Oxford Lieder Festival - a Different Rosenkavalier

As part of the Oxford Lieder Festival's 2017 season, focusing on Mahler and his contemporaries, a very different Der Rosenkavalier, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenmnt, conducted by Thomas Kemp. Not Der Rosenkavalier the opera, as we know it, but a screening of the 1926 film by Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1921) and Genuine the Vampire (1920)  Tickets still, available, book here.

The film was made with the enthusiastic support of Richard Strauss himself, who appreciated the power of the new medium of cinema. The film was  first screened at the Dresden Opera House, where the opera itself had premiered fifteen years previously.  It wasn't an "opera movie" in any modern sense of the word, because it was made when movies were silent. In those days, films were accompanied by live performance, with music adapted to the action on screen. Obviously, the music for the opera would not fit. In any case, what would be the point in a silent movie?  Instead Strauss wrote a new soundtrack, based on an orchestra of 17 parts, which mixed extracts from the opera with snippets from other works  including Arabella, Burleske, Till Eulenspeigel and  Also sprach Zarathustra. He  threw in bits of Wagner and Johann Strauss for further effect. Strauss himself conducted the blend live while the movie screened.

The plot follows the novel from which Hugo von Hofmannsthal  derived the libretto, with extra scenes like the battlefield on which the Feldmarschall rides to victory and an opera bouffe in a small theatre, where the principals watch their dilemma being acted out.live while the movie is screened. How will today's opera snobs react?  Methinks they take themselves too seriously, because the "silent" Rosenkavalier is a heady cocktail of good film and fun. It captures the savage satire while dressing it up with visuals so frothy they border on excess. This in itself is a dig at the materialistic culture that values frills, yet turns fresh young women into commodities in a cynical marriage marketplace. Swoon at the wigs and acres of lace, but this is no costume drama.

The technical film values are very high, as one would expect from the director of Dr Caligari (full download here) and Genuine the Vampire (more here). Scenes are carefully planned so they seem like tableaux in some elegant object of art, designed to distract from the grubbiness around it.  The Marschallin's boudoir suffocates in luxury: one imagines that any man kept like this would lose his masculinity. For all her wealth, the lady isn't happy. She sighs and uses exaggerated gestures and poses: Wiene is satirizing popular theatrical excess. Baron Ochs wears embroidered silks but is a boor. He somersaults, arms and legs akimbo like a broken puppet. Later, when Octavian challenges him to a duel, he collapses  though he's barely been scratched. The camera pans closeup on his face and then his mouth, wide as a grotesque sculpture. We can almost hear the screaming.  

Lots more about this Rosenkavalier some years ago, and also, about Robert Wiene, other Weimar films and music, and of course Mahler and his contemporaries, who are my main thing. This is one of the most comprehensive sites on the internet -I am frequently borrowed from, to put it delicately. So check here first for many things.

Brudeferden i Hardanger Fiddles and film

Tomorrow at the Aldeburgh Music Festival is Hardanger Fiddle Day. Julian Anderson's Ring Dance for two violins (1987) will be heard at the Jubilee Hall, together with pieces played by Hardanger fiddle master Sivert Holmen.  The Hardanger tradition comes from the mountains of western Norway.  In rural areas, social occasions like weddings  brought isolated communities together,  thus helped shape regional culture. Hardanger fiddlers played for dances: thus the strong rhythmic beat and repeated patterns.  Hardanger music is joyful, even athletic - some forms of Norwegian dance resemble acrobatics. Yet Hardanger music is also plaintive, with an overlay of keening melancholy. 

That curious blend of youthful vigour and sorrow pervades Brudeferden  i Hardanger, a film from 1926, directed by Rasmus Breistein, who was himself a country fiddler and later learned the Hardanger style. The film is based on at least one novel, but also explicitly connects to one of the most famous paintings in Norwegian art, Brudeferd i Hardanger, (1848) by Tidemand and Gude. The painting shows a boat sailing down a fjord, surrounded by mountains. On the boat is a bride leaving home for a supposedly happy future.  In the film, there's a shot in the film which almost exactly replicates the painting.  Presumably those who watched the movie made the connection.

Breistein's film, though, starts out first with another scene in which a boat carries a family, forced by poverty to emigrate. Marit refuses to go with her parents, but runs up the mountainside, watching the ship head out to sea. The family look back, grimly, at the mountains, not knowing what will lie ahead. Marit stays because she's secretly in love with Anders. Anders is leaving, too, but gives Marit his mother's Sølje, a traditional wedding brooch.  She assumes he'll marry her but four years pass without a word.

Next we see a bridal procession, the Brudeferd. The soundtrack, added when the film was restored, features Hardanger fiddle played by a named master, though otherwise the music is mostly Grieg.  It's a big wedding, with at least a dozen boats, being rowed down the fjord, fancier than in the painting. The bride is rich, wearing a jewelled crown, and elaborate traditional dress. Wonderful shots of the wedding party, with  the women in starched aprons and headresses.  Hardanger embroidery ? Hardanger fiddlers, of course. But who is the bridegroom ? Marit gets Anders alone and scolds him for marrying money.  Marit quits her job in the house of the judge and goes to work with a crofter in the mountains.  Loyal Tore, who has loved her all along, finds her and takes her back to Skjralte, his big farm in the valley.

Many years pass, and Marit is now a rich old widow. Look at her embroidered finery now !  She's still wearing Anders's mother's Sølje. But she's bitter, her mouth hard, like a scar.  Anders has fallen on hard times. His wife's money is gone, and the once rich bride is forced to peddle small goods to scrape a living.  Cruel Marit humiliates the woman, who eventually dies.  Fate, though, intervenes. Marit's daughter Eli falls in love with Anders's son Bérd. When her mother throws her out, she goes to live with him and old Anders in a humble hut. Another country dance, another Hardanger fiddler. Marit's son Vigleik gets drunk, goes to Anders's hovel and beats the old man up. Eli takes Anders back to Skjralte to recover, Vigliek flees to America, and Marit nurses Anders back to health.

