Béla Bartók – { feuilleton }

Powell’s Bluebeard on blu-ray

My film viewing at the weekend included a return visit to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s opéra fantastique, The Tales of Hoffmann, followed by the new blu-ray restoration of Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle. This is the third time I’ve written about Powell’s film of the Bartók opera, the first occasion being a “When will I get to see this?” post, the second a review of a VHS copy which had turned up on YouTube. The new release, which is the film’s debut appearance on disc, is a restoration by the BFI under the supervision of Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese.

Norman Foster (Bluebeard).

Powell directed the hour-long dramatisation for the German TV channel Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963, at a time when his career was in the doldrums following the critical outrage provoked by the release of Peeping Tom. The production was a smaller one than he was used to but it was still shot on 35mm which has now been polished to a breathtaking degree, revealing rich shadows, deep colours and a profusion of glittering detail. (See this clip.) The audio track remains monophonic but the sound is a great improvement on the VHS version. Seeing the latter was gratifying after so long a wait but was also an underwhelming experience. The restoration proves once again how unfair it is to judge filmmakers from a low-grade copy of their work that’s been thrown onto the internet.

Ana Raquel Satre (Judith).

Bluebeard’s Castle (or Herzog Blaubarts Burg, to use the film’s German title) wasn’t a project that Powell inaugurated. Hein Heckroth, the production designer on many of Powell and Pressburger’s colour features, had been working for German TV since the late 1950s, and suggested to singer/producer Norman Foster that Powell might be interested in directing the film. The presence of Heckroth’s weirdly Expressionist designs give Bluebeard’s Castle a continuity with the extended ballet sequence in The Red Shoes and the “Giulietta” episode of The Tales of Hoffmann; all three stories share a dream-like atmosphere whose grading to nightmare is enhanced by Heckroth’s decors. I’ve often wondered whether the strangeness of some of Heckroth’s set designs, whose aesthetics extend to Dalínean Surrealism, were a factor in the frequent grumblings of distaste expressed by British critics for Powell and Pressburger’s films even before Powell made Peeping Tom. The first film that Powell worked on was The Magician in 1926, Rex Ingram’s adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel, and a film which is at its best in its moments of visual excess. Powell’s films are valued today for their own visual excess but this quality hasn’t always been encouraged in British cinema, as Ken Russell later discovered. Favourable critics like Ian Christie often point to this as part of the “European” sensibility of Powell and Pressburger’s oeuvre, something which is present even when the subject matter is very English. Pressburger was a Hungarian emigré, while Powell met Ingram when he was living in the south of France; the production designers on all the major P&P films, Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, were both German, and the films themselves, especially The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann, feature a host of different nationalities. Watching Bluebeard’s Castle again I was reminded of Italian horror cinema, especially the films of Mario Bava. When you combine the artificiality of Heckroth’s sets with the Gothic story of a woman imperilled by a powerful aristocrat, plus the resemblance of Ana Raquel Satre to Barbara Steele, the whole thing assumes a very Bavaesque flavour.

On a musical level I much prefer Bartók to Offenbach, (although Offenbach’s famous Barcarolle is always worth hearing) so I’m pleased that this minor work has been treated to the same restorative care as The Tales of Hoffmann. The 1988 version of Bartók’s opera directed for the BBC by the late Leslie Megahey remains my favourite filmed Bluebeard even though it lacks Powell’s flamboyance; Megahey’s film has more gravitas, and the direction, performances and musical recording are better. But seeing Powell’s film again revealed nuances I’d missed before, like the sustained shot near the end when Judith seals her fate by asking for the key to the forbidden room. It also makes a change hearing the whole thing sung in German, a language I can understand in parts. Bluebeard’s Castle is a further example of Powell’s idea of a “composed film”, a work that would combine all the dramatic arts. (Or almost all—this one lacks dance.) As I said ten years ago, it may be minor compared to the films that he made with Emeric Pressburger but it offers a more satisfying coda to his career than his final features.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bluebeard’s Castle, 1981
• Powell’s Bluebeard revisited
• Joseph Southall’s Bluebeard
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
• Powell’s Bluebeard
• The Tale of Giulietta

Directions to Servants by Tenjo Sajiki

Tenjo Sajiki was an avant-garde theatre troupe led by Shuji Terayama from 1967 to 1983. The name of the troupe is taken from the Japanese title of Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, a film I happened to be watching again this weekend. Terayama is known more in the West for his cinematic work than his many plays, consequently I never expected to see any of his theatrical productions until stumbling across this short TV documentary about a performance of Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants that Tenjo Sajiki were staging in Europe in 1978. (There’s actually a lot of Tenjo Sajiki footage out there once you start looking for it, including whole videos of original stagings.) The film has the additional attraction of being a rare early episode from the BBC’s Arena arts series, made during the period when the programmes were only 30 minutes long, with director Nigel Finch often acting as unseen commentator and interviewer. Regular readers will be aware that Arena has cult status on these pages but I didn’t get to see many of the earliest programmes, and usually don’t expect to find those from the late 1970s at all, video-recording only really becoming widespread a few years later.

