A Master Builder

 A Master Builder

I saw A Master Builder at its North American premiere at the Provincetown Film Festival on Cape Cod in 2014.  I think this was in June, a little before the Cape’s summer invasion by hordes of East Coast tourists.  One of the film’s producers was on the dais to present the movie as were the picture’s director Jonathan Demme with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.  

Provincetown is a strange place, an elongated dune broad enough for about four parallel streets running between 19th century boarding houses and cottages.  There’s an aggressive-looking fortified tower at on one side of the town, a hulking landmark commemorating the Revolutionary War – exactly the sort of structure from which Master Builder Solness might catapult to his doom.  In the commercial district, every other building seems to be a little theater or a Drag Queen revue.  I was there at dawn one day and the light was murky and submarine, clouds of mosquitos rising out of the salt water marshes, and some homeless people camped on the dirty beach.  

A Master Builder was screened in the hall of some mariner’s association.  The structure felt like a vast barn built from enormous wooden joists and pillars, an interior like Noah’s Ark.  Alternatively, it was like seeing a movie on a remote screen in the cavernous belly of a whale.  The place was mostly full with casually dressed people, apparently primarily local residents.  Everyone seemed to know Andre Gregory who has a place in Truro just beyond the brine lagoons on the approach to Provincetown.  People referred to Wallace Shawn as “Wally” and there was a vibe that he was regarded as an eccentric character but much beloved by his neighbors.  Wally came late to the screening and seemed to be very drunk.  He had flown in from Los Angeles where he was working as a voice-actor, playing some animated critter in a Disney movie.  

I don’t recall much about the screening or the Q & A that followed it.  From a distance, Andre Gregory looked elegant wearing cream colored clothes and a scarf.  Wally also had a scarf draped around his throat.  It gets cold at night on the tip of Cape Cod. 

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A Master Builder is regarded as the third in a trilogy of films featuring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.  Two of these movies were directed by Louis Malle, a famous French film director: My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994).  A Master Builder is dedicated to Malle who died in 1995.   Jonathan Demme is best remembered for his Oscar-winning adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) followed by the AIDS-related courtroom drama with Tom Hanks, Philadelphia (1993).  Demme also made a noteworthy documentary about the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, a movie adaptation of Spalding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, and the incandescent thriller, Something Wild, one of the best pictures of the ‘80's.  He died in New York City in 2017. 

The three pictures in the trilogy document Andre Gregory’s idiosyncratic approach to theater.  My Dinner with Andre is the result of a long collaboration between Gregory and Shawn.  The work evolved over several years as a result of dinner-time conversations between the two men.  At the time of its release, both Shawn and Gregory were well-known as figures in the avant-garde New York theater scene.  Shawn in particular had written and produced several plays, some of them notorious for their sexually graphic subject matter.  (In fact, Gregory’s Manhattan Project theater group was the first enterprise to produce one of Shawn’s controversial play, Our Late Night in 1975; Gregory directed.)  Gregory had studied theater with Jerzy Grotowski in Poland in the sixties, one of Europe’s most famous avant-garde directors, lived at the Findhorn commune, periodically, renouncing the theater for other more spiritual pursuits.  (His adventures are described in detail in his monologue in My Dinner with Andre.)  

During one of Gregory’s sabbaticals from commercial theater, he led a workshop devoted to a single play, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.  Gregory met with a small group of actors weekly for more than four years to work through David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s theater work.  Gregory had no intent to produce the play commercially.  But these extended rehearsals for a play that was never to be performed were filmed by Louis Malle, resulting in Vanya on 42nd Street – many of the personnel in A Master Builder worked with Gregory in Vanya including Larry Pine, Wallace Shawn (as Vanya) and Gregory himself. (The cameraman on The Ibsen Project, the name for the enterprise involving the 14 to 17 year rehearsals of the text, Declan Quinn, also shot Vanya on 42nd Street.) 

In 1997, Shawn “translated” Masterbuilder Solness – Shawn admits to knowing “some German”, was a Latin teacher after college, but doesn’t known Norwegian.  He commissioned a professor in Scandinavian languages to prepare a literal translation, word for word, of Ibsen’s text, a writing that listed synonyms for many of the expressions in the original.  Using this resource, Shawn made his own version of the play.  Gregory, then, began to workshop the text, convening periodic rehearsals beginning in 1997 through 2012.  Larry Pine (Herdal), Julie Hagery (Aline Solness), Shawn (Solness), and Gregory (old Brovik) were regulars in this 15 year endeavor.  Gregory saw these workshop rehearsals as an end in themselves, a sort of spiritual exercise, and there was no plan to ever present the theater-work to a paying audience.  In 2012, Jonathan Demme attended one of the workshop rehearsals and suggested that a film be made of the play.  Shot over several years, A Master Builder, was the result of this work.  The exteriors in the film were shot in Nyack, New York.  Interiors were filmed in Manhattan at manor house converted into a private women’s club in Greenwich Village, the Pen and Brush Club.  

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Ibsen’s original play is reputedly very difficult to persuasively stage.  This is because of the work’s peculiar mixture of dream-like symbolism and apparently naturalistic realism.  Like Ibsen’s Masterbuilder Solness, the Norwegian playwright was fearful of being displaced by younger rivals, most notably August Strindberg, the Swedish writer, and Knut Hamsun.  In some respects, Ibsen’s Master Builder attempts to best Strindberg at his own game, incorporating aspects of the Swede’s overtly dream-like imagery obvious in plays such as The Father.  (Strindberg’s Dream Play of 1902 seems to reflect back some of Ibsen’s visionary symbolism and, in fact, seems a reaction to the Norwegian’s later works.)

