Actors, Reenactors and Just People Being

Downton Abbey cast

            Aside from the fact that it is a really appealing, well-acted high-class soap opera, why does everyone love Downton Abbey so much? My guess is that it takes to another time, and a whole group of people we have come to know, who dress and behave somewhat differently than we do now (but not too much).  That’s the appeal of any “period piece” novel, movie or TV show, and there’s a lot of entertainment in imagining ourselves living in a different time (and that’s true of future imaginings, too).

            But since we live in the context of now—all our cultural, scientific, political, linguistic and social structure—and odors, too, or lack of them--and because each of us looks out on the world through our own perceptions and experiences, we can’t really know what it was like to live then.

            Re-enactors are groups who try as best they can to inhabit some other time: the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Old West. They are all over the United States, and their reenactments, some public, others private for their own members, strive in varying degree for authenticity.  One of the most knowledgeable and serious, who blogs under the name of “Historical Ken” has clearly defined the various degrees of strived-for authenticity:

“MAINSTREAMERS - use general-line clothing and accessories from sutler-row and usually exhibit a "this is only a hobby" mentality. Mainstreamers are generally accurate in their outward presentations.

PROGRESSIVES – are reenactors that reach the stage when they begin making an all out effort (within the limits of their finances) to get things as right as possible. They'll usually have an increased interest in doing Living History, and a 1^st Person mentality prevails.

HARDCORE - This is the big leagues where complete immersion is the goal. Finances be d***ed, there are no excuses to be made at this level. Do it right or don't do it.

And just for the sake of completeness, FARBS  are reenactors who spend relatively little of their time or money maintaining authenticity with regard to clothing, accessories, or even period behavior. The 'Good Enough' attitude is pervasive among farbs, although even casual observers may be able to point out flaws.”

If you have an interest in reenactments, I heartily recommend Ken’s website and all of his links.  It will introduce many readers to a fascinating subculture. They commemorate all sorts of events, with authenticity varying among Ken’s categories.

Dawn at the Alamo - 2013 reenactment

 Probably the most accessible reenactment to this writer is the yearly “Dawn at the Alamo,” staged annually by the San Antonio Living History Association to commemorate the fall of Texians defending themselves within the old mission and their Mexican besiegers on March 6, 1836.  I don’t know how Ken would rate it, but I suspect that the local association achieves the level of PROGRESSIVE.  It literally begins before sunrise on March 6, as did the actual siege.  Of course, everything around the Alamo is different now—even the façade of the mission itself—and there are plenty of floodlights, which I’m sure neither the Texians nor Mexicans had.

"Deadwood" Saloon Girl

Real Deadwood Saloon Girl

The most obvious reenactors we see are in movies and television.  The amount of authenticity for which they strive varies.  Grade “B” westerns of the 1940’s and ‘50’s are at best MAINSTREAMERS, or at worst, FARBS.  Even if they get their Western gear reasonably correct, their hairstyles, and, for the women, lack of corsets, give them away.  The other extreme, originating with Sergio Leone and still continuing (think Deadwood) is stylish scuzzy chic.  Corsets get lots of ribbons now, but a comparison of a saloon girl from the show Deadwood and a real one from the real Deadwood is quite eye opening.

We even have “Progressive Baroque”: films like Gangs of New York and TV series like Copper, where history becomes stylized by exaggeration (think Daniel Day Lewis with a very tall stove-pipe hat and his invented, intriguing but hardly authentic accent). I know that in the nineteenth century, the Five Points area of New York was a really sordid place, but it wasn’t on such a grand scale, accompanied by such thunderous music.

 

Daniel Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher

There are, of course HARDCORE Reenactor films.  The one that comes to my mind is Lucchino Visconti’s film Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.  Released in 1963, it evokes life in Sicily, particularly among the waning aristocracy, of a century before.  One of the most fascinating things about it is that you can accept it as an evocation of the 1860’s, so carefully is the period researched and presented, so much so that there is almost nothing to give the viewer a clue of when it was actually made.  Visconti was known as a stickler for authenticity, and in an interview, Claudia Cardinale relates that the corset she wore was so tight that it left a bloody ring around her waist at the end of the day.  A quick look at the IMDB website will also inform you that everyone was authentic right down to their underwear and handkerchiefs, even when viewer’s couldn’t see it.  Visconti even got descendants of Sicilian aristocrats to play their great-grandparents in the ball scenes.

