Interesteg What makes it different from others?

YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Tahhh This very peculiar setting of Wagner's last opera definitely grew on me. When I first saw it, I was somewhat annoyed by many of the films surrealistic images, and felt that far too much was superimposed upon the story. However, if you can put up with a fair amount of rather recherché "gimmicks," I think you will find that the film DOES manage to capture the very strange, other-worldly atmosphere of the opera, and that there are moments which are particularly fine.Personally, I never really understood the role of Kundry until I saw how Edith Clever portrayed her. Her performance (a lip-synchronized mime of the singing voice of Yvonne Minton) is nothing short of dazzling, from end to end, and alone justifies the hours it takes to absorb the film.Another reason to delight in this film is that it captures the spectacular interpretation of Robert Lloyd of the crucial role of Gurnemanz, one which Lloyd has performed to a crisp at opera houses throughout the world. I have been privileged to enjoy him in the role of Gurnemanz on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera several times, and the lusciousness of his voice, and the warm, fatherliness of his interpretation of this noble character really needed to be preserved, as did his performance in the character's two major monologues, the Karfreitag scene and the recounting of the prophecy in Act 1.The version I have seen was a videotape made for America, and so there were subtitles which, alas, could not be done away with. This is especially unfortunate because the translation used is very inaccurate and forces an extremely Christian interpretation on a film which is already forcing layers of interpretation on the opera. This seemed to me to be quite contrary both to Wagner's clear AVOIDANCE of Christianity, and his very deliberate attempt to "generalize" the Christian elements of the story. (See footnote with spoiler at the end of this review.) I find it nearly impossible, when viewing a film with subtitles, to keep from absorbing them, and strongly recommend that, if in the DVD versions you have the ability to turn the subtitles off, you do so, and instead, if the opera is unfamiliar to you, that you read the libretto carefully beforehand.The bottom line is that there is much in the film which I dislike, and would just as soon have seen done differently...but it has risen steadily in my estimation over the years since I first saw it, and I find myself drawn to enjoy it again and again.__________________________________________________________________FOOTNOTE CONTAINING A SPOILER: A good example would be Kundry's famous line, "I saw him...him...and laughed." This gets translated, in the subtitles, for reasons which escape me, as "I saw the Savior's face." It is especially irritating to me, because throughout the libretto, Wagner very deliberately and carefully refers to this unseen character WHO NEED NOT BE THE BIBLICAL Jesus as "der Heiland," i.e., the German for "The Healer"--a reference to the wound of Amfortas, and to all wounds and maladies and the need for healing.

FloatingOpera7 Parsifal (1982) Starring Michael Kutter, Armin Jordan, Robert Lloyd, Martin Sperr, Edith Clever, Aage Haugland and the voices of Reiner Goldberg, Yvonne Minton, Wolfgang Schone, Director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg.Straight out of the German school of film, the kind that favored tons of symbolism and Ingmar Bergmanesque surrealism, came this 1982 film of Wagner's final masterpiece- Parsifal, written to correspond with Good Friday/Easter and the consecration of the Bayreuth Opera House. This film follows the musical score and plot accurately but the manner in which it was filmed and performed is bold and avant-garde and no other Parsifal takes the crown in its bizarre cinematography. Syberberg is known for controversial films. Prior to this film he had released films about Hitler and Nazism, Richard Wagner and his personal Anti-Semitism and a documentary about Winifred Wagner, one of his grand-daughters. This film is possibly disturbing in many aspects. Parsifal (sung by Reiner Goldberg but acted by Michael Kutter) is a male throughout the first part of the film and then, after the enchantment of Kundry's kiss, is transformed into a female. This gender-bending element displays the feminine/masculine/ying-yang nature of the quest for the Holy Grail, which serves all mankind and redeems it through Christ's blood. In the pagan sorcerer Klingsor's fortress, there are photographs of such notoriously sinister figures as Hitler, Nietzche, Cosima Wagner and Wagner's mistress Matilde Wesendock. The Swaztika flag hangs outside the fortress. Parsifal journeys into the 19th and 20th century throughout the film. The tempting Flower Maidens are in the nude. Kundry is portrayed as a sort of beautiful but corrupt Mary Magdalene or Eve from Genesis (played by Edith Clever but beautifully sung by mezzo-soprano Yvonne Minton). Ultimately, this film is for fans of this type of bizarre Germanic/European symbolic metafiction and for intellectuals who appreciate the symbolism, the history and lovers of Wagner opera. Indeed, the singing is grand and compelling. Reiner Goldberg's Parsifal is a focused and intense voice but it lacks the depth and overall greatness of the greater Parsifals of the stage - James King, Wolfgang Windgassen, Rene Kollo and today's own Placido Domingo. Yvone Minton is a sensual-voiced, dramatic and exciting Kundry, delving into her tormented state perfectly. While the production is certainly unorthodox and as un-Wagnerian as it can possibly get (Wagner's concept was Christian ceremonial pomp with Grails, spears, castles, Knights and wounded kings, a dark sorcerer, darkness turning into light, etc typical Wagnerian themes)..it is still an enjoyable, art-house film.

