The Tales of Hoffmann

Considered the last great Powell/Pressburger film by modern appraisers -- The Battle of the River Plate enjoyed a rapturous reception upon its release and was the collaborators' third-most profitable film -- The Tales of Hoffmann marked the duo's most ambitious project yet. Michael Powell always sought to combine the various arts into the cinema, into the "composed film," and he'd made significant strides with his masterpiece, The Red Shoes, which combined his cinematic form and his usual painterly touches with magisterial architecture, music and dance. Hoffmann, as an adaptation of an opera, seeks to incorporate that mix of five of the seven arts with literature, as operas come with librettos. As for sculpture, well, that depends on how poetically one wishes to discuss staging.

As with The Red Shoes, Powell is not content merely to reproduce his artform-within-an-artform merely as a simple adaptation of stage to screen. The dance sequence in the Archers' ballet film blended the effervescence of dance with the magic of cinema, rooting the action on a stage yet jutting off in directions that reality could not follow. That blend of the old style of design -- cut-outs and well-chosen colors and lighting -- with the freedom of cinema is what makes that film, and this one, so amazing. The Tales of Hoffmann at no point breaks from Jacques Offenbach's opera (though Powell does omit some details and plot lines of the original), to the point that its sets are blatantly constructed (some are even surrealistic, influenced by such artists as Joan Miró). Yet Powell and Pressburger make this spare presentation into something so far beyond the original theatrical adaptations, those pictures that simply transplanted Shakespeare et al. to the screen with nary a hint of visual imagination, that it looks more vibrant and tangible than the most ambitious operatic films that followed.

Artifice plays a huge role in The Tales of Hoffmann, from its opening synchronization of rotating weather vanes with the first strains of the score to a shot of actors revolving in a gilded gazebo as if in a giant music box to three separate shots of the playbill that introduces each of the three acts with a brief synopsis and the dramatis personae. One of its final shots shows the orchestra's conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, guiding the film's music. Visually, Powell uses a number of camera techniques that call attention to themselves, such as overprinting and jump cuts. Indeed, the tales of the titular Hoffmann, which begin after a drunken revel in a tavern, seem almost an afterthought, in the best possible sense.

Powell pulls out all the stops from the start, moving from the opening credits and the start of the music to a transcendent sequence known as the Dragonfly Dance, a setpiece from a ballet within the opera. In it, the ballerina Stella (Moira Shearer) dances like a maniac as Count Lindorf (Robert Helpmann, who looks every bit as if he just walked off a German expressionist film) watches with a mixture of lust and malice -- this will factor into the story later. The Dragonfly Dance, an explosion of ecstasy so light that it ends with Shearer seemingly bounding upon lily pads and leaves, is no less impressive a feat than the dynamic sequence in The Red Shoes. It's so good that one wonders why Powell would place it at the start. Maybe he didn't want to bury the lede, as it were, but where else can he go from there?

It all makes sense, though, once Act I begins, as Hoffmann recounts the first of his three epic, tragic romances. Act I occurs within an obviously staged set draped in brilliant yellow, creating a light, frothy mood enhanced by the bubbly music. Hoffmann arrives to find a scientist, Spalanzani (Léonide Massine) having created Olympia (Shearer again), a dancing doll who twirls and leaps when wound up. Another scientist, Coppelius (Helpmann a second time, even more Germanic and expressionistic than the last) sells Hoffmann a pair of magic glasses that make Olympia seem real, as Spalanzani sets off the robotic girl into her dance. Much of this first act plays out humorously, with Olympia dancing frenetically until her gears slow down, only to be wound once more by the deceitful scientists. However, in context of the Dragonfly Dance sequence, Olympia's constant wavering between movement and immobility visualizes a complexity behind what might have been a simple setpiece: after watching Shearer dance so majestically and yet so fiercely from the start, seeing her "powered down" produces a cognitive dissonance.

Powell heightens the effect by filming her almost exclusively in long shot so that, when Coppelius learns that his colleague tricked him out of the profits and returns to dismember the doll, the moment is even more shocking. Coppelius rips apart everything but a leg, which continues to dance, a touch that brings the contradictions of the doll to a close by giving us a Shearer who dances even in death. It also builds upon the Dragonfly Dance by showing the degree to which a male character (invariably played by Helpmann) either subtly or openly controls the female in each segment and brings about her ruination.

That Olympia is a dancing doll instead of a singing one, as per the opera, advances this underlying theme by showing Helpmann break her down into the component that most attracts Hoffmann. Presumably Powell shifted Olympia's talent from singing to dance because he would eventually cover the downfall of a singer in the third act, but the simpler explanation is that dance is more visually arresting than singing; in the first major cinematic version of an opera, Powell turns the opera on its head. Martin Scorsese refers to this shift and its influence on the film as "dance as narrative" regarding how dance becomes the primary method of storytelling. But dance is also the form and the subtext of the film, central to any reading of the movie. Note that, compared to Helpmann, Shearer and Massine, Robert Rounseville is the only singer instead of a dancer with an overdubbed voice, and is it any wonder than Hoffmann himself is the least interesting character in the movie? (Note that he doesn't get title billing in the poster.) Even garbed in outlandish, garish purple that clashes with each of the different, alternately colored sets, Hoffmann exists in Powell's mind simply to link the segments and is otherwise unremarkable.

Powell and Pressburger move the focus of the film further away from the title character in the second act, where Olympia is replaced by the prostitute, Giulietta (Ludmilla Tchérina), the virgin white of the doll swapped for a seductive black leotard. Bewitched, literally and figuratively, by her magician pimp, Dapertutto (Helpmann), Giulietta steals away Hoffmann's reflection and, implicitly, his soul.* Powell contrasts Giulietta with Olympia is a stunning aside following a fatal duel between Hoffmann and another suitor who holds the key to her bedroom: suddenly, Powell separates the woman from the action and switches her black clothes to a white sari, focusing on her jeweled feet as she lightly walks upon the heads of all the men she'd lured to their doom. In that moment, she transforms into Kali**, the Hindu goddess of time and change who represents both fertility and destruction. The most famous myth involving Kali involves her dancing upon the corpses of the slain on a battlefield; by reflecting her, Giulietta becomes a destroyer through her dance where Olympia was herself destroyed by hers. Hoffmann manages to regain his reflection, but Giulietta is already gone with Dapertutto in a gondola that looks more Egyptian than Venetian, as if the prostitute now becomes Isis and Dapertutto Osiris as they ride off-screen into the realm of the dead.

Or perhaps she becomes Persephone and Dapertutto Hades, especially given the use of the Demeter/Persephone myth in the third and final act. Antonia (Ann Ayers) lives on a Grecian island in a home that might wash away at any second but seems as if it will stand forever. Compared to the previous women, though, Antonia cannot express her talent, cursed to die if she ever sings with her angelic voice. The Persephone imagery begins in earnest when Dr. Miracle (Helpmann) arrives, looking not unlike the Grim Reaper (which is of course is the modernized image of Hades but still relevant). Dr. Miracle drugs her in an attempt to coax the young woman into singing, and the drugs give the poor girl intense hallucinations. Her room becomes a massive garden with stone steps, which turn into an endless stairwell in the middle of space as the disembodied voice of Antonia's dead mother coaxes her onto the stage. The entire sequence builds into a frenzy, the initially inviting imagery of Antonia's visions is layered with increasingly unsettling undertones of the dark truth behind her hallucination. And so, tricked by "Death" by the image of her mother, Antonia takes to the stage for her aria (as flames arise to mark her damnation and hands reach up à la Lang's Metropolis), and Hoffmann arrives just int time to see her collapse. As the last piece of Olympia to function was her dancing leg, so too is the last vestige of Antonia's character her voice.

Each of the three acts is itself intriguing, but it is the denouement that collects them into a larger intelligence and emotional reward. Lindorf confronts Hoffmann and rips off the various faces of his disguises, bringing each of the related female characters back to life. They then combine into the character of Stella, dressed in white, and suddenly the treatment of these women becomes more clearly a Christ parable. Olympia, Antonia, even Giulietta (who survives but clearly "belongs" to her pimp by the end) are torn apart for their womanhood, yet in their destruction they defeat death, three like figures who combine into one composite figure garbed in pure white. Powell then splits the frame to show Stella dancing with Hoffmann from four different angles, a pas de deux that becomes even more an emotional payoff through its visual duplication. Yet the director clearly stresses the emotion of the shot over the connection with Hoffmann, to whose reality Powell returns via a tableau vivant of the tavern patrons frozen around their drunken storyteller. As in the original opera, Stella arrives to see her admirer too wasted to stand and leaves with Lindorf instead. But Powell and Pressburger omit the revelation of Hoffmann's companion Nicklaus to be the Muse who inspires and loves her poet; when it comes to Hoffmann's denouement, Powell takes the same stance as the rabbi who relates the story of the goyim's teeth in A Serious Man: "Who cares?"

But let us consider Nicklaus and the actress who plays him. Pamela Brown was the director's love from the moment they met to her early death at 58 in 1975, and her own story informs many of the elements of The Tales of Hoffmann. Brown suffered from crippling arthritis from age 16 that made acting an excruciating experience, and she could perform only under heavy sedatives. Thus, she is reflected in all three of the women who tempt Hoffmann. Like Olympia, she had to be "wound up" before each performance; like Giulietta, her feet represent destruction (Giulietta's of others, Brown's of herself); and the haze of Antonia and her ultimate self-annihilation visualize the effects of the drugs that allowed Brown to kill herself day after day. When Nicklaus sadly closes the curtain (literally) on Antonia's body at the end of Act III, Brown herself might be looking away from her own future in fear. Powell does not reveal Nicklaus as the Muse because he'd already proved how deeply Brown affected him and influenced his storytelling throughout the film. Look at the end of the second act, when Hoffmann breaks the mirror in Giulietta's room and regains his reflection. Powell cuts to a close-up of Hoffmann in the mirror with Brown just behind, her eyes glowing from reflected light. Though in the background, she draws as much attention as Hoffmann until she slips behind the protagonist, symbolically returning Hoffmann's soul and making a larger statement about Nicklaus/Brown's status as the Muse of the project more than a stated proclamation could convey.

That mixture of intensely personal narrative and more bombastic cinematic experimentation in the most grandiose of the older arts marks The Tales of Hoffmann as one of the Archers' great triumphs. Powell's direction is so striking to watch in a time when realism is being paraded about as the surest sign of artistic validation:*** his dancing camera is occasionally limited by the shortcomings of technology, yet the freshness of its movement and staging remains captivating. There is a lightness in Powell's approach, flying in the face of the post-Griffith era in American and British film by clinging to the old bastions of cinematic imagination -- expressionism, Disney, the first forays into special effects cinema at the turn of the 20th century -- a childlike peevishness best typified in the film's final shot, of a stamp that plants a cheeky "Made in England" on the screen.




*Remember that mythical creatures without souls, vampires, do not cast reflections. Even in the real world there exists a correlation between reflection as the soul, such as the belief among some that photographs or any form of image capture steal a piece of the soul.
**Did Powell and/or Pressburger learn about Kali reading up for Black Narcissus? It's a hell of a stretch, considering they shot the film at Pinewood Studios, but the connection between Giulietta and Kali is too strong to assume that they are unrelated.
***Some realist and realistic films are certainly great, but when did visual storytelling become so out of fashion? Even the more visually sumptuous films floating about the mainstream contain a wide gap between those gorgeous looks and the narrative.

Peeping Tom

The first shots of Peeping Tom switch from an extreme close-up of its lead's eye to the viewfinder of his hidden camera. The camera's owner is propositioned, follows the hooker back to her room and murders her. Then we see it all over again, only now the character is watching the film of his exploits. This is a Michael Powell film, right?

Yes, and that's just what people asked when it came out nearly 50 years ago in 1960. After Alfred Hitchcock made his way to Hollywood with 1940's Rebecca, allowing Powell to set himself up as the finest British director working in Britain. Granted, he received much of his critical adulation in retrospect, but he was still a popular enough draw in the UK, starting with his "quota quickies" and carrying through his more major features with Emeric Pressburger. Pressburger didn't write the film; instead, ingenious World War II cryptographer Leo Marks -- he devised simplified coding transmissions that were strong while being convenient enough to transmit for short messages -- wrote the screenplay. Pressburger's absence, though, did not earn Peeping Tom the pure outrage that greeted its premiere.

Admittedly tame by modern standards, Peeping Tom is nevertheless an incredibly dark psychological thriller that must have shocked audiences back in 1960. Its protagonist, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a jittery, withdrawn young man, murders women and films his crimes to play back at his leisure. He works with a film crew by day and aspires to be a proper filmmaker in his own right. He's like that kid in American Beauty, always filming in the creepiest of manners, though Lewis is less annoying and more psychotic.

He lives in his father's old house and rents out a room, posing as a tenant so he never has to deal with anyone asking for a landlord. He tends to skirt right past the boisterous rented room, but one night Helen (Anna Massey) follows him up to his own room and charms her way inside. She pities the strange man but is also interested in his filmmaking and asks to see one of his tapes. Scrambling for something that doesn't directly implicate him in a murder, Mark breaks out the most sadistic home videos ever created, of his father's psychological experiments on him as a child. The father wanted a document of the nervous system's response to fear, so he wired his house to spy on his son at all times and tormented the poor boy throughout his childhood.

So, the film is a Freudian examination of a son's relationship with his father. His father gave his son no love, only psychological torture, and in turn the psychology community hailed the man's experiments as brilliant. Therefore, not only has the boy been irreparably scarred, his father's example has been hoisted up by intellectuals; his torment gave his father a legacy. So, Mark perpetuates the cycle, torturing women, killing them and filming them, all in the efforts to build a legacy for himself as a director.

But Powell and Marks delve far deeper than an Oedipal surface level. When Lewis kills his victims, he attaches a large mirror to his camera, so his victims can watch themselves die. In this way, Powell gets to the root of the title: this film is about sadistic voyeurism, but it implicates more than just its characters. At his day job, Mark sits and watches a director curse at an actress and give her demanding orders as his camera pushes in to capture false pain. Powell uses this juxtaposition to point out a simple truth: we as the audience routinely line up to see depictions of death, and many cinematic slayings have become comical or thrilling to the audience.

Powell makes plain the truth of cinema, that those who create it are aggressive and demanding at that those who consume it pay money to insert themselves into someone's life, even if that someone is fictional. He also points out the inherent misogyny of cinema: Mark only targets women, and the on-set director screams at a young woman as he shoots her clichéd character. Mark's mother died when he was young, and his father casually filmed the funeral to study the boy. Six weeks later, he re-married, filming her with the same objectivity (in this case literally as an object), a tool to bring out some response in the boy. This theme is only exacerbated when you take the movie and compare it to that other 1960 psychological thriller by that other British director, Hitchcock's Psycho. Mark Lewis certainly compares to Norman Bates -- both skittish, sexually repressed young men driven to murder and insanity through years of child abuse -- but there is one key difference: Norman was raised by his mother, Mark by his dad. Hitchcock of course had numerous hang-ups with women, and much of his cinema was his way of coming to terms with his issues. Psycho, as much as Vertigo, allowed him to get inside his own mind. Powell, on the other hand, featured strong female leads in acclaimed works like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, and he savages the mindset that marginalized and tortured women for perfectly acceptable entertainment.

That hatred of the cheap cinema around him informs the farcical nature of the film's portrayal of the movie studio. These people are all on their high horse making tacky pictures with no originality or craft, and greats like Powell & Pressburger's Archers were simply lumped into the same group by those who didn't understand their genius. Martin Scorsese later said that this, along with Fellini's 8 1/2, said everything that could be said about directing, that Fellini captured the glamor while this brought out the aggression and sexism. At one point, Mark refuses to film Helen because "everything I film, I lose." At the end of the scene, he looks into the camera eye, an ominous sign. With this film, Powell lost nearly everything; the British reception was so poor, so hysterical -- check out this page which mentions how some reviews were so harsh that the writers didn't even bother with facts before launching tirades -- that Powell never recovered. He made a few other films here and there, including an Australian film that somehow paired him with good old Pressburger in a non-Archers production, but he never enjoyed his prolific rate of creation again.

There's nothing bloody or exploitative about Peeping Tom (it attacks the exploitative nature of other filmmakers), so why the reaction? And despite his glorious use of Technicolor, Powell injected some darker sides into his work: The Red Shoes ends in tragedy, Black Narcissus concerns a group of missionaries who go insane, even A Matter of Life and Death presents "heaven" (or at least a non-hellish afterlife) as dull and bureaucratic compared to the lush beauty of life. Perhaps critics, the people who line up to see movies the most, didn't like what the film had to say about them. Art in The Red Shoes is a means of power, our basic form of humanity; in Peeping Tom, art via filmmaking is the outpouring of humanity's worst attributes.

The Red Shoes

From 1909 to 1929, the Ballets Russes, headed by Sergei Diaghilev, effectively reinvented musical theater. Hiring not only gifted and promising young composers and performers but designers and choreographers to elevate ballet to a new artistic watermark, they took late 19th century innovations in tonality and rhythm and used them to break ballet of its rigid, uncomplicated form. Most notably, Diaghilev launched the career of Igor Stravinsky, whose compositions were so revolutionary they quite literally sparked riots. Today, of course, Stravinsky is enshrined as one of the great composers of the modern era, and the influence of the Ballets Russes on theater is still plainly seen in productions.

What Diaghilev and his company did for musical theater, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes did for film. A mixture of ecstasy, tragedy, realism, melodrama, hallucination and passion, it is one of those films that is not a film at all but an invitation into a self-contained world. Once inside, the characters' emotions become your own, their perceptions our reality. It is the finest filmic depiction of music I have ever had the pleasure of watching. I have never seen another film like it, though I can see immediately that many have tried to replicate even a small portion of its genius. I do not mean to slip into superlatives so quickly, but some masterpieces require time to grow on you and some grab you by the throat on the first try, and The Red Shoes firmly belongs in the latter category.

Diaghilev's life loosely informs the character of impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), director of the theater company that bears his name. He is a demanding, cold taskmaster with grueling standards and a dismissive attitude toward those who fail to meet them. After losing his prima ballerina to marriage and in need of a new composer, Lermontov hires two replacements: Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) and Julian Craster (Marius Goring).

From these three characters, two stories emerge, each far removed from the other. On the one hand, we have the story of the dancer and the composer, initially quarrelers but ultimately lovers. Julian's creativity and innovation give Vicky the advanced material to let her fully prove her astonishing talent, and Vicky becomes Julian's muse. The other story concerns the impresario's obsession with his dancer, and how he attempts to force himself between her and Craster. The first is quota quickie melodrama at its finest, filled with enough cheeky wit to let us know that Powell and Pressburger are in on it, but with enough sincerity to make it work as drama. The second is infinitely darker, one that introduces a fascinating psychological element to the film and provides its fundamental artistic message.

That message might strike some as "elitist." Lermontov meets Vicky at a party, where the hosts attempt to foist Vicky on an understandably suspicious impresario. After some funny exchanges and some faux pas, Lermontov gauges his potential new talent in a sort of pre-audition: he asks, "Why do you want to dance?" to which she immediately responds, "Why do you want to live?" "Well, I don't know exactly why, but ... I must." "That's my answer, too."

You see, the film is about art. Films about film/art tend to fall into one of two categories: the pain and joy of creation and its effect on the artist, and the paramount importance of art in the life of the person who appreciates it. The Red Shoes features elements of both, but it boldly combines the two. In this world, art is the fundamental proof of humanity, and of status. Those who can create are the true rulers of the world, and those who cannot are but serfs in control of the masters on the stage.

Ironically, Lermontov, the only character among the theater troupe who is not an artist, understands this more than either Julian or even Vicky. He angrily dismisses his first prima ballerina for falling in love, and when he learns of Julian and Vicky's relationship his wrath is terrifying as it pushes out of the edges of his cold and collected demeanor. On one level, this is Powell and Pressburger's nod to Diaghilev's dismissal of his lover, the famed dancer Nijinsky, out of jealousy when the latter eventually married. But Lermontov's jealousy is not a sexual lust: he simply resents anything that might distract his star dancer from her art. Walbrook's performance is watertight: it's impossible to read his face for either the moment of joy he feels with art or the rage he feels when his joy is threatened. When Craster informs the director that the two are in love, Walbrook's eye twitches ever so slightly. His cruelty is firm and passionate, but always restrained enough to make him truly menacing.

There is also the matter of the ballet. Lermontov tasks Craster with composing a new, more daring score for Hans Christian Andersen's story. Pressburger's script sets the film up not as a musical adaptation but an adaptation of an adaptation. As the film wears on, we see Andersen's tale come to mirror Pressburger's narrative and themes. In explaining the story to Julian, Lermontov draws out its poetry: a cobbler gives a woman a pair of red shoes, which force her to dance and dance and dance. She dances until her clothes are rags and she can barely stand. At last she makes her way to a funeral where a priest helps her. Craster mulls this over, then asks what happens to the girl. "Oh, in the end she dies," Lermontov flippantly replies. That says more about his mindset than his conversation with the choreographer Ljubov, in which he admits he does not understand human love and, when confronted with the truth that he cannot alter human nature, offers, "I think you can do even better than that — you can ignore it."

The ballet itself is one of the greatest sequences in all of film. The structure of the script already set the film apart from all musicals made before it (and most made since), but the actual depiction of the ballet sets the standard for great film musicals even as it sets itself up as the permanent king. The ballet starts normally enough, with shots of the dancers doing their thing on-stage. But when Vicky's character sees the red shoes in a window, suddenly everything changes: Powell uses optical printing to show her character imagining wearing and dancing in the shoes. From there Powell unloads technique after technique that sets the ballet apart. He leaps into Vicky's perspective, at which point the audience shrinks fades into near darkness. The shadow of the male lead is revealed with flashes of light to be both Craster and Lermontov, the two men who struggle for her affections. That same lead also drifts in and out of existence, occasionally present but often represented only by his clothes, which still dance. Powell mixes traditional stage performance with the freedom and possibility of film, and the result is a phantasmagoric burst of euphoria. When Vicky's breathtaking performance ends, Powell plays the audience applause in the audio track but presents us with Vicky looking out not into a crowd but a roaring ocean.

Matthew Dessem notes in his review of the film for his excellent blog "The Criterion Contraption" that the structure of the ballet, and filming it from within Vicky's perspective, informed the boxing scenes in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. I would go one step further and say that Scorsese -- who helped restore Powell's reputation after the disastrous reception of Peeping Tom sidelined Powell's career for decades, is largely responsible for the preservation and restoration of the director's films (let's hope the recent restored versions and Blu-Rays of this and Black Narcissus make their way across the pond soon) and even introduced Powell to his last wife -- draws upon this one sequence for his very best work. At the top of his game, Scorsese dives into the POV of his protagonists, from Taxi Driver to Raging Bull to GoodFellas; the subjective POV of The Red Shoes practically lays out a blueprint for Scorsese's career.

That subjectivity allows us to see Vicky's true desires. Faced with the choice between the man who can further her career on the one who can counter and foster her creativity, she chooses the latter, but when Lermontov begs her to return (without Julian, of course), the red shoes cast as much of a spell on her as they do on the character in Andersen's story. The end is shocking and heartbreaking, yes, but unavoidable; in this world -- in Powell and Pressburger's world, perhaps -- one must always choose art over human distractions.