Romani Movie Reviews
Rossellini's Joan of Arc
Rossellini's Best but So Far Most Obscure FilmEnthusiasm has got the better hold of me. I cannot believe that this stark, formally brave, one-of-a-kind film directed by Roberto Rossellini, his next-to-last feature starring then-wife Ingrid Bergman, will find its way onto home video. Here, Rossellini insists on a completely inward performance from Bergman. The setting is deliberately theatrical, Bergman is seldom seen closely, and in fact much of the time what we see of her is a ghostly superimposition. There may never have been a less fleshly performance in the history of cinema, and yet Bergman's passion is tremendous, and she overcomes obstacles that would seem to prevent communication with us, as Joan fled imprisonment and the shackles of this world to unite with God. While I love the film versions of Joan of Arc directed by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Rivette (the complete five-hour-plus version), this one is my favorite. If I were to select the ten best films ever made, this film, translated as "Joan at the Stake," would be one of them.
I AM a teenager who loves classics, and this is MY FAVORITE!
"Syberberg's Parsifal" is exactly that: it is not to be approached as a video presentation of an opera but as a full-scale film in its own right. The director's concern with the claims of the romantic and "irrational" in Germany's cultural heritage, demonized as an aftermath of the Third Reich, is here at its apex. An astonishingly intricate profusion of imagery saturates the film--as props, cluttering objects, costumes, part of the set, or visuals projected onto the background--with the resonance of a long, disturbing dream. Striking visuals from the opera's own symbolic world are set alongside a veritable parade of iconography from Europe's cultural history, while the action of the opera is seen to take place within and around an enormous replica of Wagner's death mask as backdrop. Conceptually the intention is to counter Wagner's "narcotic" spell with Brechtian distance or with a Walter Benjamin-like slant on the artifacts of culture.
For all of the radicalism of his imagery, Syberberg hews surprisingly close to more traditional acting styles here, drawing on a "presentational" approach of gesture, the stylization of early film, and intimate reaction shots. The music was actually recorded separately as a soundtrack, to which the actors (mostly a separate cast) lip-synch their performances. Conductor Armin Jordan--a sensitive but never self-indulgent Wagnerian--also actually performs the role of Amfortas, and the distinguished actress Edith Clever is a special asset for her mesmerizing, expressive Kundry, making the role into the opera's psychological epicenter. At the point of the resisted kiss in Act II, in a Jungian split, Parsifal becomes portrayed by a woman (still mouthing the mellifluous tenor exclamations of Reiner Goldberg). Syberberg wallows in contradictory currents and obscure symbolism that sometimes reinforces what he seems to want to take apart. Yet he has also succeeded in locating the work somewhere in a unique space between fetishized ritual and purely aesthetic experience. The DVD transfer is somewhat grainy in resolution, while the soundtrack has a noticeable persistent hiss. Jordin's relatively fleet pacing allows for much texture and offers a fine enough performance, though not a top choice on musical terms alone. --Thomas May
Great Production, Shame about the Sub-titles
An ineffable experience of a work of genius
melancholy...What I dislike about the Met version is the musical interpretation and the acting. The overture is just awful. Bad acting in Act 1, till Kundry appears. Then Jerusalem, he just can't act and his voice doesn't really suit the role.
Anyway, Syberberg's Parsfal is so much better done overall.