Rarely rescreened, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg‘s seven-hour Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) remains one of the great masterpieces of the form. Below, a ten-minute video essay on the film, with text from Susan Sontag’s “Syberberg’s Hitler,” available online here; the film itself is available on DVD from Facets:
The Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
I confess that I find some stagings of Wagner’s operas, often categorized as regietheater, more convincing than others — which is as it should be, I suppose. I was never too offput by Patrice Chereau’s 1976 Bayreuth centennial staging of the Ring, which set the operas in the Victorian, late industrial age; and Heiner Müller’s Tristan und Isolde (at Bayreuth in 1993), from one of Europe’s more notorious enfants terrible, remains a fine production.
And then there are those that never made it to the stage for one reason or another; Lars von Trier’s Ring cycle was one of them. The Danish film director, whose new film Melancholia will be released in the U.S. later this year, was commissioned to stage the four operas at Bayreuth in 2006, and worked on the cycle for two years before giving it up as an impossible task — at least, the way he saw it. “I’ll start with my qualifications for directing an opera: none, apart, perhaps, from an instinctive yearning towards and away from the medium,” he says in introducing “Deed of Conveyance,” an essay that brought together his insights into the work and his working notes on the production. But the essay remains an interesting precis of the challenges that Wagner brought to this director, who shares a certain elective affinity for the sublime. In perhaps the most evocative section of the essay, “Enriched Darkness,” von Trier discusses darkness, mythology and imagination:
Actually, the concept is filmic. In horror films in particular, the technique of hinting without showing has been tried and tested, and adopted to great effect by electronic games. In both media we are familiar with arriving at a darkened house with the frail beam of a torch our only source of lighting. Not to mention in real life: at night, no matter how delightful and safe our neck of the woods may be, it inevitably becomes populated by demons, evil and mythological forces; and as we all know, they are all the more real and terrifying for not being illuminated.
A via B to C: imagine two spots of light on a stage. Top and bottom. We see the top and bottom of an old ladder. The ladder is rotten and the bottom half is split. In a horror film blood would be dripping from the darkness above. As somebody climbs the ladder and disappears into the darkness the ladder begins to shake violently. If the person had been armed his weapon would have tumbled into the patch of light at the bottom. Then for a while neither end of the ladder would move until the top began to shudder more and more and two hairy hands emerged from the darkness above and whipped the ladder away. Perhaps it would prove to be a short length of ladder unattached to the length below … etc. etc. This is just an illustration of the narrative potential of enriched darkness, familiar to us all; how by seeking the great impression amidst the smallest ones we can achieve more than by employing maximum power. Our observation of the person on the ladder in what is surely a perilous, claustrophobic situation somewhere in the midst of the darkness may be compared in a small way to our observations of the tiniest particles in physics, which we cannot observe directly but only on the basis of the effects they must have on things around them big enough to be visible. That we can’t see atoms doesn’t make the atomic any less fascinating! [Emphasis mine -- GH]
The document is available online here at the Mostly Opera blog, as well as at von Trier’s own Zentropa Films Web site here; if you read Danish or German, you can also take a look at von Trier’s more detailed notes for his never-to-be-realized stagings of Die Walküre and Siegfried, the second and third operas of the cycle.
My appreciation, as always, to A.C. Douglas at Sounds & Fury for pointing me in the direction of the essay.
Lars von Trier.
… and sometimes artists should just stay away from the press entirely. By now Lars von Trier’s pungently ill-considered, stupid remarks about being a Nazi, made at a Cannes press conference the other day, have been around the virtual world three or four times, and von Trier has issued an apology. It seems apparent that this was intended to be an act of tasteless, comic provocation; only the tastelessness and provocation came through, however, and threaten to overshadow the reception of his new film Melancholia – which, by the measure of several critics, is a masterpiece. Despite von Trier’s apology, he has been rendered persona non grata because of his remarks and has been expelled from the festival, though apparently his film itself will remain in competition. Von Trier has nobody to blame but himself for this course of events, reminiscent of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s unfortunate 2001 remarks that the World Trade Center disaster was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos,” according to Andrew O’Hehir in this coverage for Salon. Stockhausen apologized too, and his reputation ten years on seems to have survived the public fury; the same will no doubt be true for von Trier, though I do hope that we won’t have to wait for ten years to see Melancholia released in the U.S. as a result; it is now scheduled to open here on 4 November through Magnolia Pictures. (Even Mel Gibson’s latest film made it to theatres in the end, after all.)
