• Bible Films Blog

    Looking at film interpretations of the stories in the Bible - past, present and future, as well as preparation for a future work on Straub/Huillet's Moses und Aron and a few bits and pieces on biblical studies.


    Name:
    Matt Page

    Location:
    U.K.












    Tuesday, March 23, 2010

    Not the Messiah In Cinemas For One Night Only on 25th March

    I've posted several pieces over the last few years about Not the Messiah - an oratorio based on Monty Python's Life of Brian. Having aired on BBC's iPlayer at New Year, it seems a filmed version of the work will be showing in cinemas across Europe this Thursday (25th March 2010). It will also be playing in South Africa.

    A full list of participating cinemas is posted on the film's website, where you can also find a trailer and a gallery, but perhaps best of all, you can download the libretto. Here's the film's promotional blurb:
    A fabulously entertaining 90 minute comic oratorio by Eric Idle and John Du Prez (creators of Spamalot) inspired by Monty Python's Life Of Brian filmed at its only European performance at the Royal Albert Hall in October 2009 to celebrate 40 years of Monty Python.

    This hilarious take on the Messiah features the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, a host of superb soloists in the lead roles including Rosalind Plowright and Eric Idle, with Michael Palin as Mrs Betty Parkinson and special guest appearances from Pythons Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam. And of course three sheep!

    Like Handel only funnier.
    For what it's worth I'm sure I read another version of that tag line "Like Hamlet only funnier" which, assuming I've remebered it correctly. makes for an interesting switch.

    The cast stars William Ferguson as Brian and also features Eric Idle (who wrote the oratorio along with Spamalot's John Du Prez), Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Carol Cleveland. The BBC Symphony Orchestra will be providing musical accompaniment.

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    Thursday, August 07, 2008

    US Reviews for 'Not the Messiah'

    It's well over a year since I posted anything on Eric Idle's Life of Brian based oratorio 'Not the Messiah'. Since then, the show has played in a few places in the US and so Peter Chattaway has linked to a couple of reviews.

    Stephen Brookes of the Washington Post called it "hysterically funny" predicting that Idle's "dead-on Dylan impersonation will go down in musical history" and gives a decent indication as to what it might actually sound like.
    Idle rewrote the film's key scenes as songs, which Du Prez then set to music with gleeful abandon - mixing spirituals, doo-wop, Scottish ballads, Sondheim-ish show tunes, John Philip Sousa and even a tip of the hat to Handel himself.
    Which ratchets up my interest in seeing this yet another notch. Then there's Richard S. Ginell of Variety also mentions the Bob Dylan impersonation and admires the piece's "satire on oratorio form". Ultimately, however, he he finds it all rather "inconsistent".
    ...There could have been more sustained hilarity, and the most memorable thing in the score remains the classic, chipper holdover from the film, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."
    I know that's intended to be a criticism, but I can't imagine, for even a moment, that it will deter devoted Pythonists from flocking to see it.

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    Tuesday, January 30, 2018

    Moses und Aron (1973): An Introduction


    Still from the 1959 Berlin performance
    Moses und Aron (1973) is arguably the most mentally challenging of all biblical films. The lack of discussion of it amongst scholars of the Bible on Film is not, to misquote G.K. Chesterton,  because it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and not tried. The film is directed by Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, two filmmakers who though born in France went on to make most of their films in Germany and who are renowned for their austere and inaccessible style. Furthermore it is based on a complex and difficult atonal opera by Arnold Schönberg / Schoenberg, one of the best known examples of twelve-tone serialism. The result is a dense and challenging work that "manages to combine biblical commentary with timely political propaganda" (Tugenhaft). It's a piece that will alienate the vast majority of audiences but still have much to say, reflecting a key dilemma when looking at biblical films: the more entertaining and accessible they become, the less spiritual and vice versa.

    Given Straub and Huillet's unique filmmaking style, and in particular the faithful yet innovative way they handle their source material, it makes sense to examine Schönberg's contribution first in some detail, so that Straub and Huillet's treatment of it becomes clearer in future posts.

