Saturday, January 17, 2009

A Sunset and an Eastern German Goya


First, The Sunset





Goya as presented by DEFA Studios, East Germany, 1971


Francesco Goya's life was kind of like living on a powder keg. At least that is how I see his life being portrayed by East Germans in the 1970s in Konrad Wolf's Goya. Any move the artist made was generally the wrong one as far as the women he shacked with, the most intense of aristocracy he painted for, and the high drama of the politicians, malcontents and public folk he circulated with. The first half of the film shows how his naivete as a focused artist and street peasant sensibilities tore all of these components into his life to a kind of Goya taffy pull between the various factions. The inquisition and the weird court of King Karl IV and Queen Maria Luisa were not a good backdrop for the lusty, temperamental, and self-absorbed artist that was Francisco Goya.

I don't believe that DEFA studios did too many of these epic historical flicks and I don't know all of the anecdotes, but this has got to be an anomaly in the history of the big studio in Babelsburg. I noted on the very bold and graphic credits with screen crops, accent colors, and heavy font choices. The content was harsh pilgrimage footage and there was organ music in full hard seizure like it was an animal dying.

A huge assett in this film is the performance of Donatas Banionis as Goya. He is able to emote his troubled soul and play along with the lot he believes, sometimes quite obtusively to live the artist's life. One that got highly internalized with the onset of deafness. His work reminds me of Bruno S. in the Herzog films or Günter Lamprecht as the uber Rodney Dangerfield, Franz Bieberkoph, the protagonist of Herzog's epic Berlin Alexanderplatz.

I don't know if Konrad Wolf's bioepic is a great film, but it would be a wonderful film to teach at the end of a film studies class that emphasized style, technique and influences. But don't get me wrong. I am not dismissing Wolf as filmmaker. I think everyone who likes a good movie about soldier life should see Ich Wer Nuenzehn aka I am Nineteen. It isn't that Wolf is just throwing out a bunch of style choices (deep focus, long takes, cutting the sound out to illustrate Goya's deafness) Instead, what gives this film a really individual dynamic is that there are so many stylistic things happening in it, and most are at good service to the story and presentation as a whole.

Goya contains both montage and mise en scene approaches. There is a lot of David Lean, Welles, and Visconti in the way Wolf approaches his story. The inquisition sequence in which Goya, who was hand picked by the Church to show him what would happen if he didn't mend his ways--incredible reaction shots of this travesty with no touch of civility or emotion is a real accomplishment.

For shure there are some intriguing sequences and very individual sequences in this film. Occasionally they misfire, like in a montage of Goya's editorial cartoons in Caprichio format set to what sounds like an early recording of the Gypsy Kings. But one of the best, a dream sequence that echoes Brecht Beckett, and Hitchcock really leaves the viewer creeped out.

At one point in the second half the film kind of turns into a picaresque western. Wolfe can be also very John Ford-like. His use of broad humor reminds me of similar sequences in Ford. And he also can employee a touch reminiscent of Leone. I even thought of Fellini at one point because there is this semifaux surrealistic midget jester for the king that just kind of appears at one phase of his love affair with a princess.

Wolf and this film also remind me of Pontecorvo but more of Burn! than Battle For Algiers. Right after I made this conclusion, lo, and behold mattie, as they say in the pirate movies, there was this intense zoom out of one of the lead females ultra fast because that was the main effect to show that it was a dream.

I love the movies of the seventies. They so often resemble rock guitar solos of the era. Goya reflects a lot of the flamboyant cinematic zeitgest in the world of the late sixties and seventies. In fact, this film looks like it was rolling and marinade in the wildness of that independent spirit despite its big budget. Despite its government controlled (or contained) studio, that spirit is oddly apparent. And how they got away with the ultimate theme of the preservation of creative freedom and political dissonance which was much of Goya's life, only research of those present at this odd one of a kind film will know.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:36 PM
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