EXTERMINATING ANGLES

The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès:  the Dinner Party Begins

             A week or so ago, I went to the Economy Opera: The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD at my local movies.  The sound is great, the views unobstructed, and I can sit back in a nice big recliner and eat popcorn too.  The opera was a relatively new one by the British composer Thomas Adès, entitled The Exterminating Angel, replete with innovative instruments, including tiny violins, and a really weird old electronic sliding keyboard called an ondes martinot.  One of the female leads, the opera singer Letitia (Audrey Luna), sings the highest notes ever written in an opera. I am no music critic, and so can't critically dissect the wonderfully dissonant score, but I loved it.

 

Buñuel's El Angel Exterminador: The Dinner Party Begins

            The plot was adapted from a 1962 film by Luís Buñuel, El Angel Exterminador, so I had another look at that as well, in my own living room (no popcorn this time, though) courtesy of Amazon Prime.. The opera plotline follows the body of the movie: a group of wealthy people go to a swanky dinner party, and afterwards discover that they are unable to leave.  They are stuck in their evening finery in an elegant salon, for some reason trapped there for days, or weeks maybe.  Over time, their behavior becomes less and less civilized: they cut into a water pipe to get drinking water, then slaughter three sheep who apparently usually live in the garden, and roast them over chopped up furniture.  One partygoer dies of a stroke, and a pair of young lovers decide that since they love each other so much, things can't be better on the outside, and so they commit suicide.  All three are deposited in the bathroom.

            In the pre-cellphone era in which the story is set, nobody on the outside knows what's happened, and they can no more enter the mansion than the dinner guests can leave.  Finally, one of the guests, that singer named Letitia, figures out a way to break the spell, and they can all finally go home--at least the ones still alive.

Luís Buñuel

            Buñuel's film, with its black humor, is very characteristic of his very idiosyncratic style and also reflects the issues of his time.  Though made in Mexico, the movie is very much a satire on Franco's Spain at the period and Buñuel's favorite whipping boys there: Spain's Fascist government,   

the reactionary high bourgeois ruling class of the time, and the Catholic church, the latter most clearly seen in the film's epilogue: all the former partygoers go to church for a mass of thanks after their liberation, only to find that they are trapped there a second time, along with the officiating clergy and other churchgoers. Not only can no one leave again, but they are soon joined by a flock of sheep who manage to enter---welcome to the Hotel California!

            In the course of the interminable dinner party itself, Buñuel takes potshots at other belief systems besides Catholicism: neither the two guests who are freemasons or the ailing and eccentric Leonora who pulls chicken feet from her purse and tries uttering Kabbalistic phrases in Hebrew are able to break the spell either.  Leticia's solution of having the guests repeat some moments at the beginning of the party and having everyone present assume the exact positions they were in at the time breaks the cycle of enchantment before everyone can completely degenerate into murderous insanity.

Leonora, Kabbala and Chicken Feet

            Living in Spain in the mid 1960's, just a few years after Buñuel made his film, I can see exactly where he was coming from.  Born in the Aragonese town of Calanda, in Spain, he had been one of the iconoclastic bad boys of Surrealism in Paris during the 1920's (remember Chien Andalou and that eyeball)?  He subsequently returned to Spain during the years of the Republic between 1931 and 1936, but left in 1937, and was to spend most of his life abroad with periods in the U.S., France and Mexico. His one foray back to the Motherland was to make the weirdly wonderful Viridiana in 1961, but that didn't go well for him there; after all, this movie is slyly anticlerical.

            You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.  Buñuel always kept a finger in Surrealism and against the reactionary forces of the country of his birth, though he long survived Franco. In El Angel Exterminador, sheep and a bear cub wander around the mansion, some scenes seem inexplicably repeated (though this repetition becomes crucial for the exit strategy), and the occasional hallucinatory vision flits through.

 

Thomas Adès

            In adapting the film scenario to an opera, Thomas Adès and his librettist Tom Cairns have basically remained true to Buñuel's film, but have not only made it more modern, but also more timeless.  The seventeen characters trapped in Buñuel's salon are here reduced in number, and the opera is an hour longer than the movie, which allows for more character definition--you really get to know these people and begin to understand how each of them reacts to their strange situation.  The use of those little fiddles and the ondes martinot also add to the weird mood at strategic moments.   Since it's an opera, the three musician characters (Letitia, the singer, the conductor and Bianca the pianist) are more fleshed out, but others are too. The doctor becomes the voice of reason far more than in the film, and the Colonel is a vain, exaggerated military man. The religious satire is muted, and the references to Freemasonry and Kabbalistic mutterings disappear, but the chicken feet remain as a symbol of civilized logic breaking down. By the end, the guests appear far more disheveled too.

