The Tales of Hoffmann 9781137451217, 9781844574469

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website:

‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

The Tales of Hoffmann William Germano

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

© William Germano 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Series cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from The Tales of Hoffmann, © British Lion Film Corporation Ltd; Taxi Driver, © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Tetro, © American Zoetrope. Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 ISBN 978–1–84457–446–9 eISBN 978–1–83902–063–6 ePDF 978–1–13745–121–7

Contents Acknowledgments

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1 The Archers Take Aim

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2 Three Tales of and about Hoffmann

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3 Film and Opera after Hoffmann

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Technical Details

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Notes

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Credits

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Bibliography

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For Ralph and Dorothy, and Bill and Edna, who were young when Hoffmann was

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Acknowledgments To write on any Powell and Pressburger film is to wade into deep water. The films are beloved, and those who love them know them very well. I’ve approached this project not primarily through film history but instead through questions of adaptation and the relation of an ‘opera film’ to opera’s own long history and performance practice. I hope that in taking its place in the BFI Film Classics series this little book will help extend ways of thinking across the great – but imaginary – divide between these two forms of art. A book on The Tales of Hoffmann would be difficult without the excellent Criterion DVD, which includes the film, ancillary visual material, an essay by Ian Christie (the dean of Powell and Pressburger scholars), and in particular the audio commentary by Martin Scorsese and Bruce Eder. Scorsese’s special enthusiasm for The Tales of Hoffmann has been crucial to making this classic film known once again. As to the film’s creative team, Michael Powell’s autobiography and interviews are precious resources for anyone working on the Archers. The New York Public Research Library at Lincoln Center, an essential institution for work on the arts, helped me fill in hardcopy gaps. A particular thank you to the Powell & Pressburger Pages, an online compendium of materials related to the film-makers; it’s helped point me many times towards what I hope has been fruitful thinking about Hoffmann. Short manuscripts can take as much time as long ones. In the case of this particular short manuscript, Dana Polan, my colleague on the BFI Film Classics advisory board, has provided smart and generous advice. At the BFI itself I’ve been fortunate to have the support of my editor Rebecca Barden, without whom this project would never have happened. Sophia Contento provided all necessary assistance and more in the matter of permissions and stills access;

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Philippa Hudson offered judicious advice at the copy-edit stage. Nigel Arthur, the BFI’s film stills curator, is a P&P fan; I thank him here for his time and suggestions. I suppose I’ve read a lot of books, but when it comes down to it, Diane Gibbons taught me whatever I really know about film, and lots of other things, too.

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1 The Archers Take Aim In 1951, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – the British film-making duo who dubbed themselves the Archers – made a film of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann, one of the most delightful – and oddest – theatrical works to come out of Second Empire France. Les Contes d’Hoffmann has held the stage for more than a century on the strength of its appealing and colourful score, its spectacular musical-dramatic effects, and a handful of good roles for singer-actors. The ‘tales’ of the title are strange and meant to be: Hoffmann is a poet and a disappointed would-be lover; but his tales are less stories of lost love than of hapless misidentification. The Archers’ Tales of Hoffmann has been called many things: a film, the film of an opera, a film opera, an opera film. Powell referred to it as a ‘composed film’, but he wasn’t trying to define a genre, just explain what he had been doing. Whatever Hoffmann was, there had never been a cinematic creation quite like this one – a fully realised, filmic interpretation of an operatic work. Hoffmann would emphatically not be a record of a stage performance, or even try to be one. Offenbach’s music would be there, but the film would be sung in English and shot to a pre-recorded track. Most of the principal singers would never appear on screen; their roles would be played by dancers. In a theatre work with no shortage of flashy roles and numbers, the star of the Archers’ Hoffmann would be the camera. Opera is a superb form for exploring the limits of spoken language. That capacity turns out to be a key link between opera and cinema. ‘In my films,’ wrote Powell, ‘images are everything; words are used like music to distill emotion.’1 Opera, which is always complex, is not always emotional, but it is always about the

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distillation of emotion. That understanding of his work was more than enough to connect Powell – experienced director but operatic neophyte – to the essence of his new project. The Tales of Hoffmann is gorgeous, an exercise in cinematic fantasy, and its often giddy visual pleasures are many. But what makes The Tales of Hoffmann particularly interesting to us sixty years later is its vivid, cinematic reuse of an opera – not the story of an opera but the opera itself – to create a film work. No film before Hoffmann had attempted what the Archers aimed for here, a combination of dance and music, acting and camera magic, to be laid out along the temporal grid of a pre-existing musical composition. There had been ‘musical’ films before this – ‘numbers’ movies like 42nd Street (1933) and countless melodramas with an on-screen song at a key moment – but in The Tales of Hoffmann, there would be continuous musical action rather than numbers to be enjoyed Powell directs Robert Rounseville (Hoffmann) and Ludmilla Tchérina (Giulietta)

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between the plot-advancing dialogue. In Hoffmann, the Archers took a full-evening musical work and made it the entirety of a film world. The Archers’ project may have arrived at a fortuitous moment, but it also came with certain requirements. In the immediate postwar years, efforts to bring live opera to new and larger audiences resulted in English-language performances – English was a point of principle for such ‘people’s opera’ initiatives as the New York City Opera in the US and Sadler’s Wells Opera (later the ENO) in the UK. If The Tales of Hoffmann was going to reach an English-speaking audience, an English-language text was an inevitable requirement of exhibition; such audiences could not be expected to sit through two intermissionless hours of singing in French. More to the point, the Archers had never made anything in a foreign language. If Powell had any concern about the nakedness of opera in English, he didn’t show it. Today we can view The Tales of Hoffmann as one of the hypnotic beauties in the Powell–Pressburger catalogue, but it’s still not an easy film to pigeonhole. On the one hand, the film liberates Offenbach’s work from the opera stage, but it’s then shot entirely in a studio, with the result that the idea of ‘stage’ is never entirely erased. Even its few exterior shots are so deliberately artificial that they seem to deny the possibility of escaping the contract between proscenium and theatre spectator. Hoffmann takes colour and line to be more important even than voice, and by the end makes a convincing case that film can do things with opera that opera by itself cannot. Most strikingly of all, Hoffmann ‘hears’ the score through dancing – no other ‘opera film’ is as emphatically also a dance film as this one. It’s just as plausibly a ‘dance film with singing’ as it is any other category of film work. Even if we were to settle on ‘the first true opera film’, that would be enough to earn the Archers’ Hoffmann a long footnote in British film history. But this Hoffmann is more than that. It’s an oneiric, at times surrealist mash-up of stories gone bad – a Technicolor exploration of romance, fantasy, and failure. It’s also a kind of cinematic essay on

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opera itself. Opera is a sung form, but it can also be thought of as an art that denies the viewer the easy comfort of speech.2 The natural environment of opera is song. Whatever gets ‘said’ in opera takes place through pitched tones, harmonic relations, and extended vocal lines. In the Archers’ Hoffmann, every thought is sung, except for three words spoken in the film’s final moments – and when they come they’re spoken by a drunk. That final moment of real dialogue, spoken by the title character as he drifts out of consciousness, also releases us viewers from the film’s spell. Both film and opera, Hoffmann explores a category that might best be considered ‘film as opera’. It’s a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between the high artiness of operatic form and the demotic entertainment of cinema – or, if you prefer, the easy pleasures of singing and the cerebral arts of the camera. *

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The outline of Michael Powell’s film-making career is both well known and irregular. To piece together an account of the film-maker’s trajectory, film historians can draw on several kinds of sources, including Powell’s own words. The result is a portrait of a director’s life: Powell’s experience of silent film learned with Rex Ingram; his work for that ultimate English Hungarian Alexander Korda, notably on The Thief of Bagdad (1940); Powell’s meeting with Emeric Pressburger, another Hungarian émigré, and the formation of the Archers in the 1940s as a creative team; a remarkable series of jointly produced films; the dissolution of the Archers in the face of changing tastes; Powell’s notorious Peeping Tom (1960), which made him a pariah in film circles; a smattering of film projects in the decade that followed; and the restoration of reputation that comes to many a creative artist if only he or she lives long enough. The Tales of Hoffmann is one of the films the Archers made during an extraordinary ten-year period of productivity and invention. From its wartime founding moment in 1942 through the 1950s, Powell and Pressburger’s joint production company was

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responsible for a series of productions that, taken together, offered the British cinema new models of what film-making could be. Even today, a viewer is struck by their insistent quirkiness and by their marked difference both from other British film projects and from one another. Consider only their great – and alarmingly generous – wartime film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).3 Its implicit politics – that Germans were people – outraged Churchill, who wanted to prevent it from being exhibited. Or films that draw upon Powell’s feeling for the natural world of the British Isles. Among them is the understated A Canterbury Tale (1944), whose sleight of hand mingles something like neo-realism with a deep and immediate sense of English landscape and place. There’s a famous cut in that film – a fourteenth-century pilgrim looks up at a hawk and the next shot is of a British plane soaring protectively over the countryside – that’s a trick only in the sense that time is a trick. A Canterbury Tale makes the most ordinary experiences glow. In I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), another lovely and quiet film from the Archers’ canon, Powell draws an irresistible performance from Wendy Hiller, the screen’s famous (and nonsinging) Eliza Doolittle. I Know Where I’m Going! is a narrative that’s all about the triumph of what one feels over what one says. Hiller’s Joan is off to Scotland to marry a wealthy man, except that she meets someone else on the way.4 Or The Small Back Room (1949), a tense drama about a disabled, alcoholic vet – David Farrar’s Sammy Rice – who must finally be the one to defuse a volatile German bomb. The film’s long, final sequence on Chesil Beach, as Sammy painstakingly manipulates the bomb’s ingenious workings, reminds us of how much Powell had learned about using a camera in the absence of spoken dialogue. The Archers could just as easily explore the non-natural. There’s the heavenly fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (1946, released in the US under the title Stairway to Heaven) where, through a celestial bureaucratic error, a downed pilot isn’t officially dead and is given a chance to lodge an appeal with the ultimate High Court.

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The film’s ‘stairway to heaven’ was shot on what would become one of the most famous escalators in British cinema.5 Or the non-natural can be a film’s fantastical mise en scène – as in the colour-drenched ‘mountain drama’ Black Narcissus (1947), a film about nuns, isolation, and erotic obsession, where the Himalayas are entirely constructed on an English set. A silent-film embrace of camera tricks, a heat-seeking sense of what is needed to make emotion visible on screen, an understanding of how the camera responds to wordlessness, an unapologetic respect for fantasy – these are skills Powell had honed in the films he made before he got to Hoffmann, where he drew upon them all. To that list we might add the increasing importance of colour in Powell’s films. Black Narcissus treated colour with an opulence and abandon that helped isolate the plot’s religious discipline within an exotic locale. When at the film’s climax, troubled Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) puts on the red lipstick (and it is really red), we know she’s finally gone over the edge. Black Narcissus seems to mark a hyper-colouristic turn in Powell’s cinematic vision that would culminate in the Archers’ two major ‘theatre films’ – The Red Shoes (1948) and then The Tales of Hoffmann three years later. The Archers’ ‘theatre films’ If the visual arts, including the cinema, take as their task showing us how to see, the musical arts, including opera, work to show us how to hear. Dance asks us to pay attention to movement, to see positions and directions and shapes in space, and to integrate back into our lives what dance can tell us, including the truth that being alive means to move through time. We may not go to the ballet or the opera house or the multiplex for lessons in sensory acuity, but it’s through the artifactuality of these forms and genres that the arts – including cinema – seek to extend our sensory capacities. In creating their Hoffmann, the Archers took the most physically rooted of theatrical genres and transformed it into a work of filmic imagination. Music’s twin charges – voice and dance – are

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both crucial to The Tales of Hoffmann, and in film the connections between these powerful arts are spatial and visual as well as temporal and acoustic. The Archers were arguably the first film-makers to understand fully that something happens when opera and film cohabit the same imaginative space. At least that seems to be true with The Tales of Hoffmann, a suite of unhappy narratives told – and transformed – twice, first by Offenbach’s clever and irresistibly melodic score, and then again by the Archers’ cinematic reimagining of the opera. The Red Shoes Of all the Archers’ projects, The Tales of Hoffmann is most closely associated with The Red Shoes. Maybe the best known of all the Archers’ films, The Red Shoes wasn’t just a film, it was a movie – a sensationally popular entertainment which, despite its tragic ending, made young girls of all ages dream dance dreams. It’s the mother of all ballet films. Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page was the young woman torn between Life and Dance, with Dance getting most of the screen time. Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 Black Swan is a creepy gloss on the Vicky Page story, with Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers driven to her doom not through demonic footwear but by means of a horrific Ovidian transformation. Instead of the costume of black feathers Odile might wear in Swan Lake, Portman’s Nina sprouts black quills, and dies – not, however, like Vicky Page, by means of an obsessive jeté out of the theatre and into the world, but because for Nina, art is finally a kind of cancer that has metastasised throughout her body. Vicky Page is granted a cleaner death. Besides the Scottish beauty of Moira Shearer, The Red Shoes offered a powerful performance by Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov, the demanding ballet impresario who holds Vicky in his Svengali-like grip; Marius Goring as the young composer Julian Craster, who has written the ballet ‘The Red Shoes’ and whose relationship with Vicky precipitates her crisis; and three cameraworthy dancers: Ludmilla Tchérina, Léonide Massine, and Robert

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Helpmann. All four of The Red Shoes’ dancing principals would reappear in The Tales of Hoffmann. The Red Shoes is memorable for many things, perhaps most of all for its unprecedented fifteen-minute dance sequence, the story-ina-story ‘Red Shoes’ ballet. This is a dance film – even a dance of death – but it remains securely the camera’s story, told with speaking actors. It means to grip the viewer as Vicky herself is gripped by the power of dance, and as the music students, storming up the stairs in the film’s opening sequence, are gripped by a passionate enthusiasm for their art. The camera is always aware of Vicky Page and the way in which she is moving through and seeing her world. The point is driven home when, early in the film, Walbrook’s Lermontov goes to see Vicky dance Swan Lake in a small theatre. As she spins through her fouettés, a brilliant set of POV shots anchors the viewer just as the dancer does in order to keep her balance. Lermontov’s experience in the theatre strengthens his determination to take control over the dancer, while the viewers’ experience of the sequence deepens a visual complicity with the dancer’s determination and her fate. The Red Shoes made Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story into a parable of modern life and art. In ‘De røde sko’ (Andersen calls it by the Danish word aventyr, though we call this sort of story a fairy tale), a wilful young girl named Karen wants a new pair of red shoes. When she gets them, the shoes carry her off, dancing on and on as if with a life of their own. So Karen becomes a kind of puppet. She begs for release, but nothing can take the red shoes from off her feet. In a final act of desperation, Karen begs a woodcutter to chop off her feet, which he does, and then fits her out with wooden feet and crutches. Now sober and devout, Karen learns to work and tries to pray. But when she approaches the church door the red shoes (with her feet still inside them) bar the way. Unable to enter the church, Karen prays at home, and the crippled girl dies as the morning sun extends heaven’s blessing.

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Andersen’s last observation – that in heaven no one has heard of the red shoes – isn’t much of a consolation to this thrillingly awful story. It’s a non-instructive parable that simply dead-ends. Andersen’s shoes are still out there somewhere. Too shocking to be dismissed as treacly, Andersen’s story marries captious egotism with incomprehensible punishment and a morbid fascination with the suffering female body. (Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ is similarly shaped and almost as grim.) Emeric Pressburger’s revision to Andersen resituates the ‘red shoes’ problem in adult terms. Vicky is caught in a triangle – art/woman/love – that can only become more pressured but that cannot be resolved except through the destruction of the woman in the middle. In the Archers’ hands, Shearer and Walbrook turn in mesmerising performances. And as any viewer familiar with Andersen’s original narrative will know, Vicky never has a chance. She becomes a star, she leaves for love, she returns; she puts on the red shoes one more time to dance the accursed ballet. But the shoes, like those in Andersen’s tale, have a will of their own. They dance Vicky on and on, through an open window, into the path of an oncoming train. She dies asking Julian to take the red shoes off her feet. Andersen’s tale is a moralistic horror story for children; the Archers’ cinematic version is a romantic tragedy about the toxic beauty of art. We even get a dark, final glance at the shoes, as Massine places them, like a possessed relic, ceremonially before the camera. The Tales of Hoffmann, which followed The Red Shoes by a few years, is and isn’t a companion piece, much less a sequel. Vicky Page is destroyed by the dark side of the art she loves. The poet Hoffmann is neutralised – ‘castrated’ is tonally wrong for a work as fundamentally ironic and witty as Offenbach’s score and the Archers’ film. Nonetheless, the two films are closely connected. The overlap of casts, crew, and theatrical mise en scène suggests a single creative gesture throughout – it’s easy to forget that Hoffmann wasn’t even on Powell’s radar screen when he was shooting the earlier film.

