Think Pink!
It may still be officially suppressed, but Ken Russell’s BBC profile of Richard Strauss, Dance of the Seven Veils, has sneaked out of its archival prison, in a faded pink print. Read all about it — why is Strauss a caveman? — at The Auteur’s Notebook in this week’s The Forgotten.
shadowplay 
November 27, 2009 at 10:43 am
OH…MY…GOD!
November 27, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Indeed.
November 27, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Now I’ve got over the shock…what amazing news!
Typical that poor old Ken Russell should get in trouble for daring to tell the truth. According to any sources I’ve read, Richard Strauss was a raging Nazi and a close buddy of Goebbels. Now his family would like to pretend it never happened.
When the emigre writer Klaus Mann visited Strauss after the war, all he had to say was: “Herr Goebbels was a highly cultivated man who showed great appreciation for my music.” What a loathsome individual – and his relatives sound worse.
November 27, 2009 at 3:32 pm
My dear late friend Warren Sonbert made exquiste silent 16mm films — all exercise in pure montage. he did have one idea for a more conventioanl feature. it would have been about the premier of Strauss’ oper Cappricio. Warren was a great opera buff. He reviewed opera in San Francsco for the “Bay Area Reporter” under the pen name of (wait for it)
“Scottie Fergueson”
He adored thr 1956 version of The Man Who Knw Too Much and his Capprico film would have been a hommage to the cliamx of that great Hitchcock. He found it all so fascinating: “Here’s an opera all about people wondering about which comes first — the word ot the musci — and the theater is filled with S.S. officers with the world coming apart at the seams!”
Alas Warren died of AIDS before he got so much as a shot at doing this.
His name pops up a lot lately as he was a major boyfriend of Jerome Robbins.
November 27, 2009 at 6:15 pm
There is a brief mention by Thomas Mann in one of his mid-30s diary entries concerning Strauss’s flirtation with the Nazis. But, as we all know (especially David E. in his frequent responses to the artistic value of BIRTH OF A NATION), the usual response is that art has nothing to do with politics. Russell’s film rebuts this and presents this musical auteur as a sleazy opportunist. Also, the actor who played Hitler also portrayed him in a three part BBC TV series dealing with three 30s dictators at earkier stages of their lives with the future “Great Leader” creating hell in a Russian Orthodox monastery while training to be a priest!
November 27, 2009 at 7:03 pm
How heavily policed is wikipedia? Because the entry on Strauss seems to soft-pedal everything about his Nazi connections. But even there they can’t totally deny everything. Russell is actually quite fair in that he admits Strauss was concerned about his Jewish relatives by marriage, and that he went off the Nazis. But the fact that he gives Herr Strauss a co-screenplay credit suggests that the anti-semitic speeches in the narration are direct from the historical record.
Kenneth Colley was a Ken Russell favourite, playing not only Hitler but also supporting roles in The Music Lovers and The Devils.
“In one year, I worked with Clint Eastwood, Gregory Peck, and David Prowse. I got a crick in my neck from always looking up toward the stars!”
November 27, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Heh, I also watched Seven Veils this week and noticed the very forgiving Wikipedia article. How’d you remove the timecode from the screenshots on Auteurs? They don’t look cropped, so I guess it was faked and blurred in Photoshop?
Funny, I saw Warren Sonbert’s name only yesterday, thanked in the credits of a short by Jeff Scher. I’d never heard of Scher before this week – amazing work. Looks like he prints old musical film shorts upon colorful patterned paper, each frame a different design, like watching a b/w movie through a kaleidoscope.
November 27, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Yeah, I just smeared the timecode.
Scher sounds amazing, I’m just off to see what I can find.
November 27, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Your title somehow gives me visions of Kay Thompson doffing veils …
I’m a fan of Richard Strauss, despite the dubious politics, and even of “Capriccio” — although I prefer “Rosenkavalier” and “Ariadne” and “Elektra” among the operas. Here’s Renee Fleming performing the finale of “Capriccio”:
I think my favorite absurd moment — included in this selection — is when the heroine asks herself “Now, Madeleine, what says your *heart*?” As if the heart were the only organ being endangered at the time of this opera’s premiere.
Stan Kenton used to perform a piece called “Artistry In Rhythm.” Perhaps “Capriccio” might be known as “Artistry In Solipsism.”
November 28, 2009 at 12:00 am
Thanks for the link. I like what the Apollo astronauts called “the theme from 2001” but I’m not knowledgeable about Strauss generally. What I’m wondering is if Ken Russell’s political side comes out in many other films. I’m very conscious of it in The Devils, and his Elgar piece, but it seems less detectable in his later work.
November 28, 2009 at 1:50 am
Jeff was a student of Warren’s. He has a continuing gig making quite interesting videos for the NYT online.
November 28, 2009 at 1:55 am
Here’s a pretty good introductory piece on Warren His first film Amphetamine (1966) features a hommage to Vertigo
via a 360 degree pan. Only instead of Jimmy and Kim, it’s two kiss kissing very long and very hard — and the shot is hand-held. One of them was the boyfriend of Tony Bakeland — of Savage Grace infamy. I knw him as well. Quite a hot number. (The boyfriend, not Tony — who was a very cold fish.)
