War Requiem (1989) - Musical Drama
War Requiem (1989) is one of writer/director Derek Jarman's most deeply moving pictures. He juxtaposes original, silent dramatic scenes with archival footage of World War I, to bring alive Benjamin Britten's towering 1962 masterpiece, arguably the greatest choral work of the 20th century, and an impassioned plea for world peace. The film also reunites Jarman with award-winning actress Tilda Swinton, who here gives one of her most memorable performances, without uttering a word. Kino International's DVD has excellent image and sound, so crucial for Britten's score. Following this brief introduction, there are sections on background — Wilfred Owen and Benjamin Britten, analysis — Jarman's War Requiem, and an annotated full text of War Requiem, with a translation of the Latin sections and all of Owen's poetry, with notes on how Britten used it.
Jarman employs Britten's own classic 1963 performance of his work — with the legendary soloists, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and English tenor Peter Pears (Britten's life partner and muse) — in a remastered edition that sounds more spectacular, and natural, than ever. Britten brought his lifelong devotion to peace to this original composition, a massive orchestral setting of the Latin Requiem Mass text, interspersed with simple but shattering settings of Wilfred Owen's war poetry. It is performed by three of the greatest singers of their era, for whom Britten specifically wrote these parts. Owen was the gay British infantry lieutenant who was tragically killed at age 27, in the final week of World War I.
Jarman interprets the six movements of Britten's score in visually stunning, dialogue-free scenes that range from the heartbreakingly realistic to the surreal, often drawing on dramatic imagery from Owen's poems. To take just one example, that is original with Jarman, in the film's second scene, Tilda Swinton plays a nurse standing watch over Owen's candlelit corpse. The moment is simple yet so deeply evocative that it moved me to tears, through the combined power of her heartfelt gestures that climax in a silent scream, Jarman's visual mastery, and Britten's haunting music.
The excellent cast includes Nathaniel Parker (Zeffirelli's Hamlet, Wide Sargasso Sea, BBC series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries) as Wilfred Owen, Sean Bean (title role in Jarman's Caravaggio, the James Bond film GoldenEye, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) as Owen's star-crossed German counterpart, Owen Teale (the 1991 Robin Hood) as the Unknown Soldier, Patricia Hayes as the Mother (A Fish Called Wanda), and Laurence Olivier (director/star of Hamlet, Richard III) in his final appearance on either screen or stage.
This is one of the great translations of classical music into cinematic imagery. And it is a ferocious vision of the nature of war, that does full imaginative justice to Owen's searing poetry and Britten's unforgettable score...
Britten dedicated the War Requiem "in loving memory" to four of his and Pears' dead military friends: Sub-Lieutenant Roger Burney, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; Ordinary Seaman David Gill, Royal Navy; and Lieutenant Michael Halliday, Royal New Zealand Volunteer Reserve; and Captain Piers Dunkerley, Royal Marines: the first three died in combat, but Dunkerley actually survived the Normandy landing and the rest of the war only to commit suicide on the eve of his wedding (Humphrey Carpenter, in his Benjamin Britten: A Biography, suggests that Dunkerley had been in unrequited love with Britten). (ALERT! Polemical parenthetical: Although the intensely private Britten would have been aghast at the in-your-face activism of Jarman and groups like ACT UP or OutRage, he would certainly have shared their desire for justice and equality; and perhaps he would have understood that there was yet another kind of "war" being waged against GLBT people through the systematized homophobia that, even at the time of his oratorio's premiere, still imprisoned men for "committing the crime" of same-sex love, that forced Wilfred Owen to keep his deepest longings locked up in his notebooks (some of which his family burned after his death to "protect" his reputation), and that perhaps led to his friend Piers Dunkerley's suicide that might have seemed a better option to him than a sham opposite-sex marriage and so being another kind of casualty.)
Also like Owen, Britten often turned to the theme of lost innocence. It permeates much of his music, that frequently has an elegiac feel, including his works for children's voices like the Children's Crusade (1968; to a text by Brecht), several of his operas such as Billy Budd and Owen Wingrave (1970), and of course the War Requiem...
