The Tales of Hoffmann: Tales from the Lives of Marionettes

Les contes d’Hoffmann demands fantasy, but it can also have realistic settings, with its three acts set in Paris, Venice, and Munich (the last becomes a Greek island in the film). Yet Powell and Pressburger’s approach was to create a completely artificial fantasy world in the studio, encouraging designer Hein Heckroth to create bizarre sculptures and trompe l’oeil effects—like a carpet painted with a staircase in the opening episode, “down” which Hoffmann dances with Olympia—with puppets instead of extras and freakish costumes. More radically still, the soundtrack was recorded first—as in animation—and the entire film shot to playback, which allowed for the use of dancers and actors in most of the parts, other than those of Hoffmann and Antonia (sung and acted by tenor Robert Rounseville and soprano Ann Ayars), and thus the extraordinary expressivity of Red Shoes veteran dancers Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, Moira Shearer, and Ludmilla Tchérina.

The same technique would later be used to excellent effect in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), where all but one member of the visible cast is dubbed, but in The Tales of Hoffmann it not only realizes the opera’s original intention that all of the poet’s rivals be different manifestations of the same character—we recognize Bruce Dargavel’s voice as Helpmann transmutes into a maker of automata, a Venetian sorcerer, and a demonic doctor—but also allows some highly original “improvements” to the opera. That barcarole, usually sung by Hoffmann’s companion and the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, becomes a duet between Giulietta and her reflection, turning the sequence into an intensely poetic exploration of illusion and identity.

For Powell, who had begun his career in the silent era, entranced by the magical atmosphere of Rex Ingram’s company of bohemians at the Victorian Studios in Nice—which Powell had joined in the midtwenties—this was a chance to reassemble and add to the company of great artists already recruited for The Red Shoes. Massine had danced with Sergei Diaghilev; Helpmann was not only a principal dancer in London’s Vic-Wells company but had also produced a series of stunning, original ballets with modern and futuristic themes; and Shearer was a rising star of English ballet. Joining them for The Tales of Hoffmann was the choreographer Frederick Ashton, who also appears in the film, and a range of leading singers, both on- and offscreen, giving the film the maximum expressive potential. It was also a return to the freedom of purely visual filmmaking, without the demands of synchronous sound recording. Powell delighted in being able to use different camera speeds and the same primitive “magical” effects used by cinema’s pioneers for such sequences as Olympia’s dismemberment, when Shearer’s limbs and head seem still alive as she is fought over by her enraged creator and his defaulting client.

The Tales of Hoffmann is certainly a riot of color and exuberant performance, and made a welcome splash in the drab world of 1951, when Britain, like the rest of Europe, was still struggling to recover from the ravages of war. Its release coincided with the Festival of Britain, a government-funded attempt to boost the national morale by celebrating past achievements and looking to the future. London’s riverside Royal Festival Hall and the forerunner of the National Film Theatre both date from the festival project to rehabilitate the city’s bombed South Bank and to reassert British creativity in the arts—which probably explains the mischievous shot at the very end of The Tales of Hoffmann, in which this thoroughly international production, inspired by England’s most cosmopolitan musician, who is seen laying down his baton, is finally stamped “Made in England.”

But was England ready for it? The Tales of Hoffman inevitably disconcerted many, who found the combination of Heckroth’s expressionistic surrealism, already seen in the decor of the Red Shoes dream ballet, and the film’s total embrace of stylized performance disturbing. Even one of Powell and Pressburger’s strongest supporters among the rising generation of critics, Raymond Durgnat, ridiculed the film’s visual style, suggesting that it could best be appreciated as a “bad taste classic.” Unlike Jean Cocteau’s recent Orpheus (1950)—which explored the theme of poetic alienation in a cool, “modern” manner, and was correspondingly well received—The Tales of Hoffmann had to wait until its shock tactics no longer distracted from its underlying seriousness and originality. No doubt the extravagant fashions of the sixties and seventies, from flower power to glam rock, have helped make the film feel less outrageous, while Derek Jarman’s use of flamboyant costumes in his films, from Sebastiane to Jubilee, seems directly indebted to The Tales of Hoffmann.

Jarman, of course, was often suspected of putting style before substance, and there is a traditional English suspicion of the image that has undoubtedly worked against The Tales of Hoffmann’s reputation. Yet as long ago as 1968, the critic Thomas Elsaesser bracketed the film’s romantic pessimism with that of Orson Welles and the Jean-Luc Godard of Contempt. And we might add to this list Ingmar Bergman’s puppet motif in From the Life  of the Marionettes. Critics have been slow to follow the appreciation of filmmakers as diverse as Scorsese, Jarman, and George A. Romero. But instead of holding it at a distance, as “filmed opera,” we can surely now see it as a vital link in the erotic chain that leads from Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), with its three versions of the same female ideal; through the tortured, tragic heroines of Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes, and Gone to Earth; and on to the women who dare to enter the threatening male worlds of Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Bluebeard’s Castle (the last of his three opera films, made in 1963). In The Tales of Hoffmann, the poet is deceived by all the women in his life, or rather by his distorted images of them; and his reckless pursuit of beauty and new experience makes him an easy victim of the malevolent magician, in all his guises. Freud drew on one of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories, “The Sandman,” for his classic 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” interpreting its concern with loss of vision as symptomatic of castration anxiety. More recently, Romero has shrewdly identified Helpmann’s multiple role as that of a shape-changing Dracula, which may offer a further clue toward its interpretation. When Powell and Pressburger withhold the opera’s final consolation—that Hoffmann will be strengthened as a poet by his experiences of loss—we can read this conclusion, both pessimistic and ironic, as a bitter comment on the fate of the artist in cinema. Here Dracula gets the girl, leaving the dreamer to drown his sorrows, and us with a gorgeous yet disturbing feast for the senses.