November 28, 2009 at 5:00 am
Speaking as a contributor to Wikipedia, articles are subject to scrutiny and change by the readers who wish to add something. What raises attention is lack of citations and references. The rest is interpretation. So the piece on Strauss you are reading may have been less forgiving a month or year ago and more charitable now. If you have the information and the sources you can swing the pendulum back.
A good example is the Citizen Kane page where they printed that story about Pauline Kael’s claim that Mankiewicz was the real genius of that movie. I added sources from Robert Carringer and James Naremore that showed that Welles did more than Mankiewicz did and even cited Bernard Herrmann’s anger at the book(though more for the assumptions Kael made of his music) to disprove it. Now the piece has been changed to something of a defence of Pauline Kael or Mankiewicz. I must have made someone very mad for exposing that fraud.
November 28, 2009 at 11:36 am
Amazing the Kane Mutiny still goes on, but then it’s tied up in people’s feeling about auteurism and the underrated screenwriter. Which I do sympathize with (as an occasional director, it seems only decent to embrace anything taking the mickey out of the job), but a glance at Mank’s credits should be enough to settle this one: even if he wrote every word, one would have to credit Welles with allowing him access to a project with this level of ambition. And in fact, the evidence of Welles’s authorial contribution is well established.
Since Welles was a writer/director, it seems foolish to use him as a test case in the authorship debate.
November 29, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Well the American cultural media have this huge grudge against Welles. At Dave Kehr’s blog there is this debate on the fact that all the movies about Welles(and there are now an equal number of fictional portrayals to the number of films made by Welles in his career, an irony worthy of the auteur of F For Fake) and even among reviewers it’s always that Welles “started from the top and worked his way down”(which was Welles’ own self-deprecating claim).
Mankiewicz of course contributed to Citizen Kane but mainly in his function as ex-moocher at Heart’s San Simeon eager to rage against the circle from whenst he was cast out. Welles was interested in something else. At the end of the day, without Citizen Kane, Welles had a groundbreaking career in theatre and radio and his non-Kane films are incredibly beautiful and innovative if less widely seen. Without Citizen Kane, well Herman J. would be Joseph L.’s alcoholic self-destructive big brother and the screenwriter of Christmas Holiday.
I don’t see any point in “debating” auteurism. Tag Galagher pointed out that it was because of auteurism that people are bothering with screenwriters of little known films when otherwise it would concentrate on self-promoters of the likes of William Goldman(and which of the films he wrote is a masterpiece?) and the producers. By focusing on directors, critics made awareness of the director’s frequent collaborators – the DPs, the Art Director, the Soundman, the Music Composer and screenwriters and actually made them even more well known. So auteurism has actually had the effect of raising awareness of a true collaborative medium rather than obsessing on directors. What have screenwriter-centered pundits have against that legacy – Pauline Kael’s obsessive fixation on “trash” and sexy moments in movies?
November 29, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Since the director is the only person in a position to coordinate all the creative elements of a film, only the director can make a film a work of art, unless you get very lucky indeed. So for true cinematic art, I’m on the side of the director.
I do respect good writing, which Herman Mankiewicz produced on several occasions (and let’s not forget Bernstein’s monologue in Kane), and I think it’s a shame when reviewers attribute ideas to directors which are often the work of the writer. It can be hard to know who did what in a film, but assuming the director deserves credit for every plot turn or character moment is excessive.
William Goldman wrote at least one film which WOULD be great if the direction were stronger: The Princess Bride is a near-perfect script, beautifully cast, but rather slackly shot and colourlessly designed. A bunch of his other scripts are very good. And it seems a shame he’s had to self-promote as hard as all that to be known at all: how many other screenwriters from the 70s are remotely famous? And even then, his self-promotion pales besides that of your average feature director.
November 29, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Paul Schrader attained a lot of visibility but then he became a director. But his fame rested on the fact that he wrote Taxi Driver which in many interviews is acknowledged to being semi-autobiographical(or what Paul says could have happened to him had he remained in depression. Poor man!). In that case, the screenwriter, the composer and the cast are great talents, you would think that it wouldn’t need “directing”, yet it’s now an immortal landmark of American cinema and 60 to 70% is down to the guy who directed it. Schrader later said that if he had made it, it would not have been as sensual as Scorsese made the film, it would have been sparser and the climax would have been anti-realistic with over-the-top displays of blood all over the place. He used this argument to admit he wasn’t ready then to direct a movie.
There are plenty of cases where a film is a total “accident” and when otherwise talented directors are completely dissolved and unrecognizable. Like Billy Wilder’s The Spirit of St. Louis or in the case of Robert Rossen’s late films when a journeyman metteur-en-scene suddenly evolves into an auteur with a strong personal investment in the films he makes.
A great argument for screenwriters would be the career of Jean Gruault. He worked with Truffaut, Rivette, Resnais and Roberto Rossellini. The film that is considered by some to be his masterpiece, La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV was a Rivette project but he was totally strained after La Religieuse and told Gruault that he wasn’t going to make it. The producers than shopped around and Rossellini came on board. Rossellini was bummed after some films he tried to get off didn’t come off and he wasn’t initially interesting in, “this fucking Sun King”(his words). But Gruault’s preperation and his screenplay was so powerful that Rossellini came on board, he provided the structure and clarity that Rossellini was lacking for his other films. And yet the final film has a strong cohesive personal vision that’s Rossellini’s(despite some second unit work of a hunting scene done when Roberto left the set because Isabella had surgery).