, perhaps, for the magnificent troika~ P l s o d e which juxtaposed treetops and horse's hoofs in fast cutting so as totncrease the impression of speed. lJ

This reading of the film is predicated on placing Der Mifrder DimitriKaramasoff Within the traditions of German preSSlOllIst cinema, as

9 S lTM CKENZIE

Kracauer sees them. Others perceived a different aesthetic-and thereforepolitical-tendency within the film. Writing t he y ea r after the film'srelease, Werner Klingler notes the film's Soviet style:

Recognising Ozep as a product of the strictly scientific Soviet films choo l we have in him a film director of highly individual mould.We dealing here with a man of great skill who has conquered theA-B-C of montage and permeated it with his own genius and creative power. Throughout th e picture, the harmony of image-values isconsummated in a perfect symphony. The camera is ever the experiencing eye of the spectator, or the piercing vision of the protagonisthimself. At times the complete collectivism of the filmic apparatus isunder the dominant control of the spectator. l2

I t is the desire of both Kracauer and Klinger to pigeonhole the nationalcharacteristics of Ozep s work that is of interest here. Neither a classic ofSoviet montage nor a l at e German Expressionist film, Der Marder DimitriKaramasgff stands as a hybridised film-as TomMilne recognizes: The. f ~ s .cinating thing about both The Living Corpse and The Murder of m trKaramazov however, is their unique fusion of Soviet montage and GermanExpressionism. 3

This view of the film has been noted by other critics, most often thosewho champion a transnational aesthetic . As Raymond Durgnat-whoplaces Ozep s work in the category of cinema maudit writes

The Karamazov film is a tour e force of stylistic eclecticism: expressionist acting (Kortner), dynamic angles, Russian editing, marathontracking shots. It 's a real showpiece of formalism geared to psycholyrical ends, exactly as Eisenstein intended, except thatDostoievskian soul-torments replace Leninist collectivism to whichthe official montage-maste rs tuned their lyres. l4

Milne develops this further when he writes that The Living Corpse is not.onlyimportant as a hybridised German-Soviet film, bu t also because ofwhat i tforeshadows in terms of film style: Th e importance of The Living Corpse .. .isthat it is a source-book no t only for the later Lang and the poetic dilutionsof Carne and Prevert, bu t for Bresson. 15 Milne treats Ozep as a precursorof some of the most influential pre-nouvelle vague Frenchcineastes, and in doingso, claims an impmtant place for Ozep in film history. But by drawing him

CINE FORUM 9


4/6

into a tradition, he minimises the most radical or transgressive and histor ical ly interes ting aspect of Ozep s work, i ts incompatibi li ty with anystable and discrete historical tradition in one national cinema or film aesthetic. Yet by foregrounding Ozep s influence on th e masters of Frenchcinema, he points t o t he fact that the aesthetics of national cinema movements are often greatly inf luenced by the presence of transnational cinemas circulating within a nation s public sphere.

With the rise of Nazism, Ozep movedto France at the heightof FrenchImpressionist cinema, and directed, among other films, La Dame de Pique 937) and Gibraltar 938), the latter s tarr ing Erich von Stroheim. In hisFrench films, Ozep returns to the melodramatic themes that dominated hisRussian and Soviet period, and that marginalised him after the revolution.While in France, Ozep was also asked to direct a British film entitled Woman Alone (UK, 1936), although another expatriate, Eugene Frenke, subsequent ly replaced him as director. Ozep s presence in France points toanother moment in the development of transnational cinema aesthetics. AsColin Crisp notes, Chronologically, the first nation . . . to affect Frenchfilmmaking practices was Russia; the influence of Russian immigrants wasenormous in the twenties and had las ting effects in a number of areas ofproduction. 16

WhileOzep arrived a decade later, two of his films nevertheless demonstrate this influence: Mirages de Paris (1932) and Amok (1934). The formerbrings the formal elements of German Expressionism and Soviet montage tothe city film. While there are both Soviet and German city films that precede Mirages de Paris most notably DZiga Vertov s Man With aMovie Camera(USSR, 1928) and Wal ther Ruttrnann s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City(Germany, 1927 Ozep producedone ofthe first films within the city filmtradition that combineda variety of aesthetic strategiesfrom different national cinema movements. Ozep s subsequent decision to adapt Stefan Zweig snovella Amok is also an interest ing choice, not only for its subject matter,which addresses the tensions inherent in the experience of eXile, but alsobecause Zweig s displaced status as emigre parallels Ozep s to a large degree.

At the beginningof World War II Ozep was interned in France as a displaced person, then freed \,Ipon the fall of France. Like many displacedcineastes who relocated from one country to another during the war, Ozepeventually made his way to Hollywood, where he hoped to direct anEnglish-language version of Tolstoy s War and Peace a project that nevermaterialised. Before arriVing in North America, however, Ozep co-directed (with Jose Marfa Tellez) a melodrama, Cero en Conducta (Spain, 1945),

s n M CKENZIE

which appeared only after he had begun to make films in North America,and which has lef t even less of an his torical t race than his previous work.From Spain, Ozep moved to Hollywood and directed B-pictures, such asthe pro-Russian film Three Russian Girls (1944, c o ~ d i r e c t e d with HenryKesler) for United Artists.

