The conversion of a tragedy by Cocteau into a cinema melodrama: a reading of Il mistero di Oberwald
Núria Bou
The viewing of Michelangelo Antonioni's Il mistero di Oberwald (1980) brings on an tangle of several questions which revolve about the experimental and therefore hybrid nature of the author's exposition for the making of the film. Actually, hybridisms in the film are multiple: it is an adaptation of a theatre text, the first in Antonioni's career, by an author, Jean Cocteau, apparently not at all close to the Italian producer's usual aesthetic expositions, and whose figure and work are also marked by the hybridisation of artistic forms. On the other hand, Il mistero di Oberwald is the first full-length cinema film in video format, and this allowed its author to investigate the new expressive possibilities of image manipulation which it offers to cinema narrative.
Setting aside the polemic raised among critics by the work's possible incoherence as to the development of the director's aesthetic evolution, the film's proposals seem to be a very suggestive and fruitful field of analysis. The purpose of these pages is to note some reflections on the intersection of forms proposed by the film, centering our interest on the mechanisms used by Antonioni in the handling of a work which in its theatre origins seesaws between tragedy and melodrama (as these are understood in the theatre world), and which in the Italian director's hands is configured as a cinema melodrama, a genre quite far -a priori- from Antonioni's own field.
I. TRAGEDY AND MELODRAMA
1. The Tragic Register and the Melodramatic register
For Jean Cocteau, L'aigle à deux têtes was a tragedy. In the text of the prologue to the 1948 edition, the author asserts that his work is an answer to the "degeneracy" of the dramatic modes of theatre of action which has been "substituted" by a "theatre of words" and "of scenography" (Cocteau, 1948:301). The cry, the sublime gesture, movement, according to Cocteau, have been stolen from theatre by the cinema, an art of action and movement, and the author proposes, by his work, a return to violent action on the stage; the dramatist next confesses his fear that a large elite will take this "noisy awakening" badly and will mistake it for melodrama. His work, he asserts, is a tragedy for which all interpretations are possible.
The first question suggested by these assertions, besides the reading of the work -and taking into account the particular characteristics of the figure of the French artist- is that of the possible relativity of these in an author more given to creating "his own genre" than to join existing classifications, as is proved by his multifaceted evolution. On the other hand, the term "melodrama" in the cinema sphere has connotations very different from the theatre definition although in some cases they may have common elements; and this field is the basis for our article, which will thus come to inquire how the cinema melodrama works in the version of Cocteau's work which a key producer in the cinema of the second half of the century like Michelangelo Antonioni carries out 32 years later.
Robert Bechtold Heilman (1968), in his study on Tragedy and Melodrama, defines the universe of tragedy as that where the division of the protagonist is the basic hub of the plot. The existence of the tragic hero is centred on the conflict between imperative and impulse, between law and moral order on the one hand and desire -unbridled passion- on the other; this contradiction breeds tragic conflict which always begins by the character's conscious choice, by a choice within the conflict which gives it its human dimension (1). Hamlet's choice, like that of so many other tragic heroes, is both a self-affirmation and a self-destruction; the hero's conscience of taking up his irremediable division is the basis of self-knowledge which lies at the core of the tragic genre. Tragedy, as characterised by Heilman, thus uses the mechanism of division at the heart of the character as a means of achieving a unity of view which can give a universal scope to the conflict set up.
To this characterisation of the tragic genre, Heilman opposes the view proposed by the melodramatic genre. If the tragic attitude consists of a conscious choice which in the last instance makes "not the stars, but ourselves" responsible for our ills, melodrama is, in a sense, a "literature of disasters", that is to say, a way of conceiving the relationship between good and evil as something in which human responsibility has no place as a plot mechanism. Events happen to the characters, who become passive elements onto which the world's misfortunes and disasters sift (2) . Melodrama evokes feelings that are intense but -still according to Heilman- easy: the absurdity of the world, self-pity, heroism, are themes which come up easily in melodrama plots; the idea of victim (of Nature, of Society, of Political forces, of intrigues by others) is consubstantial to the melodramatic view. This concept, which Heilman traces in modern authors as diverse as O'Neill, Tennessee Williams or Cocteau himself -in La machine infernale-, is far from the internal conflict basic for providing a feeling of "fulness" of feeling (the man is a coward or brave, never both at the same time). Melodrama provokes in the spectator a "monopathy", that is to say the imposition of a single sentiment which gives a feeling of wholeness: compassion, joy for a triumph, woe for a defeat, absurdity of the world, the triumph of justice. Ideas of good and evil are invoked in absolute terms -far from a tragic perspective which is always ambivalent-, and configure a structure marked by a certain manichean point of view.