    For Schönberg, "Moses und Aron" was the culmination of his work adapting biblical narratives. His "interest in the musical statement of religious thought" first came to fruition with his oratorio "Die Jakobsleiter", based on the story of Jacob's Ladder, in 1917 Steiner, 41). Around this time he began to experiment with twelve-tone technique that typified the third, and final, phase in his career. Ten years later he wrote a play "Der biblische Weg" (The Biblical Way) which, like Preminger's Exodus (1960), explored the idea of a modern Jewish state whilst drawing on the biblical narratives about Moses. Later works included "Psalm 130" (1950) and the also unfinished "Modern Psalms".

    Initially Schönberg developed "Der biblische Weg" into an oratorio before converting it into a full blown opera, "Moses und Aron", and by the end of 1932 he had finished the first two acts and written the libretto for the third. Sadly it was to remain largely in that form even though "Schoenberg’s letters leave no room for doubt that he was firmly resolved to complete the work’s composition” (Wörner 91). The transition between to two pieces also coincides with Schönberg's return to Judaism, which was sparked by an anti-Semitic incident in Mattsee, Austria in 1921 but did not become official until he had fled from Berlin to Paris in 1933.

    Schönberg died in 1951 with the third and final act still unfinished. It did not even receive a full concert performance until 1954 in Hamburg and the first proper performance of the opera did not come until Zurich in 1957 (Wörner 104). Following its German premiére in Berlin, 1959 (pictured above), it was performed on only a few more occasions before Straub and Huillet decided to adapt it for the screen in the early seventies.

    The unfinished nature of the final act has led to different approaches towards its performnace. Performances have tended to either end at the close of Act II, or perform the final section without music. Indeed the lack of agreement as to the best approach goes back to the first two performances. “In Zurich it had been decided to close the performance with the end of the second act; the text of the third act was reproduced in the programme-book. In Berlin, the text of the third act was spoken on the stage by Moses and Aaron, in the manner of spoken drama, while, as a very soft background, the music of the first scene was relayed through a loudspeaker.” (Wörner 105) More recently, Hungarian composer Zoltán Kocsis developed his own score for the missing section, which was performed in Budapest in 2010 (Jeffries). Goldstein summarises a range of theories as to why Schönberg failed to complete the opera (151), before concluding that it is best to "explore the aesthetic implications of the opera as one whose third act is spoken and to resist speculating about the philosophical implications" of that for opera (152).

    In future posts I'm going to explore in more detail the story, the techniques Schönberg uses and key elements of his portrayal, before going on to look at Straub and Huillet's film in more detail.
    ================
    - Goldstein, Bluma (1992) Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness, London: Harvard University Press.
    - Jeffries, Stuart (2014) "Schoenberg's Moses und Aron: the opera that comes complete with an orgy". The Guardian 15th May. Available online at - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/15/schoenberg-moses-und-aron-opera-orgy 
    - Steiner, George (1965) “Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” Encounter (June), pp.40-46.
    - Tugenhaft, Aaron (1997) "Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron" in Sources: The Chicago Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Studies. Volume III. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20031013145056/
    http://humanities.uchicago.edu:80/journals/jsjournal/tugendhaft.html
     

    - Wörner, Karl H. ([1963] 1959) Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’ trans. Paul Hamburger, London: Faber and Faber.

