Content area
Full Text
FILMEX hosted an unusual celebration this summer: a daughter presenting her once-famous father to a world that had almost forgotten him. Maud Finder's richly textured The Man in the Silk Hat is a biography of the French silent film comedian Max Linder, told with clips from 42 of his films.
"This is my father, yet I never knew him," Maud Finder's calm voice tells us, as we look at a trim, dapper man lazing on a formal garden lawn. "The first time we met, he was smiling on the screen."
And long beyond her reach. Maud Linder was not yet a year old in 1925 when her father, then 43, and her mother, 20, ended their three-year marriage in a double suicide pact. The dead young woman's prominent family (her father had been the mayor of Paris) took charge of the orphaned infant, raising her under Max's real name, Leuville, and banishing any mention of Linder from her life.
It was not until she was almost 20 that Maud Leuville happened upon a Paris cinema club playing Seven Years' Bad Luck (1921), one of her father's six feature-length films. The young woman who believed she never liked comics sat in the back of the theater, transfixed. What she saw encouraged Maud both to adopt her father's name and to begin searching out his films. (He made a staggering number - at least 500 - compared with Chaplin's 72 shorts and eleven features, and Keaton's 35 shorts and twelve silent features.) Maud compiled an earlier film, called Max, from three of Linder's features, but it is no yardstick by which to judge this extraordinary new work.
What is exceptional about The Man in the Silk Hat is the attitude of the woman who presents the prints - the one person who might have reason not to cherish her father. Maud Linder's joy in Max Linder permeates the film. It is as clear as her own feelings of abandonment are suppressed. "There was never any...