A Weblog of Curious Things.
Media referred to by suffix as follows:
Saturday, 1st July, 2006, am
239.D: Chaplin in The New Janitor, 1914, 11'06"
239.D: Chaplin in The Rival Mashers, 1914, 12'12"
294.D: R. Hamer: Kind Hearts & Coronets, 1949, 101'36"
The New Janitor has been admired as one of the better stories of the Keystone Chaplin films. Charlie is the lowly janitor who foils the crooked boss. The combination of cleaning duties and safe-breaking was made into a suspenseful sequence by Hitchcock in Marnie exactly half a century later. We also get a near-vertigo moment as the janitor finds himself outside the window looking down. The Rival Mashers is more primitive and has attracted attention mainly for its more or less direct depictions of prostitution. There is certainly an air of loose morals in a lot of these early comedies and the depiction of women is not always as weak victims. These prints on the Delta label are very rough copies. The New Janitor ends with a notice to patrons: "Please do not eat peanuts and leave the shucks on the floor - it is both annoying and unclean."
Kind Hearts & Coronets is a much-loved classic and it deserves its high reputation, though it must be the chilliest film to inspire such general approval. This DVD issue shows off the fine cinematography and set-design. It is said that Michael Balcon was apprehensive about the film chiefly on account of Joan Greenwood's purring sexuality. I see that the bbfc demanded cuts in 1949 before it could be shown as an 'A' rated picture. No details seem available about what the cuts were or how extensive they were. The social comment would be very hard to eradicate as it is more or less printed throughout the film. The Americans did not demand cuts but there had to be a ten second addition at the end to show that the confessional memoirs are actually found by the warders in Price's cell. The current print seems to be intact: allowing for the PAL 4% speed-up, it corresponds to the film as originally submitted to the bbfc in 1949.
Sunday, 2nd July, 2006, am
292.D: A. Hitchcock: The Ring, 1927, 89'12"
I think this is the only film with the credit Written & Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, for this simple boxing melodrama was an original story. What impresses is the way the figures have space to be individuals more than types. Each scene carries a strong emotional current, sometimes more than one. Many of the special effects which now seem fairly standard were then quite innovative. It is true that the party sequence has dated somewhat: English flappers doing decadence are quite amusing. The transfer is soft but not too bad with even the dark scenes coming over without artifacts. The framing is poor, however, giving us essentially the bottom right of the picture and sometimes cropping heads as well as titles. The cyclorama outside the window and the adjacent piano, as well as the situation of awaiting a guest who does not materialise all seem to foreshadow Rope.
Wednesday, 5th July, 2006, am
295.D: A Brunel: Elstree Calling, 1930, b & w & tinted & Pathé Colour, 1930, 82'08"
Thanks to my friend Charley from the Hitchcock Message Board, I was able to see this early British talkie in which the linking material was directed by the young Alfred Hitchcock. Essentially it is a filmed review featuring Cecily Courtneidge, Jack Hulbert, Will Fyffe and others in a time-capsule of light entertainment 1930 style. The weak linking script is read by Tommy Handley, many years before ITMA. The subject of this picture was raised when Charley noticed that the Director of Photography was Claude Friese-Greene, inventor of a Natural Colour process which has recently been featured in a series made by the bfi & BBC. The process was a commercial flop and Friese-Greene had to go to work for the BIP company. Several sections of this picture are tinted and the last section, a song from Cecily Courtneidge, raised the hope that the process used might have been a development of the Friese-Greene system. In the event, it seems that what we have is an example of the expensive Pathé Colour stencil technique. This used pantographic techniques to colour each frame, allowing actors dressed in one or more colours to pass in front of backgrounds using different tints. I have seen it used in the Carnival of Venice sequence of the 1928 Casanova, where it is very impressive.
Elstree Calling is very much of its time and neither the comedy nor the music stands up as other than awkward and plain odd today. However the framing device is interesting and it is probably these sequences which were Hitchcock's responsibility. Two hobbyists are tinkering with their Heath-Robinson television sets. The man upstairs can't leave well alone and in quest of a better picture misses the show. By the time early television did come in, the shows seem to have been rather similar to what was envisaged here. The other device is the repeated appearance of Donald Calthrop who threatens to raise the tone of the piece with some Shakespeare. In the end he gets his way with a surreal version of The Taming of The Shrew featuring Anna Mae Wong, a circling motor-cycle and a custard-pie fight. The chaos is all strangely prophetic of Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small.
Thursday, 6th July, 2006, am
224 - 25.CD: Schoenberg: Erwartung, Op.17, D. Dow, NYPO, D. Mitropoulos, r. 1951, 28'20"
224 - 25.CD: E. Krenék: Symphonic Elegy for strings, 1945, NYPO, D. Mitropoulos, r. 1951, 15'28"
135.CD: Bruckner: Symphony No.2, Original 1872 Edition, National Orchestra Ireland, G. Tintner, r. 1996, 71'10"
Schoenberg is out of fashion now but I grew up believing he was a great composer and I think so still. Erwartung is unashamedly Expressionist and the libretto by Marie Pappenheim has been accused of Freudianism. I think it's mainly a retread of Wilde's Salome. To his credit, Schoenberg resists the urge to do likewise in his music. Dealing with the nocturnal agitations of a soprano, the tessitura is often strenuous but the lines are essentially lyrical. Dorothy Dow does not avoid a certain whiteness in some passages but she is intelligent and finds much beauty in the piece. Mitropoulos directs with pioneering zeal and Columbia Masterworks have conjured good sound from the 1951 tapes. The record - now a generous fill-up to the Wozzeck set - was originally issued in the UK on the Philips Modern Music series in 1961.
It has long been thought that the libretto is based on the psycho-analytic history of one of Freud's patients: Anna O. whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim. Attempts to establish a familial relationship with Marie have been so far unsuccessful. However, according to a persuasive piece by Alexander Carpenter, the libretto also owes a great deal to the case of Dora in Freud's casebooks. According to Carpenter:
"If Marie Pappenheim drew upon the Anna O. case for a classical representation of hysteria, then she drew upon the Dora case for its evocative dreams and their subsequent interpretations, but also may have been drawn to Dora herself as a powerful figure of irrepressible feminine sexuality and sexual ambiguity."
Krenék's Elegy on the death of Anton Webern represents a very approachable face of serialism, being darkly Mahlerian in its emotional directness. The nagging semitones may recall Bartók and there is ample variety of movement to prevent the piece stagnating. The New York strings play this wonderfully well.
The Naxos Bruckner cycle under George Tintner has divided critics. This was the first recording of the Second Symphony in the original 1872 version. How far the extra playing time - about an extra ten minutes on top of the usual duration - is down to extra bars or Tintner's relaxed pace, I don't know, not having any score to hand. It is - at least here - a gentle undulating landscape, more Schubertian than Wagnerian. Divided violins helped the textures to breathe in an appealing way. The climaxes find Tintner discovering reserves of power which were unexpected, however some will think the performance slightly lacking in urgency and impact. I enjoyed it but was not wrapped up in the piece as I can be.
Friday, 7th July into Saturday, 8th July, 2006 am
136.CD: Szymanowski: Symphony No.1, Op.15, Polish State PO, K. Stryja, Naxos, 1988, 20'28"
Not a work I had ever heard even in the first flush of enthusiasm for this composer many years ago. This is early and derivative - mainly from Richard Strauss. The condensed form might seem forward-looking but is probably from Schumann. The colours are lush but there is a lack of any real substance here. Though his most popular works are the sensual first violin concerto and the third symphony, Szymanowski pared down his musical language as he got older. I'm never quite sure how many of the Mazurkas, Op.50 I can take at a sitting: they seem to consist of the same material viewed from many different angles. However, they are haunting in a way which the early pieces are not.
Sunday, 9th into Monday, 10th July, 2006 am
269.D: W. Herzog: Fitzcarraldo, version with commentary by director etc, 1982 etc, 150'45"
Life is probably too short for commentaries. We might love to have Hitchcock as companion to the movies he made but this confessional albeit commercial new technology might have tempted him to rather less self-revelation than Truffaut's simple tape recorder. Herzog is probably a volcano nearing extinction and his commentaries on his DVDs are monotonously benign. Apart from his pet fiend Kinski, he seems only to have nice things to say about his casts of dwarfs, freaks and misfits. People are typically, "very nice," "very kind," and so it goes for two and a half hours. In the commentary to Fitzcarraldo, he particularly at pains to squash accusations that he was anything but kind to the native peoples of Peru he used in his famous boat-lugging dream-fest. I wish we had caught the diabolical Herzog of those years - he would have been far more entertaining. As things are, he does an alarmingly plausible parody of sanity.
I'm not, in any case, much of a fan of the picture, except as the comedic shadow of Apocalypse Now. I am far too much of a gramophone-dweeb to buy into the fiction of the horn on the deck, regaling the natives with Caruso. Our modern take on classical music and the savage breast is that it is mainly useful for dislodging feral youths from bus-stops. Herzog's works seem to me to have little or nothing to do with the external world, however much he needs to impose himself on it to realise them. He claims they are his compensation for the fact he does not ever actually dream.
Wednesday, 12th July, 2006, am
161.V: Brownlow & Mollo: It Happened Here, 1967, b & w, from Channel 4 broadcast, August 1999, 96'04"
It is always tempting to describe the gritty newsreel quality of this film as realistic. Made on no budget over a period of several years, the pet project of two young film anoraks, we might expect the boys' toys aspects of an imaginary occupation to be foremost. In fact what always astonishes is the mysterious, dark poetry of the work. By following the story of an unglamorous, unheroic woman about whose back-story we learn very little, we explore her narrow world in a way which implies a whole culture. What disturbs and confuses critics is the fact that the film resembles at times a history written by the victorious Germans. From Liszt's Les Preludes at the start to the German marching songs later, the emotional meaning of occupation is implied by the "ownership" of the film itself. We are not allowed to inhabit the film itself as a place of reservations, the luxurries of conscience and alternative decencies. The quiet efficiency of this Final Solution is chilling not because it is entirely soulless but because the emotional toll of the task is acknowledged by those routinely involved. The soul itself has been corrupted. Is there any scene more chilling in film than the bright morning in a cottage hospital garden? Then, as the pendulum swings against the occupiers, we witness a pitiless revenge. The collborator-nurse seems set to survive not because of her essential humanity but simply because she possesses transferable skills. This print contains the controversial scenes in which the fascist case is made by a non-actor who himself belonged to the British extreme Right. Cut at the time by the nervous distributors, it has been reinstated, since the rights to the picture have been reacquired by the makers. Kevin Brownlow, of course, went on to become an expert on early movies while Andrew Mollo became a historical advisor on big budget productions. "It Happened Here" is however a masterpiece and it could happen only once.
Saturday, 15th July, 2006, am
051.D: A. Hitchcock: Sabotage, 1936, b & w, 75'52"
Underrated, perhaps on account of its unsatisfactory wrappng-up, this was the picture in which Hitchcock thought he had gone too far. Stretching the nerves of the audience was one thing, threatening to offer up an innocent victim was good theatre but actually daring to perform the sacrifice was diabolical. The full cruelty of Sabotage may depend on recent events to hit home. Assassins may change their colour but the banal mysteries of terrorism remain oddly reliable. Yesterday a cinema, today a mosque. Certain scenes stand out: the dissolve from aquarium-tank to cinema screen; the scene in which Sylvia Sydney briefly and beautifully seems to lose herself in cinema, after she has killed her husband, the accidental way in which the kindness of a conductor allows a dangerous package onto a bus. Conrad's novel was wickedly retooled to play on the nerves of pre-war audiences. The dialogue is partly credited to Helen Simpson, who was joint-author of the novel from which Hitchcock derived Murder six years before. About this time, she would have been working on the novel Under Capricorn, published in 1937, which Hitchcock brought to the screen in 1948 - 49, by which time she had been dead nine years.
Saturday, 15th July, 2006, pm
2.E: Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op.6 Nos.3 & 4, Boyd Neel Orchestra, Decca, 1950, reissue 1970, 11'31" + 11'55"
4889.M: Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op.6 Nos.3 & 4, SW German CO, Tilegant, Ariola-Eurodisc-WRC-RMC,1963, 10'29" + 11'14"
A compare and contrast session. The Boyd Neel set was incomplete for years and I would still like to find the first eight Concerti in good original Mono pressings. This Eclipse issue from the early seventies is in processed "stereo". There is a way these English players had of colouring the string sound with a range of almost vocal inflections. The German orchestra is efficient but plods at times in Concerto No.3. The 4th Concerto, a marvellous piece, fares better but it is a still a comparitively plain light of day performance compared to the Neel. A Doctor by training, he left these shores for Canada, taking with him the rights to his name. The later band made some records I gather but the glory days were the forties and fifties when the Decca contract produced some classic discs.
Sunday, 16th July, 2006, am
3152.S: Grieg: Piano Concerto, Van Cliburn, Philadelphia, E. Ormandy, RCA, 1968, 29'19"
3146.S: Sibelius: 7th Symphony, Hallé, J. Barbirolli, HMV, 1967, 21'36"
3142.DS: Scriabin: Piano Sonata No.1 & 4 Pieces, Op.51, V. Ashkenazy, Decca, 1987, 20'45" + 6'46"
3148.S: Schubert: 5th Symphony, Philharmonia, O. Klemperer, Columbia, 1963, 26'08"
3149.S: Berlioz: Harold in Italy, W. Trampler, LPO, G. Prêtre, RCA, 1969, 45'59"
Among my least favourite concertos, the Grieg seems thin and rhetorical stuff. Just a few moments of poetry in the slow movement seem born out of an authentic feeling; the rest is glittery and shallow. That isn't my reaction to most of the composer's music, just this piece. Great white hope, Van Cliburn, sold a lot of records in the sixties, when his Moscow triumph seems in retrospect to have been a Cold War event as much as a musical one. It is hard to imagine any classical musical event raising such enthusiasm today. I have seen some dealers plead with sellers not to send them any Cliburn discs as they can't shift them now. He isn't bad but rather stiff at the start of the concerto and the piece needs freshness above all. The recording was made on the outdoor stage at the Saratoga Springs Music Festival. The somewhat hard piano tone is typical of these sixties RCA Dynagroove issues, pressed by Decca. I gather the full Dynagroove technology was never unleashed on the UK public, involving as it did a deliberate distortion to compensate for tracking error on the inner grooves. Whether connected to the technology or not, I always detect a low-level ripple of surface noise, however well the discs have been cleaned.
Barbirolli's Sibelius Seventh is honest and compelling with good clear sound but this semi-circle pressing - original label? - is crackly throughout. Ashkenazy's Scriabin, heard in an early Decca digital - the kind of LP which no one collects - is hard to beat. He gives the music a dignity and a backbone which relates it to the Russian and Polish heritage rather than indulging in it as a decadent binge. Even so, there seemed a more personal warmth to the playing of the short pieces here, which were magically done. The Sonata is a young man's piece, self-dramatising but not outrageously so. Klemperer's Schubert is sturdy and earth-bound, slightly dour at times, tending to underline the G minor shadows and its debt to Mozart's 40th. I think Böhm's Viennese version was a lot more genial. Having been reading Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley and Byron during the week, the Berlioz "Symphony" seemed a natural choice. Trampler is too closely balanced for comfort but there was poetry and life enough, even if the disc does not carry us through some of the duller stretches in the piece. At times I had some sympathy for Paganini: those dull accompanying figures are not what any soloist dreams of having to play. Yet it is worth hearing every so often as probably the most authentically Byronic of pieces and surely the inspiration for Elgar's Italian adventure In the South, at least its moonlit central section. Badged as another Dynagroove disc, this English-made record seemed less spluttery than most, though the Third Movement had some bad clicks throughout.
Sunday, 16th July, 2006, pm
3148.S: Schubert: 8th Symphony, Philharmonia, O. Klemperer, Columbia, 1963, 24'46"
3152.S: Liszt: Piano Concerto No.1, Van Cliburn, Philadelphia, E. Ormandy, RCA, 1968, 18'21"
3142.DS: Scriabin: Piano Sonatas Nos.6 & 8, V. Ashkenazy, Decca, 1987, 11'26" + 13'15"
The Klemperer Unfinished had more poetry than his 5th and I would have enjoyed the record but for the constant surface noise. A disappointing copy, as the recording per se seems good. Van Cliburn and Ormandy were efficient enough in Liszt's Concerto but it needs a touch more involvement to come to life. It is isn't completely Liszt's fault that he no longer seems to be in good taste. Probably he never was, so we need to transcend all that, which we didn't, quite, here. Scriabin considered his Sixth Sonata to be a tainted piece and he refused to play it in public. It owes something to the haunted regions of Schumann's Prophet Bird then it flickers off chasing Will'o-the-wisps till it vanishes into thin air, like Scarbo. The Eighth is slightly more benign. Ashkenazy has the measure of these exotic pieces and the record is very well made.
Monday, 17th July, 2006, am
123.D: A. Hitchcock: Rope, 1948, 77'00"
I like the little plug Hitchcock gets in for his next movie: the social chatterboxes are discussing movie stars and immediately after mention of Bergman, we learn that Cary Grant was a Capricorn. I have not checked this. Soon after we get the assertion that since Freud, everything must have a meaning. I don't find a lot of Freud in Rope, champagne bottles aside. The camera gets to explore the apartment in a kind of re-enactment of the murder, as deduced by Stewart.
Monday, 17th July, 2006, am
Cornerhouse, Manchester: R. Aldrich: Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, 110'
Impressive on the big screen, this is the quintessence of pulp. I read a piece recently in which the author invited us to count the references to high culture in this film. I had forgotten that the disc being played by the opera-lover is M'appari from Flotow's Martha, which also features in Hitchcock's Rear Window. I suppose these were the years when the cult of Mario Lanza was at its height and bits of Caruso were quite the thing. I especially enjoy the horrible morgue attendant whose trapped fingers we are invited to savour. There are several broad ethnic stereotypes. I confess to looking forward to the moment when the annoying Greek mechanic gets his. What a corrupting movie this is!
3134.M: Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op.6 Nos.5 & 6 & Corelli: Concerto Grosso, Op.6 No.8, SW German CO, Tilegant, Ariola-Eurodisc-WRC-RMC,1963, 15'36" + 14'26" + 13'50"
3150.S: Mendelssohn: MSND: Overture & Incidental Music, Cleveland, G. Szell, CBS, 1968, 30'15"
3151.S: Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Weber, Cleveland, G. Szell, CBS, 1968, 19'38"
3163.S: Mozart: Magic Flute Excerpts, Cast, Philharmonia, O. Klemperer, Columbia, 1964, HMV reissue ,1980s, 54'07"
Tilegant's Concertos are all pleasing without any real magic. This old mono disc plays well enough and the shorter sides make it project somewhat better than its companion. Odd that WRC chose only to issue half the Handel set. I gather it was complete on Ariola-Eurodisc. Szell rather predictably lacks the gentle touch with Mendelssohn and the recording sounds a little coarse. Plently of good detail, of course and seldom can the Mahlerian pre-echoes of that Wedding March fanfare have sounded so loud and clear. I doubt if the very German title of the Hindemith did much to commend it to wartime Americans. For all its ancestry in some mysterious pieces by Weber, it speaks with a decided American accent as the Scherzo breaks into a kind of jazz. In the succeeding movement, are their hints of Coplandian outdoors music? The concluding March is rather thin. The large percussion section was innovative, I suppose, though Gershwin was probably first in that line with his Cuban Overture in the early thirties. All in all, it seems a bit of a damp squib these days but Szell did everything he could for it.
The trouble with excerpts from Die Zauberflöte is that you get what is basically just a concert of nice airs. The cast on this 1964 Walter Legge production was very strong and Klemperer's speeds did not seem too sluggish. This was a digitally remastered late LP with some very ugly tape-joins. The sound was vivid but there were signs of peak distortion here and there. I found all the stops and starts - most tracks are just about three or four minutes - prevented me getting into the spirit of the piece.
Friday, 21st July, 2006, am
004.D: M. Pellington: The Mothman Prophecies, 2001, w/s, 114'00"
One of the first DVDs I ever played and one of only a handful of relatively modern films I bought to see what the new medium could do. A second viewing now the medium has lost its novelty-value confirmed my original doubts. As the story of a breakdown, it lacks the necessary intimacy, opting instead for wide-screen panoramas and the inescapable homogenized digital sound design. Near the beginning we see Geer in a television interview claiming that politicians have created a stalemate and that people are only left with projections. Near the end, he imagines casting himself as the Soothsayer to a visiting Senator. Yet the politics angle is not developed at all. In the end we get a bloated variant on the Orpheus myth. Having failed to save his first wife, Geer succeeds, thanks to his dark hallucinations, in saving a woman who will probably become his second. Her delivery from an underwater car is all very symbolic but his being there seems to validate the voices which otherwise seem evil and taunting.
Really I got the feeling that the director here was more interested in the spectacular disaster-movie elements than he was in the human drama. Since none of the characters seemed real to me, it was a matter of little moment whether what they thought was real was or not. A pity, because there might have been a good film to be made about Keel's strange book. It owes its fame to the claim that it records a true phenomenon. And the key thing was the grip of this thing on a whole community. Here the whole story is whittled down to cast of about a half dozen characters drawn essentially from modern stock: the sympathetic rural cop, the half-crazy man, the scarred writer with his solemn warnings etc. Part of a wave of supernatural thrillers, this one really tends to confirm my feeling that modern movies apply expensive technologies to compete with the fairground rather than the great movies of the past.
Saturday, 22nd July, am
273.D: P. Shibli: The Nutrcracker Prince, animation, 1991, 70'10
239.D: Chaplin in A Musical Tramp & A Fair Exchange, 1914, 11'33" + 13'01"
282.D: A. Rudolph: Head aka Premonition, 1971, 79'23"
Clammy and ennervating weather so nothing demanding was called for. The Nutcracker Prince is a Canadian-made cartoon but the animation is hardly fantastic and the makers do not dare to make things scary or even disconcerting, which means Hoffmann is uprooted, the children become North American while the characters around them speak with comic European accents. The story retains some sense that is a child's nightmare of adolescence but this is such painting by numbers that it feels like a form of social engineering rather than an imaginitive exploration of some very dark spaces. Tchaikovsky's score features at the start but soon becomes mere background. The full-screen print and stereo soundtrack are adequate but a child with balletic leanings would be disappointed and if it was on telly they might turn to desultory channel-hopping. I notice this one has also turned up as a newspaper give-away. This copy was the A-side of a flipper which featured some Krazy Kat cartoons from the sixties. Thankfully just a Pound store purchase. Undemanding fare can sometimes prove to be quite exhausting in its banality.
A Musical Tramp features Charlie briefly gainfully employed in a music store. His two-fold task is to deliver a new piano to a rich man and repossess the piano of a struggling musician. The house of the musician is up a vast flight of stone steps, probably inspiring one of Laurel & Hardy's best-remembered pictures, The Music Box. Here the steps are not so well-profiled and the canvas seems bitty. A Fair Exchange is another episode of Mashing which here revolves around the louche subject of a partner swap with the additional complication that one of the ladies is played by a large ugly man. I wonder just how much sexual activity went on in the parks of Los Angeles in 1914? These early Chaplins suggest that every bush concealed a predator.
The trippy Rudolph picture got a second outing which seemed to confirm that although drug-taking could be treated head-on in 1971, the sexual subtext had to be symbolic. It now seems to be a time-capsule of hippy values but there is a down-beat feel to it, the dropping-out is not merely a fashionable pose.
Saturday, 22nd July, pm
3151.S: Janacék: Sinfonietta, Cleveland, G. Szell, CBS, c 1965, 24'03"
3150.S: Schubert: Rosamunde: Overture, Entr'acte & Ballet Music I, Cleveland, G. Szell, CBS, c 1960, 25'05"
In an odd coincidences, I turned the radio on a few minutes before settling down as planned with this disc; what should have been playing but the Sinfonietta. Maybe from the Proms? Szell's performance is powerful and incisive. Probably it just misses the ecstatic happiness that the piece seems to strive for. The combination of Szell with Schubert seems less natural. The Entr'acte and Ballet Music however did seem to relax into the right romantic mood.
Sunday, 23rd July, am
125 - 27.D: Anton Webern: Complete Works with Opus Number, Various, P. Boulez, 1967 onwards, Sony-CBS, Disc One, 74'10"
Shovelling down Webern's complete published works a CD at a time is to do them a disservice, perhaps. But how are they to be programmed? Reducing the length and increasing the specific gravity of the music seems to turn it into a kind of pharmaceutical and to place Webern's pieces in the context of older music makes them seem like pills scattered among slices of red meat. I used to listen to these pieces a lot in the eighties and returning to them was interesting. A reaction against serialism has called into question the validity of the post-Webern school but the foundations of that revolution were always too flimsy to support a whole international movement. Listening to Webern, after a long gap, is to be surprised by its emotional openness. It is concentrated and serious music, the emotions explored are intense states: obsessive ideal love, nervous tension, horror, fear of death. These first twelve opus numbers offer more sensual vocal contours than the middle-period songs to come. It is not Webern's fault that the truth and authenticity of his art was seized upon as the One True Way ahead after the Second World War. His martyrdom helped. The odd thing is that while he set out to purge his works of musical rhetoric, Webern was saturated in a literary culture whose posturings he did not question: Strindberg and George now seem a lot closer to Victor Hugo than they would have liked to acknowledged. From the Twenty-First Century, Anton Webern is looking increasingly Romantic.
Friday, July 28th, am
137.V: I. Bergman: Through a Glass Darkly, 1961, 85'55"
Saturday, July 29th, am
137.V: I. Bergman: Winter Light, 1962, 77'23"
There have been a few articles in the last couple of years which suggest Bergman's more austere work may have reached a nadir of fashion and be due for some restoration of its reputation. That may simply be a hook for the writers to sell a new piece on an old subject, for you can find David Thomson recalling that Bergman was "a discredited innovator" in the eyes of the fashion-conscious world by 1961. If DVDs are a sign of fashion then the collected Bergman edition, which includes the pictures he wrote as well as those he directed, hardly suggests a forgotten figure.
Yet it is hard to imagine these works - together with The Silence they were said to comprise a so-called Faith Trilogy - ever exciting a new wave of critical writing. Not because they are not good - everything about them screams quality - but because they hardly require interpretation. Far from being difficult or academic works, they seem to attempt a stripped-down cinema. Like good plain glass, pots or furniture they require raw materials of the finest quality and the special quality of Nordic light. And people, oh dear, yes, people of the kind you can fillet like herrings; people who fall off their bones as you watch.
I think they were always shown in Academy ratio, even in the cinema. In the seventies, when I got to know them, it seemed, along with their short running-times to guarantee their authenticity. To see Winter Light in the cinema was nearly like going to church. Not even Bresson dared to be so spare. It is concentrated misery of the sort which cries out for parody. Yet I am sure there is a dry and very sly sense of humour, just about showing its cloven hoof at the end of Winter Light, where the bad pastor, the pissed organist and the twisted sacristan launch into Mass for a congregation of one. It's show-time, folks!
Sunday, July 30th, pm
287.V: A.Hitchcock: Topaz, 1969, widescreen version, Film Four, c 136'
The first time I had seen this in its theatrical ratio. The region 2 DVD is open-matte, which does the cinematography no favours. It looks somewhat better here and this turned out to be the Director's Cut with the aeroplane boarding ending.