I've recently started working on a book on Howard Hawks's use of music in his films, and as a way to get my value judgements out of the way I thought I would here give a gut-reaction ranking of his entire oeuvre. Over the past few months I've gone through all of the films chronologically, which has been a fascinating exercise. Watching them all in relatively quick succession shows just how much thematic material repeats from film to film: while the personnel surrounding him changes, there are most definitely elements that the whole oeuvre has in common. Robin Wood, Gerald Mast, Peter Bogdanovich, and many other critics have listed these, so I don't want to take more time here to do it and instead get onto the films themselves. This ranking is based on my primal reactions and personal taste; the book's readings will of course be much better critically justified!
First, a caveat: I'm not ranking every film Hawks had a hand in, only those he directed large portions of. So I'm not including Viva Villa! (about a quarter directed by Hawks before he was fired and Jack Conway hired), The Outlaw (for which Hawks only shot a day or so of material), or Corvette K-225 (Hawks only produced, though apparently he had something to do with the screenplay). Of his eight silent films I'm only including the two I've seen complete: Fazil and A Girl in Every Port. The Road to Glory and The Air Circus are lost, The Cradle Snatchers is mostly lost, and I've not seen Fig Leaves, Paid to Love, or Trent's Last Case (please tell me if you've got a copy of any of those!).
1-10: The Immortals
These ten are the films that no film lover should miss, whether or not they care about Howard Hawks.
1. Rio Bravo (1959)
While Bringing Up Baby is my favourite film in absolute terms, Rio Bravo is my favourite Hawks film because it so perfectly distills everything the director is about. Its dramaturgy never falters in spite of its leisurely pace, it has the only Dimitri Tiomkin score that I really like, and it has the best performances most of its actors ever gave. It's nominally quite long, at 141 minutes, but every moment is packed with action and/or feeling and the time flies by amazingly quickly.
2. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Long my favourite film, Bringing Up Baby is simply the funniest ever made. Words fail, just watch it.
3. Red River (1948)
With the exception of over-acting Joanne Dru, this is the best-cast of all of Hawks's films. John Wayne demonstrates that he can actually act, Montgomery Clift becomes a star, Walter Brennan shows that he was the best character actor in the business, John Ireland and Harry Carey Jr. show how to support the leads, and Harry Carey Sr. adds nostalgia value. Each of the minor members of the team is fully characterised, which makes this a great film to get lost in. That also makes analysing it quite challenging: I try for critical detachment but keep getting caught up! (This is true of all of these great films, and I found the same thing writing my doctoral thesis on Monteverdi operas.)
4. To Have and Have Not (1944)
In which Bogart and Bacall demonstrate what chemistry means. Every performance here is good, especially Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael. I reckon this is Hawks's most musically sophisticated film.
5. Ball of Fire (1941)
Gary Cooper is watchable when doing comedy, and Barbara Stanwyck is especially watchable here. They are surrounded by a fine supporting cast and a great script by Billy Wilder. Alfred Newman's score is very clever; ironically, the music here is much better than in the 'musical' remake, A Song is Born.
6. His Girl Friday (1940)
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell have great chemistry here. There are some unfortunately preachy moments in the film (very unusual for Hawks), but most of the time it's expert filmmaking.
7. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Like Red River, this one is full of well-rounded supporting characters. It also has one of Cary Grant's best performances.
8. The Dawn Patrol (1930)
Hawks's first sound picture and his first real masterpiece. This one has everything: action, comedy, and engaging performances (especially from Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr). Hawks shows right off the bat how good he is at dialogue directing, and the screenplay has a clear, organic structure. The air battle sequences are beautifully done.
9. Scarface (1931)
Hawks seems to have got all of his grisly guignol tendencies out of his system with this one, his most violent and dark film (but also very funny). Paul Muni overacts, but George Raft is great as his sidekick and there are some good supporting performances and cracking Ben Hecht dialogue.
10. Hatari! (1962)
Many critics would not rate this as high, but it provides the most pure pleasure of all of Hawks's films apart from Rio Bravo and Bringing Up Baby. Yes, it is overlong and sometimes wooly in its structure, but it's two and a half hours of joy.
11-20: Good
These ten are amusing and interesting, not masterpieces but still quite good.
11. Twentieth Century (1934)
There is an awful lot to like here, especially the cast and the dialogue, but I can't help but wonder if Hawks had stuck more closely to the play with its single setting on the train whether this would be even better. As funny as it is, the long prologue before we get to the train feels somewhat unnecessary. As the play and the musical adaptation (On the Twentieth Century) showed, there is plenty of intrigue to keep us occupied in the single location. Here is an example of the drive to 'open out' stage plays for the screen not really being necessary.
12. Air Force (1943)
Pure propoganda, but well made and effective. The pilot's death scene, written by William Faulkner and subtly scored by Franz Waxman, is the most moving scene Hawks ever shot.
13. I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
Solid middle-period Cary Grant paired with Ann Sheridan, and some amusing situations and dialogue, don't quite manage to let this take off into screwball hilarity.
14. Ceiling Zero (1936)
Hawks made this aviation film between the more famous Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings. James Cagney is the only really great thing about this one, but he's here at his very best and the rest is watchable.
15. The Big Sky (1952)
A little known middle-period Hawks western, with fine performances from Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin. This is constantly engaging if never quite breaking through to sublimity. It's Hawks's most under-rated film.
16. Monkey Business (1952)
More mid-career Cary Grant, mismatched with Ginger Rogers and a screenplay that starts well but descends into dullness. Grant's scenes with Marilyn Monroe are the best part.
17. The Big Sleep (1946)
If The Big Sky is Hawks's most under-rated film, this is his most over-rated. Yes, it's fun to get lost in, but at the end of the day the plot makes no sense and I get the feeling that the whole thing doesn't really amount to a hill of beans (to quote another Bogart picture). But Bogart and Bacall are wonderful to watch, as are most of the supporting cast, and the nutty dialogue is amusing. I don't like the Max Steiner score, which is a little too repetitive and obvious.
18. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Hawks seems to have mostly been phoning in the dialogue direction, and the songs (the best part of the picture) were directed by Jack Cole. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are excellent in spite of mediocre dialogue.
19. Barbary Coast (1935)
The strange combination of Edward G. Robinson, Joel McRae, and Miriam Hopkins destabilises this film, but makes it interesting. Hawks was never as good at doing period pictures as he was with contemporary subjects, but this makes a gallant attempt at recreating gold rush San Francisco.
20. The Crowd Roars (1932)
Auto racing doesn't really float my boat, but James Cagney is good as always. The dialogue direction feels like a step backwards from The Dawn Patrol.
21-31: Falling Short
Compiling this list has made me realise that Hawks made quite a few films that don't quite work for various reasons. Sometimes it's miscasting or an unfixable screenplay, or they just rub me the wrong way.
21. Sergeant York (1941)
This is a Hollywood propaganda film and little more (compare to Air Force, also propaganda but much more compelling). I don't find much evidence of Hawks here; it's really more of a studio film than most of Hawks's other work. I find Gary Cooper annoying here and elsewhere (other than Ball of Fire).
22. A Girl in Every Port (1928)
This is widely recognised as the first truly Hawksian film, in that it deals with the male group/conflict subject matter he would return to so often. It's a very breezy film, and not as stolid as many other silents. One can feel Hawks wanting to break into dialogue.
23. Tiger Shark (1932)
Edward G. Robinson is wonderful here playing a Portuguese fisherman, but the rest is not.
24. The Thing From Another World (1951)
There is some debate as to whether this was ghost-directed by Hawks or was actually done by the credited Christian Nyby. Whether or not he told them where to put the camera, Hawks's fingerprints are all over this, almost to a fault. Like so many science fiction films of the period, it is overly schematic and predictable. This is anathema for Hawksians, but I prefer The Day the Earth Stood Still.
25. The Criminal Code (1931)
Walter Huston and Boris Karloff are always watchable, but this one is pretty forgettable. It is a backwards step from The Dawn Patrol in its speed and vivacity.
