BRUGES-LA-MORTE 1978 FEATURE Prix de la Presse/ Ghent Film Fesvital 1980
NEW HI-RES HD RESTORATION 2020
From the novel by GEORGES RODENBACH
THE BACKGROUND STORY
Three weeks after finishing the shoot for Lulu, Chase and the entire crew embarked for Belgium. The filming of Bruges-La-Morte was unusual even for an under-budgeted independent feature. Lack of funding meant the crew were required to pay their own transportation. Knowing the footage would be used for the NYC Opera’s production of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt, the budget was augmented to allow for only a two week shoot. Chase had prepared with two pre-production trips, arranging the locations and lodging for actors and crew.
In London, a friend of opera director Richard Perlman happened to run its largest casting company. She felt an experience in a small film would be helpful for any of her rostrum of talent who had seldom acted in film. Chase was able to come up with a dozen—Anthony Daniels (C-3PO in Star Wars) and Nickolas Grace (Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited) were a couple of the young recruits making one of their first films. Richard Easton, the lead, was an old friend of Chase’s who had become well known in a British sitcom, and who volunteered to make the film as a favor. (His later career included a Tony award for The Invention of Love) All the actors and the crew were paid equally — $100, plus room and board. As the crew had recently finished another film (Lulu) they were working with maximum speed and harmony. The city of Bruges was almost deserted, though another film crew was filming on the other side of town (Paul Verhoeven with Katie Tippel). This meant little interference with any of the outdoor locations and the officials of all city departments that were asked to help with permits and permissions did so with enthusiasm.
FESTIVALS: Rotterdam, Ghent, Liege, Antwerp
PRIX de la PRESSE Ghent 1980
STILLS FROM THE FILM
INTRODUCTION
In the late 1800's until the first world war Bruges was an escape for a certain type of romantic tourist. The town had become almost deserted (the canals and waterways had dried up) and heavy fog and a feeling of sadness and despair hung over the city. The English were especially drawn to Bruges, and often had a second house there. A school of art around Symbolism was created by a small group of writers and artists surrounding the writer, Georges Rodenbach. They gave Bruges a nickname - The Dead City. The Symbolists believed in the power of dreams--they often felt dreams were filled with the real character of people, and were more truthful than waking life. Rodenbach wrote:
“The essence of art that is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.” Georges Rodenbach
The artists James Ensor and Odilon Redon expressed many of the ideas of the symbolists. Ensor’s depictions of grotesque masks to reflect people's inner lives, and Redon’s misty landscapes inspired some of the visual motifs of the film. A teenage composer, Eric Korngold, was fascinated by the novel Rodenbach wrote in 1892, and adapted a libretto for his opera Die Tote Stadt. Chase’s collaboration with stage director, Frank Corsoro for the New York City Opera required footage to be shot on location in Bruges. The film was created from this footage.
INTRODUCTION from the director
When beginning to think about the subject I was most interested in the idea of the double and all the questions it brings up. We have a mirror image—a saintly young wife and her outspoken, brazen opposite. What could be made of that? But what of the protagonist? Could he also have a double personality? If you go there, then why not create a film which itself is a double, and could be read 2 ways? The first plot would be a hero living in a state of denial and delusion, convincing himself his wife was dead and mourning her. But in the second could she have left him, and that trauma has led him to build this elaborate story. And could she not have become a completely different person? But why would she return? Out of curiosity? Guilt? When she discovers he is so far delusional, she says nothing.
Hermann Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf, left a profound impression on me when I was young. I was not thinking of it when planning this film, but in retrospective I realize how near the Rodenbach it is: it also includes a journey, a magic theater and a struggle to learn the truth about one’s self. It had to be looking over my shoulder as I began.
Working from this premise –I began to think of images that could create the atmosphere. I was very drawn to filmmakers who often explored dream imagery– Tarkovsky, Bergman, Resnais, Cocteau. All of them were drawn to mirrors. Some, like Cocteau, saw mirrors as a door you entered to discover alternate worlds. Others were interested in the gaze—when you look into the mirror and try to understand who that is looking back.
So mirrors were a way for me to explore the theme of double-ness. And the hero, Paul. What’s the mirror image of him except a lot of rage and suppressed anger; his strange ideas about women in general; lots of hypocrisy. But also a lot of ambiguity.
The theater performance gave me an opportunity to explore these ideas further and use the work of James Ensor, whose masked figures had so fascinated me in my youth. The masks were a modern presence in all Flemish celebrations. Ensor made them frightening and creepy. They were perfect for my theater, as were the ideas of Poe with his premature burials, death figures of the plague and suggestions of necrophilia.