Whoever unearthed this film must have liberated it from the BBC archives since it has a time code running through it. The film is a curio more than anything else which makes me wonder why anyone went to this amount of trouble to find something that isn’t very revealing about its subject. The play was a difficult one for audiences, being performed in Japanese while the audience was forced to watch select views on TV monitors or sit inside black boxes being pushed around the performers by stage-hands. Terayama had treated the audience like this for other plays, the disruption being his way of reflecting our own disrupted view of real events. It’s a shame that Arena caught Tenjo Sajiki while they were touring this particular play. Shortly before this the troupe had staged an adaptation of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin which was followed a few years later by Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, either of which would have been more interesting to see.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Chants de Maldoror by Shuji Terayama

Twilight, a film by György Fehér

There’s a Thomas Ligotti story—you’ll have to forgive my not recalling the title—in which the world is suffused in an inexplicable and persistent twilight, a condition that you see manifested for real in this remarkable film by György Fehér. Twilight was released in 1990 but for a long time hasn’t been easy to see. Second Run announced their region-free blu-ray edition a couple of months ago, another film which, like Son of the White Mare, is a restoration presented by the National Film Institute of Hungary. The new disc arrives with filmed appreciations by the Quay Brothers, Peter Strickland and others. Mention in the publicity of the Quays, Strickland and Béla Tarr, who the film credits as a consultant, was enough to make me order this without knowing anything further.

A seasoned detective investigates a series of child murders, succumbing to an all-consuming and tragic obsession with the case, finding empty solace in his quest for vengeance. What emerges is not a crime story, but a harrowing venture through the darkness of the human soul.

Twilight unfolds with breathtaking cinematography and haunting sound design, allowing the mystery to emerge in tantalisingly atmospheric and meditative fashion.

A police procedural, then, but not one like any you’ve seen before. The narrative is reduced to a skeletal trace, subsumed, like Ligotti’s world, by the twilight atmosphere. Tarr’s films are an obvious reference here; Fehér’s investigation takes place in the same misty, rain-sodden rural nowhere as Sátántangó (which Fehér helped produce), and shares with Tarr’s epic a similar approach to shot duration and camera movement. Fehér was a cinematographer before he became a director, so the shots may be long but they’re also mesmerising and perfectly choreographed. The film is placeless and also rather timeless, in that it’s evidently set in the past but the antique quality might equally be the product of an isolated backwater. All the cars and phones and typewriters look old, while the men wear big coats and big hats; the atmosphere isn’t so much film noir as film gris. (Fehér followed Twilight with an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice which I now have to see.)

There’s a lot more I could say about this but I hadn’t really intended to write a review. I ought to note, however, the three musical cues which sustain the sombre visuals, and which repeat throughout: the opening chords from Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle; the opening chords of Brüder Des Shattens—Sohne Des Lichts by Popol Vu, which are slowed and muted to create a Thomas Köner-like drone; and (very surprisingly) the last minute or so of Hello Earth by Kate Bush, which seems to have been used mainly for the song’s borrowing of Tsintskaro, a Georgian folk song which most people know either from The Hounds Of Love or from its earlier appearance in the plague scenes in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu. I recognised the Bush track immediately, and was a little disconcerted at first, but the music is as muted as the other pieces, and subtly looped to create a refrain which contrasts with Bartók’s ominous overture, something we may take as a leitmotif for the murdered girls.

As I was saying only a couple of weeks ago, “it’s a big cinematic world out there, and ‘world cinema’ is more than just a few shelves in an entertainment store”. It is indeed. Consider this Exhibit A.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cremator by Juraj Herz

György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin

2023 is the centenary of György Ligeti’s birth so here’s an hour-long French documentary about the composer directed by Michel Follin. György Ligeti was made in 1993, two years after Leslie Megahey’s BBC crew had paid a return visit to Ligeti’s apartment to film an update to the Omnibus profile from 1976, All Clouds Are Clocks. The two documentaries complement each other rather well, although you’ll have to take my word for this since Megahey’s film has yet to appear on any video site. Both films interview Ligeti at the studio table where he wrote many of his compositions, and where he talks about his musical interests and intentions.

