Entries associated with the tag "Michael Powell":

First Michael Powell, now Preston Sturges ... must be in a time warp: forward to the past!

Anyway, re Sturges and my previously related difficulties with his high-period, you'll excuse the language, "comedies"—that the laughs are obvious and underlined, that the performers are like programmed robots, spewing out cookie-cutter bons mots with hardly a trace of naturalistic empathy or self-reflection ("They gave me these lines so I say 'em"—that kind of professionalized artifice by rote)—is there really any hope for such a sorry, sorry case (i.e., moi-meme), an alleged film admirer whose sense of humor's so thoroughly skewed he can't even understand (though in fact he can) why anyone would laugh at these critical sacred cows? What, the maestro's pushing another button? Damn, got past me again.

Of course I could temporize, stave off ridicule by pointing out, as I already have, how wonderfully well made these movies are, their "choreographic sensibility ... commedia dell'arte energy and spectacle ... 'Brueghelian' congestion," all that diversionary hoo-hah. But when it comes down to basics—are they funny or or are they not?—then, sorry, ladies and gents, gotta part company there.

With one notable exception. A comedy from the high period I actually find hilarious, that almost leaves me rolling on the floor. And it's the only one—the only Sturges "classic" this confirmed Sturges hater (but I'm not! I'm not!) can feel enthusiasm for. Anyone want to guess what it is? No prizes, aside from the dubious satisfaction—or maybe it's smirking pleasure, the controlling superiority of insight—of having got the writer's number. Which I'm hoping won't be that easy—quel embarras!—but you'll probably prove that it is.

So yeah, right, like anyone's supposed to care. But I'll post an answer in the comments sometime next week—and I promise not to lie. Sure hope it won't be the only comment there.

About two weeks from now, on February 19, the Gene Siskel Film Center will present a rare screening of Bluebeard's Castle, one of the twilight works by the great British director Michael Powell. I haven't had a chance to see this adaptation of the Bela Bartok opera, though Jonathan Rosenbaum has reviewed it for the Reader.

As part of the film's run, Powell's widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, has made available a short piece about the movie by French director Bertrand Tavernier (Safe Conduct, Round Midnight, Captain Conan). The Film Center has kindly allowed us to reprint the piece, translated by Michael Henry Wilson:

"I remember seeing this film in a small British Film Institute theater. Michael Powell had set up the screening for me. I was impressed then by its extreme rigor, its strangely luxuriant sobriety, and its great visual beauty. Seeing it again 40 years later is an even stronger experience. The friendly familiarity that I have formed with Powell's films provides more keys, opens other doors through which the imagination can surge.

"Bluebeard's Castle appears suddenly as the missing link that connects The Tales of Hoffman and Peeping Tom. It combines the incredible visual inventiveness, the surrealistic set design of the first one, and the moral rigor, the peremptory, inescapable and yet deeply compassionate tone of the second. Bluebeard is Mark’s twin brother. Both live in a universe of death and desolation, haunted by terrifying memories of their crimes and broken dreams. Flowers and clouds are tinted with blood like the images filmed by Karl Boehm or the magnetic tapes upon which he recorded the screams of his victims as well as his own cries of fear. In this funereal world, victims seem to long for their destiny or to stage it.

"Let us acknowledge right away that Bartok’s opera is one of the masterpieces of the last century—along with Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw by Britten. Magnificent is Bela Balasz’s libretto, with its extraordinary score building up an almost unbearable dramatic tension without any artificial effect. And Powell recaptures this musical power in his direction, in his changes of camera axis, of lighting, of angles, blurring perspectives and vanishing points. Judith finds herself suddenly facing Bluebeard, when in the previous shot he stood at the other end of the dungeon... The characters appear to be walking towards each other but you quickly realize that they are following each other or moving away from each other.

"Helped by the brilliant Hein Heckroth whose experiments are on a par with the work of some of the greatest theater directors—Peter Brook, Strelher, Chéreau—Powell creates on a single set a tortuous, unpredictable maze—a mental labyrinth. You feel as though you are penetrating the characters' emotions just as you penetrated David Niven's mind in A Matter of Life and Death. This labyrinth is perfectly in tune with Bartok’s music. 'The eye listens' as Paul Claudel said magnificently. This was perfectly understood and mastered by Powell.

"What also strikes me in this film where the dark, brown colors of the background and props are pierced by flashes of gold—like in the shot where Judith is suddenly irradiated by a yellow light as if struck by an unexpected and, alas, fleeting ray of sunshine—or violet, or red like the flowers in the water, is its extraordinary melancholy. It is a melancholy that you find in many of Powell and Pressburger's films, from The Small Back Room to Hoffman to Red Shoes to Blimp to Peeping Tom. It emanates from the scenery or from the characters and their relation to the decor. The impressive Norman Foster expresses it marvelously in his acting as well as in his musical phrasing; in the way he holds back his voice. In the last minutes, when the camera moves away from Judith (played with intense inner fire by the beautiful Ana Raquel Satre, who recalls so many of Powell's heroines), one gets the impression that he merges physically into the set, becomes a part of it, and turns to stone.

"Florence Delay, in her magnificent books on the Knights of the Round Table, showed that what was called 'the disease of melancholy' in the Middle Ages was always related to the story of an immense, devouring, impossible, broken love. That tragic love is the one haunting the rooms of Bluebeard's Castle."

Facets Film School has announced its winter session of weeknight film classes, which begins February 5 and runs for six weeks. I took a class on early Fassbinder there once, and it wasn't bad—the films were projected from DVD and the lectures tended more toward open discussion, but the tuition is only $95.

On Mondays, Christy LeMaster of Chicago Cinema Forum will teach "Stranger Than Truth: The Hybrid Documentary" and screen such titles as Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein's The Kid Stays in the Picture, Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal, and Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder.

On Tuesdays, Jeremy M. Davies will teach "What I Tell You Three Times Is True: The Provocative and Fantastic World of Raul Ruiz," which includes screenings of Klimt, Life Is a Dream, and Three Crowns of the Sailor.

On Wednesdays, Bruce Scivally will teach "Saints & Sinners: Politicians in the Movies," focusing on such features as Gergory La Cava's Gabriel Over the White House, Preston Sturges's The Great McGinty, Frank Capra's State of the Union, and Michael Ritchie's The Candidate.

And on Thursdays, Brandon Linden will teach "Arrows of Desire: The Films of Powell & Pressburger During WWII," examining the British team's treatment of the war in such dramas as Contraband, The 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.