Showing posts with label Faust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Faust. Show all posts

Friday 10 January 2014

Power in his clenched-up fist, held aloft

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9 January

This review of The Phantom of The Opera (originally 1925, but revised in 1929) was of a special screening, with a world premiere solo harp score written and played by Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, at the Pathology Museum at St Bart’s Hospital on Wednesday 8 January 2014, the first of four such screenings put on there through Silent London (@silentlondon) (with a complimentary portion of freshly popped popcorn, and a Hendrick's gin (with tonic, if required)


Declaration of interest : Trust me that I am being impartial, though Elizabeth-Jane and I are friends (as a consequence of having met at Bath Film Festival). However, this means that I cannot – because it does not sound right – adopt my usual approach and call her Baldry…


To-night’s introduction to the film, by Pamela Hutchinson from Silent London, made clear that it had had a chequered history, not liked by the first audience that saw it, re-made by adding some comic elements (and still not liked), before getting to what we have now, with a grand scene at the Paris Opéra, which pays homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (in fact, with an empty threat), in what we were told was an early type of two-part Technicolor. Predicting it where it was going was not easy, with films such as The Third Man (1946) having given certain expectations of underground chases with water, whereas, as referred, the Poe mention suggested a false trail.

What it does meditate on approaches, but veers away from, the subject of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête (1946), whether love can redeem all and make physical disfigurement beautiful (with the singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) as a healing Christ-figure), for then an index-card pins down exactly who The Phantom (Lon Chaney) is : something that only the force and energy of the mob (not exactly storming La Bastille, but almost), not the not-so-organized official means (which the very end of the film quite forgets about), can address. Roughnesses such as these may owe their existence to that troubled production history (and, doubtless, many have written much about its genesis), as, for example, this issue of continuity : when The Phantom goes off with one of his displayed pair of schnorkels (the need for two seems fanciful), then returns, deed done, and dons a hat, he is not wearing his mask, but, when, hat on, he is at the organ, he is wearing it.

The jauntiness of a man in full evening dress walking into water, over his head, and casually subverting a plot to find him. The sphinx-like fingers that had, by rising and falling, acted as some sort of unexplained early warning system. These elements and more were literally marvellous for their free invention – they almost floated free of wider considerations of plot or even character, and subsisted for their own pleasure.

Not really a story, either, of the vaulting ambition of Faust (it is presumably the Gounod version of which we see extracts on stage, but it could be that of Berlioz : the familiar motif of Gretchen am Spinnrad, in any case), despite Christine's being keen on being a star* and having The Phantom as her Master until, like Pandora (or Eve), she disobeys and sees who he is. There the parallel with the Cocteau story runs out, since she looks to Raoul to save her, and, for her, it is not going to be loving this creature in order to have a career.

So the index-card (perhaps where the story was re-worked) does all the work for us, and takes away the initial intrigue or ambiguity of The Phantom, when the pretty young dancers are busy being startled in their tutus, and where it could easily be a story from an episode of Scooby-Doo : Which way did he go ? Didya see him, Scoob ?, with the wicked Old Owners (with one of them in disguise as The Phantom) frightening the New Owners with a story, so that the latter, to be rid of it, will sell it back again for nothing. (Later, there is casual talk of 'another strangling.)

The story simply is not going to cohere and be any one thing, and why should it, when it is was hardly unusual for a film to be written as it went along (cinema has always been a wasteful business : just think, now, of all the feature-length films made, and how few get distributed) ? Whether the lengths to which those working on the film went were unusual, others would know better than I, but IMDb credits the characters of Carlotta and Raoul’s brother as only existing since the 1929 version).

Elizabeth-Jane Baldry’s accompaniment for solo harp does allow the film to cohere, and it is clear that she had thought carefully about times whether her part was to be more evocative, or more imitative, and there were important moments that she had to address in some way, such as when the man in the box is first seen by the new owners, and when, girding their courage, they return to find him somehow gone. The mirror into The Phantom’s realm was especially rich, when she had two types of material, one for the slightly dreamy Christine going through to him, the other for Raoul, shut out when the mirror has swung back** (and how fitting that the universal symbol of vanity should conceal from her the origins of her success, as the law from Pip how he comes to be a gentleman) : the alternation made clear that, however penetrable the barrier, Christine was in another world.

