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Tristan and Isolde
The rising four-note phrase that begins Tristan and Isolde (1859) is delayed, deferred, and finally resolved only at the end of the four-hour opera. It suggests abiding and seemingly limitless yearning, a perfect complement to the myths Wagner adapted. Tristan, a Cornish knight, is tasked with bringing the Irish bride of King Mark home, but he instead falls in love with her under the influence of a magic potion. Exiled to Brittany, he dies before the two lovers are able to fully reunite.
In Love in the Western World (1939) [1], Denis de Rougemont identified the Tristan myth as the fundamental drama of Western civilization, with personal desire set against sacred duty and mission.
Filmmakers of many persuasions have agreed, connecting it to all-consuming love (Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, 1932), the apocalyptic imagination (Lars von Trier's Melancholia, 2011), the myth of the Wasteland (John Boorman's Excalibur, 1981), and the human capacity for self-destruction and self-delusion (Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, 1958).
Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
The great Wagnerian Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting at Covent Garden (London) in 1952.
A Farewell to Arms
Frank Borzage disarmingly treats Tristan and Isolde with unvarnished and direct sincerity in his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), completely transforming the tone of the original story in the process.
Vertigo
Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo directly alludes to Wagner's Liebestod music and its dark themes of love through death, with death, and in death, highlighting the deeper stakes of the illicit desires at the heart of the film.
Hitchcock brings all his stylistic resources to bear in this sequence. Shot/countershot is used to convey both anticipation (the cuts to the empty corridor at the beginning) and an exchange of discrete points-of-view (just before the embrace). As the Wagnerian music builds, the characters are placed on a specially designed moving platform, evocations of the past transform the physical space of the room, and the "reunited" lovers swoon into pure color. It is this sequence that makes Vertigo the cinema's greatest siren song.
Melancholia
Lars von Trier's Melancholia opens and closes with the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde, connecting it to both imagined and literal apocalypse.
In the opening scene, the use of slow motion and mannered forms suggests kitsch irony. By the end, the film has passed through that to recapitulate the original power of Wagner's music.
In theatrical screenings, the collision of a stray comet with the Earth (foreshadowed in the opening scene) is accompanied by escalating volume levels for Wagner's music. A final reverbation passes through all corners of the room, leaving the surround sound speakers quite literally shaken.
Excalibur
John Boorman returns to Tristan's sources.
Un chien andalou
According to legend, for the first 1929 screenings of the quintessential Surrealist film Un chien andalou, director Luis Buñuel juxtaposed recordings of Tristan and Isolde and an Argentinian tango. This has since become the established score for the film.
Intended to disrupt ordinary patterns of logic, it also deepens the film's exploration of l'amour fou and its parody of the Romantic iconography associated with the Death of Siegfried towards the end of the clip. As with all of Buñuel's work, the very things that are most thoroughly parodied often find themselves ironically reasserted.
Almayer's Folly
Almayer's Folly, Chantal Akerman's final fictional feature (2011), is a characteristically rigorous adaptation of Joseph Conrad's first novel from the year cinema began (1895). Akerman uses the same sections repeatedly over the course of the film to meditate on Romantic longing and colonial experience in Cambodia. This is the most thematically significant and emotionally resonant (the cross-cutting links father and daughter across space and time).
References
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John Boorman
