Sharp and on the verge of Life

Márta Mészáros: The Miraculous Mandarin (A csodálatos mandarin)

This thirty-five minutes film, if I understand the details of its production well has been in the making for five years, and can be seen in place of a bigger work entitled The Death of the Mandarin (A mandarin halála). Originally, it would have been a feature film. The one in question is the filmic adaptation of the pantomime entitled The Miraculous Mandarin. We cannot form an opinion about the original idea or project, but what has been accomplished and can be seen is a work of great importance. Its weight and esteem is surely going to grow as time goes by.

The Bartókian scenic plot of the play is basically a brutal story. Three city-hooligans first make a girl cajole some people up from the window of their hiding-place in order that they could ransack the men. Two visitors, an old man and a young boy are thrown out because they are penniless, and the third customer is killed, but his death is both miraculous and surrealistic. It’s a triplicate death because who suffers it can only pass away after the excitement, (to draw it up in a euphemistic word,) produced by the girl is calmed. The girl renders this possible for him after two killing attempts.

Though the excitement is of sexual character, it would be a rough simplification to consider this work of art a mere gut-turning event. It’s accomplished with more than a simple, somewhat gloomy Zola-naturalism. It is about finding a possible fellow or even the birth of love. It is about looking at a human being, one who is not wearing any masks. All these can easily get an insight in the film. On the other hand, Marquis De Sade would have especially been interested in the figure of the girl making love with the wounded and bloody mandarin. If we go further in historical time, we might remember Schopenhauer who supposedly said that the result of life is death itself. And to go further on along this line of investigation we might bump into the essay on death-drive by Sigmund Freud. The musical dramaturgy, the structure of atmospheric layers in The Miraculous Mandarin must be based on and interpenetrated by the famous and so called „metropolitan music”, (although the accompaniment is not completed with this tone, but it comes to an end with the girl’s and the mandarin’s musical themes assimilated with each other). It is a quasi-overture which is held on till the curtain rolls up, and goes on with the tramps’ themes. I’m going to quote from the book written by György Kroó (the notable Hungarian musicologist) to characterize this introductory music. (In Bartók Béla színpadi művei, 1962.) „It’s full of aggressiveness, its accents are pushing over and over again, and its asymmetry makes one feel inscrutable peril.” This is a fast music, it is pit-a-pat as it jangles, rattles, howls. It’s hectic and irritably squirmy. The tramps enter fully into the spirit and gesture system of this base-rhythm all along the pantomime both in the scenes when the unwanted visitors are thrown out and in the sequences depicting the two killing attempts. As musicology puts it: the voice and sound of large cities and vagabonds are one and the same. The further layers of atmospheric elements are built later on this base. It is in these that the emotional and intellectual cycles of desire and yearning, purity, love or even redemption get reflected upon. These layers obviously facilitate other themes, rhythms and tempos to emerge.

The film’s visual stratum is submitted to those necessities which result from the musical ground. It is given way in short shots, quick and turbulent cuts, tiny and quivering camera movements, and complicated inner cuts. This is even so in those cases where other atmospheric layers and elements appear. Nor is the art of images an idyllic and harmonious one but rather surrealistic and collage-like. There are numerous close-ups, in which the represented entity loses touch with its original context, and becomes a frightening and exciting anonymity. The colours of the images are shrill and loud. The characters are in steady motion; what is more natural as it is a pantomime after all. These factors combined bring about the essentially identical language of music and motion picture which so to say breath simultaneously, and use identical gesture system.

