“Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker" at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 24 June 2024 10:16

Written by Jack Angstreich

The Tales of Hoffman

From June 14th through the 20th, Film at Lincoln Center presented “Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker,” an eclectic series of seventeen films chosen by the outstanding playwright, in anticipation of the release on the 21st, at this venue, of her first feature, the striking Janet Planet. (Her 2013 play, The Flick, was one of the finest of recent years.) The artist offered this engaging statement on the program:

“The terrible habit of theatre.” I was working at St. Mark’s Bookshop (RIP) at age 21 when I first discovered Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, in a pocket sized edition that we sold at the front desk. I was a young playwright and Bresson-lover and I was shocked and thrilled by how much Bresson seemed to hate an art form I loved (the truth was, I hated it 90 percent of the time). Over the next few years I came to understand the subtleties of his anti-theatrical argument and in my own way tried to embody them in the theatre I wrote and made. The book was for me, in the end, about understanding the limitations and possibilities of the form you’re working in, and trying your hardest not to lie to yourself. “Everything to be called into question.” “Don’t run after poetry.” “Your film must take off. Bombast and the picturesque hinder it from taking off.” Later I discovered the bombastic, picturesque spectacle of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, a beginning to end hallucinatory recreation of Offenbach’s opera that is all theatre and all cinema, totally rigorous, completely bonkers, and so joyful it made me cry. And then of course there’s the symbiotic relationship between Broadway musicals and Technicolor movie musicals, and how with so many of them I couldn’t tell you if it started as a stage musical and then became a movie musical and then a stage musical adaptation of the movie musical or the other way around. And why does Gene Kelly tap dancing in tiny shorts on a theatre set on a movie set on a soundstage feel like the epitome of truth in both mediums? Bazin called theatre “film’s evil genius” in his essay “In Defense of Adaptation” and that feels right to me, like somehow theatre is the degenerate puppeteer responsible for the best and worst of 20th century cinema. When it comes to recent theatre history, nothing is more satisfying than Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André, a movie that feels like a play but could only be a movie about two legendary theatre makers discussing the agonies and ecstasies of living as an artist in New York City, in which 30 minutes of screen time is spent discussing the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski (look closely in my film Janet Planet and you’ll see a postcard of him hanging on the wall). Other filmmakers in this series, from Bergman to Cassavetes to Ozu, show the characters actually putting on a play inside the movie, and the struggle to make something live and the experience of being in an audience is captured with irony and a lot of love for theatre’s rough edges. There are only two filmed pieces of actual live theatre: the Wooster Group’s archival recording of the seminal performance piece Rumstick Road and The Meadows Green, DeeDee Halleck and George Griffin’s immersive documentary that makes you feel after 20 minutes like you just spent three days outside in Vermont with Bread and Puppet Theater in 1974. And then there’s D.A. Pennebaker’s great documentary about the cast recording of Company, which captures the exquisite pain of having to do something over and over again in a windowless room full of tired people, and that, two decades after reading Bresson, is still my favorite thing about making theatre.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from 1951—which apparently was admired by George A. Romero—is an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s glorious opera and as an avant-garde film it is surely an attempt to venture further with the highly innovative approach essayed in their masterwork about the ballet, The Red Shoes, from 1948. (The filmmakers were to achieve some further artistic accomplishment in adapting opera to film with their somewhat more conventional—or less unconventional—realization of Johann Strauss’s exquisite Die Fledermaus, Oh... Rosalinda!! from 1955; Powell also directed an astonishing—even visionary—1963 version of Béla Bartók’s powerful Bluebeard’s Castle for television.) Christopher Challis’s amazing photography and the brilliant production and costume design of Hein Heckroth were unfortunately seen with diminished effect in the digital restoration that was screened, despite the impressive reproduction of the film’s dazzling original color. The filmmakers were fortunate in their extraordinary cast which includes Robert Rounseville, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, Pamela Brown, Ludmilla Tchérina, Ann Ayars and Frederick Ashton, who conceived the fabulous choreography. (The score was conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.)

Especially enjoyable was D. A. Pennebaker’s classic cinéma vérité documentary, Original Cast Album: Company from 1970, which observes the vexing studio recording of the wonderful LP of the acclaimed Stephen Sondheim show. It offers an exceptional opportunity to closely view such luminaries of Broadway musical theatre as Sondheim himself, director Hal Prince, playwright, librettist and actor George Furth, and stars like Dean Jones, Elaine Stritch, Barbara Barrie, Donna McKechnie, and Beth Howland. (The digital version projected was an excellent transfer of the 16-millimeter original.) Remarkable too was the short documentary with which it was paired, The Meadows Green by George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck—both of whom introduced the screening—about what is described in the Film at Lincoln Center program note as “the 1974 edition of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus, taking place soon after the company’s relocation from downtown Manhattan to the rural New England enclave where it remains headquartered to this day.” (According to the directors, Chris Marker was present to record the same event for a project that was never realized.) 