The final phase of Ozep s career has been documented to the greatestdegree. By the 1940s, the demand for francophone films in Quebec was sostrong that it seemed feasible for two production companies to open. I? Thefirst was Renaissance Films, founded in 944 by J DeSeve and CharlesPhilipp. In order to give Renaissance Films prestige, DeSeve and h i l i ~ pimported Ozep to direct theirfirst production, Pere Chopin (1944). RenaISsance Films aimed not only for prestige, but also to appease the DupleSSIS,government of Quebec and the province s Roman Catholic Church, inorder to secure distribution. Indeed, to raise money for Renaissance Films,DeSeve and Phillip claimed tha t the positive propagandistic effect of thecinema was one of their main reasons for producing films. DeSeve andPhillipp argued that an engaged cinema was needed to combat the evilsof the world, and the main evils of the time, according to the p r o d u c e ~were atheism and Communism. DeSeve and Phill ip envis ioned a renaIssance of French Catholic films with Quebec as a leading producer.

The second company to emerge was Quebec Productions Corporation,founded in 1946 by Paul I..:Anglais and Rene Germain. Quebec Product ions was more secular in i ts outlook and hoped to make films that couldcompete in th e American as well as French markets. With that objective inmind CAnglais and Germain hired Ozep to shoot the same film simulta

n o u ~ y in English and French. The result was La Forteresse and WhisperingCity both released in 1947. .

The two francophone films made by Ozep in Quebec are often diS-missed as inferior products tha t do no t tell authentically local narratives;to this extent, Ozep s work could be put in the same category as MichaelPowell s th Parallel (UK, 1941) or Alfred Hitchcock s I Confess (USA,1952). Nevertheless, as Pierre Veronneau points out, while Le Pere Chopinand Forteresse can be derided for their folkloric qualities, their elision ofQuebeCOis French for the French of France, and their American andEuropean pretensions, the two films still must be compared favourably tomany of the dubbed and/or European French-language products seen onthe screens of Quebec in the 1940s.18

While La Forteresse has been wri tt en about , a t l east in Quebec, l it tl eattention has been paid to Whispering City which is often lookedupon solely

CINE FORUM


5/6

NOTESThis essay began as a (long) footnote in my doctoral thesis, S c r e e ~ of O ~ e s .Own: QuebecCinema, National Identity, and the Alternative Public Sphere . (McGill Umversl.tV, 1 9 9 7 ~ . Mythanksto the many people who helped me track down Ozep sfilms or lent Video cOP.Jes ofhis work, including Thomas Eisaesser, Christopher Faulkner, Tony Pearson, Will Straw, GlnetteVincendeau, and Haidee Wasson.

as an English-language version of La Forteresse Yet, despite the fact that thecamera set-ups for the two films are vir tual ly ident ical , Whispering Cityworks far better as a film nair than La Forteresse does as par t of what HeinzWeinmann calls the Quebecois roman Jamilial cycle. 19 Indeed, WhisperingCity along with the all-but-forgotten, Montreal-based, English languageSelkirk Productions film Forbidden Journey (1949, Richard J Jarvis) can beeasily seen as the only two Canadian fi lms produced in the t 940s thatcombine a nair visual aesthetic with a crime story. Of note, as well, is the factthat Ozep s career ended with a nair film, th e genre that , above all others ,exemplifies the hybridisation of European cinematic s tyles in a recognisably American form.

The story of Fedor Ozep not only offers a compelling account o f t hemobility that lies behind the construction of national cinemas and aesthetic movements, but also provides insight into the shifting ground uponwhich film history is based. Commenting on the German emigre experience and the foundation of merican ilm nair Thomas Elsaesser observes,

In order to understand the presumed German ancestry of ilm nairattention shifts t o t he German cinema in i ts t ransnational as wellas international dimension, which involves a more differentialaccount of film exile than one usually finds in film histories.A linear history of influence would have to be combined with alateral history of interference .... Rather than subsume all directors,stars andmovie personnel under the category of emigre, we wouldhave to s tudy, in each and every case, th e precise reasons andcircumstances that brought a German director to the Uni ted States.20

What is most compelling about Elsaesser s argument, in the present context, are the ways dia logi sm plays a key role in the development of cinema aesthetics, transnational or otherwise. In the case of Ozep s aesthetics,his pre- and post-revolutionary Russian and Soviet cinema cannot be totally separated from the work of his German and French periods. This foregrounds the fact that transnational cinema aesthetics, both in Europe andthe United States, are more often tha t not the rule rather than the except ion. This being the case, reconsidering the works of Fedor Ozep is notsimply a matter of rediscovering a directorwhose work has fallen throughthe cracks of cinematic history; it also allows one to re-conceptualise howthe history of cinema aesthetics and stylistic influences between nationalcinema movements might be understood.

