György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin

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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.

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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 Gudnadóttir, 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

Leslie Megahey, 1944–2022

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TV producer & film director Leslie Megahey died at the end of August but the news has taken a while to filter through to these pages where his BBC TV productions have been the subject of several posts. My recurrent comments about his work were effusive enough for him to send me a handwritten note of thanks a few years ago, plus a promotional card for one of the films in the Artists and Models series. If more of his productions had been available online or on disc I would have written something about them as well, but old television, especially the documentary variety, remains persistently inaccessible to future audiences.

There are biographical details in the link above so what follows is a list of the Megahey productions that, for this viewer at least, made his name one to look out for in the TV listings. Some of these are on YouTube, a couple are available on disc, while the rest have yet to resurface anywhere. Everything here is highly recommended…if you can find it.

Omnibus: All Clouds are Clocks (1976/1991): An hour-long interview with composer György Ligeti. I caught this one on its updated rebroadcast in 1991 when Megahey revisited Ligeti to see what directions his career had taken over the past 15 years. Currently unavailable.

Schalcken the Painter (1979): Another Omnibus film, and a ghost story (after Sheridan Le Fanu) that’s as good as any of the BBC’s MR James adaptations. Released on (Region B) blu-ray & (Region 2) DVD by the BFI.

Arena: The Orson Welles Story (1982): A two-part interview (165 minutes in total) which caught Welles in a rare mood when he was happy to talk at length about his career. The TV equivalent of the huge book of Peter Bogdanovich conversations. Part One | Part Two

Artists and Models (1986): Three drama/documentaries about French painters: David, Ingres and Géricault.

Cariani and the Courtesans (1987): Another historical drama about an artist, Giovanni Cariani (c. 1490–1547). Very much in the mould of Schalcken the Painter but without the supernatural element. Currently unavailable.

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1988): The best film version of Bartók’s opera. The Region 1 DVD by Kultur seems to be deleted but is worth seeking out for having removable subtitles. There’s a copy at YouTube.

The Complete Citizen Kane (1991): A 90-minute documentary about Welles’ film using extracts from the Arena interviews and the Megahey produced TV series The RKO Story, plus new material. No longer on YouTube (or anywhere else) due to a copyright complaint. This is why I’m always saying you should download these things as soon as you find them.

The Hour of the Pig (1993): A feature film about a medieval animal trial, this one was hacked around by Miramax then released in the US as The Advocate where it flopped. The hard-to-find UK version turned up on YouTube a few days ago.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Men and Wild Horses: Théodore Géricault
The Complete Citizen Kane
Schalcken the Painter revisited
Le Grande Macabre
Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard

Men and Wild Horses: Théodore Géricault

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Yes, I’ve been watching a lot of films about art recently, and here’s another one. Artists and Models was the series title for three 80-minute drama-documentaries broadcast by the BBC in 1986: The Passing Show, Slaves of Fashion, and Men and Wild Horses. The writer and director of all three productions was Leslie Megahey, a name I always looked out for in TV listings throughout the 1980s, and still do in the case of films such as these. I watched the series at the time, and taped the episode about Géricault but the tape went astray many years ago so it’s great to find again.

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Art, especially painting, was a recurrent theme in Megahey’s work going back to the 1960s. In his later films he combined this interest with careful period recreations, the most celebrated example of which is his superb supernatural drama, Schalcken the Painter, an adaptation of the Sheridan Le Fanu ghost story. Artists and Models favours art history over drama, being an examination of the connected careers of three French painters of the late-18th and early-19th centuries: Jacques-Louis David, the Neoclassicist who was probably the only artist in history to sign the execution warrants of his own king and queen; Jean-Auguste Ingres, the Academician and painter of sensual nudes; and Théodore Géricault, the gloomiest of all the French Romantic artists. Being partial to the Romantics, especially the gloomy ones, I was always going to be more interested in the Géricault film. But all three films are worth seeing, each depicting an aspect of French art during a time of great historical upheaval: state propaganda (David), meticulous Orientalism (Ingres), and tormented realism (Géricault).

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The Raft of the Medusa (1819). All photo reproductions of this painting are compromised by the bitumen that Géricault painted into the shadows, a substance that degrades badly over time.

Men and Wild Horses uses the researches of Géricault’s first biographer, Charles Clément, to investigate the life of an artist whose bouts of depression and early death cut short a career that promised much but delivered less than the artist hoped. Clément, portrayed by Alan Dobie, informs us that Géricault only exhibited three paintings in the Paris Salon, none of which sold while the artist was alive. The largest of the three, The Raft of the Medusa, is recognised now as one of the great paintings of its age, but the Paris art world didn’t think so at the time. The story of the shipwreck survivors, and Géricault’s obsession with depicting their plight, forms the centrepiece of Megahey’s film which avoids too much awkward historical recreation. Géricault himself is only present via Clément’s account of his life, the memories of the artist’s friends, and the voiceover by Martin Jarvis which provides detail that the biographer was unable to find. The camerman for all three films in this series was Megahey’s regular collaborator, John Hooper, a real artist himself in his manipulation of light and shade. Men and Wild Horses is filled with many beautiful chiaroscuro compositions, so it’s a shame that the copy at YouTube isn’t better quality. The same account also has a copy of the Ingres film, Slaves of Fashion, while the David film, The Passing Show, may be seen here.

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One of the “interviewees” in the film is Antoine Étex, the creator of Géricault’s monument in Père Lachaise cemetery. I took a few photos of this when I was there in 2006; it’s easier to stumble across than some of the other famous tombs, and includes among its details bronze reliefs of Géricault’s three major paintings. British readers will know that “gee-gee” is a colloquial term for a horse so there’s some wry amusement for les rosbifs in the sight of the letters surrounding the monument of a horse-obsessed painter. Despite snapping a close-up of the bronze Raft of the Medusa I was more interested in chasing Symbolist paintings in the Musée d’Orsay and the Gustave Moreau Museum so I didn’t go to look at the original in the Louvre. Maybe next time.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
The Complete Citizen Kane
Schalcken the Painter revisited
Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard

Bluebeard’s Castle, 1981

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Filmed performances of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle continue to find their way to YouTube. Clips of this film from 1981 have been around for a while but not the entire opera which I hadn’t seen until now. On a theatrical and cinematic level this performance isn’t as successful as the superb version Leslie Megahey made for the BBC in 1988; director Miklós Szinetár gives us a rather traditional Gothic reading that’s only contradicted by the slight stylisation of the sets. The climactic moment when the Fifth Door opens delivers a simple blaze of white light that can’t compete with the equivalent moment in Megahey’s version when the castle floor opens up and Bluebeard’s kingdom is revealed in miniature. The musical recording is excellent, however, with Georg Solti conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Kolos Kováts plays Bluebeard and Sylvia Sass is Judith. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Michael Powell’s Bluebeard revisited
Joseph Southall’s Bluebeard
Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard

The Complete Citizen Kane

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The Orson Welles centenary approaches so the posts this week will be devoted to one of my favourite film directors. The Complete Citizen Kane was an especially generous BBC documentary—comprehensive, authoritative and 90 minutes in length—screened in 1991 for the 50th anniversary of Welles’ most celebrated film. Christopher Swayne and Charles Cabot were the producers, and the narration is by Leslie Megahey, producer and interviewer of The Orson Welles Story (1982), a two-part documentary for the BBC’s Arena that ran for 165 minutes. Megahey’s Welles film was a definitive work for persuading Welles and his collaborators to discuss the director’s entire career at length. Clips of the long Welles interview turn up in The Complete Citizen Kane, as do clips from a later BBC series, The RKO Story (1987), which devoted a whole programme to Welles’ time at the studio.

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The Complete Citizen Kane captures the attention at the outset by showing you a film that never existed, Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness, the film that would have been Welles’ first project for RKO before it was cancelled due to expense. Helping narrate the evolution of Citizen Kane is William Alland, the actor who played the investigative reporter in the film, and also the voice of the News on the March sequence. Despite obvious sympathies, the documentary devotes some time to Pauline Kael’s controversial Raising Kane essay, and the fraught question of who contributed what to the finished screenplay. The Complete Citizen Kane ends with an extract from a radio show featuring Orson Welles talking to HG Wells shortly after Welles had shocked America with his adaptation of The War of the Worlds. All arts documentaries should be this good.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Return to Glennascaul, a film by Hilton Edwards
Screening Kafka
The Panic Broadcast