Wajda Update

News from the Barbican that Andrzej Wajda will make an appearance at the Censorship as a Creative Force event (25 April). He is filming a 10-minute personal introduction to the evening.

Milky Way

Is it something about living in Hungary? For cinephiles the names Béla Tarr and Miklós Jancsó evoke memories of languid, beautifully shot films, full of extremely long takes: with The Round-Up (1967), Jancsó became known as the master of the technique, while Tarr’s Macbeth (1982) has just two shots – and one of those is only five minutes long.

These are obviously experimental in their own ways but Benedek Fliegauf’s new film Milky Way (2007) pushes things even further. Its 82 minutes comprise just ten shots, each around the same length. So far, so ‘normal’: technology has made feature-length ‘single-shot’ films possible, most famously Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), but I’d also recommend Salvatore Maira’s Valzer (2007).

But Fliegauf decides to restrict himself even further. The ten shots take us from night to night through a single day, the camera never moves, and most of them are horizontally bisected by a flat horizon (thoughts of the Hungarian plain). So, there you have it. Ten tableaux where any interest is completely within the frame. The only music you hear is from the scene itself. Oh – and there’s no discernible dialogue, either. More Dogme than many Dogme films, Fliegauf has chosen not to go for accreditation.

We start with a static scene. Something happens. The original set-up returns, but with a subtle difference.

But what might seem dauntingly minimalist is in fact incredibly engaging. Some of the scenes are positively action-packed, and even those that aren’t reverberate with meaning, filled with often wry, but occasionally sad reflections on everyday life and human ambitions and failings.

In the mournful opening scene a lonely wind-farm turbine, with its flailing arms, stares balefully back at us through the pre-dawn gloom, reminding us that we aren’t the only watchers on this planet.

Next: a camper on a windy hillside goes for an early morning pee only to see her tent blown away.

Three pensioners – two men a woman – float in a swimming pool, taking refuge from the sun’s heat. After a while, one of the men lazily swims over to the woman. While they make love, the other man takes no notice. They part and the initial tableau returns. Then a young man swims by oblivious to these goings-on, forcing us to question society’s youth-ophilia.

A wintry tree stands next to a cairn-like pile of rocks. Two BMX-ers appear and bounce their way over it (after all, why simply ride around it?) then disappear down the hill. The scene is again empty. In the tree a crow’s nest mysteriously catches fire.

The highpoint is a frankly hilarious scene about a bouncy castle, finely balancing hope and joy with disinterest and failure, and the film ends, again at night, with two silhouetted kids deliriously break-dancing by the light of a chemical factory.

It might sound wilfully quirky but Milky Way is a delightfully humane work, looking at homo sapiens with an anthropologically objective, yet affectionate eye.

You can catch Milky Way at the Barbican on May 10, 2008.

The Round Up (which I'll be blogging about in a few days) is at the Barbican on April 28 2008.

Wajda

The news that 82 year-old Andrzej Wajda is too ill to travel to London to take part in on-stage discussions at the Barbican and the BFI South Bank is obviously worrying.

At the Barbican he was to appear on stage with Jirí Menzel and István Szabó (oddly, born just five days apart in 1938) on 25th April. Wajda's place has been taken by Agnieszka Holland who, with recent episodes of Cold Case and The Wire under her belt will certainly bring a different perspective to the event.

At the BFI Southbank Wajda was to introduce his Oscar-nominated Katyń on 22nd April, but he will be replaced with another, as yet unannounced, speaker.

I'll be at at least one of those events, so will report back.

In the meantime, here's the trailer for Katyń.

"Das Wunder" at a hundred

As the centenary of conductor Herbert von Karajan hove into view, so there was another certainly - that Norman Lebrecht would excoriate "Das Wunder".

Reminding the world that Karajan was a deeply unpleasant, greedy, vain, musically conservative Nazi, who has destroyed classical music is at least a part-time occupation for Norman Lebrecht, as he struggles to push against the pendulum of adulation.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for critical engagement with reputations, and where necessary violent re-evaluations, but it has to be done with a larger aim in mind.