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While both The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann are ‘theatre films’, they locate themselves differently in relation to theatrical space. The action of The Red Shoes moves between backstage, the theatrical stage, and the real world, while Hoffmann is principally a long reverie with drinking buddies in a cellar tavern. Yet however different, the two films speak to one another in terms of tone and the material each emphasises. The Red Shoes is the dance film, Hoffmann the opera film. But there’s an ‘operatic flavour’ to The Red Shoes, with its dramatic narrative turns and big emotional arcs. And Hoffmann, with its attention to footwork and the fluidity of the camera, is even more ‘dance-y’ a film than its predecessor. Long after the fact, Powell observed that the ‘Red Shoes’ ballet in the earlier film was a sort of draft for Hoffmann’s ‘Enchanted Dragonfly Ballet’. The dragonfly sequence is the most easily separable event within Hoffmann’s dance-driven world, but it provides only one of many links between the two films. As different as the Archers’ many projects were, visual and thematic markers across the films offer themselves to the viewer as reflective points of connection. Like eyes, dance itself threads its way through many of the Archers’ films, as if such filmic moments were clues pointing to The Red Shoes and Hoffmann. And then there’s the question of dance. Powell and Pressburger sense the pulse of life in dancing, even when dance itself is not the focus of the narrative. ‘Come on, Daddy! You can dance! You taught me to dance!’ pleads Joan Webster, eager to get her banker father on the dance floor in I Know Where I’m Going! In The Small Back Room on the other hand, Sammy Rice, who’s lost a foot (shades of Andersen’s Karen), will never dance, not even in the nightclub where he and Susan have their weekly assignations. His carefully disguised metal substitute is the source of the pain that pushes him into drug and alcohol abuse. For Sammy, to be able to dance is one of the precious gifts life has denied him. Even social dancing wordlessly connects people to one another, and the body to space. Dance is more than a pastime; it’s movement

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raised to a higher power. The Archers’ films – theatre films and quiet dramas alike – repeatedly suggest that dance, like voice, is not the expression of something but the thing itself. Ballet and opera have formidable histories. It’s not clear how – or rather from where – Powell developed his comfort with these elaborate and formal art forms. Of the two Archers, Pressburger was the musician; Powell didn’t know the Offenbach score before beginning work on the film. When Korda learned that Powell had never seen Les Contes d’Hoffmann on stage, he sent the two off to a performance in Vienna. They arrived only in time for the curtain calls. Powell was no song-and-dance director, but he somehow had an instinctive feel for making the camera rethink theatrical works. It’s not a surprise that the Archers’ two major theatre films turn out to be dramas about the irreconcilability of art and life. In both films, the camera probes deep into that conflict instead of observing coolly from outside. Directors need cool heads, but these are hot films. Their energies are about to break out at any moment. Similar and different, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann read as distorted mirrors of one another, each reflecting the dilemma of lives lived for (and against) art. Powell had a feeling for dramatic repetition and mirror-echoes. In Blimp, a series of women are all played by the same actress; the three former wives hover behind Bluebeard’s doors in Bluebeard’s Castle; serial murder is the ultimate repetitive (if recordable) act in Peeping Tom. Hoffmann’s real or imagined lost loves are as much unresolved acts of repetition as they may be human beings. Hoffmann is a cracked three-way mirror of a narrative, and only the most musical entry in Powell’s stories of men who find the world a repetitive mystery. If The Red Shoes presents art and life as irresolvably conflicted, Hoffmann explores a world in which art is the only language life can speak. Hoffmann is a fantastical twist on The Red Shoes’ art–life dilemma, a single doomed romance shattered into three tales and a prologue.

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Literary tale-telling is important to both film projects. It’s one of the things that make The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann literary cinematic siblings, too. While the earlier film is derived from a violent and bizarre Danish tale, the other emerged out of stories by the German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822). Hoffmann is a writer perhaps still best known to us for having unwittingly provided the source for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet scenario (Hoffmann’s original is considerably less sweet). The world of Hoffmann the German writer is, in fact, not sweet at all. The Barbier libretto for Offenbach’s opera is based on five of Hoffmann’s stories. Roughly in the order in which their events occur in the Archers’ film, they are ‘Die Gesellschaft im Keller’, ‘Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober’, ‘Der Sandmann’, ‘Das verlorene Spiegelbild’, and ‘Rath Krespel’. They provide the basis for the taletelling in Luther’s tavern, the film’s little Kleinzach episode, the creepy Coppelius tale, Hoffmann’s lost reflection, and the curious story of Crespel’s daughter Antonia. It’s a coincidence that the literary sources of these two projects – Andersen and Hoffmann – remain overly familiar but under-appreciated figures in the history of the nineteenthcentury imagination. It’s a reminder that some of our best nightmares derive from Andersen and Hoffmann, not just Kafka and Poe. Michael Powell was hardly an operaphile. In a 1968 interview, Powell told Bertrand Tavernier that When Sir Thomas Beecham, who had directed the orchestra for The Red Shoes and had anticipated other possibilities, suggested The Tales of Hoffmann to me, I have to say that I didn’t know much about the opera, not less however than I was up on ballets when I had done The Red Shoes!6

It’s likely that Powell had actually known more about ballet than he let on. He had worked with the Australian dancer Robert Helpmann even before using him in The Red Shoes, and elsewhere in his recorded interviews Powell recounts evenings on the Côte d’Azur when he and his friends hustled off to see Diaghilev’s ballets – ‘eight

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to a taxi’.7 But it seems quite true that in the case of opera, Powell was working from a clean slate. So how does a director go about taking on – and for the first time – the constraints of opera with all its conventions and history? The answer seems to lie in Powell’s unflappable confidence and his trust in a superior team – Pressburger as his other producing half, the designer Hein Heckroth, Christopher Challis for photography, his editor Reginald Mills, and four key performers – Shearer, Helpmann, Tchérina, and Massine – who brought to Hoffmann the dancer’s innate sense of physical limit and its transgression. The boundedness of gravity. The centrality of line. Working with dancers would mean being surrounded by artists who understood intimately some of the same problems the camera faces in every set-up. It helped, of course, that another key member of that team was the eminent English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Beecham (1879–1961) was to be Hoffmann’s godfather. His importance to the project cannot be underestimated, even as his own star has diminished in the half-century since his death. Beecham was a larger-than-life figure on the English musical and social scene, arguably the country’s most influential musician. He was famous for his authority, his performances, and his caustic wit. Beecham was a kind of George Bernard Shaw of the musical podium, dispensing bon mots, most usually at the expense of those in his own profession (a quip often attributed to Beecham: a musicologist is someone who can read music but can’t hear it). And Beecham had one sterling credential: he had conducted the British premiere of Offenbach’s opera in the years before the First World War. Four decades later, the Archers had worked with Beecham when he conducted Brian Easdale’s dramatic ballet scorewithin-a-score for The Red Shoes. Beecham was a force, and Powell listened to what ‘Tommy’ had to say. In his autobiography, the waggish conductor seems to dismiss Les Contes d’Hoffmann as lightweight stuff,8 but perhaps in his eyes this may have made the project more fitting for the cinema. A lighter operatic work, Hoffmann could be more susceptible to cinematic

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Hein Heckroth painting cellophane screens for the Olympia sequence

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invention, less bound to the rules of high operatic seriousness, and more likely to capture a paying audience. Beecham even appears on screen in Hoffmann, one more impresario controlling the action in a story about mysterious men and their connection to the magic lurking in our universe. Beecham’s appearance is also a man-behind-thecurtain moment, like Cecil B. DeMille appearing before ‘the curtain’ to introduce The Ten Commandments (1956) a few years later, except that Beecham’s effect is sly and DeMille’s more than a little pompous. Then as now, great conductors were among the few cultural figures capable of inducing awe. Beecham had never appeared in a film before; conductors rarely did. In the pre-television era, men like Toscanini could be heard but rarely seen; at the time of Beecham’s cameo, only Leopold Stokowski, who had served as Disney’s on-screen conductor for Fantasia (1940) and who even leaned over to shake hands with Mickey Mouse, would have been a sight more familiar to film audiences. Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic recording the score

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Tales of Offenbach Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann had – and still has – a complicated history. Offenbach was the great light opera composer of Second Empire France, but Les Contes d’Hoffmann – his final work for theatre – was his masterpiece. Les Contes d’Hoffmann stuck out among Offenbach’s catalogue of works because it was a serious opera. In a way, the Archers’ film of Hoffmann stuck out because it gave its critics something they hadn’t expected. Left unfinished at the composer’s death, the opera was composed to a libretto by Jules Barbier, based on Barbier and Carré’s stage play of 1851, itself derived from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories. (Some confusion may be unavoidable: there is Hoffmann the writer, Hoffmann the opera, Hoffmann the film, Hoffmann the protagonist of both opera and film. But there is no character ‘Hoffmann’ in Hoffmann’s original stories.) Offenbach died in 1881 before he was able to complete, or even firmly order the sections of, this elaborate construct. As a result, an aura of instability floats over Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann – the dead hand of a composer who didn’t live to orchestrate or definitively order the sections of his work, the survival of competing musical editions, the plot’s status as a drama patched together from disparate stories. To all this we can add our contemporary fascination with the robotic body as a liminal zone between the human and the non-human, the discreet charm of the undead, the endless appeal of the monstrous. By the time they encountered Offenbach at the twentieth century’s midpoint, the Archers were working with powerful material. And with that material they made choices. Powell and Pressburger transfer both the opera’s architecture and music to the screen, but in the process they redefine Hoffmann’s conflicts. The Archers created a Hoffmann remarkable for its spatial and atmospheric qualities. What was psychological in prose and melodic and dramatic on stage takes on a new amplitude in the cinema. Les Contes d’Hoffmann may be an unfinished work. But when interpreted by a first-rate team of artists, what Offenbach left to be completed by others becomes a brilliant piece of musical theatre –

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witty, dramatic, sly, powerful, funny. The opera changes with every production, every performing edition, and on stage it changes with every performance, even those with identical casts a few days apart. That’s the liveness of theatre. The Offenbach–Barbier Contes d’Hoffmann is the story of a depressed poet, in the figure of Hoffmann himself, who recounts three unhappy romantic encounters: an inventor’s daughter, a Venetian courtesan, an opera singer. The inventor’s daughter turns out to be an automaton, the Venetian courtesan a magical soulstealer, the opera singer a terminally ill consumptive. Establishing the proper performing edition for Les Contes d’Hoffmann has long been a concern for conductors and musicologists. In recent years, a growing consensus on the order of the acts would seem to place the Venetian sequence as the last of the three tales, but for most of its life, Les Contes d’Hoffmann was ordered as it appears in the Archers’ film: prologue, mechanical Olympia, sultry Giulietta, fragile Antonia, resolution. As a genre, opera thrives on passions grandly felt and grandly expressed, and Offenbach’s score is a meal with many delectable dishes. Offenbach manages both to give free rein to opera’s emotional expansiveness and to retain the comic wit that marked his entertaining Orphée aux enfers and La Belle Hélène, two operettas with thematic connections to the Hoffmann opera (the love of a beautiful woman can send a man to his own personal hell). Hoffmann’s frame narrative (prologue, resolution) and three tales pit the poet-artist against his nemesis, a bass singing four separate roles: Councillor Lindorf, Coppelius, Dapertutto, Dr Miracle. For the audience, the roles fuse into one. He’s the figure who denies Hoffmann happiness in this world. Taken together, the Hoffmann villains feel very much like the Mephistopheles of Goethe’s Faust, the devil as the figure who denies, who says no to life in all its forms, especially when it takes the form of love. (Like all proper devils, Mephistopheles is a shape-shifter, and it’s exactly the lifeforce’s capacity to reinvent itself that makes it his target and him its enemy.9) In Goethe’s poem, Johann Faust is shown visions in which

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Helpmann and the masks for three of his four roles

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his demonically secured powers still fail to provide the pleasure he seeks. Hoffmann’s constant companion through different landscapes is another kind of demon. This one doesn’t provide the pleasures teasingly – he’s just there to block the poet’s access. Like the Faust myth, the Hoffmann story turns on the inseparability of the individual will from the negating power. The key difference is that Hoffmann the poet isn’t a learned seeker – he’s a passive lover, always in danger of disappearing out of his own tales. That existential condition goes back to the story’s literary roots. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’ is, among other things, a doppelgänger story, and Barbier’s libretto for Offenbach ups the ante on uncanny doubling. How to create on stage and on screen a sense of Hoffmann’s hopeless repetitiveness in matters of the heart? Barbier and Offenbach’s solution is structural: by restarting the opera’s emotional clock three times, both protagonist and audience are placed at a point where the poet’s journey to disappointment can begin all over again. The women in Hoffmann’s life are, even by the poet’s own admission, three features of his feminine ideal. On stage the opera’s three heroines, with their different vocal ranges, are usually taken by three different singers (though Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills were among the famous sopranos of the postwar period to take on all three parts in a single performance). On the other hand, the opera’s four villains are always played by one singer. In performance, the soprano roles, particularly when played by three very different women, may not aim to convince us that they are bound together by Hoffmann’s depressive fantasy. But the four villains, embodied in a single artist, are clearly meant to be different faces of the same negative force, tearing Hoffmann’s dreams apart again and again. Powell foregoes the possibility of doubling the female roles, perhaps because Shearer might have seemed less persuasive as the seductive Giulietta, perhaps because the Archers had envisioned the participation of Ayars and Tchérina from the beginning. But it’s tempting to imagine how different the film would have been if Shearer had danced her way through all four roles. As it is, Powell gives us

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Shearer in two of Offenbach’s original roles – one singing (Olympia), one not (Stella) – and a third invented for the screen (the Dragonfly). Robert Helpmann’s four villains are another matter. Helpmann’s theatrical persona is almost more than an ordinary film could bear – it’s hard to imagine him in anything that wasn’t larger than life. Helpmann was a dancer first and an actor second, but his dancing was always highly theatrical. Although he wasn’t one of the century’s great dance technicians, few other dancers have had the opportunity to create as powerful a dramatic figure on screen as Helpmann does in Hoffmann. In later years, Helpmann and Ashton memorably took on the drag roles of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters in Ashton’s Cinderella for the Royal Ballet (that performance was captured on film). Elsewhere on screen, Helpmann would play a few small roles. The Archers had used him in The Red Shoes as the ballet master Ivan Boleslawsky, and even earlier in their 1942 drama One of Our Aircraft Is Missing. Olivier had cast him in a small part in Henry V (1944). Late in his career, Helpmann played a different sort of villain, the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). In Hoffmann’s cast of players, it’s Helpmann who stands out. His characters are present throughout the film, and when he’s off screen we wait for his return, because we never know what bad thing he’ll do next. Lithe, insinuating, poisonous, Helpmann is superb as the destroyer of Hoffmann’s romantic hopes. There is a simple equation at work here: it may take three women to inspire Hoffmann’s stories, but it takes one multifaceted villain to make the stories worth telling. For without Helpmann’s villains we have no story; with him we have the theme and variations of Hoffmann’s love life. What we might call, for the sake of simplicity, ‘the Hoffmann project’ – meaning the transformation of literary origins into opera and into film – is itself about setting and resetting narrative and phenomenological machinery, pulling the spring back and watching it uncoil over and over, and always with the same result. Like Wile E. Coyote or Charlie Brown, Hoffmann gets it again and again. Helpmann’s villainous personae are there to see that it happens.

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The man who hopes Like Offenbach’s opera, the Archers’ Hoffmann isn’t about a Hofmann – a man of the court – but a Hoffmann – a man who hopes. (The name of both character and opera is frequently misspelled, either with one f or one n.) Hoffmann may be one of the least realistic of the Archers’ protagonists, but he is identifiably a figure of a type that Powell knew how to treat cinematically. Powell’s films seem to trace two arcs – the ‘realistic’ mode exploring the intimate, personal engagements of characters, and the ‘symbolic’ mode, the territory of the allegorical, the fantastical, the fable. Powell and Pressburger put great female characters at the centre of films like The Red Shoes, I Know Where I’m Going! and Black Narcissus. But many other of Powell’s films – with or without Pressburger – explore protagonists who are men in crisis – from the adventurous Aladdin near the beginning of the career to the sociopathic photographer near the end. The Tales of Hoffmann is quintessentially a story about a man chronically disappointed in love. The poet Hoffmann is a fantasist or, to put it in clinical terms, a man who cannot locate himself within a non-imaginary erotic realm. The Archers’ film shows us Hoffmann’s dilemma as a series of problems in perception – not merely in making good interpersonal choices but, given that this is the cinema, in literally seeing incorrectly. The Olympia sequence, with its magic glasses, literalises the problem for us. The Giulietta sequence turns on Hoffmann’s reflection – and mirrors in general – as the nexus of not only a romantic but an existential dilemma. By the time we get halfway through the Antonia sequence, Hoffmann has been banished to peeping through the draperies while his beloved is being driven to her death. How to love women begins with knowing how to look at them, the opera seems to be saying, and the Archers’ film makes full use of that suggestion. The operatic Hoffmann is a poet, which is to say a dreamer. What he thinks he wants is a beautiful woman, but his bad object choices are a doll, a whore, an invalid, and a star. He may succeed as a writer – we’re surprised to see him identified as a successful poet in

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the title card to the opera’s final tale – but Hoffmann’s love is doomed as his love objects are doomed. He may even prefer it that way, leaving him with no personal relationships with women but merely narratives he will retell in an endless loop. The guy who can’t get the girl does have one trusty companion through his adventures, however, someone who is either male or female depending on one’s perspective. The role of the student Nicklaus, the poet’s devoted sidekick, is a trouser role in both opera and film. Mozart’s Cherubino – the role of a male adolescent sung by a female mezzo-soprano – may be the most inspired trouser role in opera history, but Rossini, Bellini, Meyerbeer, and Gounod had all created roles in which women portrayed young men. The convention continued on through the nineteenth century, if with lessening frequency and greater self-consciousness. (The mature Verdi, for example, wrote trouser roles for royal pages, but not for leading characters.) In the twentieth century, the trouser role had its last great stand with Strauss’s lush romantic operas. Given that what Hoffmann most wants is the love of a faithful woman, the Nicklaus role is Offenbach’s sly vocal joke on the opera’s gender relations. The joke turns Hoffmann into a sort of operatic buddy film – or would if Nicklaus were rarely more than a patient observer. He isn’t even Jiminy Cricket, cheering the poet on or offering sensible advice. Nicklaus will see what’s wrong with a situation, but neither Offenbach’s score nor Powell’s direction allows Hoffmann’s companion to break free. On screen we’re left with Nicklaus as a kind of visual resting place, Pamela Brown’s intelligent but gnomic expression offering little more than a sympathetic reaction shot as Hoffmann struggles with his own delusions. Is the Hoffmann story about a man’s chronic failure in love? Or an inability to distinguish women from one another and real women from phantasmatic erotic objects? Some works of art contemplate Hoffmann’s themes through doubles and twins, as Buñuel does in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Some films reuse the same actor in multiple roles, as the Archers do for the

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leading women in Colonel Blimp. Both the Offenbach opera and the Archers’ Hoffmann, however, approach the problem musically, through theme and variation played out over a constant figure in the bass (and here the bass is, literally, a bass). The tenor-poet falls in love with and loses the woman. The poet is always the same, and the woman? She might be different, or maybe not. But the bass villain continues implacably in scene after scene. Offenbach’s opera may not be familiar territory, but dance enthusiasts who know the ‘Nutcracker’ Hoffmann will also know him in another benign version. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’ is also the source tale for the popular ballet Coppélia (1870; music by Léo Delibes), in which the eccentric inventor Coppelius maintains a collection of automata, including the beautiful Coppélia of the title. When Franz, the ballet’s male principal, espies the doll and tries to flirt with it, Franz’s jealous beloved, the spunky Swanhilde, plans an attack on Dr Coppelius’s house. Discovering that her rival is a mere puppet, she takes Coppélia’s place only to torment and finally ridicule the inventor. Swanhilde and Franz are happily reunited, and in some versions, such as the famous Balanchine–Danilova staging for the New York City Ballet, Coppelius runs away from the celebration, cradling the broken doll in his arms. Aside from the famous ballet scenarios, the best-known treatment of Hoffmanns Erzählungen probably belongs to the history of psychoanalysis. Freud’s analysis of Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’ tale turns on the identification and release of that story’s capacity to transmit a sense of the unheimlich – the Freudian uncanny that brought a renewed sense of uneasiness into modern culture. The ‘Sandmann’ tale is the source of Offenbach’s ‘Olympia’ episode, in which French wit is married to German dread. Offenbach’s ironic, late Romantic view of his protagonist’s dilemma is essentially romantic with a small r – music tells a story that reframes its German source material as being about the misrecognition of love. So what should the tone of these stories be on screen? Powell could have taken Offenbach’s interpretation of .

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Hoffmann’s stories and ratcheted up their unpleasantness, drawing the film farther from its French source and closer to its German ur-text. We know from his other films that Powell didn’t shirk from exploring tension and unpleasant personalities, but there have been productions of Offenbach’s opera that are decidedly more neurotic than anything in Powell’s film. Powell’s Hoffmann, in fact, isn’t neurotic at all. The Archers move Offenbach’s opera in, if anything, the opposite direction, away from neurotic tics, creating a cinematic dream for the viewer in which the sufferings of the poet-protagonist Hoffmann become a children’s story for adults. This choice is not a foregone conclusion. The life that the operatic Hoffmann recounts is a tale of wandering among amatory freaks, of which Hoffmann himself is finally one. The opera’s score sparkles and delights, but Les Contes d’Hoffmann can deliver real chills, too. The Diamond aria in the Giulietta act and the appearances and disappearances of Dr Miracle in the Antonia act are meant to set the pulse racing, as are Offenbach’s vocal ensembles. Even the dismemberment of Olympia, which is always sad-funny, holds out the promise of directorial cruelty. In this sense, Offenbach’s (pre-Freudian) score is literally a set of notes on the uncanny. There are many ways to assemble a performing edition of Les Contes d’Hoffmann and many ways to bring it to life. The Archers’ film is a classic or ‘straight’ reading of the work – in 1951, the sorrows of young Hoffmann weren’t yet the subject of Regietheater, the highly individual, and frequently wilful, director-centred opera stagings that emerged decades later. The on-screen result is witty and musically straightforward, the better to allow Heckroth’s designs and Powell’s direction to indulge in the cinematic trickery that has been a staple of film fantasy since Méliès. And yet however delightful and even charming it may be, Hoffmann is still a film about the many ways in which hope is destroyed. At the end of the opera – though not the film – the poet Hoffmann appears to accept that if he’s unsuccessful in love, he still has a compensating gift. He’s a poet, and so he will be a

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success at telling the world about his failures. The idea of transcending one’s misery by writing – or composing, or filming – is an old one. All the world is filled with disappointed lovers, but Hoffmann’s disappointments have been spectacular. This has the curious result of encouraging us to applaud – even approve of – Hoffmann’s disappointments, which alone are the basis of his stories and our entertainment. But this is the fate of the constructed ‘Hoffmann’ character, not of the individual protagonists of the German stories. The difference between E. T. A. Hoffmann and Offenbach’s Second Empire wit couldn’t be clearer. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’ tale ends with the protagonist Nathanael, obsessed with thoughts of persecution, throwing himself off a tower (shades of Vertigo, 1958). The Offenbach Hoffmann sees himself as a damaged but inspired survivor. And the Archers’ cinematic Hoffmann? This poet is neither lofted up into Parnassus nor pushed over the edge. At the end of the film he’s unconscious. It may be better for him to go on dreaming. The poet has drunk too many steins to see what Offenbach’s score, and the Archers’ camera, finally reveals to be the truth: it’s not about the lost women in his life, it’s about the sadness and sparkle in the telling. For the cinematic and operatic Hoffmanns, it’s never about plot per se but about affect. What’s more, the stories that Hoffmann tells us – whether real or not – are the miserable thing that, in a way, he loves the most. He’s a dreamer, a poet, a depressive, a drunk. That understanding of the poet’s dilemma may seem unfair to E. T. A. Hoffmann, who couldn’t foresee the role his avatar would play in disseminating these tales through other, later media, but it’s true to the operatic Hoffmann, and to the Hoffmann the Archers show us on the big screen. In performance, the opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann aims to be something nearly impossible to pull off: a rueful, lighthearted exercise in paranoid delusion. The poet Hoffmann is almost a passive observer of the stories in which he himself functions as a passive observer; his essential condition is hopelessness. But the brilliance of the film lies in

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the delicate tracery through which a drunken depressive’s paralysis is made lyrical – not only musically but visually, too. Hoffmann’s problem isn’t just hopelessness, of course, it’s romantic hopelessness (he’s a lover, not an existentialist). But there are two things romantic hopelessness requires: women and something standing in the way. The Tales of Hoffmann gives him – and us – both. *

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Powell drew on his extensive knowledge of film in making Hoffmann, or rather he took no pains to conceal what he knew. Hoffmann’s tripartite structure echoes the shape in which Offenbach’s opera came to be performed, but the film’s formal arrangement into three principal episodes has its own cinematic lineage as well. The formula of three filmic tales with an interlocking theme or narrative conduit was given its most imposing incarnation in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). More relevant to Hoffmann might be Lang’s 1921 Der müde Tod (Destiny) and Leni’s 1924 Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), which also spin their narratives along three storylines. Leni’s film offers a particularly interesting resonance with Hoffmann: a carnival’s wax museum is in need of a publicist, and a young poet, accompanied by his girlfriend, answers the call. The film’s three episodes focus on notorious men. William (born Wilhelm) Dieterle, who would soon become better known as a director, here plays a poet who conjures up stories about Harun al-Rashid (Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt), and Spring Heel Jack (Werner Krauss). Leni’s film sustains varying degrees of expressionist distortion, culminating in the wildly disorienting, lapped images that texture the film’s brief third episode. As the tales are presented to us, Dieterle’s poet and his beloved become characters in the stories he invents, ending in the film’s nightmarish finale in which the poet’s alter ego is stabbed in the chest. In The Tales of Hoffmann, by comparison, the poet is wounded to the heart again and again. In Waxworks, the poet shows

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us that this is all fantasy by pretending, with a laugh, to have stabbed himself with a pen. No such luck for the Archers’ sorry Hoffmann. Waxworks offered models for Douglas Fairbanks (whose Thief of Bagdad appeared later the same year) as well as for Eisenstein, for whom Conrad Veidt’s Ivan the Terrible helped guide the Russian director’s more famous enactment of the tsar’s life. Waxworks, with its three-scene portfolio of adventures, is a cheerfully haunted film with a happy those-were-just-stories finale. But the materials of Leni’s stories resonate eerily with Hoffmann’s dilemmas: a wax figure’s missing limb (frame story), a hand hacked from a sleeping figure (Harun al-Rashid), a villain with a galvanising stare (Ivan the Terrible), and a mysterious killer whose disorienting effect on the world is echoed in expressionist camera techniques (Jack). In the Archers’ film, the poet finds a mechanical girl of his dreams reduced to a shuddering head and limbs, a villain who transforms himself into whatever negative force is needed to ensure Hoffmann’s defeat, and a sadistic musician who drives enfeebled Antonia to death-by-singing. One doesn’t need a direct link to Leni – or any other specific film work – however, to appreciate the extent to which Hoffmann elegantly deploys the syntax of silent film. There are visual assaults that recall Eisenstein, Cocteau’s version of surrealism, Busby Berkeley’s crane work, and the go-for-broke cartoon world of Fantasia. One might add to that list Murnau’s glacial menace, which Robert Helpmann’s villainous characters so ably display. Through Helpmann’s over-the-top performance (his eyebrows alone do more than Robert Rounseville’s Hoffmann can with his whole body), Hoffmann’s four villains become linked to the inexhaustible evil of cinema’s undead monsters, from Nosferatu (1922) to Romero’s hungry zombies pounding on the kitchen door. There had been earlier films based, if not on Offenbach, then on the Hoffmann stories that provided the opera’s source. They kept getting longer. A fifteen-minute silent version of the opera, released in 1911 as Hoffmanns Erzählungen, was directed by Claudius Veltée; in exhibition, the film would have been accompanied by Offenbach’s

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music. A version directed by Richard Oswald came to the screen in 1914, and Max Neufeld’s 1923 film clocked in at 78 minutes. Among the unfulfilled possibilities of film history is Bertolt Brecht’s interest in filming Offenbach’s opera. Brecht made not one but two attempts to put Hoffmann before the camera, first in America and then in East Germany. In 1947, the playwright tried – and failed – to interest Louis Milestone in the project; two years later, Brecht approached the East German film company DEFA. Even the involvement of the composer Hanns Eisler failed to win the project the necessary support.10 Offenbach’s music itself – especially the famous Barcarolle – has been attached to many moments in cinema history, including appearances in Titanic (1997) and La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997). The melody was also central to a 1934 film called Barcarolle; the German version starred Lída Baarová (Goebbels’ one-time mistress), the French version starred Edwige Feuillère.11 While the Barcarolle may be the best-known number in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Offenbach in fact wrote the famous number for a different (and unsuccessful) opera, Die Rheinnixen (with no reference to Wagner’s Ring cycle); the Barcarolle was inserted into Hoffmann by Ernest Guiraud, who completed Offenbach’s unfinished orchestrations and to whom we are indebted for seeing that the composer’s most ambitious work came to the stage at all. No sound film attempted a full-dress treatment of Offenbach’s opera until the Archers, seventy years after the composer’s death. In many ways, The Tales of Hoffmann remains unique now, in the seventh decade since its release. This Hoffmann project was hardly inevitable, since opera and film would seem to have almost nothing in common. Or maybe they have everything in common; maybe it’s that there are points of connection between the two art forms, and that Powell instinctively sensed the links between cinematic and operatic forms of expression. The result is a beautiful, frequently dazzling, and exhilaratingly strange film, a work that bends genre as if it were light.

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2 Three Tales of and about Hoffmann Following Offenbach’s opera in the edition prepared by Sir Thomas Beecham, The Tales of Hoffmann is shaped into five episodes: a prologue by way of an extended introduction, the three tales of Hoffmann’s three loves, and the final, hasty resolution in the form of epilogue. Hoffmann deploys every imaginable camera technique – variable speeds, reverse shots, aggressive cross-cutting, mirror work, dissolves, flash cuts, sudden ninety-degree shifts from the horizontal to the vertical plane, and techniques of cinematic magic with roots going back to cinema’s first decade of visual trickery. A title card identifies this as ‘A Fantastic Opera’. The conductor gets a credit of his own before the singers’ names appear. The card

The first of many cards shaping the viewer’s relation to the unfolding action

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‘Designed by Hein Heckroth’ acknowledges Heckroth’s responsibility for the look of the visual production. Hoffmann is at once spare – like an indie theatre project – and almost obsessively organised, as if the sets had to be schematic in order for colour to more fully determine the mood of each scene and segment. The film isn’t just in colour, it is colour. Hoffmann’s opening credits – over the sounds of the orchestra tuning up – establish both the film’s fantastical atmosphere and its approach to narrative framing. The camera discovers a cityscape of black-and-white silhouettes, Hein Heckroth’s vision of a storybook Nürnberg sometime in the imaginary nineteenth century.12 The camera stops before a house with two tiny windows; we peer in to see a man and woman looking like figures in an Advent calendar come to life. The drawn characters dissolve into live actors; the man blows out a candle, and the lovers are alone in the dark. Naïve and scopic, it’s the first cinematic view of the opera’s subject. Imaginary houses with real people in them

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The camera moves on across the roofline. With Beecham’s first authoritative downbeat a weathercock flips from side to side and we’re off. In Hoffmann, music animates what may not be fully alive: the camera pans to a mechanical clock where real actor-dancers pose as figures we will encounter a little later on. The film never abandons this playful slippage between the human and the mechanical, or between the real and the fictive, the natural and the theatrical. The camera cuts from the imaginary skyline to an oddly angled image of a gilt figure holding a victor’s wreath atop a theatre’s pediment (is theatre the story’s hero after all?), then to a chandelier, cloaks hanging in a cloakroom, and a slow pan across a table with coins before coming to rest on a pile of programmes. We can read that it says ‘The Enchanted Dragonfly Ballet’ – and the camera pans down to complete the thought – ‘in three acts’. This Hoffmann will be a film, an opera, and a three-act ballet, too. Against a red surround, a pair of ornate doors swings open to reveal Councillor Lindorf – the first of Helpmann’s four villainous characters. Abruptly the camera is above him to show us Lindorf’s sinuous passage around three empty gilt chairs. It’s the film in a nutshell: Lindorf and his avatars are conjurors erasing Hoffmann’s three loves – if those loves ever existed at all. Holding an ornate lorgnette that makes him look like a bird of prey, Lindorf inspects an announcement of Stella’s imminent performance, his posture arranged so that his shadow occludes the illustration on the poster. Helpmann is all shapes and shadows here. His characters will have plenty to sing in the rest of the film, but his Councillor Lindorf is a silent role. In many ways, Helpmann is Hoffmann’s on-screen star – and the unseen basso Bruce Dargavel, who sings Helpmann’s parts, is the off-screen one. No other performer or voice in Hoffmann is as distinctive or as dramatically effective as these two are, working as they must do together. In this sequence, Helpmann, aided by the camera, draws on every dancerly instinct to convey without words slithery Lindorf’s character. We watch for the last bit of his trailing

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Lindorf slithers towards his prey; Lindorf casts his shadow on the poster, as he will on Hoffmann’s dreams

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cloak as it disappears around a column and through a doorway, as if it were the tail end of a snake. Backstage, Lindorf watches Stella transforming herself into a dragonfly – in this Hoffmann he’s one creature watching another, and we’re watching both of them. Just before Stella goes on stage, she leaves the poet a note written on a handkerchief – ‘I love thee Hoffmann’ (a G-clef in place of the ‘I’) – along with a key to her room. But once she has begun performing, Lindorf bribes Andreas, her oily attendant, to waylay the note and get him the key. Hoffmann will never know that Stella had offered herself to the man who adores her. It’s a small but important point that the Archers’ Stella loves Hoffmann. Offenbach’s Stella is more evasive. The most striking – and innovative – individual sequence in Hoffmann is the ballet that occurs early in the film and that was, from Korda’s perspective, a necessary component of funding. Following the success of The Red Shoes, Shearer’s celebrity made an

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elaborate dance episode an essential part of the new project. The ballet isn’t even suggested in Offenbach’s score. With Beecham’s assistance, the Archers concocted a glittering little scenario for Shearer that is, despite the presence of her male partner, a duet for ballerina and camera. Playing both Stella and the doll Olympia, Shearer’s presence dominates the first half of the film (she is the principal female in the first hour) and establishes the long physical lines of dance as key to the work’s visual grammar. But the long line – the dancer’s graceful suturing of movements from ground to air and back, or the singer’s ability to connect and shape tones on a reservoir of breath most of us can’t imagine – is something else as well. It’s a rebuff to the limitations of mortality – to gravity, to the shape and strength of ordinary bodies, to the medium in which we conduct our daily business. Dancers seem to move weightlessly, as if they alone exist in something other than air. Opera singers have the lungs of pearl divers. Both dancers and singers in their way have something in common with the aquatic world, and not coincidentally water is present throughout the Archers’ Hoffmann. We see it in the wave-like images that frame the dragonfly ballet, in the camera’s aqueous dissolves, in the diaphanous fabrics Heckroth uses to set so many of the film’s scenes; we see (and hear) it literally in the gondola duet and the Venetian setting of the Giulietta scene (the famous Barcarolle), and finally in the setting – invented for the film – of a Greek island for Antonia, an island to which our Hoffmann arrives by boat. In the Archers’ Hoffmann, Offenbach’s opera is reconfigured from the very beginning in dance language. This is the film’s fundamental aesthetic reunderstanding of Offenbach’s project: in The Tales of Hoffmann, dance reframes the voice as the camera reframes what the ear will take in. It’s one of this film’s tricky, balancing-ontoe oddities: opera’s vocal phenomenology is reconsidered in spatial terms and through a discourse that is essentially speechless. Dance becomes the work’s central storytelling mode through three devices: 1) actual dance sequences (like the dragonfly ballet), 2) the casting of

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dancers as actors in principal roles, and 3) the ‘danciness’ of the camerawork, which echoes and connects the first two. The Enchanted Dragonfly Ballet Hoffmann’s Enchanted Dragonfly Ballet – an invented, dialogue-free prologue to the action – immediately positions this Hoffmann as a work shaped by but not held fast to the contours of Offenbach’s opera. This extended sequence may be less dramatic than the Grand Guignol of the ballet sequence in The Red Shoes but it’s also more lyrical, as well as a visual indication of the film’s balance between nature and magic. Make no mistake: however delicate, this is also a ballet about erotic death. The dragonfly dances with her cavalier, then kills him and moves on. With choreography by Frederick Ashton, the dance sequence lasts for almost six minutes of screen time in what would become Hoffmann’s presiding atmospheric condition: a gauzy non-space of saturated pastels. It’s a function of Ashton’s skill as a choreographer, Christopher Challis’s camerawork, and Reginald Mills’ editing that Shearer and her partner Edmond Audran – a red, horned cavalier identified in the credits (without explanation) as ‘Cancer’ – completely hold our attention. (Audran, Tchérina’s husband, died in an accident shortly after the completion of the film.) As Shearer and Audran skitter across painted lily pads, the episode gives Powell an early opportunity to introduce some of the camera effects that give Hoffmann its visual texture: slow motion, film run backwards, jump cuts. Where is the singing? (Be patient, the film tells us.) Ashton’s choreography listens well; at a musical climax, he lets the orchestra run free while Shearer’s dragonfly has nothing to do other than vibrate triumphantly en pointe. The camera responds with equal care: at one particularly oneiric moment in the dragonfly sequence, Audran ‘swims’ down into the frame from above.13 Surrealist inflections are part of the film’s grammar. Hoffmann’s ballet sequence can be read as a dream, as a fairy tale, or as an animist reverie, but its real function is clearly to give the

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The dragonfly among the lily pads; Audran as Cancer, swimming down into the frame

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audience a view of Moira Shearer doing what they came to see her do: dance. The film’s design and camerawork are never more striking than in the ballet sequence and the Olympia tale immediately following it. Walls are sheer fabric. Lighting creates the contours explored by the camera eye. As elsewhere in Hoffmann, the overall effect of space is precise and boundless at the same time. Shearer’s dragonfly finally dances into a posture of apotheosis and the camera cuts to Lindorf, eyeing Stella from off stage. Through a specular hole in the theatre curtain the camera also shows us for the first time our title character, the poet Hoffmann. Played by the American tenor Robert Rounseville, Hoffmann sits in the audience as if in a trance, having just watched his beloved perform. Is it the trance of the victim or of the lover? Stella’s performance has ended, and now the opera proper begins. A card announcing an entr’acte of twenty minutes before Act II extends an invitation for refreshment (‘Students!/Art is long/The Lindorf looks through the theatre curtain

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interval is short/Come to Luther’s Cellar for a snort’). Stella the ballerina will only return to our view at the end of the film, when Hoffmann has exhausted himself with the effort of making his stories come to life. Luther’s Cellar The ballet sequence and Lindorf’s backstage manipulation are the long prologue to Hoffmann’s three tales, the visual equivalent to an extended overture. The tavern setting, however, is the opera’s real prologue and where the story of Les Contes d’Hoffmann actually begins. The murderous dragonfly ballet, all grace and upward movement, is visually about the body’s release from the earth. Luther’s Cellar is the opposite, a subterranean drinking pit for Nürnberg’s students and one melancholy poet. As the camera enters the new location, the picture plane is broken diagonally by a flight of stairs descending to a setting marked

Hoffmann’s hideaway: the architecture of depression

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by tracery and heavy shadows. The Archers’ films have remarkable staircases – among them the celestial escalator in A Matter of Life and Death, the overgrown steps that Vicky Page climbs in The Red Shoes as if she were Belle on the way to meet the Bête, and the ingenious flight of stairs in the Olympia tale, about which more below. Like all locations in Hoffmann, the set for Luther’s Cellar, even when crowded with students, is minimalist. The film’s effects and attentive camerawork are so ingeniously contrived that one might not even notice a remarkable detail: it’s only here in Luther’s Cellar, almost twenty minutes into the film, that for the first time we see on-screen actors singing. Down in Luther’s Cellar the students’ drinking song prepares us for Hoffmann’s vocal entrance into the story. The poet and his companions are seated at a table around a large flame as Hoffmann begins to reflect on his loves. Hoffmann is filled with odd geometric arrangements. In one shot, the poet’s head is framed by the flame behind him. He’s on fire, but he’s not. This, the camerawork tells us, will be a melancholic reverie. Robert Rounseville’s Hoffmann, though pleasantly sung, lacks the neurotic energy or vocal brilliance we associate with the role’s later interpreters (Placído Domingo for vocal beauty, Alfredo Kraus for style, Neil Shicoff for the portrayal of a Hoffmann driven by his neuroses). Rounseville’s readings of the music are clear and direct, if rendered rather bland by his acting, though in his defence one could point out that Hoffmann’s passivity is itself an element of the opera’s story. This Hoffmann is more ground than figure, more the field on which others will play than a player himself. It’s against the emotional backdrop of Hoffmann’s strangely neutral characterisation that Powell trots out the opera’s menagerie of characters. Helpmann’s performance as the villains, on the other hand, hardly needs pumping up. At his entrance into the cellar he looks something like a Boris Karloff character, or maybe Nosferatu attempting to be sociable. One of the film’s many wonderful shots of Helpmann’s face occurs here, as Lindorf passes a single finger slowly

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over his own lips. It’s a chilling bit of stage business straight out of silent cinema as the gesture primes the viewer for the menace laced through the story’s three tales. *

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The Hoffmann we first see may be reserved, even meditative, but his friends know him as a storyteller, and a good one. Gathered in Luther’s Cellar, his companions want to hear a favourite story one more time. The choice turns out to be bizarre – it’s the tale of the deformed Kleinzach. The poet begins what feels as if it will become a little ballad, with an off-accented whiplash figure in the music representing the movement of the dwarf’s body. Hoffmann whirls towards the hearth and begins his song. The camera cuts to Rounseville’s hand, which points at a grotesque mug on the mantelpiece. As Hoffmann sings, the camera dollies out, then cuts to a high-angle shot of his drinking Helpmann’s signature gesture: a finger passing before the lips

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companions, and then into a close-up of Rounseville’s face as he imitates the unfortunate Kleinzach. As Rounseville snaps his head sideways (‘Krik! Krak!’), his nineteenth-century pompadour bounces in the frame. Suddenly the camera upends our sense of scale as it cuts to a giant version of the mug; out of its façade steps a tasselled yellow harlequin, a Kleinzach come to life, nose and belly and all.14 As Kleinzach, Frederick Ashton dances a few grotesque steps with a gigantic prop pipe (we have seen the Kleinzach figure earlier on the clock in the film’s credit sequence). The camera twice cuts back to Hoffmann, who is again seen imitating the movement of Kleinzach’s malformed limbs. Suddenly we are immersed in the miniature world of Ashton’s dancing. Kleinzach disappears behind the giant mug, reappearing as a deluded cavalier; a spotlight hits Kleinzach and rises to catch, at the top of the frame, the legs and lower torso of a beautiful dancer. It’s a flash of a moment that gives us an idealised woman’s body cut in half by the camera. But besides Hoffmann’s head. ‘Krik, krak!’

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its circus-trick pleasures, the shot thematically underscores Hoffmann’s inability to imagine women as complete. In a wonderful directorial gesture, a spotlight falls on Kleinzach and the mysterious, haughty beauty. Again and again in the film’s dramatically lit compositions, a spot catches an actor’s face, as if the theatre can never be erased from the cinematic apparatus. Kleinzach woos her gamely with a few dance steps, but when the beauty holds up a mirror in which he sees himself, Kleinzach despairs and collapses. This visual anecdote is an invention of the Archers based on the few lines of narrative in Hoffmann’s song. Yet the brief sequence underscores a recurring figure of dance as the unspeaking language of Hoffmann gestures towards the stein; Kleinzach jumps out into the playing space; the haughty beauty admires her reflection; Kleinzach destroyed

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tragic romance. The plot of Hoffmann itself is, of course, a theme and variations: the man who imagines a woman can love him, only to discover (‘Krik! Krak!’) the impossible gap between himself and the images he pursues. Viewers may recognise this as the plot of Oscar Wilde’s 1892 story ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ in which a deformed dwarf, given to the proud infanta as a birthday gift, imagines she loves him until he sees his own reflection and dies of heartbreak. Though nowhere in Hoffmann’s source texts or in the Offenbach– Barbier libretto, the Archers’ invention here winks slyly at a very English take on the perversity of love.15 Hoffmann’s song of Kleinzach lasts only a few minutes, but in visualising the story, the film connects Kleinzach’s dilemma and the poet’s – they’re both deluded cavaliers. The camera observes Kleinzach through a trellis, emphasising contained space and its figurative entrapment of the characters. When the lady turns the mirror on Kleinzach, he collapses in horror, and the camera pulls backwards through the trellis, before cutting to a poster of Stella – the mirror-bearing lady of Hoffmann’s own romantic malaise. On the poster is text that reads ‘Tomorrow Don Giovanni’. (In Offenbach’s opera, Stella is a singer.) Hoffmann will dream of the opera and its leading lady. But Hoffmann is as far from being a Don Giovanni as the earth is from the stars.16 The Tale of Olympia Hoffmann’s scenario quickly establishes its intention of moving the film outside the confines of Barbier’s libretto and the stage directions of Offenbach’s score. A gloved right hand turns the page of a storybook to reveal ‘THE TALE OF OLYMPIA’, promising the viewer ‘puppets, automatons and puppet-guests seen through magic spectacles’. It’s pretty close to Offenbach on drugs. We’re even given a strange detail of location: ‘The action takes place in PARIS – before the Eiffel Tower was built.’ (So long ago as that? Or is the impending construction a wink at the film’s mechanical rereading of the original tale?) The figure of a cherub designing the Tower embellishes the foot of the page.

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Of all the episodes in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, the Olympia story is the most brilliant. The starring role for coloratura soprano is one of the most rewarding in the operatic repertory. Olympia is on stage for no more than a half-hour, but the audience can’t keep their eyes off her: the soprano must be a singing actress, able to execute to the audience’s delight whatever idea of a singing automaton the production’s director has invented. In the opera house there have been Olympias of all sizes, from the monumental – the great Australian diva Joan Sutherland first among them – to the petite, like the French soprano Natalie Dessay. The most compact Olympias have often had the advantage of bringing to their performance some dance training as well. Early in her career, Dessay delighted her audiences by rising en pointe while singing Olympia’s Doll Song (‘Les Oiseaux dans la charmille’), as if singing the stratospheric music weren’t difficult enough. Whether or not there is any direct connection between Shearer’s on-screen, danced Olympia and Dessay’s live, balletic Olympia fifty years later, the Archers’ Hoffmann redefined the possibilities for staging this crucial scene in Offenbach’s opera. What we know as the tale of Olympia is the soft side of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story ‘Der Sandmann’, in which the real focus is on a protagonist’s morbid speculation, strange eyeglasses and artificial eyes, an automaton, and his encounter with a sequence of male figures that include a Doctor Coppelius. While E. T. A. Hoffmann’s narrative ends with the protagonist’s suicide, neither opera nor film is quite as cruelly inexplicable. In Offenbach and the Archers’ Hoffmann, Coppelius is the figure who brings about Olympia’s destruction, but Hoffmann escapes unharmed. Offenbach’s telling of this episode (inventor, automaton, misplaced romance, vengeful destruction) is full of details; even in the opera house there is almost too much plot to get straight in the Olympia episode. The eccentric inventor Spalanzani (played by Massine) has created a life-size mechanical doll, which he brings to the home of Coppelius (Helpmann), his business associate.

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Coppelius will give the doll the one thing it lacks: eyes. Here Hoffmann encounters the sleeping figure of a lovely young woman. When the poet is given a pair of magic glasses, Hoffmann ‘sees’ Spalanzani’s ‘daughter’ as real and falls instantly in love with her. But there is tension between Coppelius and Spalanzani over investments and payment – we get a quick shot of an expressionistic cashier’s window to tell us of a deal gone sour – and the enraged Coppelius takes revenge by tearing the doll to pieces. Heckroth and the Archers reconceive the Olympia episode so that the act is no longer about one singing doll but about a fantastical assembly of figures caught somewhere between man and mechanism. Coppelius’s servant Cochenille, played by Ashton in his second brief appearance in the film, is even described in a title card as half-man, half-puppet – neither fully human nor fully automaton. Even more strikingly, the Archers turn the chorus of guests into ‘puppet-guests’, offering an ingenious filmic twist on the opera’s otherwise standardissue chorus of onlookers. The Olympia episode concerns self-delusion and its consequences, so it is appropriate that Heckroth’s sets are painted cloths, translucent curtains with figural work on them. Nothing is substantial except the actors and the occasional prop. Everything is held together by the camera. Wearing the magic glasses, Rounseville looks more like Liberace than a lovesick poet, but when he looks through them the world is transformed, and when he looks at the doll Olympia, played again by Shearer, Hoffmann is transfixed. The world seen through Hoffmann’s magic glasses is a logic-free dream world, and to render it visible Christopher Challis’s camerawork is everywhere. Crane shots suddenly place us above Olympia in her cradle-like bed or search the open space around the characters. The lens catches decorative bosses on the floor, which read as physical ruptures of the plane on which the actors move. As Olympia sleeps, a shotreverse shot cues us to a Dalí-like contraption, slowly bobbing up and down screen right, that answers a view of the waxen, immobile Olympia rocking slowly in her cradle-bed.

