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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

Category Archives: opera and film

DESCENDING TO HADÈS part 2: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL AS FILM AND AS OPERA

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, disaster movies, opera and film, surrealism

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Alcoriza, Bunuel, Calanda, Exterminating Angel, Figueroa, Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, Thomas Ades, Tom Cairns

We are familiar with disaster movies, and have been for some time – not just Titanic in 1997 but also the 1953 version. Then there’s the British take on the same disaster, A Night to Remember (1958), the latter title displaying British understatement. American overstatement, titanic you could call it, favoured concepts such as a group stranded on the top floor of a skyscraper in The Towering Inferno (1974). The genre is embedded enough to earn its own spoof title, Airplane! (1980), which exploited its comic possibilities and was wildly successful.

Where did the idea for Buñuel’s disaster movie come from? It had been suggested to him as a young man in the 1920s that Géricault’s narrative painting of 1819 ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ would make a terrific film. It was only in the 1950s that he and his regular scriptwriter at the time, Luis Alcoriza, picked up the idea and wrote a short story, ‘The Castaways of Providence Street’, from which Buñuel later worked up a screenplay. Six years earlier in Mexico he had made La Mort en ce Jardin / Evil Eden about a group of disparate and desperate people stranded in the jungle in a situation like the castaways in Géricault’s painting. The short story gave him an opportunity to tackle the subject again and to inject a darkly comic element. That comedy was partly contributed by the Catholic religion, the mocking of which motivated Buñuel throughout his career. He used the idea here to invert Christian ideas in a sort of ‘transvaluation’. The disaster takes place on the Calle de la Providencia,

2017-05-12 17.42.12

and the victims find themselves damned by Providence rather than saved. Secondly they are imprisoned in a room by a ‘miracle’ (they discover they lack the will to leave even though there are no physical obstacles to their doing so), an event Hume defined as something “beyond custom and experience”: they then find themselves taken by this miracle not to heaven but to hell, which by Act 3 is Hell Cubed.

2017-05-12 17.44.37

Buñuel’s film is satirical, subversive, made for revolutionaries. Although there are plenty of surrealist touches – a disembodied hand, the feet of a dead bird, the amour fou  between Eduardo and Beatriz –

2017-05-12 17.43.27      2017-05-12 17.43.50

it owes just as much to the theatre of the absurd, the godfather of which is surely Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, less terrifyingly comic than comically terrifying. Another key feature of the film is the fluidity of its treatment of time, not to mention the ‘joke’ about physical space, an echo of the fantastical disruption of space and time that marked Buñuel’s first film, made with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, it has no film score, hard to imagine as that is when we are burdened so much by music-saturated television. So, that makes it right for reinventing as an opera? Thomas Adès thought so, although there were other reasons such as the story’s dramatic premise and its claustrophobic atmosphere. In the production in the Royal Opera house, the surrealist touches become a bit contrived – film is so much better at these things –

2017-05-12 17.44.22

but the hysteria inherent in the situation is wonderfully heightened. The film’s visual patina of light and black, created by Gabriel Figueroa’s camera, beautifully crafted as it is,

2017-05-12 17.45.01

the ultimate barbarism: Nobile’s cello is destroyed for fuel

cannot match the musical flourishes of Adès’ score. The film can be criticised too for the difficulty of distinguishing the individual characters who in a way all look the same, the men in their dinner jackets, the women in their evening gowns. Adès and his librettist, Tom Cairns, do something clever here by using what they call the ‘encantada’ (as in ‘enchanted to meet you’) sequence to introduce the twelve characters (down from seventeen) to the audience.

What really distinguishes the opera from the film, however, is its tragic quality. These people are not so much condemned to hell by their bourgeois, ruling-class origins as by the condition of being human. And the opera is to be appreciated not so much by would-be revolutionaries as by people who are a mirror to those on stage: after all the characters are gathered for dinner after a night at the opera listening to ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’. The effect was so powerful that as we left the building it crossed my mind that we would lack the will to exit it, even with all the doors unlocked. Are we meant to like the people in the story? I think the people in the film not, but the people in the opera yes, or at least perhaps – they are our tragic selves.

