O Bestiário ou Cortejo de Orfeu (Bestiary, or the Parade of Orpheus). 1995. Portugal. Written and directed by João César Monteiro. With Monteiro, Raquel Ascensão. 35mm. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 7 min.
Foolish Wives. 1922. USA. Written and directed by Erich von Stroheim. With Stroheim, Rudolph Christians, Miss Dupont, Maude George. DCP. Silent; English intertiles. 147 min.
Advertised as “the first million-dollar movie” when it was released in 1922, Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives offered American audiences a sweeping vision of European decadence, unforgettably embodied by the director himself in his starring performance as Count Sergius Karamzin, a phony Russian aristocrat who bilks the naïve tourists of Monte Carlo with the help of his two dubious “cousins” (Mae Busch and Maude George). Stroheim’s performance as the egregiously amoral count has lost none of its wickedness and subversive appeal. In Bestiary, or the Parade of Orpheus, shot as a Cinemascope test for God’s Comedy, João César Monteiro deals with an uninvited guest in an unexpectedly salubrious way.