Operas for the 21st Century:
Mozart’s New Crowned Hope

By Christoph Huber

If you live in Austria, by this midpoint in the year of Mozart’s 250th anniversary, nobody can fault you if you’ve had enough. Wolfgang, wellspring of national popularity (cue tourism-tie-ins) and Amadeus, artist of the first order and whatnot, have been so omnipresent as to become indistinguishable, increasingly resembling a brand rather than a brilliant light (and mind) in artistic history. Any meaningful engagement with his legacy has long been buried under an assault of repertoire repetitions, revisions, rediscoveries, and not exactly redoubtable appropriations. Has the Mozartkugel won out over Mozartkunst? In quiet moments I find myself hankering for the proudly narcissistic and periodically hilarious rants of the iconoclastic Kurt Palm’s ego-documentary Der Wadenmesser oder das wilde Leben des Wolfgang Mozart, which not only amply compensates its proud (and birth-certificate-justified) sub-titular Amadeus-rejection with nose flutes and neat fecal comedy (all original quotes from the original letters of the composer’s family, of course), but was also pointedly released on the 249th anniversary—which itself now seems like a quarter-millennium ago.

In short, although there seems hardly anything around that’s not inspired by Mozart in some way or other, there is little that’s inspiring. Which is why the idea of the year-ending New Crowned Hope festival seems like such a breath of fresh air. As conceived by Peter Sellars, there’s a good chance it will provide a kind of happy end, by looking to the now and into the future instead of gazing reverentially back into the past (the name “New Crowned Hope” is drawn from the Freemason lodge for whose reopening, after all the Masonic lodges had been shut down by the Emperor for fear the French Revolution might spread, Mozart conducted his last completed work of music, a little cantata: his last public appearance, just a few weeks before his death). Consisting of new commissions drawing inspiration from three key works from Mozart’s last year, 1791—The Magic Flute, the Requiem, and the lesser-known but recently re-evaluated final opera La clemenza di Tito—from mid-November to mid-December in Vienna the festival will present a series of works that range from concerts, theatre and dance to visual arts, architecture and, what brings it into these pages, films. Six features, with an additional short belatedly added, have been commissioned, on all of which Illumination Films’ Simon Field and Keith Griffith served as executive producers. One film—Paz Encina’s remarkable, minimalist feature debut Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock)—debuted earlier this year in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar, while most of the others will premiere in Venice: Apichatpong Weerastehakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt are in the main competition, Garin Hugroho’s Opera Jawa contends in the more experimental “Orizzonti” section, and Teboho Malatsi’s Meokgo and the Stickfighter opens the short film selection. The missing item, Bahman Ghobadi’s Half Moon, is scheduled to premiere before Vienna in a special program in Toronto, which will show the whole package together for the first time, under the rather immodest title “Mozart’s Visionary Cinema: New Crowned Hope.”
Still, judging from the majority of works made available, claims of excellence are not entirely unfounded. But before attending to the merits of the individual films it may be instructive to ponder what the ideas and realization of the whole enterprise signify in an international as well as a national context. The project’s financial contribution to the respective films are varying (and undisclosed), though it’s not hard to guess whether it’s easier to get a new Tsai off the ground or the first entirely Paraguayan-shot 35mm feature in almost three decades (the last having been a historical apologia ordered up by then-dictator Alfredo Stroessner). Yet especially considering the recent state funding policy in Austria, which increasingly leans towards insularity and ideas of national success (whatever that may be), it bespeaks the idealism of Sellars’ idea: the city of Vienna gives money (in this case directed towards some not exactly wealthy regions), and in return may get some art and a degree of prestige. (Certainly, this year’s Venice selection is Austria’s shining hour in the major festival sweepstakes) What’s more, apart from drawing inspiration from suggested “Mozartian themes,” the artists were evidently accorded quite a degree of freedom: the films seem to have grown organically from their previous work rather than some superimposed assignment. (Unfamiliar with Encina’s previous work I can’t vouch for her, and I haven’t yet seen Ghobai’s and Tsai’s films—though one seriously doubts Tsai will use the project as an occasion for an about-face.)

Sellars has rightly pointed out the timeliness of the composer’s themes, especially in the case of La clemenza di Tito, which, in his words, “has become a most important opera for the 21st century: it is about responses to terrorism, breaking cycles of violence, and the rule of mercy. In Act One conspirators assassinate the president and set fire to the capital. In Act Two the president miraculously recovers and orders those responsible to be brought before him. The terrorists, already sentenced to death, are presented. The president forgives them, deals with their issues, and invites them to join the government, because until they have both representation and responsibility no one will be safe.” Sellars adds that “we all thought this opera was a daydream until Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, formed a government with the people who had tried to kill him, and declared that the cycle of killing had to stop. His Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which perpetrators faced their victims and their victims’ families, tested the limits and possibilities of forgiveness in our time.”