*

This is Adès’ third opera. His first one, ‘Powder Her Face’ (1995), was also tawdry, and makes full use of the modest musical resources of a 15-piece ensemble. Here such forces are of the fullest and lessons from his symphonic work, such as ‘Asyla’, ‘Polaris’ and ‘Tevot’, make the score sometimes searing, sometimes blasting. Acts 1 and 2 were performed without an interval, and separated by a musical interlude marked by pounding drums, an idea taken from the Good Friday tradition of communal drumming (for 24 hours!) in Calanda, the remote town in Spain where Buñuel was bought up. (That it made a powerful impact on him is witnessed by Buñuel giving it a chapter in his autobiography, ‘My Last Breath’, and in the fact that his son Juan-Luis made a documentary about it in 1960, which can be watched on YouTube – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jbu6qqdxj8&t=2s)

Act 1 of the opera puts us in the vice, and Act 2 turn the screws on us. Act 3, I felt, was less successful. This may be due to the curse of the interval but the question Act 3 poses without quite answering is how it will all end. In disaster movies, the people are saved (with the good ending happily and the bad unhappily), but would this happen here? The film has an elegant solution which seems to arrive seamlessly and ends with a twist, the most comic moment in the whole story.

In the opera I got confused. In the film the offer of suicide by the host, Edmundo Nobile (noble by name and by nature), is treated in an off-hand away and superseded by Leticia’s eloquent and clever solution.

2017-05-12 17.45.46

Nobile gets the gun with which to shoot himself

In the opera it is a big moment that teeters on the idea of Christian atonement: one man’s death can save others. But then this premise is choked off by Leticia’s big aria, an unmotivated Ladino song, sung in her shrill manner (Ades’ intention, not the singer’s poor technique), that fits very oddly into the whole.

Of course, I have only heard the opera once, and the ending might make much more sense after it has been heard half a dozen times. What will they say in 30 years’ time, and 100 years’ time, and 500 years’ time? I have no idea but I do foresee a long life for this piece, as well as for the film.

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DESCENDING TO HADES part 1: BUÑUEL’S ‘EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON

05 Friday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, God, opera and film, surrealism

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Ades, Bunuel, Exterminating Angel, Royal Opera House, Tom Cairns

It is the late 1960s: Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is on at the cinema, and I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Half a century on, I am drawn from Norwich, like a lone iron filing to a far-off magnet, to the Royal Opera House in London on the 3rd  May to see the new opera ‘The Exterminating Angel’ by Thomas Adès (or Hades in certain imaginations), with a libretto by Tom Cairns drawn from the script Luis Buñuel wrote for the film.

I am preparing some treasure-able words on a comparison between the opera and the film for my next blog piece. Suffice it to write now a Trip-Advisorish comment on going to the ROH in Covent Garden.

Oh, splendiferous temple to grand opera and high art. You cannot enter the building without a palpable sense of entering a sanctum of civilisation at its most civilised. Its elegant luxury, and the emanations of power, financial and cultural, that it exudes make me gasp in admiration.

But then, what is this? We paid £72 for our two seats, admittedly not at all a bad price by London standards for a theatre seat, but we were seated on the Left Balcony, which means that by the design of the building – extraordinary when it was first built and even more extraordinary now – you only see two thirds of the stage. We’ve encountered this problem before but never until now have we been so short-changed. The stage design is brilliant in every way, except that a lot happens at the side of the stage and is therefore out of sight to spectators in the left-side balcony. To rub it in, the ROH has ditzy little wall lights all way round which no doubt were le dernier cri when it was built but when you lean over the balcony to see better (thus blocking the view of the person behind you) these pesky objects get in the way. Banish them, I say. Replace them with flat lights from John Lewis.

The photo was taken before the performance began when the sheep that feature in the opera (yes, sheep) were paraded on stage. You can see what I mean about the lights.

ROH 2 - May 2017.jpg

The real story however is the opera, which is a drama about a group of wealthy socialites at a dinner party held after an evening at the opera (‘Lucia di Lammermoor’) that all goes wrong, the dinner party from Hades you might say. When it finished and we were seeking to leave, I had a curious feeling: will we in fact be able to? But that is for the next post . . . coming soon, I hope.

