Lithography and Soliloquy
Hello again! So glad you could join me in my newsletter. Please, pull up a chair next to the fire. Yes, that's it. Would you like some cocoa? There, now you can get all warmed up––you're dripping wet! How's the work been going this week? I see, well that's certainly something. And the family? Mm-hm, just like them isn't it? Oh don't mind old Argos there, he loves a good scratch behind the ears. How have I been, you ask? Well…
I Wandered the Belle-Époque
Through Open Culture I stumbled onto a gallery of gorgeous lithographic posters, all designed between the years 1880 and 1914. Part of what makes them so enchanting, I think, is how they don’t fight their medium, but instead turn it to their advantage. By embracing their two-dimensionality and making a virtue of the heavy outlines, saturated colors, and minimal shading of their printed—rather than painted—heritage, they produce an instantly recognizable graphic style that is still familiar even a century later. They’re so distinctive, in fact, that it’s easy to forget they’re actually ads.
There was one image in particular, however, that caught my eye…
Hold on, is that an ad for Sarah Bernhardt playing not Ophelia, but — Hamlet? As it turns out, yes! At the height of her career, Sarah Bernhardt opened her own playhouse and cast herself in a number of leading roles, including, beginning in 1899, Hamlet:
As someone who knows Sarah Bernhardt by name and nothing else, this came as a bit of a surprise to me. I came to find that beginning as early as the 18th century, there have been a number of women who’ve played Hamlet both on stage and on screen.
A silent film from 1921, starring Danish actress Asta Nielsen as Hamlet, incorporates Hamlet’s (secret) womanhood into the story proper by having the queen pass her off as a son at birth in hopes of securing the succession when it seems as if her husband has died in battle.
A contemporary review from the New York Times says of the movie:
One cannot speak of the work of Miss Asta Nielsen without enthusiasm. There will be discussion as to her physical charms… But what does all this matter? The woman can act… She impersonates a character, she makes it live and have a meaning, a hundred meanings. Her mouth is not simply something to paint a cupid's bow on. It is an organ to express the thoughts and feelings of the woman within. And her other features are not merely facial adornments or fixtures to be adorned, but human parts that reveal a human being.
You can find the entire movie here (in English) or here (in the original German). Just keep in mind, however, the NYT’s concern that “The most serious fault with the American version of the picture is that it is overtitled. Scenes which can stimulate the imagination are made explicit by words.” Talkies were a mistake.
And Finally…
I can’t get enough of this series of fake documentaries on YouTube, which often feature a very famous person developing an odd eccentricity of some kind. I think my very favorite so far is the one on Freud.
That’s All For Now
Thanks for asking! Same time next month? I’ll keep the kettle on.