There have been two film adaptations of Alain-Fournier’s novel Le grand Meaulnes, by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco in 1967 and by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe in 2006,  and several adaptations of  Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu  or parts of it. There have also been some other fascinating attempts to bring these two novels to the screen which failed despite the tireless efforts of two remarkable women – Isabelle Rivière and Nicole Stéphane.

Isabelle Rivière (1889-1971), Alain-Fournier’s sister and dedicatee of Le grand Meaulnes, owned the film rights to the novel. In 1933 she met André Barsacq (1909-1973), a young Ukrainian-born stage designer with some experience in film as assistant director to Jean Grémillon. Barsacq later became the director of the Théâtre de l'Atelier and for some forty years he was a major theatre director in Paris, staging the work of, among others, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Anouilh, Marcel Aymé, Paul Claudel, and Félicien Marceau, and adapting the works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Turgenev for the French stage.

Isabelle Rivière 

Barsacq and Rivière drafted a screenplay and in the 1940s there were location searches and screen tests, but plans foundered several times due to prohibitive financial costs. Rivière turned down proposals from other film makers, notably from Julien Duvivier, who first expressed an interest in 1937 and again in 1954. By the latter date Duvivier’s commercially successful Don Camillo films would have probably helped to raise money for the film of Le grand Meaulnes but Rivière’s faith in Barsacq remained unshakeable and the correspondence between the two continued for some 32 years until 1965, when she  finally realised that Barsacq’s theatrical commitments would always be his first priority, and offered the film rights  to Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, a young director who had already successfully adapted Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (1961). Albicocco’s film is rightly dedicated to Rivière and she was pleased with the result, as it is very faithful to the novel. Had she lived to see Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe’s  2006 adaptation she would have certainly disapproved of it, as it takes liberties with the text, notably by having Meaulnes, like Alain-Fournier, killed in the First World War.

Nicole Stéphane (left) was an actress best known for her remarkable performance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s film of the Jean Cocteau novel Les Enfants terribles in 1950.  Her acting career having been cut short by a car accident, she became a film producer, and her credits include To Die in Madrid (1962), Frédéric Rossif’s documentary about the Spanish Civil War. In 1962 she acquired the film rights to A la recherche du temps perdu. Her epic attempts to turn Proust’s novel into a film lasted nearly as long as those of Isabelle Rivière, and she finally had to content herself with Volker Schlöndorff’s 1984 film Un Amour de Swann (Swann in Love) an adaptation of a more or less self-contained part of the novel. All her attempts to interest French film directors - René Clément, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette – had previously failed.

More frustrating were the failed projects of Luchino Visconti and then of Joseph Losey between 1969 and 1977, both of which had to be abandoned at a late stage. It is a small consolation that both these aborted projects left behind them two remarkable screenplays by Suso Cecchi d’Amico (for Visconti) and Harold Pinter (for Losey) to which I would like to return in a later blog.

Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian Studies

References:

Martine Beugnet / Marion Schmid. Proust at the Movies (Aldershot, 2004). YC.2006. a.5329.

André Barsacq: Cinquante ans de théâtre. (Paris, 1978).   X:900/20339.

Michel Autrand. ‘André Barsacq et le Grand Meaulnes au cinéma’ in  Bulletin des Amis de Jacques Rivière et d’Alain-Fournier, no118 (2007), p.93-106 and no.120 (2008), p. 81-110.  P.901/1770

Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi d'Amico. A la recherche du temps perdu [scénario d'après l'œuvre de Marcel Proust]. ([Paris], 1984). YA.1987.a.8894 

Harold Pinter. A la recherche du temps perdu: the Proust screenplay with the collaboration of Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray. (London, 1978). YC.1991.a.2249

 

 

We wouldn’t know anything about the ideas of Faustus if St Augustine hadn’t attacked him in the Contra Faustum.  By the same token, much of our knowledge of early popular culture (which couldn’t leave a written record) is inevitably due to the writings of educated and sometimes unsympathetic observers.  A case in point is:

Francisco Antonio de Palacios, Respuesta satisfactoria del Colegio de Misioneros de N. P. San Francisco de Zarauz ... (Pamplona, 1791)RB.23.a.21490.

Although the Bible tells us that ‘David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod’ [2 Sam 6:14], dancing for entertainment was frowned on by the Church from the earliest times.

In April 1788, Father Palacios had led a party of Franciscans on an evangelising mission to Balmaceda in the Basque country, where they preached against dancing.  The townspeople objected, and this is his considered reply.  He argues that the missionaries have been misunderstood: they are not opposed to all dancing; marshalling a battery of authorities he distinguishes between licit and (apparently the majority) illicit dances.

This book belongs in a long controversy in which the educated attempted to clean up the people.  But did it always have the desired effect?  In a Basque village in 1754 the bien-pensants banned dances and the local youth took to the woods, resulting in a leap in the birth rate (Larramendi, cited by Sánchez Ekiza).

