Music: Through the Looking Glass

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Fantastic imagery abounds in two new films of Wagner

Film ought to be a lively medium for opera. The cinema can broaden a production's scope while narrowing its focus, providing the viewer with a fresh, if necessarily arbitrary, perspective that can simultaneously combine straightforward storytelling with implicit commentary. Watching a filmed opera should be like attending a performance with an omniscient, highly opinionated fan.

It hasn't worked out that way. Directors have generally been content either to substitute handsome actors for the singers supplying the sound track or simply to shoot a stage production. A breakthrough came in 1975, when Ingmar Bergman produced a charming The Magic Flute that began in a replica of Stockholm's 18th century Drottningholm Court Theater and from time to time moved beyond the confines of the stage. Even more ambitious was Joseph Losey's mesmeric Don Giovanni (1979), expansively set amid the Palladian splendors of northern Italy.

Now come two radical settings of Wagner. German avant-garde Film Maker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 4½-hour Parsifal is a heavily symbolic interpretation that, among other extraordinary devices, uses the composer's own face as a set. French Theater Director Patrice Chéreau's complete The Ring of the Nibelung (starting Jan. 17 on PBS with a documentary and continuing a week later with Das Rheingold) is a brash, iconoclastic view that sets the four-opera cycle in the mid-19th century, when Wagner wrote it. The videotaped Bayreuth Ring succeeds triumphantly, while Parsifal a spectacular failure.

Syberberg's problem is symbols: there are too many of them for even a work as complex as Parsifal to support comfortably. "I have tried to keep Wagner's work intact," says the director, "but at the same time to make a film about Wagner, about ourselves and about the future." That is at least one thing too many. As he did in his 7½-hour Our Hitler, a perplexing, impassioned examination of German culture, Syberberg employs symbols the way others use props; in fact he uses them as props. In Parsifal, some of the actual terrain is derived from Wagner's death mask; the prominent nose becomes a rocky outcrop, the nostrils a cave. The final scene takes place in a vast ruined forum, which is contained within one of the composer's richly brocaded jackets.