In 1961, when Britten was writing this oratorio, the world again seemed on the brink of disaster, but now with nuclear weapons that had the potential to end all life. That year saw Cold War tensions becoming ever hotter between the West and USSR, highlighted by the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the US escalating its involvement in Vietnam. With an air force base just a few miles from Aldeburgh, Britten had the sound of bomber planes on maneuvers constantly in his head while writing his musical plea for peace... Read more:
http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman07.html#text
Jarman employs Britten's own classic 1963 performance of his work — with the legendary soloists, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and English tenor Peter Pears (Britten's life partner and muse) — in a remastered edition that sounds more spectacular, and natural, than ever. Britten brought his lifelong devotion to peace to this original composition, a massive orchestral setting of the Latin Requiem Mass text, interspersed with simple but shattering settings of Wilfred Owen's war poetry. It is performed by three of the greatest singers of their era, for whom Britten specifically wrote these parts. Owen was the gay British infantry lieutenant who was tragically killed at age 27, in the final week of World War I.
Jarman interprets the six movements of Britten's score in visually stunning, dialogue-free scenes that range from the heartbreakingly realistic to the surreal, often drawing on dramatic imagery from Owen's poems. To take just one example, that is original with Jarman, in the film's second scene, Tilda Swinton plays a nurse standing watch over Owen's candlelit corpse. The moment is simple yet so deeply evocative that it moved me to tears, through the combined power of her heartfelt gestures that climax in a silent scream, Jarman's visual mastery, and Britten's haunting music.
The excellent cast includes Nathaniel Parker (Zeffirelli's Hamlet, Wide Sargasso Sea, BBC series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries) as Wilfred Owen, Sean Bean (title role in Jarman's Caravaggio, the James Bond film GoldenEye, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) as Owen's star-crossed German counterpart, Owen Teale (the 1991 Robin Hood) as the Unknown Soldier, Patricia Hayes as the Mother (A Fish Called Wanda), and Laurence Olivier (director/star of Hamlet, Richard III) in his final appearance on either screen or stage.
This is one of the great translations of classical music into cinematic imagery. And it is a ferocious vision of the nature of war, that does full imaginative justice to Owen's searing poetry and Britten's unforgettable score...
Britten dedicated the War Requiem "in loving memory" to four of his and Pears' dead military friends: Sub-Lieutenant Roger Burney, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; Ordinary Seaman David Gill, Royal Navy; and Lieutenant Michael Halliday, Royal New Zealand Volunteer Reserve; and Captain Piers Dunkerley, Royal Marines: the first three died in combat, but Dunkerley actually survived the Normandy landing and the rest of the war only to commit suicide on the eve of his wedding (Humphrey Carpenter, in his Benjamin Britten: A Biography, suggests that Dunkerley had been in unrequited love with Britten). (ALERT! Polemical parenthetical: Although the intensely private Britten would have been aghast at the in-your-face activism of Jarman and groups like ACT UP or OutRage, he would certainly have shared their desire for justice and equality; and perhaps he would have understood that there was yet another kind of "war" being waged against GLBT people through the systematized homophobia that, even at the time of his oratorio's premiere, still imprisoned men for "committing the crime" of same-sex love, that forced Wilfred Owen to keep his deepest longings locked up in his notebooks (some of which his family burned after his death to "protect" his reputation), and that perhaps led to his friend Piers Dunkerley's suicide that might have seemed a better option to him than a sham opposite-sex marriage and so being another kind of casualty.)
Also like Owen, Britten often turned to the theme of lost innocence. It permeates much of his music, that frequently has an elegiac feel, including his works for children's voices like the Children's Crusade (1968; to a text by Brecht), several of his operas such as Billy Budd and Owen Wingrave (1970), and of course the War Requiem...
In 1961, when Britten was writing this oratorio, the world again seemed on the brink of disaster, but now with nuclear weapons that had the potential to end all life. That year saw Cold War tensions becoming ever hotter between the West and USSR, highlighted by the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the US escalating its involvement in Vietnam. With an air force base just a few miles from Aldeburgh, Britten had the sound of bomber planes on maneuvers constantly in his head while writing his musical plea for peace... Read more:
http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman07.html#text
