Scene from Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982)

Comparing their geometric, sparse Parsifal to that of Neues Kino director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s controversial 1982 multi-layered collage film would be a pointless task.  Syberberg’s famous film is a case of a director with so much to say, that it literally becomes a truly rare kitchen sink moment in which repeated viewings reap priceless rewards.

Syberberg’s Jungian references abound with fascist symbolism, Nietzsche, Christian mythology, Post World War II Euro culture in a narcotic texture unlike anything before or since.  Entire books could be written about this one of a kind film.

In 1993, long before Titus, Frida, or her most recent (and amazing) work, Across the Universe, Julie Taymor was known to modern opera buffs as the director of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. Taymor filtered Stravinsky’s opera through her own undeniably powerful, highly individualistic voice.

Undoubtedly, Stravinsky (who, like Picasso, went through numerous phases, from neo-classicism to post Webern serialism and yet made everything  he touched sound like his own) would have approved of Taymor’s kindred aesthetic spirit.

When Taymor’s production first became available on the video market, word spread quickly, with many proclaiming it to be one of the very best, if not the best, opera yet filmed.

The sets (by George Tsypin), masks, sculptures, puppets, costumes ( Ei Wade), make-up (Reiko Kruk), Japanese dance and narration (the libretto by Jean Cocteau, originally in Latin, allowed for translation to the native language), Ozawa’s incisive conducting, add up to one of the most extraordinarily stylized and emotionally draining operatic experiences caught on film thanks to Taymor’s uncompromising, riveting vision.  Not too  surprisingly, Oedipus Rex was available only briefly and was finally made available again in 2005, after numerous requests.

Still, for many, Taymor’s Rex must compete with one of the oldest and still best contemporary operas on film: the 1951 film version of Menotti’s The Medium.

Gian Carlo Menotti was a powerful exception to the unspoken rule that musicians should leave stage direction to others (unlike Herbert Von Karajan, who repeatedly re-enforced the wisdom of that rule).  Unfortunately, Menotti only directed a few films.  Naturally, the Medium’s black and white cinematography expresses the haunting them of Menotti’s libretto.  This film is still talked about as the yardstick of filmed operas, some fifty years after it’s debut.

Kaijah Saariaho is considered to be one of the few undeniable giants in 21st century avant-garde music.  That she has an impassioned advocate in conductor/composer Esa-Pekka Salonen certainly hasn’t hurt.   She teamed up with him and the infamous, enfant terrible director Peter Sellars for the filmed version of her opera L’ Amour de Loin in 2005.

Sellars evocative, minimalist direction perfectly serves this diaphanous music which echoes  and flows from the likes of  Debussy and Messiaen ( Salonen, who specializes in the music of all three, is equally perfect in his interpretive powers).  There’s water and enveloping blackness aplenty, atmosphere rather than an abundance of over developed plot.  For all the hopelessly conservative, classical fundamentalists ” Let’s do everything in our power to kill the future of art-music and no longer make it a viable art form” moaning and groaning of what’s wrong in contemporary music, this production shows exactly what’s right.  It’s one of the few times everything comes together just right.

Sellars, of course, came to notoriety with his productions of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas in 1989, 1990.  His Don Giovanni takes place in “the bronks” with two African-American brothers in the lead roles, and part of the opera coming out of a boom box.  Cosi fan Tutti is set in a post punk modern diner, complete with Mozart silhouetted latrines, and Le Nozze de Figaro moves like quicksilver in Trump Towers.  Opera traditionalists practically branded Sellars as an antichrist, but his avant-pop interpretations were a literal removing of the cobwebs and done completely in a Mozartian, devil-may-care spirit.  His productions won him a legion of fans and made opera-going hip, albeit briefly.

After Handel’s Giulio Cesare in 1992 and Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins (done MTV style) in ’93, Sellars appropriately tackled Theodora for Y2K. Handel’s opera on ancient Rome and early Christianity becomes a modern parable in JFK Airport with a Swat team symbolizing the Roman Army,  the President of the United States personifying Nero, and worshipping of the ancient gods during happy hour.