For a film of 93 minutes, the score is bound to use whatever one calls them of themes or leitmotifs, and the effect is as in sonata form, that one hears what one heard before, but, in between, one has heard other material, and the effect (even if the repetition were scored and played note for note the same) is that one pays attention to it in a different way. Elizabeth-Jane’s structure of themes led one unshowily through the film, though not to say, as many will know the harp from effects such as the glissando and from virtuouso concert-playing, that the accompaniment was not without its appropriate drama and grandeur (that Technicolor scene on the steps, or the seemingly playful folly of Christine removing the mask).

Using the physical architecture of the instrument, tapping and strumming on the case, and running and sliding her fingers along it, Elizabeth-Jane in no way limited herself to the traditional way in which a pedal harp would be employed, and she is no doubt influenced in her choice both by work as a recitalist and composer, and by playing works by other composers such as Graham Fitkin (who wife Ruth Wall plays his work in her repertoire). The music and its playing were daring and inventive, and the great round of applause that she received at the end of the work, and again when reintroduced, are testament to how much Elizabeth-Jane had enhanced people’s enjoyment of this silent master, with her varied layers of interpretation, and her witty and inventive performance.


End-notes

* Philbin showed herself, if not coquettish, then easily bought by flattery in her visual responses to what she hears her Master promise her : one momentarily thinks that she is not going to be taken in by it, and she then falls head over heels in love with her stardom and adoration.
** One finds it a little hard to stir much for Raoul [de Chagny] (Norman Kerry). Here, he knows that Christine has gone out of sight, behind the mirror, but, other than huff and puff a little, he does nothing, and seems to make nothing of trying to follow it up. A mere man might do no more, but it turns him into something of an anti-hero, and The Phantom, who is willing to fight for Christine’s love and capable of doing so, seem more appealing, which is all to the good of the dynamics.

And then there is when Leydoux (Arthur Edmund Carewe) and he, after the farcical holding of their hand in the air against the strangler’s snare, find themselves at The Phantom’s mercy, as the room of mirrors burns them and they strip off :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 16 March 2012

Complexity, perplexity and diversity

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 March

I was feeling left out, with everyone I knew making pacts, leaving me feeling left out - oh, I've already said that, so that just shows that I'd be the perfect patsy for one of these 'I'll be damned!', Yes, you will... arrangements.

Anyway, wanting to know where I was going wrong, I called around on Faust, because, after all, he should know, with a pact named after him and all that. Turns out that he's packed and left for Vienna, wanting a word with Freud.

Quite an angry word, as it turned out when I next saw him, because, not satisfied with one thing to his name, he's upset that, for all the bedding of women that he did and in a highly cynical and opportunistic way (for which, of course, now he's repentant), Freud's only gone and called his relevant complex after Don Juan! Faust swears that the Don, apart from anything else, grossly inflated his tally, and besides he, Faust, isn't fictional.

I tried to intervene with the observation that maybe Oedipus was fictional, but he would have none of it, adjuring by his britches (though I prefer 'breeches') that he'd, many a time, had a session with old Oed down at The Golden Dog, and he could drink most men under the table. (Still, I think it could easily explain that rather gratuitous bit of charioteer rage* that caused him a bit of bother.)

Back at me knocking in vain outside Faust's house, who should come along but Dante! A lot of people stay away from him, because she was really rather young even for his day, and they like to lump him in with that Lewis Carroll, why did he have child friends and take photographs of them? rap, but he's OK, if a bit grumpy too much of the time (something to do with spots on the moon, I gather from Beckettt).


To be continued



End-notes

* I'm told that people, lulled by the alliteration, want to style this after the substrate, but you couldn't call what Laertes was driving on a road, and, anyway, the rage was directed at him, not at the road. When Basil Fawlty's car misbehaves, he breaks off a branch and, logically enough, beats the bonnet - hitting the road, unnecessarily violent as it sounds, is something else again.