Because of the above mentioned essential sameness, those divergences, that could be apprehended as exaggerative and not belonging to the Bartókian spirit and orchestral score not only for uncomprehending inheritors and legacy administrators but also for others, become irrelevant. No doubt, a vast number of written references and indications that are present in the orchestral score are not there in the film (and vica versa). There are, for example, neither tempters in the film, nor a window where the girl should step out to lure the victims to come up from the street, since there’s no street either. There’s a boat-bridge instead, on which the victims seem to show up by accident at first sight. The film is set in contemporary Budapest. While the opening titles are running, we can listen to the various sounds of the big city (characterized mainly by car hooters screech). The view of the Buda embankment appears later opposite to the Houses of Parliament and with the lit up Chain Bridge in the background. The actors are of our days too. The vagabonds are mafioso-like creatures who are not in need of money at all. The girl wearing pin-heeled shoes and blood-red cloths, with her fingernails varnished blood-red (in the first sequence at least) makes her escape with a stole on her shoulders. Then, to the first tones of the music, she’s thrust into a car, kidnapped and driven to the hooligans’ hideout. The young boy, the second alluring person and the hero of the next scene is a biking pizza deliverer. The old gentleman of the first tempter boasts with his golden chains, but the mandarin is penniless. His only property is a fan. The mafiosos’ live on a stationary ship which is their hideout, pleasure-ground and den of vice all at the same time. They are keeping an eye on every little movement with an industrial camera that is directed at the gangway. In the meantime they are taking drugs, playing darts and basket-ball alternately. One of them, the boss is sitting in an electric wheel-chair and trundles to right and left in an easygoing and cheerful manner. (It’s not impossible either, that the first visitor, the old gentleman himself is related to the mafioso in one way or the other, for he shows up as an old exhibitionist uncle as early as in the very first sequence on the bridge. It might have been him, who „commissioned” the girl because he appears on the gangway in a little while, obviously to take over and (ab)use his „stuff”...) The story of The Miraculous Mandarin is enacted in this world, and with these characters. Brutal and perverted men are plying their time-killing games in a sadistic and perverted world.

Just like the film entitled Clockwork Orange was surrounded by irony in Alex’s recalling monologue, this film is also ironic, especially in the first part which lasts until the mandarin’s arrival. The scene where the first victim – the old gentleman – is guided to the boss, the way the financial part of the business is discussed before he arrives to the girl, the sudden movement he uses to take his gold chains out of his pocket is caricature-like and appropriate for a comedy. The scene of the second victim is pervaded by a gentle version of irony. The idea to use the identity of a biking pizza delivery-man establishes the possibility for irony, though the actor’s performance, the light fading into his punky hair, his clothing, his boyish trouser legs and his sneakers are all required to its fulfilment. The mandarin steps, respectively jumps in front of us with karate gestures. The film playfully winks at the spectator. The martial arts movie is an important product of commercial cinema, so it’s not impossible, that these lads, who play their bloody games now used to watch similar films in the past. It might be more than an interesting accident, that similarly to the camouflage sometimes worn by Alex, namely that long, unforgettable phallic nose, the hooligans’ face is also often covered by a mask.

The tramps are played by actors in this film, and Yvette Bozsik herself does not dance. Her motion is just increased, it is strongly gesture-like, overstylized, which once again strengthen irony and self-reflection. The same thing can be felt in case of Noviczky’s and Győző Szabó’s acting style. It sometimes seems to me as if they pretended they had to act in a movie using methods belonging to silent cinema. It is an allusion to the long history of cinema and to its theatre-bound acting style, which – according to Charles Chaplin – is deeply related to the art of pantomime. This hint drives the film on yet another and deeper level of self-reflection (and is an emphatic allusion to the sub-title of Menyhért Lengyel’s screen-play: a grotesque pantomime). This intensified self-reflection preferably reinforces the infernal character of the plot’s atmosphere. The viewer’s fear keeps on growing greater and greater and is not resolved right until the end of the film.

The music video-like shaping of the visual sphere does not allow to give a verbal expression of what the „message” of the film is. Because of the quick alternation of the filmic sequences we cannot interpret and construct universal meanings from the images and the segments of events which are constituted upon them, instead only the sensory and atmospheric components reach us. The good old presentiment, according to which the motion picture in quick sequenciality has a soul for music has been proven for good in this film. Film and music have already been born here, and their teaming up in the form of the video clip as musical genre should be further discussed, but that would have to be another essay.

Despite the difficulties of interpretation, I would attempt to give at least my reading of the film. The „message” of The Miraculous Mandarin by the multiple authorship of Bartók-Mészáros-Bozsik might short and simple: life and death join and overlap. This thought, if expressed in words, is too much and too little at the same time, therefore it’s of no use and inefficient. Yet, in the film, when the girl and the mandarin’s musical patterns are heard last, the following happens: the girl in red clothes shown in an high-angle shot curls up into an embryonic position slowly moving toward the bottom of the frame, while the camera is turning in the opposite direction with a fine elliptic move. Characters wearing black and red rags (the arms of the dead mandarin are on the body of the girl) form a circular figure: it’s a yin-yang symbol drawn with filmic devices.

The unique quality of the film is made even more emphatic by the fact, that having embraced the spirit of the Bartókian music as its starting point, The Miraculous Mandarin as a ballet on stage, is successfully given a new, relevant and adequate interpretation. No longer can a seminar on Bartók take place where this film is not projected or at least referred to. (I have but one objection: it seems to me as if a few notes were missing between the 41st and 42nd orchestral scores. If the movie version also contains this fault, no financial expenditure is too high to correct it. Otherwise the Bartókian music is hurt, and so is the film.)

Without Mystery

Sándor Silló: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára)

Following the Hungarian Film Feast, the interested public was given the opportunity to see the opera film entitled Duke Bluebeard’s Castle made by Sándor Silló on Duna Television. The leading roles are sung by István Kovács and Klára Kolonits, the conductor of the Radio-orchestra is György Selmeczy. The part of the Regős is delivered by Tamás Jordán. This one-act opera – composed in 1911 – is one of the significant and deservedly listed masterpieces of the international musical canon and takes up a central and leading place in Hungarian musical-cultural scene. This opus is a highly important moment of our musical conscience, and it is subject of numerous spirited and impassioned analyses.

The one-act playlet serving as the opera’s libretto was written by Béla Balázs who called his drama a mystery. If we take this label seriously, we can say it’s an initiatory ritual. To be introduced into the process, a woman, Judit, has to ask questions and also unlock doors with certain keys. The fulfilment of the initiation process is marked by a crown, a cloak and some jewels. But the course of rite is an epiphany at the same time according to which Judit becomes goddess of the night. The cloak is a star-cloak and Judit is the Goddess of the Night. She is supposed to proceed behind the seventh door together with the previous women who are goddesses, too. They are the goddesses of dawn, noon and night. Imprisonment behind the door is death, and in the light of this, Duke Bluebeard is an initiatory priest who is simultaneously The Nothingness that swallows up everything, and then dissolves into the darkness. This darkness is obviously himself/itself.

According to the common understanding the story written by Balázs is about a man and a woman. It’s a drama about love, the portrayal of solitude, the representation of female and male soul. A creation declaring the impossibility of unity for the two sexes. This fact at once drags the play into a secular and more profane sphere. We might say with some sarcasm: the man who is otherwise said to have killed his wives, warns the woman against asking needless questions. He urges her to refrain from opening up certain doors and that she had better not be inquisitive about bloodstains here and there, otherwise she’s going to get in trouble. (The „you cannot ask just anything” and „the door which must not be opened” are folk-tale motifs, the roots of which reach back to the earliest of times, but this fact does not change their earthly nature one little bit).

Yet, there is something else to take into account. Since the man bears a magical and totemic name and the woman has but a personal name, they remain allegorical abstractions. The Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman manifest themselves for us in this worldly drama. Thus the mystery-element becomes more intense, and a path is also opened to modern, depth-psychological interpretations.

This written text is complemented by the music of Bartók. The composer makes Duke Bluebeard sing in pentatonality built on neighbouring notes ambling along, whereas Judit’s vocal score is more vehement and varied with large leaps, giving character and personality a musical dimension through these melodic devices. (But it sometimes happens that they take over each other’s intonation.) The drama can head towards its dénouement. Therefore, Bartók seems to have found it most rewarding to elaborate on the relationship between sexes in Béla Balázs’s stage play.

The opening of the first six doors offers Bartók an opportunity to compose a musical interlude for each. The seventh is already the music of culmination and dénouement. The requisites of Duke Bluebeard’s life can be found behind the doors that Judit must open under endogenous coercion (such as the garden, chamber of torture, house furnished with weapons, and so on). The composition starts with quadriserial, descending type pentatonic tune, and this melodic motif returns at the very end of the play. The mystery, respectively the drama unfolds between these two pillars. It moves out from the darkness into the light (the fifth door) and back to darkness again. As a matter of fact, the door-scenes can be divided into two parts. Judit first looks at these micro-worlds with admiration. Later, when the blood motif’s semitone interval is intonated, the micro-world turns out not to be that innocent. There are hidden secrets behind.

The musical representation of the worlds behind those doors are often and worthily referred to as the miracles of ‘soundpainting’. With the Swinging open of each door musical cosmoses are revealed one after the other. The chamber of torture’s ghost/bone music, the battle-yells of the arms collection, the peace of the flowergarden and the motionlessness of the lake of tears are all great moments of music history. Neither the fifth door’s torrential C major light’n’sound deluge, nor the sound representation of the Duke’s kingdom can be left unmentioned. The musical representation of the blood motif resounds over and over again, and interrupts the woman’s reflections upon the things she has seen, as musical projections of dismay and horror.

