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Götz Friedrich’s 1984–85 production of the Ring arrived in January at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, carrying with it a mixed bag of musical and theatrical goods (seen Jan. 5, 6, 10 and 12). The sold-out cycle was presented over two weekends. There were several last-minute changes, most notably cancellations from the conductor Mikko Franck and American baritone Greer Grimsley, who was to sing Wotan.
In Das Rheingold, DOB found an excellent replacement in Johan Reuter, a bright-voiced, creamy baritone who infused Wotan with an unexpected degree of youthful ardor. In the first two evenings of the cycle, Fricka was the astonishing Marina Prudenskaja, an aristocratic mezzo who vented her righteous anger in a fierce, razor-like voice. Another standout was Oleg Bryjak as Alberich, a bloodcurdling bass who in this production controlled Nibelheim from an underground factory reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. But the evening belonged to the boisterous and ironic Loge of Clemens Bieber, who dispensed his dubious advice with cunning glee and a self-confident, mellifluous tenor.
Die Walküre introduced James Johnson’s Wotan to the cycle. The capable baritone returned for the Wanderer in Siegfried, singing with deep, rounded if occasionally raspy tones, giving the god the proper balance of severity and vulnerability. The true star of Die Walküre was Christopher Ventris as Siegmund, who sang heroically and with impressive dramatic range. As his Wälsung sister, Sieglinde, Petra Lang was understated and unconvincing in Act I. In Act II, she registered greater dramatic commitment but sang with hysterical, uneven tones. Her best moment was a rapturous reaction to Brünnhilde’s annunciation.
Irène Theorin’s Brünnhilde was frustratingly uneven. She was in good voice for her striking Act II entrance and managed the “Hojotoho” with exciting assurance. However, she lacked the requisite stamina and was struggling by the beginning of Act III. For her final scene, Theorin sang more softly, which seemed to reduced the strain and paved the way for a smooth, effective ending of the opera.
Top vocal and dramatic honors in Siegfried belonged to Burkhard Ulrich, a cunning yet eminently likable Mime. As Siegfried, American tenor Stephen Gould, a Bayreuth veteran, made an equivocal impression: seemingly underpowered in Act I, he plowed through Act II with exciting juvenile ardor and maintained enough stamina for a satisfactory Act III love duet.
Alfons Eberz made for a much finer Siegfried in Götterdämmerung: his riveting heldentenor faltered only in the long Act III monologue. As the Siegfried and Götterdämmerung Brünnhildes, Luana DeVol was at her vengeful best in Act II of the final opera. She was less compelling when it came to expressing the transports of love; moments that called for airy smoothness were often wobbly. Her performance was tainted by frequent patches of strident vibrato and piercing high notes, especially regrettable in her immolation scene.
Lenus Carlson’s tentative performance as Gunther reinforced his character’s consummate spinelessness. Edith Haller was a naïve, and rosy-voiced Gutrune. Marina Prudenskaja had a rousing cameo as the Götterdämmerung Waltraute. The evening’s finest performance came from Matti Salminen, who sang Hagen with a netherworldly bass and menacing intensity.
The chorus of the DOB was well prepared as the Gibichungs. Among the cycle’s other integral vocal clusters, the Rhinemaidens and Norns were pitch-perfect and impressive, unlike the confused mess of leather-clad Valkyries.
Twenty-eight-year-old Finnish conductor Mikko Franck was to lead the entire cycle but bowed out on short notice. In his place, Lothar Zagrosek (aged sixty-five) and Philippe Auguin (aged forty-six) shared conducting duties, which made for a less unified cycle. Zagrosek was fiery and brisk. However, he often treated the individual leitmotifs in isolation rather than demonstrating their function in the larger musical fabric. Auguin’s performances were more careful and leisurely, although he was more prone to drown the singers out.
Friedrich’s production has enjoyed more than forty performances: wear and tear showed in some creaky sets and malfunctioning props. The stage concept, a massive “Time Tunnel” that connects the various worlds of the opera with our own, is visually striking yet underutilized. At the end of Götterdämmerung, after some confusing pyrotechnics, ostensible survivors of the wreckage huddle together and lift their eyes to an apocalyptic landscape inhabited by statuesque figures draped in white shrouds. The arresting visuals provided an effective complement to the cosmic musical bursts with which the opera concludes. It seemed to signal not only a farewell to the gods but the fact that this much-used production is perhaps ready to be retired. 
