Word: olympias
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ELIOT HOUSE DINING ROOM: King Kong and Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Oct. 27 and 28, Kong 8, Blondes 10, $1. HARVARD-EPWORTH CHURCH: Ghosts Before Breakfast by Hans Richter; Diving Sequence from Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl; Adebar by Peter Kubelka; A Movie by Bruce Conner: To Parallel by Bruce Beillie: Neurology by Standish Lawder; and Moon 1969 by Scott Bartlett...
...rights Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann should belong to the tenor in the title role. It is he, after all, who goes awooing, however unsuccessfully, after Stella the actress, Olympia the windup doll, Giulietta the courtesan and Antonia the consumptive soprano. If he is not careful, though, the tenor can be easily upstaged by the soprano who normally portrays all four heroines. Her music is uniformly exquisite, and on top of that she gets to show her legs in the gondola scene...
...with some visual (but never spoken) additions to the plot that enable not just Lindorf but Coppelius, Dappertutto and Dr. Miracle as well -all played by Treigle-to win the girls that Hoffmann loses. The first act, for example, usually ends with Coppelius seeming to dismantle the doll Olympia before Hoffmann's horrified eyes. He does so in the new production, but then Coppelius and a happy flesh-and-blood Olympia (Soprano Beverly Sills) are seen embracing behind a curtain. Obviously the girl is part poltergeist, too, and in league with Lucifer...
...show business: they work. Given the incomparable team of Treigle and Sills, he has the added advantage of dealing from strength. Sills is in superb voice and thespian mien, as usual. She somehow manages, for instance, to make the viewer simultaneously amused by and sorry for the doll Olympia. Wind her up, and oh, how she warbles-even standing on one foot. Take her hand too passionately, and oh, how she runs away...
THERE is a very short history of films made by committed artists with political intentions. There are the famous propaganda films--Leal Riefenstahl's Olympia and Triumph of the Will, the early Soviet Union silent classics, the American, "Why We Fight" series during World War II. But films which have dealt with social process in a direct attempt to instruct or instigate change are few and mostly foreign. Think of Battle of Algiers The Confession If the films of Godard...