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Hoffmann puts on the magic glasses; Shearer as Olympia, inert in her cradle

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Wearing his magic spectacles, Hoffmann sings a love song. As he finishes, we see him posed near Olympia’s swinging cradle; beside him is a screen decorated with the strange boss we had seen earlier on the floor. Now the floor is smooth. These appearancedisappearance tricks, straight out of early silent-film magic, underscore Hoffmann’s prevailing aura of naïve fantasy and troubled dreaming. The ‘space’ of Hoffmann is bounded and open, violent and harmless at the same time. Freud’s famous reading of the ‘Sandmann’ story highlights the protagonist’s obsessional reaction to eyes. The camera shows us a handful of artificial eyes in Coppelius’s outstretched palm, which are then ‘magically’ inserted into Olympia’s head. When Shearer’s Olympia awakens, her eyes are there, and with Olympia the act begins to move. The entire Olympia episode is, in effect, an extended act of choreography, dominated not by a burnished tenor and a soprano’s Coppelius installs Olympia’s eyes

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jaw-dropping vocalism, as one might expect in a theatrical performance, but by five key dancers: Shearer, Helpmann, Massine, Ashton, and – most important – the camera itself. In some shots there are dolls suspended on tracks; in others there are actor-dancers made up to look like dolls. The scene whirls, not in the elegant tracery of Ophuls but with an off-kilter flow of images and angles that is impossible to anticipate.17 Figures look out at us, now sightlessly, now with real but heavily made-up eyes, and always turning to the orchestra’s lively dance rhythms. Ashton’s Cochenille attends to the details of puppet maintenance. In a brilliant piece of invention for the screen, Cochenille is shown controlling the puppet-guests as marionettes. When he drops a control device from his mouth, two puppet-guests fall into an entangled mass. One of the puppets needs its face adjusted with a tool and writhes as if it were a real person. It’s fantasy, but with the potential to induce squirms. Spalanzani presents Olympia as a magician might reveal a trick. Standing in front of her so that her arms protrude from his own body, Spalanzani’s set-up echoes the film’s themes of deceptive presentation, while also recalling visually the flames behind Hoffmann’s head in the cellar scene. The famous Doll Song begins. As in the opera, Offenbach’s guests appear, invited to admire the marvellous young beauty and to hear the score’s famous, stratospheric number. Dorothy Bond, singing the role, executes the showpiece aria, while on screen Shearer’s Olympia renders visual the palpably mechanistic character of coloratura vocalising. In Offenbach’s opera, the point is surely that the audience sees a brilliant feat of engineering – a mechanical nightingale – while the besotted Hoffmann, watching the world through magic glasses, sees what he wants. But this is the Archers’ dance-y Hoffmann, and its female star is Shearer. In operatic performance, the soprano is traditionally directed to act as if she were mechanical, complete with flattened hands held in parallel as

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Preparing the puppet actors; dance as coloratura

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The dancing puppetguests emerge from behind the curtain

Above the dance floor

Nicklaus rewinds Olympia

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she performs jerky head movements. Here, by contrast, the doll is danced (and sung) as a ballerina, not as a machine. Shearer’s Olympia – or the Olympia that we and Hoffmann see – is more than doll and less than human. The distinction between Shearer’s character and all the other automata in the scene is striking – Shearer beautifully made up, transformed by Hoffmann’s aspirational magic glasses into a romantic object. The film emphasises the contrast with the puppet-guests by means of their extravagant, surrealist make-up, their denaturalised eyes, their cheeks painted with doll-like circles of colour. We alone can see Hoffmann’s romantic fantasy as nightmare alley. Shearer dances mostly in master shot, but her dancing isn’t meant to be doll-like in any easily mimetic way. Ashton’s choreography gives his leading lady a series of classical steps and phrases into which he introduces movements that gesture slyly towards her automaton state, as, for example, when Shearer breaks her wrists first to one side and then to the other. As dictated by Offenbach’s score, the doll-soprano runs out of steam and has to be rewound – not once but twice. The puppet-audience responds with delight (as the live audience would in the theatre) and Hoffmann is more enchanted than ever. Olympia finishes, and we hear – one of the film’s acoustic jokes – the mechanical sound of the puppet-guests’ applause. Many details of the Olympia scene are straight out of silent film, as, for example, the moment when Cochenille, drawing on his half-puppet nature, disappears out of the frame at high speed. (Powell and Christopher Challis were constantly manipulating the camera to achieve the effects they required. Powell told Ian Christie that ‘in one sequence I might be shooting at 5 different speeds’.18) We’ve already seen Ashton as Kleinzach in an episode that plays with both scale and the boundaries between living and man-made figures. Here it’s Ashton’s Cochenille who plays with scale and boundaries. As he catches a puppet whose strings have become tangled, there is a cut that takes a human dancer up into the flies where he becomes, in

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Ashton’s hand, a small doll to whom Cochenille delivers a light blow of reproof. Now singing to Olympia, Hoffmann is once again lined up along an axis that makes him readable together with another curious visual cue. Rounseville vocalises in front of a gigantic swan harp. The strange object appeared earlier in the sequence, but here the harp’s placement suggests antlers sprouting from the poet’s head. It’s another of the film’s comments by means of the imposition of visual planes – Hoffmann the dreamer as Hoffmann the horned man, the butt of a romantic joke. Radiating intelligent, sceptical patience, Pamela Brown’s Nicklaus has one of the most interesting faces in the film, but Nicklaus is barely more than an observing presence. When her character enters to watch the scene, Brown is carrying, in an offhand manner, party snacks – a goblet of startlingly green liquid and an apple perched in a lobster claw. The visual detail is another surrealist throwaway, as though Nicklaus had drifted in from L’Âge d’or (1930). Ashton as Cochenille, reproving the tangled marionette

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Hoffmann here reinvents a number written for the chorus as a voiceless pas de deux for Massine and Shearer. It’s a moment of odd intimacy – one of the few in the film – as Spalanzani dances with the automaton. She is, of course, Shearer, not a doll, and our pleasure in watching the two artists move through space is innocent of the fact that we should only be able to see her graceful gestures if we, like poor Hoffmann, are also deluded. The camera is our pair of magic glasses. The contrast between Shearer – who is, after all, our visual fantasy as well as Hoffmann’s – and the puppet-guests is brought home as the camera reveals the dolls suspended on a moving contraption above the dance floor, mechanically descending to the carpet below. Then Olympia is off screen. The cheated Coppelius will destroy the doll. Olympia flees. One of the film’s most inspired choices is Powell’s idea of a painted staircase instead of a built construction, a directorial invention that provides the film with one of its most

Olympia dancing at high speed ‘down’ the painted stairs

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The enraged Coppelius; the trembling leg

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famous moments. In a late interview, Powell explained that the design for the staircase he initially requested would have cost £8,000. Instead, he instructed the crew to put the camera in the flies and have Shearer dance, as fast as she could, ‘down’ a painted staircase. Everything about that decision is right – the dreaminess, the artifice, the fiscal and cinematic economy. Down Olympia rushes, with the men in hot pursuit. Offenbach’s opera requires that here Olympia is destroyed. In the opera house, a real soprano has to disappear before broken doll limbs can be tossed on stage, but on film Olympia has a more inventive and vivid demise. We watch the doll’s destruction backstage as Olympia’s body is torn to pieces: arms, hands, head. One of Olympia’s legs is still trembling. How much did Powell care that we could see the trick? And does it matter? Even though we know it’s Shearer poking her leg through a black curtain, the image remains uncanny – one of the most striking in a film whose images arrest the viewer again and again. The camera pulls back to reveal doll parts everywhere. The screen is filled with pieces, spread out across the picture plane as if elements floating in a medieval tapestry. A close-up focuses on Ashton’s Cochenille stroking a dismembered hand. And then the final composition, in which we see what’s left of Olympia – parts, springs, wires – as a scrim shields us from the grief of a distraught Hoffmann. The camera picks out Olympia’s head lying on the floor, her mechanical eyes fluttering. Offenbach’s score stops, and in the film’s single most brilliant acoustic stroke – and a genuine musical addition to the opera – we hear nothing but the clicking of the automaton’s eyes, which sounds like the flapping of film stock in a projector at the end of a reel. It’s very smart, and very witty. It’s also one of the most memorable moments in The Tales of Hoffmann, a juncture at which the discourses of silent film, sound film, and opera coincide. The story of Hoffmann’s doll – an object lesson in self-delusion – is sad-funny, but its real point is the art of its telling. As this film Hoffmann reminds us, even at the end the doll is winking at us.

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The dispersal of detail. Olympia reduced to her parts

Cochenille strokes the doll’s hand

Olympia’s head, springs and all

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The Tale of Giulietta Olympia’s head sprouts two horns in the shape of coloured springs, and the film dissolves through montage into the glistening waters of Venice. At the beginning of the film’s second hour a card announces ‘THE TALE OF GIULIETTA’. Helpmann nods, as if he is signalling the beginning of a performance entirely under his control. The courtesan Giulietta (Ludmilla Tchérina) is the creature of Helpmann’s Dapertutto. On the opera stage, the Giulietta act is traditionally performed in the middle of Les Contes d’Hoffmann. It opens with Giulietta and Nicklaus in a gondola, singing the Barcarolle (‘Nuit d’amour’), though more recent stagings have placed the Giulietta act last so as to serve as the climactic disappointment in Hoffmann’s narrative. It never quite makes sense that Hoffmann’s sidekick would be here with the glittering courtesan, but the music is intoxicating. Perhaps Offenbach simply wanted a mezzo here to sing in thirds with his Giulietta. Powell, however, was working with a pre-recorded track and, as a film-maker, once again took the opportunity to conceive the situation by means of filmic techniques. In Hoffmann, Giulietta looks on as her reflection does the singing – and the reflection sings both parts. Just as the staircase in the Olympia scene is ‘only’ a painted carpet, so the Venetian lagoon is a painted canvas. Backed here by some of Offenbach’s most luxuriant writing, the Barcarolle is as dreamlike as anything in the film. After the ‘mechanical’ fantasy of the Olympia tale, Powell’s restaging of the opera’s most famous melody is a cagey introduction to the ‘magical’ fantasy of the Giulietta story. Hoffmann’s world is built on unstable foundations. It’s not merely that the film doesn’t seek to create the simulacrum of a real environment in the style of romantic realism (Zeffirelli’s 1982 film of La Traviata being a good example) or even the experience of the opera as performed on a proscenium stage. Instead, it creates something different, and eerier: a world that looks as if it’s almost a stage, with painted curtains and carpets, but without the borders

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that shape and sustain the illusion of a playing space. It’s the theatrical unheimlich – it’s like our theatre-home but crucially different enough for us always to be ill at ease. This is of course the privilege of the filmic, to deny the limitations within which the physical stage operates, but this is particularly true in Hoffmann’s Giulietta sequence. Offenbach’s Giulietta act is a Second Empire gloss on depravity. We’re invited to imagine the depths, but we’re not shown them, dramatically or musically. When Powell turns to the ‘orgy’ scene, the crane again positions the camera high up, as in Luther’s Cellar. We look down on the drunken men and women who lie about the central banquet table looking like smashed pastries, or maybe a broken collection of particularly unappealing puppets. No nudity, only colours and costumes in visual disarray. Hoffmann’s vision of end-limit sensual overload here looks like the island of broken toys.

In the gondola, Dapertutto passes his finger before Giulietta’s lips

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Vamp on the half-shell: Tchérina’s Giulietta in a publicity still. The image does not appear in the film’s final cut

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Once again, Hoffmann’s tale of lost love turns on the plot against him. Helpmann’s evil Dapertutto has proposed a bargain. He will reward the courtesan Giulietta with a diamond in exchange for Hoffmann’s soul. It’s an odd bargain – more Faustian than practical, and one that doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of the film’s long arc about disappointed love. But the bargain sets up the episode’s central conflict and, more important, gives Powell unlimited licence to make film magic on screen. Staged productions of Les Contes d’Hoffmann delight in the challenge of making Dapertutto (his name is Italian for ‘everywhere’) appear and disappear with cinematic speed. It comes as no surprise that the screen, as one discovers here, is Dapertutto’s natural habitat. Hoffmann’s Dapertutto appears and disappears with a simple cut; figures appear as if in mirrors; jump cuts relocate the viewer from one non-space to another.19 Powell’s interest in the Giulietta sequence is so consistently focused that he places some action (including bits involving famous Venetian depravity: puppets at an orgy

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music) outside of our visual plane, in effect executing a cinematic dislocation and reassembly of the opera’s materials. Working against the opera’s scenario, Powell uses film to emphasise the conflict inherent in the episode, where dream-logic and complex plotting are not fully reconcilable. Having first reimagined the Barcarolle as something like an internal dialogue for Giulietta, Powell next relocates Dapertutto’s famous aria ‘Scintille, diamant’ off screen. In Offenbach’s structure, this aria is the moment when the magician compels Giulietta to his will through the power of a single diamond. It’s an act of erotic mesmerism, powerfully expressed in the vocal line. In Hoffmann, the aria is heard on the audio track. Sinuous and laced with menace, Dapertutto’s dark voice (sung handsomely by Dargavel) rises at the end of the aria to a climactic demand Giulietta cannot resist. But Helpmann doesn’t actually perform the aria on screen. Instead, the film turns what is already a moment of musical rough magic into another of Hoffmann’s set pieces. Hein Heckroth’s colour scheme for the film determined that the Giulietta act would be dominated by red, and here the Technicolor stock is saturated with redness. The scene’s colours take on magical properties, and the eye is drawn to objects like the coloured candles out of which Helpmann will create the necklace he needs to win Giulietta’s help. Dapertutto conjures jewels out of candle wax as the aria fills the audio track.Wax. Flash cut. Jewel. Piece by waxy piece, Dapertutto builds a glittering necklace as the aria curls around his prey. Red, green, blue – the colours of the wax are a little Technicolor joke. Dapertutto’s filmic charm is powerful, as he demonstrates by undoing it; when the aria concludes, his fingers reverse the magic, turning the splendid ornament back into what it was – nothing more than coloured wax. Giulietta now knows the stakes she’s playing for. The camera catches her and Hoffmann, singing their duet in shallow focus. She seduces him – operatically – a beautiful woman’s voice forcing a man’s voice into submission. Hoffmann’s soul disappears into a mirror, one of the many camera tricks that fill out this episode’s magic effects. Of all the

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Dapertutto conjures the candle drippings into jewels … and back into wax

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episodes of the Archers’ Hoffmann, it’s the Giulietta sequence where the film most deliberately separates out vocal performance from onscreen image. From the Barcarolle through to the end of the act, the film renders Offenbach’s dreamy eroticism as a soundscape for visual invention. There’s more time for the dancer-actors to enact the story without attempting to mime the vocalism, more time for camerawork. In the Giulietta sequence, music and action are almost asynchronous, almost being presented to us as a soundtrack to accompany a visual artifact (which is, ironically, exactly what Powell’s ‘composed film’ was – a visual narrative accompanying Beecham’s pre-recorded track). Yet the film doesn’t feel canned here. It’s more as if the camera is thinking the music rather than attempting to depict the opera’s narrative. Having won Hoffmann’s soul, the triumphant Giulietta descends another staircase, from the palazzo to the gondola. There’s an acceleration of images, one dreamier than the next. In a

Giulietta treads on her soulless victims

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startling composition that ratchets up further the surrealist tone of the episode, Giulietta, now dressed in white, is seen walking over a field of bodies. It’s a brilliant visual invention that fills in what the opera implies but never makes explicit. These are the courtesan’s victims, a ghostly vision passing over the twisted forms of dead, soulless men, their bodies fused into a contorted mass. Heckroth’s colour scheme triumphs here: the men’s bodies are painted red, their hair gilt. Unless he can escape, Hoffmann will join them. The falling action of the Giulietta episode is as rapid on screen as it is in Offenbach’s opera. Several things have to happen: in order to regain a key that symbolises his own stolen soul, Hoffmann must kill the sycophant Schlemil in a duel. Hoffmann will turn to Giulietta,

Travis Bickle: the look

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only to find her in the arms of a servant. This Giulietta is no Juliet, and Hoffmann is no Romeo. Giulietta and Dapertutto – whore and demon – must depart together as they arrived, in the gondola, leaving Hoffmann alone on the human shore. A word about Dapertutto’s appearance: Scorsese tells us that the look in Travis Bickle’s face in Taxi Driver (1976) derives from Helpmann’s expression in the Giulietta episode. On the opera stage, this sequence of events is dense and rapidly plotted, as if there isn’t enough time, or enough music, to make the climax and resolution clear. The resolution can feel cursory, the details overlooked by an audience bathed in Offenbach’s romantic melodies. Powell, however, treats this sequence – nearly five minutes long – almost as if it’s silent cinema. Offenbach’s orchestral music paints the scene, but the action unfurls as if in a mute world: the duel, Hoffmann’s seizure of Schlemil’s key, and the stunningly executed moment when Hoffmann breaks the mirror and regains his soul. Scorsese admiringly comments that this passage is ‘pure film’, connecting it to the work of Godard and the New Wave of the next decade. But within the thematics of the film itself, this striking passage also shows us the world of the characters bereft of diegetic sound, as if sound itself were soul. Powell’s striking remark that Hoffmann is, despite its abundance of music, essentially silent film is nowhere more true than in the film’s Giulietta sequence. This is one of the moments in Hoffmann least like the experience of a live opera performance, and yet for all that it may be one of the moments that most fully captures the affect – one might be wary of saying ‘psychology’ here – of Offenbach’s musical-dramatic situation. These five minutes are in themselves a visual essay on the relation of opera to film. Image and acoustic are more than independent – it’s as if the camera has been torn away from the soundtrack and the film work cracked apart. Viewers who know the Offenbach score will already have been startled by Powell’s reimagining of the iconic Barcarolle at the beginning of the Giulietta sequence. But this film is constantly

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surprising the viewer in its inventive turns. (Powell would return to operatic subjects twice more in his long film-making career.) It might, however, be more useful to think of the surprises in Hoffmann not as attempts to undo the expectations of an operaphile but instead to watch a master film-maker think through problems without prejudice. Powell had the safety net of Beecham’s musicality and Heckroth’s extensive stage experience with the work, but the solutions and decisions we see on screen are of interest precisely because they are not reinventions. Unlike so many present-day opera directors, Powell isn’t taking a revisionist stand on traditional readings of a work. Instead these are inventions – we’re watching a film-maker think about opera, moment by moment, as if it were new. And it was, because it was new to him. The Tale of Antonia The silent-movie denouement of the Giulietta scene leaves Hoffmann alone, curiously undamaged, unconcerned by his new status as murderer. He has one more story to tell. The Antonia episode – dead girl singing – begins as the last and the quietest of Hoffmann’s three tales. Powell’s films are good at getting quiet moments to speak to us, but in those other on-screen moments we’ve been located in the British countryside or in a small back room. Antonia’s tale begins in a small – but completely artificial – space that looks as if it should be a miniature decoration on top of a cake. The artifice somehow seems more artificial here than earlier, partly because of the subdued tonalities of the music and the visuals, and because of the necessarily realistic (meaning not cinematically professional) performance by the American soprano Ann Ayars, who is seen both acting and singing the role of Antonia. A decade earlier, planning Colonel Blimp during wartime, the Archers composed a ‘manifesto’ to guide their film-making practice. One of its principles was, bluntly, ‘No artist believes in escapism.’ Placing the viewer in the thick of Hoffmann’s fantastic tales, the Archers leave us no choice but to take them at their word.

