Leslie Megahey – { feuilleton }

Painting with Light

The Quantel Paintbox was one of the first computer systems designed to create and manipulate digital graphics in a manner that was much closer to painting and drawing than computer programming. The technology was launched in 1981, and was essentially Photoshop ten years before Adobe Inc. announced its own image-editing system. Rather like the Fairlight CMI, being a pioneer had its disadvantages for Quantel, one of them being the enormous expense of the Paintbox system. Photoshop was never really cheap if you were buying it new but it was still only a software package; with the Fairlight and the Paintbox you also had to buy the computer and all the peripherals that ran the software. Consequently, Paintbox systems were mostly used by TV studios for on-screen graphics during throughout the 1980s, although Quantel also created a parallel system for print graphics which was used for image processing and photo collaging until Macintosh and Adobe started to dominate design studios.

David Hockney.

Painting with Light was a BBC series intended to explore Quantel’s technology by inviting six artists to spend a day playing with the Paintbox. It was the recent news about David Hockney that reminded me of this series. I definitely remember watching the first episode when it was broadcast in 1987 but couldn’t recall anything of the rest, which suggests I may not have seen them all. Each episode is narrated by Leslie Megahey who also receives a credit as executive producer. Nearly everything that Megahey was involved with at the BBC had some connection with art or painting which suggests the series may have been his idea.

Larry Rivers.

It’s been fascinating watching these programmes after 40 years of technological development. In 1987 I was working with pens and sheets of paper most of the time, and didn’t give much thought to the idea of creating computer art since all the most interesting gear was prohibitively expensive. How things change… I now find myself watching the reactions of these artists as they struggle with a rudimentary version of the kind of technology I use every day. I also sympathise with their frustrations. The Paintbox was a magical device for the time but the brush settings are very limited when compared to the endless variety that Photoshop offers. The drawing table and stylus of the Paintbox are also big and bulky in comparison to one of today’s small and very precise Wacom tablets.

Howard Hodgkin.

David Hockney was an obvious choice to open the series when he was often described as “Britain’s favourite artist”. Popularity aside, he was a good choice for his restless curiosity and interest in all forms of pictorial representation. That curiosity prompted his famous and controversial theories about the use of optical devices in the creation of paintings from the Renaissance on; it also kept him experimenting with different media, leading eventually to the iPad paintings he was making in the last years of his life. Of the other contributors we have an American Pop artist (Larry Rivers), a British abstract painter (Howard Hodgkin), an Australian painter (Sidney Nolan), an American painter (Jennifer Bartlett), and a British Pop artist (Richard Hamilton).

Sidney Nolan.

Hockney and Bartlett both use the technology for painterly improvisation, with Hockney drawing continually over the same piece, while Bartlett draws different versions of a glass of water. The latter sounds boring but her curiosity about the new medium makes her the only artist of the six to try out all the available drawing tools. Rivers, Nolan and Hamilton all begin with scanned photographs which they manipulate in various ways, Rivers by painting over his, Nolan (via a Quantel assistant) creating photographic collages that are forerunners of the familar Photoshop style.

Jennifer Bartlett.

Hamilton does something similar but also takes over from the Quantel assistant in order to paint onto the image in a much more careful manner than the rest. Of the six artists he’s the only one who attempts to create something that might be exported as a properly finished piece. He also notices how the cut-and-paste concept which was becoming widespread in word processing was now applicable to digital graphics. As for Hodgkin, I’ve always regarded him as a limited and not very interesting abstractionist, so it was no surprise to see him creating a pixel imitation of the same lines and blobs he was always doing in his paintings. Hodgkin’s film is the least interesting one to watch but his encounter with the technology is just as revealing about his character as an artist as the other films are for the individuals involved.

Richard Hamilton.

• Further reading: The Quantel Paintbox

The Performers: Goya

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

All Clouds are Clocks: György Ligeti

It’s unlikely that anyone will be stuck for anything to watch during the next few days but you could do worse than spend an hour with this documentary about the music of composer György Ligeti. I’ve mentioned this several times over the years, it’s one of my favourite films by the late Leslie Megahey, my favourite director of TV arts documentaries. All Clouds are Clocks was made for the BBC’s long-running Omnibus arts strand, and is unique among all the films made for that series in being broadcast twice (in 1976 and 1991), with the second broadcast appending new footage to the original film.