26. Come and Get It! (1936)
The Hawks sections of this (approximately half, before he was replaced by William Wyler) are decent but no more. The same can be said of the Wyler sections. In his biography of Hawks, Todd McCarthy describes the film that could have been, making the one that was made seem even more disappointing.
27. A Song Is Born (1948)
Aside from its jazz sequences, this is an unnecessary and dull musical remake of Ball of Fire (often shot-for-shot).
28. The Ransom of Red Chief (1952)
Hawks's only short film, released as part of the omnibus O. Henry's Full House. Hawks's film is a mediocre adaptation within a mediocre group of five O. Henry adaptations.
29. Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
This is a largely inert film with a lovely performance by Paula Prentiss and the occasional good scene. One gets the impression that Hawks was phoning it in.
30. Rio Lobo (1970)
This is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't as bad as some make it out to be. The first half goes along very well; it's really only the second half that falters, as it becomes an uninteresting rehash of Rio Bravo. Most of the acting as bad, but I quite like Jorge Rivera's performance: he finds a very Hawksian balance between serious and tongue-in-cheek.
31. El Dorado (1967)
An imitation of Rio Bravo, this can only pale in comparison. Without the precedent of Rio Bravo, would this be seen as a better film? In a way it's a meaningless question, as the intertextual references are so explicit here. El Dorado is more interesting as a semiotic case study than as a film. The French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma went nuts for it because it seemed to confirm all of their auteurist theories, but even they don't quite claim that it's a great film.
32-36: Disasters
Even Howard Hawks can fumble horribly, as these turkeys demonstrate.
32. Red Line 7000 (1965)
Some people out there (Robin Wood and Quentin Tarantino among them) swear by this auto racing film, but it is Hawks at his most derivative, and it also features some truly awful music. The acting is bad, but the cars perform well. Stick to The Crowd Roars if you want a film about cars. I should say, though, that I've only seen this in a pan-and-scan VHS version. A new blu-ray is coming out later this year, and seeing it in the right aspect ratio and digitally restored might make a difference (I doubt it).
33. Fazil (1928)
This one is a curiosity in that it features every orientalist stereotype in the book. There are some intriguing scenes, but Hawks had not developed much of his signature style and there is little to set this one apart from all of the other Middle Eastern-themed films of the 1920s.
34. Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
It is often said that Hawks excelled in every genre, but this film belies that claim: he failed miserably in the historical epic. The unrelenting score by Dimitri Tiomkin, the abysmal acting, and the stolid dialogue drag this one down into the lower depths, but the production design (by the great Alexandre Trauner) is first-rate and there is some good editing, especially in the pyramid building sequence and the climatic burial. But the success of these sequences has little to do with Hawks and are more the work of Trauner and editor Rudi Fehr. Those sequences can't save the film.
35. Today We Live (1933)
Miscast Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford star in this boring First World War drama. The first few reels of this, which take place at Crawford's country house (she's meant to be English), are unbearably awful, with the slowest dialogue in the whole Hawks canon. Franchot Tone does manage to liven things up in a decent performance, but Cooper and Crawford are both dull as dishwater.
36. The Road to Glory (1936)
This is Hawks's worst film, and surely one of the worst to ever come out of Hollywood. An unnecessary remake of the French film Les Croix de Bois, this is Hawks doing the First World War even worse than he did in Today We Live. The whole thing runs as slow as molasses, and Frederic March gives a particularly awful performance in the lead. Lionel Barrymore hams it up in the worst possible way, yet he's still the best thing in the film. The dialogue is poorly edited and has the pacing of a bad stage performance. It all reeks of sentimentality, and there is a particularly egregious performance of Schubert's 'Ave Maria' in a church while it is being bombed. June Lang, the female lead, gives the worst performance in any Hawks film (there's a reason you've never heard of her), not helped by wooden costars and unsensitive direction. It's just plain awful.
There we go, Hawks's films ranked according to my taste. Percentage-wise there are only a few duds, and considering how prolific Hawks was over a long period it's a pretty good track record. I suppose I fall into the typical 'auteurist' category of critics, who find even bad films by an 'auteur' interesting. Now I've got to write that book...
Monday 7 August 2017
Friday 3 March 2017
L'enfant et les sortilèges: Dream or Reality?
Here is opera production journal part two! Danger: Freud ahead.
At the moment I am working on a translation on the libretto and a transcription into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, which our students use to help them with singing in foreign languages). Paying close attention to every word and phoneme is a good way to study the libretto in depth, and the more I look at Colette's work the more I am impressed by it. It is not merely a vehicle for Ravel's music but a rich text on its own, full of ambiguities, comic lines, and colourful turns of phrase, to which Ravel responded with unceasing invention. I had never really thought of Ravel as a great text-setter, but looking at his other vocal works having now studied this opera I can see that he is one of the best. Take the scene between the Child and the Princess as an example: the Princess uses a very elegant poetic style, with long sentences set to an undulating solo flute line, and the Child responds with short bursts over a more turbulent orchestral accompaniment (we'll just have piano and flute in our version). 'Qui sait si le malin enchanteur/ Ne va pas me rendre au sommeil de la mort,/ Ou bien me dissoudre en nuée?' ('Who knows if the evil enchanter will render me up to the sleep of death, or even dissolve me into a cloud?') vs. the Child's brusque 'Ne t'en va pas! Reste! Dis-moi...' (Do not go! Stay! Tell me...').
After emerging from the pages of the book of fairy tales the Child destroyed, the Princess introduces herself as the 'Princesse enchantée, celle que tu appelais dans ton songe la nuit passée', the Princess you called to in your dreams last night. This opens up the important question of whether the events of the opera are happening within a dream, or if they have some kind of objective reality. Are the enchantments the Child sees products of his imagination, or are they representations of mysterious uncanny forces acting upon him from the outside? As it premiered in 1925, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of the opera is Freudian: the whole opera was seen by many critics as a psychological case-study. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein read the opera (without having seen it or even looked at the score) as a study of the absent Father. This is a compelling reading, as a father is never seen or mentioned, but Klein sees his sublimated presence everywhere. All of the enchanted objects and happenings can be seen as Oedipal manifestations, mostly phallic: the child has taken out the clock's pendulum and has pulled the cat's tail. The mother and mother-figures are most prominent as signs of order and love, in particular the Princess and the Squirrel who sings of forgiveness. The father-figures represent chaos and/or oppression: destroyed objects, animal riots, cages. A Freudian like Klein would read the opera as a dream, specifically Colette and Ravel's dream, but this kind of autobiographical criticism has (for the most part justly) fallen out of favour today. Artists don't always have to produce expressions of their psyches, and are just as capable of putting on a persona for a given work as performers are of becoming someone else when they perform it (pace Lee Strasberg). Freudianism is essentially Romantic in spite of some Modernist trappings, but Ravel is a quintessential ironic Modernist. There is little in his (or Colette's) other work to indicate much interest in Freudianism or even dreams more generally.
This all leads to me think that the events of the opera are indeed happening in reality, albeit a heightened, fantastic reality. This reading seems rather more interesting to me than explaining it all away as a dream, which I've always found somewhat of a cop-out. The Oz books are narratively superior to the 1939 MGM film because Dorothy really does go to Oz; her trip isn't just a dreamy metaphor for the values of home but is a real experience. Ravel's opera sometimes has a similar ethos to the Oz books (or, perhaps more, Alice in Wonderland, though Lewis Carroll sold himself short by making Alice's adventures 'just a dream'). Rather than seeing it all as a dream, we could try the opposite: the Child has been figuratively asleep, unaware of the world around him, and the opera represents his awakening.
The Princess's sequence is central here, but playing with an interpretation that the opera represents awakening means we need to read her in quite a different way than as a Freudian mother-figure. She calls to the Child to rescue her from being pulled back into the land of night and sleep, that is, into his dream-time subconscious. She wants to break free of being a character in his childish fantasy (his dream). The Princess is a dream character who has come to life, insisting that the dreamer engage with her as a real figure. On the surface she is beautiful (as the fairy tale come to life) but really she is monstrous, a figure lost between dream and reality, suddenly making demands in waking life, a character out of Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. She does not want the Child to grow up; by calling on him to 'rescue' her she is really trying to enforce his childish dream-world onto his waking life. I suspect that if the Child were able to hold onto her longer, instead of pulling the Princess out she would have pulled him in with her. We could read the rest of the fantastic characters in the opera in a similar way: the animals and furniture cease being passive objects of the child's fantasy destruction and enter his waking life, although many of them offer him more positively-framed lessons in compassion than the negative temptation offered by the Princess. Far from being a representation of the dream, the opera demonstrates what happens when the dream starts to pervade reality, leading eventually to disenchantment and growing up if the lessons of the slippage are heeded. Woody Allen took a lighter (but just as profound) approach to this idea in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Celia, a depressed 1930s housewife, wills the romantic lead of her favourite movie off of the screen and into her life. The cinema is Celia's place in which to dream, and over the course of the film she learns that she must face reality and cannot count on her dream-prince to rescue her. This blurring of dream and reality provides another link to the avant-garde arts of the 1920s and 30s: surrealists and expressionists alike were interested in this slippage between dream and reality that the opera represents so well.
The Princess, then, is really a cautionary figure. Far from being a protective mother substitute, she represents regression and fantasy rather than progression and reality, almost a false/negative mother figure, essentially calling the Child back into the womb ('land of night and sleep') rather than sending her offspring out into the real world. The Child's real mother, who we meet at the beginning of the opera when she punishes the Child for not heeding her, could almost be seen as setting off the phantasmagoria as a lesson: all of the things come alive to teach the Child how to get through life's temptations and hardships, teaching him to be compassionate rather than selfish. The real mother turns up again at the end of the opera (though, perhaps significantly, she doesn't sing) to offer a guiding hand to help her son grow up: the Child has successfully met the challenges of the Princess's temptation to regress and the healing of the wounded squirrel. I should note that this is still a Freudian reading, but one from a different angle: while the opera still portrays the Child's development from self-directed actions to other-directed actions (it would be difficult to argue otherwise), the role I see for the mother is different from what Klein saw. For me, she is a more positively supportive figure than she is for Klein, for whom she only has her basic Oedipal role. I find it more interesting to examine the mother as an active character with agency, guiding the Child's development, rather than merely a catalyst for the Child's lesson. I prefer to see all of the characters as having more agency than productions usually afford them. It will be more interesting for the singers (and, I hope, the audience) for all of them to have 'real' roles with their own agendas, instead of only being manifestations of the Child's ego.
The idea that the Child has learned something is supported by his aria which follows, 'Toi le cœur de la rose'. It can be read as a song of wistful regret that the book's world of fantasy is now past; he may look back on it fondly, but his inability to rescue the Princess was really his developing subconscious holding him back for his long-term good. It ends with the Child brusquely saying 'Tous ceux-ci sont des livres arides' ('all these are dry books'), an indication that he is finished with fantasy and is ready to face more difficult matter (which in the next scene turns out to be mathematics, as he is chased by an old man who personifies arithmetic spouting out math problems with incorrect answers).
When I staged the Princess sequence as part of our 2015 opera scenes production we made her a glamorous Snow White-ish figure, needing to be rescued by the Child who is, alas, not yet strong enough to be her Prince Charming. This time around, to fit with the surrealist reading and with the way I'm now starting to understand the rest of the opera, we will of course need to stage it very differently. That this opera can stand so many interpretations (including variations by the same interpreter!) is yet more evidence for how good it is. Last time the 'land of Night and Sleep' was War, fitting the 1940s milieu of the production and allowing the shepherds and shepherdesses who sing the preceding chorus to be represented as ghostly soldiers. This time the Princess herself is the dangerous figure: she tempts the Child to regress. This time around, she belongs more in the expressionist forest Snow White runs away from than in the palace.
At the moment I am working on a translation on the libretto and a transcription into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, which our students use to help them with singing in foreign languages). Paying close attention to every word and phoneme is a good way to study the libretto in depth, and the more I look at Colette's work the more I am impressed by it. It is not merely a vehicle for Ravel's music but a rich text on its own, full of ambiguities, comic lines, and colourful turns of phrase, to which Ravel responded with unceasing invention. I had never really thought of Ravel as a great text-setter, but looking at his other vocal works having now studied this opera I can see that he is one of the best. Take the scene between the Child and the Princess as an example: the Princess uses a very elegant poetic style, with long sentences set to an undulating solo flute line, and the Child responds with short bursts over a more turbulent orchestral accompaniment (we'll just have piano and flute in our version). 'Qui sait si le malin enchanteur/ Ne va pas me rendre au sommeil de la mort,/ Ou bien me dissoudre en nuée?' ('Who knows if the evil enchanter will render me up to the sleep of death, or even dissolve me into a cloud?') vs. the Child's brusque 'Ne t'en va pas! Reste! Dis-moi...' (Do not go! Stay! Tell me...').
After emerging from the pages of the book of fairy tales the Child destroyed, the Princess introduces herself as the 'Princesse enchantée, celle que tu appelais dans ton songe la nuit passée', the Princess you called to in your dreams last night. This opens up the important question of whether the events of the opera are happening within a dream, or if they have some kind of objective reality. Are the enchantments the Child sees products of his imagination, or are they representations of mysterious uncanny forces acting upon him from the outside? As it premiered in 1925, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of the opera is Freudian: the whole opera was seen by many critics as a psychological case-study. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein read the opera (without having seen it or even looked at the score) as a study of the absent Father. This is a compelling reading, as a father is never seen or mentioned, but Klein sees his sublimated presence everywhere. All of the enchanted objects and happenings can be seen as Oedipal manifestations, mostly phallic: the child has taken out the clock's pendulum and has pulled the cat's tail. The mother and mother-figures are most prominent as signs of order and love, in particular the Princess and the Squirrel who sings of forgiveness. The father-figures represent chaos and/or oppression: destroyed objects, animal riots, cages. A Freudian like Klein would read the opera as a dream, specifically Colette and Ravel's dream, but this kind of autobiographical criticism has (for the most part justly) fallen out of favour today. Artists don't always have to produce expressions of their psyches, and are just as capable of putting on a persona for a given work as performers are of becoming someone else when they perform it (pace Lee Strasberg). Freudianism is essentially Romantic in spite of some Modernist trappings, but Ravel is a quintessential ironic Modernist. There is little in his (or Colette's) other work to indicate much interest in Freudianism or even dreams more generally.
This all leads to me think that the events of the opera are indeed happening in reality, albeit a heightened, fantastic reality. This reading seems rather more interesting to me than explaining it all away as a dream, which I've always found somewhat of a cop-out. The Oz books are narratively superior to the 1939 MGM film because Dorothy really does go to Oz; her trip isn't just a dreamy metaphor for the values of home but is a real experience. Ravel's opera sometimes has a similar ethos to the Oz books (or, perhaps more, Alice in Wonderland, though Lewis Carroll sold himself short by making Alice's adventures 'just a dream'). Rather than seeing it all as a dream, we could try the opposite: the Child has been figuratively asleep, unaware of the world around him, and the opera represents his awakening.
The Princess's sequence is central here, but playing with an interpretation that the opera represents awakening means we need to read her in quite a different way than as a Freudian mother-figure. She calls to the Child to rescue her from being pulled back into the land of night and sleep, that is, into his dream-time subconscious. She wants to break free of being a character in his childish fantasy (his dream). The Princess is a dream character who has come to life, insisting that the dreamer engage with her as a real figure. On the surface she is beautiful (as the fairy tale come to life) but really she is monstrous, a figure lost between dream and reality, suddenly making demands in waking life, a character out of Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. She does not want the Child to grow up; by calling on him to 'rescue' her she is really trying to enforce his childish dream-world onto his waking life. I suspect that if the Child were able to hold onto her longer, instead of pulling the Princess out she would have pulled him in with her. We could read the rest of the fantastic characters in the opera in a similar way: the animals and furniture cease being passive objects of the child's fantasy destruction and enter his waking life, although many of them offer him more positively-framed lessons in compassion than the negative temptation offered by the Princess. Far from being a representation of the dream, the opera demonstrates what happens when the dream starts to pervade reality, leading eventually to disenchantment and growing up if the lessons of the slippage are heeded. Woody Allen took a lighter (but just as profound) approach to this idea in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Celia, a depressed 1930s housewife, wills the romantic lead of her favourite movie off of the screen and into her life. The cinema is Celia's place in which to dream, and over the course of the film she learns that she must face reality and cannot count on her dream-prince to rescue her. This blurring of dream and reality provides another link to the avant-garde arts of the 1920s and 30s: surrealists and expressionists alike were interested in this slippage between dream and reality that the opera represents so well.
The Princess, then, is really a cautionary figure. Far from being a protective mother substitute, she represents regression and fantasy rather than progression and reality, almost a false/negative mother figure, essentially calling the Child back into the womb ('land of night and sleep') rather than sending her offspring out into the real world. The Child's real mother, who we meet at the beginning of the opera when she punishes the Child for not heeding her, could almost be seen as setting off the phantasmagoria as a lesson: all of the things come alive to teach the Child how to get through life's temptations and hardships, teaching him to be compassionate rather than selfish. The real mother turns up again at the end of the opera (though, perhaps significantly, she doesn't sing) to offer a guiding hand to help her son grow up: the Child has successfully met the challenges of the Princess's temptation to regress and the healing of the wounded squirrel. I should note that this is still a Freudian reading, but one from a different angle: while the opera still portrays the Child's development from self-directed actions to other-directed actions (it would be difficult to argue otherwise), the role I see for the mother is different from what Klein saw. For me, she is a more positively supportive figure than she is for Klein, for whom she only has her basic Oedipal role. I find it more interesting to examine the mother as an active character with agency, guiding the Child's development, rather than merely a catalyst for the Child's lesson. I prefer to see all of the characters as having more agency than productions usually afford them. It will be more interesting for the singers (and, I hope, the audience) for all of them to have 'real' roles with their own agendas, instead of only being manifestations of the Child's ego.
The idea that the Child has learned something is supported by his aria which follows, 'Toi le cœur de la rose'. It can be read as a song of wistful regret that the book's world of fantasy is now past; he may look back on it fondly, but his inability to rescue the Princess was really his developing subconscious holding him back for his long-term good. It ends with the Child brusquely saying 'Tous ceux-ci sont des livres arides' ('all these are dry books'), an indication that he is finished with fantasy and is ready to face more difficult matter (which in the next scene turns out to be mathematics, as he is chased by an old man who personifies arithmetic spouting out math problems with incorrect answers).
When I staged the Princess sequence as part of our 2015 opera scenes production we made her a glamorous Snow White-ish figure, needing to be rescued by the Child who is, alas, not yet strong enough to be her Prince Charming. This time around, to fit with the surrealist reading and with the way I'm now starting to understand the rest of the opera, we will of course need to stage it very differently. That this opera can stand so many interpretations (including variations by the same interpreter!) is yet more evidence for how good it is. Last time the 'land of Night and Sleep' was War, fitting the 1940s milieu of the production and allowing the shepherds and shepherdesses who sing the preceding chorus to be represented as ghostly soldiers. This time the Princess herself is the dangerous figure: she tempts the Child to regress. This time around, she belongs more in the expressionist forest Snow White runs away from than in the palace.
Sunday 19 February 2017
Towards a Production of L'enfant et les sortilèges
This year the greater part of our university's opera production will be Maurice Ravel and Colette's 1925 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. As part of their coursework, the students in the cast have to write a journal documenting their experiences with preparation, rehearsals, and performance, and in the spirit of solidarity I am going to do the same as I prepare to direct the opera.
My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.
What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).
But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'
I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).
So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.
How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.
With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.
My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.
What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).
But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'
I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).
So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.
How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.
With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.
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