S OTT M KENZIE

2.

3.

4.5.

6.7.8.9.

10.

12.13.14.15.16.

Raymond Durgnat, Fedor Ozep: Film Dope 49 (1993): 43.Tim Bergfelder, The Nation Vanishes: European C o - P r o d ~ c t i o n s and :opular GenreFormula in the 19505 and 19605, in Cinema nd Nation, Mette Hjort .and ScottMacKenzie, eds. (London: Routledge, 2000), 139. For more. on the a ~ s t h e t l c c ~ l t u r ~ 1and stylistic interchanges between.European and American cmema durmg p e r l ~ d . mquestion, see Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., RIm Europe nd FlI .America ; Cinema, Commerce nd Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939 (Exeter, UK.University of Exeter Press, 1999).There is some disagreement about where Ozep actually died .. A c c o r d ~ n g to RichardTaylor s entry on Ozep in Enc/yc/opcedia of European Cinema, Gmette V m c ~ n d ~ a u ed.(London: BFI, 1995), Ozep died in Ottawa. Vet all other reliable accounts list hiS placeof death as Hollywood, including the account o f his friend colleague Georg.esFreeland which was written in response to David Godin s essay Fedor Ozep: A BllefBiography: Griffithiana 35/36 (1989): 66-74. See Freeland, Letter, Griffithiana 8 9(1990): 282-287.Jay Leyda, Kino:A HistoryofRussian nd SovietFilm (London: GeorgeAllen, 1960), 88.Vuri Tsivian, Early Russian Cinema: Some ObselVations, in Insidethe Film Fac:or:: NewApproaches to Russian nd Soviet Cinema, Richard Taylor and Ian Chllstle, eds.(London: Routledge, 1991), 13.Leon Moussinac, Le cinema Sovietique (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), 112-113.Paul Rotha, The Film TillNow, revised and enlarged (London:Vision Press, 1959),247-248.Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: ssays in ilm Theory (New York: Harcourt, 1949),Herbert Ihering, review of er Marder Dimitri Karamasoff, B e r l i n e ~ ~ a r s e ? k u f l e rDecember 1931, cited in [anon.], Fedor Ozep-Regisseur,.Author, m CmeGraph.Lexicon zum deutschprachigen Film (Munich: edition text kritlk, 1977).Perhaps partof the reason that Kracauer viewed Karamasoff as foreshado,: ing the, riseof Nazism is that excerpts from Ozep s film-along w i t ~ . s c e n ~ s from Fritz Lang s M(Germany, 1931 were used in Fritz Hippler s anti-SemitiC NaZI propaganda film Derewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, Germany, 1940). Nevertheless, one cannot hold Ozepaccountable for this appropriation of hiswork.Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Historyof the German Film(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 252.Werner Klingler, Ozep s Film The MurdererKaramazov: Experimentalilm 4 (1932): 30.Tom Milne, The Living Corpse, Monthly Film Bulletin 43.504 (1976): 16.Durgnat, 44.Milne, 16.Colin Cri sp , The French Classical Cinema, 1930-1960 (Bloomington and London:Indiana University Press and I.B. Tauris, 1993), 167.

INE FORUM


6/6

17. R:lr the history of Renaissance Rims and Quebec Productions Corporation (interestingly,both companies used English names), see Pierre \leronneau, l e su:es est eu film {XlI -font froot;ais: histnirc au cinema l Qu6bC The couple seek a di_ce When it is nol granted feyda tries to drown himsell, Usa marries her 10ller and is dlllrged with mganl'f.Ow Morder Dimitri Karomasolf (aka The Murderer Dimitri Karamazov, Germany, 1931). In aloose adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The rothmf(ammaov, Dimilri falls in IlMl with a prosti.tute who was al$O iJ1\lOIved with his father. When the father is killed Dimitri is charged with palricide,Mirages de Paris (aka CroIlstm:Jncdrt, Frana , 1932). tn the tradition of the city film,' this experImental work explores the dtv of Paris.Amok (France, 1934 A doclor living in the jungle is sought oul by a desperatewoman seekingan abortion (adapled from a nOliella by Stefan Zweig).A Woman Alone (aka rwoWho Dared, UK 1936 completed by Eugene Frenke). A maid faUs in10lle with her employer, an army offia r, leading to dire consequencesarising out of class cooflict:L a D am e d e P iq ue (aka Queoo of S{Xldes, Frame 1937). An army officer falls victim to hisobsession with gambling (adapted from a story by Alexander Pushkin).TarK.amOOV4 (aka Betrayal France 1938). Catherine the Greal plots against both her fonnerklver and a claimant to her throne, who have fallen in 1000e with each other.Gibraffor (aka It Happened in Gibraltar france, 1939).A British $Oldier posing S a traitorcatches 0lIt a NaIl spy.J e Nre ChopirI (aka COlloe ali Carwdc, Quebec, 1944). Two brothers, one from the

ozep 121 mackenzie soviet

Documents