The film is beautifully shot, lingering lovingly on things like spinning wheels, bucket making, rustic houses furnished sparsely, some with simple painting on on the walls. and the laying of hay to dry on branches set in the ground.  The acting is good, too, much better than in most silent film.  The restoration is so good that  details are given in full at the end, deservedly so.  Brudeferden i Hardanger is an even more beautifully made film than Troll-Elgen  (which I wrote about here) though Marit is an unsympathetic piece of work.  In the photo below, we can see the simple, portable cameras Breistein's crew used, shooting on location in the open countryside.

The Gay Shoe Clerk

Pretty racy for 1903 !

Silent Rosenkavalier bei Dr Caligari

A silent version of Der Roskenkavalier by the director of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. In 1926, Robert Wiene made a version of Der Rosenkavalier with the enthusiastic support of Richard Strauss himself. The film was screened at the Dresden Opera House, where the opera itself had premiered fifteen years before. It wasn't an "opera movie" in any modern sense of the word. 

The plot follows the novel from which Hugo von Hofmannsthal  derived the libretto, with extra scenes like the battlefield on which the Feldmarschall rides to victory and an opera bouffe in a small theatre, where the principals watch their dilemma being acted out. Obviously, the music for the opera would not fit. In any case, what would be the point in a silent movie? Instead Strauss wrote a new soundtrack, based on an orchestra of 17 parts, which mixed extracts from the opera with snippets from other works  including Arabella, Burleske, Till Eulenspeigel and  Also sprach Zarathustra. He  threw in bits of Wagner and Johann Strauss for further effect. Strauss himself conducted the blend live while the movie screened. How would today's opera snobs react?  They take themselves too seriously, methinks, because the Silent Rosenkavalier is a heady cocktail of good film and fun. It captures the savage satire while dressing it up with visuals so frothy they border on excess. This in itself is a dig at the materialistic culture that values frills, yet turns fresh young women into commodities in a cynical marriage marketplace. Swoon at the wigs and acres of lace, but this is no costume drama.

The technical film values are very high, as one would expect from the director of Dr Caligari (full download here) and Genuine the Vampire (more here). Scenes are carefully planned so they seem like tableaux in some elegant object of art, designed to distract from the grubbiness around it.  The Marschallin's boudoir suffocates in luxury: one imagines that any man kept like this would lose his masculinity. For all her wealth, the lady isn't happy. She sighs and uses exaggerated gestures and poses: Wiene is satirizing popular theatrical excess. Baron Ochs wears embroidered silks but is a boor. He somersaults, arms and legs akimbo like a broken puppet. Later, when Octavian challenges him to a duel, he collapses  though he's barely been scratched. The camera pans closeup on his face and then his mouth, wide as a grotesque sculpture. We can almost hear the screaming.

The scenes where the Men of Property and their lawyers work out the marriage contract are brilliantly done. Backgrounds dissolve into darkness, so the rococco filigree of the costumes and wigs frame faces whose features twist in angular contortion. Outside, in the garden, gigantic gryphons five metres high tower over the party goers. In contrast, the actress who plays Sophie expresses her personality with great sensitivity. Sometimes she looks like a nine year old, too naive to take in what's happening. Her jutting chin and turned up nose indicate her petulance.The rich folk cram into a tiny theatre in the Mehlmarkt to watch a play about "the Proud Father and his humiliation", narrated in rhyming folk poetry. The Marschallin plans a masked ball. Great crowd scenes. Mystery letters direct Octavian and the Field Marshal (straight from the battle) to meet a woman in the grotto of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. The last reel of the film is missing but the inconclusive ending isn't a problem. We know what's going to happen. the last frame shows the little black boy, with his plumed turban, drawing a curtain and gesturing silence.

Weimar animation - The Star of Bethlehem

Strikingly modern image - but it's from 1921  It comes from Lotte Reiniger's film The Star of Bethlehem originally made in Germany but best known in the version below, produced in 1953, using the Glyndebourne chorus,  though they aren't listed in the credits. In the early days of film, artists were experimenting with many new techniques, from short stop animations (Meliés, Segundo do Chomo ) to posed shots of insects (Wladyslaw Starewicz), light shows (Walther Ruttmann) and sophisticated fantasy (René Clair) so it was perhaps natural that Reiniger, who worked in avant garde film circles, should turn to the German art of Scherenschnitte which had thrived in the 18th and 19th century, before photography took hold.

Silhouettes and puppets bridge folk art and sophisticated commercial performance. As a child, Goethe had an elaborate toy theatre where he acted out dramas of his own creation.  Silhouettes, puppets and street theatre have roots not only in German culture but also in Turkish, Chinese and Indonesian Wayang. Thus Reiniger's use of Scherenschnitte fuses tradition and modernity, folk tradition and high tech art. .

Lotte Reiniger's Scherenschitte are beautifully executed - look at the lace tracery on the angel's wings - but she adapts the form so the figures move, and can be posed like puppets, and animated for film.  The figures are black, so you see only the outlines: you fill in the magic with your imagination. Early 20th century audiences would have connected the images in this film with silhouettes they'd known from their own childhoods and responded to the magic of memory. Twenty-first century audiences, bombarded with a multiplicity of styles, would do well to ponder the simplicity of Reiniger's art, which uses naive form in a highly sophisticated, non-naive way to recreate a sense of mystery and wonder.

Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch, were both closely involved with Weimar left wing circles. In 1933, they left Grermany, settling first in France, reaching England in 1949. Reiniger left her archive to the British Film Institute which has released a 2 DVD set of her fairy films. Read more here about how they've been restoring the original The Star of Bethlehem, painstakingly removing the desiccated cellotape that held the cardboard joints in place while filming took place. They are also replacing the long sequence of flying devils which were "considered so scary that they were cut from the American release". Some things, alas, don't change. From the stills in the article quoted above, those demons seem a crucial part of the whole. So perhaps the version below will be replaced by something less sanitized. Also recommended, a documentary made about Reiniger in1970, which is well worth the rental price of £1.

Abel Gance Napoléon RFH Saturday

Almost unique event this Saturday, 30th November - a screening of Abel Gance's epic Napoléon at the Royal Festival Hall, London.  This version, curated by Kevin Brownlow,  runs from 1330 to 2130 with two intervals and a 100 minute dinner break. A marathon! This screening will be accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing Carl Davis's score for the film.

Gance's Napoléon is legendary because it's a masterpiece of cinematic art, with sequences and shots way ahead of its time, and a dramatic intensity that makes spoken dialogue superfluous. This was film as the highest form of art. Albert Dieudonné played Napléon, Antonin Artaud played Marat and Gance and his wife played subsidiary parts. The original music was composed specially by Arhur Honneger and can still be heard - separately from the film - as his Napoléon Suite.

So why is a milestone in film and music history,  made nearly 90 years ago, still excluded from public life? I won't go into the legal ramifications here, but read the article in the NYTimes for background.  But what artistic integrity lies behind some things. How much of the profits actually accrue to those who made the film in the first place? It also raises questions about the stranglehold of the English language media,. The NYT article quotes a US review of an early version released in the US. "The film “doesn’t mean anything to the great horde of picture house goers over here......“Nap wasn’t good looking enough and they didn’t put in the right scenes for the flaps here.” Oh well. Maybe we're wiser and more mature nowadays.  Or not, as the case may be.

Romance of the Fruit Pedlar

The Romance of the Fruit Pedlar (掷果缘) (1922) is the oldest complete Chinese movie we can still watch today. Earlier films, dating from 1909, have been lost, It's a treasure

The fruit pedlar's stall is decoratively arranged. Bunches of bananas hang on hooks, rows of lotus root line the table. The pedlar tries to cut open a watermelon. Then you realize he's new to the job. Real fruit pedlars can wield machetes like surgeons wield scalpels. This pedlar, however, used to be a carpenter, so he measures the melon and tries to cut it with a carpenters saw. Later, he cuts sugar cane with an axe and planes off the outer husk. he's applying the wrong tools for the task.

This is an open air market where the stall holders live in close proximity. Next to the fruit stall is  the "Hall of the Ne'er-do-wells" as the vintage intertitles tell us. It's a tea shop (people who sit about and talk, without doing anything useful). Next to that is a quack doctor with a sideline in fortune telling. A passerby has a swelling. "You need an operation!" says the doctor hoping to make enough money to pay his rent.  The would be patient offers a vase in payment.  "It's a Chien Lung" he says.  But no-one would carry a precious vase in this way, it could be broken.  In other words,  it's not what it seems to be. The image is a huge hint as to what's behind this ostensibly gentle whimsy. What is the "swelling"? What is the illness that needs a cure?

The Pedlar flirts with the doctor's daughter who is as down to earth as her dad is feckless. The girl throws the pedlar the old man's spectacles. While the old man wobbles about blind, the young man has a laugh pretending to be the old guy. He can't see either, the glasses are too thick. The pedlar returns the spectacles and the two men become pals.  The ne'er-do-ells have stolen the girls things.  "Why don't you look after it properly?" they shout.  Anotrher clear (to those who know history) what the movie is really about.

Because the fruit stall is untended, small kids take all the fruit. But the pedlar's good natured and plays with the kids.When the ne'er do wells tease the daughter, the pedlar comes to the rescue and pushes the tea shop owner into his vat of herbal tea. The pedlar and the daughter are in love, but the doctor says he'll marry her off to whoever makes him rich.

Upstairs, above the street in every sense, there's a prosperous gambling house, where men come and go with loose women. Or rather, women who are forced into the profession because they're poor. One cries as she takes a last look out at the "free" world. In the gambling house, men fight and make a ruckus. Perhaps it's significant that one of the gamblers is a gigantic foreign-looking man with a beard. He's at least 6 foot 6. The tea shop owner pretends not to notice the mayhem above, but falls off the table he sleeps on. Our hero, the fruit pedlar, has a better idea.

Because he's a carpenter by trade, he knows how to fix wooden staircases. So he builds a mechanism that will make the steps slide backwards when he wants them to, so anyone on the steps will slide down.  Like the sudden reversals of fortune on the mah jong table, there will be sudden reversals on the staircase. When the big man with the beard stands on the step, down he slides!  Meanwhile the crafty pedlar hides behind the steps and readjusts them, ready for the next crowd of revellers.  .

The bruised and battered gamblers troop off to the doctor for  help. Notice, however, that none of these men will admit they got hurt falling down stairs at a gambling den. "It's these confounded foreign shoes that caused the mishap", says one. The doctor has so much business that the pedlar has to help out setting bones in order (Chinese type of chiropractice). Now the doctor welcomes the pedlar as his son-in-law because he brought in so much business. But don't be lulled by the charm and delicacy of this story. It's a whole lot more pointed than we might expect.

Because Chinese film makers were progressives and modernizers, there's almost always a moral and social message. In this film, it's pretty clear that the marketplace is a metaphor for China, where poor folk struggle, while dissolute gamblers carouse and exploit. Hence the giant and the foreign shoes, and the tea shop owner who puts up with the chaos around him. The pedlar represents positive action and change. Those who go up the stairs will fall down. Avarice and discord weaken the body politic.  Ordinary men like the pedlar/carpenter can fix things if they use their wits, which are the right tools.  What could be more explicit? Behind the delicate charm of this film lies subversion.

Bats! Die Fledermaus ENO Johann Strauss

 I love Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus because it's utterly, barmily bats. The plot's mad. Jolly tunes distract lest you get too sober. Christopher Alden's production at the Coliseum for the ENO captures the operetta's crazy spirit well. It reflects the music's polyglot diversity: Csárdás, waltzes, Hussar marches, Italian opera, can-can and Tyrolean Ländler.  Die Fledermaus really shouldn't be played "straight" or literally, because that's not how the music works.

Shadows of bats fly across luxurious satin drapes, and a huge timepiece hangs from the ceiling. Nothing seems to be happening on stage. This is a great opportunity to listen to the music without distraction: Later, we'll hear ticking sounds in the orchestration - watches, clocks or time bombs? But for now, we can indulge in the escapist frou-frou of the Overture. Perhaps we're in an eternal New Year's Eve Gala where time - and reality - stand still? Eun Sun Kim conducts with more energy than effervesence, but that's perfectly valid. There's so much dance in this music that it should feel physical and exuberant.

