Chamber of Forgetfullness

Chamber of Forgetfullness  

Your opinion of this film

Comments

[BCB]

"The Chamber of Forgetfullness" is an odd little film. It is not the finest one-reel drama I have seen from the United States in the early 1910s. It is, however, a welcome example of filmmaking by French expatriots living in the United States. I imagine that most Americans (such as I) tend to associate the French expatriots who produced films in the Fort Lee, New Jersey area with the works of Maurice Tourneur. After watching "The Chamber of Forgetfullness," Tourneur's preeminence within this community still seems secure to me. The film's director Etienne Arnaud seems not to have adequately planned the structure of his film. Certain transitions in time and space seem very awkward, and I had a lot of trouble figuring out why the wife needed to hide the photograph that proved to be such a source of confusion. I admit that many American one-reelers from the early 1910s seem to have a perpexing mix of classical "continuity editing" and earlier disjointed styles of film structure. As a consequence, I cannot call "The Chamber of Forgetfullness" a badly-made film, but it is not as artfully made as the contempory films of Griffith, Ince, or Maurice Tourneur. "The Chamber of Forgetfullness" may not be an excellent film, yet it still has its interesting qualities. In some sense, the film is a blend of cinematic genres. Different parts of the film reflect the influence of the American western and the marital dramas being produced in Europe and the United States. There are hints of a ghost story in the spirit that haunts the dead wife's private room, and the final scene in a graveyard has the melancholy sympbolism of a Leonce Perret film or (may be) Evgenii Bauer. Need I also mention the actor Alec B. Francis, who plays the jealous husband with a great deal of honest acting skill? (He also played the cantankerous squire in Maurice Tourneur's feature film "The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England" [1914].) There is a lot of good in "The Chamber of Forgetfullness," and I am glad that I had a chance to see it. However, I still think that the quality of the film's parts is more interesting than the totality of the result.

[Candace Reckinger]

Like a dream, powerful in its disjuncture.... archetypal characters, scenes and symbols....strangely unsettling yet powerful like a fairy tale. Enjoyed it very much, particularly the binary oppositions of male/female and Old World interiors v. Western landscape....dreamlike evocative piece tho not a controlled artfully realized movie.