Rapt (The Kidnapping). 1934. Switzerland. Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. Screenplay by Benjamin Fondane, based on the novel The Separation of the Races by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. With Dita Parlo, Geymond Vital, Jeanne Marie-Laurent, Auguste Bovério, Dyk Rudens. US restoration premiere. DCP. 83 min.
We open the 22nd edition of To Save and Project with the spellbinding Rapt, in its long-unseen French-language version. A dark melodrama of violent eroticism, fear, and revenge in the Swiss Alps, the film stars Dita Parlo, who was so unforgettable in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante that same year, and weds Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoérée’s contrapuntal sound experiments to the poetic images of Dmitri Kirsanoff, an Estonian Jew who fled the Bolshevik Revolution to become a pioneer of French avant-garde cinema. (Kirsanoff’s Menilmontant, from 1926, remained one of Pauline Kael’s favorite films until her dying day.) The story of rival French-Catholic and German-Protestant villages on either side of the mountain, Rapt was adapted from Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz’s presciently titled 1922 novel The Separation of the Races; it would be one of Kirsanoff’s last truly independent films before he was forced into hiding in the French countryside during World War II.
Restored in 2025 by Cinémathèque suisse at its inhouse laboratory, sound restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata and photochemical preservation by Haghefilm, from the original image and sound negatives, a dupe negative, and a 35mm original print.