The Opera: Sheep's head

Adès and Cairns even go one better than Buñuel's surrealism by having one of the characters coddle the severed head of one of the sheep.

            But what really makes the Opera both more contemporary and timeless is that Adès and Cairns chose to eliminate the church epilogue.  The liberated guests stagger out to reunite with friends and family, but we the viewers and listeners understand how close they became to degenerating into anarchic savagery, and how thin the veneer of "civilization" really is.

            I am neither a knowledgeable music critic nor a film critic with technological knowhow to really dissect the opera and the film in a profound way.  For that I have added some links from real critical experts.  I do think though that I'm a good audience-goer with enough cultural savvy to enjoy both the film and the opera as end products.

            Could you imagine a new film (or opera, for that matter) of the same story with "Red" and "Blue" politicians and pundits (perhaps including the Trumps and the Clintons) trapped in an endless Washington cocktail party?

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A disclaimer: my pictures are filched from the Internet (as usual--most of the time).  Some of the stills from the opera are from the British production.  The opera itself premiered in Salzburg in 2016.

Buñuel's film can be rented for a modest fee from Amazon prime.  It is also available on Youtube, as are clips from the opera.  The Met should be encoring Adès's opera via their LIVE in HD series in local movie theaters somewhat later in the season.

The Wikipedia article on Luís Buñuel is thorough and well researched: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Buñuel


Roger Ebert wrote a wonderful review of the movie which can be read at:  https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-exterminating-angel-1962

Two Articles on the Opera that appeared in the New York Times are accessible at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/arts/music/exterminating-angel-metropolitan-opera-thomas-ades-bunuel.html?_r=0

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/arts/music/thomas-ades-exterminating-angel-metropolitan-opera.html

A trailer for the opera can be seen at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEyy1wsl1eY
Maybe one day the whole thing will be available on youtube.  I hope so.

Perfect for Halloween and Day of the Dead: The Dybbuk Movie of 1937

            

S. An-Ski: Ethnographer, Author, Polyglot

Recording in the Shetl

           This past weekend, I had the chance to see the Polish/Yiddish 1937 film The Dybbuk again, restored and uncut, with new English subtitles.  What a cool movie!  It was based on a play with a complex history, written by S. An-Ski (aka Shloyme Zanvi Rappoport).  An-ski was a complex guy himself.  A product of Eastern European 19th century Jewish culture, An-Ski is best remembered as an ethnographer, who with a photographer and musicologist, sought to study the vanishing culture of the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking shtetl (village) of his time in a series of expeditions made between 1912 and 1914 in what is now the western Ukraine.

            At around the same time, An-Ski wrote the Dybbuk.  Completely bilingual in Russian and Yiddish, he produced versions in both languages, beginning around 1911, and spent the rest of his life trying to get it produced.  It was first published in Moscowa in 1920, but in a Hebrew translation by Chaim Bialek--which subsequently was performed by the Habima company there, and went on to have a long life in Israel, not only in continuous performance, but inspiring several operas (you can watch them on YouTube).

The Dybbuk: First Vilna Production

            The Yiddish premiere came in the city of Vilna (now Vilnius), a month after An-Ski's death, and was an instant hit.  It was later translated into several languages and performed all over Europe, the United States and Canada, and is still performed today.

            But in many ways, it is the 1937 movie that has endured in the popular imagination.  It was made in Poland in Yiddish, directed by Mical Waszinsky, himself quite a character.  Waszinsky had been born Moshe Waks in a Ukrainian shtetl, but later moved to Warsaw, Poland and converted to Catholicism, after learning the film director's trade from F.W. Murnau in Berlin.  Most of his prolific film career in Warsaw lay in Polish films, but in 1937, he made The Dybbuk in Yiddish with a Jewish theatrical cast.  It was filmed in Warsaw and on location in the Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny, called Kuzmir by its Jewish population.  It was lucky to have been made then, because two years later the Nazis invaded and began obliterating this culture altogether

            The Dibbuk probably remains the only Yiddish-language film that was targeted to an audience beyond the local Yiddish speaking community. In order to do this, the plot was enlarged with a back-story to explain its subsequent events.  Its story in the movie is as follows:

 

The Dybbuk: The Messinger and the Young Sender

The Dybbuk: Leah and Chonan

            In a little Jewish town, two friends, Sender and Nisn, whose wives were both pregnant, made a vow if one baby was a boy and the other a girl to marry them off when they grew up.  In spite of dire warnings from a mysterious Messeinger, they declared their vow in front of the illustrious visiting Rabbi.  Sender duly had a daughter, Leah, and Nisn a son, Chonan, but Sender's wife died in childbirth, and Nisn, returning to his distant village just as his wife went into labor, died on the way home.