The approach proposed by Heilman -shared in general terms by other authors who have recently approached the melodramatic phenomenon, like James L. Smith (1973), Frank Rahill (1967), or Peter Brooks (1976)- does not propose, whatever the characteristics sketched out above may make us think, a disparagement of the term "melodrama" or of "the melodramatic". Quite on the contrary, all these authors share the vindication of the genre faced with the despective nature which the adjective "melodramatic" has had and still undeniably has in the contemporary culture and world. The term "melodrama" is often used to describe works with both unbelievable and stereotyped intrigue, overloaded with sensational and sentimental effects which scorn psychology and good taste. Faced with this scornful attitude, the works mentioned above put forward a need for melodrama as agent of a basic aesthetic function for an audience which projects its emotional charge onto the unending adventures, misfortunes, dangers, and fortunes of the protagonists.
Of all these studies dedicated to melodrama, Peter Brooks' monography -the most recent work of all those mentioned- is the approach which most leaves aside strict considerations of plot and content to work from more general criteria: the kind of dramatisation, for Brooks, is what defines melodrama, which, in his words, becomes the narrative mode of excess, that is to say of the intensifying of what is acted -Brooks does not enter into debates on the "ease" or "simplicity" of genre mechanisms, as Heilman does; he may be the author who makes the most disinhibited apologia of the genre.
2. Jean Cocteau's L'aigle à deux têtes, between tragedy and melodrama
In Cocteau's own words, L'aigle à deux têtes puts on the scene "two opposing ideas with the obligation of becoming reality, of taking on form": a queen with a spirit of anarchism, an anarchist with a spirit of royalty. Both "betray their causes and become a shooting star that shines for an instant before disappearing altogether" (Cocteau, 1948:302). This proposal, which undeniably evokes a certain manicheism of feelings, answers to Cocteau's purpose of creating a work in which the characters have a more "heraldic" than real psychology, where the relationship between these and the human personages is the same as that between heraldic beasts and real animals. It is undeniable that Cocteau's peculiar poetry instrumentalises the sentimental relationship between the characters and the historical plot so as to make up a specific view of the facts put on the stage: the balance between the importance of the political events and the passionate plot is always very delicate, and Cocteau constantly plays with intensifying the sentimental elements (the queen's loving memory of the king -assassinated on their wedding night-, the incredible resemblance between the newcomer and the late king, the anarchist's hate for the queen which from the first moment verges on desperate love), counterpoised with the implacable political plot which will doom them to destruction. The decision with which the protagonists, herded by their fate, face situations of love and death without the shadow of a doubt stopping them, is another of these elements set in motion which could insinuate melodrama if the life breathed into them did not make them enter fully into a mechanism of unequivocally tragic personal doom: the author gives his characters the gift of choice, the tragic gesture which leads them to a foreseen self-destruction. The balance between the tragic and the melodramatic (perfectly formulated in the queen's phrase, "Moi, je rêve de devenir une tragédie") seesaws, under the weight of the author's intentions, towards an atmosphere and temperament of tragedy.
3. Notes on a theory of cinema melodrama
The reading which Michelangelo Antonioni made of L'aigle à deux têtes was resolved, as to its proposal in aesthetic and plastic terms, in a melodramatic key -in the cinema meaning of the word. Within the classic Hollywood genres, where no theatre distinction between tragedy and melodrama can fit in, and beside genres such as the Western and mystery cinema, the term melodrama refers to works which have the world of feelings, passion, as a hub. It is a genre in which the dramatic intensity of events and the emotional impulses of the characters are the basic core which structures the stories narrated, which seeks the participation -projection, identification, refusal- of a cinema audience's emotional register.