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The Antonia world, like the rest of Hoffmann, is a vision of experience, not an escape from reality. Like opera, the Archers’ Hoffmann insists on the seriousness of its own rhetoric and decisions – you can like them or not, but you have to take them as choices made to achieve intended consequences and effects. Heckroth’s design, all airy Aegean blue, is nowhere prepared for in the opera’s libretto. We see a small playing space in a Greek tempietto open on all sides to the sea beyond; and for now it’s the one specifically confined arena in the film. It was Heckroth’s idea to isolate Antonia on what appears to be a Greek island. It’s a strange choice, but it offers immediate visual release from the heavy reds and flickering nocturnal magic of Giulietta’s Venice. Antonia’s story is instead played out in bright Aegean sunshine. But islands are places of the dead, too. San Michele is the burial island in the Venetian lagoon, an idea that might have crossed Heckroth’s mind as he designed a painted background of a Böcklinlike island of the dead. Against the backdrop, Nicklaus rows Hoffmann towards the island, as fans blow the young man’s cloak, animating a static set-up and heightening its feeling of unreality. After the baroquerie of the Giulietta episode, the Antonia plot is quite straightforward. Antonia, the daughter of a famous opera singer now dead, is herself a singer, but Antonia’s frail health prevents her from ever singing again. She is tended by her father Crespel, ‘a great conductor living on his memories’, as we learn from a title card that introduces the sequence. The prohibition against singing is the operatic equivalent of a film in which a character is told at the beginning never to open a certain door, so that all we can do is wait until the door is opened. That is, in fact, the situation in Powell’s last opera project, Herzog Blaubarts Burg (1963). In the opera, a portrait of Antonia’s beloved dead mother hangs on the wall. Powell and Heckroth transform the portrait into a Greek statue, as if the mother were herself an enchanted object. The move to a three-dimensional figure augments Hoffmann’s fantastical reverie with yet another physical substitute for a live woman. Just as

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Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the Dead; Nicklaus and Hoffmann approach Antonia’s island

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Olympia is a doll and the courtesan Giulietta is halfway to being the devil’s dam, Antonia is suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead. Antonia’s mother is a pillar of marble. Antonia’s widowed father tends his ailing child and protects her from the world. Dead mother, depressed father, sick daughter: the island refuge is part mausoleum, part psychiatric ward, part medical asylum. Into this sanctuary comes Dr Miracle (Helpmann), the opera’s fourth and final avatar of destruction, with a promise to heal the sick girl. The brief plot is as simple as its visualisation is not: Hoffmann loves Antonia, but that love is less powerful than Dr Miracle’s infernal powers of possession. Dr Miracle is an enchanter who gets the statue to lure Antonia into singing again. She does, and it kills her. The Antonia scene begins very slowly, much more slowly in fact than the other two tales. For many listeners, this deliberate musical development is of a piece with the more cohesive, more musically mature architecture of the Antonia episode. The music of this act is less flashy than the Doll Song, less of an earworm than Giulietta’s Barcarolle. But for some opera fans, it’s the Antonia act that gets Offenbach’s richest music. At the time of Hoffmann’s release, the beginning of the Antonia scene was cut, so that the viewer was plunged into the rising action. But once repositioned in the film, as it is in the most recent restoration, these deleted minutes ground the development of both character and situation. For the Antonia story, Powell took a significant risk. Only here do two singing principals – Rounseville and the soprano Ayars – perform together on screen. That might seem a plus, but neither singer is an actor or a dancer on the level of the film’s non-singing performers. We give up the fluidity of dancerly bodies in favour of singers who deliver the music directly to us, but whose effectiveness is somewhat compromised by what is often a generalised approach to acting. Powell has tamped down the gestural energies we might expect to see on screen from experienced opera singers, with the result that their filmic performances avoid oversized articulation,

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though perhaps to a fault. More to the point in the Antonia sequence, Ayars doesn’t look as if she is, as the title card has told us, a ‘young singer fatally ill with consumption’. We’ve watched Rounseville’s Hoffmann throughout the film, in almost all of which the tenor’s presence has been counterbalanced by vivid or beautiful danceractors. Here he’s alone with another singer, and the results, especially after the Giulietta sequence, seem oddly plain – at least until Hoffmann leaves the scene and Helpmann’s Dr Miracle arrives to enflame the proceedings. The Antonia episode also begins with a sense of physical restraint, with the camera delimiting further some of the film’s most recognisably contained space. The first establishing shot reveals crumbling steps leading to columns and draperies and, in the middle distance with her back to us, Antonia accompanying herself at the piano. The tempietto is a memorial space, with statues, musical objects reverently placed, and a chest which, as we will learn, Antonia, enclosed in protective space

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contains her late mother’s effects. In the background, Crespel consoles himself with his violin. The comic role of the servant Franz is pared back for the film (omitted is the little aria in which he practises singing), and while Massine is given some small stage business here, he remains underemployed in this sequence. Antonia opens the chest and picks out a painted miniature of her mother à l’antique, standing in the same posture as the statue in the room. We understand it to be one of the mother’s great roles – it could be something like Gluck’s Alceste, another story about bringing the dead back to life. The power of her mother’s performance, persisting in Antonia’s memory, becomes the means by which Dr Miracle will bring about her death. Hoffmann arrives at the island and surprises Antonia; they sing a romantic duet (the score at the piano is titled ‘Heart of Mine’), and the couple exit the scene. The stage is cleared for Helpmann’s entrance as a terrifying Dr Miracle. In his wig and make-up,

Franz reacts to the arrival of Dr Miracle

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Helpmann’s Dr Miracle

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Helpmann makes a convincing death’s head. Alone with Crespel, Dr Miracle says that he can cure Antonia of her illness. Helpmann’s mime training as a dancer is brilliantly on display here, as Dr Miracle appears to summon an invisible form. Curtains flutter, and he extends his hand to an unseen figure. It’s not even a camera trick – it’s pure staginess – but it works. Crespel watches in consternation, while Nicklaus and Franz peek out from behind curtains to frame the scene. Again and again, the camera looks for Antonia in the empty space on the divan where Dr Miracle insists she is lying. Miracle’s hands enter the frame on the right to clasp the hand of a patient we cannot see. Hoffmann himself watches from a corner as Dr Miracle gestures commandingly towards the empty divan. Meanwhile, the camera cuts away to another dreamy space, revealing the real Antonia, who stirs in restless sleep. The Antonia episode plays out in the spatial extremes, moving from the most confined space in the film to increasingly vast arenas. The camera moves out of the tempietto into the room where Antonia sleeps, a space like a ballroom, empty except for her curtained daybed at the rear. Menace takes on a new dimension here. The great empty playing area feels oppressive, and in another moment we see why, as even the logic of narrative succumbs to Antonia’s terror. Antonia enters the scene through a door on the left of the frame, crosses the set to flee Miracle and exits through a door on the right of the frame. Immediately, she re-enters on the left of the frame – her operatic No Exit is a moment of pure filmic nightmare. Dr Miracle continues with his back to us, bent over the daybed, ministering to an invisible patient. Again Antonia tries to exit, but the doors are now locked to her. Ayars does well here, moving rapidly and dramatically through the playing space, before turning in despair in the camera’s direction – and leaps. Whatever claims to a rational spatial logic may have governed the earliest moments of the Antonia tale, the viewer is now deep inside Antonia’s distressed psyche. Antonia plunges in slow motion headlong towards us, moving into a non-space, and the scene is transformed again, this time into

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Dr Miracle treats the unseen patient before the marginalised onlookers; doctor and patient, hand in hand

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something between sacrificial altar and conductor’s stand. Dr Miracle, hands outstretched, stands with his back to the camera before Antonia’s bed, now the only space left on this psychically damaged island. The camera cuts again, moving the viewer from psychic spacetime back to real space-time as we discover Antonia, now lying face down on the floor of her own room. Dr Miracle’s spell has been broken, at least for the moment. Hoffmann enters, and with his help Antonia is recalled to consciousness. But when he has calmed her and again exits, Antonia is once more alone in the tempietto as Dr Miracle appears in a hooded cloak to initiate his final temptation. All three of Hoffmann’s stories are about lost souls. Antonia sings, ‘Who can save my own soul from the fiend? From myself? My mother?’ Dr Miracle overhears and dares Antonia to invoke her mother who, he says, speaks through her. The act’s climactic trio is one of the best numbers in Offenbach’s score. Antonia’s salto mortale

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Against the solidity of its musical construction, Powell counterposes a visually fragmented sequence of images. Dr Miracle takes up the violin we hear in the orchestra, using it to drive Antonia onward. As the music moves remorselessly forward over the bass figure in Dr Miracle’s vocal part, the voices of Antonia and her unseen mother sing their final lines. On the visual plane, space is pulled apart, and the theatrical coordinates collapse in on themselves. At one moment we’re in Antonia’s tempietto, at another we’re in some gilded theatrical arena, in which Antonia searches beyond the pulsating light of her mother’s figure. Under Dr Miracle’s spell, the mother herself now appears in living form, and the three figures – daughter, dead mother, and Death – brought tightly together, are framed in a nimbus of light. The Antonia sequence begins deceptively in a small, airy playing space, but it’s the almost pastoral simplicity of that opening that gives Powell such latitude to expand cinematically on the depths of Antonia’s fear. On stage, the episode is necessarily confined to what live singers can do and what stagecraft can be mustered by an imaginative director, but The Tales of Hoffmann makes the most of its filmic technology. We cut again: now the women are moving towards the right of the frame behind a screen of trees. The mother fades, reappears; Antonia begins to whirl, her arms uplifted, as the frame is engulfed in flames.20 In visual terms, Antonia’s end is an immolation scene – a moment of ecstatic self-destruction – that works through the ultimate terror and thrill of performance. Her rapture is a performer’s rapture, and whatever she thinks is happening, Antonia is not being burned alive. Dr Miracle appears on stage, and the flames are now nothing more than footlights. Cut from Dr Miracle, his hands uplifted, to Antonia, spinning deliriously in the middle distance while between her and the viewer a sea of hands enters the frame from below. They’re not applauding, but waving back and forth, as Antonia lifts her hands in exultation. Antonia is in an ecstatic state, morbid and transcendent, as she imagines herself receiving the accolades – those

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Antonia and her mother in a ring of fire

Antonia’s Liebestod

And the flames become hands

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waving hands – that are also tongues of fire. This is a nightmare, a fantasy; it’s the image Dr Miracle has conjured so that Antonia can destroy herself, and Hoffmann can be robbed of one more love interest. Turning in place like a figure on a music box, Antonia looks for a moment like a cousin of the dolls in the Olympia act. Once again the camera moves us from psychic space-time to the space-time of the clinical present. Now Antonia, standing in the tempietto before Dr Miracle, is singing full out. Crespel, no longer in his right mind, is brandishing a baton, conducting the music that will kill his daughter. Crespel extends his baton towards her at the climax of the musical line – it’s a dare, a command, a father’s helpless participation in his daughter’s final gesture. The musical line rises, and Crespel conducts Antonia’s climactic phrase. She collapses, and her father takes a bow at the moment she dies in Dr Miracle’s arms. As in Offenbach’s opera, Hoffmann – always helpless, as one finds oneself in anxious dream narratives – steps into the frame only at the last possible moment, adding a sung exclamation to fill out the musical passage’s final chord. Hoffmann looks on in horror at the scene of death. Nicklaus observes him silently, and the act ends. Unmasking Les Contes d’Hoffmann is a work with a problematic shape, which the Archers simplify, but through a set of complex visuals. The film’s finale ties the episodes together as dance events: for the poet, Olympia, Giulietta, Antonia, and Stella are different aspects of Woman; for the viewer, they are manifestations of Hoffmann’s inability to escape from a self-defeating melancholy. Unlike Hoffmann himself, the viewer is explicitly grounded in the continuity of Helpmann’s malevolent villains – Lindorf, Coppelius, Dapertutto, and Dr Miracle are the poet’s constant companion, the dark force to Nicklaus’s patient witnessing. At the end of the film, then, the narrative problems of the Hoffmann story are dissolved back into ballet, as if the three tales

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had been temporary crystallisations out of a cinematic and musical flux. We end with an extended sequence set to the Barcarolle. Four images of a couple dancing against a black background merge, followed by a cut to a single couple dancing amid four time-worn obelisks on a painted perspective set. One of the striking things about Hoffmann’s tale – both its operatic and film versions – is that the poet learns nothing from experience to experience. Hoffmann is not only passive; he suffers from emotional amnesia. In some productions of the opera, Nicklaus returns as the Muse of Poetry, and Hoffmann has an unspoken vision of his calling as a writer. A still survives showing a gilded Pamela Brown, looking less like a muse than a monument – or one of Goldfinger’s victims. It’s evidence that at some point Powell had considered the extended narrative gesture that would have paired Hoffmann off with Poetic Inspiration, an idea that would at least resolve the question of heartbreak: Four visions of the romantic ideal, danced in a single frame

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Nicklaus as the Muse. The image does not appear in the film

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the poet realises that his calling is the most important thing in his life. But that would be to make a happy story out of an ironic one. We can’t know what Offenbach would have wanted from his own final cut, but the Archers’ Hoffmann makes a good case for their vision of the poet. He’s present and observing, but even when he’s caught up in a complicated plot – magic glasses in the Olympia story, losing and regaining his soul in the Giulietta episode – it’s as if he’s dreaming his way through a retelling of his own misfortune. He learns nothing from the Olympia affair that would warn him away from the seductive courtesan in the Venice story, and neither disappointment protects him from his involvement with the doomed Antonia. The frail singer is, of course, neither a machine nor a siren, and as much a victim as Hoffmann himself will be. But the poet moves through his encounters as if each time is the first time. It’s the way episodes – and not fully developed plots – present themselves in dreams. Critical responses to Les Contes d’Hoffmann and to the Archers’ Hoffmann neglect to point out the very different narrative strategies of the three tales. We know from the framing narrative in Luther’s Cellar that in each tale Hoffmann will be disappointed. In the Olympia tale, however, the plot’s ‘surprise’ can only be Hoffmann’s, as the audience soon learns that the charming young woman is an automaton. Stagings of the opera have latitude to postpone the audience’s recognition, at least for a little while, but the Archers’ Hoffmann emphasises the strangeness of the Olympia world, reinforcing the doll-like character of Shearer’s dancing by surrounding her with marionette party guests who morph into lifesize grotesques. The Giulietta sequence is lush and erotic, but its plot is much harder to follow. Even sung in English and viewed with subtitles, the story moves rapidly to the duel and the recovery of Hoffmann’s shadow. The rapidity is there in Offenbach’s score, but the Archers’ transfer to the screen revels in effects rather than

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straightforward storytelling. At the beginning of the tale, we have no idea what will happen to Hoffmann, and at the end we may not know exactly what has occurred, except to note that he has escaped the wiles of a Dapertutto and Giulietta, who will live on to destroy again. The Tale of Antonia offers the simplest narrative form of the three: Antonia must not sing or she will die, and so we watch to see how her singing will come about and whether she will, in fact, die. After an initial duet, Hoffmann himself is practically incidental to the episode. The narrative dissimilarities in Hoffmann’s three tales stand in for female difference, as if by narrativising these ‘strange’ (because different from one another and yet identical in their outcomes) experiences, Hoffmann could justify the incomprehensible difficulty of women. As if to emphasise Hoffmann’s dilemma, both opera and film de-emphasise the poet’s agency from tale to tale. In the Olympia sequence, Hoffmann arrives self-assured, a romantic dandy eager to be given access to the secret of female sexuality by means of the magic glasses. As the glasses seem to permit him to see what Olympia is, the trope of the specular becomes the spectacular: Hoffmann sees what he thinks is the real thing. The magic spectacles work, in effect, as weakening lenses, just as underpowered glasses make the image go fuzzy. Hoffmann sees a delightful creature moving nimbly through Coppelius’s drawing room, while the camera’s 20/20 vision shares with the viewer the hidden sutures that hold the Olympia doll together. In the Giulietta sequence, Hoffmann seems to have abandoned control of his romantic intentions, and is instead forcefully subjugated by the seductive courtesan and lured into a pointless duel. In the Antonia sequence, the poet is almost erased from the story, in which this final beloved is paired up with her true life-and-death partner, Dr Miracle. The scene’s climactic trio – with Dr Miracle, Antonia, and the ventriloquised statue of Antonia’s mother raising

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their voices upward as if climbing a tower – ends with Antonia’s collapse and death, but it’s only in the final bars of the episode that Hoffmann and Nicklaus arrive. The tales have ended. With the dead Antonia on his left arm, Helpmann takes centre stage in a semicircle of light against a dark field. With his right hand, he pulls up the mask of Dr Miracle’s face to reveal Councillor Lindorf. Cut to Dapertutto with Giulietta on his arm. Again, Helpmann’s right hand lifts off the face of the Italian villain. And again, a cut to Helpmann as Coppelius with a (reconstituted but inert) Shearer on his arm; again his hand pulls up the mask. Now Lindorf – whoever he may really be – stares implacably at us.21 Hoffmann’s four loves are patched out against a black field. They separate, they merge, and the composite woman dances a final pas de deux with her cavalier before they depart through that surrealist landscape of obelisks towards a painted sunset. A theatrical curtain descends. On it we see a random scattering of flowers. The arrangement, however, morphs into a crane shot of Hoffmann and his companions. We’re back to Luther’s Cellar, where we had left the poet and his audience, now sitting in reflective poses. Cut to a close-up of Rounseville’s sweaty, exhausted face. He’s at the end of his strength. In a final gesture, Hoffmann speaks the names of his three loves: ‘Olympia … Giulietta … Antonia …’ Meanwhile, Lindorf has entered the tavern holding Stella’s handkerchief. Again the camera shows us the message ‘I love thee Hoffmann’, but now Lindorf shows us the other side, where in red Stella has written ‘after the performance at Luther’s tavern’. This is the moment Hoffmann should be waiting for, but retelling his tales has pushed him into melancholic solitude. Stella enters and looks with profound disappointment towards Hoffmann. The poet has collapsed unconscious on the table before him. In opera performance, Stella and Nicklaus may exchange spoken words here – ‘Is he asleep?’ ‘Dead drunk,

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Madame,’ comes the reply. The film dispenses with the unnecessary exchange: everything that needs to be said is there in Shearer’s close-up. Lindorf extends his arm, and Stella departs with him, ascending the stairs as Offenbach’s score dances itself up and away from view. The real ending of the film, however, isn’t our last admiring glance at Shearer, but the pull-back to a low-angle shot of Sir Thomas Beecham, presiding over the musical event we have just witnessed. The opera is ending, and we’re left with a view of the conductor. Hoffmann is, among other things, about fantasies of control. Or is it fantasies of independence? Do people make choices, or are they controlled by Fate as if they were puppets? As commander of the orchestra’s forces, Beecham presides over the whole work. But when we see him at the end of the film, he’s not winking at the audience. His work is done, and he’s proud of it. In one of the great closing moments of a British film, we see the conductor’s hand close the opera’s score. On it a hand comes firmly Stella’s last look

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Beecham at the podium before the unseen orchestra

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down to stamp, in bold letters, the words ‘Made in England’. When asked about it years later, Powell politely deflected interpretation. ‘I wasn’t meaning anything particular by it,’ he said; ‘it was just a piece of cheek.’22 But Scorsese has called it the best final credit shot in film; it’s certainly one of the wittiest.

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3 Film and Opera after Hoffmann Hoffmann was Powell’s finest achievement in bringing opera to the screen, but beyond it lay two other opera-based projects, spaced almost a decade apart. In the mid-1950s, the Archers turned to a subject that captured the imagination of several leading film-makers of the period: the occupation of postwar Germany and Austria by the Allied Powers. Orson Welles’s The Third Man (1949), Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948) and his return visit to Berlin in One, Two, Three (1961) make strange bedfellows for the Archers’ Oh … Rosalinda!! (1955). Oh … Rosalinda!! is a filmic treatment of the 1874 operetta Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, a frothy confection about a husband with a wandering eye, a costume ball, and the misadventures of a night. The Archers updated Strauss’s Viennese pastry to postwar occupied Austria. Despite the participation of distinguished actors like Michael Redgrave and singers like Walter Berry (off screen) and Annaliese Roethlisberger (on), Oh … Rosalinda!! failed to appeal either to opera audiences or to film fans. Though rarely screened today, the Archers’ Fledermaus film demonstrated yet once more that Powell and Pressburger were risk-takers. This would be the Archers’ third and final ‘theatre’ project together. The Archers’ partnership came to an amicable end in 1957. But Powell’s taste for theatrical projects had not been exhausted. In 1959, he directed in Spain a now obscure feature entitled Luna de miel (released in English under the titles Honeymoon and The Lovers of Teruel). Its plot: on her honeymoon, a former ballerina (Tchérina once again) has a chance encounter with a male dancer, who attempts to lure her back into her former life. Léonide Massine appears briefly as a spirit. In Luna de miel, the themes of the Archers’ two great

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theatre films are present once more. It seems as if, at least for Powell, those irrepressible red shoes keep on dancing; the woman who has renounced art is tempted once again. There was to be one final theatre project in Powell’s filmmaking career, and because it is so little known it’s worth special attention here. Powell’s final musical film project, and his last treatment of opera, emerged at a point when the Archers’ partnership had long been dissolved. Even more remarkably, this last venture into operatic materials took place after the disaster of Peeping Tom, when an unremorseful Michael Powell would seem to have been erased from the rolls of active film-making. For German television, Powell created the now rarely seen Herzog Blaubarts Burg, a film never released in the UK or the US. It’s Powell’s treatment of Bartók’s dense operatic two-hander, A kékszakállú herceg vára, known in English as Bluebeard’s Castle (the opera premiered in 1918). A print of the film in the BFI’s collection is augmented with an English-language title sequence explaining that ‘this is the story of a woman who is curious’ and urging that the viewer not be put off that it’s in German. The print itself isn’t subtitled as much as interrupted by an occasional summary title in English, and the effect is very much like the intertitles of silent cinema. It’s also a reminder of how comfortably Powell interposed cards, books, and titles in his theatrical film projects. Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle has a libretto after Perrault by a name familiar in film circles, the critic and theorist Béla Balázs. (As a librettist, Balázs – born Herbert Bauer – may be better known for his script to another ‘opera film’, Pabst’s 1931 Die Dreigroschenoper.) Another important critic, Siegfried Kracauer, also has an oblique connection to Powell’s opera projects as the author of an early study of Offenbach and his times. Like Bartók’s opera, Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle is a twocharacter work: Judith implores Bluebeard to open a series of locked doors. Reluctantly, he turns over to Judith the keys that open onto his armoury, his treasury, his gardens, his lands. The opera builds to the

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final door, where the series is punctuated by the revelation of Bluebeard’s three earlier wives – the woman he loved in the morning, the woman he loved at noon, the woman he loved in the evening. The doomed Judith is led by the three spectres into the last chamber, from which she will never again emerge. What appeal did Bartók’s morose one-acter, the work of an ambitious thirty-year-old steeped in musical Romanticism’s last flowering, hold for the veteran film-maker? One answer may lie in the opportunity Bluebeard gave Powell to be reunited with Hein Heckroth, whose vision did much to shape both The Red Shoes and Hoffmann years earlier. There are Hoffmannesque touches in Bluebeard, too, like Heckroth’s decision to give the dead wives – entrapped like insects and displayed like mannequins – masks that all resemble the face of the doomed Judith. The other clue may lie in Bartók’s music itself. As each door opens, the composer’s technical mastery of orchestration saturates the moment with an array of colours from the musical palette. In a way, Bartók’s music here provides an auditory equivalent of the hyper-colouristic visual style the Archers had explored in the big theatre films a decade earlier. In Bluebeard’s Castle, a range of unnatural colours and lighting collide in a single shot, to be replaced seconds later by another set-up and a different bouquet of tints and effects; a shot-reaction shot can relocate the viewer with the first speaker, now lit in quite different colours. Colour acts out the intense conflicts within Bluebeard’s psychological castle, fragmenting by means of light a world into which curious Judith can only peer – firmly, courageously, and fatally. Bluebeard’s Judith is a figure from a tragic, but still mysterious, corner of Powell and Heckroth’s colouristic universe, a world as artificial and vivid as Sister Ruth’s Himalayas. Somewhere in another corner of this imaginative space, the red shoes are still dancing. And somewhere else again, the poet Hoffmann drinks and remembers. *

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In the sixty years since Hoffmann, and the fifty since Powell’s last films, modes of exhibition have dramatically shifted the relationship between film and opera. Online broadcasts are increasingly frequent, sending performances out from the world’s most famous opera houses. Cameras and photographers have become more adept at producing a visually engaging, and visually usable, replication of the live event. Yet however ambitious, these transmissions remain fundamentally extensions of the theatrical original, designed to put viewers into theatre seats and outfit them with binoculars. Few digital broadcasts or DVD releases, while providing cinematic records, could make convincing claims to being cinema. The opera film, on the other hand, remains something different. It takes shape under two assumptions: that cinema can release opera’s story and pleasures from the confines of the opera house, and that the film studio system understands better than the impresario or intendant what’s needed to make that happen. A case could be made that, at least in theory, the purest opera films would be those from the silent era, where the story is visualised in cinematic means without anchoring film acting to the vocal acting on a synchronised soundtrack. A silent film like DeMille’s Carmen (1915) offers the unusual case of a bona fide opera star, here Geraldine Farrar, ably performing her role on screen without access to her own singing voice. Chaplin would satirise the film in his Burlesque on Carmen (1916), in which he played the role of Darn Hosiery (Don José) to Edna Purviance’s gypsy. Chaplin recreates DeMille’s film, down to the final murderous encounter. It’s genuinely dramatic. So much so that after killing his Carmen, Chaplin and Purviance get up to show the audience that they were using a trick knife. Even in burlesque, opera is powerful stuff. But without the sonic complement of real operatic voices and a full orchestra, silent film’s romance with the musical form is reduced to treating operas as stories or to turning celebrated singers into self-conscious semiactors. The bathetic comedy My Cousin (José, 1918) featured Enrico

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Caruso, the greatest living opera star, playing identical cousins, one of whom happens to be an opera star (this is a half-century before Patty Duke’s dual roles for an American television series). Caruso’s performance is almost a triple role, as the plot turns on a bust depicting his familiar head. Silent cinema made Farrar and Caruso the first popular crossover artists, but their success didn’t open the doors to legions of non-singing opera stars on screen. The technical limitations of early cinema kept film from recording opera, much less interpreting and transforming it for cinematic purposes. When an opera finally went before the camera, the outcome was strictly archival. Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci by Fortune Gallo’s San Carlo Opera Company was filmed in 1931 for theatrical release, but the camera didn’t move. (Gallo’s opera troupe is now largely forgotten, though the opera house built to be its New York home would later achieve celebrity as Studio 54 and is still an actively used theatre.) The exhibition of Gallo’s Pagliacci, however, failed to ignite the public’s appetite, and the experiment of exhibiting an archival record of opera ended almost before it began. Later in the 1930s, Abel Gance, a director who produced the monumental fragment Napoleon (1927) and envisioned other gigantic film projects, took up an adaptation of Gustave Charpentier’s 1900 opera Louise, a romantic story of love in working-class Paris. Made in 1939, Gance’s Louise starred real singers, the American soprano Grace Moore and the French tenor Georges Thill. More typical of opera’s screen presence during the 1930s and 40s, however, is the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935), with its relentless send-up of opera’s linguistic foreignness, its theatrical conventions, and its class appeal. The casting of Margaret Dumont as Mrs Claypool, a wealthy opera lover and backer, gave the screen an indelible impression of opera’s fans as monied, gullible, possibly charming, and definitely eccentric. A Night at the Opera incorporates short excerpts from Il Trovatore (performed by Kitty Carlisle and Alan

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Jones as not very star-crossed lovers), and in doing so reinforced the idea of opera as a powerful cultural form from which cinematic quotations might be drawn. Within cinema, opera quickly became a luxurious point of reference. Plots and characters would refer to opera, or listen to opera, or talk about opera, but those references and conversations would often be about some sort of ache, some sort of loss. To cite one example, the Hedy Lamarr vehicle Lady of the Tropics (1939) tells the story of a ‘half-caste’ named Manon who is torn between a wealthy protector and the man she really loves. It’s a version of Abbé Prévost’s Manon plot, which became the basis for the operas by Massenet and Puccini that are still in the repertory. Without telegraphing the relevance of the scene, the film places this Manon and her wealthy keeper in an opera box. Coincidentally, on stage Puccini’s Manon meets her beloved once again in their powerful Act II scene (‘Tu? Tu? Amore, tu?’), a moment in the opera when the flighty heroine determines to choose love over wealth. As she watches the stage, Lamarr’s Manon resolves, like her operatic namesake, to leave the luxury she has enjoyed as a kept woman. All Manon stories, however, end badly. Coppola’s Godfather III (1990) uses opera for quotational counterpoint, juxtaposing a scene from Mascagni’s popular Cavalleria rusticana – the Easter morning hymn, complete with a Calvary procession by the faithful – cross-cut with an execution-style murder. In Otto Preminger’s Canadian Western River of No Return (1954), Marilyn Monroe takes a moment to explain to young Tommy Rettig (of Lassie television fame) that opera is when they sing ‘all high-toned and fancy’. All high-toned and fancy is the way people have thought about opera, in the movies and out, for most of the past hundred years. Beyond the parodic and the quotational, beyond the star vehicle and the truncated film adaptation, opera persisted as a subject of interest for the camera. The Tales of Hoffmann is the first of that clutch of films and early television projects that attempts to

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reconfigure this complex musical-theatrical event in cinematic terms. In the years around Hoffmann, opera found new paths to both the big and small screens. On Christmas Eve 1951, NBC broadcast Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. The first opera expressly composed for American television, Amahl is a chamber work, appropriately scaled for the camera and for the small-screen televisions of the early 1950s. A more ambitious attempt to capture opera for the television monitor was NBC’s 1952 production of Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera Billy Budd. Adapted by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier from Melville’s story of an innocent sailor and his fate, the television production required that Britten’s opera, originally conceived in four acts, be trimmed to what the producers hoped was a length suitable for the television viewer.23 Billy Budd has emerged as one of the most durable operas written in English. Not all of the early 1950s opera film projects were as successful. Among the oddities is the 1953 Aida directed by Clemente Fracassi, in which the young Sophia Loren, bronzed up to resemble an Ethiopian princess, acts to a soundtrack featuring the great Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi. The film makes a hash of Verdi’s opera and, like Gance’s version of Louise, cuts the score heavily. These early efforts to bring opera to screen were attuned to the attention span of filmgoers, not operagoers, and the result carved out of a two- or three-hour opera score a work that, in the case of Aida, feels like opera suffering memory loss. The year 1953 also witnessed a filmic experiment in operatic cultural translation. Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones reimagined Bizet’s characters as black and American. Dorothy Dandridge acted the role of Bizet’s gypsy (opposite Harry Belafonte), while the American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne sang the role of Carmen on the soundtrack. Carmen Jones was not a direct cinematic reinvention of Bizet’s classic opera; Preminger’s film was more properly a cinematic adaptation of the 1943 stage musical Carmen Jones, in which a black American GI meets a woman he can’t resist. (As a side note, the musical Carmen Jones was successfully revived in London

