The Burning Crucible

The Burning Crucible (1923)

Le Brasier ardent

A woman, named simply "Elle" and her husband, a wealthy industrialist, are not on the best of terms. While she enjoys the way he caters to her every whim, she wonders whether he really loves her. He, on the other hand, torments himself by imagining rivals. One morning she awakens from a nightmare in which she has been pursued by a man in various guises, who turns out to be the famous Detective Z, whose memoirs she has been reading. When she and her husband quarrel over leaving Paris permanently for a country estate, he goes to the "Trouve Tout" Agency and hires, of all people, Detective Z, to win back her affection.

Date of release
1923-08-04
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Mystery
Director
Ivan Mosjoukine

Casting

Interesting facts

Le Brasier ardent is a 1923 French film directed by Ivan Mosjoukine. It combines elements of comedy, mystery, romance and psychological drama. The title has been variously translated into English as The Blazing Inferno, The Burning Crucible, The Burning Brazier, The Burning Cauldron, and Burning Embers.

Production

After a group of Russian film technicians and actors left the new Soviet Republic and established themselves at Montreuil in Paris in 1920, Ivan Mosjoukine became not only their leading star but also wrote scenarios and had the opportunity to direct his first film, L'Enfant du carnaval, in 1921.

In his preparatory notes for the production, Mosjoukine wrote that his subject was the love between a man and a woman, and it made no claim to originality or to moral or philosophical significance. It was an old theme which remained eternally fresh: "It is She and He, caught by surprise by the camera lens at the moment of their unexpected meeting.

The mixture of styles made the film difficult to label with any specific genre but it placed it firmly among the avant-garde trends of French cinema, perhaps drawing on developments in current American and German films, as well as imitating French genres of the serial, the melodrama, and fantasy.

The film features two sequences of rapid editing, a practice then in vogue among French avant-garde film-makers (following Abel Gance's notable demonstrations of it in La Roue, released early in 1923). One is used in the first section of the opening nightmare scene, conveying the woman's sense of panic as she is pulled ever closer to the flames of the burning pyre.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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