The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (406 page)

Blanche Sweet
(1895–1986), b. Chicago
Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri—the greatest women stars of the silents were immediately identifiable; however talented they were, they registered first as extreme personalities. Blanche Sweet was different: she was so various an actress that it’s sometimes hard even to recognize her. You can’t really spot the spunky young heroine of
The Lonedale Operator
(Griffith, 11) in the majestic heroine of
Judith of Bethulia
(Griffith, 14). She was yet another Griffith discovery, joining Biograph when she was fourteen after a long career as a child actress on the stage. Because she looked so mature, she was often cast as a real grownup woman, unlike Pickford and Gish, and although she claimed that all was sweetness and light among the young Griffith protégées, Gish snatched the role of Elsie Stoneman in
Birth of a Nation
out from under her. (To add insult to injury, Gish was known to refer to her as “Miss Sweet and Sour.”) No wonder that, like Pickford, she left Griffith early on, first for the Famous Players—Lasky company, where she made seven movies, including two for Cecil B. De Mille (The
Warrens of Virginia
and
The Captive
, both in 1915), and met her first-husband-to-be, director Marshall Neilan. After two years, she formed her own company, Blanche Sweet Productions, and eventually moved on to other major studios.

She looked large on the screen for a star of that period, and she was consistently confident and capable. But her natural wholesomeness was easily discarded when the script called for it. You can believe her masquerading first as a tough boy, then as an Indian maid, then turning into a romantic heroine in
That Girl Montana
(21, Robert Thornby). She was a notable
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(24) for Neilan (they had to fight to retain the unhappy ending) and widely applauded for the first film version of
Anna Christie
(23, John Griffith Wray), which she says O’Neill preferred to all other film versions of his plays. She’s strong in it, but let’s face it—she wasn’t Garbo; she still depends too much on the Griffith gestural approach to acting.

Sweet was a major film presence for a dozen or more years, a real leading lady. But there had been extended absences from the screen, caused by emotional and/or physical problems. By the time of
Diplomacy
(26, Neilan), she was losing her edge and her judgment: this conventional highsociety melodrama wasn’t her meat, but she insisted on doing it, and she petered out after a few undistinguished sound films. Then it was back to the theatre, and successes like
The Petrified Forest
with Leslie Howard. Her film career was in many ways exemplary, if erratic, and at a major retrospective at MOMA in New York in the nineties, she made a tremendous impression. If she had lived just a little longer, she could have enjoyed it—she was over ninety when she died, in 1986.

Tilda
(Katherine Matilda)
Swinton
, b. London, England, 1960
Margaret Hall in
The Deep End
(01, Scott McGehee and David Siegel) is a kind of single mother. Her husband is far away in the Navy, so she is left in Tahoe City to look after three children and an ailing father-in-law. It’s a movie about the ways in which that kind of woman can lose or abandon her own emotional life—until it is reawoken by a strange blackmailer, the very person who has split her crammed routine, of driving kids to this or that, with the absurd demand for $50,000. As I watched the film, I wondered what Margaret might have been like as a young or younger woman—so tall, so milk-white in complexion, so redheaded, so romantic a figure. And I recalled something from Derek Jarman’s diary,
Modern Nature
, something from 1989, when he was filming
The Garden
(90) and Tilda was his Madonna—“Tilda glitters in the grass-green sari holding on to the wobbly Van Eyck crown.”

Quite a journey—and not over yet: how the daughter of a military commander, raised in grand homes, schooled with the future Princess Diana, went from being a fascinating icon in the imagination of Derek Jarman to an actress who could play an American housewife.

Moreover, I’ll be surprised if the later Ms. Swinton ever abandons her loyalty to experimental projects done for the love of the thing.

So, once upon a time, Tilda Swinton was a part of that extended group around Jarman, capable of stepping from the role of cook or foot masseuse to become one of his figureheads. She was in
Caravaggio
(86),
The Last of England
(87),
Aria
(87), a nurse in
War Requiem
(89), Queen Isabella in
Edward II
(91), Lady Ottoline Morrell in
Wittgenstein
(93), and one of the voices on
Blue
(93).