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in 1992, winning Olivier awards for Best New Musical and Best Actress in a Musical. That Carmen was Wilhelmenia Fernandez, better known to film viewers as the elusive opera star at the centre of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film Diva.) Other opera stars would go before the film camera during the sound era, but few made memorable cinematic appearances. Maria Callas, who remains the consummate diva of the recorded sound era, never sang in a commercial film project. Callas left only fragmentary traces of her stage performances (primarily concert footage and a capture of the second act of Tosca, directed by her mentor Luchino Visconti, from a single live performance at Covent Garden). Many regret that Visconti never directed Callas for the screen. When Callas did finally appear before the camera in Pasolini’s Medea (1969), it was as a speaking actor. Viewers familiar with the soprano’s career would recognise that a different Medea (the title role in Cherubini’s 1797 opera) had been one of Callas’s great operatic triumphs at its 1953 revival at La Scala. Opera would inveigle itself into the work of other, later directors. Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) saw the debut of a young Catherine Deneuve in a film in which everything was sung to Michel Legrand’s music. This was opera without the operatics, a popular composer writing simple tunes as if to rid opera of its overdetermined difficulty and musical seriousness. As a philosophical and aesthetic project, the film demonstrated that the mimetic act of singing one’s on-screen feelings and thoughts sustained a second-degree removal from real life. Even Jean Renoir tried his hand at this theatricalised double-distancing in the episode ‘La Cireuse électrique’, a ‘mini-opera’ within his Petit théatre de Jean Renoir (1970). With music by Joseph Kosma, Renoir’s little film opera concerns a housewife disturbingly attached to her electric floor waxer. The film of a real opera was an entirely different exercise in film-making. By comparison with the Archers’ Hoffmann or even

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Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten) is highly restrained. Shot for Swedish television in 1975, Bergman’s project essentially films a performance at Stockholm’s eighteenth-century Drottningholm Theatre. The film retains its charm four decades on, though one of its most notable features remains its touch of Bergmanesque psychology: Sarastro and the Queen of the Night become the bitterly divorced parents of Pamina, an explanation that fills a gap in the libretto that Schikaneder provided Mozart. It may be only a coincidence that the climactic sequences of both The Tales of Hoffmann and Bergman’s Magic Flute show us key characters set before a sea of waving hands standing in for flames – Antonia at the moment of her ecstatic, delusional breakdown, and Tamino and Pamina as they pass through Mozart’s trials of fire and water. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982), released at the beginning of Wagner’s centenary year, attempted to make the composer’s final opera speak the truth of German history. Parsifal is an exhausting opera, and at 255 minutes Syberberg’s Parsifal is an exhausting film, deploying mysterious visual effects and puzzling conceptions of gender (Parsifal is sometimes a young man, sometimes a young woman). Like Hoffmann, Parsifal is dubbed and doubled, with actors synched to operatic voices on the audio track. Beginning in the 1980s, opera began to find new technological paths to larger audiences. The advent of supertitles, full-length opera telecasts such as ‘Live from Lincoln Center’, and the rise of CD and DVD culture expanded access to all forms of theatre and music, including opera. Zeffirelli’s opera films – primarily of Verdi operas – wooed audiences with their richly appointed romantic-realist designs and international vocal casting, capturing for the screen performances by Teresa Stratas, Placído Domingo, and other stars. With their emphatic reproduction of heavyweight operatic luxury, Zeffirelli’s projects seem light years away from the cinematic world of Hoffmann.

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Whether it was ahead of its time or simply too extravagant for the early 1950s, Hoffmann’s early critics were divided. Ian Christie points out that Raymond Durgnat thought the film a ‘bad taste classic’.24 André Bazin praised the film. Towards the end of his life, Powell himself remarked that Hoffmann was one of the best things he and Pressburger had done. It’s something of a connoisseur’s film, which might suggest that it’s only for the cognoscenti, but the film wasn’t made for specialists. Hoffmann is a film that directors have paid particular attention to – George Romero, Derek Jarman, and Martin Scorsese among them. Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro (2009), a drama about the fragility of identity and of the human body, incorporates footage from The Tales of Hoffmann, and even goes so far as to restage a moment of the Olympia/Coppélia sequence. In an interview about Tetro, Coppola spoke of his brother bringing him to see The Tales of Hoffmann when he was a child. ‘He told me Coppélia is really Coppola and there are themes in even the Coppapélia story that resonate in our family.’25 The most recent film to draw energy from Offenbach’s opera is Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011), which interpolates The Tales of Hoffmann restaged in Coppola’s Tetro

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the Barcarolle, here gorgeously voiced by Renée Fleming and Susan Graham. *

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The automaton and the camera, two mechanical devices invented to delight and deceive, continue to exercise their uncanny power. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach, Powell and Pressburger: from German fiction to ‘opera as film’, the course of Hoffmann’s self-deluding fantasies is the stuff of our dreams. Opera is a form that balances an idea of continuity – of musical line, of vocal production – with the discontinuity of its narratives. Film has its own balancing act. As Dudley Andrew has remarked, while the medium may promise immediacy (and, by implication, a digestible continuity), ‘cinema quickly became – and, at its most interesting, still remains – an object of gaps and absences’.26 Perhaps this aesthetic family resemblance tells us something about how these two forms might be brought into a productive relationship.

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However we explain it – and the only explanation that counts is in our response to the film on screen – The Tales of Hoffmann sits, or maybe floats, somewhere between film and opera. It’s a formal experiment: a full opera brought to the screen, but only on the screen’s own terms. Just as they had built the Himalayas in a studio and created a Scottish whirlpool with gelatin, the Archers here treated opera as a world to be reinterpreted, to be remade in cinema’s likeness. The resulting film clearly isn’t a record of the opera, and it’s also not quite an adaptation. It’s an odd balance between opera and cinema, in which a musical score is uncoupled from performance only to be re-enchanted through colour, editing, and the dancing body. Like screen silence, dance and singing point to ways of narrative and emotive communication not dependent on hearing the speaking voice. The Tales of Hoffmann, with all its pleasures and puzzles, is finally one of the most remarkable silent films of the sound era.

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Technical Details Hoffmann was shot in Technicolor in seventeen days (1–16 July 1950) at Shepperton Studios. Filming took place on an enormous, uninsulated stage suitable for silent but not sound filming.27 Before shooting could commence, however, the film’s soundtrack had to be entirely recorded. Beecham led the Royal Philharmonic. Hoffmann was then shot to playback, so the unsuitability of the stage for sound recording did not inhibit production. The film’s length was the subject of some debate, and it was rumoured that savage excisions were planned before release. Korda, the impatient producer, nipped some minutes from the prologue’s backstage action. A longer passage, later replaced, was excised from the beginning of the Antonia episode, one of the opera’s quietest passages, but central to the carefully modulated crescendo of danger and feeling that animates that tale. The Criterion release clocks in at 127 minutes. In anticipation of the film’s British debut, the publication Picturegoer described the Archers’ new film as ‘vast, earnest, and rather self-conscious in its own cleverness’ and went on to wonder aloud, ‘Is “Hoffmann” entertainment as millions today understand that word?’28 The Archers gambled that audiences would be entertained by their double translation – out of French and into English and then again out of opera-ese and into the language of cinema. The Tales of Hoffmann was entered in competition at Cannes in 1951. It didn’t win the Grand Prize, but the film received a double acknowledgment, along with a nicely confusing attribution. With Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, a Special Jury Prize was awarded to ‘The Tales of Hoffmann, directed by Michael Powell’. The Cannes award Un Certain Regard was also given to two films:

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La balandra Isabel llegó esta tarde, acknowledging the work of Luis-María Beltrán, and ‘The Tales of Hoffmann, directed by Emeric Pressburger’. There were other acknowledgments of Hoffmann’s achievements, including two Oscar nominations in 1952 for Hein Heckroth (Best Art Direction-Set Direction, Colour, and Best Costume Design, Colour). The film also won the Silver Bear at the 1951 Berlin Film Festival.29 By 1987, film-making had changed in many ways. That year, Cannes screened a group out of competition, several of which were, in one way or another, ‘opera films’ – films of operas, a silent film, non-musical sound films based on operas, and films whose plots concerned historical or fictional people from the world of opera. The earliest of the group, L’Herbier’s silent melodrama L’Inhumaine (1924), starred and was partially financed by the opera singer Georgette Leblanc, playing a diva caught in a romantic triangle with a scientist and a maharajah. Remembered for its design and visuals, L’Inhumaine is a silent opera in all but name. Among the other entries were Pabst’s Don Quichotte (1933), starring Fyodor Chaliapin; Gance’s Louise; Fracassi’s Aida; Zeffirelli’s Pagliacci (1982), starring Placído Domingo and Teresa Stratas; and d’Anna’s Macbeth (1984), starring Leo Nucci and Shirley Verrett. Except for Leblanc, whose film is silent, and Loren, who is dubbed by Tebaldi, these principals all do their own singing.

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Notes 1 Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (London: Faber and Faber, 2000; orig. 1986), p. 168. 2 There are, of course, operatic genres that interrupt sung numbers with spoken dialogue: e.g. the German Singspiel form whose best examples are Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Beethoven’s Fidelio, or the French opéra comique form, of which the best-known example is Bizet’s Carmen. While the Singspiels continue to be performed with spoken dialogue, opéras comiques – including Les Contes d’Hoffmann as we imagine Offenbach intended – are usually performed with sung recitative replacing spoken text. 3 For more on Blimp, see A. L. Kennedy’s BFI Film Classics volume (1997). 4 For more on I Know Where I’m Going!, see Pam Cook’s BFI Film Classics volume (2002). 5 On A Matter of Life and Death, see Ian Christie’s BFI Film Classics volume (2000). 6 David Lazar (ed.), Michael Powell: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), p. 38. Originally published in Midi-minuit fantastique, no. 20 (October 1968), pp. 2–13, translated by Gina Honigford. 7 Interview with Olivier Assayas in 1981, in Lazar, Michael Powell: Interviews, p. 77. 8 Sir Thomas Beecham, A Mingled Chime (London: Hutchinson, 1943), p. 174. Although they are quite different works, Beecham links Hoffmann with Die Fledermaus as ‘tuneful lightweights’. Interestingly, Powell would turn to both as material appropriate for the camera.

9 In Arrigo Boito’s best-known opera, Mefistofele, the demon-protagonist identifies himself, following Goethe, as ‘lo spirito che nega’ – the spirit that denies. 10 Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 9, 77, 173. 11 This summary of early Hoffmann films is indebted to the Encyclopedia of Opera on Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), compiled by Ken Wlaschin. 12 Heckroth’s designs for the film’s opening shots could be the setting for a treatment of Faust, a story that in each of its versions concerns a man’s longing for an ideal. The Tales of Hoffmann recalls – if in a reduced, even absurd form – the idea of ‘the search’ through uncanny means for an ideal. 13 Scorsese calls it ‘one of the best cuts’. 14 Scorsese has remarked that in the Archers’ films, the viewer never knows where the next cut or shot will be. The point is borne out repeatedly in Hoffmann – master shots, high angles, faces in startling close-up, shots through screens, over shoulders – but in this film, the repertory of directorial choices is expanded to include startling shifts of scale, as now happens in the Kleinzach episode. 15 The same Wilde story had already been the basis for Zemlinsky’s 1922 opera Der Zwerg. 16 Though there are connections. It is easy to forget that Mozart’s Don Giovanni (the subject of films by Joseph Losey and others) is also the story of the

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famous rake’s three final, unsuccessful encounters with women. 17 Scorsese makes this point in his commentary. 18 Lazar, Michael Powell: Interviews, p. 121. 19 In his audio commentary, Scorsese connects this sequence to the underground films of the 1960s. 20 The detail of a woman spinning in a ring of fire is directly taken from Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’ – but that story is the source of Olympia’s tale, not Antonia’s. Freud summarises the moment in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’. Having witnessed the destruction of the doll, ‘Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his recollection of his father’s death is mingled with this new experience, “Hurry up! hurry up! ring of fire!” he cries. “Spin about, ring of fire – Hurrah! Hurry up, wooden doll! lovely wooden doll, spin about—” ’ At the climax of the story, the young man and his fiancée are in a tower. He looks through the spyglass he received from Coppola, sees the lawyer Coppelius, and again crying ‘Ring of fire, spin about’ attempts to throw his fiancée over the edge. The film-makers have taken the fatal verbal fantasy from Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’ story and visualised it to heighten the effect of Antonia’s end. The transposition demonstrates a more grounded knowledge of Hoffmann’s German tales than one would otherwise assume here.

21 Truman Capote’s comic turn in Murder by Death (1976) ends with a similar unmasking. 22 Lazar, Michael Powell: Interviews, p. 169. 23 See Jennifer Barnes’s study Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003), which examines three operas and their fate on the small screen. 24 Quoted in Christie, ‘Tales from the Lives of Marionettes’, an essay accompanying the Criterion DVD (2005). 25 Interview with Francis Ford Coppola, Movies on Line . Accessed 8 December 2012. ‘Coppola’ is the name of the maker of eyes and spy-glasses in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’ tale. The story’s complex doubling (there is, for example, both a Coppola and a Coppelius) is the engine that drives Freud’s famous analysis of the ‘uncanny’. These details are economically simplified in the Barbier–Offenbach work and, in turn, in the Archers’ film. 26 Dudley Andrew, ‘Core and Flow in Film Studies’, Critical Inquiry (Summer, 2009), p. 914. 27 This production detail is noted in the DVD commentary by Scorsese and Eder. 28 Picturegoer, 24 November 1951. 29 . Accessed 25 June 2012.

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Credits The Tales of Hoffmann UK/1951 © 1951 British Lion Film Corporation Ltd Written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Produced by the Archers for London Film Productions Based upon the opera by Jacques Offenbach English libretto by Dennis Arundell Translated from the French text by Jules Barbier Music director Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart. Production design Hein Heckroth Photography Christopher Challis Art director Arthur Lawson Editor Reginald Mills Associate producer George Busby Assistant director Sydney Streeter Choreography Frederick Ashton

Assistant choreographers Alan Carter Joan Harris Recorded by Ted Drake Recording supervisor John Cox Assistant musical director Frederic Lewis Camera operator Freddie Francis [Note: Ashton did not choreograph Helpmann or Massine’s roles] CAST Robert Rounseville (sung and acted by) Hoffmann Pamela Brown (sung by Monica Sinclair) Nicklaus Prologue and Epilogue Moira Shearer Stella/his lady love Edmond Audran Cancer Robert Helpmann (sung by Bruce Dargavel) Councillor Lindorf Meinhart Maur (sung by Fisher Morgan) Luther

Frederick Ashton Kleinzach Philip Leaver Andreas John Ford (sung by Rene Soames) Nathaniel Act 1: The Tale of Olympia Moira Shearer (sung by Dorothy Bond) Olympia Léonide Massine (sung by Grahame Clifford) Spalanzani Robert Helpmann (sung by Bruce Dargavel) Coppelius Frederick Ashton (sung by Murray Dickie) Cochenille Alan Carter bank clerk Act 2: The Tale of Giulietta Ludmilla Tchérina (sung by Margherita Grandi) Giulietta Robert Helpmann (sung by Bruce Dargavel) Dapertutto Léonide Massine (sung by Owen Brannigan) Schlemil Lionel Harris (sung by Murray Dickie) Pitichinaccio

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Act 3: The Tale of Antonia Ann Ayars (sung and acted by) Antonia

Robert Helpmann (sung by Bruce Dargavel) Dr Miracle Léonide Massine (sung by Grahame Clifford) Franz

Mogens Wieth (sung by Owen Brannigan) Crespel Joan Alexander (sung by) Antonia’s mother

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Bibliography Barnes, Jennifer. Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003). Beecham, Sir Thomas. A Mingled Chime (London: Hutchinson, 1943). Calico, Joy H. Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Christie, Ian (ed.). Powell, Pressburger and Others (London: BFI, 1978). ———. Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (London: Faber and Faber, 1994). ———. A Matter of Life and Death (London: BFI, 2000). ——— (ed.). The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives (London: BFI, 2005). ———. ‘Tales from the Lives of Marionettes’, essay accompanying the Criterion DVD of The Tales of Hoffmann (2005). Citron, Marcia J. Opera on Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). ———. When Opera Meets Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Cook, Pam. I Know Where I’m Going! (London: BFI, 2002). Crook, Steve (ed.). The Powell & Pressburger Pages website. Available at: . Durgnat, Raymond. A Mirror for England (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Freud, Sigmund. Translated by James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917–19) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74).

Gough-Yates, Kevin. Michael Powell in Collaboration with Emeric Pressburger (London: BFI, 1971). Greenfield, Amy. ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’, Film Comment (March–April 1995), pp. 26–31. Grover-Friedlander, Michael. Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Joe, Jeongwon and Rose Theresa (eds). Between Opera and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002). Kennedy, A. L. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (London: BFI, 1997). Lazar, David (ed.). Michael Powell: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003). Littlejohn, David. The Ultimate Art: Essays around and about Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Macdonald, Kevin. Foreword by Billy Wilder. Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (London: Faber and Faber, 1994). Moor, Andrew. Powell & Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1986; Faber and Faber, 2000). ———. Edge of the World (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). ———. Million-Dollar Movie (London: Heinemann, 1992). Sadie, Stanley (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (New York: Macmillan, 1997). Schroeder, David P. Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure: The Operatic Impulse

T H E TA L E S O F H O F F M A N N

in Film (New York: Continuum, 2000). Stern, Lesley. ‘The Tales of Hoffmann: An Instance of Operality’, in Joe and Theresa, Between Opera and Cinema, pp. 39–58.

Wlaschin, Ken. Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen: A Guide to More than 100 Years of Opera Films, Videos, and DVDs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

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