Lebrecht’s argument is that Karajan being an awful person and a Nazi, led inevitably to musical inferiority: that and his vanity led to him being over-rated: that and his greed damaged classical music for everyone else. This can be shown quite simply as:

(QM/(PA+N)+V=R)+G=K

QM is the Musical Quality
PA is Personal Awfulness
N is Naziness
V is Vanity
R is Rating of musical performance in the public’s mind
G is Greed
K is Karajan

Note that a common howler is to see the outcome of the equation as QM

Actually, a lot of what Lebrecht says is fair enough.

Karajan’s recordings of baroque music are, depending on your taste, repellent or hilariously misconceived: the gloopy Adagio, commonly ascribed to Albinoni but at least half-written by Giazotto brings forth a queasiness unmatched by any other piece of music I can imagine.

The explorations of what was once called ‘authentic performance’ before its aspirations were reined in as ‘historically-informed’, left no impact on his chromium shell. His Mozart and Haydn can seem laughably bloated, but his Beethoven, Brahms and other bits of the core German repertoire (for Lebrecht, Karajan’s concentration on this is itself a dubious choice) still worked (at least in his early days).

It’s true also that Karajan was no storm-trooper for the avant-garde – he didn’t care to help anyone ‘throw a lance into the future’. A few pieces by Carl Orff hardly count – especially as he fights his own posthumous rear-guard action against accusations of Nazidom. Though why a Nazi would want to conduct the degenerate works of Schönberg, Berg and Webern, the unacceptably nationalist Bartók, the shamefully Slavic Stravinsky, and Hindemith’s clearly anti-Nazi Mathis der Maler Symphony isn’t immediately clear.

Would Schönberg have approved of the dubious sonic experiment of reseating the orchestra through each of the Variations? Who cares?; he was dead. Stravinsky, one of the few living composers Karajan essayed, memorably and tartly remarked that his Rite of Spring was in a ‘tempo di hoochie-koochie’.

But attacking Karajan raises the same problem as attacking Wagner and Eliot for their anti-Semitism. We begin to focus on that individual as a lightning-rod of hatefulness, forgetting that there were others whose views were just as nightmarish, and so, those people get off.

The truth is that anyone who wanted to continue their careers when the Nazis rose to power had to choose from three options;

1) Enthusiastically embrace the philosophy
2) Decide to what degree they were willing to see their careers suffer rather than help the Nazis
3) Leave

Once we start to look at anyone who stuck around, we find the inevitable and necessary compromises that come with living in a dictatorship. Once the dictatorship is gone, it’s a different matter, but the genial uncle still has a dark past.

Lebrecht’s Cassandra act has been going on for over a decade: one of his most successful publications was The Maestro Myth: a sustained attack on… well, it does what it says on the tin. Stupidity, pettiness, arrogance, vanity, unfaithfulness, greed, cruelty, deviousness, blackmail, profiteering, racism, sexual perversion and above all tyranny and egomania, this catalogue of conductors’ unseemly behaviour spared few (except those who, living, might sue).

But for some reason Karajan has become Lebrecht’s lightning-rod. It’s just a shame that while focusing on the éminence-not-so-grise, and his Fafnerish wealth, he was unaware of the fact that conductor Robert King was abusing his choristers.

Mickey Mask

I see that Verdi’s A Masked Ball is being traduced again.

In ENO’s infamous 1990s' ‘flying pizza’ production, Gustavus III of Sweden’s impending death was subtly underlined by the appearance of a skeletal grim reaper on horseback and a giant clock whizzing across the stage. Not content with that, their 2002 production opened with a line of men reading newspapers, whilst… errr… relaxing.

Actually neither of these productions was as bad as the press would have you believe, but never mind.

However, as German producer Johann Kresnik, whose production will be seen in Erfurt, points out: “One has to introduce new elements – otherwise it is difficult to attract new theatregoers.”

