33 Scenes from Life (33 Sceny z Życia)

Małgorzata Szumowska’s latest film, 33 Scenes from Life (IMDb entry here), made an impressive, if claustrophobic opener for the seventh Kinoteka Film Festival.

It begins with a family meal including Jerzy, a journalist, his author-wife Barbara, their artist-daughter Julia and Piotr, her composer-husband. They gently rib each other though there’s a serious undertow and we might think we know where the story’s going. But we’re blindsided when Barbara gets cancer and dies. Shortly afterwards, Jerzy has a fatal heart attack and Julia, having lost both parents, is forced to reappraise her life and work with her husband, her sister, and artistic collaborator Adrian.

33 Scenes is impressively photographed, using a muted palette and, mostly in medium shots. Going for a documentary style meant no blocking – the actors improvise and the camera follows them: hence no close-ups, though the initial idea to shot each scene, Woyzeck-like, in a single take was soon abandoned. One great shot sums up the gradual clarification of the emotional maze. Half-obscured by the doorframe, Julia sits on the bathroom floor talking to Adrian on the phone, but when Piotr enters the scene we gradually work out that what we're actually seeing is partially reflected in a mirror, with the doorways and reflections slightly confused. It adds to the oppressive atmosphere, which is lightened (if that’s the word), by touches of the darkest imaginable comedy.

But most formally surprising are several long musical interludes by Paweł Mykietyn. Acting the part of Piotr’s new orchestra piece, they make one of most impressive and uncompromising film scores I’ve heard for a long time. Though it begins with a semi-impressionistic falling theme dominated by the harp – perhaps inspired by Julia (Peter reveals it in the bedroom during a tenderly comic bedroom scene) – we soon get a Schonbergian variation, and the music continues to intensify: dark, grinding, dissonant, roaring and occasionally rearing up terrifyingly, like something from the 1960s Polish avant-garde. Against such music, shots of the orchestral rehearsals seemed banal and so, pending another idea, they were removed and replaced by black leader. When one of the German producers saw it, he thought they should remain. And so they do, like operatic interludes, bleeding slightly into the surrounding scenes, or even the diegetic, as when the obsessive xylophone is taken over by a bleak oscilloscope. The combination of music and blank screen allow us to contemplate what we’ve just seen and prepares us for the continuation.

As for the title: yes the script originally had 33 scenes but during editing that changed and Szumowska now doesn’t know how many there are. It began as an autobiographical sketch – her father was journalist/film-maker Maciej Szumowska about whom she made the documentary Mój tata Maciej (2005) and her mother the children’s writer Dorota Terakowska. This all proved controversial in Poland, though Szumowska insists that there isn’t a strict 1-to-1 relationship between reality and the film. Perhaps the original idea of doing the film in English would have helped the separation (or perhaps made it more controversial as her parents were quite well known) but in the event she decided that it was a very Polish film that would only work in that language.

Casting Julia was problematic: Polish actresses recognized the autobiographical elements and assumed that they would be playing some form of the director – exactly what she didn’t want! Eventually she saw what she wanted in the German actress Julia Jentsch in Sophie Scholl. Not speaking Polish, she learned the role phonetically and was dubbed, as was the Dane Peter Gantzler as Adrian. But, demanding more direction, Jentsch clashed with Szumowska several times on set, even threatening to leave the film. Fortunately she stuck it out, though they parted on very bad terms. Happily, when she saw the final edit Jentsch was delighted with the result and the two are reconciled.

I won't bother embedding the trailer that's on Youtube as it completely misrepresents the film, so here's part one of Paweł Mykietyn's Cello Sonata instead - you can click through to part two afterwards. Not as dense as 33 Scenes' score and there's not much to see, but enough to make me want to hear more.



Finally, with many East European films, it’s violently pro-smoking: as Szumowska says; “if I want to commit suicide by smoking, that’s my business.”