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    Thursday, August 24, 2017

    List of Daniel Films


    Whilst most of the stories from the Bible that get made into films tend to be those which are popular in Sunday Schools, one of the main exceptions is the story of Daniel. Popular in the pews; not so  much in Hollywood. Here's the titles of all the Daniel Films I've managed to find over the years:

    Les martyrs chretiens: Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Lucien Nonguet[France], 1905)
    Les martyrs chretiens: Le Festin de Balthazar (Lucien Nonguet[France], 1905)
    Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Louis Feuillade[France], 1908)
    Le Festin de Balthazar (Louis Feuillade[France], 1910)
    Les Sept Péchés Capitaux: L’Orgueil (The Seven Capital Sins: No. 1, Pride (Nebuchadnezzar)) (Louis Feuillade[France], 1910)
    Cast into the Flames (Gaumont[France], 1910)
    The Fall of Babylon (Theo Frenkel[UK], 1911)
    Le Festin de Balthazar (Gaumont[France], 1913)
    Daniel (Frederick A. Thomson / Madison C. Peters[USA], 1913)
    Slaves of Babylon (William Castle[USA], 1953)
    Greatest Heroes of the Bible: Daniel in the Lions Den* (James L Conway[USA], 1978)
    Greatest Heroes of the Bible: Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar* (James L. Conway [], 1979)
    Nabucco (Henri Ronse[France], 1979)
    Nabucco (Renzo Giacchieri[Italy], 1981)
    Belshazzar (Harry Kupfer[Italy], 1985)
    Nabucco (Robert De Simone[Italy], 1986)
    Animated Stories from the Bible: Daniel (Richard Rich [USA], 1993)
    Veggie Tales: Rack, Shack & Benny  ( Phil Vischer/Mike Nawrocki,[USA], 1995)
    The Beginners Bible: The Story of Daniel in Lions' Den (Gary Selvaggio, [USA], 1996)Testament. The Bible in Animation: Daniel (Lioudmila Koshkina[UK], 1996)
    Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible: Daniel and the Lions' Den (William R. Kowalchuk [USA], 1998)
    Nabucco (Fabio Sparvoli[It/US/UK/FR/GER/CZ], 1998)
    Nabucco (Gianfranco de Bosio[Austria], 2000)
    Nabucco (Elijah Moshinsky[USA], 2001)
    Veggie Tales: Where is God when I'm S-S-Scared? ( Phil Vischer/Mike Nawrocki,[USA], 2003)
    Bugtime Adventures: It's the Pits (Jeff Holder[USA], 2006)
    Liken Bible Series: Daniel and the Lions ([USA], 2006)
    Belshazzar (Don Kent[France], 2008)
    The Bible: Survival (Crispin Reece; Tony Mitchell; Christopher Spencer[USA/UK], 2013)
    The Book of Daniel (Anna Zielinski[USA], 2013) - pictured above


    Even just a cursory glance of these 30 titles reveals that almost all of them fall into at least one of four basic categories: church-based, animated, silent or opera adaptation. Sadly many of the early, short, silent films are now lost. That leaves a couple of entries from a longer series (Greatest Heroes of the Bible (1978-79) and The Bible(2013)) and the 1953 film Slaves of Babylon.

    I must admit I know very little about Nabucco, Verdi's 1841 Opera which has been filmed at least six different times, or about Belshazzar, Handel's 1744 Oratorio which has been brought to the screen twice.

    I'm about to do a piece on the Lion's Den in film and surprisingly there are significantly fewer films that cover this, given that the story is the most famous of those from the book of Daniel. I suspect this is because many of the films are from the early silent era. Anyway films that specifically cover the Lion's Den scene are:

    Les martyrs chretiens: Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Lucien Nonguet[France], 1905)
    Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Louis Feuillade[France], 1908)

    Daniel (Frederick A. Thomson / Madison C. Peters[USA], 1913)
    Slaves of Babylon (William Castle[USA], 1953)
    Greatest Heroes of the Bible: Daniel in the Lions Den* (James L Conway[USA], 1978)
    Animated Stories from the Bible: Daniel (Richard Rich [USA], 1993)
    Testament. The Bible in Animation: Daniel (Lioudmila Koshkina[UK], 1996)
    The Beginners Bible: The Story of Daniel in Lions' Den (Gary Selvaggio, [USA], 1996)
    Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible: Daniel and the Lions' Den (William R. Kowalchuk [USA], 1998)
    Veggie Tales: Where is God when I'm S-S-Scared? ( Phil Vischer/Mike Nawrocki,[USA], 2003)
    Bugtime Adventures: It's the Pits (Jeff Holder[USA], 2006)
    Liken Bible Series: Daniel and the Lions ([USA], 2006)
    The Bible: Survival (Crispin Reece; Tony Mitchell; Christopher Spencer[USA/UK], 2013)
    The Book of Daniel (Anna Zielinski[USA], 2013)


    I suspect my piece will also mention the 2008 Argentinian film Leonera (Lion's Den) which isn't a modernisation, but simply uses the way that the phrase "going into the Lion's Den" has passed into popular parlance.