A genre which has feeling as raw material must create a chain of mechanisms for a production which will allow the visualisation, by means of cinema, of the internal psychological dimensions of the characters and their stories; thus, one of the key elements in melodrama is stylisation. Stylisation gives cinema melodrama its characteristic tone and rythm by means of a specific management of space (where the family home is sometimes the protagonist element), time (and, within it, the importance of the past), objects, or elements such as COLOUR, music, and even actor direction -with the frequent protagonism of the feminine figure.
Consequently, it is a genre which is far from the constants pointed out by authors such as Heilman or Smith when referring to theatre melodrama; more than having to do with the continual vicissitudes of "good guys/bad guys" or utterly incredible plots, cinema melodrama puts a world of feelings into play, which if it has anything in common with the criteria of the forementioned authors for approach to theatre melodrama, it is not so much at a level of strict content as of handling.
Peter Brooks' perspective for elucidating the constants in the literary melodramatic genre finds strong points of contact with the cinema genre we are studying: his theory on excess as a form of melodrama proposes that the central node of melodrama's discourse consists of an aggression on the surface of the real -which is, at the same time, an aggression on the surface of the text. Speaking of Balzac, Brooks asserts that photographic registers of objects always surrender, at some time or another, to "the mental demand for going beyond visible appearances, to weigh them up and question them". This is one of the basic devices of cinema melodrama; reality is both on the stage of the drama and the "mask of a more authentic drama", and to melodrama belongs the task of exploring the sentimental and emotional dimension which circulates behind the surface of things. Melodrama wants to express it all, and its occasional manicheism is no more than a mechanism for bringing to light "the hidden moral universe" which beats below the surface of reality, and which configures it in all its complexity. Melodrama, conferring a cosmic moral sense to the most every-day and usual gestures, becomes a hyperbolic scene for feelings "larger than life" -to define it with the title of one of Nicolas Ray's melodramas.
II. ANALYSIS OF THE FILM
1. Introduction
Cocteau is, a priori, an author quite far from the aesthetic universe which is characteristic of most of Antonioni's filmography. The approach to the text of L'aigle à deux têtes proposed by the film's scriptwriters, Tonino Guerra -the Italian director's usual collaborator- and Antonioni himself, while respecting the dramatic unity and development of the work took off from a certain lightening of the poetic "charge" of Cocteau's text. In protagonist Monica Vitti's words, Antonioni's intention was to make a "temperate melodrama"; the poetic flights characteristic of the French dramatist's language in the piece would thus be reduced, somehow trimmed. Verbal expansion has never been a substantial part of Antonioni's films, and even though in Il mistero di Oberwald there is more speech than in any other of the director's films, one of the most substantial modifications to Cocteau's text lies in this reduction which extends even to the interpretation of the characters: Monica Vitti and Franco Branciaroli, in this aspect are more contained -even dulled- than Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais, who interpreted both the theatre version of the work and the cinema adaptation directed by Cocteau himself in 1948. Even so, Antonioni's attitude is not merely reduced to a simple "cooling" of Cocteau's flaming prose; quite on the contrary, verbal moderation is only a vital departure point so that Antonioni's mise en scene can carry a whole linking of visual concerns which condition Antonioni's unique reading of Cocteau's tragedy. The handling of image, the dramatic use of music, and especially the manipulation of colour, substitute the poetic element of Cocteau's word to configure a personal discourse which finally takes us back to inequivocally melodramatic codes. The exuberant plastic elements which Antonioni puts into play lead to an excess of fulness which, although in several aspects is far from his usual world and his discourse on void -in feelings, in space- finds its articulation in basic elements which are present in other films: mirrors, reflexes, colour, music, the dialectics between characters and the space around them, the amorous relationships, the protagonism of the feminine figure, are all elements which Antonioni has used constantly during his carreer to build a personal discourse on appearances, and an exploration of the "disease of feelings". The same elements appear, although in a totally different plot context, in Il mistero di Oberwald, and this new use -due to its heterogeneity, doubly suggestive- is the scene which the next pages of this article will tread.
2. A melodramatic reading of L'aigle à deux têtes: the handling of colour in Il mistero di Oberwald
Il mistero di Oberwald begins with the night chase of Sebastian (Franco Branciaroli) through the woods of Oberwald. The film's first images, mountainous landscapes electronically tinted with unreal tones which run from bright red to purple, offer one of the basic keys on which Antonioni builds his visual discourse in Il mistero di Oberwald: the use of colour.
Long before making Il deserto rosso (Antonioni, 1964) -one of his key films, together with Il mistero di Oberwald as to the handling of colour- Antonioni had already shown an interest for the theme of chromatic language in cinema. During his years as a cinema critic, between 1930-1940, the chromatic element had more than once been an object of analysis for him. Compact, anti-natural and synesthesic colour fascinated him, as much in works like The Thief of Baghdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) -hand-coloured, as was usual in the silent years- as in the case of musical films or melodramas or Westerns: Duelo al sol (King Vidor, 1946) led him to assert that without a doubt, the future of the cinema "is colour" (Di Carlo, 1988:310). His obsession with the non-naturalist use of colour leads him to assert such curious things as "I believe that Greta Garbo has a mauve voice" (Di Carlo, 1988:291) or even to propose a chromatic scale for the better-known Hollywood actresses of the time: pinkish blues for Ingrid Bergman, browns for Lana Turner, yellows and greens for Gene Tierney. Precisely in 1945, the latter starred -dressed in green and yellow, but also rose, brown and white- in one of the melodramas which was to set the seal on the beginning of the splendour of the genre in 50's Hollywood: Que el cielo la juzgue (John M. Stahl, 1945) where the use of colour overflowed the naturalist frame to become a true "presence" which freely inhabited spaces and the character's exacerbated feelings. Only three years before, Antonioni had asserted in one of his critical texts that colour in cinema was "the medium for transforming the world into a pure artistic illusion..."
The great Hollywood melodramas of the 50's are a key reference point in the conscious use -with a degree of elaboration which was to achieve mannierism- of the chromatic element in cinema. Films by Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray make a use of it which surpasses the simple symbolic dimension to arrive at a mise en scene in which colours are elements which orchestrate the passionate movement of the characters: The violence of pure yellows, reds and blues in Escrito sobre el viento (Douglas Sirk, 1956) is both a signal and a consequence of the emotional storm which tosses the protagonists during the whole of the film. The chromatic behaviour of the image, on the other hand, was not ignored by a director such as Alfred Hitchcock, who in a film shot through with melodramatic pulse, Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), proposed one of the most beautiful visual metaphors in cinema when he represented the protagonist's fascination with beautiful Kim Novak by a true modulation of the colour of the image's background; in the scene where she is introduced, the scarlet tone of the wall against which her foreground profile is etched softly turns and is lit up for a few brief instants, while James Stewart sees her for the first time, and goes out again just before she leaves the frame. The subtlety of the effect in Hitchcock's film and the chromatic violence displayed by some of Sirk's best films are two extreme examples of how the universe of feelings finds expression through an element both visible and at the same time as ethereal as colour.
Antonioni, who had already worked the symbolic and psychological slant of colour in films like Il deserto rosso, where he literally painted reality -the vegetation, the objects- or Blow-up (Antonioni, 1966), undeniably a debtor from the plastic and chromatic point of view to pop-art, and especially to Hockney's work, abandoned the strictly pictorical point of view with Il mistero di Oberwald. His experiments with the chromatic possibilities of video format (electronic addition of colours, selective colouring of the image, among others) decidedly leans toward the dramatic and passionate in the story he tells, while not forgetting the expressive restlessness which has set its seal on the development of his career: the search for "beyond" the image, the "behind" the image, is set up by a chromatic brush-stroke which overflows the strict limits of the figures and objects represented, somehow becoming a "stain" which is perfectly integrated into the plastic discourse of an author obsessed with the inquiry into the surface of the real.
This experimentation proposed by Antonioni's film as to colour does not eclipse in any way its use as a melodramatic element: it is precisely its "dramatised" use -which creates a parallel internal reading of the facts, as happens in films by Sirk, Ray or Minnelli- of the chromatic element which is the base on which the film's whole formal inquiry rests (3) . The narrative articulation of this visual research is perfectly evidenced by the fact that Antonioni often uses colour in a temporal dimension -and therefore, perfectly rooted in the development of the film. In Il mistero di Oberwald colours are modulated and change in time; the opening of windows in the stormy night at the beginning provokes a shift towards green in the tones of the walls. In the same way, the announcement of the new lector's arrival tinges the space near the window with a bluish tone. In both cases, the two chromatic vibrations evoke the penetration of an outside element (the storm wind, Sebastian's arrival) and their influence on the emotional temperature of those living inside. As in the great Hollywood melodramas, the dialectics created by what happens outside (including atmospheric phenomena) and their echo inside the rooms where the passionate relationships between the characters exist, take on a basic role. The interior space is impregnated with the malaise created by exterior events, and vibrates with their emotional residue which irremediably penetrates the lives of its inhabitants. From this point of view, the movement of the camera in the opening scene is perfectly understandable when it moves from the windows to the portrait of the king which is finally tinged with green; something new has penetrated the life of the castle.
