Darth Vader and the Sylphide, Part Deux

                                                             II: Darth Vader (1977)

Iconic Darth

Last week at the Comic Con convention in San Diego, preview a clip for the newest film in the Star Wars collection was shown, and (surprise!) the three best-known surviving stars of the original 1977 film (Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford) made an unannounced appearance to hysterical acclaim.  Even better, they will reappear in the new epic, along with other stars of the first film.

Then

Now

If I certainly wasn’t around for the opening performance of La Sylphide, in 1832, I did see Star Wars with friends the weekend it opened in San Antonio in 1977.  From the first opening scroll to the giving of the final medal, we were completely entranced.  The vividness and fast pace of the action, the sweeping sense of sheer adventure and quirky fun, real heroes and villains and the battered world of that galaxy “a long time ago and far, far away,” swept us into a complete and gleeful suspension of disbelief, and just let us be carried along.  John Williams’ exciting score helped too, with its echoes of Holst’s The Planets and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring amalgamated into its own originality enhanced the action.   When, regretfully it was over, we all bounced out of the theater, high as kites—or spaceships.

Like la Sylphide, Star Wars arrived at a moment in popular culture when the audience was ready for it.  After all, otherworldly nymphs had been wafting around story lines long before The Sylph ever floated by, but it was the supernatural in that exotic Scottish setting and Doomed Love that resonated with the audience caught up in Romanticism.  For us, science fiction and fantasy had already existed for 80 years or more.  Both George Lukas and I had grown up with the klunky Flash Gordon serials, made in the mid 1930’s on the cheap with recycled sets, blimp-shaped rocket ships spewing exhaust and reused costumes from second-rate movie musicals, seen 20 years after their creation on ten-inch TV screens.  The first Star Trek series had already come and gone as well, not to mention Kubrick’s acid-tripping 2001, a Space Odyssey.  But Lukas, over a period of four years, had created a visually rich and very accessible space world at a moment when the digital age and all its possibilities and overkill hadn’t yet arrived. 

Reviews contemporary with the 1977 premier reflected an almost universal (forgive the pun) intoxication. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, after summarizing the plot said:

That's about all the plot that anyone of voting age should be required to keep track of. The story of "Star Wars" could be written on the head of a pin and still leave room for the Bible. It is, rather, a breathless succession of escapes, pursuits, dangerous missions, unexpected encounters, with each one ending in some kind of defeat until the final one.

The initial movie became  the first of a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi continuing the story, a sort of cinematic Ring Cycle, Wagner more than Tolkien.  Not leaving well enough alone, three more films were made, prequels to the first three, putting the original Star Wars as episode IV.  These three, necessarily with different casts, over-explained the Jedi story and Anniken Skywalker’s fall from grace and metamorphosis into Darth Vader.  With newer digitization techniques, all sorts of magic became effortless—and for me, it was certainly overkill and very forgettable—like so many Sylphide knockoffs.  And of course all of them, like La Sylphide, generated all sorts of Star Wars commercial paraphernalia, on a far greater level, due to all of the improvements to mass media.

The first Star Wars was actually a great stand-alone film, and has influenced the science-fantasy world to this day.  Like La Sylphide, serious scholars of popular culture, as well as religion and philosophy have endlessly dissected it, and like La Sylphide’s scholarly literature, basically dehydrating the miracle in the process.

Princess Leia of Alderaan

For the rest of us, we can delight in Lukas’s archetypes, but not explore it too deeply (has anybody noticed, for example, that Princess Leia’s hairdo echoes an earlier powerful heroine’s—Ozma of Oz)?  The heroes are all recognizable in type, even the bots, priggish R2-D2 and that wonderful garbage-can computer C-3PO.  And what about our favorite Wookie—an extraterrestrial who looks like an amalgamated lion, chow dog and great ape?  And then, there are all of those critters in the famous bar scene.  On the other hand, the villains of The Empire, with their gray-black uniforms and the anonymous white troopers certainly invoke all-too human Nazis.  Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Laia are all humans too, and so is the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobe.  There’s just enough human population here for us to identify with, mixed with those crazy extraterrestrials to make this film appealing to us humans.  Once again, this is similar to all those Scots in La Sylphide versus the Sylph and her companions.  The fascination of both is that we’re suspended between the familiar and the fantastic.

