A Film Canon

The Tales Of Hoffman reinvents opera in much the same way as Busby Berkeley’s musicals do theatre, replacing the restricted vantage point of the audience with an apparently endless range of angles and perspectives (culminating at those moments at which various aspects of the same event are superimposed), and intensifying it with the duo’s most lavish Technicolour palette to date. In doing so, it encapsulates the hyperbolic, hyper-real vision that is the hallmark of Hoffman’s uncanny, which, combined with Robert Helpmann’s particularly stylised form of ballet, completely breaks down the distinction between human and automaton; or, alternatively, clarifies that breakdown as dance’s peculiar pleasure, both for participant and observer – a diagnosis that recalls The Red Shoes, and is extended to song in the second of the three stories that constitute the bulk of Offenbach’s selection, as well as, more implicitly, to the silent medium, since it remains (relatively) clear that the music has been recorded beforehand. It’s also worth mentioning the extent to which the duo take advantage of close-ups to encourage figurative readings within and between the stories, most poetically in the gradual identification of jewel, disembodied eye, and the supposed autonomy of the rapturous spectator, reinventing the iconic ode to a gem: “A joy divine/Illumines all around me/Your glances kindle mine/And tongues of fire surround me.”