Burnt by the Sun

Stage plays have always provided material for the cinema, but recently there has been a series of productions going the other way (in fact, with The Fly, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Lost Highway amongst others, you could argue that the preferred ultimate destination is opera). And so the National Theatre is showing Peter Flannery’s adaptation 1994 Foreign Film Oscar-winner Burnt by the Sun, scripted by Rustam Ibragimbekov and director Nikita Mikhalkov.

SPOILER ALERT (throughout)

June, 1936. Colonel Sergei Kotov is at his dacha with his daughter Nadezhda (Nadia), his wife Marusia and her family. An old friend (and Marusia’s former lover) Mitya arrives unexpectedly. Some years previously, Kotov had ‘invited’ Mitya to join the NKVD (predecessors of the KGB) where, under cover of being an émigré musician, he betrayed several White officers. He has received orders to take Kotov to the Kremlin to be questioned about alleged spying. Mitya finds his duty coinciding with his desire for revenge.

Though it’s obviously a Chekhovian dacha-drama, the film occasionally breaks out into the countryside, but here, apart from the swimming trip (with the dacha in the backgound), it all takes place at home, which works surprisingly well.

The film achieved a remarkable success in working well for western audiences, while embedding dialogue, music and references that added additional layers for Russian viewers. In fact the English version was slightly cut to remove some of the more Russocentric elements, and Flannery has followed that, while making some additional cuts and introducing new things, notably a subplot involving the middle-aged maid Mokhova, a virgin who flirts with a passing van-driver.

Why a reference to Hamlet was replaced by Escalus I'm not sure: a nation of Bardophiles like Russia would be completely unfazed. One minor but definite improvement is cutting the film’s destructive burning orbs, though oddly there’s still a vestigial reference to them that could disappear without losing anything apart from a few seconds of stage time. The 'Holiday of the Stalinist Balloon-Makers’ subplot is also a bit troublesome. Though it leads to the film’s impressive climax and a dreadful moment for Mitya, it's hard to imagine how it could be staged: better simply cut it altogether, as the semi-symbolism here (looking and sounding like an off-stage asthmatic dragon) probably only confuses anyone who hasn’t seen the film.

There's also a clear missed opportunity: the film starts with Mitya receiving his orders and making a desultory attempt at Russian roulette to avoid the job. At the end he slits his wrists in his Moscow bath, ironically echoing the titular song’s line about crimson waters (in the sunset) and the suicide attempt that Marusia made when he left (enforcedly) without explanation. In the play Flannery cuts the opening scene and finishes with Mitya shooting himself at the dacha: surely including the prologue would have made a neat book-ending.

But the major change is to Kotov’s daughter, Nadezhda (Russian for ‘hope’). In the film she’s irreplaceably played by Mikhalkov’s own similarly-named six year-old daughter, but here she's about ten. Practicalities (including child-actor laws) probably forced the change but it’s sad to lose the innocence that is so overwhelming in the film: the dark end of the play’s first act makes Nadia aware of how the state is overwhelming private life, whereas in the film she remains cheeky and charming to the very end, making her fate all the more distressing.

Her role is also cut back in two of the film’s tent-pole scenes: her dialogue with Kotov on the boat is given to Marusia, though he still invokes the spirit of Chapayev and conveys his intense faith in the Soviet future. But more serious is the decision to restage Mitya’s crucial story-confession. In the film it's a long scene framed by a window in which he tells Nadia a ‘fairy story’, reversing and anagramaticising the family’s names to allude to his dark mission, while the rest of the family listen uncomfortably in the next room. The complex layering of audiences (Nadia; the family; and us) is simplified on stage and his motivation flattened as it he is less torn between a sense of duty and a desire to be challenged. Here it is lesss nuanced: Nadia sleeps on Kotov's breast while Mitya's story, a semi-overt confession, is to Marusia and the whole family.