The two films differ in their approach to the world outside Ligeti’s window. Megahey concentrated on the music, illustrating a number of lengthy recording extracts with footage of melting clocks, a wooden puppet, etc, whereas Follin attends to the biography, with Ligeti relating his personal history while also describing the evolution of his musical ideas. Ligeti’s youth was a tumultuous one, encompassing the upheavals of the Second World War, during which he lost half his family to the Holocaust, and the later Communist years in Hungary when the kinds of modern music that he was trying to write were proscribed by the State. It’s good to see him confirm the importance of Bartók’s music to his growth as a composer. Ligeti’s oeuvre contains many Bartók-like moments but I’ve often thought that regarding these as any kind of influence or reference might be a lazy comparison based on a shared nationality.

All of this reminds me that I recently picked up a copy of the 5-disc Ligeti Project in a charity shop but still haven’t listened to it all the way through. Charity shops can be useful (and cheap!) sources of modern composition if you don’t mind trawling week after week through iterations of the classics. Secondhand shops were my first introduction to music like this, providing the opportunity to sample the recordings of those mysterious names at a bargain price. Bargains are still to be found if you’re patient, as with the Ligeti box. Other recent discoveries include Without Sinking by Hildur Gudnadóttir, and Memoryhouse, the first album by Max Richter, both of which were bought for a fraction of their usual asking price.

(A note about the film subtitles. These are an amateur translation which fails to recognise the names of Gyula Krúdy—the writer whose work Ligeti describes finding at an early age—and Paul Hindemith, the German composer.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Grand Macabre
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• Metronomes

Leslie Megahey, 1944–2022

TV producer & film director Leslie Megahey died at the end of August but the news has taken a while to filter through to these pages where his BBC TV productions have been the subject of several posts. My recurrent comments about his work were effusive enough for him to send me a handwritten note of thanks a few years ago, plus a promotional card for one of the films in the Artists and Models series. If more of his productions had been available online or on disc I would have written something about them as well, but old television, especially the documentary variety, remains persistently inaccessible to future audiences.

There are biographical details in the link above so what follows is a list of the Megahey productions that, for this viewer at least, made his name one to look out for in the TV listings. Some of these are on YouTube, a couple are available on disc, while the rest have yet to resurface anywhere. Everything here is highly recommended…if you can find it.

• Omnibus: All Clouds are Clocks (1976/1991): An hour-long interview with composer György Ligeti. I caught this one on its updated rebroadcast in 1991 when Megahey revisited Ligeti to see what directions his career had taken over the past 15 years. Currently unavailable.

• Schalcken the Painter (1979): Another Omnibus film, and a ghost story (after Sheridan Le Fanu) that’s as good as any of the BBC’s MR James adaptations. Released on (Region B) blu-ray & (Region 2) DVD by the BFI.

• Arena: The Orson Welles Story (1982): A two-part interview (165 minutes in total) which caught Welles in a rare mood when he was happy to talk at length about his career. The TV equivalent of the huge book of Peter Bogdanovich conversations. Part One | Part Two

• Artists and Models (1986): Three drama/documentaries about French painters: David, Ingres and Géricault.

• Cariani and the Courtesans (1987): Another historical drama about an artist, Giovanni Cariani (c. 1490–1547). Very much in the mould of Schalcken the Painter but without the supernatural element. Currently unavailable.

• Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1988): The best film version of Bartók’s opera. The Region 1 DVD by Kultur seems to be deleted but is worth seeking out for having removable subtitles. There’s a copy at YouTube.

• The Complete Citizen Kane (1991): A 90-minute documentary about Welles’ film using extracts from the Arena interviews and the Megahey produced TV series The RKO Story, plus new material. No longer on YouTube (or anywhere else) due to a copyright complaint. This is why I’m always saying you should download these things as soon as you find them.

• The Hour of the Pig (1993): A feature film about a medieval animal trial, this one was hacked around by Miramax then released in the US as The Advocate where it flopped. The hard-to-find UK version turned up on YouTube a few days ago.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Men and Wild Horses: Théodore Géricault
• The Complete Citizen Kane
• Schalcken the Painter revisited
• Le Grande Macabre
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard