The Knack To See White When It Is Black: The Tales Of Hoffman (1951)

I am constantly amazed by certain directors when each time I unpack a work of theirs for the first time I find myself captivated and moved in new ways, showing that their cinematic abilities transcend singular feats or ideas, able to appropriate various genres, stylistic choices and ideas into deeply moving and wholly encompassing films.  When I think of directors that this statement holds true for, although they are not given equal credit to Kubrick or the Welles, my mind immediately wanders to the work of Agnes Varda and Paul Thomas Anderson.  Each time I find one of their films anew, or sit down and earnestly revisit their works it is as engaging, if not more moving than the first time, and, fortunately, for the both of them there are still films in their respective oeuvres that have yet to be viewed.  I am adding the directing team of Powell and Pressburger to this list, because they could very well prove the dynamic duo that are in possession of two films in my top ten film discoveries of the last year when I compose such a list on Letterboxd in the upcoming months.  While quite familiar with them years ago, I have only started to chip away at much of their collective works in the past year, one being the absolutely perfect The Red Shoes.  However, it is not this film that moved me in a new cinematic way, but was instead A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven) which helped me to understand new cinematic conventions and exactly how powerful a shift one can evoke simply by moving between color and black and white.  As such, stepping into their 1951 film The Tales of Hoffman was initially more of a checklist activity that happened to coincide with my month of musicals than an actual desire, thinking that it would not even come close to A Matter of Life and Death.  While this is true, because the former is traipsing around in top ten films of all time territory for me, The Tales of Hoffman is still an absolutely exception and realized work of art.  I found myself yelling expletives at the screen not out of disdain, but out of earnest confusion as to how such magic could be achieved and how even two directors could deliver such consistency for a two hour film.  This is the magic of the moviegoing experience so many speak of and wax poetic about in interviews and text.  This film was ahead of its time and frankly is still quite ahead of its time.  Nothing works on the visceral viewer quite like the lavish, lush landscapes of a Powell and Pressburger musical.  Nothing.

The Tales of Hoffman is a pseudo-omnibus film in that it is a collection of short narratives all centering around the literary figure of Hoffman (Robert Rounseville).  This man, a poet of sorts navigates the spaces of various tales as a poet and observer to some rather curious occurrences, the first taking place in the laboratory of scientist and engineer of sorts.  In this laboratory the scientist is noted for his ability to create automatons that replicate human movement and behavior, having particular success with the Olympia (Moira Sheerer) whose lifelike movements become a thing of longing for various persons.  Indeed, when donning a special pair of glasses the person looking at the various automatons, including Olympia come to realize that they replicate human behavior on far more than a marionette level.  The second story centers on the travels of Hoffman through Venice where he meats a sultry courtesan named Giulietta (Ludmilla Tchérina).  The bejeweled woman while incredibly attractive and clearly curious about Hoffman, becomes indifferent to his ways when she comes to understand him as nothing more than a trickster, emphasized by his attempts to fabricate various jewels out of colored candle wax.  The final and perhaps most evocative of the three stories centers on the relationship between Antonia Crespel (Ann Ayars) a sickly opera singer who simply wants to be with her partner who is once again Hoffman.  However, the love is made to be stifled by Antonia's father and stickler for formalities and class separation Spalanzi (Léonide Massine) thus making their relationship an impossibility.  These stories are, of course, all woven together by the narration of Hoffman who explains to those listening to, or rather attending, the ballet that the stories are all intended to represent aspects of a ballet dancer named Stella (Moira Sheerer) who is decidedly his muse.  Yet when, one of Hoffman's advisors and confidants explains that this is problematic, doubled by Stella's own refusal of his advances, Hoffman is left with nothing more to do than to sulk at a bar that fills with young patrons.

Meta.  It is a thing that I will admit to throwing around rather hap hazardously, if not outwardly ironically here on the blog, suggesting that films often take on a meta level that is, if anything, purely incidental.  In regards to The Tales of Hoffman, however, this is meta-narrative, meta-cinema and probably other forms of meta that I could not even begin to unpack.  Tales of Hoffman, is already setting itself up as an adaptation, borrowing form Jacques Offenbach's opera of the same name, however, it becomes fascinating when one considers that the story is about a group of people attending an opera, wherein Hoffman is the focus of the story, yet within the very focus of the story, it is Hoffman telling a further series of stories.  The viewer of this film is asked to watch a film about a group of people watching a play about a man telling stories.  That might be as deep a layer of metafiction as I have encountered and one would assume that such structures would be stacked in such a way as to cause the narrative to implode within itself.  Not in the world of Powell and Pressburger, however, this sort of narrative richness is their expertise and one becomes so aware of the sense of scale both in its grandness, emphasized during the Antonia sequence, when the two lovers are attempting to unite and an image of theatre seating is layered to appear as though it is celestial in composition, only to be double by a kaleidoscopic image of the scowling Spalanzi.  Yet the sense of grandiosity is not the real fascination here, as it is a thing that is often achieved to great ends within cinema.  The real curiosity her comes in the way of Powell and Pressburger devoting an equal level of attention to the most minor of spaces. Indeed, the already expansive narrative delves into the microscopic by allowing the etchings on the side of beer steins to take on their own dance number, moving into the space of art in such a simple way as to show and interconnectedness that New Age thinkers could only hope to express in their faux-intellecutal sermons.  Few films move through space in such a moving way, but even fewer do so with such exuberance.

Key Scene:  For all the real ballet going on in this film, the marionette sequence is absolutely stunning.

This film is sadly OOP and while I have been lucky enough to attain a Criterion disc copy, I would suggest finding a means with which to rent it as its price tag is steadily rising.

After All, What Is Time? A Mere Tyranny: A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)

The idea of melodrama is something that has its grounding solidly within the romance genre and tends to branch out in minimal ways to other genres.  This is a pretty consistent thought about the stylistic choice, unless, of course, one is referring to the works of the beloved and highly influential masters of Technicolor Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose works are no stranger to this blog.  As I imagine most people did, I came to this duo via The Criterion Collection who have done an excellent job of bring many of their films to homes of cinephiles seeking out the most mesmerizing and stellar of movie experiences.  Yet, the film I had the joy of catching up with recently, their 1946 pseudo-war film A Matter of Life and Death, also known as Stairway to Heaven, has yet to receive the illustrious Criterion touch.  As such it went off of my radar for quite some time, but when I heard its mention first on an episode of Filmspotting regarding "romantic gestures in film" only to be followed by its inclusion as one of the hundreds of clips in the all-encompassing Story of Film miniseries, I knew that both its unique narrative and its visual style were something that I needed to witness.  Imagine, if you will, a film that has some of the grandly woven romantic offerings of the best World War II romance stories, but with the surrealist eye of Cocteau.  Moving perfectly between black and white and the Technicolor cinematography which made the duo famous, A Matter of Life and Death is serene, fantastical and easily one of the most artistic moments in all of cinema.  It is clear where other directors would draw heavy influence, whether it be the obvious borrowing by Wim Wenders for Wings of Desire or in more subtle ways for a variety of East Asian romance film.  A Matter of Life and Death, however, does not simply stop at looking amazing, it continues on to be a perfectly pitched story of sacrifice and acceptance of loss that is so masterfully acted it is really a surprise it has not received a larger awareness, because in some ways it is a better film than The Red Shoes or Black Narcissus, both of which are definitive masterpieces.  I have allowed myself almost a week to let the film wash over me to before I was certain, but I know definitively that this is my new favorite work within the romance genre.