 

Princess Ozma of Oz

And then there’s my favorite villain, Darth Vader.  His appearance, all black, implied massiveness (though human in scale) made monolithic by his black cloak and his both fly-like and skull-like mask, and that wonderfully wheezing and menacing voice! It took three humans to produce this character, the body, provided by David Prowse, the lightsaber fighter by Bob Anderson, and the raspy voice by James Earl Jones (uncredited in the initial movie), plus costume designers and other production folk. All the “human” actors merely needed stunt-doubles.

Vader evolves through the other films in the series —indeed as everyone who follows Star Wars in all of its manifestations knows, how Aniken Skywalker, Jedi knight, went over to the dark side and became Darth Vader (and a cyborg, no less), is the theme of the Prequel.

But in the initial film, Vader is a stand-alone figure, a former Jedi master with the Force still with him, and already tragic.  He is a space-age equivalent of a World War I – era Prussian General, imbued with an older chivalry of war, who lives long enough to become a Nazi, but is clearly uncomfortable within the New Order.  In short, a formidable foe for Obi-Wan Kenobe and Luke Skywalker.

 

Darth Vader and Other Neighboring Gargoyles

            Darth Vader’s mythic status has been elevated to the world of art as well: he is one of the gargoyle figures added to the Washington National Cathedral in the 1980’s (and they sell his bobble-head in the gift shop).  He has become as universal a figure in black for the 20^th and 21^st century as the Sylphide was in white during the mid-1800’s.

 

Darth Vader as Bobblehead

            We can’t recreate the initial euphoria and wonder we had in 1977, not only are we older perhaps more jaded now and over-bombarded with CGI images, but the film itself has changed.  George Lukas modified it somewhat and added digital footage in 1997 and tweaked it further later on, partly because of new technologies, but partly to synchronize better with the succeeding episodes.

            Meanwhile, the iconic Darth Vader mask has been immortalized on the Cathedral, and it keeps serving as a model-type for other fantasies: just have a look at the costume of Ant Man, a film that debuted last week!

 

Ant-Man!?

            In the original Star Wars, George Lukas took universal fantasies and contextualized them for the 1977 world, much as Filippo Taglioni did for the romantic imagination of 1832, and both emblems for their times.  Can the upcoming Star Wars VII bring any of that initial magic back?  If so, it will have to satisfy both the 2015 mindset and the nostalgia for the 1970’s--pretty much what Laclotte tried for in his 20^th century Sylphide reconstruction.

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Some Sources:

Wikipedia has an excellent article on Star Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_%28film%29

For an old original episode of Flash Gordon see:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1MOvthQYz4

Vincent Canby's 1977 review in the New York Times is at: http://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/26/movies/moviesspecial/26STAR.html?_r=0

A complete study of the changes that George Lukas made to Star Wars when it was rereleased and made into Episode IV can be found at: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4334040

Darth Vader and the Sylphide, Part I.

I. La Sylphide: 1832

            If you were in Paris on March 12, 1832, and decided to catch the premiere of the new ballet at the Paris Opera that night, you were in for a rare experience: the ballet was La Sylphide, and she was played by the soon-to-be-superstar Marie Taglioni.  The plot was simple: Scottish Highlander James, about to be married, gets tempted away on his wedding day by an otherworldly Sylph.  She looks like a girl, but has wings and can fly, and lives in the nearby woods.  He follows her there, but she keeps flitting away until a witch named Madge offers James a scarf that will ground her, so that she can be his forever.  But when James puts the scarf around her, the Sylph loses her wings—her life force—and she dies.  James is left with his dead dreamgirl, carried away skywards by her sister sylphs, while his ex-fiancée marries his best friend. It’s a flimsy plot, so why was this ballet a landmark?--Because it came at the right time, in the right place, and with the right girl. 

