Ekstase

Digital restoration: Filmarchiv Austria 2023

‘Every time I see the film, and I have seen it four or five times, the reaction of the audience is the same - cheers, applause, mixed with sighs and boos’, Henry Miller wrote about EKSTASE in Paris in 1938. A short time after the screen learned to speak, EKSTASE with its terse dialogue seems almost anachronistic. The story of a young woman who enters into a marriage with an older man and then meets a pithy nature boy relies on the power of charged and associative images and music - and makes Hedy Lamarr (then Kiesler) world-famous. To mark the 25th anniversary of her death on 19 January, this now undisputed classic can be (re)discovered in its restoration by the Filmarchiv Austria. (Florian Widegger)