Erotikon

What else did the director Mauritz Stiller do, apart from discover Greta Garbo and take her to America? Erotikon is one answer, a cult silent movie remarkably triumphing in a genre that usually needs dialogue to succeed. It’s a farce and Stiller gets it up and running in two opening scenes sketching his two main characters. In one corner Leo Charpentier, a professor of entomology who can wax lyrical about the sexual proclivities of the male beetle – how it likes to put it about a bit, in short – without ever realising that the same might apply to a) the female beetle, b) a human subject and c) most pertinently, his wife. We … Read more