A Matter of Life and Death begins in the midst of a sky fight between Axis planes and a handful of British pilots, most notably Peter Carter (David Niven) whose realization that he will inevitably be gunned down and die leads him to seek solace in the radio assistance of American woman June (Kim Hunter).  While he is initially playful with her reciting poetry and telling her she has a wonderful voice, the imminence of death lead to the two confessing their shared hopes for love.  Tragedy is not avoidable, however, and Peter's plane does crash.  This event is followed by a transferring of the narrative to the black and white world of what is assumedly the afterlife, where a variety of deceased figures deal with the incoming deaths, many of which are soldiers.  The bookkeeper, as well as one of Peter's fellow pilots note his absence, despite it being clear that he could not have survived the crash.  At this point Peter's assigned aide to the afterlife Conductor 71 (Marius Goring) admits to having missed grabbing him due to the thick British fog.  This realization then leads viewers back to Earth where a Peter who has survived his crash navigates the land, only to instantly run into, of all people, June.  The two seize the inconceivable occurrence as a sign to pursue their love, realizing quickly that their feelings are quite real.  Yet when Peter begins seeing visions of Conductor 71 and smelling fried onions, the concerned Doctor Reeves (Roger Livesey) steps in to help diagnose Peter's visions.  Reeves comes to the conclusion that Peter has suffered from serious head trauma that, if not treated, will result in his death.  This narrative in reality begins paralleling Peter's own experiences with Conductor 71 who says that he can be afforded a trial to justify his staying on Earth, one that allows him to pull from any person in the history of time to serve as his defendant, but it must happen in the upcoming hours, coincidentally at the exact same time as his surgery.  Finding it difficult to choose a counsel, Peter is hesitant, but when a motorcycle accident takes the life of Doctor Reeves he appears in the afterlife and reluctantly agrees to help Peter.  What unfolds after is a trial between Peter and the laws of the afterlife that transcends space and time, where he is to convince those in attendance that he should be allowed to pursue love that was allowed to blossom as a result of the miscalculation on the part of the conductor.  Heated and heavily semantical, Peter, along with the help of a brief dream induced visitation by June, convinces the jury of his deserved chance and the two are given their lives on Earth, where he survives his tricky surgery and the two are assumedly to live a long and love-filled life.

What makes A Matter of Life and Death both a great romance and an important moment in cinema is that it manages to take its subject matter and extend it to a large scope, considering not only what grounds a persons notions of love, but what causes a person in a different setting to have feelings of animosity.  We are shown the relationship between June and Peter as one entirely of adoration, that goes against the societal norms of British folks marrying one another and Americans staying within the states, although as history certainly showed, that was far from the case.  Similarly, the film analyzes the, then, deeply seeded resentment between some loyalist British and Americans as to their relationship to one another, despite fighting on the same side of a larger war that questioned the value of human life on a scale larger than mere nationality.  Powell and Pressburger manage to deal with the questions with a precise combination of levity and seriousness that shows how entrenched distrust can cause for sadness to more than a single person and, further, how the seeming simplicity of two persons and their shared love can extend well beyond their rather personal experiences.  By pulling from a wide net of historical narratives and centering it with the era of World War II, where combat casualties were high, the film becomes both a reflection and expose on the nature of how love forms quickly or slowly depending on time allotments and how in its most enriching experiences it can take on an otherworldly feeling of importance.  I claim to be no scholar on the ethics/philosophy of love, nor fully aware of its biological process, but having lived long enough to know that it is a real feeling and one that ebbs and flows according to the aforementioned factors, I can affirm that, for me personally, this film really gets the beauty entrenched within true love and passion paints the film both narratively and visually, making it first about a love between characters and secondly about the very love of using cinema to share a worldview.  A Matter of Life and Death, much like its story, extends between at least two worlds of thinking and manages to combine them into a shared moment of wonder.

Key Scene:  The film, as noted earlier, was also called Stairway to Heaven.  There is a scene in the film that makes this name obvious and boy is it a feat of movie technology.

This film is hard to come by, I would suggest seeking it out by alternative methods or patiently await a Criterion release, it should only be a matter of time before it makes their prestigious list.

Simplicity Can Only Be Achieved By Great Agony Of Body And Spirit: The Red Shoes (1948)