Also bewitching was Ingmar Bergman’s pleasurable adaptation of the final operatic masterpiece of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute from 1975, photographed by Sven Nykvist and shown here in a very good 35-millimeter print. In his book, Images, the director commented on his attitudes about the casting, in which he was thoroughly successful:

Since we were not performing The Magic Flute on a stage but in front of a microphone and camera, we did not need large voices. What we needed were warm, sensuous voices that had personality. To me it was also absolutely essential that the play be performed by young actors, naturally close to dizzy, emotional shifts between joy and sorrow, between thinking and feeling. Tamino must be a handsome young man. Pamina must be a beautiful young woman. Not to speak of Papageno and Papagena.

The sometimes valuable critic, Pauline Kael, who had become progressively disillusioned with the filmmaker, was unusually astute in her assessment for The New Yorker:

Ingmar Bergman's film version of The Magic Flute is a blissful present, a model of how opera can be filmed. Bergman must have reached a new, serene assurance to have tackled this sensuous, luxuriant opera that has bewildered so many stage directors, and to have brought it off so unaffectedly. It's a wholly unfussy production, with the bloom still on it.

Less felicitous, however, was Rumstick Road, from 2013. Film at Lincoln Center provided the following description:

The Wooster Group’s 1977 theater piece Rumstick Road has been recognized by critics and scholars as a landmark work that helped usher in a new era of experimental performance. Conceived by Spalding Gray as a response to the suicide of his mother, and directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, Rumstick Road combined Gray’s personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35mm slides, music, and dance. This 2013 video reconstruction of Rumstick Road keeps faith with the theater piece by registering, in a new composite, the texture of time and memory that shaped the original production. LeCompte and filmmaker Ken Kobland have worked with Wooster Group archivist Clay Hapaz to layer, juxtapose, and blend together numerous archival fragments—including U-Matic video, Super-8 film, reel-to-reel audio tapes, photographs, and slides—in order to reconstruct that lost performance.

To judge by the one production that I’ve seen, The Wooster Group was one of the most interesting theater companies of its time and LeCompte seems to me an undeniable talent, but whatever merits Rumstick Road had as a stage work are difficult to discern in this disappointing reconstruction, marred especially by poor quality video recording.

Perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying experience I had in the series was re-seeing Ernst Lubitsch’s delightful To Be or Not to Be from 1942, which wasscreened in a truly splendid 35-millimeter print from the Library of Congress. Film at Lincoln Center offered the following account of it:

The famed “Lubitsch touch” was perhaps never deployed to such urgently political ends as in To Be or Not to Be, a satirical take on collective artmaking under Fascism in which the German-born auteur draws a darkly humorous connection between the workaday labor of stage performers and the life-and-death stakes of wartime subterfuge. Released just three years after the Nazi invasion of Poland and set amid the fraught social and cultural climate of the German occupation, the film’s intricately plotted comedy of manners concerns Joseph and Maria Tura (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard), the married stars of a celebrated Warsaw theater company mounting a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the eve of the invasion. When Maria’s admirer, a lovesick Polish lieutenant with connections to the resistance, unwittingly puts her in harm’s way, Joseph and Maria are drawn into a web of sexual entanglements worthy of the bard himself, building to a virtuosic series of impersonations that hinge on the chameleonic acting prowess of the Turas and their fellow troupe members.

Based on a story by Melchior Lengyel—who provided the basis for Bartók’s marvelous ballet score, The Miraculous Mandarin, as well as the original story for Lubitsch’s celebrated Ninotchka—the screenplay was co-written by the director and Edwin Justus Mayer, the author of the play, Children of Darkness, which was prophesied by the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom in his book The Western Canon to be a permanent work. Elegantly shot by Rudolph Maté—the legendary photographer of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr—the film is especially unforgettable for its terrific cast. Jack Benny undoubtedly was never better than he is here and Carole Lombard, one of the supreme exemplars of the practice of Hollywood comedy in that era, had her most sublime role along with that in Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century. Robert Stack who later triumphed in darker parts such as those in Douglas Sirk’s Written on The Wind and Jacques Tourneur’s Great Day in the Morning, effortlessly projects an ingenuous charm, while Sig Rumann delivers one of the most hilarious of character performances. (Also featured are Felix Bressart—so memorable in Lubitsch’s superb The Shop Around the Corner—and Lionel Atwill.)

The fascinating critic and philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, in an interview in 2015, said about it, “It is madness, you can not do a better comedy I think.” Dave Kehr, in his sterling capsule review for the Chicago Reader, summarizedthe general auteurist perspective on the movie:

Ernst Lubitsch directed this 1942 film from his own story about a troupe of Polish actors stranded in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of World War II. It could be his finest achievement, and it’s certainly one of the most profound, emotionally complex comedies ever made, covering a range of tones from satire to slapstick to shocking black humor. The issues, as the title suggests, are deeply serious, but it’s part of the film’s strategy—and the strategy it endorses for its characters—never to openly acknowledge them. Jack Benny, as the leader of the troupe, displays an acting talent never again demanded of him; Carole Lombard, in her last film, is kittenish, slinky, and witty as his unfaithful wife.

If I slightly dissent in being more partial to such pinnacles of Lubitsch’s art as Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner and Heaven Can Wait, I can only applaud Baker for a very rewarding selection nonetheless.