Whipping up pogroms

Elsker Hverasndre (The stigmatized, or Love one Another), a silent movie about pogroms in Russia, made in Germany in 1922, by Danish director Carl Th Dreyer with a mainly Russian cast, still frighteningly prescient 100 years later. Hanna-Liebe Segal grows up in the ghetto of a Russian town on the Dnieper.  For some reason her mother sends her to a Cristian school, which is odd since her older brother Jakov was cursed by their father for converting after he moved to St Petersburg and got "Russianized". When Hanna grows up she falls for a student revolutionary, Sasha, so she, too, heads off for St Petersburg.  She lives with a Jewish family since her brother is  passing for Russian.   Jakov, a successful lawyer, recognizes secret police infiltrators among Hanna's friends, one of whom is Rylowitsch, who seems to hate everyone, Jewish, radical or Christian. After smashing the progressives, Rylowitsch poses as a mad monk, whipping up fear. "The Tsar is signing your land over to te Jews!"  You'd think that might be a logical reason for dumping the Tsar, but instead, the peasants kiss icons of the Tsar and kill Jews instead.  Then, as now, populist mobs are easily manipulated. Jakov goes back to the village when his mother dies and sees a ghost in a prayer shawl, walking through doors.  Though he's a Christian, sincere enough to wear a cross, the mob kills him, too.  The village goes up in flames, many are killed. Hanna's revolutionary boyfriend returns, and the pair head off for the Polish/German border.......  Everyone's screwed when mobs run loose. Could a film like this have been made in Russia at the time ? And will such things happen again, to different communities, in different times and places ?  Though the pace is slow and stylized, there are many good moments here. The ghetto scenes were filmed in a studio in Berlin, but based on real places in the ghetto in Lublin.  Brother-in-law "Red haired Abraham" operates a machine that rocks the cradle while he works across the room.  Mama Segal lays out her daughter's trousseau though Hanna has no intention of settliung down.  The scenes in St Petersburg are in some ways even more poignant because they aren't artificial sets but real furniture and furnishings, new at the time, antique now. The family Hanna lodges with owns a keyboard iunstrument with no apparent backboard, unless it's built into the wall. Above the keys is a depiction of a lyre which must stand 2 metres tall.  A world that's  gone. Or does history repeat ? Plenty of Rylowitschs around, though they don't pretend to be monks.  Please see my other posts on early film and on Carl Th Dreyer, using the label below, including his Der Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer - the movie

Full download of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) directed by Carl Th. Dreyer. Click here to run. This one is SILENT  and over 70 years old, out of copyright in Europe. It's being shown tonight at the Barbican, while Marin Alsop is conducting the LSO in a performance of Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light written in 1999 to accompany the film. If you buy the DVD release you get the movie plus Einhorn.  Personally, I'm inclined towards the silent version. Firstly, silent makes you concentrate on the intensity of the images, almost a spiritual experience, which is what Jeanne is going through in the movie. Secondly, from other Dreyer films, like Vampyr (full download HERE) and Vredens Dag (description HERE) it would seem that Dreyer conceived his movies with minimal sound. Although the Einhorn soundtrack is interesting, it's an add-on and isn't that overwhelming as music.

Joan is played by Renée Jeanne Falconetti, billed as "Mlle. Falconetti" for reasons unknown. She was a stage artiste, so making this film must have been a kind of ordeal, holding a pose for an eternity for the camera, then slowly changing expression so every muscle twitch is recorded. Look at the intense lighting too. At the end of a day's shoot, her eyes might have stopped working and  her brain given her migraines. So maybe Falconetti was a hero, like St Jeanne. For posterity she'll be remembered without makeup, stressed out and her head shorn.