I set out to keep things subtle, ambiguous, to create a film that was dark and evocative–– to let the audience discover and interpret these images for themselves. I also wanted to advance my own ideas of pure cinema—to show rather than explain with dialogue. I never aimed this film at a general public. I did hope there were enough people that might enjoy how I was exploring these ideas. That didn’t happen –– disappointing, of course. But with this new restoration, I’m happy it can now stand on its own.
FURTHER COMMENTS:
The film is book-ended by two formal rituals. The breakfast is almost like a church service—everything after he wakes up at the end has the same ritualistic order. The double dominates the film---his double at the breakfast (and we will see a far different side of him as the dream progresses –angry, bitter, resentful) The Marie, Marietta double, of course. But the film itself is a double! You can follow the story two ways. One as a simple story of loss, delusion and denial. That one gets punctured by the dream, which suggests she left him, and his trauma at having been left leads to the delusion and denial he builds around that fact, and makes him a far more strange and neurotic person. Why in the world did she come back? The way she needles him in their only real scene together, suggests that she’s getting back for old wrongs. There are enough moments there to see her embarrassment, or sadness at finding him in such bad shape, falling for her disguise. Also, in the street, he was set up. What’s that about, if it isn’t her come back? But maybe not! She could simply be a ghost of his yearning for her.
The Pierrot guides the film along like a master of ceremonies. Yes, the theater performance could be more clearly constructed---we almost miss the take on necrophilia, when Preriot crawls into the coffin (presumably screws her and that brings her back to life)
ESSAY - Emma Eisner (17)- Bruges-la-Morte Double Time
Bruges-La-Morte is a compelling film, containing multiple aspects which require deeper thinking to interpret and understand. One thing I found particularly interesting was the concept of doubles within the film and how, specifically, they were used/intended. I am aware that the intention was that the real wife returned to the scene, so to speak, but, for me, I found the concept of ambiguity to make this more compelling. Was it the real wife, or a similar woman? Within the protagonist’s dream, the concept that the woman is his real wife, returned, is cemented when she goes on her tirade outlining why his wife left. Her knowledge is too close to home and it becomes clear that, while she is acting the role of not being his wife, she actually is. As a viewer, I am still not sure whether to interpret this as a literal revelation, or as a part of his unconscious during the dream state desperately grasping for his wife’s return. The story follows a mythic structure where the man prays for his wife’s return, and the woman subsequently manifests. One could say, “No matter how experimental a film, dreams are not real life, and what happens in a dream reflects the unconscious of the dreamer, so the man dreaming that the woman is his wife could be a reflection of a desire for his wife’s return, rather than a reflection of her actually being his wife.”.
What additionally complicates this for me in this regard is the fact that outside of the protagonist’s dream, the “wife” character exists primarily as a foil for him. Inside of his dream, she seems to exist as an independent character structure that does not function to reflect his losses and longing. This would point evidence in the opposite direction of what I wrote before; though a dream usually reflects the dreamer, this dream seems to have elements that function independently of the lead character, and, though, it feels like a real dream, it is actually a device within a film, so it can hold any function that the director intends for it to hold. And, as I pointed out before, dreams often must be changed to preserve their function as devices to reveal an idea lower than the surface of waking experience when they are transferred into a film. Since the director has said that the intention in the story is that the real wife comes back, one can conceptualize these elements not as structures to create ambiguity, but instead as evidence for a truth within the film.
That being said, this creates a very interesting structure around the enduring theme of “doubles” within the film; there are double interpretations of the wife, double realities within the film, and double interpretations of the film based on double understandings of the purpose of art. Thus, this theme penetrates every aspect of the film, from its imagery to the abstract larger elements of it. The wife herself could be a doppelganger, or the real wife. The dream reality could be indicative of the truth, or the waking reality could be indicative of the truth. They could portray conflicting evidence because of the wife, who is an actress, choosing to conceal or lie within one or within the other. And, lastly, the watcher could take a typical avenue of interpretation of the film where he or she has an interpretation affected by the intention of the filmmaker and concludes by the end of the film that the dream tells the truth and the woman is the real wife. Alternatively, the viewer could take a Foucault-ian approach to his or her interpretation and disregard the filmmaker’s intention instead to perceive the dream as a reflection of the protagonist’s internal state (IE his longing for his wife, not her real presence) and conclude that the “wife” is not the protagonist’s wife at all. All of these creations of doubles are embedded within the film with intention and, for me, this degree of consistency on all levels created an effective web for this story.