Friday 20 January 2012

Great books that bored me (and I didn't finish)

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20 January

So, maybe, they weren't so great...

At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:

Faust
Proust


When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.

So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.

And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.

For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:


Shakespeare's
Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;


Cervantes'
Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).


In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...


* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.


** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.


Wednesday 21 September 2011

Unlimited dimensions

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 September

What a brilliantly entertaining evening!

I had deliberately not decided between getting a ticket for Wild Side at 11.00 (in the 'Tartan' strand) or The Disposable Film Festival at 10.45 (in the 'Shorts' (short films) strand), because I might not be able to go to either - and I couldn't, because of compelling matters elsewhere (and ineptly lacking the capacity to bi-locate).

In Screen 2, B8 (more to the front and the centre than I would normally have chosen, because of the sheer popularity evident when I came to buy a ticket for Cambridge film Dimensions) was my seat, where, when waiting for the show to start (which turned out to be director Sloane U'Ren and writer / composer Ant Neely plus almost all of the cast briefly at the front) I got into an interesting conversation with my neighbour about the film and what science might be the basis of what happened.


The film itself was well worth waiting for, and unlike anything else so far in the Festival - picking things out as they occur to me, it had humour (my neighbour and I turned out to have the same sense of humour), stunning visual effects with the titles, a brilliant riverside setting, a script that really kept you guessing about a number of important matters, a type of Faustian pact, a multi-dimensional love interest, boffins and their marvellously whimsical contraptions, and a water-feature that drew all the main characters into its domain.

Oh, I could go on, and mention a splendid tree (not sure what kind) that was another focus, the recreation of the gentility of the twentieth century after the Great War, and a glimpse of Cambridge academic life. However, not only don't I want to give anything away, but those things really say nothing that addresses what the film is about.

Forget the science (wonderfully presented though it is), forget what may already have been public about this film or its budget or how it was made (though those things are facts): this is a film about longing, many people's longing, and for different things, and how that longing affects this brief span that (however long we do live) we are allotted - whether we are longing what we can't have, or doesn't belong to us, or won't do us any good.

It is very well done indeed, and it will have you choked and affected by seeing unfold what holds us back or spurs us on, what makes us who we are or gives us the scope to be something else. If you can guess where the title's 'tangle of threads' will take you, then well sleuthed, and perhaps you were hunting clues!


Later, events took me to the bar with important cast and crew, and I had a chance beforehand to speak to Olivia Llewellyn in a little detail concerning what made this shoot different and the type of thing that she would want to repeat: it was not, as I thought, that what is conventional in the big studios seemed impersonal as such, but that this was different and that there had been a luxury, say, of being with the other protagonists and to build up more of a bond with them off the set. Before that was questions and answers, led by someone not known to me.

Talking to Ant afterwards, neither of us was sure why this person had wanted to talk about the science so much, as if anyone would expect, say, Matt Smith, as Doctor Who, to be questioned about the physics of the TARDIS (but the Doctor always offers people a jelly baby instead or reveses the polarity with the sonic screwdriver), but he did. When things were opened up to the floor, I had my hand straight up, and jumped in with a question about the children whom we see become adults and whether we can see the former in the latter, and it was nice afterwards to have some appreciation for it from those with Ant, Sloane and me in the bar.

I'm not even sure whether it was bizarre, although I have mentioned the notion of longing and what it entails, but, after other audience-led questions, not only was the question put to Ant and Sloane asked whether there was anything that they would have done diferently, but everyone at the front was asked what question they had expected to be asked and what their answer would have been. Perhaps an answer might have combined those two approaches: we would have had a different person leading the session, and can we have a time-machine to go back and put that right?

What I want to do, though, is to take a trip into the future, and see this film get the coverage and exposure that all those who have worked so hard on it deserve. Maybe, in the meantime, I'll see whether I can look at my schedule to establish the possibilities for revisiting this enchanting world, given that (the screening on Thursday 22nd has also sold out), there is now a third on Saturday 24th at 5.00...





(And, of course, getting back late, after staying around carousing until Festival central's ability to let us stay longer finally disappeared, and then making these jottings, was all made possible, consistent with an early bed-time, just by learning the lessons of this film!)