Gabriel von Eisenstein (Tom Randle) is supposed to be going to jail but goes to a party instead. As if life were so easy! Rodelinda, his wife, (Julia Sporsén) makes much of marital fidelity but keeps her options open. Adele, her maid (Rhian Lois) has ideas above her station.  Prince Orlofsky (Jennifer Holloway) provides them with the means to act out their fantasies, He/she is  a woman acting as a man. The "Bat" is Dr Falke (Richard Burkhard)  luring Eisenstein into a devious trap.  Bats are associated with darkness and with the unconscious. Die Fledermaus, for all its airhead frivolity, has dangerous undercurrents,

At Prince Orlofsky's Ball, everyone turns up in disguise. Prison Governor (Andrew Shore) and Prisoner-to-be pretend to be French aristocrats. Behind a mask, Rodelinda von Eisenstein can manipulate the men around her.  Excellent costumes (Constance Hoffman) for the ENO chorus, too, suggesting images of decadence  and delusion. Set Designs (Allen Moyer) hint obliquely to silent film. This is an erudite touch, since many early movies dealt with dreams and psychological issues. Indeed, Die Fledermaus was filmed as a silent in 1917, directed by Ernst Lubitsch who made several"opera movies" without sound, such as Gypsy Blood (Carmen) (more here).

Good operetta, good conducting and excellent staging. So why did I, to quote Prince Orlofsky, weep at the "chatter and weariness" of these "scenarios of ennui"?

This is a "numbers" operetta, with long sequences of dialogue between the show tunes. Unless the lines are delivered with quickfire wit, they fall flat like stale champagne. The characters became hammy caricatures. Corny accents aren't funny when everyone is doing them. Here, lively farce descended into hammy end-of-pier pantomime. Some singers can sing with magnificent panache. This cast was good by ENO standards, which are not very high, but not good enough to truly animate their roles. It didn't help that  Strauss wrote many opportunities for applause, so the audience dutifully clapped on autopilot,  further killing dramatic pace.  Mindless clapping makes shows drag. Might it be possible to pare the dialogue down to the minimum, even if it meant losing some of the jokes ? But the real problem is that most singers can't do razor-sharp repartee the way good actors can.

Siegfried not Wagner but Lang

To get us in the mood for Wagner Siegfried with Barenboim, Prom 18 tonight, Fritz Lang's Siegfried from 1924, four years before he made Metropolis.(read more about that HERE). "Farewell, Siegfried, son of King Siegmund, you will never get to Worms!" 

This Siegfried is a golden prince who for some reason lives under a World Ash tree on good terms with a community of trolls. They're quite endearing. When they walk they stomp. legs wide apart.  One guts fish while three childlike trolls (ugly Rhinemaidens?) scamper about.  Siegfried forges a powerful sword. "Siegfried, son of King Siegmund", says Mime,"ride home to Xanten. Even I cannot teach you any more!"  In the woods, Siegfried meets an amazingly realistic reptile, constructed in an era when special effects weren't done by computer, but made by hand, and moved by machines. Fantastic scene! A less convincing mechanical bird tells Siegfried to bathe in the dragon's blood to become invincible..He gets the "Wonder Cap"  from Alberich and steals the Nibelungen Treasures.

Siegfried, now with 12 Knights of his own, arrives in Worms, where King Gunther of Burgundy and his sister Kriemhilde reside in stylized art deco medievalism.Study the sequences, they're a visual delight. Hagen, who wears a magnificent winged cap, tells Gunther to fetch Brunhild, Queen of The Northlands. She lives in a castle surrounded by flames with a regiment of amazons. Defeated in a tournament she is taken back to Worms. More spectacular art deco designs!  "Traditional" costumes were never as audacious as these. The set is immense, allowing dramatic panorama shots, not easy to achieve with early camera technology. This is medievalism as modernity, done with great style. Please read what I wrote about Fritz Lang's four hour Die Nibelungen saga HERE .

The Cheat 1915 - hypocrisy and dishonesty

Oriental Villain burns brand onto White Woman! Even today the subject would be sensitive. Racial prejudice, violence. Exotic, erotic aliens. The Cheat (1915) is shockingly prescient even now, a hundred years after the film was made. Modern audiences can't hide behind the illusion that things have really changed.

"Haka Arakau, a Burmese Ivory King to whom the Long Island smart-set is paying social tribute" is played by Sessue Hayakawa, (1889-1973) the first non-white to have a major film career. That in itself is telling. Not until Bruce Lee did Asians get to play important dramatic leads that didn't pander to stereotype. Arakau is seen using a Chinese incense burner to heat a branding tool to burn his seal onto ivory idols: the alien making his mark, in every sense. Because he's immensely wealthy, he doesn't get sidelined like nearly every other non-white in a era where race laws nullified reinforced prejudice. Arakau can switch from "oriental" to sophisticated western gentleman in elegant dinner jacket. He's threatening because he doesn't conform to stereotype.

Edith, a socialite, flirts with Arakau, even though inter-racial relations were illegal, and she's married as well. Not a nice lady. Her husband Richard teeters on the edge of bankruptcy but she can't stop spending wildly and showing off. She steals money from a Red Cross fund raiser to help her husband on a money making venture. Edith borrows from Arakau to cover the misappropriation, with the implication that she'll sleep with him in return.  She slips into the inner rooms of Arakau's home. There's a struggle. He coat slips off, revealing her naked shoulders. It's not very clear what's happening until Arakau grabs his branding iron and pushes it into her flesh. She falls to the ground: even then it's not completely clear how she feels. She doesn't scream, but gasps ambiguously. Then she picks up a gun and shoots him, also in his shoulder. Branding iron and gun: both symbols of sexual penetration.