Her most important work away from Jarman was the title role in
Orlando
(92, Sally Potter), a work that let itself be overly infatuated with her striking appearance. But then, after Jarman’s death (1994), she moved on to the solemn and pretentious
Female Perversions
(96, Susan Streitfield); Ada Augusta Byron King in
Conceiving Ada
(97, Lynn Hershman); Muriel Belcher, the legendary Soho figure, in
Love Is the Devil
(98, John Maybury); Mum in
The War Zone
(99, Tim Roth);
The Beach
(00, Danny Boyle);
Teknolust
(01, Hershman);
Vanilla Sky
(01, Cameron Crowe);
Adaptation
(02, Spike Jonze).

Busy, ambitious, bold, she seems ready to try anything—
Young Adam
(03, David Mackenzie); the judge in
The Statement
(03, Norman Jewison);
Thumbsucker
(04, Mike Mills). She’s often riveting, but it’s a stretch to think of her as mainstream.

She won an Oscar—in
Michael Clayton
(07, Tony Gilroy)—but it changed nothing. She had a lead in a big picture, the White Witch in
The Chronicles of Narnia
(05, Andrew Adamson) and shrugged it off. She did two pictures for Jim Jarmusch
—Broken Flowers
(05) and
The Limits of Control
(09)—and picked up nothing. Her most committed performance was as
Julia
(08, Erick Zonka), but the film didn’t work. She seemed limited in
Burn After Reading
(08, the Coens), mystified in
The Man from London
(07, Bela Tarr), at her best in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(08, David Fincher);
I Am Love
(09, Luca Guadagnino).

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
, b. Nossendorf, Germany, 1935
1968:
Skarabea/How Many Earths Does a Man Need?
. 1972:
Ludwig II—Requiem für einen Jung Fräulichen König/Ludwig Requiem for a Virgin King
. 1973:
Theodor Hierneis oder Wie Man ein Ehemaliger Hofkoch Wird/Ludwig’s Cook
. 1974:
Karl May
. 1975:
Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried 1914–1975/The Confessions of Winifred Wagner
. 1977:
Hitler—a Film from Germany
. 1982:
Parsifal
. 1984:
Die Nacht
. 1990:
Ein Traum, Was Sonst
.

Syberberg is among the most absent and absorbing modern directors. Even as you list his films, it is a riddle as to whether they are fiction, documentary, or a patchwork of epic theatre on film that exceeds labels. No German director has so conscientiously assaulted his country’s recent past, and no one apart from Rossellini has so explored the cinema’s disciple relationship with history. Syberberg’s Hitler film is not just a way of making us aware of Hitlerism as a universal instinct, not just a profusely inventive and original puppet show on modern history, but a movie made in the awed spirit that appreciates Hitler as a monstrous Selznick who hoped to leave the world a mixture of Wagner and film noir. Syberberg is a theatrical genius too rich for the stage, and a brilliant analyst of the way media have become our messages. It is Brecht meeting McLuhan on one track; but it is Wagner going
Cabaret
on another. And those are just two tracks of the cinema’s ringmaster of quadrophonic ideas. The films are still little seen, and they are works that need to be experienced before it is profitable to read about them.

As a youth, he was a keen photographer lucky enough to get in to see Berliner Ensemble rehearsals and to record them on an 8mm movie camera. Twenty years after that adventure, the material was blown up and released as
Last Time I Moved
(73), a vital document on Brecht’s methodology. Syberberg grasped two things from the experience: that film added an impenetrable glaze or mystique to theatre—like legend rather than practice; and that Brecht’s energetic mixture of drama, parable, farce, and lesson offered a way for other artists to work in different media: it is relevant to Godard and Warhol, as well, two of Syberberg’s acknowledged influences.

After university, he went into German TV, where he made many documentaries on theatrical subjects—including one on Fritz Kortner rehearsing scenes from Schiller. This period taught him the value of research and original documents, as well as the way media imagery transformed their findings into slogans, games, and icons, a language of intimate cliché known to nearly everyone. It was with this background that Syberberg launched himself at the last century in Germany and a line of tainted hero figures—perfect source material for tracing the media’s knack of turning ideals into ogres and plastic toys.

