Early Cinema: MADAME DUBARRY

"Early Cinema: Film and Perception" is the title of the session of the FU seminar "Introduction to Film History", which we will accompany with the screening of Ernst Lubitsch's great international postwar success MADAME DUBARRY (1919, May 26, on the piano: Eunice Martins). Lubitsch's tragicomedy also marked the international breakthrough of the Polish theater actress Pola Negri in the leading role. Against the backdrop of the French Revolution, she plays the Parisian seamstress Jeanne, who turns down the student Armand to ultimately become the mistress of Louis XV. After the revolution, she is sentenced to death, as a member of the royal court, by the people's court headed by Armand. Despite the enormous technical and personal effort, the individual characterization of the figures prevails, which Lubitsch develops from a certain ironic distance.