Look at the rest of the cast list. One of the prosecutors is played by Antonin Artaud, theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty. That doesn't mean S&M but the idea that pushing boundaries makes us challenge assumptions. So the connection between Dreyer's intellectual austerity and Artaud's theories goes pretty deep, All the more reason for a silent Passion of Joan of Arc. Sound distracts. Brian Ferneyhough explains his music in terms of Artaud theories. Now, there's a thought - a Brian Ferneyhough soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc. He's good with complex "medieval" polyphony too. You can bet his version wouldn't be anything like Einhorn. I'll be writing more soon on Ingrid Bergman's Joans of Arc, especially her version of the Arthur Honegger Jeanne d'Arc au bucher (Giovanna d'Arco al rogo) directed by her then husband Roberto Rossellini in 1954. When I wrote about the Barbican Jeanne d'Arc, (see HERE) I hadn't seen this film, which is much overshadowed by the famous Bergman Joan of Arc movie made in 1948 by Victor Fleming. The Fleming movie is staightforward Hollywood. The Rosselini film is art. Read about it HERE and come back for more!

More Carl Th. Dreyer - Vredens Dag - music for film

Two evenings round St Joan of Arc this week at the Barbican. First, Arthur Honneger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher on Thursday and on Saturday, Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc with soundtrack by Einhorn. I was planning to write on Joan of Arc in music (specifically Walter Braunfel's opera ) and will, but got sidetracked by the role of film in music. But it's relevant because Dreyer's films use music in a very different way to the "Hollywood style", although Dreyer uses different composers in each of his movies.

Dreyer revisits the territory of Joan of Arc in Vredens Dag, (Day of Wrath, 1943) but with a very different perspective. Dreyer's Joan is unequivocally a saint, though she isn't the least bit romanticized. Her beauty is in her faith, shining past the suffering she receives on earth.  In Vredens Dag, and old woman known as Heklot's Marthe (Marthe with the owner Heklots) is burnt at the stake for being a witch, though she comes over as a frightened rather simple minded old lady. In Joan of Arc, Dreyer highlights Joan's tormentors as individuals, albeit in a stylized fashion, as in a medieval triptych. The "action" is in Joan's soul.  In Vredens Dag,  the tormenters are the good folk of a clean living, organized, peacable community. This film is a study of relationships on a group of different personalities. Yet again, Dreyer uses black and white for meaning. This community is austere and conformist. Everything is black and white for them, not only their costumes and spartan taste in decor.

Absalom is the elderly local preacher, who is probably a genuinely good man, within the confines of the system.  He has an extremely young wife, Anne, whom his mother hates with such ferocity that she's more likely to end up in hell than heaven. "This is the house of the old", says Absalom, while Anne withers into desiccation.  Then Absalom's son, Martin, returns. Like Anne, he's repelled by Marthe's murder but they can't object. Soon they fall in love. The "rising of the sap" in nature. Anne is reinvigorated and starts to stand up for herself.  One stormy night, Absalom returns from a storm, saying he's felt the chill of death. Since Anne had wished him dead, now she thinks maybe she has occult powers after all. In this communiuty, if you want anything other than the norm, you must therefore be primed by the devil.

Marthe must be a witch because she keeps denying it, so she's tortured until she proves her accusers right. Flawless logic. No evidence needed. "It's those eyes" says the mother-in-law from hell of poor Anne, whom Absalom married when she was barely a child. (who is the real villain here?) Eyes that Absalom sees as innocent, eyes that Martin sees as mysterious. Since Anne has been brought up in this community, she thinks that she too must be a witch. When Absalom drops dead, mother-in-law accuses Anne of witchcraft and murder. Knowing that she can't hold Martin, Anne has nothing to lose and declares, yes, she's at fault.

Vreden's Dag was made in 1943 whike Denmark was neutral, but surrounded by Nazis, so it's easy to read anti-Nazim protest into the film. But I think that's grossly delimiting. This situation can occur anywhere, any time. Indeed, in the age of the internet it's even easier to stir up mobthink and ignorance.  In Vredens Tag, the locals at least know each other and can doubt, though they don't act. The original story this movie is based on was an apparently true story that happened in Norway in 1623. Bigotry knows no borders. The scary thing is that even the victims are conned into losing faith in themselves.