"Il Gattopardo" with real aristocrats

Ah, but underneath all of this, there are still modern choices.  I assume that the actors could use modern bathrooms.  Much of the mood was accomplished by powerful stage lighting—even when candles were used within the scenes themselves.  The extended and beautiful sequence of the Cardinale character playing hide and seek with the Delon character through many seemingly interconnected, deserted palace rooms was filmed in an amalgam of three dusty attics in three separate Roman villas.  So there was a great deal of artifice used to take us into this time-warp

We want to lose ourselves in those long-ago worlds, and so do we really care that Daniel Craig’s progressively worn-down (yet elegant) leather jacket that he wore as he saved Jews and bumped off Nazis in the film Defiance, was actually made up of thirteen identical leather jackets, increasingly distressed in the wardrobe department, as the narrative spun out?  PROGRESSIVE, perhaps, but not HARD CORE.  Also, the real Tuvia Bielski wasn’t bad-looking, but nowhere near as cute as Daniel Craig.

Tuvia Bielski

 

Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski

 Maybe the closest we can get to an actual experience of What It Was Like Then is not through Reenactors, but through Enactors.  The series Apocalypse World War I produced by the French team of Isabelle Clarke, Daniel Costelle  and Lois Vaudeville (C C & C company), culling from three hundred hours of archival film footage, brings us into direct confrontation with that conflict in the most vivid way. First shown on French television in 2014, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary this war’s outbreak, it is currently playing on The National Geographic and American Heroes’ channels. 

            It took C C & C five years (one year more than the actual war) to produce their five-part series.  We are used to seeing silent film blurry and much faster-moving than normal.  Technicians got the film to proper speed, restored sharpness to the images, added color, background sounds, music and a narration.  The colorization is very discreet (the technicians call it “texturization”), and I’ve included a link below as to how the firm carried out their restoration.  Musical background is there, but quiet, and the net effect is more of an added sound effect than a dramatic element, as it is so often in contemporary film, and sound effects aren’t amplified to movie-level hysteria.

I realize that all of this is manipulation, but the result is eerily current. Czar Nicholas II, Emperor Franz Joseph and Kaiser Wilhelm II seem so alive that you could swear that if you opened your front door you would see them walking by.  More poignant are the soldiers of so many nationalities, struggling through trenches full of mud, working various weapons, marching endlessly, sometimes being killed (more often as so many corpses, though the editors have spared us severed body parts and spattered guts).  Every looks very, very ordinary: no fancy lighting, capped teeth or filters hiding bad complexions.  They hunt and remove lice, use latrines, smoke incessantly and eat. Marshal Von Hindenburg waddles like a duck, King George V is quite short, and General Pershing scratches his nose.  Facial expressions become vivid; I never realized how expressive Woodrow Wilson’s eyes were—we think of him as so stony--or the Grand Duchess Anastasia rolling her eyes during a solemn procession.

 

Enactors, "Apocalypse:World War I"

            The narration is in present tense, and this adds to the sense of immediacy.  The result is something very close to contemporary war footage seen on the nightly news; the main difference seems to be that since present-day nutrition is so much better, soldiers are taller now. Even stills from the program come to life more than mere photographs.  Maybe it’s because a still is part of a longer sequence, so there appears to be less stability in the poses of figures.

            So though even though a lot of work went into this production, there is an eerie feeling of reality to Apocalypse, World War I.  What’s missing, thank goodness, are the smells, all of the unthinkable stink of war, death, decay, detritus, diarrhea, body odors.  Thank goodness for that!  We want to watch the war unfold, but not wallow in it. Even enactment beyond HARD CORE has its limits!

