Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

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196 CLOSE UP Ecstasy, directed by Gustay Machtay (Elektafilm, Prague). We have become so modest in our long period of starvation for good films that we thankfully receive any experiment along the line of films as art. We appreciate the tendency, be the outcome failure or success. A young woman is married to an oldish gentleman, with all the egotistic habits of a long bachelorhood — she feels neglected, bored and deeply disappointed, and finally runs away from her husband and home. She takes refuge on her father's estate in the country, in the fields and woods, where she takes long rides on horseback, swims in the clear water of the lakes, giving way to the freshness and activity of her youth. It is there that she meets a young man, that the experience of a passionate and happy love is the outcome. To point out the contrast between the sober narrowness of her first matrimonial experience and the wideness and wildness of free primitive nature is the main tendency of the film. Gustav Machaty, the talented Czech director, has chosen the open fields, and the thick woods of the Russian Carpathians for his outdoor scenes. Man is a part of nature and linked to it with the flowers and animals. The photography is masterful; for a long film I have not seen such shots taken with so much love and understanding of the beauty of the country and animals and clouds. The film is somehow akin to Granowsky's Song of Life, and they have more in common than the person of the young actor, the natural and very congenial Aribert Mog. Hedy Kiesler who plays the female part is very young and very beautiful, but her beautv is that of a statue, lacking dynamic expression ; thus her passion is not very convincing. The husband (extremely well represented by Zvonimir Rogoz) is shown in the beginning as a dry, over-punctilious fellow, who does not have our sympathy at all, exaggerated even to a slight caricature, symbolized by a pair of shining, well cleaned eve-glasses. But when he comes to the estate to ask his wife to come back to him, when she refuses and he recognises what had happened in the meantime, he is so miserable and wretched in his loneliness that he nearly abstracts our sympathy from the young couple, who celebrate the festival of their love in the same house and at the same hour in which he commits suicide. Which event forms a separation between the young lovers — the end is not clear : they are waiting for a train in a station at night, the man falls asleep and the women steals away from him and leaves with the train. That was the version shown in Vienna. The original version is said to be more intelligible. The film was turned as a silent film and if it had been made some years ago it would have been shown in the cinemas accompanied by a more or less fitting music, produced by the local cinema orchestra. But since we live in. the decade of the achievement of the sound film, this more or less fitting music was synchronized, and because we are also able to reproduce the human voice the actors have to say one or two words on special occasions, which has an utterly inverted effect.