by Christopher Fulkerson
CF Conducting Maxwell Davies
Vesalii icones
The visual treatment is not too lurid, but the mood certainly is, and for the wrong reasons. If you are genuinely interested in the material of which these documentaries treat, read the books by the well-respected scholar Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. There are curiosities here, such as the usage of the terms "clockwise" and "anti-clockwise" for the directions of the swastika; does not the Hacken face INTO the direction it is going? Therefore this film's usage is backward. The influence of the Thule Society is overstated; it was an influence, but it never had more than a few hundred members. And the Nazis were just a brutal to their occult ancestors as to everybody else, so in general the implication that the Thule or the List Societies were welcomed by the Nazis is misleading. As usual with documentaries as compared with good scholarship, these movies are primarily interesting for the photos and film footage a book can't provide.
From the point of view of cultural authenticity there is something very disturbing here - the films are given a strange spin by the misuse of the music in the soundtrack. It is not clear from the credits whether Andrew Redman, who wrote the title music, chose the Classical excerpts that form most of the soundtrack, or whether the producer may be responsible for these selections. We might expect the Holst "Mars," but in its case the iconography is invited, and general enough not to specifically Nazi.
But quite a bit of the time, the music here is by, of all people, Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok. Aside from the fact they were on the other side than the Nazis, and the fact that the Nazis persecuted them and all music like theirs, their "Modernist lite" styles are accessible enough to be used in film, but serious enough in tone, relative to other films scores anyway, for unsuspecting watchers to think this music is "appropriate" to the subject of Nazi occultism.
But listen to the pieces themselves - the "Symphony of Psalms" is hardly a pro-Nazi essay, and "The Rite of Spring" is in no wise Nazi. It is interesting that those of Stravinsky's passages mined by the light-fingered Mr. John Williams for the Star Wars movies aren't used here - so the blatant use by Williams of the Rite's famous repeated string chords, from the beginning of "the Augurs of Spring," just at the moment Darth Vader first appears walking through the blasted-out wall in Episode Four, does not appear here. In other words, the producer here did not choose any Stravinsky that would step on Star War's toes.
The use of the beautiful "Night Music" from the Bartok "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” is another chopped-up travesty, just as it was in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." There ought to be laws against this sort of thing. In a better world, there are. When I once asked Mr. Williams whether I might work for him doing orchestrations, he replied, "I don't think Hollywood is the place for a serious composer." One wishes Hollywood would not misuse serious music, and one feels civilization is raped by this misuse of musical masterworks just as surely, though unfortunately not as detectably, as the Nazis themselves systematically raped the world. Knowing now what is in these documentaries, I would watch them with the sound off, with less intrusion into the learning process. If the musical choices had been appropriate, this special would merit more stars.
************
First posted 11/17/2011
Copyright c 2011 by Christopher Fulkerson.