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    Tuesday, January 05, 2010

    Not the Messiah on iPlayer

    I've just discovered that Eric Idle's oratorio Not the Messiah (based on Monty Python's Life of Brian) played on BBC Radio 3 on Friday Morning and is, therefore, available to listen to on iPlayer until this Friday. It's a bit bizarre really because Mark Goodacre tweeted that he was listening to it earlier in the day, but I assumed that he had bought it on CD or something. Then coincidentally I happen to look (for the first time ever) at what's playing on radio 3's iPlayer channel and there it is. So I'm off to listen to it now.

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    Wednesday, December 29, 2010

    Bible Films Blog Review of 2010

    2010 was a comparatively quiet year for Bible films, distinguished only by a couple of good TV series at the start and the end of the year. The start was Channel 4's series The Bible: A History, a seven documentaries that covered Creation, Abraham, The Ten Commandments, Daughters of Eve, Jesus, Paul and Revelation. Although it was Howard Jacobson's take on Genesis 1-2, a pre-Strictly Anne Widdecombe's defence of the Decalogue and, most of all, Gerry Adams's examination of the gospels that grabbed the headlines, it was the other programmes that proved the most interesting (Rageh Omar's tangential look at the Abrahamic faiths aside). Bettany Hughes's look at the women of the Bible, and Tom Holland's re-appraisal of Paul that stand out and Robert Beckford was, as ever, good value on the Apocalypse.

    The length of Channel 4 series meant that it didn't end until early March, just a few weeks before Easter. The Easter period this year was certainly a disappointment. The last few years have seen a number of productions targeting Easter 2010 as a potential release date. Alas none made it through. The one exception was Eric Idle and Co's one-night-only screening of their oratorio Not the Messiah. It had been broadcast on New Year's Day in the UK, and didn't really grab me. It's funny enough in its own way, but most of the humour, for me, lay in remembering how funny the corresponding parts of Life of Brian are. Mark Goodacre disagreed.

    One of the promised productions that was not released as originally suggested was the new Ben Hur mini-series. In the end it was only broadcast in Canada, which is funny because when I finally reviewed it, I did kind of like it.

    And that was pretty much it until Christmas. While the world was preparing to celebrate Jesus's birth and the magi's journey to discover the new born king, the silver screen was being graced by what is, I suppose, another story of the same ilk. The story of the magi and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader are both stories about long journeys to seek the face of Jesus/Aslan which reflect our own journeys of faith. But despite having one of the longest titles in the history of popular cinema, Dawn Treader struggled at the box office. It was a shame given that it is arguably the best film in the franchise so far.

    Top billing for 2010 however must go to the BBC's The Nativity. The four half hour episodes were striped across the week leading up to Christmas gaining decent viewing figures and good reviews. As much as I liked it, many of those I've read or spoken to seemed to like it a great deal more than me. For me, and this is probably just my rugby player side coming to the fore, it was just a little bit trite in places, a weakness easily forgiven in light of the other strengths the film displayed. It will be interesting to see what the BBC do with this. There was talk a while back of them releasing a series of animated films on the Bible, but it's been a long time since I read anything about that project.

    There were a couple of other things worth mentioning about the last year. BBC2's series Rev, a humorous look at the life of an inner-city vicar was wince inducing and hilarious. Series 2 has been commissioned and hopefully we will see that next year. There was also a sad note as we lost one of the most prominent actresses from the (second) golden age of the biblical epic, Jean Simmons. Simmons starred in some of my favourite films and her versatile body of work will live on as testament to her talent.

