Review: Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann on Criterion Blu-ray

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann is the final masterpiece of the filmmaking duo’s imperial phase, which began in earnest with their ambivalently patriotic wartime works 49th Parallel and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and continued through increasingly abstract films that reckoned with the tolls of World War II. The Tales of Hoffmann, an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s episodic opera fantastique that itself cobbled together some short stories by German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann, finds the Archers completely removed from themes of national and psychological rumination and throwing themselves into the pure visual ecstasy that they had perfected over the preceding decade. Narrowly glued together by a fictionalized Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville), these tales are excuses for nothing more than grounding for some of the most inventive musical sequences ever filmed.

In each tale, Hoffmann is the central character, falling for a woman who is doomed, a temptress, or, as in the segment where an animatronic doll (played by Moira Shearer) wins his love before being dismantled by her maker, both. The initial impression of the film’s women is a dated one, each winning and then breaking Hoffmann’s heart, but the subtle emphasis on the way in which these women are always the playthings of men seeking to hurt the protagonist hints at the filmmakers’ enduring sympathy for their female characters.

The stories are mere pretense, however, for an extended experiment on cinematizing the medium of opera. The Archers had of course tackled the realm of musical theater before with The Red Shoes, which dove into its protagonist’s perspective to depict artistry as a primal existential urge. In that film, the stage slowly dissolves to reveal the emotional and mental landscape that a dancer traverses after she gets lost in her creative process. Yet this film, which remains far more rooted to the stage as a malleable location and all the techniques and craftsmanship of traditional theater, may be an even more radical work of formal daring.

The production design draws from a long history of using two-dimensional constructions of paper and other materials as cheap and easily moved backdrops, but it’s rendered in modernistic, avant-garde ways. The two-dimensional, skeletal outlines of false walls and other means of blocking off space are shot at angles to open up the three-dimensional space between them. Like the sculptures of Alexander Calder, it’s precisely the void between objects that becomes the composed shape. An elaborate bricolage of curling, Gothic shapes and shadows are placed in the foreground in ways that come to resemble the cut-out animations of Lotte Reiniger, creating thickets of interlacing lines that lend a claustrophobic charge to scenes of complex dance choreography or melodramatic singing.

Throughout The Tales of Hoffmann, the jolts of color are so vivid that even the normal splendor of musical theater and opera comes to seem tame by comparison. The living doll segment sees the stage enshrouded by curtains of a deep mustard yellow, and a harp’s strings rise from the instrument all the way out of frame presumably to the stage’s rafters. A middle section, predicated on Hoffmann having his own shadow stolen from him, is suitably plunged into dark shades of twilight purple and ashen grays, and a gondola floats through silhouetted figures like Charon sailing the river Styx. Superimpositions and other in-camera techniques abound, adding additional complexity to already dense choreography and blocking.

Though lacking the thematic depth that characterized the Archers’ earlier work, The Tales of Hoffmann ranks among their finest triumphs for its purely aesthetic self-justification. If The Red Shoes suggested that cinema transcended the limits of earlier art forms, this film finds a synthesis of old and new that honors previous traditions while remaking them into something new and bold. Cinema here is not the usurping Young Turk of the art world but a long-missing element that unifies every other medium into an all-encompassing Art.

Image/Sound

At long last porting the 2015 4K restoration by the Film Foundation and the BFI National Archive to video, the Criterion Collection’s presentation of The Tales of Hoffmann predictably obliterates the one on the boutique label’s 2005 DVD edition. Colors are well-saturated and at times almost explosive, especially those yellow curtains. Flesh tones show off the exaggerated makeup used on every cast member, with each layer of pancaked white tones visible under streaks of red, blue, and seemingly every other hue in the rainbow. The ample use of shadow never results in crushing artifacts, and the exaggerated artificiality of the production design is heightened by the added clarity of brush strokes on painted skies and other backdrops. The musical score dominates the soundtrack and even at its most brassy and blaring never bleeds into distortion, with each singer’s voice always ringing clearly.

Extras

Martin Scorsese and film historian Bruce Eder contribute a commentary track that doesn’t lack for insight. Scorsese is, as ever, an energetic speaker, particularly on the topic of one of his favorite films, and he also supplies ample breakdown of many of the Archers’ formal techniques. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a 1955 short film by Michael Powell made for German television and cut down to 13 minutes from its original 30, is also included. A gun-for-hire project, the short isn’t a showcase for the director, but it did reunite him with several crew members from The Tales of Hoffmann. Elsewhere, we get an appreciation by the late horror maestro George A. Romero, who charmingly recounts a youth spent renting the same library print of the film over and over and finding himself in competition for the reels with another New York cinephile who turned out to be none other than a teenaged Scorsese. The disc is rounded out with galleries of stills and storyboards by production designer Hein Heckroth. A booklet essay by historian Ian Christie argues that both Offenbach’s original opera and the Archers’ treatment of it are radical achievements in the history of opera, and that the film advances cinema while paying tribute to the medium’s artistic antecedents.

Overall

The Archers’ last great collaborative work gets a stunning and long-overdue high-definition upgrade from the Criterion Collection.