A.J. GOLDMANN
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The CineStar in the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz
Stargazers wait by the entrance of the Grand Hyatt
An installation of one of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno videos
Actress Tilda Swinton and director Julien Issac at the press conference for their documentary Derek, about the British filmmaker Derek Jarman.
Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai and French actress Jeanne Moreau after the press screening of “Plus tard, tu comprendras”
Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz pose for papparazzi at the press conference for “Elegy”
Isabella Rossellini, Guy Maddin and Jody Shapiro discuss “Green Porno” and “My Winipeg”
The 55-year-old Rossellini
If the Feuilletonist has of late been more silent than God, it is the fault not of laziness or fatigue, but rather competing obligations. As of a week ago, I was reporting on the 58th Annual Berlin International Film Festival, zipping around town to attend screenings, fight my way into crowded press conferences, and beg press agents for the rare interview.
My coverage of the 10-day festival is divided among various magazines. To start, there’s a lenghty festival overview / wrap-up at Anthemmagazine.com.
Secondly, I contributed a story on Isabella Rossellini’s small screen directorial début, “Green Porno,” for Wired.com.
Visit the website of The New Republic for an in-depth analysis of the film and video work of French director Michel Gondry, whose new film “Be Kind, Rewind,” opened nationwide this past Friday.
As a supplement to that feature, a Q&A I conducted with the quirky and charming filmmaker has been posted as well.
On the horizon is a feature on a food and film series that brought Michelin chefs to cater gourmet meals inspired by films with gastronomic themes, which should appear sometime this week at Gourmet.com.
Even though I was not accredited as a photographer at this year’s Berlinale, I still managed to steal a few surreptitious shots of the festival’s stars. I’ll be posting a selection of photos from this year’s Berlinale shortly. So, stay tuned!
-Adam
First off, here’s an excerpt (with link) to a piece that appears on the Op-Ed page of tomorrow’s International Herald Tribune about being a young writer in Berlin:
A.J. Goldmann
BERLIN
“I recently returned to Berlin to live in a spirit of comfortable frugality and to write. Prior to this trip, I’d only known the city in the summer. I was unprepared for the harshness of winter in Berlin, where the cold itself has a color: gray.
“The gloom outside my window has made me into something of a bookish hermit. On my second night back, I decided it was time: I leaped to my amply-stocked bookshelf and removed my copy of Christopher Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories,” an unaesthetic edition from the 1960s whose badly cracked spine resembles a broken accordion…”[READ COMPLETE ARTICLE]
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In fact, “The Berlin Stories” only consistuted a fraction of an impromptu trilogy that I designed during my first weeks here. So, let me tell you about the Berlin-related works that flanked it.
My Improbable Berlin Trilogy
Several days after returning to Berlin, I finished reading Joseph Kanon’s “The Good German.” The mass-market trade paperback fit nicely into the pocket of my pea coat, which had made it a perfect companion while zigzagging around town during my last week in New York, during my delayed flight out of Newark and eventually while struggling with the bad cold that had attacked me as soon as my plane landed at Tegel.
The book had been recommended to me by a German journalist friend almost five years back. Were it not for the slickly-advertised film adaptation that came out last year, I probably would have never remembered to try it out. As it were, the badly received film did nothing to resurrect my interest in the book – in fact, seeing the promotional tie-in copies at Barnes & Noble acted as a deterrent. It was this edition, however, that wound up on the 50-cent rack of the Morningside Branch of the New York Public Library.
I was coming out of a months’-long ordeal of slogging through a long contemporary work set in Japan (and recommended to me by numerous friends) and was looking for a change of scenery and pace. I was also bound for Berlin in a week’s time and could use something to help reacclimatize me to life in the Hauptstadt.
At the center of the grim, noir-colored world of this carefully plotted neo-pulp tome is an American newspaperman who returns to Berlin in 1944, shortly after the Soviets stick a red flag on the Reichstag. He is searching for his lover amid the lies, secrets and rubble of the incinerated capital. Kanon’s knowledge of the city is dead on, and one of the book’s greatest pleasures for me was tailing the characters mentally as they wound their way around the sprawling wasteland: Mehringdamm, Hallesches Tor, Wittenbergplatz, Grünewald – these are places that I know only in their present-day incarnations.