As with all opera-adaptations, – when it is essential to make clear how the motion picture can reveal the hidden visuality of the mere instrumental sections, (namely at the parts without human voice or words), or how it deals with the sound-painting of the descriptive music aspects –, the filmmaker who adapts Duke Bluebeards’s Castle must likewise decide what to do with the music of the micro-worlds reviewed above. Since Silló had come to the conclusion not to put the setting in a castle but in a theatre building instead, he did not convert the music’s inner/subjective or latent and larval visuality into an external/objective one. This way he could avoid a series of naive audio-visual pleonasms, (which, in all likelihood, – and not forgetting about schemes of thrillers and the detective films – would have been enormously ticklish). No jewellery, flowers or tears are seen on the screen, only the house of weapons makes its appearance in the form of actual war footage, and this might probably be appropriate. The image of jewels or flowers would turn external the music’s inner or subjective visuality (its undefined ‘objectness’ according to Lukács). It would set it into a more specified, more concrete, and therefore a more limited world, and consequently weaken it. (A musical hen or snake is always more interesting than a real one.)

Since opera is not simply instrumental music, but the genre of words as well, the film cannot treat itself as independent of the words that are audible in the opera, or in this case, of the sung performances at the door scenes. Therefore, if Judit is singing, „I see a tranquil, white lake”, but the camera shots an orchestra pit, there will occur a big gap between words and images. The viewer might think that the two protagonists are having a joke, and the story of their relationship is likewise only a big joke. If the fifth door concealing the duke’s kingdom flied open while we were being shown the auditorium of the theatre instead of silken meadows and velvet woods, an analogous incomprehension would be formulated. That is, the man and the woman would seem to be playing against reality, or simply rename the things we can also see. But that would already be another plot. Balázs was not after this, and Bartók’s powerful music clearly refuses to take on meaning in this manner.

The renaming of reality in the name of an ontological and epistemological game moreover makes the blood-motif devoid of meaning. It turns practically redundant in such a long musical texture like the sections from time measure 112 to 118, when Judit reveals her knowledge concerning the identity of those hiding behind the seventh door. The semitone conjoint interval of the blood motif becomes a modulation in this section, and the essential component of a musical section which leads us – with its drudging convulsion and emotional intensity – to the point when the Duke hands over the seventh key and the dénouement takes into force.

All this is inevitable and the obvious consequence of the already mentioned misconception according to which Silló had set the plot in a theatre building. We know what a theatre building is. It is surely not what the castle of Duke Bluebird should be like. Silló uses the full theatrical space for the development of the action. So Duke Bluebeard and Judit moves about freely from the vast spaces spreading from the proscenium’s back storey to the entrance hall. The placement of the doors is varied. While the first three doors are on the box line, by the fifth door we have made our way into the auditorium. The lake of tears mentioned above, accordingly the sixth door, is placed on the proscenium, right in front of the fireproof curtain. Judit is looking down from this place into depth of the orchestral trench. Her position can be obviously approached from the auditorium through the two side stairs, but it is unclear whether the theatre in question is equipped with these. I’m far from getting ironic, I’d only like to call attention to the fact that the real duration of the music does not provide enough time for covering so big distances, especially when there are dialogues and interaction between the protagonists in the meantime. (They have to nestle close to each other, the keys have to be handed and taken over.) The dividing of the action into scenes into scenes or cutting, both of which are essential expressive elements of any motion picture, are forced and non-spontaneous in this opera film.

It is due to the great distances and consequently to the forced nature of cutting and interpunctuation that we see the star-cloak – the piece of black veil – appear unexpectedly, or rather is produced out of the blue as if by magic. Once in the hands of the Duke Bluebeard he lays it over Judit’s head, that is to say, he initiates her into a queen – at least this is what the text of the mystery suggests. Those who are familiar with both the play and the opera would know that this veil is identical to the star-cloak. (It is not the substitution troubles me, the substitution of a veil for a cloak.) According to the libretto, the cloak is on the threshold of the treasury along with the crown and the jewels, and the Duke himself goes to pick them up and take them for Judit. Since the opera is set in the propylaeum of the Duke’s castle (from where the doors open), and from where the two protagonists do not move according to the orchestral score, the Duke theoretically has enough time to do all that. The accomplishment of this already poses numerous difficulties on the opera stage. The given amount of time is but four Largo-cadences. Given the spatial dimension of the filmic location this is something unachievable: there is simply not enough time to go back to the boxes where the treasury, the third door has been installed. Therefore the veil had to be kept with the Duke all the time, hidden under his costume. Hidden, since we have not seen it either on his shoulder or arm. The filmic version of the dénouement takes place, but altogether looses touch with the musical and dramatic processes, that is to say, its accomplishment is illusionary.

