The faces of War Requiem: Nathaniel Parker, Sean Bean
and the incomparable Tilda Swinton
I'm
currently preparing to direct a production of Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes, a moving play about
the friendship of British poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen during World
War I. Doing a play like that at this point in history has become an emotional
challenge for me. The play speaks to my own pacifism, my long-standing belief
that humanity needs a massive reframing of its views on violence. At the same
time, I feel caught in a political landscape that fills me with anger every
day. It's easy to seduce yourself with images of Trump, his political enablers
and his cultish supporters writhing in agony. There are times his behavior
makes me wish hell existed, though I realize that's the same kind of thinking
that leads fundamentalists to threaten hellfire and damnation for everything
from same-sex love to wearing yoga pants in public.
After
a fulfilling day of auditions to find the perfect actors for the two roles, I
was in a very vulnerable state when I decided it was time for a reviewing of
Derek Jarman's War Requiem, his 1989
tribute to Benjamin Britten's monumental work and Owen, whose too short life
inspired Britten's composition. I had watched the film years earlier and found
its imagery compelling but a little beyond my frame of reference. I was fairly
new to Jarman's work at the time (I think I'd only seen his 1986 Caravaggio) and didn't know much about
Owen beyond the fact that he had been killed in World War I. Watching it again
years later from a more informed space, I was deeply moved. I now consider the
film and Tilda Swinton's performance among the screen's greatest
accomplishments.
In
his Washington Post review of the
film on its 1990 U.S. debut, Joseph McLellan called it "the first music
video that must be taken seriously." (Quick note: I only heard of this
evaluation in podcaster Alonso Duarde's informative introduction to the picture
on Filmstruck—just giving credit where it's due). That evaluation seems a bit
reductive both of music videos and Jarman's film. There were some pretty damned
good music videos before 1989, including Jarman's own work for Marianne
Faithful and The Smiths, not to mention innovative work from other filmmakers
for artists like ABC, Devo, Cyndi Lauper and Bonnie Tyler. I would suggest that
even lighthearted videos like ABC's "The Look of Love" and Lauper's
"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" are well worth serious consideration.
These videos transcend the commercial end of the form, the sale of music.
In
addition, McLellan's assessment reduces the film to the level of marketing tool.
It seems to suggest that 26 years after Britten's premiere recording of War Requiem, Jarman suddenly felt the
need make a promotional video to increase the recording's sales.
Rather,
War Requiem is a fascinating confluence
of three artists — composer, poet and filmmaker — to create a wholly new work
of art. To obtain the rights to the 1963 recording, Jarman had to agree to
present it complete and with nothing else on the soundtrack during the
performance. That's a blessing to music lovers who may have cringed at what MGM
did to the ballet in An American in Paris
(1951) or the cuts Woody Allen took in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"
at the start of Manhattan (1979). All
Jarman adds are a bell ringing at beginning and end and a recording of Laurence
Olivier's reading from Owen's "Strange Meeting" before the music
starts. The images he plays against the music, however, carry the film beyond a
mere recording of an admittedly fine composition.
Jarman
visualizes the music in three ways. Some sequences are played against montages
of newsreel footage from World War I, with images from World War II, Korea and
Vietnam added for the "Libera Me" (the images of wounded soldiers may
be too intense for some). Using Nathaniel Parker, in his film debut, as Owen,
Owen Teale as The Unknown Soldier, Swinton as a nurse and Sean Bean as a German
soldier, Jarman also creates his own images related to the war, jumping through
time and space to show Owen in the trenches with his men, children celebrating
Christmas, Owen with his mother and Swinton grieving over his dead body, among
many other visuals. Finally, the second half of the "Requiem Aeternam,"
the "Libera Me" and the "Offertorium" play against short
wartime stories, the only clear narratives in the film. The first shows men going
through the initial stages of training, with Parker and Teale becoming friends.
The second depicts a brief moment of détente between Teale and Bean, enemy
combatants, disrupted when Parker fires at Bean. The third plays out the story
of Abraham and Isaac as depicted in Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and
the Young," in which the poet changes the ending to have Abraham defy God
to sacrifice his son "and half the seed of Europe one by one."
For
the actors, this seems like a return to silent cinema. The "Offertorium"
is the only section, however, to present the stereotyped image of silent acting
as an exercise in scenery chewing. That seems natural, as the segment is an
extended allegory, painted in broad strokes.