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    Monday, March 04, 2019

    Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp, 1968)


    As part of exploring the context of Huillet and Straub's Moses und Aron (1974) I am exploring their other films including this one.
    Like its title Straub/Huillet's 1968 short The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp, splits readily into three parts, but the three parts of each do not so much correlate to each other as to the three leading characters who emerge as the film progresses.

    In many ways the film references the very earliest period in film history. The opening shot - a 40 second focus on a piece of graffiti functions like an intertitle. The second shot, a four minute pan taken from a car as it drives along Landsberger Strasse in Munich's red light district recalls many of the actualité of the 1890s, most notably the Lumière's Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896). It also anticipates the longer shots from a car in Huillet and Straub's later work History Lessons (1972), not to mention Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).

    Then there is the third shot, even longer at 11 minutes than the two that went before it. In most other respects however the shot is different. The outside, street location is swapped for inside a small theatre. The moving camera is exchanged for a static one. The real life "set" becomes a deliberately artificial one with a drawn on looking door. Again this recalls early silent film, but here it is more the static tableaux of the early films such as Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost (1901) or the earlier versions of Pathé's Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1902 onwards). As with those film, the camera holds this mid-shot without moving for the entire shot, the main noticeable difference with those tableaux silents is that, as ever, Straub and Huillet have placed the camera off centre.

    Furthermore whereas the earliest part of the previous shot started in silence before giving way to Bach's "Ascension Oratorio", here we lose the extra-diegetic music but gain audible dialogue. There's a brief moment of diegetic music when one of the characters slips a typical 1940s instrumental onto the record player and two of the characters begin to dance. It's a moment worth bearing in mind because it's easy to assume that that delivery of the play is without acting that is actually not quite correct. The speech that is delivered is more about rhythm than emotion, but it's not entirely deadpan and the characters movements whilst muted from what might be expected in conventional cinema, is still largely present. The characters stand, sit, smoke, twirl, come into and leave the room.

    It's this section footage that was shot first. Straub was approached by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Munich Action-Theatre group  to direct a theatre production of Ferdinand Bruckner's "Pains of Youth" (1926), and only agreed on condition that he could strip it down to its essentials. The filmed, live, footage (and it is live, even the two moments of blackout between scenes retain that atmosphere thanks to Huillet and Straub's insistence on live sound) is what we find in the film and whilst following the thread of the plot through the terse dialogue is tricky, it nevertheless forms the key to understanding the rest of the film. Fassbinder himself plays the pimp, and the link to the opening footage from the red-light district is apparent. He also portrays the pursuer in the final section of the film where the documentary like footage of the first section and the stage footage give way to a more conventional (but still rather unconventional and stripped down) sequence.

    The final sequence contains more shots than the rest of the film put-together, and they are far shorter in duration. There's an opening shot outside a woman's flat where she kisses her lover goodbye. As he gets into the lift, the camera holds on it and we see it descend. The next shot captures Fassbinder waiting for the man in a VW Beetle outside. The car recalls the opening section where one of the cars that the camera overtakes is a similarly shaded Beetle. A car chase - shot Straub and Huillet style - ensues. The man leaves his car to flee on foot. The pimp catches him up, but give up when the man kicks him away. The man is then reunited with his lover and in the lengthiest shot in the sequence (some 5 minute or so) get married. They return home only to find Fassbinder waiting for him, whereupon the woman shoots him and then gazes out of the window (recalling a similar shot in Der Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach) as the (extra-diegetic) music of Bach's "Ascension Oratio" starts up again.

    The three sections, then, unite and complete one another with their interaction. Straub/Huillet's films are always political, but the use of real-life documentary footage to frame the artificial theatre section and the dramatic cinema section makes this one of their more political films (not to mention the Mao quote emblazoned on the walls in the theatrical section). This is not simply an entertaining story about a woman escaping prostitution, it is born of a real-life scenario. Indeed if anything, the demonstrable artificiality of the final two sections highlights the improbability of such an escape in the real world. The woman saved from prostitution by a man who loves her, and by her taking her fate into her own hands is, in the majority cases, a fantasy as pristine as the footage from the church.

    For such radical left-wing filmmakers religious imagery and references abound. The church footage here recalls that from Machorka Muff (1962), not least because of the diagonal, low angle of the camera (this time however, the couple is shot from the rear, and the church is more austere and less ornate) and of course is a regular feature of Anna Magdalena. Then of course there is Moses und Aron (1974) which speaks for itself, but there is also a reference to the law of Moses following the wedding ceremony here (which is taken from the writings of St. John of the Cross). And then, naturally, there are the words of the wedding ceremony and religious element behind the music of Bach's Ascension Oratorio which appears at the start and end of the film.

    In honesty I didn't intend this article to be quite so long, but somehow I just find Huillet and Straub such fascinating filmmakers to write about. In some ways their shorter works are far more suited to this kind of blog-length analysis than their longer ones; the dense, intellectual nature of their films means that there is just too much to explore satisfactorily for the lengthier works. And for anyone who is interested in getting acquainted with this one - which until now has only been available on a French DVD - there's a chance to see it on the big screen on Wednesday (6th March), and it will be released by Grasshopper on Bluray and DVD as an extra for their  release of Der Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach).

    ========
    Although I've not cited them directly I owe a debt to the authors of the following words , from whom I've derived many of my ideas about it.
    - Byg, Barton (1995) Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Berkeley: University of California Press.
    - Pummer, Claudia (2016) "(Not Only) For Children and Cavemen: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet" in Ted Fendt (ed.) Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet. Vienna, Filmmuseum Synema Publications, 2016.
    - Roud, Richard (1972) Jean-Marie Straub. New York: The Viking Press.

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    Monday, May 28, 2007

    More Previews for Not the Messiah

    Monty Python fans will no doubt be anticipating the June premier of Eric Idle's Life of Brian oratorio Not the Messiah.

    I mentioned a few articles on this project in March, notably those by Playbill, Variety and The Globe and Mail. Peter Chattaway has just linked to another article on it in The Toronto Star. This in turn led me to track down a new article in The Globe and the Mail - an interview with Eric IDle (left in the picture).

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    Tuesday, March 20, 2007

    Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy) - Life of Brian: The Musical

    Way back in October, Peter Chattaway posted about Eric Idle's plans to turn Monty Python's 1979 Jesus film Life of Brian into a musical. There have now been a number of articles on this show, which is to be called Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy). Playbill reported on it back in October, then Variety covered it last month, and then yesterday Peter linked to The Globe and Mail (although you have to pay for that last article).

    Following the success of Idle's "Spamalot", he is, once again, collaborating with composer John Du Prez. However, according to The Globe and Mail article the show's première will be conducted by Idle's cousin, Peter Oundjian - the musical director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Not the Messiah is due to open at the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity in Toronto on June 1st.

    But notably, according to this latest article at least, this production will not actually be a musical. It will be an oratorio (a non-costumed, non-acted, concert performance usually dealing with religious subject matter) and it will use 40 musicians and 4 classical singers. Idle notes how it it unlikely to cause offence as there is no crucifixion scene. It's "good-natured playing with the concept of [Handel's] Messiah" as much as anything else.

    This latest article includes a few interesting quotations for fans of Life of Brian:
    "As Handel's lyricist adapted the Nativity story and the Gospel story," says Idle, "this adapts the story of Brian, a simple boy mistaken for the Messiah, which is his curse." He's talking over the phone from his home in Los Angeles, and the end of that sentence is nearly lost in laughter. The mere thought of Brian Cohen, not-Messiah, still makes him giggle...