Shawn’s adaptation attempts to solve the problem of clashing styles in The Master Builder by imagining most of the action as the dream fantasy of the dying Solness.  The opening scenes, naturalistic in character, although teeming with oddities, give way to fantasy when Solness repeats the speech about his fear of youth knocking at the door, the second version more vibrant in tone with the literal knock on the door following.  At that point, Solness rises like Lazarus from his “mattress grave” to confront Hilda Wangel haloed by rim-lit radiance, a figure that advances in her “mountain-climbing’ garb (it looks like a skimpy white tennis outfit), some kind of goddess who seems to be literally twice the size of the Masterbuilder.  (Up to Hilda’s entrance, the cadaverous old men, Solness and Brovik, have dominated the film and Shawn’s character, shown as an invalid, tyrannizes everyone from his death bed.)  After Hilda’s appearance, the tone of the film changes radically, with the mise-en-scene increasingly agitated, culminating in hand-held camera shots of Aline running through the house with the blue bottle that has been repeatedly mentioned by Dr. Herdal, and the acting is pitched at an ecstatic tone of histrionic melodrama that seems reminiscent of silent movies.   

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The strange psycho-dynamics of The Master Builder present a riddle that can’t be solved, indeed, a mystery that is designed to implacably resist interpretation.  Hilda seems to represent the embodiment of Solness’ terrifying and indomitable will.  Thus, she seems to be an aspect of Solness’ character somehow freed to act independently of the sensibility to which she belongs and that has given birth to her.  In this respect, mythological correlates are, perhaps, suggestive.  Athena, who Hilda represents, was born from the brow of Zeus and seems to represent some of the God’s qualities although acting independently of her father.  Similarly, in Wagner’s The Valkyrie, Bruennhilde (“Hilda”) is referred to as Wotan’s “will” – her father sends her on a mission to destroy a man who has committed incest in defiance of the God.  But, like Hilda in The Master Builder, the Valkyrie is more than simply the embodiment of her father’s will – she acts in defiance of her divine father, falling in love with the man she is supposed to destroy and, thereby, triggering in a long passage in the Wagner opera in which Wotan berates her as an unnatural child for acting on her own desires and not merely as his embodied intentions.  Somehow, Solness has both spawned Hilda and, then, become her victim.  Solness dream-child, who replaces his actual children who were poisoned to death, is the master builder’s desires in alienated form.  The play reminds us of Emerson’s great characterization of genius in his “Self Reliance” – “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”  Hilda is Solness’ intentions and desires materializing before him “with a certain alienated majesty.”  

Ibsen’s theory of life, the “life-lie” to cite The Wild Duck, in The Master Builder is that the man of genius is one who wills that his fantasies take on a life of their own and become embodied in the real world – the Master builder’s designs become structures; Ibsen’s fantasies become plays.  Ibsen argues that the genius’ thought is omnipotent – to desire is to achieve that desire.  In short, the genius can control everything except his own will.  He molds the world to his ends and treats those around him as mere instruments of his desire.  But the one thing outside his Will is his Will itself and this paradox is fatal.

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Shawn scraps the God-defying aspect in his Master Builder.  In the Ibsen play, the death of his twin baby boys has caused Solness to hate God to the extent that atop the steeple of his last church, the Master Builder proclaim to the heavens that he will no longer build churches to a deity who is nothing more than a despised rival.  Thus, the imagery of Solness tempting fate on the high tower with the sound of “harps in the air” – that is, he has invaded heaven and thrown down God himself.  

No one believes in God any more.  And Shawn doesn’t want to run the risk that Solness’ doom be viewed as God’s righteous judgement on the Master Builder’s blasphemous defiance.  So the religious elements of the text are excised; this makes sense but it deprives the theatergoers of a significant motif in the Ibsen original – the repeated phrase that Solness will ascend into the heavens with “the harps in the air” (it’s like Hedda Gabler’s assertion that Lovborg will triumph with “vines in his hair”) is excluded from the text.  

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Ibsen is cumulative.  He insisted that his plays be read in chronological succession, asserting that each work was a foundation on which his later plays were erected.  In The Master Builder, we encounter the motif of poison inherited from the parents – Aline’s poisoned milk infects her baby boys and kills them.  (This is similar to themes in Ghosts and Dr. Rank’s death from inherited venereal disease in A Doll’s House).  The human capacity for self-deception evident in The Wild Duck with its artificial woodland in the garret is mirrored by Solness industriously engineering a phallic tower that will kill him.  Nora’s rebellion in A Doll’s House has engendered the possibility of certain type of liberated modern woman, the femme fatale embodied in Hedda Gabler and Hilda Wangel. (Hedda Gabler and Hilda Wangel are aspects of Ibsen’s “demonic” or troll-like energy, destructively converting thwarted desire into revenging furies, projections from the self that disastrously threaten the self.)  The dolls in A Doll House re-occur as the “nine dolls” – the number of the Muses – that Aline Solness played with until fire destroyed them and her ancestral home.  Examples can be multiplied but the point is clear – The Master Builder summarizes and compresses Ibsen’s concerns expressed in previous plays into a dense, crystalline structure.  

