Herzog Blaubarts Burg

Michael Powell made movies in Germany?

Yes, and here's the proof.

Herzog Blaubeard's Burg or Bluebeard's Castle is a real oddity in Michael Powell's filmography. Shot in West Germany in 1963 and produced privately by singer Norman Foster, Powell became involved through the intervention of the film's production designer Hein Heckroth, who had designed some of the best Powell & Pressburger productions. For Powell it was a late chance to return to the kind of `total cinema' he and Pressburger dreamt of in their glory days at Rank, but which was impossible to create in the changed climate of the 60's. Powell's career had been derailed by a series of failed projects and the controversy of Peeping Tom. Moreover a new generation of `social realist' directors were the key players on the scene - and incredible as it might seem - Powell was now seen as an almost embarrassing throwback to outmoded values. But he wasn't about to give up and was already organising productions in Australia and directing for TV.

Still, this was the only really distinctive project he got to complete and thus it's all the more unfortunate that due to legal entanglements the film has rarely been screened outside of West Germany and is one of the most elusive titles for the hard core Powell fan.

I finally saw the film yesterday and I can report that it's a real treat. Although Heckroth and his students were responsible for the highly stylized and creative look to the piece, all materials used are synthetic, the camera work and intensity of this is pure Powell. In fact it's a total return to form.

Such a small scale piece requires great performers and both are well up to the task. Norman Foster makes a striking Bluebeard (although strangely his beard is actually auburn) and Anna Raquel Satre is a very effective Judith. Both give fine intelligent performances although Powell always thought Foster's performance was lacking in passion.

In it's darkness and other worldly beauty the film is a logical extension to The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman. Working in Technicolor for the first time in some years Powell creates some truly startling images, using transparent sets and back projection to give the film a magical multi layered feel.

It's all sung (in German), although apparently an English dubbed version exists, and although I'm not an opera fan, the Bartok score is quite powerful and brooding.

Duke Bluebeard's Castle may be static in story at times, but because of the atmosphere created and the music it is regardless one of Bartok's best works. While this film adaptation is not one of Michael Powell's best films, coming from a director with a filmography full of great ones, it is nonetheless highly effective and doesn't deserve the relative obscurity it has.

Bluebeard's Castle is not one of the best-looking of Powell's films, but that is not meaning that it looks cheap because it doesn't. This is meaning that Powell's films were always well-made, the best of them among the most beautiful-looking films ever. In fact it's very atmospherically shot with truly creepy Expressionistic settings and lighting that is both moody and effectively garish(a term I've often used negatively but considering the subject and the filming style it works here). Bartok's music is hypnotic and hair-raising in its most suspenseful parts(ie. the penultimate door), and the orchestra play it with every bit the nail-biting mystery and tonal power it ought to have, nothing sounding underpowered or faded. The score is conducted with plenty of authority and nuance too.

Powell's direction is attentive is atmospheric, never does one doubt that this suited him well. The story here avoids being static and while the pace is deliberate and allows the music to breathe and have space not once does the suspense(and there's tons of it in the latter half, nail-biting even towards the end) dissipate or the film never stops being exciting or genuinely unnerving. There are only two characters here, Judith and Bluebeard, and they are brilliantly played by Ana Raquel Satre and especially Norman Foster. Satre is elegance personified and plays Judith with a lot of spirit as well as touching vulnerability, her voice is limpid and doesn't become shrill under pressure. Foster is suitably restrained and powerful in voice, he is legitimately threatening while also bringing a refreshing degree of melancholy to the role.

All in all, a very, very good film and should be better known, proof that despite its obscurity that Powell did make at least one great film after Peeping Tom. The Robert Lloyd, Sylvia Sass and recent Met productions of the opera are also well worth tracking down and very close together in ranking. 9/10 Bethany Cox

Cinephile wisdom has it that Michael Powell made his final masterpiece, Peeping Tom, in 1960 - only to dwindle into rapid and irreversible decline. In fact, this cinematic wizard did make one more staggering film. Bluebeard's Castle, a film of an opera by Bela Bartok, was shot for German TV and has never (to my knowledge) had a screen or video release. Yet its blend of sadistic voyeurism and Gothic visual frenzy makes it a great 'last will and testament' by Powell, who was a master of both.

In Powell's mise-en-scene (as in the libretto by Bela Balazs, a pioneer film theorist) Count Bluebeard is not a sneering fairytale villain. He's a man of refined taste, whose sheer aesthetic adoration of his brides compels him to kill - to reduce the women he loves to lifeless statues. He's in a direct line of descent from Conrad Veidt as the evil magician in Thief of Baghdad, Anton Walbrook as the demonic ballet impresario in The Red Shoes and, indeed, Karl Bohm as the homicidal photographer in Peeping Tom.

