Saturday Night Cinema: The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema selection is an extraordinary work of cinematic poetry by Geller favorite, the British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known as The Archers.

They don’t make films like “The Tales of Hoffmann” anymore. In fact, they never have.

Written, directed and produced in 1951 by the celebrated British duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, “Hoffmann” is an immersive aesthetic experience best thought of as an art form all its own.
Mastery of color, and the arts, is almost a given for the Powell-Pressburger team, known for such previous Technicolor extravaganzas as “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissus.” Here, however, they were going for something different, something Powell described as a “composed film.”

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The Tales of Hoffmann review – Powell and Pressburger’s purest work

(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951;The Guardian:

One of the great experiences of British cinema in the mid-20th century was to sit in the stalls as the curtain drew aside and an arrow hit a bull’s-eye on a target, announcing a film by the Archers, the team of British director Michael Powell and Hungarian émigré screenwriter Emeric Pressburger. They took a joint credit as “writer, director and producer”. This logo presaged a wartime movie such as 49th Parallel or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which took a subtler, more humane view of the conflict than the usual black-and-white propaganda, or it proffered a thoughtful view of a possible postwar world the way A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death did.

In the 1940s and 50s, the Archers stood apart from the prevailing social realism of that period in their feeling for the mystery of the landscape, their sense of magic, of destiny and of the surreal that made them allies of the British artists of the neoromantic movement. Indeed in the book edited by Dr David Mellor to accompany an important 1987 exhibition called A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55, Powell and Pressburger are given a chapter to themselves alongside such artists as John Craxton, Michael Ayrton and Graham Sutherland. At one point Sutherland painted in a studio belonging to Powell in the south of France and wrote a screenplay for the Archers that, sadly, was never filmed.

A delightful credit sequence, never previously seen, has been discovered by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker

Powell and Pressburger greatly benefited from the powerful resurgence in the arts that accompanied the second world war, most especially the interest in music and ballet fostered by the dedicated dancers and musicians who toured the country under the auspices of Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells opera and ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association). Without their efforts, we might well not have seen that most celebrated of ballet films, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) or that combination of opera and ballet, The Tales of Hoffmann, which was the Archers’ encore to their greatest international triumph. The latter now comes to us newly restored under the loving supervision of their admirers Martin Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who is Powell’s widow). Fittingly, it’s a version of Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera inspired by the frantic life of the widely influential early 19th-century German neoromantic writer-composer ETA Hoffmann. Elegantly translated into English by Dennis Arundell, it’s Powell and Pressburger’s purest, most immaculate work.
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‘Immaculate’: trailer for The Tales of Hoffmann.

Powell called The Tales of Hoffmann “a composed film”, meaning that the whole soundtrack was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Sir Thomas Beecham (who’d conducted the work on several occasions and in fact recommended it to the Archers) before the movie went before the cameras. So when the actors appeared at Shepperton Studios on the sets and in the wonderful costumes designed by the great Hein Heckroth, it was as if cinematographer Christopher Challis and Powell and Pressburger were making a silent film.

In fact, only two performers – the American tenor Robert Rounseville as the glamorous doomed hero and the American soprano Ann Ayars as one of his unattainable lovers – both sing and act. The other actors and dancers (most of them having previously appeared in The Red Shoes) are dubbed by leading opera singers. Among the dancers is Moira Shearer, one of whose two major roles here being Stella, a singer in Offenbach’s opera, a dancer in the film, whose romantic affair with Hoffmann is torpedoed, as are all his loves, by his arch rival the villainous councillor Lindorf (Robert Helpmann).

While waiting in a beer hall for Stella, Hoffmann recalls three other unattainable objects of desire, one in Paris with an automaton, a second in Venice, and a third on a Greek island, which are coloured coded respectively yellow, red and blue in Heckroth’s designs. They are varied in pace and tone, but the most striking and powerfully erotic is the central act. Its stylised Venice invites comparison with the black-and-white art deco Venice of Top Hat and the frozen Grand Canal of Fellini’s Casanova. Ludmilla Tchérina is a dangerously enchanting presence as the courtesan Giulietta, and death, a constant factor in Powell and Pressburger’s cinema, is alluringly dramatised. Above all, there is Offenbach’s barcarolle, one of the most haunting of all operatic tunes.

From the synchronised weathercocks that open the overture to the final bold gesture of Beecham conducting the final bars then putting down his baton and rubber-stamping the score with the words “Made in England”, the film is inventive, authoritative and passionate. And now in this definitive version, 20 minutes longer than the one initially released, it doesn’t end with Beecham but with a delightful credit sequence. Discovered by Scorsese and Schoonmaker, and never previously seen, it features the singers on the soundtrack and the actors on the screen who take to the stage in adjoining frames from which they bow to the audience and to each other.

Why the film received a mere two Oscar nominations (both for Heckroth) is still a surprise, but 1951 was the year An American in Paris swept the board, and American audiences found The Tales of Hoffmann somewhat chilly. But Hoffmann provided nourishing cinematic poetry as our postwar age of austerity was dragging on into the 50s, and it continues to be a visual and aural delight.

 

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livingengine

6 years ago

Ludmilla Tchérina!
http://www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com/show/325/Ludmilla+Tcherina/index.html

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marlene

6 years ago

Thanks

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Vincent Lombardo

6 years ago

hello to you Pamela –
this is my favourite, too.
Reading as always all the many Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was the inspiration for the NUTCRACKER ballet, COPPELIA, ecc.
The first opera I directed was Offenbach’s TALES OF HOFFMANN.
all the best,

Vincent (Lombardo)

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Voytek Gagalka

6 years ago

Charm of masterful music augmented by cinematic magic: no Opera Theater could ever achieve that! Too bad that the cinema came so late when romantic era in literature and music was all but gone. Thanks for finding this treasure.

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