Before considering the ‘new elements’ he has introduced, it might be helpful to remind ourselves that this is an opera about King Gustavus III of Sweden and how he was assassinated at the titular celebration in 1792.

Given that, it’s entirely understandable that Kresnik has chosen to see the opera as a Marxist attack on post-911 capitalist America. He makes this abundantly clear by having a chorus of naked pensioners sporting Mickey Mouse masks (“a very beautiful, poetic scene”, according to the theatre’s general manager), a woman sporting a Hitler moustache consorting with Uncle Sam and giving a Nazi salute, and – beloved in America, but a tedious symbol of vapidity elsewhere else - an Elvis impersonator.

If we hadn’t already spotted it, the theatre manager helpfully points out that the production is “a little critical of America”.

But let’s not be too harsh: Verdi hit lots of political problems with this and other works and he himself was a symbol of Italian unification. The slogan ‘Viva Verdi’ wasn’t just an acclamation of the greatest Italian composer (ever?) but a coded political rallying call: Vittorio Emmanuele, re d’Italia.

Written in 1859 just 67 years after the assassination, Un ballo in maschera was incendiary stuff and it was clear that the censor in Austrian-dominated Naples would have something to say about it. But Verdi wasn’t a documentarist and his story is no closer to the truth than Scribe and Auber’s 1833 operatic version. However, Verdi and his librettist balked at the censor’s suggestions and took the opera to Rome, where they had to acquiesce to moving the action from Sweden to Boston and demoting the hero from king to governor.

So, should a modern producer try to draw parallels between events (set it in Dallas in 1963?) or try to find some sort of objective correlative that will stir in us the same emotions that the original audience had?



Whichever path is taken, reducing it to a bit bourgeoisie épater-ing does it no favours.

In fact, both paths are equally bogus: history doesn’t repeat itself (either as comedy or tragedy) and in any case what's bang up to date now is out of date all too quickly - it'll be interesting to see how ENO's Candide, transferring from Milan and Paris, deals with the fact that four-fifths of the kings (Blair, Chirac, Putin and Berlusconi) are no longer in power. Bush will still be there (just) and Putin obviously retains power in some way. Ironically it's possible that the production may be saved one change - by the return of Silvio Berlusconi. Jonathan Miller's 1988 production is a good example of the benefits and disadvantages of updating: a brilliant satire on (Panglossian) Thatcherite laissez-faire economics, it would mean less today. Wouldn't it?

Meanwhile shocking the audience entails out-jumping all the shocks between the original and the present: The Rite of Spring, Look Back in Anger – whatever else you want to add to the list – leading inevitably to our current worship at the church of latterday producers.

Why not just trust the audience to know that this is a fictionalised portrayal of historical events that, as far as modern parallels are concerned, fits where it touches? This may of course lead to productions where the hero of A Masked Ball is an 18th-century Swedish monarch who is assassinated, or Henry V has a sword rather than a submachine-gun that he, for some reason, fails to employ against his enemies, but if that’s the case, we’ll just have to put up with it.

Audiences and critics of that persuasion will be accused of hopeless conservatism, but that’s not the point: the best production of Rigoletto that I’ve ever seen is still Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York Mafiosa one (the words occasionally subtly altered to accommodate the conception) and Peter Sellars’ Middle-East Giulio Cesare had some interesting things to say. Sadly, updating is in danger of being a first base for producers who fear that otherwise their work will be seen as stale or irrelevant or, even worse, ignorable.

Essentially Kresnik is peddling ‘Ostalgia’ – East Germans’ affection for the days when the Stasi had files on a good proportion of the population but the trains ran on time – in the form of an anti-Capitalist rant. Ostalgia was mocked with touching ambiguity in Goodbye Lenin! But if Kresnik thinks he's being serious, he's a long was short of Patrice Chéreau’s then-controversial-but-now-classic centenary Ring at Bayreuth.

