Made for Paul Decauville’s “Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre” at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, this short formed part of an experimental undertaking which involved other stage stars in famous roles (e.g., Coquelin the Elder in Cyrano de Bergerac, and Felicity Mallet in L’Enfant prodigue). Although today understood to represent little more than an early effort to join recorded sound to film, this excerpt offers a remarkably rich insight into Bernhardt, her theatre, and the terms of her engagement with film. Choosing to represent herself in the “black Hamlet” of William Shakespeare (a play she had commissioned Marcel Schwob and Eugène Morand to translate, which opened at her Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt on 20 May 1899), Bernhardt showcased herself in an excerpt which included a “standing death”, and enabled her relative thinness to be emphasized via masculine dress. Hamlet also highlighted spectacle and performance: Bernhardt not only performs gender but age (remember that the actress playing the young Danish prince was then 56), choosing the moment in which Hamlet himself thinks that his duel with Laertes is but a stage performance. That we do not see Hamlet’s attendant audience (the King and the Queen) again underscores these terms, since the image of Bernhardt with a sword in hand resonates with the newly popular sport of female fencing.

Victoria Duckett