Back to the music. Glorious "medieval" plainchant marks the opening, where Dreyer shoots an ancient manuscript that introduces the story. But then, silence for the most part. Only atmospheric sounds, like the ticking of clocks, or footsteps. You must be watchful, always alert, just as Anne is. Very occasionally, flourishes of music. When she falls in love, she starts to hum, and there's music when she and Martin have trysts. The compser is Puol Schiebeck (1888-1949), old enough to have studied with Carl Nielsen, yet this score is modernist enough to sound avant garde even today. Listen to the music in the sequence where Anne is thinking of Marthe at the stake. Turbulent cross currents, not obviously disssonant, but deeply disturbing.  Listening to Schiebeck's score, and indeed to Wolfgang Zeller's score for Vampyr (described here with download) I'm less convinced by Richard Einhorn's 1994 Voices of Light, used in the DVD rerelease of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. But maybe audiences today need film music with their films.

Vampyr - Carl Th. Dreyer

Carl Th. Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is a masterpiece every serious film buff studies frame by frame. But Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) is equally remarkable. The two films are very different. Joan of Arc is shot with extremely harsh lighting, bleaching out unnecessary detail, so every line and pore in Joan's face is exposed, like she herself is exposed and alone in her torment.  Vampyr, on the other hand, is a study in ambiguities.  What is happening? Who is the vampire, the old man, the old woman or the protagonist himself?

Vampyr is also fascinating because it's a sound movie with a score written by Wolfgang Zeller (1898-1967), one of the most innovative composers of film music when it was still an experimental art. The music for Vampyr ia a lot like the film - tonally ambiguous, mysterious, spare. Single instruments (wonderful brooding cello), merging in and out of a mist (mainly strings). Low rumblings, sudden sharp chords. Listen to the music without watching and it works on you emotionally - very unsettling. Film noir music before film noir existed.

Zeller worked with Walter Ruttmann whose Dadaist abstract films can be seen HERE on this site, and were made to be  shown with live music. (Ruttmann is the creator of Berlin, Symphony of a great City, which you can see in full download with analysis HERE)  Ruttman's credentials as a moderrnist are impeccable, yet he went on to write music fotr the Nazi film The Jew Suss, which I can't bring myself to watch for more than a few moments. After the war, he wasn't blacklisted, so I don't know what his denazification file says. We can't aassume anything. 

In Vampyr, a young man with a butterfly net (important detail) stops at a country inn. Already we know something's not right. A peg legged old soldier sits on a bench, and his own shadow comes down to sit beside him. In the inn, shadows of dancers are seen, and their music can be heard, but they don't exist in the real world, whatever that is. Then there's the star himself played by "Julian West" who looks Indian or something exotically swarthy, quite alien to whatever country the story is set in (anywhere from Northern France to the Baltic). "Julian West" is in fact Nicolas de Günzburg, whose family were Russian Jews, bankers to the Tsar. Günzburg, who financed the film, was supposedly fabulously wealthy but when his father died in 1933, it turned out the family was broke.  So Günzburg goes to New York and ends up editor of fashion glossies.

Watch Vampyr and see how Dreyer uses odd angles, so you're seeing things from odd perspectives. He makes the most of the discipline of black and white, using darkness and light as a palette to paint ideas. Details, like the Grim Reaper on the inn sign, and the peasant with the scythe in the field.  Just as the film seems to develop a narrative, Dreyer throws all into confusion. Julian West sits on a bench in the park, but his shadow gets up. It's so subtle you might not notice until you see his figure is transparent. Then he finds a coffin, and looks in. As the coffin is carried out, you see the treetops, the tower, and hear the tread of dull footseps. Is West now looking out, upwards from within? Watch the final sequence frame by frame. It's the mill, where the doctor, who may or may not be the vampire's helper, gets trapped  Fantastic shots of the machinery, wheels and cogs like infernal mechanisms. The machine grinds flour which suffocates the doctor. Will the bread (the staff of life) be tainted? Meanwhile, West and Léonie, the young girl who is saved from the vampire (whom we never see) are in a boat in a fog. They call out, echoing the doctor's cries. But they cannot hear him, nor he them.
PLEASE see here for Marschner's opera Der Vampyr (nothing like the movie)