The mutations to which Antonioni subjects colour all during Il mistero di Oberwald are in no way alien to the manipulation proposed by Hitchcock in the example quoted in Vertigo. Antonioni goes deeper in his personal research, and constantly plays with chromatic registers, even where colour should have been absent: Sebastian's arrival, a very double of the dead monarch, to the queen's chambers, -through a secret passage whose door is precisely the great portrait of the king which presides over the chambers- is evoked by a light swerving of the portrait's image, which changes from green to brown till it finally remains a very contrasting black-and-white at the moment when the young man enters from behind the image.
The queen's monologue before the wounded anarchist has a turning point at the moment when she relates the events of their wedding day; she and the king were riding in the royal carriage and a man jumped on to it with a bouquet of flowers in his hand. Approaching the king's chest, he stabbed him with the knife hidden in the bouquet, killing him instantly. While the queen remembers these events, and the blood which spattered the king, the camera leaves the close-up of her to descend to the bouquet of flowers on the table; the flowers, which take up almost the whole screen, suddenly take on a flaming red tone and remain so for a few seconds, while the music rises over the queen's silence. The actress's telling of the story, with colour and music as parallel effects, take us back to the pattern of melodrama, to the overload of feelings which characterises the genre discourse; if melodrama wishes to explain all, this is one example of how the intensification of elements in play seeks a new dimension of feeling. The importance of music as a language of passion, often used as an example in Il mistero di Oberwald (the use of various fragments of Brahms, Richard Strauss and Schöenberg), also takes us back to the peak works of the genre: we have only to remember the importance of music in Sirkian films such as Tiempo de amar, tiempo de morir (Sirk, 1958) or Sólo el cielo lo sabe (Sirk, 1954) -which adapted themes from Lizst- or Vertigo itself -with the extraordinary sound track which takes up the wagnerian air of Tristan und Isolde. Or the sublime pieces by Yasuhiro Ozu, or the best of Visconti's work: the examples are endless. Melodrama, the language of reiteration, makes an appeal to visual and sound resources to saturate feeling and condense the energy of passion in its cinema epiphany.
The overlapping of elements once more has a basic role a few seconds later, when the queen opens the window to look at the night after the storm: the image closes over the circle of the moon and, while the queen's voice monologues with Schöenberg's Transfigured Night in the background, the moon slowly varies its colours -from yellow to orange and red, till it becomes mauve and blue. Que les orages son courts... Que la violence est courte... Tout retombe, et tout s'endort, are Cocteau's words which act as counterpoint to the moon's metamorphosis: it is difficult not to remember, in this meeting between Monica Vitti's voice and the changing hues of the image, Antonioni's discourse in the 40's on Garbo's "colour of voice". The association between the moon and the queen will go even further a few seconds later when, having fallen asleep on an easy chair, she will be visited by the moonlight which approaches -still with Schöenberg's music in the background- in the shape of a great bluish stain which eventually covers her completely. The theatricality of the effect is resolved in a slow fade-out of the figure of the protagonist under the moon's influence, which evaporates from the image; it is an effect which reconciles the melodramatic element with the Italian director's constant concern for the disappearance of the human figure within the scenery as an aesthetic cause, registered and widely commented in critical studies on Antonioni.
The stylisation transported by a melodramatic vocabulary comes back in strength in the scene where the queen and Sebastian make their passion clear for the first time, in a field near the castle. The scene opens on a shot of the flowery lawn which in succession modulates from green to yellow to blue till it finally takes on a magenta hue. After this brief chromatic prelude, the scene begins and takes on a classical tone as it is structured in a shot/countershot characteristic of the scenes of passion of cinema classicism. The conversation, which turns on the purpose of his arrival at the castle, -the assassination of the queen- reaches its peak with the surge of feelings of love between the characters, joined in a kiss in which their faces are hidden by the branches of a tree; the camera moves very slightly to focus on their caresses. The background thus produced within the shot makes their hands all-important; they metaphorically reap the scene's intensity. One of the great stylists of melodrama, Leo McCarey, in An affair to remember (1957) evoked the amorous tension in a similar way with the suggestion of the protagonists' first kiss by a travelling shot of them towards the upper part of a staircase, till their bodies partially disappear from the frame. The movements of the actors' legs, almost a choreography -the musical element is also one of the protagonists of the scene in McCarey's film- correspond, as to the degree of emotive suggestion, to the brief but intense gestural vibration of the actors in Antonioni's film in the sequence we have seen
.
By means of this scene, we have evidence that the strength of Antonioni's film is found especially in moments where action is delayed, amplified, expanded, to favour feelings: the melodramatic expansion reroutes the development of the narrative flow towards its suspension -inescapably ephimeral and thus doubly effective on a melodramatic level. Mirrors are used by Antonioni (the same way as the greatest stylist in melodrama, Douglas Sirk) as an instrument to emphasise the characters' feelings. A remembered image of the queen appears in a mirror when the Duke of Willenstein remembers the moment when he saw her face for the first time -as do diverse effects which evoke reflections- be it electronically or otherwise: the knife which the queen leaves on the table when she invites Sebastian to kill her is reflected in its reddish surface, which repeats the anarchist's image at the same time, while he stares at it. At the moment where, at the beginning of the film, melancholy seizes the queen, she sees her own image reflected on the wet surface of the room's wall, giving evidence of the isolation which permeates Monica Vitti's character all during the film.
The film's denouement -probably the most visually successful moment of the whole work- represents the culmination of the conjunction of elements of aesthetic research and melodramatic device set in motion by Il mistero di Oberwald. After the conversation in which the queen provokes the dying Sebastian to incite him to kill her, she leaves the room to go outside, hoping that he will follow her. Everything which words have not been able to say during the long verbal battle becomes haste in the film's last five minutes of practically dialogueless action. The queen walks through the castle corridors, stopping only for a moment below a great spot of vibrant turquoise blue light. Meanwhile, young Sebastian approaches the hall's arms cabinet and opens one of its doors; the close-up of one of the pistols has a garnet background which becomes more and more intense. The flaming red of this scene is linked to the image of a painting in one of the corridors, a hue exactly like that of the shot before; the queen passes at that instant and becomes definitely associated to the image of the weapon which a few seconds later will kill her. After a brief travelling shot of the corridors -where the paintings on the walls express all the violence beating at the heart of the scene-, the queen arrives at the last passageway before the front door; here she is stopped by the arrival of Sebastian, who shoots at her from the other end of the chamber. A majestic general shot in which the left half is in colour and the right half in black-and-white shows the two characters at the instant of the shot; the queen's fall is evoked for us by a shot of her hand which waves softly while covering our view of the pistol a few metres away on the floor. This relation between hand and pistol takes us back to the image which two minutes before showed the reflection of Sebastian's hand, quiet on the glass of the arms cabinet, overlapping the pistol he was about to take; through the distance the relation between the characters and their deaths is perfectly formulated. Sebastian's hand -reflected- is less guilty of the queen's death than the queen herself; the opacity of her hand's eclipsing the weapon while she dies shows us who is the true artificer of the crime. The visual metaphor is heartstopping and inequivocally Antonioni: the mise en scene in Antonioni is, above all, "distanced" and therefore the death of the characters, which Cocteau resolved by means of a stabbing -intimate, tragic- is formulated here in the key of space: the management of distance is one of the director's great aesthetic weapons. The configuration of the film's denouement focuses the different perspectives from which Cocteau and Antonioni faced the meaning of the work: Cocteau, in the film version of his work, transmitted a hint of tragic irony when he made the queen die at the top of the stairs and the anarchist at the foot, thus turning the staircase into an element which makes the insurmountable social difference between the characters