A viewing of The Red Shoes has been a long time in the making, it was probably the biggest gap in my film viewing catalogue and was always a point of shame when I would have to admit to having never seen it when talking with fellow cinephile.  Finally, on Friday I had yet another individual with excellent taste in film mention it to me and I decided then and there that I would go home and watch it without hesitation.  Going into it I expected nothing short of perfection and I can say with every degree of certainty that the film still overwhelmed me with its magic, its madness and its sheer cinematic mastery.  The Red Shoes, has made a very welcomed come back thanks to the diligent work of some film preservationists at UCLA, the tireless efforts of the gang over at Criterion and a surprise advocation for the film coming from Martin Scorsese whose filmmaking oeuvre certainly does not reflect this ballet heavy, musical influenced film from the masters of Technicolor Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  There is not a moment within The Red Shoes that is not entirely entrenched within the cinematic spectacle, much like Singin' In The Rain the film exists as a work of grandiosity so artistic that to profess to disliking it would essentially be admitting that you hate living.  As pretentious as that may sound, The Red Shoes seriously is an impeccable film and aside from a few moments of wry British humor there is nothing about this film not to completely love, in fact, it manages to the cross the seemingly divergent lines of classicist filmmaking styles and highly expressionistic experimental filmmaking with such fervor that it has the feeling of being a colorful rendition of an early Busby Berkeley dance number.  Furthermore, like the aforementioned Singin' In The Rain you can easily go into this film assuming you know the plot to the film, yet it will very much unfold in front of you with such expertise and layers that when the close finally does come in its climactic intensity you will realize that you may well have stopped breathing for a few minutes.  It is still baffling that this highly realized film is essentially just an adaptation of a children's fairy tale, all be it a dark one.

The Red Shoes begins with a crew of students rushing an auditorium to witness the performance of an acclaimed ballet piece from Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) whose prestige has led to all group regardless of class to view his work, including Julian Craster (Marius Goring) an aspiring conductor who is immediately baffled to realize that his own pieces are being lifted for the performance.  Also in attendance is Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) an aspiring dancer whose ties to high places afford her an opportunity to meet the elusive Lermontov post performance, using her charm to assure a chance to audition.  Craster via letter confronts Lermontov about his theft, only to regret his decision, in the process meeting Lermontov who hires him on the spot.  Both Craster and Page become witness to the insanity and deception latent within the world of ballet performance, and begin to fathom how much power Lermontov truly wields.  Each, nonetheless, takes their turn in making an identity for themselves, Page by dancing wildly at a minor performance for the company, where as Craster jumps at the opportunity to rewrite a ballet adaptation of The Red Shoes, which he does brilliantly leading to Lermontov choosing it as the company's next pieces.  It is within this performance of The Red Shoes that harmony comes together beautifully as Craster and Page unleash a chemistry undeniable in a ballet performance that literally transcends the space and time of the theater.  The show of course receives rave reviews and the names of Page and Craster become well known, yet they fall for one another, much to the disapproval of Lermontov who sees it as a risk to his newly found cash cow.  He demands that they split leading to a deep depression in the two and the subsequent falling apart of the company.  Lermontov, nonetheless, manages to convince Page to return to the performance, which leads to a falling out between her and Craster who leaves dejected.  Realizing her mistake Page attempts to return to Craster, only to encounter her demise in what is easily one of cinema's most harrowing moments.  Of course, The Red Shoes is danced on, although the lack of Page is a very real thing when the troupe decides to perform without the presence of their leading lady, or any person in her place.

I once attended a conference where I saw a presentation comparing The Red Shoes to the then recently released Black Swan.  A majority of the discussion grounded the comparison in a use of Jacques Lacan's mirror theory which at the time was something I was unfamiliar with making for a rather difficult to understand talk, although I certainly think, upon seeing The Red Shoes that something is to be said about the notion of identity, sanity and the affects of performance demands on the individual.  Both films feature female performers whose quest for perfection and acknowledgement lead them to spiral into a degree of madness, although in Aronofsky's film the madness is tied to sexual inexperience and clear mental distress.  In the case of The Red Shoes it is a desire for success and a clear passion for the art of ballet, which by all accounts is probably the most labor intensive art one could choose.  Furthermore, where as Black Swan is about a singular individual, The Red Shoes focuses on a group of peoples' experiences, viewers have just come to associate the film with Moria Shearer, because it is her image the dominates the most magical and cinematic portion of the film.  The Red Shoes is much more a film about navigating the world of art, which has inherent ties to prestige and bourgeois power moves.  We see this in Page's complete disconnect from the fact that she is able to attend and leave practice in a chauffeured car, where as her fellow dancers must walk everywhere.  In sharp contrast is Craster whose identity as a student means he has little wealth or power to navigate, making his being robbed of his musical identity the exact thing to push him into impassioned action, which has relative success, up until the films closing moments of course.  Where The Red Shoes and Black Swan seem to come back together is in the closing moments of both main female characters, each arguably perform their last leap of perfection with dire results, but both also raise the question as to where one can go but down after achieving perfection.