Cholera in Paris

What would it have been like to be there at that moment?  Paris in 1832, like most cities at the time, was not a healthy place: it still had its narrow medieval streets, sewage was a problem, disease was rife, with tuberculosis common.  As a matter of fact, two weeks after this performance, Cholera appeared in the city, and would eventually take 20,000 lives.  The average life expectancy in 1830 was around 45.  If you want an evocation of Paris in 1832, think Hugo’s Les Miserables; the episode of the barricades chronicles the brief uprising in the city in that year. Certainly the precariousness of life, and the preoccupation with the supernatural, helped to fire up the Romantic movement, now just coming into vogue.  Theater, music and literature provided escape, and ballet, emerging into its own as an independent art form did too. 

To understand 1832, we have to modify our mindset even more: Just last week, the actress Patti LuPone, miffed at a woman who was texting on her cellphone  all through a play in which she was performing, grabbed the phone from the lady’s hands at the end of the second act.  We all know how distracting texting can be, and in a darkened theater, those bright screens shine like beacons, not to mention the dings and boings.

In 1832, the Paris Opera was not the one we know now, but on the much narrower Rue de Peletier.  Unlike modern theater, the house lights were kept on, so people could socialize, chatter and flirt particularly if the entertainment were mediocre.  I have the feeling that audiences then could have at least as much A.D.D. as they do now.  The curtain never went down between acts, so scene changes (and stagehands), could be seen by everyone. There were also boxes right at the stage, so that rich playboys could ogle their favorite actors, singers and dancers up close and personal, and proposition ballerinas and ladies of the chorus afterwards in a salon adjacent to the stage.  Before 1800, stage and house lighting was provided by flickering candles.

The Opera, Rue la Peletier: Robert le Diable in full tilt

But by the 1820’s, the advent of gas lighting at the beginning of the century allowed for much more dramatic theatrical special effects.  In 1831, the Opera presented Giacomo Mayerbeer’s Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil) with a spectacular ballet involving Robert, the Devil’s son, cavorting with the spirits of lascivious long-dead nuns in a ruined cloister at night.  Theatrical illusion was

aided by the new custom of lowering the curtain during scene changes. Devilish Robert caused a sensation, the opening shot of fifteen years of hybrid spirits, ghosts, fatal and insanity-causing love, often occurring in exotic locales—if not the extraterrestrial, at least the supernatural. Such creatures can tempt humans, but can’t really be life partners; and the Sylphide doesn’t have a name, human or otherwise. They constitute the Romantic notion of the Unattainable Ideal, and they usually end badly.

Marie Taglioni seemed to have epitomized the unearthly/earthly dichotomy of the Sylph, or at least her contemporaries thought so.  Critics of the day wrote elaborate, wordy paeans of praise, but beyond that, everyone who saw her in this role was enchanted.  It’s interesting because she had rather long arms as well as a stooping posture, and was not a particularly pretty woman, which set her apart from most ballet dancers of the period, who were considered fair game for dalliance among men of the leisure class.

Foyer de la Dance, where Rich Guys and Ballerinas meet; Taglioni isn't here

Taglioni on her toes

But she made viewers believe that she was beautiful and not quite of this world.  Great dancers are great athletes—musical ones.  Marie was all this, and also had an exceptional genetic pedigree: her maternal grandfather was a celebrated Swedish opera singer, her mother a dancer, and her Italian father’s side formed a veritable dynasty of dancers (grandfather, father, aunt, uncle, brother).  Most of her extraordinary ethereality, though, was formed by years of rigorous training, and sustained by very hard work—she would practice two hours a day for her whole career, and to prepare for her debut in Vienna in 1822, her father put her through an exhausting boot camp (pardon the pun), working her six hours a day. She was also fortunate to have her father, Filippo, not only her personal trainer, but also a personal choreographer and business manager.  She was said by legend to have invented toe dancing.  In fact she didn’t, but with her father’s training and her own personal determination, what she herself did was to extend the technique and so integrate it into her dance style that she really seemed to float—and she did all this while wearing a corset and soft shoes!

