The bitter life of the great London actor Edmund Kean, born at the end of the eighteenth century and long considered the best actor in the world. The making of Kean was in France. The interiors were shot at the Albatros studio in Montreuil and the Joinville studios, which were large enough for reconstructing the legendary Drury Lane theater. The exterior shots were filmed in Paris and Versailles. The art director of Albatros, Aleksandr Lošakov, did a magnificent reconstruction, studying period prints kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Using many visual experiments, the film depicts how Shakespearean theater and reality became one in the same in Kean’s mind. Kean is a modern work, demonstrated also by the use of Stanislavsky’s system, which the Russians Volkov and Mozžuchin knew well. The fast-speed Slavic dance is the scene that amazed viewers the most: André G. Brunelin, a projectionist at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, remarked that the audience wanted an encore of the scene forcing him to project it a second time. His testimony, in Au temps du Vieux-Colombier de Jean Tedesco (“Cinéma 61”, no. 52, January 1961), also refers to “delightfully colored films” with “varied chromatic tones”, whereas the film’s first restoration in 1964, which has circulated to date, was in black and white. A fragmented positive print kept at the CNC and the notes on the original negative made its colour restoration possible today. The 35mm copy obtained from the film transfer was colored directly on the surface by the Czech lab Jan Ledecký thanks to a partnership between Cinémathèque française and Národní Filmový Archiv.

Céline Ruivo