In 2007, Sellars teamed with minimalist composer John Adams for the filmed version of his most universally acclaimed production, Doctor Atomic. Adams’ opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the testing of the atomic bomb is an overwhelmingly exquisite and intense post Varese electronic opera, even for those who normally do not respond to Adams’ music (ahem).  Sellars direction is a perfect marriage between an innovative, visionary director and contemporary composer.

More Peter Sellars opera on DVD:

*This is part two of a three part series. Read part one. Read part three.

DIRECTED BY:  Joachim Hess, from a production of composer/librettist Giancarlo Menotti

FEATURING:  The Hamburg State Opera

PLOT:  In this children’s opera, the world has been invaded by bizarre alien creatures named Globolinks, who are allergic to music.   A bus full of children returning to boarding school breaks down in the middle of a lonely forest, and the students are surrounded by the alien creatures.  Meanwhile, back at the school, the headmaster is infected by one of the aliens, meaning that he will soon turn into a Globolink himself.

BACKGROUND:

• Gian Carlo Menotti, the author of Help! Help! The Globolinks, was a well respected, Pulitzer Prize winning composer.  His most popular work is the Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, which was commissioned specifically to launch the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” television series, and which was shown annually in the United States on television during the Christmas season from 1951-1966.
• Help!  Help!  The Globolinks, by contrast, was a flop and is rarely performed.  It is usually only mentioned in complete biographies of Menotti.
• Menotti was a pioneer in adapting opera for telecast, and the film version of Help!  Help!  The Globolinks was originally shown on German television in 1968. 

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  No doubt, it’s the Globolinks themselves (pictured above), who come in two varieties: one that looks like a wriggling rook from a chess set, and one that looks like an avant-garde ballerina dressed in a full-body dayglo bungee-jumping suit.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  A children’s opera about music-loathing aliens is

3 minute clip for Help! Help! The Globolinks courtesy of Naxos (English subtitles available on DVD)

already presumptively pretty weird.  But when the opera is made in 1968, at the height of the psychedelic sixties, and utilizes all the camera tricks, distorted electronic noises, and bizarre set designs Summer of Love filmmakers developed in an attempt to mimic the disorienting effects of LSD, there’s no more need for the presumption–we’re definitely caught in a very weird nook of film. 

COMMENTS:  Help! Help! The Globolinks is one of the most obscure movies likely to be mentioned on this site.  It’s only of the very few movies that (as of this writing) has yet to be absorbed into the bloodstream of that vast movie-digesting machine, the IMDB (Internet Movie Database).   A children’s opera produced for German TV in the late 1960s doesn’t exactly command the attention of the Nintendo generation, or their parents.  Globolinks is mostly a historical curiosity, a bizarre and bad example from a dying art form.

Opera is no longer a vital popular art form, and hasn’t been for generations.  Many people who cannot bear the sound of screeching sopranos, or minor characters who answer a simple request for the time of day by belting out a phrase in F-sharp minor, would find Globolinks pure torture even if it were a good opera–which it isn’t.  The music is pleasant enough but unremarkable; I doubt many could hum an aria from it (beyond the single note “la”), even after several listenings.  The vocal performances are all impressive, but the cast has little melody to work with.   The alien noises of the Globolinks, likely intended by Menotti to be a parody of the experimental electronic music of composers like Stockhausen, is frequently more interesting than Menotti’s wandering score.

Globolinks doesn’t fare much better as a story than it does as a piece of music.  Even though it was designed for children, the plot is probably too preachy and ridiculous to enchant them.  The second act drags badly as the focus shifts from the Globolink invasion to comic relief and a claptrap debate between the characters about the power of music.

One of the strangest problems with the story is that the putative heroine–Madame Euterpova the music teacher–may be the piece’s least likable character, while the supposed villain–Dr. Stone the headmaster–is actually a long-suffering victim whom the script cruelly casts adrift.   We’re first introduced to Euterpova when she storms into the headmaster’s office and throws a shrill tantrum, threatening to quit because the music department doesn’t get the attention she feels it deserves and complaining that she “has an artist’s heart and suffers.”  She’s obviously Menotti’s mouthpiece for the importance of the power of traditional music against society’s indifference and electronic rubbish, but one has to wonder why he chose to make her so ridiculous and unsympathetic.  Throughout the rest of the film, Euterpova is bossy, dismissive, pretentious, and shrewish.  She even has a grotesque physical deformity in the form of a nose elongated with putty to Cyrano’s length.  (There’s probably a deep symbolic meaning attached to her ridiculous proboscis, but I prefer to think of it as just a weird flourish).   Though she’s intended as a comic figure, Madame Euterpova is the kind of teacher that gives kids nightmares.

