What Was So Special About Greta Garbo?

 

 

"A face as beautiful as Garbo’s—the

enormous eyes and deep­set lids,theway

love or tenderness or some private, un-

spoken amusement unknit her brows in

an instant, melting her austerity—was

almost overwhelming when it filled the

screen.She belonged, as Roland Barthes

wrote,“to that moment in cinema when

the apprehension of the human counte-

nance plunged crowds into the greatest

perturbation, where people literally lost

themselves in the human image.” This

is not to diminish her craft as an ac-

tress. But her acting was perhaps most

effective in her silent films or in non-

verbalscenesin talking picturesinwhich

her face is the canvas for emotion. In

the famous last shots of “Queen Chris-

tina”(1933),Garbo’s androgynous Swed-

ish ruler stands at the prow of a ship

bearing her away from her country; the

body of her lover, killed in a duel over

her,is laid out on the deck.Garbo stares

into the distance, her face a

kind of mask but no less el-

oquent for it.The film’s di-

rector,Rouben Mamoulian,

had told her that she must

“make her mind and heart

a complete blank,” empty

her face of expression, so

that the audience could im-

posewhatever emotionsthey

wanted on it. The scene

would then be one of those

“marvelous spots,”he said,where “a film

could turn every spectatorinto a creator.”

 

She was skilled at inciting such pro-

jection.More than one contemporary in

Hollywood noted that her magic truly

showed up only on celluloid,like a ghostly

luminescence undetectable until the film

was developed.ClarenceBrown,who di-

rected Garbo in seven films, recalled

shooting a scene with her, thinking it

was fine,nothing special,then playing it

back and seeing “something that it just

didn’t have on the set.” On her face, he

said,“You could see thought.If she had

to look at one person with jealousy, and

another with love, she didn’t have to

change her expression. You could see it

in her eyes asshe looked from one to the

other.”Garbo herself,with a kind of arch,

adolescent indifference,never wanted to

look at the rushes.According to Brown,

she’d watch only when sound pictures

were played in reverse: “That’s what

Garbo enjoyed.She would sitt here shak-

ing with laughter,watching the film run-

ning backward and the sound going ya-

kablom­yakablom.But as soon as we ran

it forward, she wouldn’t watch it.”"

READ THE PIECE BY MARGARET TALBOT