Now, one must ask the following question. Is it a necessity to set the cinematic version of the opera in a unified, continuous space? As far as I can see, the setting of the action in that hall with seven doors has its own inner logic. Bluebeard has nothing else to do, but satisfy Judit’s demand and hand over the keys before putting the jewellery on her. He remains stationery, and he is motionless in mental/spiritual terms too. He is not supposed to peep into the micro worlds hidden behind the doors (that is, he does not have to open his heart) because he knows what is there. His motionlessness is sombre and rich in extremities. By the way, certain elements of the text suggest that the Duke and the castle are consubstantial. We come to realise telluric forces working inside him. The Duke scarcely moves, and he surely does not wander around the theatre building. Similarly Judit cannot stroll off but keep on the route from one door to the next. Meanwhile, as I have already mentioned, he has some acting to do with the man. Bartók was having in mind the spatial attributes of an opera stage where the distances are not that great as in a theatrical building. Silló seems to have ignored all these. He submitted too much to his hunger for camera-work and to the potential of editing, but on this he got more distant from the Bartókian work than intended.

The resilient Bluebeard, who has been rambling all over the place climbs up directly on the stage-loft’s long ladder toward a white light spot in the last sequence. This is evident, because he always declares ‘night’ whenever he beholds light. Later the light is somehow blocked out (perhaps with the body of the Duke himself?), and then indeed the screen is plunged into complete darkness.

Silló had the protagonists perform to the previously completed sound recording. It’s easy to notice, even if one is not expert in music that he singers are not actually singing. We might know based on everyday experiences or having watched enough television programmes and films that singing the vocal score of an opera requires bodily expenditure of energy. The jugular veins bulge out, and not only the oral cavity but also the whole body perform special movements while articulating the words. Forming and training the opera singing voice require special technical tricks. Silló does not risk to confront the viewer with he sight of a de facto singing singer, and he is not the only film director among those who adapt operas for the screen. However, cinema in relation to our way of perception does not endure this: opera-films presenting really singing singers are more authentic.

Backing out from this authenticity might have crucial because Silló had sometimes committed his singers to act through mimicry (designed for prosaical actors). This ambition can be observed especially in the case of close-ups. Yet, the two singers are inexperienced on this field. They are dwelling on no man’s land in esthetical terms: they are not being allowed to play their roles as opera singers (which they are), and understandably they are not capable of acting as prosaic actors (which they are not). Their instability permeates even into the most hidden texture of the filmic version. Their filmic presence grows pale and becomes insignificant. Thus both the mystery and the drama turn into ‘light and airy’.

Sándor Silló shot his film in black and white except the very first and the very last shots that are not part of the opera and show a square of a town mixed together with the sound of traffic. The story, presented in black and white of an actor and an actress who are actually pretending/acting that they recite the Duke Bluebeard while singing neatly and hanging about in a theatre building, and thus they are allowed to call things otherwise than usually, – well, this story is breezy and graceful. It is lyrical poetry instead of a drama, and it’s by no means a mystery play. The „colourless” film lets us undertake a nostalgic journey in film history. Camera positions, lighting effects evoke the past, and both István Kovács and Klára Kolonits’s face revive the memory of silent film heroes’ physiognomy.

Calling the abandoned and deserted periods of film history to mind wraps this motion picture in a peculiar light. Our interest might be raised by three factual things brought in line with each other only by force. The first one raises doubt how much had Bartók noticed the coming about of the new art. The second one is that Adorno, who had made his own private place in film aesthetics, was preoccupied with this opera at the time of its Frankfurt premiere in 1922. The third thing is that the first cinema book by Béla Balázs was published in 1924. These three threads seem to have been interwoven in this black and white movie. Is it by accident? Or predestined? Only the director knows.

(Translated by Zsolt Győri and Gábor Kis)