On the occasion of the centenary of the disappearance of Sarah Bernhardt, the reissue of the biography of the actress at Payot, by Claudette Joannis, completes with talent the documentary by Aurine Crémieu broadcast today on Arte. A point of detail, however, which bothers me, and which delights me: I note with astonishment that one of the prettiest anecdotes is never mentioned. Is it Sarah Bernhardt who tells it, or one of her flatterers?
Here she is: passing through Warsaw, a desired and applauded diva, she realizes, on going on stage, that the spectators are arranged in a strange order. Looking more closely, she understands: the cashier, by assigning numbered seats, has invented a new way of paying homage to the actress. The bald men have been placed in such a way that they form the letters S and B, on the floor. No one can see it without being on stage: it’s simply wonderful. Ah, those Poles… In her Memoirs, Sarah Bernhardt lines up other stories: she saves the life of President Lincoln’s widow, who was about to fall down the outside stairs of a steamer; she visits a whale in Boston; she marvels over the Brooklyn Bridge, “terrifying machine” ; she takes opium in London… What a life! Luckily (for us), Sarah Bernhardt lived when both photography and (silent) cinema were born.
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What gives us amazing images: this way of playing, “with all its fibers”, this emphasis, this flight of nerves, would it be accepted today? Sarah Bernhardt, like her contemporaries Mounet-Sully or Edouard de Max, is the very incarnation of a style ” beyond reality “. Nicknamed “the Divine” and “the Sacred Monster”, the actress was both the idol of 1900 and the fury defying convention, with her love life on the rocks. She died during the filming of “La Voyante” in March 1923, in her private mansion on boulevard Pereire: it was not a death. It was a stage exit.
Sunday April 16 at 5:50 p.m. on Arte. Documentary by Aurine Crémieu (2022). 52 mins. (Available in replay until May 15, 2023 on Arte.tv).