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The unmade film of ‘In Parenthesis’

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in opera and film

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David Jones, Iain Bell, In Parenthesis, Somme, WNO

Transferring books from stage to screen is a staple of modern culture, but you would not necessarily choose David Jones’s ‘In Parenthesis’ to work your magic on. ‘In Parenthesis’ is a First World War memoir published in 1937 and so a little late in the day compared to Edmund Blunden’s ‘Undertones of War’ (1928), Robert Graves’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ (1929), and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’ (1930). But it was worth Jones taking his time, for ‘In Parenthesis’ is the most original of these memoirs and to my mind the most vivid. I first read it in the 1970s, and have cleaved to it ever since.

Its potency is in the way it fuses the vernacular with the poetic, the realistic with the mythological and religious. It is superlative in a number of ways, one of which is the rendition of soldiers’ speech. Since Jones was a private, we are reading here the words of the ‘poor bloody infantry’ not those of the officer class. It is a mixture of Cockney and of Welsh manners and words, for Jones, whose father was Welsh (and mother a catholic) and who was born in London, served in the Welch Fusiliers recruited from London and Wales. This speech would work well on stage, or even better as a radio play – and indeed there was a notable adaptation done for BBC radio. Yet the mythological/religious element presents more of a challenge, even though it is poetry, and poetry is best spoken.

For the challenge with a stage version is doing justice to the visual drama of the story, which runs from the assembly of the Regiment in Wales, through embarkation to France and into the front line (‘cushy, mate, cushy’ as we are unreliably informed). Part 6 is about the wait for the Somme offensive to begin and Part 7 about the attack on Mametz Wood *, a bloody affair in which Jones saw his comrades mown down and himself wounded in the leg, crawling to safety with great difficulty. In the final pages the Queen of the Woods distributes garlands to the fallen soldiers, German as well as British.

In Parenthesis

from Act 2 of the opera – photo by Bill Cooper

So far the book hasn’t got its film; what it now gets is an opera, commissioned from composer Iain Bell by Welsh National Opera, and premiered by them on 13 May 2016 within touching distance of the centenary of the first day of the Somme, 1 July 2016, which is when I saw it performed at the Royal Opera House in London. Opera is wonderful for making the dramatic intensely dramatic and the words memorable through musical phrases. Nothing pierces the heart like it. To see it and hear it for the first time, without preconception, was an intense experience: the production, stage design, movement and gesture; the words sung by a cast of eleven; a full orchestra straining to make all the sounds it can muster. I knew Jones’s text beforehand but it was demanding to watch the action, follow the words on the surtitles, and absorb the score, all at the same time, and hard as it is on the composer, it was his music that I absorbed least. But salvation was at hand because two days later I listened to a broadcast of the opera on radio 3: in this case the visual aspect was absent and the sung words present. In particular the beauties of Bell’s orchestral score were able to assert themselves. Within the space of forty-eight hours I had a second intense encounter with this extraordinary work.

What I want now is a film version. Not one of those anaemic streamed performances to your local arts cinema that are so popular now, but the full synaesthetic experience: in addition to the words as subtitles and the music coming through a full sound system, we should get on the screen the full optical experience of the soldiers in close-up, the flash and crash of the whizz bangs at the front, a realisation of the mystical ending using the full resources of CGI. A 3-D IMAX version would do nicely. And as a film it would have the merit of being digitally available for repeated encounters.

We are still a long way from this. The opera was commissioned by the Nicholas John Trust and supported by the National Lottery and the Department for Culture. Opera is an expensive pastime and has to be subsidised. Making a film is another expensive pastime, but if it is subsidised it is only on a basis of break even and then turning a profit. Fair enough, but on this basis my film of ‘In Parenthesis’ is unlikely to get made.

* “There was some bastard woods as Jerry was sitting tight in and this mob [the Welch fusiliers] had clickt for the job of asking him to move on – if you please – an’ thanks very much indeed, signally obliged to yer, Jerry-boy.”

for a dyspeptic review of the opera by Stephen Walsh go to http://www.theartsdesk.com/opera/parenthesis-welsh-national-opera

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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.

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