The Love Of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney) (Lusts of the Flesh) (1927) [720p]
Channel: The Cinema Cellar
Date: 2023-06-14

'The Love of Jeanne Ney (German: Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney), released as Lusts of the Flesh in the United Kingdom, is a 1927 German silent drama film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst based on a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg.

Cast
Édith Jéhanne as Jeanne Ney
Uno Henning as Andreas Labov
Fritz Rasp as Khalibiev
Brigitte Helm as Gabrielle
Adolf E. Licho as Raymond Ney
Eugen Jensen as André Ney
Hans Jaray as Poitras
Sig Arno as Gaston
Hertha von Walther as Margot
Vladimir Sokoloff as Zacharkiewicz
Jack Trevor as Mr. Jack
Mammey Terja-Basa as servant
Josefine Dora
Heinrich Gotho
Margarete Kupfer
Robert Scholz

Production and release
The Love of Jeanne Ney was shot at the UFA film studios in Babelsberg and on location in Paris. For reasons of authenticity, Pabst had the partying White Russians in the opening sequence played by actual White Russian expatriates. Ehrenburg, initially excited about the opportunity to work with Pabst, whose films he held in esteem, was soon disappointed to find that the director was more concerned with set details than the "absurdity" (Ehrenburg) of the script. Protesting in vain against Pabst's changes to his original work (including a happy ending not in the book), he tried to have his name removed from the titles, condemning the resulting film for its philistine morals, such as having communist Andreas kneel in front of the holy virgin. After Alfred Hugenberg had acquired the producing company UFA, more changes were demanded against Pabst's will, including the almost complete deletion of the scene with Jeanne and Andreas spending the night at the hotel.

The Love of Jeanne Ney premiered in Berlin on 6 December 1927. It was released by Parufamet, a joint distribution company by UFA, Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For the American release version, 20 minutes were cut from the film and, in certain scenes, different camera angles used.

Because the film negatives of both the German and US version are lost, HD restorations were made based on negative duplicates and prints. The German version was restored in 2016 from a duplicate made by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s, the US version from a German archive copy. The restored German version was first screened with live music at the UFA Filmnächte in Berlin in August 2017 and premiered on Arte TV the following month. It was released on home media in Germany, the US and the UK between 2018 and 2021.

Reception and legacy
Initial recations to The Love of Jeanne Ney were mixed. Shortly after the film's premiere, Edmund Meisel, composer of the scores of Battleship Potemkin and other films of the era, wrote a letter to Sergei Eisenstein in which he called the film's changes to the novel, apart from moments of unintentional humour, "not funny but profoundly sad". Kenneth MacPherson, co-editor of film magazine Close Up, gave The Love of Jeanne Ney coverage in several issues, rating it superior to Pabst's Joyless Street for being "more complete" and "dynamic" and calling Édith Jéhanne's performance "admirable". MacPherson had been shown Pabst's original cut in Berlin before the film's release and gave the director the opportunity to explain his technique of editing on actors' movements.

Shortly after World War II, film historian Siegfried Kracauer noted in his book From Caligari to Hitler, "The Love of Jeanne Ney exceeds [Pabst's] Joyless Street not only in scope of vision, but in the determination with which it records reality". Kracauer nonetheless commented negatively on the production company's deletion of all provoking political and moral content of the source material.

For James Monaco (writing in 1991), The Love of Jeanne Ney "marked an important advance in Pabst's technique". His rapid cutting on movement "foreshadowed the dialogue cutting of sound film" and adds to the "surprisingly modern" appearance of his silent films. Reflecting on Pabst's filmography in his 2006 essay for the Criterion Collection, J. Hoberman rated The Love of Jeanne Ney as one of "the culminating works of silent cinema", being "an ambitious attempt to synthesize Soviet montage, Hollywood action-melodrama, and German mise-en-scène."

Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Screenplay by 
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ladislaus Vajda
Rudolf Leonhard
Based on Ljubov' Žanny Nej
by Ilya Ehrenburg
Starring 
Édith Jéhanne
Brigitte Helm
Hertha von Walther
Uno Henning
Cinematography 
Fritz Arno Wagner
Walter Robert Lach
Edited by 
Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Mark Sorkin
Music by Hans May (premiere)
Production
company 
UFA
Distributed by Parufamet
Release date 
6 December 1927 (Germany)
Running time 
107 mins. (Germany)
86 mins. (US)
Country Germany
Languages 
Silent film
German intertitles'

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_of_Jeanne_Ney

File Source: https://archive.org/details/die-liebe-der-jeanne-ney-1927