Richard tells the police that he shot Arakau. The truth is too dangerous. The grid of the shoji screen is now reflected in the shadow of the bars in a prison cell. Edith, hardly in fear of being raped or attacked, goes to Arakau. He's reclining in bed, and she leans close to him. Note the hands that don't quite touch. She wants to bribe him to drop the case. "You can't cheat me twice", he says. "It's in the hands of the law". But he concurs with Richard's story. At last Edith is spurred to tell the truth. She rips her clothes off in front of the courtroom and displays her scar. This scene alone is quite shocking, given the proprieties of the time. Mayhem. The crowd attacks Arakau and Richard is freed. It's not very clear but Arakau seems to be arrested by the police. Better than than get lynched by the mob, I guess. Despite her duplicity, Edith is a "heroine". Who are the "cheats" here?

Apart from Hayakawa's dignified performance, the acting in this film is exaggerated, even by the standards of the time. Perhaps the direction is a further clue to meaning. Edith is the fake, Arakau has integrity even though he assumed she would sleep with him if she couldn't repay the loan. The director was Cecil B De Mille. Four years later, D W Griffiths made Broken Blossoms, on a similar theme of dishonesty, sexuality and racism, (read more here). Significantly, Griffiths used a white actor in yellowface for his later movie, defusing some of the impact.  De Mille couldn't confront racism head-on, but disguised it under a story audiences then - and now - take at face value. How modern audiences read The Cheat tells us a loit about racism today. Some will assume that Arakau gets what he deserves, since he's a foreigner and doesn't "know his place". Others will read the film as something much more disturbing and brutally honest.

Silent Wagner 1913 wryly intuitive biopic

Is that Richard Wagner conducting? "Silent Wagner" is a remastering of a 1913 film made to celebrate Wagner's centenary.

A hundred years on, it's even more fascinating because the actor, Guiseppe Becce, is a dead ringer for Wagner himself. He's short and scrawny but moves with nervous energy. Perhaps Wagner, who had massive chips on his shoulders, moved with that punchy combativeness. In the scenes where Becce's Wagner squares up to the enormously tall Ludwig II (Ernst Reicher) we can sense something of the unspoken personal dynamic between them. Wagner's a chancer, getting his own at the aristocratic Big Guy. No historian can ever quite suggest this, but Becce has the intuition of a true method actor.

Becce (1877-1973) was also a musician and composer, who worked with  Arthur Nikisch and Ferruccio Busoni. He was a big name in German cinema. Before sound, he conducted live orchestras  who played during screenings. He was involved with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). For the Wagner biopic, he wrote an original score. When sound movies came in, Becce did very well. He wrote and conducted the music for Pabst's Geheimnisse der Seele, Reifenstahl Das blaue Licht, Ekstase, numerous classic Bergfilme. Becce was extremely important in the evolution of German cinema. It's unfair that the remastering calls the film "Silent Wagner" because it obliterates Becce's contribution. He must have written the music with wry humour: scenes from the operas pop up throughout the film with hilarious effect.

The script's a bit dodgy, lingering too long on Wagner's youth, leaving the Cosima years to the last 20 minutes. Cosima was alive and still truculent when the film was made, so perhaps the director, Carl Froelich (a huge presence in later in German cinema), was diplomatic to shy away from detail. "Cosima" appears in  brief shot, holding a suitcase, gesturing that she's come to serve her Master. Minna is excoriated. "Wagner" throws her out, suggesting that he was single before he met Cosima. All we see of their relationship is a flashback to a shot of Siegfried awakening Brünnhilde on her rock. Somehow I don't think Wagner would have exclaimed "Das ist keine Mnn !" This film is more tongue in cheek than meets the untutored eye. Ooops, wrong choice of metaphors.

But the period detail is breath-taking. Elaboate sets, suggesting how over-stuffed and claustrophobic period interiors might have been.  There are scenes with tiny, cramped theatres. The actors move stiffly in "actorly" poses. Yet even this tells us something. Was Wagner moving away from the stylized kitsch of the past? Cosima would not have liked that. Nor would she have liked seeing Meyerbeer who appears, tall and confident. Cosima would, however, have liked the scene where she's presented to Ludwig II surrounded by children who have mysteriously appeared. The boy who plays Siegfried Wagner sports a blond bouffant - must be a wig!
 
The composer sits at his desk, or plays a lumpy antique piano. "Ghosts" appear : Beckmesser, Eva and then Hans Sachs. Presto! Opera complete! Ludwig II visits Wagner in Switzerland, arriving in a boat, preceded by a swan. Wagner reads his Nibelung poems to polite Swiss burghers. Mathilde Wesendonck falls decorously for the artist, with a chaste kiss. Getting a shot of Bayreuth must have been easy enough, but the film uses state of the art technology (for 1913) to show Wagner on his deathbed in Venice. He's visited by apparaitions : Parsifal, Brünnhilde, Sachs, Walter with his harp. If this film is approached in modern cinematic terms, it's hard  to take. But appreciate it for its wry insights and provocative humour, and delight in the way it revises the Wagner story. There';s a scene where Becce plays Wagner in a bathtub, which is fair enough. But the film lingers lovingly on his naked body, discreetly lit from behind a screen.  When he emerges the towel he's wearing keeps threatening to slip off. That's a clue that this isn't reverent hommage, but "Wagner revealed".

 It's also important as a record of the evolution of German film, given that those who made it were to become leading figures in the business. And it also suggests the links between opera and film. Cinema was another form of "high art", treated with respect.

Weimar Psychosis Nerven 1919

Nerven (Nerves) was made in 1919, a year before The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Nerven is even weirder than Caligari but isn't nearly as well known. It wasn't a box office success, and the director, Robert Reinert, died poor in 1925. The film still hasn't been restored in its entirety but what remains is enough to suggest that Nerven is an amazing example of Weimar Expressionism.

"Glückliche Kinder, die Ihr noch nichts von Nerven wißt!" "Nerves" meaning panic attacks, intense emotions and delusions. The Prologue, like an Overture, shows a madman murdering a woman, then stopping to give water to a bird in a cage "Poor creature, without water it will die". Images of chaos and nudity give way to the formal opening of Act One. Business magnate Roloff announces to his shareholders that he's invented a machine that will make them masters of the world. He stands alone, framed against rows of men in business suits, but cries "Die Fahne hoch!" the rallying cry of Socialism. Suddenly  the factory is destroyed. There's rioting in the streets. Johannes the Teacher addresses the crowd, He connects social unrest to war and inequality. Do we see a flashback of Johannes walking through a pile of corpses? Or is Johannes thinking symbolically? A naked man wields a sword over other naked men.