Similarly, The Master Builder encapsulates a Hegelian history of the Spirit (or Geist) in the 19th century.  At first, the Master Builder devised sanctuaries to the glory of God – rural churches that he elevated into high art.  Then, Solness rejects worship for domesticity.  Just as the bourgeois tragedy develops out of  dramas involving kings and princes and generals, so the erection of churches evolves into the design of homes for the middle class, houses for fathers, mothers and their children.  (Consider that Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest creations throughout his career were houses ostensibly designed for the upper middle class – although in practice too elaborate for any but the very wealthy.  Like Solness, Frank Lloyd Wright largely directed his genius toward constructing homes for his bourgeois clients – in particular, his Usonian homes were aimed at being affordable middle-class dwellings available for the masses.  It’s interesting to observe that like Solness, Frank Lloyd Wright’s career involved the death of his children and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, the “shining brow”, his Wisconsin studio.)  As Hegel predicts, ultimately Spirit or Geist prevails, evolving into its final mode: pure concept.  Solness reaches the conclusion that the only structures worth designing are those that are purely conceptual, fantasy towers erected in the air.  Spirit wrestles with itself; Solness the Master Builder proclaims that he will no longer build except in imagination or theory.  Hilda’s fatal emergence as the female embodiment of Solness’ desire illustrates the final aspect of this evolutionary progression.  Solness is hurled down from on high by the contradictions within his own spirit.  There’s a curious passage in which Aline claims that the fearsome and domineering Solness is really a person with a “very gentle and kind disposition” – this seems incongruous with what we have seen.  But there’s no reason to disbelieve Aline’s assertion that Solness’ secret self may be something very different from the tyrannical guise in which he interacts with those whom he believes inferior to him.  Aline has been, after all, the embodiment of Solness’ desires herself before the death of her children turned her into the skeletal apparition that we see in the film.  A couple days after my father died, I characterized him to my mother as being someone who was selfish, destructively perfectionist, and a tyrant.  My mother responded to me that my father was not the person he pretended to be and that only she really knew him.)  

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Iceland is a post-modern society.  Everyone speaks English – indeed, Icelanders speak English among themselves code-shifting back and forth between their ancient ancestral language (old Norse) and the diction of modernity, English, as the discourse requires.  They vacation in Barcelona and Santa Fe.  No one seems to have any vestige of religion and relations between the sexes are construed, at least, officially, as embodying complete equality. Banking and tourism, with an ecological slant, are the country’s primary industries.   

But all this modernity has, perhaps, a lunar side.  Icelanders are said to be very superstitious.  They believe, supposedly at least, in elves and fairies and other supernatural creatures.  Icelanders will chuckle tolerantly when outsiders bring up anecdotes of litigation to route roads around places where elves are supposed to reside and other paranormal eccentricities.  But, if you bring up the notion of a person’s “fetch”, the conversation will chill notably and interlocutors will evade questions about that subject.  In northern countries, a “fetch” is a part of a person’s innermost being, embodying his or her secret desires and fantasies.  The “fetch” can become separated or dis-integrated from the personality that harbors it.  It is said that if you encounter this embodied aspect of your desires as a Doppelgaenger, death will soon follow.  (The old Norse word for “fetch” is fylgia – this means “one who follows or accompanies”; the fylgia is sometimes described as a “dream woman” – for instance, a “fetch” of this sort appears in Gisli’s Saga as a harbinger of the hero’s death.  Fylgia as “something that accompanies” is also the word used for “afterbirth” or “placenta.”)

It seems plausible to regard Hilda Wangel as Halvard Solness’ “fetch.”  

  

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One strategy often used by filmmakers adapting a play is to “open” out the action – that is, dramatize event only described in the theatrical version of the work.  In this way, exterior shots, landscapes, and, even, action sequences can be staged that would not be feasible within the confines of the proscenium.  Ibsen’s play offers an obvious opportunity for “opening” the work: the director and scenarist could depict Solness’ ascent of the tower, the adulation of the townspeople, and, of course, his fatal fall.  A Master Builder, however, pursues the opposite narrative strategy.  Demme and Shawn don’t show the tower at all, even thought it is said to be visible by Ibsen in stage scenery described in the play.  The creative team producing A Master Builder suspect rightly that there is no real tower, no wreath of victory, no actual fall – all of these things are the furnishings of a dream play and to show these elements would be to make tangible what should be construed as the visionary apparatus of Solness destruction.  

Far from “opening out” the play, Shawn and Demme almost eliminate space and distance entirely.  The film’s paradigmatic shot is a very tight close-up.  Dialogue is staged as two persons with their faces, perhaps, four inches apart breathing their words into one another.  (I assume the film’s budget contained a significant line-item for breath-fresheners, Tic-Tacs, and mints.)  The eccentric staging reverses the ordinary formula for the use of close-ups in film: typically, close-ups are sparingly used and only deployed to emphasize moments of high emotion.  But Ibsen’s text is all high-emotion; once the situation is established, every line and exchange of dialogue has a life-or-death aspect and so the mise-en-scene is one of continuous and suffocating tight close-ups.  The ultimate impression that the viewer carries away from the film is one that is profoundly unnatural – in real life, no one speaks to another at a range of four inches or less.  A Master Builder creates the impression of flesh conjoined, figures literally melting into one another – the effect is not unlike “body horror” directed by someone like David Cronenberg: the characters run the risk of fusing into one flesh.   

 

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A Master Builder suppresses some of Solness’ speeches about his “helpers”.  Solness asserts that his good fortune arises from the assistance of uncanny “helpers”, supernatural beings that implement the Master Builder’s secret desires.  Solness believes that the force of his will is such that he can project his thoughts into others, control them, and make things happen by purely mental energy.  The agents of his “omnipotent thought” as described as the “helpers.”  They work on his behalf to implement the zero-sum game that Solness believes rules human relationships – what makes me strong, makes you weak; my power subtracts from your power.  

Ibsen slips into some peculiar byways in late Victorian thought in The Master Builder.  Evidently, Solness is an adherent of something called Spiritism.  This is the idea that the universe is congested with invisible beings, some of them beneficent and others malevolent.  One can call on benevolent spirits and ask that they “help” with good luck and arrange events in one’s favor.  This notion was elucidated by a French writer named Allen Kardec in a number of influential books between 1857 and 1868.  Solness seems to be referring to these beliefs in some of his speeches in the play.  Spiritist beliefs remain vibrant in some parts of the world – aspects of Latin American Catholicism are “spiritist” in character and many Native American groups in the Southwest (notably the Yaqui Apache and Tohono O’odham in Arizona) practice a folk Catholicism heavily inflected with Spiritist beliefs.

Spiritism should be distinguished by Spiritualism, also a very popular doctrine at the time that Ibsen composed The Master Builder.  Spiritualism holds that the spirits of the dead can be summoned by mediums and that these revenants can prophecy the future and provide useful advice to the living.  The “helpers” in Spiritism are not dead souls, but independent celestial entities. (Needless to say, Spiritism and Spiritualism overlap to some extent and the distinctions between the two doctrines are not always clear.)

As with the religious references in The Master Builder, Solness’ references to his “helpers” will probably fall on deaf ears today.  So, it seems, the Shawn downplays this aspect of the play.  

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Solness’ bleak view of the zero-sum nature of human transactions is effectively phrased in a song by Ry Cooder from his Bop’til you Drop album.  Cooder sings:

My father told me lyin’ on his bed of death / He says “Boy, a woman’s gonna make you a fool of your”/ I sez: “Oh Dad what do you mean?” / He sez: “She’s got somethin’ that makes a man / Lay his money in her hand / Cuz the very thing that makes her rich will make you poor.”   You can put her “behind a deuce and a quarter / Treat her like a rich man’s daughter” but the very thing that makes her rich makes you poor.  (“Don’t make that bad mistake / I’d rather climb into a bed with a rattlesnake” because “the very thing that makes her rich, makes you poor.”)

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Wallace Shawn’s Solness on his death bed is wearing a sort of track suit with red piping or stripes that seems to anatomize his failing circulatory system.  When Hilda Wangel makes him rise from his bed, he continues to wear this odd outfit throughout the film.  In one of the rooms in the house, there is a table on which a small model of the Taj Mahal, the epitome of the architect’s art, is displayed.  A print on a wall also shows the Taj Mahal.  In the corner of the sickroom where Solness is attended by ghostly nurses – they are wearing red like the stripes on his pajamas in the final scene – there is a model of a tower.  Aline Solness wears a double strand of pearls as a choker around her throat.  The pearls seem to be a sort of desperate body armor.  Aline cuts up cantaloup for breakfast.  We see her wield the knife.  In the sun-room, she puts her legs on a bright red Ottoman that is like a puddle of freshly spilt blood.  A figure of a Kore or dead Greek maiden stands in one corner of the sun-room.  A white ladder appears against a wall just before Solness departs to climb the tower.  A moving shot of the sun flickering between the roadside trees marks Solness final delirium – we see this shot as punctuation in earlier scenes.  (The image of the light flickering through the skein of trees alludes to the famous Twilight Zone episode, broadcast in 1964, dramatizing Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” as directed by Robert Enrico – the award-winning French short subject was made in 1964; Bierce’s doomed hero invents an entire narrative of his escape from execution by hanging and his flight through the wilderness to his plantation home during the drop from the railroad trestle in the instant before the noose breaks his neck.)

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Just before Solness’ death, Ragnar Brovik tells the Master Builder that the foreman Tesman will assist in hanging the wreath on the tower.  (Brovik is holding the rather sinister-looking wreath – it seems to be comprised of the pads of some sort of succulent, like a wreath made from prickly pear.)  Brovik praises Tesman as a good and loyal man.  Tesman doesn’t appear in Ibsen’s The Master Builder; rather, he’s a character in Hedda Gabler, Hedda’s scholarly “specialist”, an ineffectual man with expertise in the “domestic handicrafts of the Brabant.”  In A Master Builder, Kaya or Aline says that she saw Solness “burning the book”.  This is also an irruption into The Master Builder play from Hedda Gabler.  In the earlier theater piece, the malevolent Hedda Tesman nee Gabler burns the only manuscript of Lovborg’s treatise on the future and fate of civilization.  She does this as part of her scheme to compel the doomed alcoholic Lovborg to commit suicide.  These allusions suggest that Solness is the same as Hedda Gabler, a figure who desires to have the power of life or death over others.  And many modern critics have seen Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler as a self-portrait of the playwright himself.  (Harold Bloom notably claimed that Hedda Gabler represents Ibsen’s secret self as refracted through the lens of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.)  Shawn takes up this theme in the last instants of A Master Builder.  The film is not “the” Master Builder by Ibsen but rather “a” Master Builder, that is one iteration of themes in that work among many other possible versions