Unlike the women in those earlier films, Bluebeard's new wife Judith is no hapless victim - flailing about like a butterfly stuck through with a pin. She is, rather, a strong-willed and ruthless manipulator of her crazed husband. One by one, she wheedles out of him the keys to his seven secret chambers. In a horrifying way, she colludes in her own demise.

This tormented couple are the only live beings onscreen, yet the sets and costumes seem to writhe with a life all their own. A hall of Expressionist sculptures loom like twisted, frozen gargoyles. A jungle of artificial flowers sheds it radiant petals, as Bluebeard and his bride make love on a vast purple bed. Given this film's intimate scale, designer/painter Hein Heckroth outdoes even his own work on Powell's 1951 opera epic Tales of Hoffmann.

Best of all, Bluebeard's Castle passes the test of any truly great opera production - making us listen raptly to music we might not otherwise care for. I've never been a Bartok fan, but his score won me over because every note was matched so perfectly by the images and the drama onscreen.

Not only does this hour-long tour de force point back to Powell's great work of the 40s and 50s. It also looks forward to some of my favourite films in later decades, notably Carmelo Bene's Salome and Matthew Barney's Cremaster 5. What more could an obsessive film and opera buff ever want?

This is a beautifully photographed interpretation of the Bartók opera and thanks to the vision of Michael Powell and designer Hein Heckroth, it's a good one. It's all sang by Norman Foster ("Bluebeard") and Ana Raquel Satre - his latest (4th) wife "Judith" and set in his castle that were it not for the colour, would not have looked out of place in a Von Sternberg film. The couple are getting to know each other, and rather unwittingly "Judith" is interrogating her new husband about his life and what lies behind the seven doors of his home. As she progresses, she discovers his torture chamber, his treasury and despite his warnings that she is unlikely to like what she sees, she perseveres through the others before... It's sung entirely in German and the version I saw had only the most sparing of sur-titles to guide us through but the imagery and the performances - especially from the mesmerising Satre - tell us all we need to know about her, her new husband and her not too bright future. There's a lovely chemistry between the two. The Duke has an almost intimidatory character to him, but Foster plays that subtly and we can believe that possibly, just possibly, he might actually love the curious "Judith". The photography captures the intimacy and despair of these two really effectively, with the targeted use of light and shade and the gothic-style set design adding hugely to the allure of this hour-long story.

In exile, Michael Powell made a quick stopover in Germany to make this filmed adaptation of the opera by Bela Bartok for West German television based on the French folktale of the eponymous Bluebeard who killed his series of wives. An hour long, it's one of Powell's least physically ambitious efforts in decades, but he makes the absolute most of his limited sets, focusing on his two performers as they belt out the libretto by Bela Balazs. He gets some great compositions, making this one of his best looking movies in a long time.

Bluebeard (Norman Foster) brings home his new wife Judit (Ana Raquel Satre) to his dark castle. Deeply in love with the man she's eloped with, having left behind her fiancé, Judit wants to do everything to improve Bluebeard's life within her power. That ends up including opening up the castle to light, and that must be done by opening seven locked doors which Bluebeard resists her opening.

This being an opera, the story isn't that complicated. Judith opens the doors, steadily getting the keys from Bluebeard and opening the doors, discovering hints of the truth of his previous wives. That truth gets revealed through a mixture of images like the almost surrealist vision of blood seeping from between the white tiles in one room to the use of red gels to create light in places like through jewels to having blood trail on the bottom of her white gown. Through this, she gains a red sash and some glittering armor around her waist (which disappears at a certain point, a choice I don't get unless it's meant to show her getting close to Bluebeard and then further away by discarding it, yeah, that's got to be it).

So, the rooms end up being that white tiled room (a torture chamber), to his treasure room, to an armory, to a garden, to a reveal of a model of his kingdom, and to a room with a pool of tears. As Judith discovers these things, her love cracks as it becomes obvious what's going on, but she insists on going forward towards the locked seventh room. There, she finds his previous three wives, one representing morning, the next representing noon, the third representing evening, with a fourth space for the one representing night, Judith.

Not a complicated plot, of course, and it all hinges on the performances from Foster and Satre along with Powell's staging. Apparently, the opera is often considered unstageable because of the lack of action, but it provides opportunity for Powell to go full German Expressionistic in his framing. He has these marvelous shots as Judith discovers her way through the castle, putting people in different parts of the composition, all framed by the primal architecture that reminded me of Welles' approach to Dunsinane Castle in Macbeth. And, of course, both Foster and Satre were professional opera singers, so I cannot fault them for performance. Although, since I don't speak German, I can only say that their voices were strong.

Really, there's not much to talk about, but I did really enjoy the experience as it played out. It looks really good, it sounds really good, and the story, while simple, plays out in this tragic direction that works quite well. It's worth a discovery.