alr

Sumurun

Live Musical Accompaniment by Martin Marks
Screening on Film
Recently Restored
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With Jenny Hasselqvist, Pola Negri, Paul Wegener.
Germany, 1919, 35mm, black & white.
German intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Deutsche Film Institut

In his last appearance in front of the camera and his only surviving serious role, Lubitsch plays a hunchback who falls hopelessly in love with an alluring traveling dancer: the inevitable Pola Negri, who had already played the part on stage in Warsaw and in Max Reinhardt’s Berlin production. Drawing inspiration from both The Arabian Nights and Reinhardt’s play, matters in this exotic pantomime spectacle get beautifully complicated when Lubitsch interweaves several stories: Sumurun, a rebellious member of the harem, rejects the old, tyrannical sheik, while Negri’s dancer falls for the sheik’s handsome son. A tinted and restored film print from the Deutsche Film Institut will be shown.

Part of film series

Read more

That Certain Feeling... The Touch of Ernst Lubitsch

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy