Day for Night Magazine

The Archers' Arias [ Tales of Hoffmann DVD review]

BY KYLE SMITH

In a brisk 20-minute interview on Criterion’s release of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, zombie wrangler George Romero describes the troubles he had renting a 16mm print of Hoffmann during the 60s in New York. He claims to have rented the film more than 50 times; that number would surely be higher if
Martin Scorsese wasn’t checking out the same print with equal fervor.

Scorsese is famously hung up on Powell and Pressburger, jointly known as the Archers; a glance at his participation in Criterion’s steady release of Archers-related films (this is their sixth, if one counts the Powell-only Peeping Tom) suggests that the duo are as important to Scorsese as his mother. Scorsese appears on this disc as well, and, like Romero, he shares the same formative passion for these films. The Tales of Hoffmann is, like so much of the Archers’ color pictures,overwhelming, a film ripe with allusions, architecture, color,and wonder that boggles the mind. To the preteen Scorseseand Romero, it must have been a live-action Fantasia:pleasing to the senses but intellectually impenetrable.

There’s something about the way film—especially the films of Powell and Pressburger—demands cross-medium analysis. Do you compare a painting to a song? A song to a novel? A sculpture to an opera? With their orgiastic version of Jacques Offenbach’s opera, the Archers borrow from every imaginable nook of creativity and artistic expression, beckoning the viewer to measure the film Hoffman’s original text, Offenbach’s opera, and centuries of art and architecture.

To a more intellectual audience, the Archers work in film—the lowest common denominator in art—often was criticized as sentimental and derivative; masterpieces dumbed down for the masses.

This assessment is probably true, and it gets right to the heart of the Archers’ magic: their unironic assimilation and emulation of “finer” art fosters a fanaticism within the uninitiated. This is not unlike the strange phenomenon of a teenager discovering Led Zeppelin. The band’s archaic symbols and geeky sense of literature becomes a treasure
trove of mystery to a culture-hungry youngster; similarly, the Romantic compositions of the Archers’ Black Narcissus or the intricacies of ballet in The Red Shoes captivate fertile
imaginations better than any museum exhibit.

Zeppelin always served as a sort of gateway drug to that fantasy world of Tolkien and Nordic history, and it was the resulting passion and power of Zeppelin that made the kids rabid. Judging from Criterion’s release of The Tales of Hoffmann, the evidence mounts that Powell and Pressburger have become unlikely heroes of fanboy culture, Zeppelin’s equivalent sans Faustian pacts.

Hoffmann’s supra-textuality begins with the opera. I don’t know a damn thing about opera. Then again, I don’t know a damn thing about ballet, and The Red Shoes still knocked my socks off. Offenbach’s opera isn’t just any ol’ song and dance, though—left unfinished at the composer’s death, it has been subjected to countless revision and reinterpretation. The Archers added ballet, mixed some scenes up and went for a more subdued ending.

Powell and Pressburger enlisted the preeminent conductor Sir Thomas Beecham for the celebrated dance sequence in The Red Shoes—the most beguiling and memorable scene in that film. Beecham returns here (visible in a Fantasia-style cameo at the end of the film), and the music seems to be the most natural element of The Tales of Hoffmann, probably because they can’t manipulate the music like the film’s visual elements.

But how the Archers try! The basic story of The Tales of Hoffmann is this: the fictional Hoffmann (based on the reallife writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, and played and sung here by Robert Rounseville) is to meet with his love Stella (The Red Shoes’ Moira Shearer), a beautiful dancer. A correspondence from her to the writer is intercepted by the dastardly Lindorf (a magnificent, malevolent Robert Helpmann). Hoffmann then visits a tavern with is dear friend Nicklaus, where he is urged to tell his famous stories of romantic disappointment. The first—“The Tale of Olympia”—has Hoffmann lusting for a robotic dancer; “The Tale of Giuletta” concerns a greedy temptress who steals Hoffmann’s reflection, and “The Tale of Antonia” is about a woman who, to Hoffmann’s horror, sings herself to death.

Like many Archers films, Hoffmann is obsessed with the blurry space between reality and fantasy. It’s important to differentiate the Archers exploration from that of your everyday filmmaker or reality TV guru—there is no indirect confusing of reality or fantasy here, no trickery, no dream sequences. What’s so captivating about Powell and Pressburger’s world is its strange logic, conveyed with considerable (but rarely showy) style. Hoffmann is always dressed the same, suggesting a continuum between each story and the prologue, whereas Helpmann’s villain morphs from scene to scene (looking remarkably like a vampire, Romero notes).

The terrible plight of each woman has one foot in reality, another in an unnerving nightmare. Antonia’s climactic croon is accompanied by the spooky image of multiple Helpmann’s shredding on violins, and her mother singing from beyond the grave; prior to her collapse she runs through a door on one side of a room only to reenter through a door on the other side of the same room (think Pac-Man when you try to exit the maze).

These scenes speak to the Archers power to speak with the image more so than any filmmaker of their era. After all, there is no dialogue in Hoffmann outside of the libretto. The entire film is shot in a soundstage, with spectacular background mattes and intensely detailed production design. But just when it seems the Archers have reached a point of ridiculous excess, they reel you back in with scenes of elegant simplicity—a stairway painted onto the studio floor, a woman stepping on the open-mouth of a statue, marionettes strutting across the stage.

The film ultimately wears you out, a delightful mélange of style and color that becomes downright exhausting. The histrionic acting seems unnatural but is necessary in keeping with the aesthetic; as such, characterization is left to Offenbach, and beyond the admirable, androgynous Nicklaus and the fascinating performances by Helpmann,
nobody here exists beyond their voice and/or codpiece.

Also included on the Criterion DVD is a 13-minute version of “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” Powell did in 1955, reuniting him with Hoffmann collaborators (including camera operator Freddie Francis, who would go on to an illustrious career as a cinematographer). Shot in Cinemascope, the short is essentially a filmed ballet, holding the dancers in wide shot with minimal camera movement and cuts. Though still well choreographed and beautifully shot, it only highlights the dynamism of the Archers best work. As Scorsese puts it early on in his commentary track, “It’s so remarkable…you never know where the camera’s gonna be next, what’s going to happen in the next cut.”

Watching The Tales of Hoffmann, it’s hard to even remember what happened in the previous cut. In collecting and exhibiting all art, they create a film that manages to be both original and imitative, dizzying the fertile minds of future filmmakers like Romero and Scorsese. They may not have understood the complexity or importance of what they were seeing, but they knew they liked it.