Review of Vingarne (1916)

Moving picture, 69 minutes

Seen in 2022.

Seen in the version restored from a nitrate print, where the entire framing device is preserved only in stills.

Supposedly the Icarus myth, but strongly influenced by the Pygmalion myth and gay porn.

A metafictional melodrama now remembered for its homoeroticism, unusual at the time. The film has little of Stiller’s smoothness, but the closing show of Lili Beck, as herself, pronouncing in an intertitle that the movie is finally over seems ahead of its time.

moving picture fiction