Carmen

Love is a bohemian child,
It has never, never known the law,
If you don’t love me, I love you;
If I love you, watch out! 

– Translated from George Bizet’s Carmen, “Habanera”

No silent film was ever truly silent, and none is more boisterous than Ernst Lubitsch’s Carmen (1918). Anything starring Pola Negri is loud, vivacious and colourful. She bursts onto the scene and immediately captivates every man around her. Her smile is wide and mirthful, her spirit rapturous. She seems to delight in every sensuality; brushing against the soldiers with charged passion, she takes one into her hypnotic gaze, using a rose as a tactile tease. Her voice (though we cannot hear her) seems loud and ringing: her mouth moves fast as though her energy cannot be contained; her movements are sharp and playful. After more than 100 years, her presence is still so strong it seems to reach through the screen.

Negri was a Polish screen and stage actress who became internationally renowned as a femme fatale and tragedienne.¹ In 1918 she had just begun her new life in Germany as a silent film actor, and in 1922 would become the first European actress ever to be signed by Paramount. Her career would afford her a reputation as a star and sex symbol from Europe to America. Born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec in Poland to a single mother, she was the only surviving child of three and grew up in abject poverty, later taking her stage name with inspiration from Italian poet Ada Negri. She would always claim that her mother came from impoverished Polish nobility. Her father was a Romani man (better known in English as a “Gypsy”, though this word is considered pejorative) born in Slovakia, a traveller and a tinsmith – a traditional Roma profession. A passionate man who wanted freedom for Poland, he was arrested for revolutionary activities by the Russian authorities and deported to Siberia when Negri was very young, and she would not see him again. 

From her father, Negri can trace her Romani heritage. The Roma are a travelling people with ancient roots as a stateless nation from Northern India. They speak Romani – a language similar to Hindi and Punjabi – and they have migrated across Europe and the world. As a travelling people, Roma frequently clash with the structure of the society around them and are noted for not assimilating, which is often cause for conflict with the locals.² Indeed, any group that does not fit into European imperial hegemony will be maligned and othered, and eventually criminalised. The Roma’s proud and distinctive culture earns them both admiration and ire. Their traditional clothing inspired the appropriative bohemian fashion movement in France; their music is the root of the Spanish flamenco; their language punctures English with words like ‘pal’, ‘chav’ and ‘posh’ having Romani origin. They are usually portrayed simultaneously as exotic and sensual (especially women) but also inherently criminal, backstabbing, untrustworthy and of dubious morality.³ These perceived characteristics, though they are incredibly defamatory, form a literary motif that is evoked uncritically in Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Carmen, and its many adaptations.

Yet the theatricality of Lubitsch’s Carmen is delightful to behold. Harry Liedtke as Don José is frustratingly stupid and macho, but also anxious and devoted. His exaggerated frown and clutching desperation can be felt through his movements and unblinking gaze. He is spun in circles by the headrush he gets after meeting Carmen for the first time. Immediately besotted, though too emotionally stunted to realise this at first, he acts out of intense passion mixed with self-loathing rage, all directed simultaneously towards his fascination for Carmen. Carmen, the best dancer in the village, a “wildfire”, uses her sensuality to ensnare every man in town. There is an implied supernatural element to her seductiveness: we are told at the start of the film of “Gypsy magic, Gypsy lore, Gypsy blood in days of yore,” and at various points she engages in the magical practices of palm-reading and molybdomancy (divination by melted lead, dropped in cold water). As a caricature of a Romani woman, Carmen is simultaneously desirable and dangerous. We are told she is “in league with the Devil himself,” a constant temptation for the supposedly noble, enlightened, European soldier of the empire – a threat to Western civilisation itself. However, this is complicated by the fact that Negri is of Roma heritage; she embraces this portrayal of a licentious “Gypsy” who cares little for the silly European men around her finger, and this exerts a certain power and confidence.

When she meets Escamillo (Leopold von Ledebur), the brave and charismatic bullfighter in the film’s final act, Carmen expresses true desire for the first time. She seems to break out of her role as a one-note caricature, and the tempestuous storm within her is finally still and calm. They lock eyes with resounding ferocity, and seem to mutually bewitch one another. Unlike her pathetic, spineless, lovesick soldier, Escamillo is masculine and assured; he is everything she desires. He wants her, but is not weak at the knees for her, and their dynamic is balanced through reciprocity. For the first time, Carmen is restrained in her affections, gently kissing his hand and forehead before he leaps into the bullfighting ring. Of course, her jealous, childish soldier kills her out of spite, a punishment for daring to be free and untameable. In the end, it is Carmen’s wild spirit that emerges victorious, for it did not buckle under the pressure of patriarchy or empire.

Carmen (1918 Germany 80 mins)

Prod Co: Projektions-AG Union, UFA Prod: Paul Davidson Dir: Ernst Lubitsch Scr: Grete Diercks, Norbert Falk, Hanns Kräly Phot: Alfred Hansen Art Dir: Karl Machus, Kurt Richter Cos Des: Alex Hubert

Cast: Pola Negri, Harry Liedtke, Leopold von Ledebur, Grete Diercks, Sophie Pagay, Paul Biensfeldt Paul Conradi, Max Kronert, Margarete Kupfer

Endnotes