Less convincing that the geographical precision is the climax of stock high-octave devices: a tense showdown during a parade followed by a lengthy car chase.
Somewhat let down by this chaotic finale to a lengthy, involved crime-drama, I wasted no time in choosing what next to tackle: “The Berlin Stories” (see above).
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My idiosyncratic trilogy came to an end on Christmas Day with a screening of “The Serpent’s Egg,” set in an even older Berlin of 1923. This was Ingmar Bergman’s sole English-language effort, a Hollywood production he embarked on with Dino De Laurentiis while evading the Swedish tax authorities in 1977.
Shot on location in West Berlin, this puzzling film stars David Carridine as a thoroughly unappealing out-of-work acrobat in Berlin during the inflation crisis. His character, Abel Rosenberg, is interrogated by the police after his brother’s suicide. It seems that the police commissioner suspects him of committing a string of homicides. Rosenberg, who has witnessed police men walk calmly by as SA men beat Jews, chalks the commissioner’s suspicions up to anti-Semitism. He resorts to boozing and violence to cope with his depression and paranoia, and repeatedly abandons his brother’s ex-wife (Liv Ullman), a nightclub singer who is the only person who cares about him.
The film is full of wildly twisted and surreal touches: kinky cabaret numbers, horrific Nazi violence, evil Aryan doctors, coked-up prostitutes and an Orwellian dénouement. But the nightmarish noir promised by all these elements never takes full form. The script is full of loose threads and the ambiguous ending seems an act of desperation. Stylistically and thematically, it also seems to lack Bergman’s imprimatur. One of the only indications comes in a scene where an American priest asks a fearful suffering Liv Ullman to forgive him for his apathy. Are we expected for forgive Bergman for this same fault?
It’s hard to remember the last time a low-budget comedy generated so much hype as “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” To make sense of this, one needs to understand the man behind Borat’s moustache, the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Though Baron Cohen’s satirical TV show, “Da Ali G Show” was popular both in Britain and the US, his cult status has been primarily built-up by the Internet and illegal file sharing. Baron Cohen’s mixing of fact and fiction is a reflexive commentary on the reality-TV craze. “Borat,” which is directed by Larry Charles, shows that the distinction between TV and film is breaking down. All of this makes Baron Cohen a quintessentially a 21st-century phenomenon. On a more practical level, the “Borat” film is one of the funniest and cleverest comedies in a long, long while. Part of what makes the character of Borat so goddamn funny is the multiple layering and crisscrossing of identities. As those familiar with the British show know, Borat simply wasn’t as funny when interacting with the English. For one, they tended to have less tolerance for his shenanigans. Beyond that, Baron Cohen always seemed held back and reserved with fellow Brits. As an outsider, Baron Cohen can mock and satirize Americans more thoroughly and courageously that he can his own compatriots. That indeed is the sense one gets from watching this quirky travelogue through the American heartland. For while Baron Cohen does satirize and mock racist attitudes, the comic strength of his film lies in his ability to confront us with the sheer weirdness of our country.
The paper-thin plot lets the various pranks and situations speak for themselves. Essentially, this is a road film. It follows Borat as he drives cross-country with his obese producer Azamat in search of Pamela Anderson. Along the way he learns to drive, buys a car, sings the Kazakhi national anthem at a rodeo and goes into rapture at a mega-church.
Most of the film’s humor is too damn good to give away. Some of the pranks will be familiar to devotees of Da Ali G Show, such as behaving badly at a dinner party. All the while, it’s very hard to believe your eyes and accept what Borat and his eight-person-crew get away with. (According to the production notes, Baron Cohen very narrowly escaped arrest several times during the shoot). Baron Cohen reportedly stayed in character throughout the shoot, and his commitment to the role borders on the pathological. He pushes the envelope pretty far while pushing people’s buttons ever further.
There is, however, one unforgivable scene juvenile, Tom Green-style idiocy: a sickening centerpiece that will provoke many walkouts. But aside from this, Borat does not disappoint. Like the TV series at its best, the film amuses, shocks and discomforts. The format of a feature film, allows it to gather momentum, building and building in outrageousness. At a brisk 83 minutes, there’s never a dull moment. But don’t let the short running