Key Scene:  This is a no brainer, the entire dance sequence in the middle of the film could play on repeat on televisions and I know I would watch it countless times.

The Criterion bluray really is something to be amazed by and well worth owning.

Without Discipline We Should All Behave Like Children: Black Narcissus (1947)

The works of Powell and Pressburger, as they related to Archer, are cinematic feasts.  Most everyone one of their films are in glorious Technicolor and incorporate expensive special effects that translate beautifully for being over sixty years old.  Not to mention the famous directing duo has an ability to make melodrama seem admirably understated and expertly extravagant.  Their 1947 work Black Narcissus does just this, while mixing religious guilt and sexual longing into the mix, creating perhaps one of their most controversial films, second only to the nightmare that is Peeping Tom.  With a stellar cast, including a young Jean Simmons and the always-amiable Sabu, the imagery seeps seduction and subversion.  It is, however, not an entirely problem free movie, in fact, as can be expected of a film released in the late forties, it deals with issues of race, gender and class rather flippantly.  Needless to say, Black Narcissus is a glorious bit of filmmaking that is right inline with my previous review of The School of the Holy Beast, minus the blatant sexual exploitation of course.

The film follows a group of young nuns who have been tasked with creating a self-sustaining convent in the uninhabitable Himalayas.  Their already difficult task is made exponentially worse by a insolent general whose whimsy with newly formed religious outposts causes the group to find the task of caring for locals more burdensome than divinely rewarding.  Regardless, the group is led by the young, but keenly devout, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr).  In youthful ignorance, Clodagh refuses to see the mission as an inevitable failure.  Along with a group of fellow handpicked nuns, including Clodagh's rival Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron, the convent opens rather successfully.  This success, as should be no surprise, is short-lived, particularly with the emergence of the suave and cunning Mr. Dean (David Farrar).  Dean, despite being an Englishmen by birth, is an expert in the Himalayan people and advises the nuns on the best methods to assure harmony with the locals.  Clodagh, as well as Ruth, find themselves incessantly drawn towards Dean, often associating him with memories of their relationships prior to their convent life.  As if to make matters worse, their dreams of intimacy are enacted physically between the general's son (Sabu) and a sultry local girl named Kanchi (Jean Simmons).  The unfulfilled desire, as well as a growing animosity between the convent and locals, results in a climactic downfall of the convent that results in one of the most mesmerizing and heart-pounding death scenes I have ever witnessed in a movie.  The film closes with voice-overs and panning shots of the now abandoned convent, employing all the key genre elements of melodrama, in sweet, aching subtlety.  Black Narcissus is a film that simply ends with its characters left desiring and worse because of it.

This film takes liberties with its idyllic portrayals of race, gender and class.  This is evident from the seemingly synchronous relations of the nuns to the smiling faces on the natives accepting their colonization, but as I noted earlier this is a style very evident of the eras filmmaking, particularly as it relates to British works.  This film reminds me of two other British films, the first being The Thief of Baghdad, which involved Powell and a handful of other directors, and an earlier work titled Gungadin, starring a young Carey Grant.  The films collectively deal with issues of colonization, whether it be racial, sexual or economically.  Gungadin exploits Indian soldiers in the name of expanding the British empire, while The Thief of Baghdad exploits the racial uniqueness of actors such as Sabu and Rex Ingram to give the film an exotic feel, while relying on a white actor to play the major roles, this is done in Black Narcissus with Kanchi, as Jean Simmons is basically applying yellow face to play the part.  These are all tragic actions reflective of film prior to the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements of the late sixties and early seventies that cannot be denied.  It is not to dismiss the movies entirely, but instead to make viewers more self aware of what they are taking in when watching a film that is in all other respects flawless.  I would use this same critique on Gone With The Wind, a critique that many people I know are unwilling to acknowledge, because they are scared of tarnishing its "classicness."  I want people to love Black Narcissus, but I do not want them to take its historical relevance for granted either.

Black Narcissus is a Criterion blu-ray if ever one existed and well, well, well worth owning.  Buy two copies, one for yourself and one for a friend...it is just that good.