Films and Feelings (1971)

"Jannings allowed himself to stray as far from “realism” as comedians do — one can speak of “slow” expressionism, like Jannings’, and ‘fast’ expressionism, like Chaplin’s (or Jerry Lewis’). The middle term between them is exemplified by Catherine Hessling in Jean Renoir’s Nana (1926), where she gives what is both the best and worst performance in the history of the French cinema. With her petal-light limbs flung out into Napoleonic postures, her bee-sting mouth pouting in her heart-shaped face, her eyes narrowed till the pupils disappear under a palisade of lashes, her fluttering precocity and jagged stances, this awkward blend of Chaplinesque, quicksilver and marionette fixity comes, if only the spectator will adapt his response, to make at least as much sense as modern “Method”-ism."