One of the film’s most evocative elements is the music, though there’s relatively little by Mikhalkov’s regular composer Eduard Artemyev. It’s more of a patchwork of popular songs from the 1930s including the almost-titular tango (the film changes it from The Weary Sun to Wearied by the Sun), which runs throughout the film as a bittersweet refrain. Originally Polish, its lyric about parting lovers meant it acquired the nickname “suicide tango”, another dramatic irony. Later, it was adapted and made a hit by Soviet jazz luminaries including Leonid Utyosov and Alexander Tsfasman. It also became enough of a symbol to pop up in Norshtein’s Tale of Tales, Kieslowski’s Three Colours: White and even (in its Polish form) Schindler’s List. I could have done with hearing it a few more times, as you do in the film.

This is the original (not, I think, the performance that's in the film).



And this is what Artyemev does with it for the trailer




Wisely they’ve kept the disturbingly manic performance of Offenbach’s Can-can, also used by Shostakovich as a symbol of a corrupt regime in New Babylon. In fact Shostakovich pops up a couple more times: on the way to the Kremlin Kotov breaks into a tune that any Russian would recognise: The Song of the Counterplan, indissolubly linked to the 1930s and a tune to which Shostakovich returned more than once, as explained in this book. At the National, Kotov simply suggests singing some folk songs (a few bars wouldn’t have come amiss, though they’d have to pay Booseys!) And there’s a brief reference to the ever-popular Aviators' March ("We Were Born to Make Fairy Tales Come True"). Finally, I wonder if the film's fragment of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth String Quartet is a little Artemyevan joke: the quartet was dedicated to the cellist Sergei Shirinsky: Kotov’s first name is, of course, Sergei. But the staging dispenses with much of the music, making the texture a bit thinner.

Burnt by the Sun is an intensely patriotic piece: Mikhalkov-Kotov saves “the people’s wheat” and fights for the Motherland and defends the future he envisages for it. Whatever Bolshevism later became, he cleaves to its initial stated aims and the play, if anything, strengthens that, with Kotov more forcefully reminding us of his peasant beginnings and the cowardice of the bourgeoisie who ran before him rather than defending their beloved lifestyle. That also slightly changes the dynamic with the rest of the family as he more openly despises them for that.

But none of these changes reduce the power of the piece and, as I said, Flannery has made it work brilliantly for a Western audience.

Meanwhile, Mikhalkov is currently producing Burnt by the Sun 2, a blockbuster two-part epic. Part one is set to open on 9 May 2010, the 65th anniversary of Victory Day, and the film will then be expanded as a 12-part mini-series.

For this he has reanimated Kotov, Marusia and Mitya who all died or were reported dead in the first film! Mikhalkov's father Sergei, of course wrote the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem and reworked them for a new audience when Putin revived it, and Nikita’s actions sometimes bring him to the edge of being an apologist for a cult of personality. Hence a visit to the set from Vladimir Putin, with his newly imposed official view of Stalinism, might raise an eyebrow but the director assures us the film will denounce the tyrant.

Finally, a small plug for Birgit Beumers' excellent guide to the film, published by Tauris.

Psycho for Sale

One of the problems for students of film scores can simply be finding the materials: studios often owned not only the copyright, but also the scores and parts, so composers could neither reuse the musical material nor ensure that it was physically preserved. But actually the studios didn’t really care about this stuff: the score was recorded; unless they wanted to re-record the music as library tracks, the manuscript was useless. Hence occasional clearouts would see them skip hundreds of pages of – to them - valueless paper.

Of course, since then, the interest in film music has developed and there is a greater value to these things, though ironically Hollywood’s obsession with rights means that often the material, though it exists, is hardly more accessible.

Still, even in earlier days, things slipped through the system, increasingly as composers rose to prominence and were able to negotiate more favourable terms.

One such was Bernard Herrmann. Hence he included chunks of his scores to Jane Eyre and The Ghost and Mrs Muir in his opera Wuthering Heights. But he also held onto the material and various donations mean that the University of Santa Barbara has a handsome collection.

