RETROSPECTIVE: MICHELAGNIOLO, SELF PORTRAIT (1989)
Edwin Jahiel
A film review by Edwin Jahiel
Copyright 1996 Edwin Jahiel
AGONY AND ECSTASY
by Edwin Jahiel
MICHELAGNIOLO,SELF PORTRAIT (1989) Produced and directed by
Robert Snyder.Written by Michael Sonnabend. 85 minutes. Not
rated.
A plastic,masterful documentary on Michelangelo in which the
artist narrates his life, works and times through the voice of
director Robert Snyder, MICHELAGNIOLO (a Tuscan spelling) is a
most moving and impressive spiritual and artistic experience.
The composite text is drawn from Michelangelo's diaries,many
other writings, conversations with contemporaries like
artist-writer Giorgio Vasari (who had also been an apprentice
to Michelangelo) and the works of Dante .
The images and the sound amount to a combination
autobiography, a guided tour of Renaissance art, descriptions
and exegeses, I suspect that the film also draws on uncredited
sources, like Vasari's LIVES OF PAINTERS and modern
scholarship. More, and without invalidating the great quality
of this film, I have suspicions about its genesis, suspicions
that set me doing detective work.
The official information is full of deserved, admiring quotes.
It states too that Robert Snyder, (b. 1916) was awarded the
1951 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature ( presumably his
first film) for THE TITAN: STORY OF MICHELANGELO. The facts
are different:
In the beginning was MICHELANGELO, DAS LEBEN EINES TITANEN
(The Life of a Titan) a documentary by an experienced
specialist in art films, the German Curt Oertel. This film ,
which "avoided the double trap of hagiography and museography"
and used light, photography and camera movement in a new way,
was a model work. It was a German-Swiss coproduction, shot in
Switzerland, and released in March 1940.
Later, the great American documentarist Robert Flaherty
reedited Oertel's footage, prepared an English commentary
(read by Fredric March) "while being vague about the original
source of his materials," and THE TITAN was released in the
USA in 1950." For this reason the film is usually referred to
as a Flaherty film, which it is not. Credit is long overdue to
Oertel, whose techniques have had enormous effect on
subsequent films of this type made for both the commercial
cinema and television." (David Stewart Hall: FILM IN THE THIRD
REICH, 1969)
The Academy Award records show that the Oscar went to "The
Titan (Robert Snyder, producer)" and in 1950 rather than in
1951. Flaherty died in 1951. Snyder then went on to making
other documentaries on artists (Pablo Casals, Henry Miller,
etc.) and others, like THE HIDDEN WORLD, on insect life.
The new MICHELAGNIOLO is an updated remake, in color (with
black-and-white sections) of the black-and-white THE TITAN .
Screen credits mention that the black-and-white excerpts comes
from the Oertel movie (which they date wrongly as 1939) but
nothing else.
For the new version, the original plans called for
distinguished actors from each culture where the film would be
distributed to appear on screen intermittently and do the
voice-over. This impractical, illusion-destroying idea was
replaced by just Snyder's raspy voice which provides a
credible thread in spite of a most American pronunciation of
some words,e.g."Il Divino" becoming "Eel Deveeno" .
This is an inside job. Just as we see and feel how
Michelangelo would take a block of stone and make the statue
latent in it emerge, the film,with its wealth of
documentation, its techniques of three-dimensional
photography, loving close-ups of details and the like, gives
us the kind of analytical and synthesizing awareness that the
unguided mind alone cannot follow in reality and that the
viewing at a distance cannot capture sufficiently.
The life of Michelangelo is traced with spellbinding images
and narration, from his childhood to his "Pieta" sculpted at
age 21; his "David" finished three years later; his constant
relationships with the Medici and the Popes.
Michelangelo's struggle, over decades, with the megalomaniac
Pope Julius II who forced him to paint the Sistine ceiling
(while Michelangelo kept protesting " I am not a painter") and
charged him with the nightmarish plans to make a monumental
tomb for him (Julius); the artist's constant harassment with
impossible architectural commissions by other Popes; his
return to the Sistine chapel to do the Last Judgment 30 years
after the Creation; the turmoil of the Reformation, the
Counter-Reformation, Savonarola, Civil wars (Michelangelo was
a general, against his old patrons the Medici); the process of
creativity -- at least as much as can be grasped -- come
through beautifully. So does the artist's lifelong pull by,
and alternation, between pagan and religious works; or the
censorship concerning nudity, which made Michelangelo give the
ultimate reply: "So, clothes are nobler than the body and
shoes nobler than the foot?"
Worried as I am about MICHELAGNIOLO's true paternity, I cannot
deny that the work is not only 85 minutes of fascination but a
totally humbling experience too.