The film as a whole is fairly simple by today’s standards, an interview with the composer in his studio intercut with extracts from Ligeti recordings and performances. After years of documentaries filled with hyperactive editing and inane comments from celebrity interviewees Megahey’s straightforward approach is a considerable relief. You have the music, and you have the composer talking about the music; that’s it. Especially commendable is that there’s no mention at all of the use of Ligeti’s recordings as film scores. If the BBC made a film like this today (which they wouldn’t in any case) the first thing you’d see would be clips from Stanley Kubrick films.

As is often the case in Megahey’s documentaries, the director himself is the narrator, and in this one he’s also the off-screen interviewer as he was in his celebrated Orson Welles documentary. The illustrative episodes include melting plastic clocks, the slow awakening of a wooden puppet, and a performance of Poème symphonique, the composition which requires the priming and operation of 100 metronomes. Ligeti comes across as good-humoured and approachable, a serious artist but one whose general demeanour never seems loftily superior to ordinary human concerns the way Stockhausen often did. Ligeti’s manner confirms the sense of humour behind compositions like the one for the metronomes, and even more so in the choral/orchestral work Nouvelles Aventures. The latter is shown in an extract from a filmed performance at the Roundhouse, London, in 1971, a concert conducted by Pierre Boulez which provokes raucous laughter from the audience when a tray loaded with crockery is hurled into a bin. There’s humour of a blacker variety in the 1991 section which includes a description of Ligeti’s “anti-anti-opera”, Le Grande Macabre, based on a play by Michel de Ghelderode. This was Ligeti’s only operatic work, and I think it may be the only Ligeti composition I still haven’t heard in full. Most stagings are a riot of grotesque costuming and set design (the setting is a place called “Breughelland”) so it obviously needs to be seen as well as heard.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin
• Leslie Megahey, 1944–2022
• Le Grand Macabre
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
• Metronomes

Powell’s Bluebeard on blu-ray

My film viewing at the weekend included a return visit to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s opéra fantastique, The Tales of Hoffmann, followed by the new blu-ray restoration of Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle. This is the third time I’ve written about Powell’s film of the Bartók opera, the first occasion being a “When will I get to see this?” post, the second a review of a VHS copy which had turned up on YouTube. The new release, which is the film’s debut appearance on disc, is a restoration by the BFI under the supervision of Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese.

Norman Foster (Bluebeard).

Powell directed the hour-long dramatisation for the German TV channel Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963, at a time when his career was in the doldrums following the critical outrage provoked by the release of Peeping Tom. The production was a smaller one than he was used to but it was still shot on 35mm which has now been polished to a breathtaking degree, revealing rich shadows, deep colours and a profusion of glittering detail. (See this clip.) The audio track remains monophonic but the sound is a great improvement on the VHS version. Seeing the latter was gratifying after so long a wait but was also an underwhelming experience. The restoration proves once again how unfair it is to judge filmmakers from a low-grade copy of their work that’s been thrown onto the internet.

Ana Raquel Satre (Judith).

Bluebeard’s Castle (or Herzog Blaubarts Burg, to use the film’s German title) wasn’t a project that Powell inaugurated. Hein Heckroth, the production designer on many of Powell and Pressburger’s colour features, had been working for German TV since the late 1950s, and suggested to singer/producer Norman Foster that Powell might be interested in directing the film. The presence of Heckroth’s weirdly Expressionist designs give Bluebeard’s Castle a continuity with the extended ballet sequence in The Red Shoes and the “Giulietta” episode of The Tales of Hoffmann; all three stories share a dream-like atmosphere whose grading to nightmare is enhanced by Heckroth’s decors. I’ve often wondered whether the strangeness of some of Heckroth’s set designs, whose aesthetics extend to Dalínean Surrealism, were a factor in the frequent grumblings of distaste expressed by British critics for Powell and Pressburger’s films even before Powell made Peeping Tom. The first film that Powell worked on was The Magician in 1926, Rex Ingram’s adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel, and a film which is at its best in its moments of visual excess. Powell’s films are valued today for their own visual excess but this quality hasn’t always been encouraged in British cinema, as Ken Russell later discovered. Favourable critics like Ian Christie often point to this as part of the “European” sensibility of Powell and Pressburger’s oeuvre, something which is present even when the subject matter is very English. Pressburger was a Hungarian emigré, while Powell met Ingram when he was living in the south of France; the production designers on all the major P&P films, Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, were both German, and the films themselves, especially The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann, feature a host of different nationalities. Watching Bluebeard’s Castle again I was reminded of Italian horror cinema, especially the films of Mario Bava. When you combine the artificiality of Heckroth’s sets with the Gothic story of a woman imperilled by a powerful aristocrat, plus the resemblance of Ana Raquel Satre to Barbara Steele, the whole thing assumes a very Bavaesque flavour.

