It’s good to find another arts documentary by Leslie Megahey turning up online. Not the best quality, unfortunately; the audio has been subjected to so much digital compression it sounds like it was run through a ring modulator but the visuals are decent enough. The Performers was originally made in 1972 for the BBC’s Omnibus arts strand. It was repeated in 1994 for the same series, with the name “Goya” appended to the title, the life and art of Francisco de Goya being the subject of the film. I remember watching the repeat screening but can’t remember why it was rebroadcast. Films like this usually remained stuck in the BBC’s vaults unless there was a good reason to show them again, as with Megahey’s portrait of György Ligeti which had the director revisiting the composer 15 years after their first meeting.
The Performers is less ambitious than Megahey’s later films, the majority of which had art or artists as their subject. The performers of the title are a pair of travelling players in modern Spain who adopt a series of roles in outdoor performances that parallel the stages of Goya’s career, from modestly successful muralist to very successful court portrait painter, and the later years when deafness left him isolated and depressed. The latter period resulted in the famous “Disasters of War” etchings and the so-called “Black Paintings” which were originally murals on the walls of the artist’s home.
The credits are missing from the end of the film but Leslie Megahey was the narrator as well as the director, with Colin Blakely reading from Goya’s diaries, and the performers played by Esperanza Malkin and Vallentin Conde. For a more personal take on the life and art of Francisco de Goya I recommend Robert Hughes’ 75-minute TV film from 2002.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• All Clouds are Clocks: György Ligeti
• Leslie Megahey, 1944–2022
• Men and Wild Horses: Théodore Géricault
• The Complete Citizen Kane
• Schalcken the Painter revisited
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