Thankfully, however, there are no clumsy terrorism analogies on display here, the closest to a statement in that direction is Haroun’s spin on forgiveness, which for all its allegorical potential skirts mere parable. Indeed, what up to now seems the richest and most ingenious expression of the New Crowned Hope idea—Nugroho’s staggering Opera Jawa—presents the contradictions of society, its values and (resulting) problems, including the capacity for violence, in such a layered manner that it’s impossible to untangle the myriad levels of inspiration. This already points to a level on which the project must be considered a success. Instead of inviting speculation about specific connections to Mozart, the films must first be made sense of on their own (for all its universal validity Opera Jawa is very much a statement from and about Indonesia), and can then be read productively in relation to each other and to the contemporary world, including the world of film. I haven’t yet seen Meokgo and the Stickfighter, but the fact that Malatsi states it will be a magic African fable in the form of a tribute to the beloved spaghetti westerns of his youth seems significant: a genre belonging to those popular forms which were internationally successful regardless of the constraining definitions of “first world” and “third world.” The very perpetuation of such terms is explicitly regarded by Sellars as anti-utopian backwardness: “There is only one planet—and we are all sharing it.”

In that sense Sellars’ momentous claim that “where Mozart ended is where we begin” can be contextualized. It also makes all the more ironic the puzzlement in Cannes when the first completed film seemed closer to Beckett than Mozart. Hamaca Parguaya, which in Variety quarters was quickly lumped into a “Lisandro Alonso school of minimalism” no-zone, is certainly the most austere of the New Crowned Hope films, but its interest in the cyclical structure of repetition-and-variation actually anticipates another jungle specialist’s entry in the series: Syndromes and a Century, amusingly the work in which Apichatpong leaves the jungle behind (as previously announced in his short Worldly Desires). With such cheap-shot comparisons off the table, one is better able to appreciate Encina’s wholly remarkable aesthetic: the meticulous, slowly changing light (courtesy of the reliable DP Willi Behnisch), and especially her use of sound. More than half of the film consists of a recurring, static long shot: the titular hammock, at first hung far in the back of the frame, with an elderly couple sitting down and a carefully crafted dialogue about their missing son (gone to war), the weather (not good for harvest), the times (not good at all), and the dog nearby (barking all the time) slowly circling on the soundtrack. Only when some of the intercut sequences show the couple closer does one realize that the conversation is only taking place in their heads—their lips don’t move. The idea of remove is central to the film: it is set in 1935, spoken in the dwindling second official Paraguayan language Guarani (associated with the poor), but the film’s historical consciousness certainly does not limit Encina’s film to that period in theme and purpose. The distancing devices of her strict style eventually betray the deeply felt melancholy of this couple trapped together in loss, decay, and memory: when the hammock is taken down as the night breaks and they leave towards the back of the shot, the light of the sole lantern disappearing in the woods, an intense sadness remains.

More straightforward but no less poignant, Haroun’s Daratt also teases ambivalent riches from its story of a son sent of in search of the war criminal who killed his father, intending to reciprocate in kind. He finds the 60-year-old, now a baker and a respected member of the community, and is given a job as his apprentice. This begins a peculiar push-pull relationship between the two, complicated by the perpetrator’s beautiful young wife, and persisting even after the would-be-assassin’s gun is discovered—astonishingly, at this moment the baker offers to adopt him. Told in the same simple yet powerful and suggestive style as the director’s previous Abouna (2002), and similarly constructed around small, diligently observed incidents, Daratt again suggests Haroun’s filmmaking as an alternative to the increasingly authoritarian stance Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema has taken since his unforced heyday. The stark elegance and clever use of sparse colour denotes an unobtrusively reflexive intelligence, even more so the exquisite punchline: forgiveness (of sorts) is possible, because revenge literally turns out to be blind.