evident. A tragic irony is, for Cocteau, what has made love appear between two beings destined to destroy each other, and the fatalism of this view which marks the characters' fate from the beginning of the play is the author's argument for giving the title of Tragedy to his creation. The last shot of Cocteau's film dives down showing the two dead bodies, very small compared to the omnipresent staircase: the use of an almost vertical dive evokes a superior gaze, not without a moral judgement, perhaps that of the director of the show who finally abandons the marionettes who have dropped at the end of the tragedy (it is not gratuitous that we then hear the voice of Cocteau himself telling us that "the events took place as I have explained them"). Antonioni, on the other hand, closes his film reaffirming his intention of knitting his discourse on passion and death in a melodramatic key: the image of the two hands of the protagonists who die without ever managing to touch one another takes on an extraordinarily emotional dimension as it slowly goes from black-and-white to colour. The movement of black-and-white to colour in a previous scene had evoked the moment of dawn, the passage from night to day; in the final scene it hovers over the action, configuring the metaphoric limit between life and death in each frame. The two protagonists fall dying in black-and-white but, once they die, colour returns slowly to their hands, and becomes a film epiphany of their passion over and above death, evoked in black-and-white. The end of Vidor's Duelo al sol showed the pair of protagonists' mutually destructive shots, blinded by passion, in a scene which has a lot to do with that which closes Antonioni's film; the protagonists' tragic death was melodramatically redeemed by the last movement of the camera which goes from the dead bodies to an image of a blue sky -thus evoking a "beyond", a new space for their passion. In the final images of Il mistero di Oberwald, the same emotion is formulated through colour which, by returning to the protagonists' dead bodies, constitutes the "new space" which prolongs the characters' passionate movement beyond death, definitely separating them from the cares and woes of a life on earth which is -like the soldiers in the last image, represented in black-and-white- completely alien to them. The dead come back to life by deed of colour, and reality, history, finally remain locked in black-and-white: what facts, history, called a tragedy, has been inequivocally transformed by the aesthetic pulse of the film into a melodrama.
All this is thanks to the incorporation of a sheaf of representation mechanisms which make up a discourse parallel to the lineality of Cocteau's original text: probably in cinema the distinction between tragedy and melodrama proper to the theatre as a concatenation of events to construct a realistic story (as Heilman's theories proposed) is not as important as the configuration of a special mise en scene intrinsic to the resource files of what is considered cinematographic, which is, in the end, what decides including a film in one category or another. Melodrama, in cinema, would be, above all, a narrative mode, a way of focusing the story, a point of view chosen by the director for putting images to a specific plot of events: it is thus that we often find, during cinema history, films which, seen from the perspective of action plots, could be tragedies, but which articulated from cinema theses, become clearly melodramatic. From Lirios rotos (D.W. Griffith, 1919) to Duelo al sol, from Escrito sobre el viento to Una habitación en la ciudad (Jacques Demy, 1982), from Tú y yo to Il mistero di Oberwald, cinema has had the ability, following a line which goes from the great creators of silent cinema to the most important exponents of modern cinema and including the undeniable masters of classicism, to give substance to its audio-visual discourse in parallel to the narrative substratum which gives it life: it has thus configured rules for representation (management of image and sound texture, as well as a gestuality which has as its hub the upsurge of feeling to the surface of the frame) which make some of the most radically lyrical expressions of this "method of excess" possible, which in Brooks' words is, by definition, the melodramatic genre.
ENDNOTES
1 This fact does not mean, obviously, that heroes can escape from a fixed weird which is beyond their decisions, as happens clearly in classical tragedies in Greece.
2 Theatrical melodrama, which has its original nucleus in popular 18th century Paris entertainment (where acrobats and tight-rope walkers shared space with musical pantomime with mythical, historical, or contemporary themes)finds its modern prototype in popular works by Guibert de Pixerécourt: Coelina ou l'Enfant du Mystère (1800) is the prototype for an entire genre which extends during the whole of the French 19th century.
3 When considering in detail the diverse visual and narrative mechanisms which Antonioni puts into play in Il mistero di Oberwald, we must take into account that, because of the special technical characteristics of the product, viewing it on television only partially restores the real results obtained by the Italian director. Antonioni conceived the film taking very much into account the substantial changes in the nature of the image transposed from a magnetic support -video- to the usual cinema support; the texture and chromatic dynamics derived from an enlargement of the images filmed on video when projected onto a large screen are irretrievably lost on a TV screen -which, in a way, restores only an outline of what a film viewing in a cinema theatre means.
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