 The film then cuts back to Roloff's palace, where his sister, Marja, is about to marry a Graf, though her heart is elsewhere. Roloff visualizes Marja being raped by Johannes and testifies in court. He's convicted though, because his blind sister's attempt to save him backfires. Marja tells her brother that she was only possessed by Johannes' idealism and leaves to work with the poor. Overwhelmed by guilt, Roloff thinks he's going mad. There's a fantastic sequence where he sees the marble floors of his palace awash with blood. He wanders through a landscape of superimposed images. (see photo above)  Is he in a forest or is he being pursued by the dead? He thinks he's murdered Johannes, and his wife collapses. Is she upset that Roloff's mad, or is there something else?

Johannes is released from prison. Roloff has a vision in which he thinks he's murdered his wife, Elisabeth. There's another fantastic "psychotic" sequence in a speeding car. He begs Johannes for forgiveness, and for poison. "Euthansie". Now it's Johannes's turn to hide a secret crime. 

Out on the streets again, Johannes tries to curb mob violence. In a pointed reversal of the image of Roloff standing before his shareholders, Johannes tells the crowd "Arbeit ist Macht!" ie progress through new values based on healthy, natural living. "So wie ein Mensch, der nicht arbeitest, an Lieb und Seele verkommt, so muss ein Volk untergehen, dass nichts arbeitet". Hardly words to appeal to audiences in 1919 facing mass unemployment. Marja and her Graf have become intolerant streetfighters, distorting Johannes's non-violent ideals. The film doesn't make explicit the connection between this and the Freikorps and Socialists, but Germans in the upheaval after the First World War would hardly need reminding. 

Elisabeth, Roloff's widow, leaves the palace, just as Marja did, and goes to live with Johannes.  They've been in love for ages but the idyll can't last. When Elisabeth realizes that Roloff committed suicide to free her, she sees that as a form of murder. Now she goes mad in turn, burning the palace to the ground. The servants flee. More shots of chaotically moving figures. Johannes braves the flames to save Elisaeth. But his faithful dog tells him that the blind sister is trapped in the burning mansion. The dog appears at several critical points in the story, literally "pushing doors open". Like the blind sister and the tame deer in the deer park, the dog is a symbol of innocence and positive action. It's worth watching the scenes where the dog runs round the burning palace, his paws on the balcony railings.
  
The blind sister dies. Now Johannes and Elisabeth have both caused the death of others. She enters a convent. In the city, there's rioting. Marja's Graf confesses that he didn't believe in the ideals he and Marja fought for. He'd given everything up for love. Marja dies next. "Ist alles Lüge auf der Welt? Auch die Ideale?" Truth and delusion, reality and madness. Roloff's psychosis was a symptom of what was happening in the world around him. 

Although much is made of war imagery in this film, the theme of religion is just as significant. Johannes, is a quasi-Jesus figure. Roloff's palace looks like an elaborate cloister, and there are small details, like Christ's feet impaled on the cross in the background when a young gardener is killed by a Freikorps-like militia. 

In Epilogue, Johannes goes  to the convent and declares love and forgiveness for Elisabeth. They walk arm in arm into the garden but suddenly Joihannes throws his arms in the arm in a grand gesture. Is he falling to the ground? Has he been struck by insight or by a heart attack? The only hint is an intertitle "Von der Gesundung der Menschheit....."

Once again "reality" dissolves. In the next frame, a semi naked man and woman (not Johannes or Elisabeth) are seen climbing up a mountain. The man raises his hands as Johannes did, saluting a glorious panorama of alpine peaks. The man and woman, now both in loincloths embrace. "Stammeltern eines neues, glücklichen.Geschlechts werden". A pagan Adam and Eve? A couple are seen ploughing an alpine pasture with their ox. "Zurück nach Natur!: Arbeit!....Neue Nerven, neue Menschen!"  Are fresh air and exercise a cure for"nerves" ? Perhaps. Compare this film  to G W Pabst's Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele) (1926) (read more here)  which doesn'tb really endorse talk therapy, however much psychoanalysts might want it to. 

Pabst Freud Weimar - Secrets of a Soul

G W Pabst's film Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele) (1926) is the story of Martin,  a wealthy Berlin scientist, who is crippled by anxiety. He develops a phobia of knives, terrified that he might kill his wife. Pabst worked closely with two noted psychologists, Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, so the film is often approached as a window into psychiatric practice in the 1920's, lovingly dissected by psychoanalysts, who see it was a vindication of their profession. But is it? Seen from other perspectives, it's actually quite damning.

Martin is shaving with a cut-throat razor, removing the hairs that testosterone makes men grow. He looks at the nape of his wife's neck and experiences horrible feelings. A woman is murdered nearby. The killer escapes to Munich, but Martin is gripped by fear and guilt.  He is intimate with his wife,  The couple haven't been able to have a child. Even the family dog has puppies, but Martin's house is empty.  Eventually a woman - almost certainly not his mother, but a mother figure, suggests he should see a doctor who will cure him. "After many months of hard work" the intertitles tell us, Martin recalls a childhood event which forms the basis of all his adult anguish. Instantly, he's "cured". An epilogue shows Martin fishing in an idyllic mountain setting. He looks up towards a chalet to see his wife embracing a child. Martin skips along a path like a happy child. Then you notice that the banks of the stream are unnaturally straight and uneven.  He drops the whole bucket of fish he's caught. Is this a happy ending, or is Pabst undermining the very idea of resolution? Perhaps this is just another dream sequence. Wish fulfilment but not reality.

