Romy Schneider” is the simple title of the exhibition with which the Cinémathèque française in Paris commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the death of the best-known German film actress after Marlene Dietrich. The trump card of the show are three hundred and fifty exhibits, which come in equal parts from the in-house collection and private collections. These include dresses worn by Schneider in Luchino Visconti’s “Ludwig” or Claude Sautet’s “César et Rosalie”, photos from the shooting of Orson Welles’ “The Trial” or the third episode of Visconti’s “Boccaccio ’70”, movie posters for “The Cardinal” by Otto Preminger or “Le Combat dans l’île” by Alain Cavalier. Of course: almost every film exhibition works with costumes, snapshots and posters.
The photo album with colorful flower drawings and handwritten captions addressed to the baby is more personal. Those who have not seen Serge Bromberg’s documentary on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished jealousy drama “L’Enfer” should be fascinated by the two-minute “picture reading” from the surviving working copies: the actress’ quicksilver (nightmare) dream visions in flickering black and white or in psychedelic colors whipped up by a schizophrenic polyphonic soundtrack.
But the exhibition only gets really dense in the chapter dedicated to Claude Sautet. Each of the five films that the Parisian-by-choice made between 1969 and 1978 with the director, who had long been dismissed in Germany as a high-end fabricator, is given its own small documentary here. Schneider’s telegrams and letters to Sautet that were thrown on all kinds of paper are particularly valuable, and in some cases touching. One reads sentences like: “Maybe I’ll never really be old”.
Romy Schneider
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Photos from the Romy-Schneider-Exhibition at the Cinémathèque française in Paris
Nevertheless, the bottom line is that the show is disappointing. She ticks off all the important films, but does not develop her own discourse. Instead, she allows numerous contemporary witnesses to have their say and quotes extensively from Schneider’s “Diary of a Life” published posthumously by Renate Seydel, a problematic source. A number of printing and factual errors in the room texts and in the catalogue, as well as the familiar “Romy”, which is used throughout to name the actress, confirm once again what Michael Töteberg complained about in his 2009 monograph, which is well worth reading: The life of the star is all too often described as a magazine novel told, not as part of the film story.
A study, which will be published in English at the end of the month, is now examining the phenomenon from the perspective of film studies. With Romy Schneider. A Star Across Europe” puts Marion Hallet, a young researcher in the field of star studies, the overdue academic counterbalance to the fluffy hagiographies that monopolize bookstore shelves (at least one serious biography by Günter Krenn is available in German). With Brio, the author fulfills her intention to trace the development of Schneider’s persona on screen as in real life, and this in the double context of European film history and gender studies. Hallet has scrutinized all sixty-three feature, television and documentary films in which the actress can be seen, she has looked through mountains of archive material from eight European countries and the USA, but has not forgotten to develop her own thoughts.