Stone, on the other hand, apparently has no use for music, a sin that pales beside Euterpova’s numerous personality disorders.  Menotti (accidentally?) engages our sympathy towards him when he is forced to listen to Euterpova’s self-absorbed complaints while he is worried sick about the missing children and the alien invasion.  In the end, Euterpova dismisses his fate-worse-than-death with a callous “I guess I’ll have to look somewhere else for a husband.”  Amusing, but it doesn’t make us like the supposed heroine, her message, or the way she dismisses opposing views without the slightest reflection, any better.   

But although Globolinks is a failure as a work of high art, that doesn’t mean it can’t hold our attention as a weird curiosity piece.  The collision of the stodgy operatic form with the love-generation art direction is entertaining, and more than a bit surreal.  The Globolink costumes are bizarre and fun, and the weird blips and distorted theremins of the alien language sound like something lifted from the internal soundtrack of a circa-1969 hippie’s acid trip. 

And there is at least one scene that’s weirdly beautiful.  Emily is the only child who has remembered to bring her Globolink-repelling violin.   Therefore, she is sent alone into the wilderness to find the school.  As she roams the forest, weird rotating mobile sculptures with huge glinting mirrors blink into existence, eventually blotting out the trees, until she is wandering in a modernist space-age forest.  This transformation is musically accompanied by an abstract, distorted chord pattern.  Emily wanders through this weird landscape playing her violin to ward off the evil Globolinks, who skulk about inside the metallic labyrinth.  This sequence alone is worth the price of a rental.

Ultimately, Globolinks isn’t very good, or even very entertaining most of the time.  Some may argue that, since it isn’t a theatrical feature but a television production of a staged opera, Globolinks isn’t a “real” movie.  If it were simply a static camera aimed at performers on stage, I would agree, but this film, with its roving cameras, dissolves and special effects, is clearly a movie as well as an opera.  However you categorize Globolinks, though–as an opera flop, an avant-garde experiment, or simply a poorly conceived excuse to fill up and hour and a half of German television–it is a genuine curiosity, a rarity that’s off the beaten path of even the weirdest movie fan.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the delight of the film lies in the work of production collaborators Alwin Nikolais, Nikolas Schöffer and Eckhard Maronn. The contributions of these three artists are very much of their time and in fact make Menotti’s music seem outdated. Schöffer’s Mondrianesque sculptures are covered with reflecting plates, upon which colored light is projected. These rotating towers create a modernistic almost psychedelic effect … Maronn’s extraterrestrial music, billed as electronic effects, is a fine example of the electronic music techniques of the 1960s. Predominated as it is by tape manipulations and analog synthesizer effects, this music brings back fond memories of the period. And Nikolais’s tube-like costumes for the male Globolinks prove both versatile and a lot of fun to watch.”–Arlo McKinnon, Opera News

“…Globolinks seems empty at its core, missing genuine musical inspiration and theatrical consistency…   The Globolinks are colorful and weird video creations, not too scary for the little ones, but effective aliens.”  –Henry Fogel, Fanfare

“Electronic effects in this film made four decades ago are very tame by today’s standards, but effective in their dated way, and Menotti’s music is very accessible.” –Classical DVD Review

IMDB LINK:  None.

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Gian Carlo Menotti: Renaissance Man Of The Theater:  This memoir/essay included on G. Schirmer’s biography page for Menotti contains a few kind references to Globolinks.

Help, Help, the Globolinks! (review):  PDF version of  a scholarly review published in Notes – Volume 65, Number 1, September 2008, pp. 146-147, available to those at an educational institution with an Athens login.

DVD INFO:  The Arthaus Musik DVD (distributed by Naxos) comes sans extras.