La Boheme (Minnesota Opera -- May 11, 2024)

 I've seen La Boheme many times.  It's a crowd-pleasing opera by Giacomo Puccini with glorious music and florid, ultra-expressive tenor arias.  There's a big chorus scene in Act Two that provides a nice work-out for the supernumeraries.  The plot is an example of verismo -- you don't need elephants or rainbow bridges to stage the work.  La Boheme's narrative is simple to the point of inanity:  a starving poet meets a poor seamstress with a racking cough.  They fall in love and the girl dies.  There are some minor complications:  the starving artist is jealous and quarrels with the girl and she leaves him for a callous viscount who ultimately discards the woman when she is in extremis.  The seamstress, turned briefly courtesan, returns to her starving poet lover and dies in his arms.  The opera ends on a note of stark horror -- suddenly, the fun has all evaporated and, when the curtain goes down, the audience is stunned.  They don't know if they should applaud the poor girl's death or leave the performance in shocked silence.  (Inevitably someone cries "Bravo!" and rises for a standing ovation and the opera-goers elect for applause over mournful stillness.)   Unlike Wagner or, even, Verdi, the show is relatively short -- in fact, the action has to be padded with the choral numbers in Act 2 to get the running time longer than two hours.  This is also a "sweet spot" for modern opera fans.

The older I get, the more sentimental I am and, so, I am moved by La Boheme notwithstanding its rather simple-minded libretto based on Henri Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,  Puccini is reliably inspired by death and the change of seasons (this is an important motif in Madame Butterfly and Turandot).  Here his love theme is a Liebestod complete with swooning late Romantic harmonies and trills of bird song.  For Puccini, love equals death and death is signified by the changing of the seasons.  La Boheme is set in a wintry Paris where it seems to be always cold and snowing.  Mimi, the poor seamstress, and Rodolfo, the starving poet, vow to stay together until the Spring -- but the hope of Spring is also the arrival of death.  Puccini signifies the demise of his heroine with four majestic chords, hammer-blows of fate no less impressive than the Beethoven's motif of the same sort in his Fifth Symphony.  "To be alone in Winter is like dying," one of the lovers says despite Mimi's apparent dalliance a callous Viscount -- this element of the plot, triggering some jealous outbursts from Marcello, is mostly suppressed in the Minnesota Opera version.  The fact that Mimi's seduction by Marcello (if that's what it is) converts her briefly (and off-stage) into some sort of courtesan like the flamboyant Musetta isn't really developed in this show.  Musetta, who is full-blown party-girl, alternately quarrels and makes love with Marcello (an artist) and one of Rodolfo's buddies in the demi-monde of the Parisian bohemians.  As in Shakespearian comedies. the bawdy and flamboyant Musetta contrasts with the "simple and happy" seamstress and the prostitute's erotic battles with the hedonistic Marcello are intended as counterpoint with the more dignified and ennobling love between the consumptive seamstress and the poet.  

The 2024 version of the opera that I saw at the Ordway Theater is set in the Belle Epoch -- that is, more or less, when the piece was composed (it was premiered in 1896).  Rodolfo's garret is a bare square space with rounded curved corners -- it looks like the entry to an Art Nouveau subway station on the Paris Metropol.  Cafe Momus where the big chorus scene occurs in the second act involves Dickensian street tableaux and art nouveau styling defining the sinuous contours of the restaurant.  A contemporary note is injected into the opera when a procession of protesters, the so-called gilles jaunes (yellow vests) marches onto the crowded stage -- replacing I think a battalion of singing soldier who appear in the original libretto.  The third scene is ordinarily baffling to modern audiences -- it's one of Puccini's luminous dawn scenes with a chorus of singers in the shadows greeting the rising sun.  The scene is set at a control point or tariff station locked against the farmers who are bringing produce into the city.  Because of unrest in Paris, the city was apparently divided into sectors walled-off from one another so that the town could be more readily defended and controlled. This setting makes no sense to an audience without knowledge of the spasms of civil unrest and violence periodically afflicting Paris and it's hard to understand why there is a sort of Berlin Wall running through the middle of the City.  The 2024 Minnesota Opera production solves this problem by imagining the checkpoint as a discoteque with reddish opaque windows, a surly doorman keeping out the hoi polloi and the shadows of people cavorting inside in this erstwhile Studio 54 showing through the windows.  Marcello, who is waiting for Musetta plying her trade, in the place installs a sign on the blood red facade where the dancers inside are shown to writhe in scarlet light like the damned in Hell; the name of the place spelled in cursive neon is Couer Fou ("the Mad Heart").  I thought this was a brilliant innovation and very effective.   Puccini's heart is always in the right place.  In the last Act, one of the Bohemians has to pawn his coat to buy money for the dying Mimi.  The man sings an aria to his old brown coat, noting that "he never bent his back to the rich or powerful" and that "poets and philosophers lived in his pockets."  Puccini probably penned the piece for a low voice, a bass, to create some diversity in the scoring of the opera -- it's most for high voices.  But the bass aria is wonderfully written and pitched, almost Shakespearian in the way it efficiently evokes the man's character. 

