Parsifal, Wagner's story of alienation and longed-for redemption through the enlightenment that compassion alone confers, distills a lifetime of the composer's deepest obsessions through the medieval Grail legend. It also evokes reactions that are especially intense even for Wagnerians. The sense of simultaneous attraction-repulsion first experienced by Nietzsche generates some of the creative tension in this controversial 1982 film by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, a member of Germany's postwar "neues Kino" generation of directors. "Syberberg's Parsifal" is exactly that: it is not to be approached as a video presentation of an opera but as a full-scale film in its own right. The director's concern with the claims of the romantic and "irrational" in Germany's cultural heritage, demonized as an aftermath of the Third Reich, is here at its apex. An astonishingly intricate profusion of imagery saturates the film--as props, cluttering objects, costumes, part of the set, or visuals projected onto the background--with the resonance of a long, disturbing dream. Striking visuals from the opera's own symbolic world are set alongside a veritable parade of iconography from Europe's cultural history, while the action of the opera is seen to take place within and around an enormous replica of Wagner's death mask as backdrop. Conceptually the intention is to counter Wagner's "narcotic" spell with Brechtian distance or with a Walter Benjamin-like slant on the artifacts of culture.
For all of the radicalism of his imagery, Syberberg hews surprisingly close to more traditional acting styles here, drawing on a "presentational" approach of gesture, the stylization of early film, and intimate reaction shots. The music was actually recorded separately as a soundtrack, to which the actors (mostly a separate cast) lip-synch their performances. Conductor Armin Jordan--a sensitive but never self-indulgent Wagnerian--also actually performs the role of Amfortas, and the distinguished actress Edith Clever is a special asset for her mesmerizing, expressive Kundry, making the role into the opera's psychological epicenter. At the point of the resisted kiss in Act II, in a Jungian split, Parsifal becomes portrayed by a woman (still mouthing the mellifluous tenor exclamations of Reiner Goldberg). Syberberg wallows in contradictory currents and obscure symbolism that sometimes reinforces what he seems to want to take apart. Yet he has also succeeded in locating the work somewhere in a unique space between fetishized ritual and purely aesthetic experience. The DVD transfer is somewhat grainy in resolution, while the soundtrack has a noticeable persistent hiss. Jordin's relatively fleet pacing allows for much texture and offers a fine enough performance, though not a top choice on musical terms alone. --Thomas May
