Word: lovingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perfect Wagnerites know that the operas are built from short musical phrases, called leitmotivs, that symbolize characters and ideas. There are themes for Siegfried's sword and Wotan's spear, for renunciation of love and for its redemption. Artfully intertwined, they underpin Wagner's own libretto, based on the sagas of Norse and Germanic legend. In presenting what the composer called a "stage-festival play," Kupfer found physical leitmotivs to complement the musical ones and give his production a visual as well as a musical unity. Characters do not just stand and sing; they stand and deliver, fighting with fury...
Schavernoch's imaginative sets contribute greatly to the production's success. Like something out of George Miller's Mad Max movies, they depict an exhausted world where love can be found only among the ruins and the survivors get by as best they can. Hunding's hut is an underground shelter; Brunnhilde's rock, a barren stretch of moonscape, glowing radioactively. The Rhinemaidens disport themselves among the twisted remnants of what appears to be a power plant (shades of Chereau). It is a gloomy, godforsaken land that well suits the Schopenhauerian concept of pessimism with which Wagner suffused his text...
...after the old order has been destroyed, he populates the stage with a crowd dressed in formal clothes -- like the Bayreuth audience -- mindlessly watching television as the conflagration subsides. The drowned Hagen lies unnoticed, a beached whale in black leather. Despite the music's glowing promise of redemption by love, no one seems to have learned a thing: only two innocent children make their way, hand in hand, out of the carnage. A forgetful human race ensures that, in Kupfer's moral universe, history repeats itself exclusively as tragedy. No wonder the audience booed. But never mind. In a couple...
...bounds of realism than the director is. Or suitable for representation by realistic means. Tucker was an expressionistic character in search of an auteur. A self-educated backyard inventor, he designed a high-speed armored car that the Army deemed impractical and a gun turret that it learned to love during World War II. Tucker used the prototype of the armored car (according to the film) to make ice-cream runs with his kids. The reputation he gained from the turret was his chief asset in finding backing for the car he decided to make after the war ended...
...ambiguous allusions to the sustaining myths of old-fashioned popular fiction and the folklore of capitalism. It neither blandly accepts them nor blithely satirizes them. Bridges' portrayal of Tucker is in the same key. In the largest sense, he is fully, honestly committed to his dream. But there are lovely little moments when we feel his love of hype and con for their own sake, and sense that whatever the outcome of his enterprise, he knows he has already lifted himself to legendary status...