(That You Will Never See)
Erich Von Stroheim
Erich von Stroheim's Queen
Kelly
In 1928, Erich Von Stroheim, one of silent cinema's greatest visionaries, began
work on an opulent five-hour epic starring Gloria Swanson, one of the silver
screen's most flamboyant divas. It should have been silent cinema's crowning
achievement. Instead, Queen Kelly was a doomed project, one of the greatest of
all lost films.
Von Stroheim developed the film for Swanson's newly created production company,
which was bankrolled by her lover, Joseph Kennedy. The story is a mix of naive
romance and grim tale of moral degradation: on the eve of his wedding to mad
Queen Regina V of Kronberg, Prince Wolfram seduces a convent girl (Swanson).
When the pair are discovered by the queen, he is imprisoned and she ends up in a
brothel in Africa.
For Von Stroheim, this was an opportunity to redeem his reputation as a
tyrannical and profligate director, working outside the studio system that had
systematically butchered his (extravagant) films. But it was not to be. After
three months of filming, one-third of the way through the story, Kennedy and
Swanson pulled the plug on the production, worried about the increasing budget
and filming delays, and disturbed by the increasingly lurid turn that the film
was taking.
It was not until the mid-1980s that Queen Kelly was restored, with lost footage,
outtakes,and stills from the last section of the film. Although incomplete, the
film has striking visuals and complex characterisations that confirm Von
Stroheim's unique vision. And, paradoxically, it reveals the director's genius
in a way that his other films do not. We see "Von Stroheim uncensored", in the
words of one critic - free of studio interference.
Queen Kelly's failure brought Von Stroheim's career as a director to an abrupt
end and signalled the beginning of the end of Gloria Swanson's reign as a screen
diva. However, they were reunited 20 years later in Sunset Boulevard,
Hollywood's darkest satire about the studio system. Von Stroheim plays the
devoted butler to Swanson's fading screen diva in the roles for which both are
best remembered today.
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei
Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico
In the 1920s, the pioneering Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein changed the face
of cinema with his celebrated Battleship Potemkin - a seminal illustration of
his theories of montage. And if he had succeeded in completing Que Viva Mexico,
his ambitious social history of Mexico, weaving together its myths, art,
religion, and social history, he might have changed cinema history once again.
Unfortunately, Eisenstein's financial backer, the American novelist Upton
Sinclair, cancelled the production before filming was completed in 1932. In part
this was due to the film's extended delays and increased expenses brought on by
arduous working conditions in Mexico, as well as Eisenstein's increasingly epic
conception of the film. However, a telex from Stalin presenting Eisenstein as a
traitor to Russia also weighed heavily on the project. The director was forced
to return to Russia empty-handed. Although Sinclair promised to send him the
footage, he was prohibited from doing so by the Russian state.
Que Viva Mexico represented a breakthrough in Eisenstein's artistic development.
Gone was the social realist approach to montage; in its place came an innovative
improvised approach, a freer, more personal kind of cinema, exploring picture
composition and mise-en-scène, anticipating directors like Von Sternberg. He was
never again to achieve this kind of creative freedom.
Several versions of the film were culled from the footage, but none bear
comparison to Eisenstein's ambitious vision, notwithstanding the fragmentary
beauty of Edouard Tisse's stark vivid images. However, the influence of the
film's imagery can be seen on directors such as Luis Buñuel, John Huston and
Orson Welles.
Orson Welles
Orson Welles's Don Quixote
Although Orson Welles left a myriad of incomplete films during his 50 years in
cinema, Don Quixote was his most enduring passion. He began filming in 1955 and
continued in Mexico, Spain and Italy over the following decades, bringing
together the cast and crew whenever he could raise the finance. Indeed, Welles
was still talking about finishing the film months before his death in 1985. Don
Quixote was Welles's great obsession. "What interests me is the idea of these
dated virtues [like chivalry] and why they seem to speak to us, when by all
logic they are so hopelessly irrelevant," he said in an interview, revealing
that this was a key theme of his films. In Welles's film, Quixote was a timeless
figure who leaves 16th-century Andalusia to confront modern Spain and the modern
world.
The film mutated countless times over the years. Unable or unwilling to finish
it, Welles continued proliferating images and stories, not unlike the style of
Cervantes' book. All that was left at the end of Welles's life was 300,000ft of
film footage poorly organised and distributed across the world.
A hastily "restored" version of the film, put together by Jess Franco in 1992,
director of exploitation films such as She Killed in Ecstasy, was received with
revulsion. It offered only occasional glimpses of Welles's brilliance and
Francisco Reiguera's superb performance as Don Quixote.
Over the decades, Welles indiscriminately accepted films in order to raise
finance for this film. This was not the only sacrifice he made. At the end of
editing Touch of Evil, he rushed off to Mexico to film Don Quixote. And
Universal studios, taking advantage of his absence, radically re-edited his dark
noir masterpiece.
Alfred Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope
In the mid-1960s, with his career at a low ebb following the critical failure of
Marnie and an ambivalent response to Torn Curtain, Alfred Hitchcock worked on a
groundbreaking experimental film that would have represented a radical change in
his style-possibly heralding a new late phase of cinematic creativity.
Kaleidoscope was the story of a serial rapist and killer. It was initially
envisaged as a kind of prelude to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. There would be
several murders, including an attempt on the life of a decoy policewoman - an
idea that particularly excited Hitchcock - and a Psycho-style stabbing. And the
director intended to use story details from infamous UK criminal cases
(including an acid bath murderer and a necrophile).
This could have been Hitchcock's darkest film. Indeed, Hitchcock himself worried
that some scenes might be too frightening for the audience. In a bold move, he
wanted to tell the entire story from the perspective of the killer, envisaged as
an attractive, vulnerable young man (Hitchcock later decided that the character
would be gay). More radically, he planned to experiment with innovative filming
techniques such as hand-held filming and natural light.
Unfortunately, MCA studios turned the film down as they apparently thought that
the protagonist was too "ugly", a decision that rankled with Hitchcock for the
rest of his life. All that remains now of his experiment is an hour-long tape of
silent footage - and the tantalising prospect of a new wave of Hitchcock films
in a new vérité style, influenced by the European avant garde, to whom he had
become a deity.
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon
In 1968, Kubrick embarked on one of his most ambitious and personal projects
thus far: an epic biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Jack Nicholson playing
the emperor. Napoleon was a lifelong obsession and Kubrick intended to cover the
entire sweep of his life, with full-scale reconstructions of his battles,
requiring some 50,000 extras (Kubrick often noted the similarities between
filmmaking and mounting a battle campaign).
The director worked for two years on the film, immersing himself with a team of
researchers in a minute analysis of the Napoleonic era, developing a day-by-day
account of court life and a catalogue of 15,000 images of the period. With
characteristic ingenuity he found special lenses to film exteriors in the
evening and low-cost paper fabric for the soldiers' uniforms. He even got the
Romanian army to agree to provide tens of thousands of men for the battle
scenes.
In 1969, however, MGM studios balked at the cost of Kubrick's epic, despite the
unprecedented success of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick went to Warner
Brothers, where he made A Clockwork Orange, but he never gave up hope for
Napoleon. If he had achieved his vision, A Clockwork Orange might never have
been made. That film's success sealed his relationship with Warner Brothers and
led to his masterpieces Barry Lyndon and The Shining.
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