But not everything. Like any other piece of music, film scores go through various versions on their way to completion and so it is that Herrmann’s widow Norma has decided to sell the most significant collection of film music related material to come on the market for several years. It comes up at Bonhams on 24 March (lots 110-11, and 193-218), details, here.

The highlight is a full autograph score of the concert suite Psycho: a Narrative for Orchestra, and anyone who has 40 grand knocking around would be tempted. Though it's a fair copy, there are a few alterations but I'm not sure it's going to revolutionise our view of either the film score or the concert work. Still, a lovely thing to own, perhaps framed in the shower.

But there are also things like a typically blunt missive from Schonberg, thanking Herrmann for a broadcast performance of the Second Chamber Symphony, which he felt was good though it suffered from electrical interference (and CBS’s engineers who disliked his music, and “always distort by the mixtures the sound.”)


Amongst Herrmann’s other left-field interests was Joseph Raff (1822-82), and you can buy Herrmann’s marked up copy of the 5th Symphony (Lenore). This may have been preparatory to his self-financed recording with the LPO, which inspired an epic shirt-ironing session.

A particular bargain (it seems to me) is a collection of eighteen letters from Charles Ives, of whose music Herrmann was a regular promoter. Having said that, Bonhams’ wide-ranging £4-8,000 estimate implies that they’re not entirely sure what it might raise.

Finally, a reminder of Herrmann’s romantic roots comes from his numerous volumes of Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal Camera Work, filled with early 20th-century photography (another 30k to find!) Herrmann’s Anglophilia is nicely (though coincidentally) illustrated by Alvin Langdon Coburn’s The Bridge – London.

Vampires, Voodoo, Vixens, Victims

In what might seem something of a departure from the stated specialisations of this blog, a heads up that I'll be interviewing ... errr ... Ingrid Pitt on Resonance 104.4fm. Tune in (or listen online) on Friday 27th at 5pm.

I'm sure that no-one here needs reminding of Ingrid's striking presence in Gothic horrors like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, as well as The House That Dripped Blood, which she is introducing on Friday 20th as part of the Barbican Cinema's tribute to Amicus (not the old trade union).


Thereafter I'll be returning to the more usual fare.

Here's the trailer for The House That Dripped Blood



Not much Ingrid there, so here's the trailer for Countess Dracula:

Kinoteka, 2009: London, Belfast and Canterbury

A quick heads up on the forthcoming Kinoteka, aka the 7th Polish Film Festiwal [sic], which takes place over a variety of London venues: The Riverside, Tate Modern, the Barbican, BFI South Bank, the Prince Charles and Cargo. Look out for:

New Polish Cinema. Mostly from the last couple of years, and including shorts, docs and a focus on the (to me, unknown) Marcin Koszałka.

The Polish New Wave. Including Zanussi's study of unblinking rationality The Illumination (Illuminacja, 1973), shot by Edward Kłosiński (obit here), and Andrzej Żuławski introducing his own On the Silver Globe (Na Srebrnym Globie), a self-referential contemplation of a politically hamstrung torso.

Jerzy Skolimowski. Including his first four features and, after a seventeen year hiatus since Ferdydurke, his latest Four Nights with Anna (Cztery noce z Anna).

In addition, there'll be an exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of Kieslowski's Dekalog and its two longer offshoots A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing. Some parts of Dekalog will be shown with supporting films from other directors.

Finally Michael Nyman will celebrate his love of Polish cinema with a new piece set to a montage of film clips.

After that, a selection of films will go to the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast, while Canterbury's Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival will include various Polish and Polish-themed films and several concerts including Penderecki conducting his own epic St Luke Passion, and the conference Polish Music Since 1945.

In the meantime, I'll be polishing up my collection of diacritics to comment on some of the films.

Air and Simple Gifts

Perhaps odd, on the day following such a momentous event, to focus on five minutes of minority interest, but we all bring our own perspectives to things and focusing on a detail needn't exclude an appreciation of the bigger picture.