If Daratt seems (deceptively) simple, Syndromes and a Century is reliably mysterious. Apichatpong’s completion of his trilogy of bifurcated films shows the Thai filmmaker at his dreamiest, and since much of it plays out indoors his elusive poetry comes through all the stronger—misreadings about natural mysticism sparked by the jungle fever of Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004) are here moot. Which is not to say that Syndromes and a Century is without moments of natural mystery, but refreshingly it is first of all an entry into a genre in dire need of revitalization: it’s a hospital comedy, of a somewhat metaphysical bent. Starting with the interview of a Dr. Nohng, newly arrived in a small country hospital from the army (although he complains afterwards about being directly sent to emergency, since he can’t bear the sight of blood), it segues into a series of melancholy and funny vignettes. A couple of monks arrive, the elder plagued by aching joints and bad dreams of fowl (which, like much here, are possibly connected), while the younger believes he has found the reincarnation of his brother (for whose accidental death he feels guilty) in the hospital’s friendly dental surgeon, whom he tragicomically begs for forgiveness. A shy young man is hopelessly in love with Dr. Toey, the woman who conducts the opening interview, while she, meanwhile, is more drawn to the reminiscences of an orchid expert and to talking about history and love. In the most astonishing scene of the first half, she sits under a tree with a female friend, and as a story is told in which an eclipse plays a pivotal role, the sunny meadow turns dark as the sun is (briefly) eclipsed. It suggests some divine intervention, lending uncanny credence to the moral of the story: “There’s always someone watching you.”
“This is a powerful place,” says one of the two women, but in this film the power is ubiquitous. Soon enough, after the sunset segues into a wonderful karaoke interlude leading to a nighttime talk bewteen young monk and dentist, Dr. Toey’s interview of Dr. Nohng starts all over again, with a slightly different set-up, occasionally different dialogue, and, as it turns out, a whole other setting: an urban hospital, its modernity stressed by being more clinical and expansive, yet in many ways even more enigmatic than its provincial predecessor. Some things in the interview happen in a very similar way: the opening interview is still fascinatingly puzzling, with its questions for preferred shape between triangle, circle, and square (Nohng’s choice is again the circle), and especially for the meaning of DDT, twice—if differently—answered by Nohng with “destroy dirty things.” Enter once more the fowl-plagued monk and the unhappy suitor, as well as certain musings. Yet other echoes are only remotely comparable: the second half ends with joyful group gymnastics in the park to sounds of cheesy synth as if in reply to the quiet glow of karaoke. On the other hand, the centre of the film shifts from Toey to Nohng, and many things seem entirely different—or are they? Even busts of historical figures (like the founder of Thai medicine) accrete an otherworldly aura when elegantly arced by Apichatpong’s camera. As the contemporariness of the second half’s setting sinks in with outdoor concrete (as well as concrète) backdrops, the remoteness of the first becomes more mysterious, both geographically and temporally.

Finally, the most arcane scene is a series of pans in an empty cellar to casually droning ambient music, first approximately following the ventilation shaft, then past an exhaust pipe, tilting back and moving in on its opening, for over a minute cherishing the forms of white fumes circling into the black hole. Full of such kind of magical dead-ends (which nevertheless point to the possibility of something greater beyond) and mirror images of all kinds, Apichatpong’s exploration of remembrance is remarkable for presenting its tangibility, and thus paradoxically its even more powerful intangibility. The film’s personal idiosyncrasies—inspired as it is by the director’s parents, who were doctors, the hospital he grew up in, and the autobiographical basis of the “DDT“ question—only add to its allure. After two viewings I don’t feel I have exhausted it yet, and I’m not sure I want to: as Apichatpong declares in his New Crowned Hope statement, his film is about “how our sense of memory is triggered by seemingly insignificant things,” and this perfectly accounts for its beauty.

While not exactly surpassed, the beauty of Syndromes is overwhelmed, in a way, by the entirely different beauty of Opera Jawa, which—true to its title, entirely sung as a gamelan opera—possesses a unique and stately grace: the closest (and only) comparison I can think of is the rhythmic elegance and haunting theatricality of the very best of Shaw’s huangmei operas. Yet while those were the revival of a traditional form (with the reassuring return to roots undoubtedly appealing to a diaspora audience yearning for home as well as a domestic audience unsettled by modernization), Nugroho boldly explodes the distinctions between tradition and modernity, in the process highlighting eternal conflicts raging in society. At the core of the proceedings is a reinterpretation of the Ramayana, the second Indian national epic besides the Mahabarata, and a key work of the Hindu canon. Nugroho centres on the decision of Sita, wife of the hero-king Rama, to sacrifice herself in order to prove her love and fidelity after his rival Ravana tried to obtain her love.

Alternating between the core drama, Brechtian commentary, and social crowd scenes, the film is played out in the palaces and temples and on the beaches of Yogkharta and Solo, two centres of Javanese culture crucial in the shaping of Javanese art. (Additionally, palace, temple, and beach represent the three pillars of government, religion, and culture.) Yet it also makes use of modern installations, including a barrage of golden and red waxheads (some of these are later hung over body models, lit inside and dripping red), hanging corpses made of white cloth, a metal sedan-creature whose helmet-head carries the inscription “Viva Lamuerte,” and a huge stretch of red cloth running through the village streets, connecting two main locations. Meanwhile, the style of singing and choreography keeps changing throughout; not exactly a juxtaposition, but no smooth merging either, despite the magnificent, measured flow of music and sound as well as the exuberant colours and symbols Nugroho orchestrates. Rather it produces a dazzling dialectic, perfectly expressing the conflicts of society as enacted on a daily basis, which are both classical and modern. This is a theme that runs through all films of the New Crowned Hope project I’ve seen so far, but in Opera Jawa it finds its most expansive expression.

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