Of course, we all know that the popular Broadway musical Rent is based on La Boheme, updating the story of starving poets and painters to NYC's Soho or Chelsea in the midst of the AIDS crisis.  (AIDS substitutes for consumption.)  People used to pride themselves on pointing out the parallels between Puccini's source material and Rent.  The equation is now reversed and I have the sense that this version of La Boheme is, in fact, influenced by Rent and, in some ways, alludes to that show.  There's a wonderful scene in which a bearded transvestite comes out of club to smoke a cigarette -- Mimi approaches the transvestite and asks "Kind Madam, have you seen Rodolfo?"  The staging of the Third Act with the disco backdrop also seems to invoke Rent.  

You harden your heart against this stuff and defend yourself against being moved, but, in vain: I'm old now and the follies of this opera have come to appeal to me.  I see my mortality in Puccini's rhapsodic music -- will I live to see another iteration of this opera?  When Death arrives will it come like Spring complete with the songs of birds in their nests trilling in the dawn?

Coup de Chance (Stroke of Luck)

 Woody Allen's Coup de Chance (2023) is an old man's movie.  The picture exemplifies what is sometimes called a "late style" in art -- the film is radically simplified, economical, and lucidly constructed.  Four characters interact to dramatize a parable that seems alternatively trite and obvious but also profound:  the film's thesis is that chance and accident control the world and that, for this reason, life is meaningless.  Notwithstanding the movie's bleak thesis, the picture is beautifully shot and replete with images of people enjoying the pleasures of food, art, and love.  Allen's mise-en-scene reverts to the earliest film grammar:  the picture is composed in short, decisive scenes each devised to make a plot point; at the film's two climaxes, that is nodes of greatest emotional intensity, Allen crosscuts between his characters -- it's a technique that Griffith and Murnau perfected.  Consider, for instance, the scenes in Nosferatu in which Murnau cuts between a young woman's growing sense of discomfort and anxiety and shots of the vampire, a thousand miles away, menacing her fiancee.  Coup de Chance is autumnal in appearance, content, and texture -- there's no preliminaries, no scene-setting, no throat-clearing; the jazz music on the soundtrack, Nat Adderly and Herbie Hancock among others, proceeds in a manner that is independent from the action on-screen; dire episodes are scored to jaunty jazz riffs.  There is no excess to the film and the movie seems impersonal, almost post-dramatic (if that is a thing); Coup de Chance is decidedly non-novelistic -- it's cast is stripped to a bare minimum, plot points are sometimes made by a sort of antiphonal chorus of upper-crust gossips, and there are no detours and digressions; Woody Allen's film form was always based on the short story -- Coup de Chance is not even a short story, but rather a lean, minimalist anecdote.  (It appears that Allen, the great poet of Manhattan, now lives in Paris.  Coup de Chance is shot entirely in French, although all of the characters, it seems, have lived in New York City in the past.)

Allen's magisterial simplicity is demonstrated in the film's opening scene:  a woman is walking along a busy Parisian street.  The camera in a Steadi-Cam shot follows her at a discrete distance.  As is the case with big cities, the pedestrians keep to themselves and scarcely glance at one another.  The viewer immediately notices an exception:  a handsome young man approaching the camera (so we can see his eyes and face) looks closely at the woman who we are trailing -- her face is not visible to us.  He seems uncertain for a moment, passes the woman who doesn't pay any attention to him at all, but, then, calls out her name.  It is a chance meeting on the street between old high school acquaintance, the accident from which the film derives.  The woman, Fanny Fournier, is beautiful and waifish -- she looks a little like Mia Farrow.  She works at an art auction enterprise and is married to a handsome, doting husband named Jean.  Jean seems a little domineering; he seems to have purchased his wife and gives her expensive gifts -- although she doesn't want to be regarded as a "trophy wife", in fact, this is what Jean's upper-crust friends call her.  Jean is said to be like the Great Gatsby -- he is very wealthy but there is a surmise that his money was acquired through criminal means.  (Jean's partner vanished in mysterious circumstances ten or fifteen years before the action in the film and there a group of three or four acquaintances in his circle who suspect him of having murdered the man -- these friends provide a counterpoint to the action and comment like a Greek chorus on the action; they are petty, malicious, and backbiting.)  The young man who chances upon Fanny on the street is Alain Aubert, a novelist who had a crush on the woman when they were in High School together.  Alain is writing a novel about the role of contingency and chance in human life.  In High School, Fanny carried around Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; she is now reading Appointment at Samarra. (Allen isn't subtle and makes his points with literary references.)  Of course, Fanny and Alain embark on a love affair.  Jean suspects that something is wrong with his marriage.  He hires a private eye to surveil Fanny and, within an hour or so, the truth is known.  (The gumshoe is a haggard, sinister older woman who melts into the background and effortlessly documents the affair -- she is a convincing minor figure in the film, carefully and indelibly characterized but without a single line spoken.)  Jean, who seems to have a screw loose, has a room in his lavishly appointed townhouse in Paris, devoted to his model trains -- it's an effect a little like the artificial forest in the loft in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, a symbolic terrain that establishes Jean as obsessive, a control-freak, and, even, a little pathetic.  Jean has a home in the country, a rather lavish chalet in the woods, and, most weekends, he and his wife retire to that place, something that she dislikes as dull -- she says she's not an "outdoorsy girl."  There are hunting rifles on the premises and deer in the woods, both aspects of the chalet that will figure in the film's later development.  Jean is savagely jealous of Fanny's lover and hires a thug to dispose of him. A crime is committed.  A fourth character enters into this situation -- Fanny's mother.  This middle-aged woman reads novels by Georges Simenon and she begins nosing about.  

