SO THIS IS PARIS (1926)
With soundtrack, 67 minutes.
Tickets: $25/$20
General seating - not reserved or numbered
(T 0419 267 318)
So This Is Paris’s visual inventiveness is proof positive that the famed “Lubitsch Touch” with its distinctive combination of style and wit was not dependent on language. The film also presages his 1930s musicals, and the climactic Artists Ball, featuring a Charleston contest, is kinetic, kaleidoscopic, the visual equivalent of music—it throbs and vibrates with music.
As Lubitsch himself noted in 1929 about his so-called “touch” to film, “The camera should comment, insinuate, make an epigram … We’re telling stories with pictures so we must try to make the pictures as expressive as we can.”
Critics raved about the film when it premiered: “The most uproarious of his farces, the most hilarious of his works, the funniest comedy imaginable … adult and magnificent satirical farce.”
Another compared Lubitsch to the great literary satirists. “We all know, of course, that Lubitsch is one of the two most skilful cinema directors in the world … Let us then remain cognizant of the fact that—as a mind—Lubitsch belongs in the varying classes that include Carroll, Wilde, Congreve.”
New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall described the audience reaction to the Charleston sequence: “This dazzling episode is like the dream of a man after drinking more than his share of wine at such an event. The comedy in this film had, up to that time, kept the audience in constant explosions of laughter, but the startling dissolving scenic effects and varied ‘shots’ elicited a hearty round of applause.”
Cinema magic for a 21st century audience!
Tickets: $25/$20
General seating - not reserved or numbered
(T 0419 267 318)
So This Is Paris’s visual inventiveness is proof positive that the famed “Lubitsch Touch” with its distinctive combination of style and wit was not dependent on language. The film also presages his 1930s musicals, and the climactic Artists Ball, featuring a Charleston contest, is kinetic, kaleidoscopic, the visual equivalent of music—it throbs and vibrates with music.
As Lubitsch himself noted in 1929 about his so-called “touch” to film, “The camera should comment, insinuate, make an epigram … We’re telling stories with pictures so we must try to make the pictures as expressive as we can.”
Critics raved about the film when it premiered: “The most uproarious of his farces, the most hilarious of his works, the funniest comedy imaginable … adult and magnificent satirical farce.”
Another compared Lubitsch to the great literary satirists. “We all know, of course, that Lubitsch is one of the two most skilful cinema directors in the world … Let us then remain cognizant of the fact that—as a mind—Lubitsch belongs in the varying classes that include Carroll, Wilde, Congreve.”
New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall described the audience reaction to the Charleston sequence: “This dazzling episode is like the dream of a man after drinking more than his share of wine at such an event. The comedy in this film had, up to that time, kept the audience in constant explosions of laughter, but the startling dissolving scenic effects and varied ‘shots’ elicited a hearty round of applause.”
Cinema magic for a 21st century audience!
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Location
State Library NSW
Metcalfe Auditorium, Macquarie Street
Entrance is via rear of the cafe
Sydney NSW 2000
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STATE LIBRARY NSW - 25 Jan 2025 - So This Is Paris (1926)
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