-------------------------------------------------------------

For a lot of information about reenactors and reenacting, with terrific links, see:(http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2012/05/extreme-reenacting.html)

For some of the technical information about the making of "Apocalypse, World War I:(http://tvo.org/program/204263/apocalypse-world-war-one)

50 Shades of Bluebeard

         Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and Bluebeard, Part 2

                                    50 Shades of Bluebeard

            In my last post, I mentioned being pleasantly freaked out by a radio broadcast of the Bluebeard story on the “Let’s Pretend” radio show when I was a kid.  The young actors kept pretty close to the classic version of the story, which originated with Charles Perrault in the 17^th century.

            The short story is online and easily read. Briefly it’s the tale of a very wealthy serial wife killer with a blue beard, out hunting for a new spouse.  His modus operandi is always the same and always works: he offers his newest wife a bunch of keys, and she is invited to use them to explore the treasures in the castle’s various rooms, except for the room opened by the golden key, which is forbidden.  Naturally the new wife goes right for the forbidden door, opens it, and finds the bodies of the dead former wives within.  She is, of course confronted by Bluebeard, who kills her too, and throws her body with the others.  Perrault’s unnamed protagonist, who turns out to be his last wife, turns the tables with the aid of her sister Anne and her soldier-brothers, who rescue her in the nick of time. Bluebeard is slain, and she inherits his entire fortune.

            The popularity of this story persisted for centuries.  The folklorist Heidi Anne Heiner has found enough variations of the story to write an 800-page volume about them, but she has pointed out that its popularity had begun to fade around the middle of the 20^th century, except in Perrault’s home country, France.

            This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have lost our fascination with serial killers, but the idea of anyone being so naïve as to fall for the key game now seems pretty far-fetched.  I don’t think that a guy having a blue beard is even that weird now, given contemporary styles; as a matter of fact, it’s possible that a millionaire who was punk enough to dye his beard blue would be a kinky enticement! Perrault’s story seems to be in the tradition of the weak female easily tempted, like Pandora and Eve. But in reality who, male or female, could really resist the temptation to do something they shouldn’t, particularly if the key is in their hands to do it? 

            Actually though, Perrault really only supplies us with a template that can be modified and updated in many ways.  Only two of his characters have names: Bluebeard and the heroine’s sister Anne.  Never is it stated how many dead victims were in that forbidden room, or how many keys there were, or an inventory of the treasures behind the permitted doors besides general specifications of gold, silver, furniture and jewels in vast abundance. And except for a mention that the current wife is attractive, the reader doesn’t know if she is older or young, curious but, in the end, cleverer and luckier than those who came before.

Breillat's Barbe-Bleu and his Child Bride

            The reason that the Bluebeard story has survived at all is probably for its shiver factor—as the heroine goes for the forbidden door, we want to scream “Don’t GO there” in the same way we want to tell those teenagers not go into that derelict house full of Vampires, Zombies or Terrible Slashers.  But of course they always do.

            “Let’s Pretend’s” version followed the Perrault line and it succeeded—I think because it was aimed at children, and radio allowed for a lot of shivery imagination,

For tender ears, they did change one thing in the story: the wives in the forbidden room were still alive.  This meant that Bluebeard was merely a polygamist, who mistreated his wives.  In this version, the latest wife, named Fatima, liberates them all.

            A recent film that followed Perrault’s story line to a T, was Catherine Breillat’s 2009 Barbe Bleue , perhaps proving Heidi Anne Heiner’s contention of its continuing popularity in France.  But Breillat’s version encloses the story within a contemporary shell of two little girls reading the tale in an attic, and one of these dies at the end from a fall.  By making the Bluebeard heroine, here called Marie-Catherine into a flat-chested pre-adolescent, she also adds a possibility of potential of underage, if marital sex to the mix, even if Bluebeard was supposed to wait until she grew up some before consummation.  If this was the case, why did he give the keys to a child-bride?  It thus adds potential child-murder to the mix (and child death does occur in the shell story).  There is some suggestion that the whole Bluebeard story is being imagined through the eyes of the two young girls who read it, but I can personally say that listening to “Let’s Pretend” as a kid certainly didn’t make me interpret it that way.  Disney, I’m sorry to say, would have done a much better job, even if they animated the keys and added songs.

Ulmer's Bluebeard

            Sometimes the story is lost altogether, the name “Bluebeard” simply folded into a serial-killer horror film, as in the case of the 1944 movie directed by my favorite B-film maker, Edgar Ulmer.  Here, long-faced John Carradine plays the demented murderer, with no castle, and no beard either, just an artist’s studio. 

Burton and Heatherton

            Sometimes the story is a pretext for S & M.  A skidding Richard Burton made an abysmal version of the story in 1972 with sexy icons of the day Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi and Joey Heatherton, updated to the 1930’s, where the villain, who does have a blue beard, is an Austrian Nazi Baron.  He keeps his dead wives in a basement freezer.  The story is told to his present victim in flashback of the death of his earlier spouses with a lot of bare bosoms and tortures. It was a box-office bomb. ‘Nuf said.

            

And sometimes the name “Bluebeard” can be the metaphor for a person’s apparent and real inner nature.  In Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful novel, Bluebeard is Rabo Karabekian, a failed abstract expressionist painter, whose entire oeuvre in that style was done with a house paint called “sateen duralux” that eventually fell off all his canvasses. He has no beard, and just one eye, the other one a World War II casualty. But his real talent is elsewhere, in a monumental 512 square foot painting that he keeps hidden in an old potato barn, closed by 6 locks.  And there is a curious lady, the incomparable millionaires writer Circe Berman, wants to go in there.  To her he says “I am Bluebeard and my studio is my forbidden chamber as far as you’re concerned.” But she finally persuades him to let her in there—and she gets to go home.  In this case, the revelation is his, and it’s a liberating one.  It’s one of my favorite novels

            Unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the original novella remains the best version, the bluebeard story lends itself to really interesting riffs—particularly in the stylized realm of opera.  Maybe the most unconventional was written as a play by Maurice Maeterlinck in 1899 and transformed into an opera by Paul Dukas in 1907.  In this version, Bluebeard is already  hated by the peasants of his estate; they are well aware of the disappearing wives (here there were five).  His latest wife, Ariane is fully aware of Bluebeard’s unsavory history, and has a plan of action.  Leaving her maid to explore the five chambers filled with fabulous jewels (entire rooms of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, etc., and cutting through the sixth, which contains diamonds, she cuts to the chase and opens the forbidden seventh portal.  There she finds Bluebeard’s wives, imprisoned but alive.  Bluebeard comes in and tries to subdue her, but she is undaunted, and the only thing he can do is lock her in with the others.

Ariane comforts Bluebeard with rescued wives

            Ariane figures out an escape route, and leads all of the girls out back to the main part of the castle, where she dresses them up and drapes them with the jewels from the other chambers.  Meanwhile, the peasants have formed a lynch mob, capture Bluebeard, and bring him back to the castle for hanging. Ariane persuades them to hand Bluebeard over to her.  She unties them, and leaves him with the other restored wives in polygamous happiness; they don’t want to leave and are content to care for him.  She, on the other hand, leaves (and presumably gets a divorce).

            Austin B. Caswell, who analyzed the opera, considers Ariane an early feminist, and credits Dukas for the transformation of the heroine into a more active protagonist from her somewhat less assertive figure in the Maeterlinck story.  But what is really unusual about this treatment is that it is all about the wives; Bluebeard himself barely appears.  Maybe this is why the opera has had revivals in the last decade or so.

            The version of the Bluebeard story that perhaps still resonates best, precisely because of its potential ambiguity, is Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.  Written in 1911, it was first performed in 1918.  Barely an hour long, with just two singing characters, Bluebeard and his latest wife-victim, Judith, it has gained popularity only since the 1950’s, when its psycho-dramatic score and libretto has become better appreciated, and as technological possibilities of multi-media stagecraft continue to develop.

            The plot here plays out with Bluebeard reluctant to give Judith all the keys at once, but leads her through six chambers: a torture chamber, an armory, a room of gold and jewels, a garden, a panoramic view of his kingdom, and a pool of tears.  The first five are increasingly filled with light, while the sixth is dark and sad, but each tainted with blood.  Finally, in the seventh room, are Bluebeard’s three other wives, still alive, but silent, weighted down by the jewels they wear.  Judith too is given these heavy luxuries, and, zombified, follows the others, as Bluebeard shuts the door.  Each room is different in color, and each wife represents a time of day: dawn, midday, evening, and the last (Judith) midnight.

Chihuly

            But Bartok’s version, like Perrault’s, is a template. Over time, the staging and even the nature of the characters has changed, from an innocent, but seductive Judith in a 1963 film of the opera, designed and directed by Michael Powell with strange, amorphous Dali-esque sets, through a production with sets designed by Dale Chihuly, consisting of seven panels, six with colored glass installations (one for each of the doors), that make the drama. Each one is black on its reverse, turned to reveal its shapes and color as each door is entered.  Only the last one is completely black.  Presented at the front of the stage with the orchestra behind the panels, it would be just a concert version if not for Chihuly’s spectacularly colored and lit glass, that expresses the emotion and symbolism of the text and music.  First produced in 2007, this one can still be seen (its next showing will be in Norfolk, Virginia, next month).  But the most dramatic presentations are those that use projection, such as a staging in Bartók’s home town, Budapest, in 2011, and the new production, by the Metropolitan Opera, which I caught at their “Live in HD” series locally last month.

Met Opera: Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko

            This is a very different production—not so much for the super-imaginative sets, that included a view down an elevator shaft as our characters descend from chamber to chamber, or the cold, Bauhausian architecture of the entry way and some of the chambers, as in the characters themselves.  Judith here is no sweet beauty but rather has a very used, down-on-her-luck bargirl, while Bluebeard seems to be a rather sinister gangster type.  Given the characters, this becomes more of an elaborate kind of assisted suicide.  Bluebeard is a perpetually disillusioned suitor, and Judith certainly doesn’t live up to whatever his diminished dream is. And yet, she is there of her own free will, so the whole thing is a sort of expressionistic journey into the circles of Hell.  But what a descent!  This becomes a true tale of horror, because the characters drive it, and they do what they do with their own free will. 

            What’s left for the Bluebeard story?  Maybe a video game app in which that last wife, whatever her name, rushes up and down the castle, opening various doors with keys, getting prizes and points (or not) as she moves through the various chambers, perhaps aided by Sister Anne. All the time, she’s hotly pursued by Bluebeard, who, if he catches her will kill her, or does she finally achieve the Forbidden Chamber level, liberate the captive wives, while Bluebeard finally gets laminated by her soldier brothers, also in the chase, armed with AK 47’s?

The Original Perrault story is available at several Internet sites.

The Let’s Pretend broadcast of Bluebeard can be found in its entirety at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foSr-EnVeQo, It was originally broadcast on June 21, 1947.

For the 88+ Bluebeard Stories, see Heidi Anne Heimer, Bluebeard Tales From Around the World,  Surlalune fairy tale series, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011—and also as an Amazon Kindle download.

Film versions:

            Edgar Ulmer’s  Bluebeard can be accessed on Youtube, as are clipse of the 1972 Richard Burton version.

Kurt Vonnegut's Novel: Bluebeard, a Novel, Delta Fiction, Dial Press, 1998 edition.  The quote is on p. 51.

For Feminism in the Bluebeard story, see

“Maeterlinck's and Dukas' "Ariane et Barbe-Bleue": A Feminist Opera? Austin B. Caswell. Studies in Romanticism, V. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 203-20

Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle:  

            Clips of the 2011 Budapest Version is at:

http://www.derivative.ca/Events/2011/Opera3D/

Clips from the Met recent Live in HD are accessible on YouTube, and entire

            versions, including the 1963 film, plus many others, also YouTube.