tostinati Back when I saw this film when it came out first run at the local art theater, it blew me away. When I tried to get into it again after locating a DVD copy, I couldn't sit through it. Most of the trappings of Syberburg's much-vaunted style have the feel of artsy gimmicks of his hot period, the late 70s and early 80s. The puppets, which are part of this scene, don't bother me half as much as the projection of images over everything on stage, and the shifting video slide show backgrounds. This technique seems to have been a solution that Syberburg believed in deeply-- and to feel he was leading the avant pack in using. But a solution to what, I'm not sure. To break up basically static tableau setups, yes. To speak to the wide-wandering emotional interior state of the films participants, certainly. But why make the film auditorium-bound in the first place if it's restless, ceaseless movement you crave? --Budget limitations? --Because you feel challenged or amused tinkering around with active/static dynamics? Either of these reasons is acceptable to me, but I don't find the fruit of this experimentation especially successful, or more, very durable.The music is great, and I DO yearn for something more eccentric or intense than the standard PBS/Met production with guys standing around bellowing in obvious crepe whiskers and stage dirt. But this film goes arty in a way that doesn't speak to many people any more, and as far as I'm concerned, it way overshoots the crazed artist mark. A little less please.

ahearn02 It must be assumed that those who praised this film ("the greatest filmed opera ever," didn't I read somewhere?) either don't care for opera, don't care for Wagner, or don't care about anything except their desire to appear Cultured. Either as a representation of Wagner's swan-song, or as a movie, this strikes me as an unmitigated disaster, with a leaden reading of the score matched to a tricksy, lugubrious realisation of the text.It's questionable that people with ideas as to what an opera (or, for that matter, a play, especially one by Shakespeare) is "about" should be allowed anywhere near a theatre or film studio; Syberberg, very fashionably, but without the smallest justification from Wagner's text, decided that Parsifal is "about" bisexual integration, so that the title character, in the latter stages, transmutes into a kind of beatnik babe, though one who continues to sing high tenor -- few if any of the actors in the film are the singers, and we get a double dose of Armin Jordan, the conductor, who is seen as the face (but not heard as the voice) of Amfortas, and also appears monstrously in double exposure as a kind of Batonzilla or Conductor Who Ate Monsalvat during the playing of the Good Friday music -- in which, by the way, the transcendant loveliness of nature is represented by a scattering of shopworn and flaccid crocuses stuck in ill-laid turf, an expedient which baffles me. In the theatre we sometimes have to piece out such imperfections with our thoughts, but I can't think why Syberberg couldn't splice in, for Parsifal and Gurnemanz, mountain pasture as lush as was provided for Julie Andrews in Sound of Music...The sound is hard to endure, the high voices and the trumpets in particular possessing an aural glare that adds another sort of fatigue to our impatience with the uninspired conducting and paralytic unfolding of the ritual. Someone in another review mentioned the 1951 Bayreuth recording, and Knappertsbusch, though his tempi are often very slow, had what Jordan altogether lacks, a sense of pulse, a feeling for the ebb and flow of the music -- and, after half a century, the orchestral sound in that set, in modern pressings, is still superior to this film.