    Idle remembers the film's shoot in Tunisia as "the most fun we ever had." Graham Chapman gave up his heavy drinking habit partway through the shoot in order to play Brian (a role that John Cleese had coveted for his own)...
    I love the thought of Idle still giggling to himself at the central concept of Life of Brian almost 30 years later, and it's good to see him exploring more challenging forms and material. I have a lot of respect for artists who continually push themselves and their work in new directions.

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    Friday, June 08, 2007

    First Reviews for Not the Messiah

    It's my daughter's first birthday today, so I hope regular readers won't mind if I go home early to play with her. Fortunately Peter Chattaway has collated a number of reviews of Eric Idle's oratorio Not the Messiah. It sounds like it's more good than bad, especially for Python fans.

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    Saturday, August 31, 2019

    Klassenverhältnisse (1984)


    Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations 1984) is Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's only adaptation of the works of Franz Kafka, which is itself a little surprising. It's based on Kafka's unfinished novel "Amerika", also known as "Der Verschollene" or, in English, "The Man who Disappeared". I'm sorely tempted to say that simply navigating one's way through those various titles feels a little Kafkaesque, but I'm aware that doing do is no doubt will prove too irritating for many. Nevertheless various commentators have discussed Huillet and Straub's change of title, which aligns with the Marxist nature of their cinema, yet for Straub "the title is good because this is precisely what the film does not do" (cited in Bösler 2004: 116). As Bösler herself observes "rather than telling us what we will be shown and told, the title Klassenverhältnisse encourages us to look and listen for what there is to see and hear" (Bösler 2004: 117).

    The novel, for those who are unfamiliar with it, focuses on a young German migrant, Karl Rossmann, who is essentially a stand in for Kafka himself. Aside from sharing a mother tongue, age and status in life and the prominent 'Ka' sound at the start of their names, Kafka and Karl also shared difficult relations with their parents. Karl has been sent away to America by his parents and finds himself being shunted around from place to place in search of employment. He is a largely passive figure seemingly unable to control his destiny, instead being manipulated  and oppressed by the vast majority of the figures he encounters.

    Whilst I've written about various of Huillet/Straub's adaptations from novels, this is the first I have actually read and it's interesting watching their always notable adaptation process more closely. As is typical most of the story and the dialogue makes it into the screenplay, but little of the text's elaboration, though the details are largely their to be observed. This contrasts markedly with Welles' adaption of The Trial (1962). Where he tries to capture all the details described so meticulously in Kafka's prose, Straub/Huillet try and limit it to the character's perspective.

    The shots are largely either static diagonal mid shots, or long panning shots, such as when Karl first observes the buildings housing his Uncle's business. Delivery is not-quite deadpan, but certainly muted. This is a development from Moses und Aron (1974) when Schoenberg's use of Sprechstimme (a form of speech halfway between singing and speech) formed something of a launching point. Speech delivery had always interested them and from there on they began to experiment more with language as an 'object' rather than merely a 'vehicle'. In an interview with Hans Hurch around the film's original release, the pair liken their use of language to the works of Bach, or an oratorio. They layer different styles of delivery and even get actors to pause on occasion in the middle of a word.

    The stilted nature of both the delivery and the acting serves to highlight  the handful of moments where sudden violence is done to Karl. This happens three times in particular where someone strikes or grabs part of Karl's head or neck. Each time it's a medium close-up of Karl against a solid object. Each time an arm thrusts suddenly towards him from the edge of the frame and then the pose is held for long enough to observe Karl's discomfort. The owner of the arm remains out of shot. It is not that Karl is necessarily hurt by these 'attacks', but they are nevertheless a shocking intrusion, not least because he offers no resistance as we are trained to expect. These moments are particularly striking because so many of the film's "gestures and actions are performed with a denaturalizing, and at times almost mechanical deliberation, [which] heightens the impact of even the minutest action which does occur" (Bösler 2004, 122). The attacks silence or oppress Karl, a summation of the story's overall oppression of its lead. There is at least one counter shot when Karl is talking to Theresa, one of only two characters who are sympathetic towards him. The framing is similar but her arm only touches his arm and the contact is gentle rather than forceful.

