Un day, long after having stopped the cinema, Greta Garbo goes to the director Billy Wilder – screenwriter of his famous Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) – to drink a Martini. “She swallows one in one go, and then another and then another. These Swedes drink Martini like beer, says Billy Wilder (in a book of interviews with Cameron Crowe). We start talking about cinema and she says to me: “I would like to make a film about a clown.” “At the idea that” the Divine “wants to return to the screen, Wilder feels the excitement invade. Could he hold his new project there? But here is Garbo detailing aloud the film of which she dreams: “I am a clown, I wear a mask… I will never remove the mask. I will be a clown throughout the film. A clown who smiles all the time…” Wilder’s enthusiasm wanes as the description progresses. Garbo insists: this role is made for her – “I am a clown in life”, she swears.
Effect of the drink or sincere confession, this confidence is surprising. Far from making people laugh, Garbo was above all a tragic actress, undoubtedly the greatest of her time, particularly in her silent films, including the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, in the 13e arrondissement, in Paris, is offering a sumptuous retrospective until February 21. These ten films correspond to the first half of the brief career of the actress, from her beginnings in Sweden to Anna Christie, his first talkie. Signed by the greatest directors of the time, they dazzle with their beauty and the modernity of their main actress… The idea that Garbo dreamed of playing a clown, with his artificial joy, his face concealed by make-up, reinforces its central mystery, that of a face which, filmed in close-up, hypnotizes the public of yesterday and today.
A haughty beauty
It was Roland Barthes who – in Mythologies (1956) – best analyzed this phenomenon: “Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when the capture of the human face threw the crowds into the greatest confusion, where one literally lost oneself in a human image as in a philtre , where the face constituted a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which one could neither reach nor abandon. A few years before, the face of Valentino operated suicides; that of Garbo still participates in the same reign of courtly love, where the flesh develops mystical feelings of perdition. »
In fact, the first role of the young Greta Gustafsson (who took “Garbo” as her stage name in 1923) in the adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel The Legend of Gösta Berling (1924), is a role of sinner and temptress. In the role of the Countess Elisabeth who makes a defrocked and alcoholic pastor lose his head, she already shines with her haughty beauty and a natural reserve which increases tenfold the effect of her emotional scenes.
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With Garbo, we are far from the codes of melodrama, its exaggerated playing and its rolling eyes. At Georg Wilhelm Pabst, in The Joyless Street (1925), she is of an overwhelming sobriety as a victim of poverty, pushed into prostitution by the economic crisis and who refuses to sink despite this decline. The film also marks one of the rare moments when the career of Garbo – subscribed to literary adaptations and historical dramas – resonates with current events: the novelist Hugo Bettauer, whose novel provides the plot of the film, arouses the hatred of the Nazi Party for its uncompromising depiction of Viennese society and he was assassinated during the filming of the film.
Her crush on John Gilbert
The mystical communion of the public with Garbo culminates in her great love films at MGM (where she signed in 1925): The Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926) who records live her crush on actor John Gilbert, with whom she shares the bill; Anna Karenine (Edmund Goulding, 1927), of which she would later shoot a speaking version, a role that suits her emotional depth beautifully. Clarence Brown, one of his favorite MGM directors, explained that “Garbo had something in his eyes that you didn’t realize unless you photographed it close-up. You could actually see her thinking. She was able without changing her expression to show a feeling of jealousy towards one person and love towards another”.
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This marvelous expressiveness which makes her one of the great lovers of cinema – one of her great post-silent roles is the Lady of the Camellias (The Novel of Marguerite Gautier, George Cukor, 1937) – comes into direct conflict with his inscrutable image. Apart from the passionate affair with John Gilbert, we do not know of his love story, probably in part because his love life is then turned towards women. Basically, Garbo is a loner, not made for the teamwork that the cinema supposes. Ditto for the social life inherent in Hollywood. When Garbo retires after the failure of The woman with two faces (George Cukor, 1941), it takes its mystery with it. Like this photomontage from 1931 which shows the unforgettable face of “The Divine” surmounting the body of an Egyptian Sphinx.
“Greta Garbo, the divine”. Until February 21. www.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com