A Tale Worth Following

My guess is that this isn’t a coincidence, but Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1952 film The Tales of Hoffman was broadcast on Turner Classic Movies the other night. The reason I bring this up is that this film plays central significance in Frances Ford Coppola’s latest opus Tetro, and having never seen it (let alone heard of it) I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was to DVR the darn thing.

Keeping this short, let me just say the film is totally surrealistic and completely unhinged. I adore Powell and Pressburger. Black Narcissus is one of my favorite motion pictures of all time, while Stairway to Heaven (or A Matter of Life and Death, depending on which title you want to go with) is so beautifully enthralling and emotionally captivating just thinking about it is enough to bring a tear to my eye.

But this movie is just crazy. A filmed version of the classic Jacques Offenbach opera, there are things going on here the likes of which I’d never even imagined. It’s a pop nightmare of love, anger, aggression and fantasy, and for anyone who ever said times have changed and that they just didn’t think of things then in the same way we do now let them take a look at this and see what the think of those statements as soon as it is over.

I almost hate to admit this, but I’ve had doll fantasies of my own. I think every girl has thought how cool it would be to be Barbie, how neat it would be to be perfect in every way almost to the point you could be plastic. This movie takes those sentiments to an entirely different level, however, and any dreams I may have had pale in comparison to the operatic elements acted out here.

What does this have to do with SIFF? Not much, really, only the wonderfully imaginative Tetro tying this particular post to the subject matter at hand. But even if it didn’t this is just the kind of movie I love to champion and tell people about, a surrealistic wonder worthy of a second look over a half-century after it first appeared on theater screens.

After all, we can not look at the current state of film without familiarizing ourselves with what has come before, the masters of the medium setting the templates all current filmmakers now draw from. Even an Oscar-winning maestro like Coppola can’t help but stare at the forgotten impresarios like Powell and Pressburger and make modern commentary on what they accomplished, and if that isn’t reason enough to seek a treasure like The Tales of Hoffman out (as well as head to a theater showing Tetro) I don’t know what else would be.