Early reviews indicate that the film is a masterwork, despite a reception described by the New York Times as “mixed.” Salon‘s O’Hehir goes on to say that Melancholia is “tender and exquisite and metaphysical and vulnerable,” a film that “can plausibly be defended as [a] cinematic and philosophical masterpiece.” The Telegraph‘s review by Sukhdev Sandhu says that the film is “mesmerizing, visually gorgeous and often moving … a bold and wholly powerful restatement of first principles” (which do not appear to be the same as those of National Socialism). For indieWIRE, Eric Cohn wrote: “Von Trier has constructed a mesmerizing elaboration on his favorite motifs, masterfully elevating them to an epic scale. … The greatest possible expression of von Trier’s recent ‘no more happy endings’ edict, Melancholia is supremely operatic, enlivened by its cosmic sensibility, and yet amazingly rendered on an intimate scale.” Even Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly, not the journal of first choice for art films, remarks that the film is “the work of a man whose slow emergence from personal crisis has resulted in a moving masterpiece, marked by an astonishing profundity of vision.”
I’ll leave the question of von Trier’s bad behavior, and whether it warrants censure and expulsion from Cannes, to the free speech, Holocaust, victimization and behavioral experts of the Internet, of whom there are legion. Meanwhile I myself await 4 November with considerable expectation. I first wrote about Melancholia on 11 April; a trailer for the film is below.
Director Lars von Trier calls his new film Melancholia “a beautiful movie about the end of the world”; judging from the trailer released last week and embedded below, he may be quite right. Opening in Denmark next month (and likely to be screened at Cannes as well), Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling in a story about two sisters who faced with the possible destruction of the planet must come to terms with the end of life as we know it. A recent post at SlashFilm quotes von Trier on the structure of the film: “In Melancholia I start with the end. Because what is interesting is not what happens but how it happens! So we begin by seeing the world being crushed, then we can tell the story afterwards. … In this way you don’t have to sit and form theories about what will happen, but can delve down into some other levels and become interested in the pictures and the universe — that’s what I imagine.”
For me, von Trier’s previous films have run the gamut from the unwatchable (Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves) to the brilliant (Europa, The Idiots and Dogville); the trailer itself, both chilling and beautifully lush, suggests it will likely be the latter. Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film in the U.S.; the official Web page for Melancholia is here. Posted online by von Trier’s Zentropa Films last Friday, the trailer, as I mentioned, is disturbing but sublime:
Three little maids from school are they: Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy
After the darker entries this week, a little piece of candy for Friday. The Criterion Collection has just released Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which has been out of print for years and covers the inspiration, composition, rehearsal and production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic 1885 operetta The Mikado. Leigh’s film is a remarkably detailed, lush and beautifully photographed (by long-time Leigh collaborator Dick Pope) portrait of not only Victorian England and two of England’s most beloved artists, but also the rewarding and often difficult partnership of theatrical collaboration and theatre work itself. Of all the many films about back-stage life, Topsy-Turvy rings most true to me, largely because of scenes like the below — a peek into W.S. Gilbert’s rehearsal room. If it were not for the period costumes, the dynamics of his rehearsal room remain the same as ours: difficult and often tedious work, leavened (in the best of circumstances) by wit and discovery. (There is a parallel scene in the film that depicts Sullivan’s rehearsals with the orchestra; that scene can be found below as well.) Playwright Gilbert is confident as his own director, in the days which immediately preceded the emergence of that particular specialization.
Jim Broadbent is wonderful as Gilbert; indeed, the entire cast (with Allan Corduner as Sullivan, Timothy Spall as Richard Temple and Martin Savage as George Grossmith) throws itself into the film with abandon. When the film was released in 1999, it failed at the box office but won Oscars for costume design and makeup. Though Leigh’s original screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award as well, it lost to Alan Ball’s American Beauty, a film whose adolescent insipidity only becomes more evident with each year. Leigh was robbed. Topsy-Turvy remains on my list of near-perfect films. There is a very good essay about Topsy-Turvy by Amy Taubin at the Criterion site, in which Taubin describes the film’s remarkable conclusion:
The riskiest and most emotionally stunning scenes in Topsy-Turvy come in the last twelve minutes, when what had been a rollicking entertainment metamorphoses into an expression of extreme melancholy and loss. Leigh turns the film over to three women who have seemed, until this point, minor characters: Gilbert’s wife, Kitty, trying one more time to coax her husband to her bed, unravels as she tells him about a dream she had that is transparently about her horror at growing old without having been a mother. Sullivan’s American mistress (Eleanor David) has the opposite problem and tells her lover, in as few words as possible, that once again she’s going to have an abortion. And the D’Oyly Carte company’s alcoholic soubrette, Leonora Braham (Shirley Henderson), playing the role of Yum-Yum (the operetta’s object of desire), is left alone onstage, singing the lovely “The Sun Whose Rays” in a voice that mixes heartbreak and triumph. It’s as if all along there has been an entirely different film taking place beneath the one we’ve been watching.
In the first clip, Gilbert leads his actors through the play:
And in the second, Sullivan leads his orchestra through the music: