Acting
Film actress, screenwriter, and director. She was wounded in an allied bombing of Aachen, Germany in 1940. She died in 1968 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Only a brief fragment survives from the beginning of this film, which seems to be a moving romantic melodrama: Diana Karenne plays the piano surrounded by a group of admirers in evening dress. She is a beautiful and slightly spoiled heiress, the kind of woman for whom Italian silent cinema reserved unfortunate turns of fate in order to elevate her to the status of tragic heroine. Even the few minutes remaining make clear that she proposes her own reinterpretation of the genre’s themes and motifs: from astonished grief over her father’s death to desperate wanderings through dark and impoverished alleyways. It is an expressive palette around which Pasquali weaves his discreet direction, paying particular attention to lighting effects.
Manon escapes with the young nobleman Des Grieux, then becomes a high-class courtesan and finally forced to exile to America.
Republic of Venice, 1760. Pursued by a vengeful husband, the intrepid womanizer Casanova, who symbolizes the decline of the city and its fall into debauchery, manages to escape and, by a circuitous route, arrives in Saint Petersburg, where he will be involved in the many plots that threaten the throne of Czar Peter III…
Two sisters are separated as infants after their father leaves their mother. One grows up with her father in privilege and the other grows up in hardship with her mother.
A classic love triangle set in the modern era (the 1920s), featuring a woman and her daughter who both share an interest in the same man.
A method actress likes living out the roles she is playing in real life. To prepare for her new play, she enters the criminal underworld and ends up being implicated in a burglary of a Duke who is one of her suitors. The film was shot at the Babelsberg Studios in Berlin. The film received a generally positive reception from critics, although some were doubtful about the blending of farce and tragedy.