Coup de Chance is exquisitely made and suspenseful -- it's a kind of crime-thriller and not a comedy except to the extent that it satirizes the affectations of the Parisian upper-class.  Allen is highly reticent; like Clint Eastwood in his late films, he implies violence but doesn't show it.  Similarly, the film's sex scenes are also restrained and, as in the case of Hollywood's classic era, Allen cuts away when things grow too intense. The cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro (he's now in his eighties) and the picture is astonishingly beautiful -- Paris glows in an amber, honeyed light; in one scene with rain outdoors and glowing rooms inside a Paris apartment, the picture channels Storaro's incredible work in Last Tango in Paris, a movie that I recall not so much for the explicit sex scenes with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider but for the contrast between warm interiors and cold, dispassionate rainy weather outside.  Storaro makes everything elegant --he's a film cameraman par excellence; there's nothing showy about his compositions but the style isn't "invisible' as in the classic Hollywood films; rather, there's a distinct texture to the light and you can feel the air intervening between lens and flesh.  Coup de Chance is a minor film but it doesn't aspire to anything pretentious and, in its own unostentatious way, it's pretty much perfect.  

You Tube tour: mostly animation

 In the early '30's, Fleischer Studios produced three Betty Boop cartoons featuring songs by the "Hi-de-ho" man, Cab Calloway::  Minnie the Moocher. Snow White, and The Old Man of the Mountain.  Minnie the Moocher and the The Old Man of the Mountain are essentially the same movie:  both pictures feature Betty Boop accompanied by sidekicks Koko the Clown and Bimbo, a sort of black puppy-like creature.  In both movies, there is film footage of Cab Calloway, swaying eerily and dancing as if he has no bones in his body at all. Calloway shuffles about, performing a sort of moonwalk in which he moves without seeming to lift his feet and writhes his hips and shoulders like a snake.  All three pictures show ghastly and monstrous apparitions -- eyeless cats, heaps of bones from which globular, mucousy ghosts spurt, strange skeletal duck-billed creatures and the like.  Of course, everything transforms into everything else, figures morphing and shifting shape.  Betty Boop runs away from her home where she is bullied at the supper table by her fat German emigrant parents -- he father's head turns into a mindlessly ranting gramophone.  The real world outside turns out to be worse than her home with its bickering, haranguing parents -- there's a ghostly walrus who sways like an undersea plant (mimicking Calloway's weird swaying in the opening shot -- his image has been rotoscoped) who leads Betty and her friends into a cave filled with monsters.  At the end of the cave, there's a horrible banshee who appears in the darkness and flies toward the camera:  the banshee's mouth opens to swallow the camera and we see her tonsils animated as small ghostly figures at the back of her throat that also grow mouths and howl at us (and the heroine).  Betty flees, diving into her bed at home -- she has left a message about running away from home, now ingeniously torn into a scrap of paper that reads "Home, sweet, home" on the fragment resting on her pillow.  The lyrics of the song are bizarre, something about a prostitute or "hootchie cootch" dancer who takes cocaine and "bangs the gong" (apparently, meaning uses heroine), thus motivating the grotesque visions in the banshee's cave.  The Old man of the Mountain reiterates this plot -- Betty goes up a winding mountain road with her sidekicks and encounters an old man with a long white beard and long white hair.  The old man is lecherous and seems to chase Betty Boop in order to rape her.  (Betty is a weird figure in her own right, all curves packed into a tight, short black dress with a kewpie face, big eyes with big eyelashes and shapely gams that come to a heeled needle point.  She is sexualized from her spit-curls to the pointed stiletto tips of her shoes.  She talks a strange lingo, some kind of "White jazz" punctuated with nonsense syllables:  Boop-boop-de-boop.  This gibberish aligns with Calloway's spectacularly fast and intricate scat singing in the songs.) Snow White involves the fairy tale story with an ugly stepsister preening herself in a sentient mirror.  Koko and Bimbo are told to take Betty out and kill her -- she cries and, while they are sharpening their swords and axes on a whetstone, they are moved by her tears, ignore the task ay hand, and grind their weapons to a dark pulpy substance..  Betty escapes into the grave dug for her which seems to be about a mile deep.  She falls through the shaft and ends up fleeing into a cavern labeled "Mystery Cave."  Koko and Bimbo follow with the witch also in hot pursuit.  In the cave, the characters encounter stalactites and petrified monsters of various sorts, the same creatures recycled from the other two cartoons:  in this cartoon, Calloway doesn't appear on film but sings "St. James Infirmary".  As far as I can ascertain, the tune of "St. James Infirmary" is the same melody played in Minnie the Moocher and  The Old Man of the Mountain:  the wailing lyrics with the skat interludes reminds us that White people originally perceived the Blues as a sort of unearthly, eerie howling -- this is very much the premise of these three short animated films.  The concept seems to be that there is a brutish world of European (German) emigrants -- their domestic arrangements rest, however, on the backs of an underclass of ghostly spooks symbolizing I suppose some sort of repressed sexual instincts. Sex here equal death -- monster ghost walruses and the amorous apparition of the Old Man of the Mountain with his prehensile orangutan arms. The middle class bourgeois, it seems, are perched atop a teeming and comically grotesque underworld that is black -- the color of night, spooks, and African-American musicians who provide the bourgeois with access to that world.  Ascribing meaning to these specimens of what Bob Dylan called "The Old Weird America" is a pointless task -- on their face, the cartoons are meaningless, a jazzy improvised melange of figures fluidly changing into other figures but the themes of these animated films:  a white woman, drawn as a baby-whore, slipping off the straight and narrow path and, then, being pursued by various ghouls and monsters, I suppose, means something -- although it's hard to articulate what this is.  

