“The legendary force of the actress Elisabeth Bergner developed on stage. It was from there that the fame which soon led to her simply being referred to as ‘Bergner’ went forth.
After Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, she was the last stage artist to awaken a larger-than-life affection, that to this day has not yet waned. But just how the extraordinary effect she had on her audience came about, has only been transmitted imprecisely. Instead of technical recordings, there are just the legend and the myth that emerged from the immediate experience and brook neither doubt nor revision.
They are of a different quality to the world fame of the great film stars. Soberly we read from the film material just how divine Garbo was, or can still be in our eyes. And we need not ponder too long on what it was about Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola that fascinated or shocked the latter-day bourgeois viewers in 1930. The fabulous super-stars that existed in the history of theatre are no longer possible in the history of cinema. Here one remains a historical phenomenon.
In an intermediary zone between the one and the other tradition we find the film actress Elisabeth Bergner. Though tangible in documents, she does not cease to be a myth. Her prestige may not have stood up to the camera, yet it still remains undiminished. When encountering Bergner’s films, one must reckon with this complicated state of affairs, which evades critical definition […]
During her decade at the theatre in Berlin from 1923 to 1933, when she developed into one of the first greats of the Reinhardt theatre tradition, Elisabeth Bergner appeared in seven films. Director Paul Czinner adapted the screenplays for her, and she fitted into the roles he created in her image and to his liking. The longer this liaison lasted, the more inappropriate to the status of the actress the critics found it. ‘This irritating nonsense should be stopped and Czinner’s alcohol license be taken away from him’, wrote Rudolf Arnheim in Weltbühne after the premiere of the film Fräulein Else.
In appearance, Paul Czinner could have been his protagonist’s father, and in all the films he surrounded her with possessive father-figures. By placing this delicate creature in the care or under the control of particularly sturdy men, he intensified the impression of her fragility beyond all comparison. The touching effect, however, also had a brutal aspect. The series of Czinner and Bergner productions began in 1923 with Nju, the study of a ‘misunderstood woman’. (Sybille Wirsing, Noras kleine Schwester, in Helga Belach (Hg.), Elisabeth Bergner, 1983)