            Fast forward 18 years.  Sender, now very rich, decided to find an even richer match for Leah, now eighteen and gorgeous.  Enter a poor itinerant student, none other than the grown-up Chonan, who comes to Sender's town to continue his higher education at the town's Yeshiva.  The Messenger reappears again, and persuades Sender to take in this poor student for his meals.  Sender has forgotten his vow to Nisn, and doesn't recognize the young man as Nisn's grown son.  Leah and Chonan meet, instantly find a strong bond, and realize that they belong together.  They wish to marry, but Sender will not hear of a poor match and continues to pursue a more advantageous one.

            The distraught Chonan turns to mystical means to achieve his goal.  He studies Kabala and other, less savory magic texts, starves himself with fasting, and finally even invokes Satan to achieve his ends.  For this last transgression, he drops dead in the Synagogue.  Leah is totally distraught, but even so her father goes ahead and contracts a marriage for her with a rich but totally unattractive and stupid prospect.  The Messenger appears again, and reveals to Sender that Chonan was the Nisn's son, and reminds him of the vow--too late!

The Dybbuk:Leah at Chonan's Grave 

            As preparations for the marriage go ahead, Leah is taken to the cemetery to invite the spirit of her mother to the wedding, as per local tradition.  While there, she goes to Chonan's grave and invites him also. The Messinger, lurking nearby, informs Leah's aunt, her chaperone, and warns her about the dangers of letting the girl wander about the cemetery alone--but--too late--the invitation has been   Back in town, the marriage celebrations begin, but in a macabre scene, Leah can only envision them as a dance with death.  When the time for the marriage vows comes, she refuses her groom, crying out Chonan's name.   Chonan has become a Dybbuk, a dislocated soul, and enters into Leah's body when she calls out to him, and she begins to speak with his voice.  Naturally the wedding doesn't go on.  The distraught Sender makes every effort to free Leah from Chonan's spirit, but both she and the spirit refuse.  He finally takes her to a famous miracle-working Rabbi, who first summons Nisn's spirit and asks his help to nullify the broken vow.  Nisn's spirit refuses him.  Finally, with a blowing of seven shofars (ram's horns) and the lighting of black candles at the Holy Ark of the synagogue, Chonan's spirit is purged, but emptied of the spirit of her beloved, and after portentous warnings by the Messinger, Leah dies in the synagogue.

made, and accepted.

            The film, done in black and white, is expressionistic in style, not surprising considering the director's training, and much of the dialogue is stylized, as well as is the gestural acting, not only by the main characters, but in the menacing figure of the Messenger, who appears and disappears throughout, standing impassively, and giving dire commentary and sometimes warnings to all.

The Dybbuk: Leah, at The Wedding, Dances with Death

            I showed the film during my classes of Jewish and Judaic art, primarily because it offers one of the few, Pre-World War II glimpses into an Eastern European synagogue "in action," and thus a picture of the very soon-to-disappear world that An-Ski was documenting.  After the war, of course, that world, that culture and that language would vanish.

            What was so very fascinating, though, was how my students reacted to the film: they loved it.  Most of my students weren't Jewish, but the story resonated.  Unrequited love and hauntings exist through many cultures. In making such a "folkloric" movie accessible to a wider audience as Waszinsky and his script-writers and cast did, they also succeeded in making the film timeless.  The story, after all, of star-crossed lovers and the forbidden supernatural, is still plays loudly in popular imagination.  The expressionistic, dark style transports us to a spiritually strange world, where these things can happen.  Modern versions would be loaded with CGI effects that would be far more over-the-top, louder and loaded with exploding color, but it's the very remoteness of the black and white stylization that makes it so tragically mysterious--even with the in-your-face presence of The Messenger.

 

The Dybbuk: Montreal, 2015; Mystical???

            Of course, if the story could have placed today, it never would have happened.  a simple cellphone call would have told Sender and Nisn's widow what had occurred in their respective towns, the vow would have been remembered, and Leah and Chonan could have lived happily ever after in a more egalitarian world.

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For an interesting account of An-Ski's ethnographic expeditions, there is a wonderful book of photographs, entitled Photographing the Jewish Nation, Pictures from S. An-Sky's Ethnographic Expeditions, Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis University Press, 2009.

An English translation of The Dybbuk is available:

S. Ansky and David G. Roskies, The Dybbuk and Other Writers, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002.

The complete, remastered 1937 film is viewable on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjy7O9sA1TQ&t=2707s