A Film Canon

An unusually ambitious melodrama, Portrait Of Jennie not only attempts to fuse cinema with literature, classical music and romantic American painting, but with science, employing an idiosyncratic time travel narrative to make the point that "nothing dies, just changes...time doesn't pass, just curves." Although this tends to reduce science to so many cliches, the script to a series of excessive discursions, abstractions and quotations (Euripides, Keats and Browning in the first twenty minutes alone), and the score to a lurid, tortured epitome of Debussy, it does create an extraordinarily painterly aesthetic, largely thanks to Joseph H. August's cinematographic innovations, which include smearing copious amounts of vaseline on the lens, to the extent that certain scenes simply appear to be shot through oil, and literally shooting through thin strips of canvas, to create the cinematic equivalent of a matte print. From this perspective, it seems odd that the narrative, which centres on the sentimental love triangle between a struggling artist (Joseph Cotten), his mysterious, ageless muse (Jennifer Jones), and the old maid who introduces them (Ethel Barrymore), should involve his gradual transition from landscapes to portraiture, since August's innovations are most striking during the various on-location sequences, all of which coalesce around an extended, pastoral vision of Central Park's seasonal fluctuations, as if to construe its topography as one of the few living vestiges of American romanticism.