Taglioni's Costume and a shoe, both in St. Petersburg.  Photo by Emma Johansson

Taglioni Corsets

By the time she created the Sylph, she was 28, and had been dancing in public for ten years, and appearing at the Paris Opera for five.  But La Sylphide made the most perfect use of her talents and though she danced many other roles until her retirement at age 43 in 1847, she would always be THE Sylph, and appeared in it in many European capitals, including in Russia, where crazy fans once cooked one of her shoes (used or new?) and ate it.

It is not surprising that La Sylphide became an instant Romantic Movement icon.  For the next decade and a half, sprites of water, air, fire and even trees continued to haunt (and elude) mortal men.  Though the basic lines of her white costume was really a shortened version of ladies’ fashion of the time, it turned around and made evening wear lighter and more gauzy, and there was even a line of “La Sylphide” corsets. An English stagecoach line was named in her honor, as was a new type of flower.  One of Taglioni’s most enthusiastic fans, the future Queen Victoria, had a doll with her costume, and there were paper dolls too.  The commercial possibilities spread—and eventually, years later, the sylph graced a brand of American bourbon.

Taglioni cutouts

La Sylphide Bourbon (1860).  At least one sylph appears to be topless

We can try and evoke that magic evening of March 12, 1832, but we can’t really.  In the pre photographic era, pictures of dancers are stylized to a period ideal, and can assume postures impossible in the real world. Performance in any genre, be it ballet, opera, popular songs, or theater are ephemeral things, and even works with a long history change over time as new artists conform to their own times.  After all techniques and fashion both evolve. La Sylphide didn’t outlast its performer for that long; art and style move on, and by 1858, when it was last seen in Filippo’s version, it was already charmingly archaic, and its last performer, Emma Livry died tragically young in a fire.  A second version, choreographed by August Bournonville in 1836 with new music, does survive to this day, but now altered by modern reinforced toe shoes, changes in dance technique, if not choreography, and of course the only lights during performance are on the stage.

In the 1970’s Pierre Laclotte attempted a reconstruction of Filippo Taglioni’s ballet, and tried to come as close as possible to the original by careful research.  You can watch two different performances of it on Youtube.  But he wasn’t at the original debut, and once again staging, lighting and the darkened theater prevail (if nobody is using a cell phone).  It remains a loving tribute, but its producer is a 20^th-21^st century guy in a different culture.

La Sylphide has been studied, analyzed, deconstructed and reconstructed many times during the last 30 years by critics and dance history scholars.  To us, here, now, it will always be a quaint and charming anachronism.  Dissecting it is like trying to dissect the dead goose to find out how she laid golden eggs.  Nobody can really know how Taglioni danced.  It was a pop-culture golden moment, and changed everything for that time on.  And we can still have that kind of experience.  Wait for Part 2!

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The two best books dealing with the Sylph and Taglioni are:

Ivor Guest, The Romantic ballet in Paris, Alton (Hampshire), Dance books Ltd., 2008.

            Guest offers a complete view of the period 1815-1847, putting La Sylphide,

And Taglioni into superb cultural and artistic context.  He is the preeminent ballet historian of 19^th century Paris and London, and all his numerous books are fascinating.

Marian Smith (ed.), La Sylphide: 1832 and Beyond, Paris 1832 and Beyond, Dance Books, Ltd. 2012

            This is a multi-authored volume of scholarly decostructions of many aspects

            of La Sylphide.

The Web: Just Google ‘Taglioni” and “La Sylphide” and you will find a plethora of websites, information and images, a lot of it solid, a lot of it not.  Interesting for the curious, but read Guest first to get the Right Stuff.

You can watch two performances of Laclotte's La Sylphide on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm-9_OpzWUE   1972 - a little blurry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=710JId_pjjM  (2004)