In World War Two, a series of cartoons featuring the Sergeant Snafu character (Snafu --  service jargon for "situation normal all fucked-up") were used to train recruits.  Snafu is a wretched soldier and makes mistakes that often turn out to be fatal for him.  (The character is voiced by Mel Blanc and sounds like Porky Pig).  In Booby Traps, Snafu is warned not to fall for the enemies tricks.  He narrowly evades various explosive devices, but makes the mistake of wandering into some kind of brothel.  Here motionless, naked women beckon.  A bomb has been wired to a piano, set to explode if a certain ivory key is tickled.  Snafu sits down to play "All those Endearing Young Charms" on the piano but keeps hitting the wrong note and, therefore, avoiding depressing the key that will blow him to pieces.  He fondles a curvacous mannequin whose buttocks are black globular bombs.  (The figure is literally a bombshell.)  The spherical bombs shift over to become her breasts.  As he gropes her, Snafu discovers that he is about to be blown sky-high.  He escapes and celebrates by playing "All those Endearing Young Charms," this time correctly, resulting in an explosion.  The cartoon ends with Snafu sitting on a cloud with a harp on which he plucks out the same melody.  In another cartoon, Snafu has failed to properly maintain his carbine and machine gun  -- the muzzles of the weapons are filled with black goo.  A brutish-looking Kraut crawls up to attack him with a hand grenade (the Hun looks like a Fred Flintstone with a pronounced beard-line).  Snafu's weapons misfire.  A machine gun on a tripod literally melts like wax when fired because the water-cooled mechanism fails.  Snafu is captured and, as the villainous Kraut gloats, we see him cowering and naked in a cage.  

Sally Cruikshank was an animator in the seventies and eighties.  She made three psychedelic cartoons that are famous among animators:  Quasi at the Quackadero, Be a Psychic, and Face like a Frog.  As with the trilogy of Cab Calloway cartoons made by Fleischer studios, these short animes are all alike.  In each, a trio of figures (like Betty Boop, Koko and Bimbo) venture from their dwelling to some sort of hallucinogenic fairground -- there they are menaced by monsters who seem to be inspired by Brueghel.  Quasi is a sort of tuxedoed duck with a flattened head and "face like a frog" -- he has an enormous mouth and little bulging eyes.  Anita, the dominant figure in the trio, is tall lanky figure, ostensibly female who speaks with a southern accent, muttering mostly nonsense -- she wears a kind of night gown qua evening dress.  The third protagonist is Rollo, a deformed face on a bean-like body who moves  around in a wheeled contraption.  These cartoons are bright with day-glo Peter Max-style colors; the fairgrounds consists of crowds of worm-like figures and creatures that look like the old Mr. Potato-Head figures, globular heads with monocles and button noses embedded in them.  The fair grounds feature strange tents that are shaped like tiaras -- some of the imagery looks like its derived from Saul Steinberg cartoons, calligraphic scrolls that broaden into figures, and caricatured men and women reduced to one or two salient features.  In the tents, you can see yourself in "100 years" -- you look into a mirror in which there is an endless line of prancing skeletons; machines spool back and forth in time.  Quasi ends up among dinosaurs pursued by ravening, if toy-like, predators.  These cartoons also feature jaunty hipster tunes, a little like the music produced by the enigmatic Leon Redbone, a gent with a white panama hat ,sunglasses, thin as a rail, who sand diddy-wah-diddy tunes from the twenties.  (His stage persona was that of a Jazz Era pimp.) Face like a Frog has a good song by Oingo Boingo (Danny Elfman's band here called "The Mystic Knights") -- it's "Don't Go Into the Basement", a mock-ghoulish ditty that, of course, accomplishes exactly what it purports to prohibit --Quasi and Anita go into the basement where all sorts of dire things befall them. 

You can also see John Fahey playing "In Christ there is no East and West", the screen split to show his fingering on his guitar -- he produces a symphonic sound from the instrument.  Sister Rosetta Tharp, drenched in sweat sings "Clean Train" -- it's the train to Salvation on which no gamblers, nor boozers, nor even tobacco chewing, cigar-smoking sinners are allowed.  There's a video showing documentary style shots of General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, illustrating Charles Ives' spooky and majestic "General William Booth Enters into Heaven", another artifact of the Old Weird America.  Shot in extreme close-up, Lightning Hopkins performs a keening Blues song.

And that makes a night of it.