“I thought I would make
[Ludwig]
like Warhol’s
Lonesome Cowboys.…
I imagined Ludwig on a motorcycle, Wagner in a little car, people with long hair, drugs. I thought that Ludwig should be some kind of hermaphrodite, a homosexual, that he should sell Bavaria to the Prussians. I invented all these things, and then, when I read the books, I learned that I was right!”
Ludwig
was cheaply made, but it is a baroque fusion of periods, fragmented forms, and projected backgrounds. Narrative is overwhelmed by the collage of points of view; history becomes a shooting gallery of grotesque interpretations, as much of a circus as Ophüls created in
Lola Montès
. His theatrical recreation of history serves as satire, but Syberberg also cherishes Wagner’s romanticism and frequently fills the movie with unabashed heroic grandeur. His analytical approach to German history is achieved through a balance of detachment and immersion, and never carries any note of sanctimonious hindsight.

Ludwig’s Cook
has an actor playing the cook and leading us on a tour of Ludwig’s palaces. It is history reconstructed from the kitchen’s vantage: domestic, irreverent, but demented in that the cook himself is a tyrant who monopolizes the camera and shuffles his roles as actor and character as if he were masturbating.
Karl May
is a kind of primitive biopic, peopled with actors from the thirties and forties, about the writer of inspirational adventures, the link between Ludwig and Hitler at that hysterical level of blood-and-thunder patriotism.
Winifred Wagner
was another innovation: a five-hour interview with the composer’s daughter-in-law. There is a two-hour version in general circulation, and it is a compelling portrait of a person involved in history’s making, revealing part of that mentality and yet still unaware of all its implications.

These projects were leading to the gargantuan
Hitler
film: twenty-two chapters in four parts and seven hours, it is the sum total of images, ghosts, and interpretations of Hitler. Most akin to
Ludwig
, it is theatrical and fairground-like, but always a jungle made into an argument by the calm scrutiny of the camera. Its freedom with levels of artifice and reality makes it a study of the ways we have tried to assimilate, forget, or reform ourselves after the ghastliest event of our time. Like Lang, though, Syberberg employs the didactic stance produced by offsetting the world’s disorder with the camera’s superb authority.

This marked as great a turning point for Syberberg as the conclusion of the moral tales did for Rohmer. He may need history’s text as much as Rossellini did, but he is not unappreciative of the narrative illusion of cinema: “My
[Hitler]
film shows how the war ended in Europe with a whole culture, a whole continent destroyed. If, in his black way, Hitler had succeeded in establishing his concept of a heroic Europe (and he was very near to doing so), it would have been the tragic end of mankind as we had known it before. At the beginning of the film I show a little corner of the hell; at the end, I show, not only hell, but also how the reality of Hitler is turned into a part of the entertainment industry.”

Since
Parsifal
, Syberberg has largely withdrawn from any conventional pattern of work. Instead, he has collaborated intensely with the actress Edith Clever in a series of dramatic monologues to be staged in theatres and then filmed.
Die Nacht
—six hours long—was the first of these, and the series culminated in 1990 with
Ein Traum, Was Sonst
, in which Clever plays the widowed daughter-in-law of Bismarck, recounting the events of her life and the passage of Germany.

This work has scarcely been seen outside Germany, and it has not found proper funding. Moreover, Syberberg has elected not to distribute the films he has finished. A fatal magnificence has set in: “People must come to my films on their own.”

In addition, he has written three books, notably
On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany Since the Last War
—which have earned a great deal of criticism and charges of anti-Semitism.

Recluse or tyrant, Syberberg is a self-conscious, self-confessed genius, and it is hard to believe that such isolation is good for his work, or that it will diminish his passion for history. He is supposed to be writing his autobiography, and it can hardly be less than epic. Syberberg gives us this advice, tablets sent down from the mountain: “People have to trust the development and make the transformation with me.”