Central to the drama is a long dream  sequence, filmed with the full artillery of modernist techniques of the time.  Multiple exposures superimposed on each other suggest the hidden layers of Martin's soul. A tree is shot in white against a black background, A whole village of cardboard buildings pop out, and a tower shaped explicitly like a penis drills it way to the surface as if emerging from the subconscious. The cupola on the tower is shaped like the pith helmet Martin's wife's cousin wears in the tropics. The cousin has sent Martin and his wife gifts from exotic lands - a sheathed knife and very well carved soapstone idol.  Since many educated Europeans at the time were fairly aware oif theosophy and orientalist ideas (they read Tagore, for example), it's quite possible that Pabst and at least some of his audience recognized the idol as Kuanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, whom some traditions describe as hermaphrodite.

Freud intepreted dreams. So have shamans in all cultures. But visual images are also the stock in trade of film makers and theatre directors. Coming to Secrets of a Soul from an opera staging perspective reveals a lot more than conventional Freudian analysis might suggest. Visual images, by their very nature, are open to multiple interpretation. Two people looking at the same object from different angles will see it differently. Seeing is a process which involves emotional input , dependent on the sensitivity of the viewer and his/her ability to think from perspectives other than their own. Thus there's so much resistance to opera stagings : audiences forget that all performances involve interpretation. There's no fixed formula. Visual literacy is like emotional intelligence. The art is in making connections, and in making connections that ring true, supported by other connections.

Because we're now so accustomed to Freudian imagery, many aspects of Secrets of a Soul are easy to identify, such as the phallic tower and the pop-gun the man in the helmet fires at Martin from the tree. Much has been made of Martin's supposed impotence or homosexuality because we're used to reading those signs. But Pabst was an artist. He wasn't confined to simple, literal images. Commentators largely ignore the women in the film, but anyone familiar with Pabst's other films (Pandora's Box, Die Dreigroschenoper etc)  will be alert to his ideas of female power.  Martin works in a lab where his assistants are women, and they're strong minded.  A little girl visits, and Martin is clearly delighted. Does that suggest his love for children is tainted?  In the absence of other clues, we can't assume. The images of dogs, the household, the meal, Kuanyin, all connect to the idea of childhood and fertility. Martin dreams of his wife in an exotic harem, clearly enjoying herself.  Martin fiddles with a key because he can't enter his house. But perhaps the key missing in a straightforward Freudian analysis is the simple fact that Martin  has married a woman with whom he grew up as a sister? No wonder he can love her but can't get her pregnant.

Martin has a flashback to a childhood Christmas when he, his wife and her cousin were playing together. We see toy trains and remember the phallic trains in his big dream. We see Martin shown a new baby, while the girl who will be his wife hands a toy doll to her cousin. Aha! Insight! The psychoanalyst helps Martin make the connection. But why should an innocent gesture like that mature into murderous anxiety? If all psychiatric problems were that easy to solve, life would be so simple. Because this is a silent film, intertitles are sparse: people watched, rather than reading words. Nonetheless the psychoanalyst has more to say than anyone else and he speaks in jargon. Perhaps Pabst is making a point by casting Werner Krauss as Martin. Krauss was the mad doctor in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1921) where the doctor/patient/relationship is upside down. Pabst shows Martin in his lab, mixing potions. Perhaps he's suggesting that science and pseudo science aren't that far apart? Artists interpreted dreams and visual images long before psychoanalysis came into the frame. Reading images is not a science, but a creative art in itself.

En avant la musique 1907

Another innovative film by Segundo de Chomon. More elsewhere on this site.

Prem Sanyas, Die Leuchte Asiens

Prem Sanyas, Die Leuchte Asiens (The Light of Asia)  is unique. It's much more than a movie. Since the film was funded by the Maharajah of Jaipur the film makers were able to use authentic palace areas where outsiders weren't normally allowed to enter. Absolutely stunning - elaborate detail that no artificial set could ever deliver. This movie is so gorgeous that you need to watch over and over to appreciate how gorgeous it is, preserved forever in beautifully made film..

Yet this is the story of Prince Gautama who became the Lord Buddha. so the scenes shot in slums and markets are, if anything even more important. Real street people and beggars, in their thousands - watch the children, some of whom have hardly seen a camera before.

Gautama is born into untold wealth but from an early age seeks something unknown. His father wants to sheild him from all knowledge of sorrow and death. He marries a princess and is blissfully happy, but goes off to seek wisdom among the poor. That's why Buddhism is so hard for some to comprehend. The whole point is letting go, disposing of judgemental ego games and fixed outcomes. The narrative unfolds slowly. No rushing, no need to grab. We all know how Gautama will become the Buddha.  The drama is in the contemplation of each moment. Buddhism doesn't "solve", but offers alternative resolution. The Light of Asia is poetic, and spiritual  in the way most movies cannot be.

The Light of Asia is also unique because it was made in India, by Indians, at the height of the Raj, in 1925.  Obligatory scenes of white tourists looking at exotic locals : they had to give context to the film if it were to be seen in the west. But as the credits roll, we're told that the actors are "members of the Indian Players Company, each of whom gave up his or her career as Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer and Professor to bring about a renaissance of the Dramatic Art of India". It's highly idealistic, in keeping with Buddhist values. The film was directed by Himasu Rai, who plays Gautama. Significantly, it was co-produced by a German, Franz Osten, which is perhaps another reason the film doesn't sentimentalize or play to colonial stereotypes. Of course the script follows a British epic poem, but the story itself is obviously Asian. So this film is important in itself as a document of Indian dignity at a time when colonial values prevailed. Since the world is becoming increasinbgly west centric, we need this film now even more than before, to remind us that there are other alternatives.

Read much more about this remarkable film HERE on Memsaab's blog,  Full of screengrab photos, scene by scene description, so even if you can't track down the full film (BFI restored) you can feel what it's like. As the blogger says, it's good karma, rewarding Rai and those involved in making the film for the love they put into it.

