Anything But Silent
Ernst Lubitsch’s SO
THIS IS PARIS
Wednesday, August 17th at 7:30 PM
With Live Theatre
Organ Accompaniment by Ben Model!
Members $12 | Public
$17
Paul and Suzanna are a happily married couple in Paris, when
new neighbors across the street start causing trouble. When Paul goes to
complain to Georgette and Maurice, he realizes that she is an old flame. Thus
begins a series of marital mishaps that try the fidelity of both couples.
When Ernst Lubitsch joined Warner Brothers in 1923 with a
three-year, six-picture deal, he moved away from the kind of historical epics
he had produced previously in Germany and began a remarkable series of marital
comedies that earned him the reputation of Hollywood’s most elegant and
sophisticated director, encapsulated in “the Lubitsch touch.” Like Cecil
B. DeMille before him, Lubitsch became the foremost commentator of gender
relations in the Jazz Age. So This is Paris, the last film
on his Warner’s contract is light as a feather and twice as funny. From the
very opening scenes, Lubitsch cleverly toys with visual representation and
audience expectation as reality and fantasy crisscross in a comic, primal love
quadrangle among the cultivated and wealthy. Filled with favorite Lubitsch
elements—deceptive guises, traded identities, delicate suggestion and
innuendo—that assume a sophisticated audience who want to participate as much
as consume. Here, the director adds to the mental and physical kinetics with
surreal animations and a phenomenally kaleidoscopic, avant-garde dance
sequence. (USA, 1926, 80 min., b/w with tinting, DCP /
Director: Ernst Lubitsch / Screenwriter: Hans Kräly /
Cast: Monte Blue, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lilyan
Tashman, Myrna Loy)
“Lubitsch applies his naughty touch to a sexual
roundelay, as two sophisticated, straying couples flirt their way towards a
mammoth dance contest, a good-natured send-up of sheikhs, jazz babies and
would-be wife swappers, replete with binge drinking, outrageous Freudian
symbolism and a writhing kaleidoscope that must be the ultimate Charleston
scene.” - J Hoberman NY Times
Ben Model is one of America’s leading silent film accompanists, and has been playing piano and organ for silent films at the New York MoMA since 1984 and the CAC since 2006. Since March 16th, 2020, Ben has been hosting a weekly live-streamed silent film show from his living room, “The Silent Comedy Watch Party.” Click here to visit Ben's YouTube page!