    The film is also deeply concerned about spaces, with the physical blocking expressing the awkwardness of Karl in this oddly ill-fitting and harsh world. It's a world where a young man might find himself sent to the other end of the world for getting a servant girl pregnant, or might loses face with his uncle for accepting a dinner invitation, or even might lose his job simply for stepping away from this post for a minute or to. These little injustices follow Karl around, while the behaviours of those around him get odder and odder. The sequence of shots breaks the Hollywood rules of continuity editing - there are few establishing shots, or master shots summarising the geography of the scenes. Even attempting to place how the scenes relate to each other by cross referencing eye lines, sources of light and so forth is frustrated by Straub/Huillet's shot selection. "Each new shot, however, introduces a variation in camera angle and distance" so that "the viewer's understanding of its spatial parameters" advances as the scene progresses (Plummer 2016: 66).

    A friend of mine, who knows Kafka better than me, says adaptations of his work are always somewhat odd, largely because the quirky nature of the source material attracts unusual filmmakers and inspires then to make bold and creative efforts to justice to the material. For Huillet and Straub it was the only other one of their films to be shot outside of Europe aside from Too Early, Too Late (1981) and sections of Moses und Aron. These include a tracking shot capturing New York's Statue of Liberty. In the book Kafka, famously, gets a detail wrong, (perhaps purposefully) replacing her flame with a sword. It's the kind of detail which adds to the confused dreamy nature of the book, which Straub and Huillet capture so well with their odd and semi-disengaging film.

    ============
    Bösler, Ursula (2004), The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening: The Politics of Representation in the Work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet", Frankfurt / Berlin / Bern / Bruxelles / NewYork / Oxford / Wien: Peter Lang.

    Pummer, Claudia (2016), "(Not Only) for Children and Caveman: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet", in Ted Fendt (ed.), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Vienna: Synema Publikationen.

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    Wednesday, March 10, 2010

    Various New Jesus Film Projects

    Been a bit busy of late, so not had time to link to Peter Chattaway's latest round up of Jesus films news.

    One of the films Peter discusses at length is Bruce Marchiano's Jesus ... No Greater Love. The news is that Marchiano is releasing a 15th Anniversary Edition of The Gospel According to Matthew. The film has been repackaged and "coupled it with a first-ever, two CD audio re-issue of 'In the Footsteps of Jesus'". Profits from the sale will go towards funding Marchiano's Jesus ... No Greater Love which seems to be the new name for the film that was being called the Gospel of John. Incidentally, can anyone else think of any other films that have an ellipsis in the title. I can think of one other and it's a sort of Bible film, but not many others are springing to mind.

    Other news is that both Jesus and Esther from The Bible Collection have been re-released; that Not the Messiah (Python Oratorio based on Life of Brian) has been given an MPAA rating, suggesting it may get an video release in addition to it's current limited cinema release (which comes to Leicester on 25th March); that Mark Millar has failed to find a studio to make American Jesus; and that there are a couple of animated Nativity films at different stages of pre-production, The Fourth Wise Man and an Egnlish language version of the Spanish film Holy Night!.

    This reminds me, speaking of animated Jesus films, I don't think I ever blogged another story from Peter about At Jesus' Side (trailer), a film about four dogs who witness Jesus' death and resurrection. It's being released on March 16th, and looks pretty darn awful. I've not been sent a review copy though so I guess I'll never really know for sure. They have a blog as well for anyone who wants to find out more.

    Incidentally, seeing as I'm speaking about FilmChat today I'd like to link to this post of his which starts off being about Avatar but actually ends up being interesting. Peter's point is that in (western filmed) battle scenes you nearly always find the side you sympathise with coming from the left. This has affected the way I have watched various battle scenes since then including one from Channel 4's 1066 where the French come from the left despite the largely pro-Saxon stance the film adopts throughout. Food for thought.

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