Thammasat University students interested in film, theatre, art, Western culture, history, gender studies, feminism, France, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520382121/html
Its author is Associate Professor Victoria Duckett, who teaches film in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of French theater.
The publisher’s descriptions of the book follows:
At the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were singular actors: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett. Talented and formidable women with global ambitions, these performers forged connections with audiences across the world while pioneering the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema traces how these women emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars. Building upon extensive archival research in France, England, and the United States, Victoria Duckett argues that, through intrepid business prowess and the use of early multimedia to cultivate their celebrity image, these three artists strengthened ties between countries, continents, and cultures during pivotal years of change.
In an introduction, Associate Professor Duckett noted:
More than a century after the French actresses Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), Réjane (Gabrielle Charlotte Réju, 1856–1920), and Mistinguett (Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois, 1875–1956) consolidated their theatrical renown by appearing in silent films, attention is newly focusing on their contributions to the early film industry. These actresses were leading stage performers, as well as international businesswomen and creative entrepreneurs. They helped grow mass audiences for cinema, while expanding the international reach of French theater through their pioneering involvement with film. This study explores the emergence of their reputations as movers and shakers in England and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their border crossings from Paris into England and America and their renown across live stage performances and early film helped each actress to become a cultural beacon and global theatrical leader in the transitional decades of the two centuries. As we will see, the accomplishments of this trio helped to ensure that ties between countries, continents, and cultures were developed and even strengthened in these pivotal years of change. The actresses I explore shared transnational theatrical acclaim. They also all emerged from a shared, marginalized background on the cultural (and at times geographic) periphery of Paris. Emerging from lower social classes that did not claim economic, political, or cultural power in France, they became successful by defying and breaking free of social, cultural, artistic, and gendered expectations and norms. Sarah Bernhardt was the daughter of a Jewish courtesan; she chose to leave the prestigious Comédie-Française and the Odéon Theatre to forge a new career with a company of her own. Adopting the lead part in famous French roles (Phèdre, Doña Sol, Marguerite Gautier), she also commissioned spectacular historical plays (La Tosca, L’Aiglon) and, in this way, defined contemporary tragic theater for international audiences. Réjane and Mistinguett also emerged from the margins of Paris to enjoy theatrical success abroad. Their careers were, however, widely divergent. Réjane established prominence in the legitimate comic theaters of Paris (in the Théâtre des Variétés and the Théâtre du Vaudeville). During her rise to renown at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, Réjane worked with her husband, Paul Porel, a respected theatrical manager and director who had enjoyed success as an actor and then director of the Odéon Theatre. Réjane excelled in roles that used physical play to caustically expose class and sexual differences (most notably, in Henri Mielhac’s Ma Cousine and Victorien Sardou and Émile Moreau’s Madame Sans-Gêne). Celebrated as a trailblazing comic actress in London, Réjane never achieved Bernhardt’s American success. In the New World, the nuance of her spoken French was considered too difficult to understand, her performance was seen as unacceptably risqué, and her works were too morally outrageous for female and family audience members to enjoy.
Mistinguett is the youngest and most “cinematic” of my three chosen case studies. She established herself in the popular Casino de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, and the Folies-Bergère—the very theaters that featured the sexualized, popular performances that Réjane was famous for satirizing in her comedies. Eventually also working her way into legitimate comic theaters such as the Gymnase Theatre and the Ambigu Theatre in Paris, Mistinguett was quite different from her compatriots. She did not regularly tour abroad, remaining largely within Paris. Here, she performed song and dance acts that were built into spectacular revues that were famous for incarnating the joyous abandon of la ville lumière. The acclaim of these ephemeral and changing variety spectacles enabled Mistinguett to gain coverage in English and American newspaper reports. Later, she consolidated international success through her wide-ranging work in silent films. This trio helped change the relationship between the late nineteenth-century French stage, the emerging film industries, and English-speaking audiences in England and North America. In this respect, Bernhardt, Réjane, and Mistinguett are more than case studies because they reveal the importance of the French actress at a point in which the Old World of Europe was giving way to the dominance of the New World of America. An identifiable yet adaptable figure, the actress helped facilitate border crossings through geographical space, cultural spheres, and class divisions, as well as through the interconnected and rapidly changing media landscapes of her time. Charting transnational performance histories, my study follows each actress as she moved from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth and from Paris to England and then on to America. My aim is to refute the bias that has removed the late nineteenth-century actress from the cinematic century that was to emerge and to give evidence of the cultural clout that actresses enjoyed with English-speaking publics abroad. Although I explore just three Parisian actresses, my overarching contention is that the French actress has been historically overlooked in the flourishing film industries of early twentieth-century England and America. If the French actress is considered in discussions of media industries, film history, or creative entrepreneurship today, it is within the context of celebrity studies or as a grounding figure in debates about American twentieth-century feminist performance practices. Rarely is discussion of an actress’s theatrical success joined to a discussion of the galvanizing impact her work had on early film, particularly in relation to attracting popular audiences to the cinema in England and America. The actress’s theatrical professionalism and business nous is also rarely offered as an explanation for international renown. In my view, although Bernhardt, Réjane, and Mistinguett’s achievements emerged on the stage—where they performed in French yet still engaged the enthusiasm of English-speaking publics—they also drew these foreign audiences to film. Their international success is not so much lost to history as it is hiding in plain sight.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)