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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Monthly Archives: November 2015

Tales of Hoffmann

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in opera and film, Uncategorized

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English Touring Opera, ETA Hoffmann, ETO, Heckroth, Helpmann, Lindorf, Offenbach, Powell, Pressburger, Rounseville, Tales of Hoffmann

The film of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) is celebrated but not, I don’t think, loved; admired but, I suspect, not much watched and watched again. Even in the superb new colour restoration now on DVD, its crimson quality, scarlet even, cannot hide its bloodlessness.Tales of Hoffmann 1

It’s got lots going for it: an Archers Production, so in the hands of those two maestros, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; production design by Hein Heckroth; camerawork by Christopher Challis; top choreography; music conducted by Beecham from a memorable score by Offenbach; last but not least, powerful story-telling by ETA Hoffmann. A sumptuous feast for eye and ear. . .

. . . which still fails to satisfy. That thought, possibly heretical, is prompted by having seen a staged version by English Touring Opera at Snape Maltings on 14 November. This was the film’s opposite: modest on the spectacle front (ETO has a shoestring air about it, which I like) but very arresting in the conflict between Hoffmann’s romantic love and Lindorf’s diabolical annihilation of it. You are with Hoffmann, but Lindorf’s evil is not to be resisted, especially by some drunken lout who cannot get his poetry together, let alone his life.

In the ETO opera, Hoffmann looks a loser, but in the film he looks a winner:

Tales of Hoffmann 3

This is because he is acted and sung by Robert Rounseville, a conventional handsome light tenor, matinée idol more like, who doesn’t look as if he would ever drown his sorrows in drink. Lindorf is better, as played in hammy fashion by Robert Helpmann.

Rounseville’s characterisation grounds the film in the banal, enslaves it to its source. The ETO production liberates the opera from its source, and by making Lindorf (Warwick Fyfe) – and his avatars in the three tales – a Nosferatu-like figure, gives this telling of it real power.Tales of Hoffmann 2

Two centuries on, hats off to ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822) for the potency of his stories.

Biopics are . . .

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in biopics

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biopics, Bob Dylan, Citizen Kane, Gospel according to St Matthew, John Ford, Malcolm X, Michael Collins, propaganda, Shakespeare, Sorrentino, The Iron Lady, Vaclav Havel

. . . all the rage: they feed our desire to know about the private lives of public people, a desire fuelled by new media.

I went to a seminar last Saturday on biopics. We discussed Malcom X, I’m not there (Bob Dylan), Marie Antoinette, Citizen Kane (WR Hearst), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse), American Splendor (Harvey Pekar), The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher). Not all these films are ‘cradle to grave’ narratives, which I think would be part of the traditional definition of a biopic. Some so-called biopics just deal with a particular crisis in a public figure’s life, e.g. Spielberg’s Lincoln trying to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the US constitution through the House of Representatives – and let’s include at this juncture Ford’s outstanding Young Mr Lincoln, dealing with Lincoln’s life as an obscure young man. Or The Queen, focusing on the crisis in the UK monarchy at the time of the death of Princess Diana. Definitely not a biopic.

Five reflections:

1              Shakespeare is our fore-runner here: ‘Richard II’, ‘Henry IV’ 1 and 2, ‘Henry V’, ‘Henry VI’ 1, 2 and 3, ‘Richard III’. These are all ‘bio dramas’ of a kind. ‘Henry V’ is the most ‘cradle to grave’ narrative because we see him as a young man in ‘Henry IV’ and as a king in ‘Henry V’. ‘Richard II’ is the exception: the play revolves round the abdication crisis at the end of his reign. Yet really the drama of Shakespeare’s history cycle is about kingly mortality. We see all these kings die (except for Henry V) and ‘Richard II’ discusses the subject at length.

2              Shakespeare’s plays serve the purpose of Tudor propaganda, which raises the point that all biopics have an agenda to promote. It might be inspirational (Selma), it might be the opposite (Citizen Kane). One of the propaganda purposes of Hollywood biopics is to trumpet American greatness. But it is in fact in an American film that this tension between presentation and actuality, between surface and substance, between fiction and truth, has been most profoundly explored, not in a biopic but in a narrative that sheds much light on the genre: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

3              We should not lose sight of the fact that there are biopics from other countries: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev for a start (which has its own agenda about Russian greatness, among other things). There’s Andrzei Wajda’s Walesa, a companion piece to Man of Marble and Man of Iron, the three making a sort of Solidarity trilogy. Only with Walesa: Man of Hope, the third film, does Wajda deal with historical people. Ireland’s Neil Jordan has made a very good fist of Michael Collins’s story in his film of that title.

I thought too of Francesco Rosi’s dissections of power in Lucky Luciano, a gangster biopic. More propaganda of a kind. And then there is Sorrentino’s Il Divo about the long-serving Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, further analysis of the corruption of power. Like the Bob Dylan biopic (I’m not there), very difficult to follow if you are ignorant of the subject, but rewarding perhaps if you do.

4              Thinking about the biopic as propaganda brought to mind a favourite biopic of mine: Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, a true cradle to grave narrative. It gets my treatment in ‘New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’.

5              The biopic I’d like to see made is on the Czech president following the fall of Soviet Communism, Václav Havel – see http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/vaclav-havel.

Zorba and ‘we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone’

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Uncategorized

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Akrotiri peninsula, Crete, Kazantzakis, Stavros Bay, Zorba the Greek

Stavros Bay, Crete, from the air, October 2015:

aerial 3

Stavros Bay from the ground, ca 1964:

Zorba 2

And here’s another view:

Zorba 6

These frame captures comes from the film Zorba the Greek, Hollywoodized from the noted novel by Nikos Kazantzakis published in 1946. It was first released in December 1964, so presumably had been shot earlier that year. It shows the bay as a pristine site, untouched by habitation just a film crew. But of course the making of the film launched Stavros Bay as a holiday site, so that it is now a popular resort on the Akrotiri peninsula on the north side of Crete. When I visited on 8 October, it was not overwhelmed by people, although the signs are that it is so in the high summer. You can see why from this panorama taken in the water:

Crete Stavros

On the right is the hill which Basil and Zorba try to mine (with an ineptitude that defies belief) and just behind the camera is the sandy shore on which Zorba teaches Basil to dance at the end of the film:

Zorba 8

So that’s all right then.

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Sarah Cawkwell on FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA …
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  • artists' film
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  • biopics
  • Brakhage
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  • British cinema
  • cinema and culture
  • cinema of hyperbole
  • costume narratives
  • courtroom dramas
  • Creation
  • crucifixion films
  • crucifixion on film
  • diary films
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