A documentary featuring Bernhardt surrounded by friends and undertaking various activities at her holiday retreat in Brittany. This film accompanied Bernhardt’s 1912 tour of America, and was one of the first films to offer a supposedly “intimate” vision of a celebrity’s private life. What is notable is not only the way in which Bernhardt is clearly unable to bound through the nature she is intent on showing, but the manner in which the rustic isolation of the island is nevertheless undermined by the arrival of a telegram, a game of tennis, and the way in which Bernhardt’s various activities have been staged for the camera. A local celebration of the actress is particularly interesting, since it shows members of the community performing a “Breton dance”. Like Gauguin and the Pont-Aven artists some 20 years earlier, Bernhardt makes vernacular life an idealized part of the modern world.

Victoria Duckett