Si j'etais blanche

"I'd like to be white. It would give me such joy if my breasts and thighs changed colour". Listen to the full song HERE. Immediately, Josephine Baker gets to the nub of what white folks thought of blacks.  Read this excellent analysis of the song by Anna Biller here. Even the dolls little girls play with enforce the idea that white is the only way to be. "Et je disais à l’air accablé, me croyant toute seule brune au monde". But as Anna Biller points out, the girl in the song subtly turns things round in her own favour

Josephine Baker confronted assumptions about race, class and orientation. In the photo, she's wearing her famous banana outfit which of course moved tantalizingly as she danced. Note the fingers pointing and the banana imagery! The show was set in a fake jungle, a metaphor for the Dark Continent where forbidden, erotic things happen, and white people don't really rule. What a frisson fancy Paris society would have felt as she gyrated on stage while they sat, "civilized" in starched tight collars.

Josephine Baker was part of the cultural revolution that reached Europe from the mid 19th century. Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, Pierre Loti, the  Impressionists, Debussy, Ravel, Picasso and his friends collecting African art.  (British colonialism was very different). Non-western cultures showed Europeans that other forms of experience were valid. Without non-western cultures, the west might not have become "modern". The whole imperialist world model we're supposed to follow is upside down.

There's perhaps more on this site than most elsewhere on the dialogue between western and non western cultures. Lots on non western culture and on cross-culture issues and stereotypes, particularly as expressed in music and early film). For example, see this, a proper Cantonese opera but a satire on Viennese operetta !

Below is Josephine Baker dancing in 1927. So energetic, so angular, nothing like the way white women danced then. Nor like black American women either, I suspect, who were finding their own way ahead (see my post on Within Our Gates ). But the spirit of the Jazz Age freed up inhibitions and let people express themselves in new ways.  It's no coincidence that the best book about Josephine Baker was written by Patrick O'Connor, the music critic whose speciality was French music and opera. He was too secure to need to sneer at crossover. How the horizons of music writing have narrowed since he's been gone. (read more about him here).

Gay Salomé, 1923 film at the South Bank

The 1923 silent film Salomé is being screened at the Purcell Room, South Bank, tomorrow, with a sound  track by Charlie Barber.  Music, for a film that was conceived as silent? Perhaps it's an indication of how lazy audiences have become that they can't pay attention unless there's noise in the background. Weeks ago, audiences walked out of The Artist, a modern  film which is partly silent, which is about silent film. So why go? (read more here). Salomé was created as a visual adventure, as a direct hommage to Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations of the story. It's not about the Salomé story per se, nothing to do with Strauss Salomé, for example. The idea is that Beardsley's pictures are coming "alive".

Most involved in the film were gay, which is also an important context, given that it was 1923 and homosexuality was illegal. So it's a very bold statement indeed. Moreover, the director and brains behind Salomé was a woman, Alla Nazimova, at a time when relatively few women did projects like that. All this and art nouveau, too? The film was suppressed at the time, but now it's box office bankable. Hence the "revival" with sound.

But first and above all, Nazimova's Salomé 1923 is a work of visual art which should be appreciated for what it is and how it translates one=dimensional sketches into moving, human film. Beardsley's art faithfully adapted to "real" situations. Nothing is straight in this movie, whatever the orientation of those involved. Nazimova's film uses Beardsley's stylization to create a deliberately anti-naturalistic aesthetic that reflects the unnatural nature of the plot. Arch surtitles - "Thou wert" and "Thou rejectedest me". They reflect Beardsley's own words which twist and curl as if in feverish delirium.. The sets are spartan, lots of white space, in the manner of Beardsley's etchings, which seemed shockingly alien to a world used to over-stuffed Victorian excess. Beardsley's aesthetic is  far from Alma-Tadema's hyper-realistic orientalism, which cloaked outright prurience with a veil of fake academicism. Beardsley doesn't do veils.

At the heart of this story is Herod's unclean lust for his own daughter, Salomé. Secondary dynamic is the relationship between Herod and Herodias, his long-term wife whom he treats like dirt. The Herodias in this film is much meatier than the Herodias in Beardsley - she has hair like a lion's mane and wears a leopardskin jumpsuit. Tina Turner, but 60 years too early. Female sexuality as opposed to Herod's leering infantilism. She looks at Herod with disgust. Because the set looks so neat it makes the fundamental perversion feel even more unclean.

Interestingly, Jokanaan looks exactly like Beardsley himself, only more repellent, hawk-like features and a skeletal ribcage that looks like Christ on the Cross in Spanish art. This adds a piquant twinge to the proceedings, as Jokanaan can't stop denouncing "The Whore of Babylon", as if all the sins of the world were caused by women, not men. It's pretty significant yet strange that lesbian Nazimova really makes a point of sexual attraction between this man and this woman. "All other men were hateful to me". Before she dies, she looks like she's having an orgasm. "The mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death".

Wonderful minor figures - Black executioners, little black kids in headresses as tall as they are, strangely louche male attendants (nipple rings like targets). One lusts for Salomé while the other lusts for him. Attendants dressed in crazy turbans, and in the dance, women dressed as screens, surrounding Salomé as she switches from boyish androgyny to female demon (white hair cut in angles).  The Dance is magnificently choreographed - fast forward to 44 minutes. You can see the influence of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, whom Nazimova, a Russian, would have known of, even if she hadn't seen them in action. Salomé as The Afternoon of a Faun.

While the stylization is fundamental to the whole concept of this film, it makes for semaphore acting. In 1923, this wasn't such a big deal, since moving pictures were still a novelty. But we've become used to Hollywood ultra-fast action, so we need to switch off the autopilot assumption that drama has to be fast and butch. Much like we've lost the art of appreciating music that's not raucous and exaggerated. And, pertinently, we've lost the ability to appreciate a work of art on its own terms, without extras. Music was played in silent cinemas, but rarely composed for the film itself. However good the new soundtrack may be, it's a distraction from what is essentially a "silent", contemplative experience. You could spraycan the Mona Lisa and claim rights to the image.  Maybe it's "art" of a form, but it's not Leonardo. Salomé is a commercial winner, though profits won't go to Nazimova.  But it's just not the same thing, no matter how good the music might be, or what the audience might demand. View the full movie free with sound turned OFF HERE

Magical acrobats!

Les Kiriki, a 1907 short by Segundo de Chomón (1871-1929) pioneering film maker who worked for Pathé and with other pioneering directors like Abel Gance

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.