made a Carmen intensely peculiar to his own subjective art. And the stage-Carmen has always been a stage-Carmen waiting in dusty, draughty wings for her cues. It remained for the cinematograph, which is a true literal mirror of human expression, to make Carmen burst into violent physical life.
But it was less the scopes of the films which made Carmen animate than it was the virile woman who played her. It was acting—but acting in the sense of losing and sinking and saturating and dissolving herself in another woman's temperament: and by it she achieved some strong sword, keen shadings of the Carmen character—to the hair's-breadth.
And she looked like Carmen. It was not important to the vigorous fire of her acting but it made bewitchment in the portrait. No one I have before seen play Carmen fitted the elusive points of her description.