John Williams, apart from being Spielberg's house composer and spending thirteen years heading up the Boston Pops, has written various pieces of what would be called "occasional music", such as four Olympic overtures, the Liberty Fanfare for the Statue's centenary, not to mention various concertos, etc.

So it was natural that his phone should ring when a piece was needed for Obama's inauguration yesterday.

Which brings us to Air and Simple Gifts (the title omits to mention a brief coda).

Williams' decision to write a set of variations on the quaker song Simple Gifts is understandable: it's a popular tune with a 'classical' pedigree (best known as the finale of Appalachian Spring, by Aaron Copland, one of Obama's favourite composers). Classical music isn't normally a part of the ceremony but the Yale Concert Band was to usher Dwight Eisenhower into office in 1953 with a performance of Copland's Lincoln Portrait, before Republican representative Fred E Busbey (ironically from Illinois) complained about the gig being given to a commie. 

I think it's probably straining things to try to see some significance in the decision to give it to the same, slightly odd ensemble Messiaen chose for the Quartet for the End of Time. 

There's often a lot of talk about how film scores are now the only way that many people get to hear orchestral (read: classical) music. Williams might not have pushed the boat out in terms of the forces involved (apart from the stellar casting). Nevertheless, it's nice to think that one aspect of a great day was that a million people got to hear the piece live, and goodness known how many on TV and the web. 

Meanwhile BBC viewers were treated to Huw Edwards introducing "four of the most gifted musicians in the world" before proceeding to a pointless conversation with Matt Frei, who described how, in 1841, President William Henry Harrison gave the longest ever inaugural speech before catching pneumonia and dying ("which", Frei reassured the doubtless alarmed audience, "is not going to happen this time round"). Harrison actually lasted just about a month, thus becoming the holder of the shortest ever presidency. So perfectly timed was Frei and Edwards' annihilation of the Air - they finished just before the 'tune' came in - you could imagine it was planned to save us the horrors of having to listen to the first two minutes of a five-minute piece.

Frost/Nixon

I saw Frost/Nixon for the second time the other day (first in the LFF then, on DVD, during a transatlantic holiday) and liked it both times. Of course, in certain circles one isn’t supposed to say that sort of thing because it’s a Ron Howard film but he’s solid enough, though he tends to be at the mercy of his writers: he can’t save A Beautiful Mind but neither can he destroy Frost/Nixon – especially as Sheen and Langella had, through the stage show, essentially been in rehearsal for months. This isn’t the blog for an extensive review (nobody would expect one and I’ve got other things on the burner) but one thing did strike me about Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Frost.

Up to this point Sheen was probably best known for playing Tony Blair in The Deal and The Queen, though his cast of real-life people also includes Kenneth Williams, and he’ll soon be essaying Brian Clough. Incidentally, The Deal's implication that John Smith's chosen successor was Brown and Blair was a usurper put me in mind of how Lenin's will was ignored, but I doubt we'll be seeing Sheen play Stalin any time soon.

In the meantime Sheen found that Frost and Blair share a strangely similar quality: the struggle between a steely will and a child-like desire to be liked.

That’s part of Frost/Nixon’s arc: the superficial playboy chat-show host faces a panward-heading career and possible bankruptcy as no-one wants the interviews that have swallowed a good chunk of his own and his friends’ money. But he pulls himself together and sits up all night doing the research to nail Tricky Dick, saving the day and forging himself a new reputation.

Similarly, Steve Bell famously skewered the young Blair as Bambi, whose radical agenda (if it was ever there) was immediately dropped for fear of scaring the voters. But a few years later the sight of a million people marching down Whitehall did nothing to change his mind. Steve Bell’s description of him as having one angry eye and one smiley one seems to sum that up.



For Blair/Sheen the decisive moment was the death of Princess Diana but for me – and I don’t think this was simply an inability by either Sheen or me to shake off the earlier role - in Frost/Nixon there were definitely some moments featuring a strange chimera: Blast or (more likely) Flair.