Her Majesty moves: Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Elizabeth and the development of motion pictures

Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest theatrical star of the late nineteenth century, enabled and even promoted the association of early film with the British monarchy. She did this literally, by playing the role of Queen Elizabeth in Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth, Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton, 1912). Bernhardt also promoted the association of the cinema with monarchy symbolically, making the medium a new empathetic vehicle for the development of celebrity mystique and global power.

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt is the most famous actress of the late nineteenth century stage. Celebrated by an emerging and very vocal group of young female workers and artisans in her native Paris in the late 1860s and the 1870s called "les saradoteurs she went on to become the most popular actress of her generation in Europe, North America, and Australia. Attention has been paid to her "golden voice," the clever ways she marketed and promoted herself, her pioneering patronage of artists such as Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique and her capacity to be at once a successful actress, manager, and theatre director. Scant attention has been paid, however, to Bernhardt’s involvement and success in the early motion picture film industry, both in France and abroad.

Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: performance and silent film

The most famous stage actress of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt enjoyed a surprising renaissance when the 1912 multi-reel film Queen Elizabeth brought her international acclaim. The triumph capped her already lengthy involvement with cinema while enabling the indefatigable actress to reinvent herself in an era of technological and generational change. Placing Bernhardt at the center of the industry's first two decades, Victoria Duckett challenges the perception of her as an anachronism unable to appreciate film's qualities. Instead, cinema's substitution of translated title cards for her melodic French deciphered Bernhardt for Anglo-American audiences. It also allowed the aging actress to appear in the kinds of longer dramas she could no longer physically sustain onstage. As Duckett shows, Bernhardt contributed far more than star quality. Her theatrical practice on film influenced how the young medium changed the visual and performing arts. Her promoting of experimentation, meanwhile, shaped the ways audiences looked at and understood early cinema.

Screening Sarah Bernhardt: reinterpreting acting in silent film

Sarah Bernhardt, the great nineteenth-century theatrical actress, was also the first major international film star. Appearing cross-dressed in a short Hamlet film before international audiences at the Paris Exposition of 1900, this 56-year-old French actress most famously went on to make Camille (La Dame aux Camélias, 1911) and Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth, 1912). Later appearing in one of the first celebrity home movies (Sarah Bernhardt at Home, 1915), she also made a WWI propaganda film, Mothers of France (Mères Françaises, 1917). This presentation explores these films as evidence of a productive exchange between the stage and the nascent film industry. Rather than see Bernhardt’s acting as evidence of the theatre’s incommensurability with film, it will demonstrate the legacy of her stage acting as she adapted it to early film. The talk will include screenings of the films accompanied by live music.

The “voix d’or” on silent film: the case of Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt is a paradigmatic case study for the joining of voice and silent film. This is because she was famous for her 'voix d'or' on the theatrical stage and because she was highly visible in the nascent period of the cinema's development. Traditionally considered an example of actress in the silent period who was 'silenced' by film, she has also been considered an anachronistic and ineffective on-screen performer. I argue instead that Bernhardt's films were not mute records of her live stage action but works that further promoted and developed her polymorphous body at the opening of the twentieth century.

Performing passions : Sarah Bernhardt and the silent screen

Film festival. Program curated and presented and by Victoria Duckett along with notes in the catalogue

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt (born Sara-Marie-Henriette Bernard, 1844-1923) is the most famous French actress of the late nineteenth century. Celebrated for her golden voice and for the sinuous flow of her slender figure on stage, she was also a theatre manager, author, sculptor, painter, and a clever businesswoman. She developed and nurtured global fame in an era when the popular press facilitated international renown. Print media as well as the emerging phonograph and film industries enabled Bernhardt to cultivate and develop her celebrity into the early twentieth century, appealing to new publics and audiences. During the First World War she became a French porte-parole for the Allied cause, appearing on stage and in a propaganda film, as well as in demonstrations and events in support of Allied troops across France and America. When Bernhardt died in 1923 at the age of 78, millions crowded the streets to watch her funeral cortège pass through Paris. This essay explores her achievements in her lifetime.

Who was Sarah Bernhardt? Negotiating fact and fiction

Review essay of : Robert Gottlieb's Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. pp. 233.

Shakespeare's Richard II and Henry V and Political Rebellions in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I

The purpose of this thesis will be to examine how two acts of rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I influenced Shakespeare's writing of Richard II and Henry V, as well as the performance and publication of these plays. The treasonous plots and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in the 1580s, as well as the failed Essex Rebellion of 1601, resulted in a sensitivity towards any writings that seemed to support a coup d'état. Shakespeare, being a well-informed and fairly well-connected playwright, wrote passages in the afore mentioned plays that clearly reflect the political turmoil of the times. Thus, his plays were censored both on stage and in print until after the death of Elizabeth in 1603.

Letters written by John Chamberlain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Mode of access: Internet.

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt is the most famous actress of the late nineteenth century stage. Celebrated by an emerging and very vocal group of young female workers and artisans in her native Paris in the late 1860s and the 1870s called "les saradoteurs she went on to become the most popular actress of her generation in Europe, North America, and Australia. Attention has been paid to her "golden voice," the clever ways she marketed and promoted herself, her pioneering patronage of artists such as Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique and her capacity to be at once a successful actress, manager, and theatre director. Scant attention has been paid, however, to Bernhardt’s involvement and success in the early motion picture film industry, both in France and abroad.