Verdi’s original had the neat irony of being set in the opera-house, but in some kind of ironic meta-comment, rounding up 35 pensioners willing to spend five evenings in Kresnik’s dystopia proved alarmingly simple: Germany’s famous tradition of nude sunbathing proved the means; the opera was the opportunity, and post-unification poverty the motive. In such circumstances, persuading them to dance around the ruins of the World Trade Center was akin to getting seals to jump through hoops for herring.

Lost Highway

"I like to remember things my own way. How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened"

If you’re going to try to sum up David Lynch’s films with a single line, then that one, from Lost Highway, pretty much does it. Conventional narrative and realistic acting have never really had a place in Lynch’s dreamworld, where surfaces only serve to conceal the truth. Civilisation is a thin façade and animal violence and sex could break through at any moment.

The plot of Lost Highway is simple enough but what it means is another matter. After hearing that “Dick Laurent is dead”, Fred and Renée find that an intruder has filmed them during their sleep. Renée is murdered but Fred remembers nothing. He’s arrested and condemned to the chair, but while in his prison cell he transforms into another person - Pete. Released, Pete gets involved with psychotic porn-gangster Mr Eddy’s girlfriend, Alice - a blond version of Renée (keeping up?), leading to sex on a motorbike, robbery, more murders and, in a loop back to the start, a discovery of what it means that “Dick Laurent is dead”. In between times we meet the Mystery Man who has the power to be in two places at the same time.

As Lynch says: [co-screenwriter] "Barry Gifford may have his idea of what the film means and I may have my own idea and they may be two different things. And yet we worked on the same film. The beauty of a film that is more abstract is everybody has a different take."

So far, so Lynchian, with the director’s habitual forays into weirdness, archetypical characters, pop culture, scarily random violence and bathetic comedy.

But then Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth comes along and decides to make it into a piece of music theatre. Unsurprisingly, it’s not your usual night at the opera, and ENO has moved to The Young Vic for the UK premiere.

In some ways it's an odd choice for a musical setting. Lynch's soundscapes (created with Alan Splet, until his death in 1995) have always been crucial to his films, whether through the murky industrial noises of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man or the pop quotations of Blue Velvet. They seem so integral to the mood that to replace them with something else risks destroying their very essence. But Neuwirth has managed to find a kind of parallel soundworld, sometimes using the same materials, sometimes equal but different.

Impressive as it is have the libretto co-written by Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek (a regular collaborator with Neuwirth), in fact it sticks closely to the screenplay. There are couple of changes: rather than being a saxophonist, Fred plays the trumpet - Neuwirth's own instrument until she was in a car crash; and Mr Eddy's moment of madness is, in a black anti-political-correctness joke, a reaction not to bad driving but irresponsible smoking.



Modern operas have a problem getting over Berg's Wozzeck, probably the greatest fusion of classical form and modernist language and, as far as any modern opera can be so described, a hit. Many later operas sound like semi-retreads filled with expressionist screaming and twisted memories of popular culture.

But in this case Neuwirth's collage is true to the original's style, lurching from the highest expressionism to echoes of everything from Monteverdi to Kurt Weill, by way of chunks of pure Nat King Cole and Lou Reed. There might be fewer than 30 people in the band but with everyone, including the cast, amplified, plus tape and electronic effects there’s no lack of power and the sudden shifts of mood and sonic explosions create a sense that anything could happen – and probably will.

A lot of Lost Highway's mobius-strip narrative seems to happen inside Fred/Pete's head, and director Diane Paulus stages it in the round, a corridor bisecting the audience and a perspex box surrounded by four video screens high above. Meanwhile, the sound is sent through speakers all around the hall, leaving the audience suspended in a torus between sound and action, bounced around by a level of intensity you’ll seldom experience in the theatre.

