The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
Erotikon (1929)
Directed by Gustav Machatý
The Czech Republic’s silent and early sound cinemas stood head-to-head with those of any other country. The national industry’s memory has been preserved by the Czech National Film Archive, which has collaborated with MoMA on a presentation of 14 early Czech pearls. The series’s highlights include three works directed by Machatý, who made only 12 credited films in total. This renderer of indelible sensuality is known best today for his wondrous Hedy Lamarr-starring Ecstasy, and is additionally represented in the series with his first sound film, From Saturday to Sunday, and with Erotikon, his beautiful final silent feature.
Erotikon was based on a novel by the Surrealist writer Vítězslav Nezval and featured art direction by the future Alexander Hammid. The film focuses on Ita Rina (a Slovenian performer who became a star in its wake) as a train stationmaster’s daughter named Andrea who encounters a smooth charmer (played by Olaf Fjord) one stormy night and has her life changed forever afterwards. In the wake of his abandonment, she grows encumbered by what he’s left behind, until the shy young lady learns to come out of herself, exchange her old life for a new one, and even choose between disputing suitors. The film illuminates its actors in energizing soft focus such that the tactility of skin remains with us, no matter the characters’ social statuses. Andrea’s world comes to seem both dangerous and generous, in a manner that befits her story’s title. Erotikon (which shares its name with a mark of perfume that appears in the film) will screen at MoMA on HD video. Aaron Cutler (April 11, 7pm; April 22, 2pm at MoMA’s “Ecstasy and Irony: Czech Cinema, 1927-1943”)