On a musical level I much prefer Bartók to Offenbach, (although Offenbach’s famous Barcarolle is always worth hearing) so I’m pleased that this minor work has been treated to the same restorative care as The Tales of Hoffmann. The 1988 version of Bartók’s opera directed for the BBC by the late Leslie Megahey remains my favourite filmed Bluebeard even though it lacks Powell’s flamboyance; Megahey’s film has more gravitas, and the direction, performances and musical recording are better. But seeing Powell’s film again revealed nuances I’d missed before, like the sustained shot near the end when Judith seals her fate by asking for the key to the forbidden room. It also makes a change hearing the whole thing sung in German, a language I can understand in parts. Bluebeard’s Castle is a further example of Powell’s idea of a “composed film”, a work that would combine all the dramatic arts. (Or almost all—this one lacks dance.) As I said ten years ago, it may be minor compared to the films that he made with Emeric Pressburger but it offers a more satisfying coda to his career than his final features.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bluebeard’s Castle, 1981
• Powell’s Bluebeard revisited
• Joseph Southall’s Bluebeard
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
• Powell’s Bluebeard
• The Tale of Giulietta

György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin

2023 is the centenary of György Ligeti’s birth so here’s an hour-long French documentary about the composer directed by Michel Follin. György Ligeti was made in 1993, two years after Leslie Megahey’s BBC crew had paid a return visit to Ligeti’s apartment to film an update to the Omnibus profile from 1976, All Clouds Are Clocks. The two documentaries complement each other rather well, although you’ll have to take my word for this since Megahey’s film has yet to appear on any video site. Both films interview Ligeti at the studio table where he wrote many of his compositions, and where he talks about his musical interests and intentions.

The two films differ in their approach to the world outside Ligeti’s window. Megahey concentrated on the music, illustrating a number of lengthy recording extracts with footage of melting clocks, a wooden puppet, etc, whereas Follin attends to the biography, with Ligeti relating his personal history while also describing the evolution of his musical ideas. Ligeti’s youth was a tumultuous one, encompassing the upheavals of the Second World War, during which he lost half his family to the Holocaust, and the later Communist years in Hungary when the kinds of modern music that he was trying to write were proscribed by the State. It’s good to see him confirm the importance of Bartók’s music to his growth as a composer. Ligeti’s oeuvre contains many Bartók-like moments but I’ve often thought that regarding these as any kind of influence or reference might be a lazy comparison based on a shared nationality.

All of this reminds me that I recently picked up a copy of the 5-disc Ligeti Project in a charity shop but still haven’t listened to it all the way through. Charity shops can be useful (and cheap!) sources of modern composition if you don’t mind trawling week after week through iterations of the classics. Secondhand shops were my first introduction to music like this, providing the opportunity to sample the recordings of those mysterious names at a bargain price. Bargains are still to be found if you’re patient, as with the Ligeti box. Other recent discoveries include Without Sinking by Hildur Guðnadóttir, and Memoryhouse, the first album by Max Richter, both of which were bought for a fraction of their usual asking price.

(A note about the film subtitles. These are an amateur translation which fails to recognise the names of Gyula Krúdy—the writer whose work Ligeti describes finding at an early age—and Paul Hindemith, the German composer.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Grand Macabre
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• Metronomes