Between fast-moving action (12 scenes in 90 minutes), shifting personas, complex – though always engaging - music and multi-level staging, there’s a sense of overload and edginess (as there should be) and everyone performs miracles. But if there’s something beyond a miracle, David Moss – Neuwirth’s preferred Mr Eddy – manages it, covering everything from crooning falsetto to straight-out shouting, sometimes in the space of a single line. If you can’t get to the Old Vic, you can catch his performance on Kairos’ commercial recording. Here's an interview with him.

Olga Neuwirth. Lost Highway. At the Young Vic, six performances from 4 to 11 April.

Information and video clips
http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on?action=details&id=1750

Lost Highway (CD) Kairos 0012542KAI.
Soundclip at http://www.kairos-music.com/startFR.html

Stenka

Стенькa Разин(ъ)*



I thought that for my first entry I'd almost follow Mary Poppins' excellent advice and start at the very beginning (it's a very good place to start), but will ignore the King's overly prescriptive "and go on till the end, then stop." Which is a roundabout way of introducing a few thoughts about the first completed Russian fiction film, Stenka Razin (1908).

In 1907, eleven years after the Lumières' cinématographe shows in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, a Russian got round to producing a fiction film. Even then, Alexander Drankov's film of the Eden Theatre performing scenes from Pushkin's Boris Godunov wasn't actually completed. How it was decided that it wasn't completed isn't clear as it was never going to be the complete play, so perhaps it's more accurate to say that it wasn't released. But Drankov, never a man to sanction waste, used the footage in Scenes from Boyar Life.

Undeterred, he started again, this time taking the 16th-century Cossack rebel Stenka Razin as his theme, and basing it on the folk song From Beyond the Wooded Island, as historically a questionable source as Pushkin's Boris (you may know it in this form).




Russia, like every other country, started early with cinematic rewritings of history.

To be honest, Drankov wasn't the greatest of directors: he was more like the Del Boy Trotter of early Russian cinema (doubtless future posts will help make a convincing case). On Stenka he served as producer and cameraman, with the since-forgotten Vladimir Romashkov helming.

What we have is a six-minute film comprising twelve shots and a few intertitles. It starts with a bang as, on board a boat, we run alongside Stenka's marauding horde for a few shots. Then the narrative unfolds in a series of land-locked shots of around twenty seconds each, some of which comprise an entire scene. Back on the water, it ends with an abruptness that would have impressed Hitchcock, though it seems more like incompetence - you can almost hear Drankov shouting "Hurry up - we're running out of film!" and the moment after the climax we see the old Konets.

A less than full-frame version is available on DVD from the French company Bach Films. They've replaced many of the attractive Russian intertitles or overlaid them with French translations which are, at their best, accurate, in the most mundane and inappropriate typeface they could find, making no attempt to replicate the layout of the originals.

The most egregious example is the text of the letter, though Bach's approximation would give you no idea of that. Perhaps it's superfluous to point out that they don't run the same length as the originals, making the film slightly shorter than it should be, to the annoyance of the few people in the world who care about such things. Accessibility (at least to Francophones) is welcome but the advantage to Bach is that it also creates a newly copyrighted artefact, circumventing the nightmare that is Russian copyright law.

Stenka used to be available on a BFI VHS and still is from Milestone in the USA. It's a better transfer than Bach's but for reasons understood only by those who understand, the BFI VHS has a burnt-in time code throughout. Not a huge one, but annoying nonetheless. I don't know if it's on the Milestone release as well, but I wouldn't be surprised as, PAL/NTSC apart, in every other regard they look identical.

Sadly, nobody makes any nod towards Drankov's coup of getting Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov to adapt the very famous and popular folk song, which apparently led to instances of sing-along-a-Stenka. True to type, Drankov later fell out with both Ippolitov-Ivanov and writer Vasily Goncharov. To the best of my knowledge, it's never been recorded, but surely the double whammy of the first Russian fiction film and the first Russian film score deserves some sort of acknowledgment?

* For those mystified by the bracketed final letter, Russian orthography changed in 1918 and the terminal hard sign (the 'yer') was dropped. I include it for pedantry's sake - it reflects what we see on the poster but not what we would see today.