nin-chan

There is a thin line between melancholy and mawkishness, and the best directors know that this gossamer thread must be handled with extreme delicacy. This movie played hopscotch across this boundary multiple times. Lean, like De Sica, is a man of capacious spirit and broad passions. As such, he is not especially good with nuances. The question to ask when you watch his films is: to which end of the spectrum does the film incline? What a polar director- good and bad range along opposite sides of the gulf. "Summertime", to my mind, is a far superior film, though much of that can be attributed to Lean's exuberant use of color and Hepburn's shattering fragility. This, in comparison, is a cloying, pseudo-Woolfian melodrama without Woolf's surfeit of ideas.

Despite P&P's insistence that the Tales of Hoffmann was 'made in England', it is clear that their obsessions are continental in nature. Clear parallels can be drawn to Thomas Mann, whose 'Tonio Kroger', 'Death In Venice' and 'Doktor Faustus' all probe the Nietzschean-Freudian intersection between art and death, as well as the work of Georges Bataille, the premier French theorist of excess and expenditure. Bataille's appropriation of Freud, alloying Freud's mature work with Nietzsche and Maussian anthropology, sought to merge the Eros-Thanatos couple: at its fullest intensity, life is indiscernible from death. This is the sovereign principle of a Bataillean ethics- dedicate yourself to the immediate, for the eternal resides in the instantaneous. For Bataille, as for Nietzsche, nature is inherently unconcerned with conservation and duration, all-too-human provisions for the future- energy desires to vent and spend itself, beauty desires to flaunt itself in all of its naked splendor.

Tales of Hoffmann is effectively a companion piece to The Red Shoes, extrapolating some of the central concerns of said film- passion is a sickness, an entropic force that marks the lover for death. This is not because the lover has some sort of congenital debility, some biological lack, far from it- desire, insatiable and voracious, suffuses the lover with an abundance of life, the intensity of which cannot be contained in the lived body. This violent, lacerating urge, the fullest possible expression of life, is truly beyond good and evil, transcending the strictures of polite society in favor of recklessness and abandon.

This is the source of P&P's somewhat mechanistic fatalism. Humanistic trifles such as 'free will' are jettisoned in lieu of an unflinching Lacanianism: at the core of humanity is a monstrous, inhuman energy that overrules any conscious attempts to contain or domesticate it. This is the lesson learnt from P&P's transposition of Hoffmann's classic 'Der Sandman'- Hoffmann is scarcely less of an automaton than Olympia. As an extension of The Red Shoes, the final tale is perhaps the most beautiful of the film's formidable troika: the final set piece is a delirium-inducing, shattering crescendo to the proceedings. I don't know anything about P&P's biographies or their working lives, but they seem intensely interested in Mann's idea of creativity as a faustian curse, a consumptive disease that places the artist outside the pale of 'healthy' society.

Formally, the film is a consummate masterpiece, its wantonness commensurate to its content - the sheer gratuitousness of the spectacle reminds one of Max Ophuls' "Lola Montes" and Fellini's "Satyricon". It is all very beautiful, and the colors are all very hypnotic, but the film remains profoundly disturbing- the pleasure I derive from watching this film is directly proportional to the horror I feel when Antonia hits her final note...

Teshigahara has never shied away from examining the more unsettling dimensions of human experience. With the trilogy of full-length collaborations with Kobo Abe, Teshigahara encapsulated the Kafkaesque hellishness of quotidian life, the yawning, gaping chasm of emptiness that lies beneath the veneer of stability.

The ubiquitous influence of the French absurdists/existentialists, Kafka and Dostoevsky looms large here- one is reminded most often of Sartre's "No Exit", R.D. Laing's "Knots" and Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment". Sartre, Laing and Abe all underline how little autonomy we really have over constituting our own identities- often, we may find that we exist only as beings-for-others, entirely 'encrusted' within personas not of our own making, but assigned to us. For Okuyama and the unnamed scarred woman, they are imprisoned in their vulgar corporeality. Met with revulsion everywhere, they come to accept ugliness as an indelible mark of their being. Trapped within the oppressive confines of flesh, they cannot evade the pity and repugnance that their countenances arouse. It is little wonder that Okuyama becomes self-lacerating and embittered.

Throughout the film, the viewer confronts how precarious identity truly is- the assumption that selves are continuous and linear from day-to-day rests entirely on the visage. The doctor's paroxysm of inspiration in the beer hall affords a glimpse into the anarchic potential of his terrible invention, one that would rend civilization asunder. Indeed, the final epiphany is particularly unnerving- "some masks come off, some don't". We all erect facades, smokescreens of self that we maintain with great effort.

Beneath the epidermis, as Okuyama discovers, is vacuity and nihility. This is likely the explanation for Okuyama's gratuitous, Raskolnikov-esquire acts of crime at the conclusion of the film- faced with the frontierless void of freedom, he desires to be apprehended and branded by society. Integration into society, after all, requires a socially-assigned, unified role, constituted by drivers licenses, serial numbers and criminal records. Without such things, Okuyama is a non-entity.

Aesthetically, the film exhibits all the rigour and poetry of Teshigahara's other work. Cocteau, Ernst and Duchamp, in particular, are notable wellsprings for the film's visual grammar. Literate, expressionistic and profoundly disorienting, this might be my favorite Teshigahara work.