Even there, Parker, whose Owen takes the Isaac role, maintains his more
naturalistic style from the rest of the film. Nigel Terry, who had played the
title role in Caravaggio, is the
leering, bloodthirsty priest, performing for an audience of lecherous,
gluttonous one-percenters. Their gleeful overacting is jarring, but it's meant
to be. Positioned as Owen's fantasy as he writes the poem and reads a Bible
(that, in a typical surrealistic touch for Jarman, is overgrown with grass), the
embroidered acting style is quite logical within the world of the film.
For
the rest, the actors perform silently and simply, often matching their
movements to the music's rhythms. That hardly stifles them, but rather seems to
liberate depths of emotion tied into the music. Swinton, in particular, is a
marvel to behold. In the "Requiem Aeternam," she mourns over Owen's
dead body with an impressive physical commitment. When she puts her fingers
over her eyes, you may be afraid she's about to pluck them out. The "Sanctus"
plays over an extended medium close-up of her braiding her hair (Is this a
reference to a section of "Strange Meeting" Britten did not use in
the Requiem?). As the music swells, she transitions into laughter and then
intense grief, gradually moving her arms and hair to the music in an extended
dance of the emotions. It's a devastating sequence and one of the most amazing
bits of acting I've seen on film.
As
the images fly by, it's hard not to notice reflections of other visionary
directors — Murnau, Dryer, Kurosawa and Vigo come immediately to mind. But I
think a good deal of the film's aesthetic has a more theatrical basis. You may
find yourself frustrated that the classical diction of tenor Sir Peter Pears
and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sing the settings of Owen's poems, can
be impenetrable at times. And Olivier's reading of "Strange Meeting"
is the kind of plummy overplayed verse that makes my teeth heart. It's more
about caressing each consonant than communicating meaning. But that, too ties
into the film's artistic goals.
This
combination of images, eschewal of an over-arching narrative and devaluing of
language, for me, are a reflection of Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Inspired
by a performance of Balinese dance he saw in 1931, Artaud advocated for a
theatre of visual and aural images that bypassed language and logic, which to
him seemed to be dominating the French theatre of his era, to affect audiences
on a visceral level. This penetration to the viewers' psyche is the cruelty in
Theatre of Cruelty (though many have associated it simply with the imagery, mainly
because Artaud's primary examples were production plans for pieces that would
have dwelt on human savagery).
Ultimately,
I think this is what Jarman is doing in War
Requiem. As the images build, there's no sense in trying to tie them all
together. You simply have to let them wash over you, accepting the bits of
narrative he supplies while opening yourself to the effects of the imagery.
When he ends the archival footage in the "Libera Me" with shots of
mushroom clouds, I found my brain trying to reject the image as trite and
overused even as the rest of my body was breaking out in goose flesh. At that
point, logical thought simply didn't matter.
The
fragments of language that you can make out from Owen's poems add to the
overall effect. Artaud valued language only for its aural aspects, though you
can make a case for the cultural associations from words and phrases playing a
role as well, with the power of those associations heightened by their being
divorced from any extended syntax. The opening line of Owen's "Anthem for
Doomed Youth," "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?"
comes through clearly in the opening movement as young men race into position
for wartime training. "Bugles sang" from "But I Was Looking at
the Permanent Stars" counterpoints the suffering of the men in the
trenches during the second part of the "Dies Irae."
The
fragmented words achieve their greatest power in the final scene, the end of
the "Libera Me." There's a visual reconciliation between The Unknown
Soldier and the German soldier who had killed him. Teale poses as Christ in a
re-creation of Piero Della Francesca's "The Resurrection" as Bean
approaches him with a basket of poppies. This plays against a setting for tenor
and baritone of Owen's "Strange Meeting," but the only really clear
line is "Let us sleep now." It's a lovely moment that balances but
hardly eradicates the violent images that have preceded it, the end of a
symphony of images and sounds that shows Jarman's filmmaking at its best. And
it represents a powerful humanistic message, as Jarman moves his imagery from
desolation and violence to reconciliation, from war to its opposite.
*
* *
If
you want to read more about War Requiem,
I heartily recommend Jim Clark's blog entry on it at Jim's Reviews - Jarman's War Requiem. I discovered the page trying to identify the painting of the resurrection
Jarman copies at the end of the film and found Clark's insights fascinating.
It's also a valuable research tool, as he includes information on Owen and
Britten and an annotated text of Britten's piece. He even includes the full
versions of poems Britten only excerpted.
