Fedora Vest-Tyskland, Frankrike 1978 Regi Billy Wilder Med William Holden, Marthe Keller, Hildegard Knef, José Ferrer 1t 52m 35mm Engelsk tale, norske tekst Aldersgrense 12 år
“The vampire seldom entrances his guest by staring him in the eye; he does so rather by not appearing in the mirror” (from (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, by Jalal Toufic).
The face of the mortal can still undergo either a trance, or a trans.
In this chapter of Vampiric Projections, the films that are considered deal with the face either getting entranced in a vampiric setting, or undergoing a transformation/mutilation via cosmetic surgery.
The first film is Billy Wilder’s Feodora, from 1978.
Adrian Martin wrote in the essay Dissolves in Time: Close-Up on Billy Wilder’s “Fedora”, on Mubi:
“For what would turn out to be his penultimate work, Wilder grabbed onto a popular-literary source of the mid ‘70s, Thomas Tryon’s suite of interconnected stories gathered under the title Crowned Heads—although, as Charles Brackett had already wryly noted back in 1942, “his idea of doing a book is to change it completely.”
A single voice underlines the ghostly, spectral effect of the film’s switching, blurring, and melding of times and identities: mother and daughter, past and present, European by birth and cosmopolitan by destiny.
In Fedora, Wilder—not for the first time in his career—found a way to re-weave the cultural roots of an entire émigré culture back into Hollywood mythology, while updating that survey for a new, changed world.”
“In a role intended for Faye Dunaway (which would have made this a Holden-Dunaway NETWORK re-match) the normally naturalistic Marthe Heller, in white gloves and Jackie O shades, gives an expressionistic perf of terrifying eccentricity, like a strung-out elf, or a Michael Jackson puppet in drag. One could quibble, but why bother when she’s the most interesting thing onscreen?
Holden’s character is our guide through this curiously one-way labyrinth. Wilder is recasting the past, trying to bring it back, and yet the last exchange of dialogue puts a rueful postmodern spin on the inevitability of failure.” (The Late Billy Wilder, by David Cairns)
An analysis by Oscar Debs will follow the screening, open to discussion.