A warning against devilish modern dancing from Franco’s Spain (reproduced in, among others, Juan Eslava Galán,  Los años del miedo : la nueva España (1939-1952) (Barcelona, 2008) YF.2008.a.39156)

The comments of these dusty greybeards also point up a number of issues in the study of folklore.  As Peter Burke (pp. 281-86) argues in his classic book on the subject, the recorders were by definition educated.  Putting it simply, up to (say) the mid-seventeenth century, observers and practitioners of popular culture formed a community; after that, a division grew up whereby one culture observed folklore and another performed it.  In Don Quixote (1605-15), although both master and servant know proverbs, it is Sancho who is characterised by his constant spouting of wise old saws.

Educated observers of popular customs, including dances, frequently describe them as obscene.  One witness of the fandango commented: ‘it seemed to be impossible that after such a dance the girl could refuse anything to her partner.’  He should know: thus spake Casanova (Burke, p. 118).

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

References

Karlos Sánchez Ekiza, ‘Oneski dantzaten: Ilustración y danza tradicional vasca’, Trans: revista transcultural de música, 1997

Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978) X.700/26600; 81/5414

It is not unusual for a big library to have “hidden collections” – items that were difficult to identify or catalogue so that the records of their existence remain vague.  Two  such catalogue records in the British Library, with the  indistinguishable titles Theatrical and orchestral programmes, not catalogued separately  (shelfmark X.905/64) and  A collection of theatrical and concert posters  (shelfmark  Tab.11747.a.(151.)), concealed seventeen  concert programmes and advertisements relating to the well-known composer, music theorist and composition teacher Joseph Schillinger, the author of a system of musical composition.  This small collection of programmes was purchased by the British Museum, probably in the 1950s or 1960s (there is no date on the acquisition stamps).

The quite random selection of programmes reflects Schillinger’s performing activities in the 1920s in Soviet Russia and Ukraine before leaving for New York in 1928 where he died in 1943. In 1920-21, at the age of 25, Schillinger taught composition and was principal conductor of the Ukrainian Symphony Orchestra in Kharkiv, then capital of Soviet Ukraine. The supplement to the magazine Teatral’nye ivestiia (Teatre News)  No. 3 announced a poetry reading and music recital on Friday 23 April in the “Hall of the Public Library” presented by  Schillinger and the poet Evgenii  Lann,  then chairman of the Russian section of the All-Ukrainian Literature Commission. 

23 August fell on a Friday in 1920, so we can be sure that the event  in question happened that year. According to the programme, apart from the Schillinger-Lann show, theatregoers could choose between quite a few venues:  the Taras Shevchenko Theatre (“former State”, as it is described on the advert), the 2nd Soviet Theatre (former “Malyi”), the 1st Soviet Theatre, the Jewish Soviet theatre “Unzer  Vinkel“  and the Comedy Theatre. Among the shows on offer were contemporary dramas such as Na provesni  by Adrian Kashchenko, Savva by Leonid Andreev and Nadezhda Teffi’s  short comedy Tonkaia psikhologiia (Delicate consciousness).

Another programme relating to the cultural life of Kharkiv in the 1920s advertises a concert on Tuesday, 24 August in the so-called “Narodnyi Dom” (People’s House). The concert started at 9 pm and consisted of three parts with an introduction by Schillinger himself. That evening Kharkiv music lovers could listen to seven pieces, including the Overture to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Handel’s Largo and a fantasia on Tchaikovsky’s themes from the Queen of Spades.

For 1920, the programmes from this collection also document Schillinger’s lectures on Scriabin  on 6 January and on some general musical topics “with illustrations” on 31 March at the Kharkiv  Institute of Music.

Bulleten’ Teatral’nykh Izvestii (The Bulletin of the Theatre News) No. 9 of 7-9 November 1921 advertised a show called Podvigi Gerkulesa (Hercules’s Heroic Deeds) at the State Theatre “Fairy-Tales” (former “Ekaterininskii”). Music for this play was written by Schillinger and the stage design was by Nikolai Akimov, then a very young avant-garde artist and later quite a prominent Soviet  theatre artist.  The show was one of the first by the group that later turned into the famous Kharkiv Theatre for Children and Young Adults.  On the same page one can see an advert for Mayakovsky’s  Mistery Bouffe  performed by the “Heroic Theatre” (former “Malyi”), which on the previous  programme was referred to as the 2nd Soviet Theatre.  It was a time of rapid changes indeed! 

In Leningrad, Schillinger’s piano music was performed on 19 March 1926 as part of a concert organised by the Association of Contemporary Music, and on 28 April and 9 May 1927 Schillinger gave a public lecture, Jazz-band and the music of the future. Schillinger was also associated with the Leningrad-based Kruzhok druzei kamernoi muzyki  (Circle of Friends of Chamber Music),  and his music was played at some of the Circle’s concerts. Schillinger also kept his connections with theatre, and wrote music for the classical play by Alexander Ostrovsky Dokhodnoe mesto (A Profitable Position)  staged by Konstantin Khokhlov  at the Leningrad Academic Theatre  in  1928.

In Moscow, the composer  was associated with the Persimfans ( First Symphony Orchestra), which was famous at that period, and his piece Postup’ Vostoka (Oriental March) was played along with the works of Rachmaninov and Stravinsky in the 1927-1928 season. 

Schillinger’s papers are held at the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but now a small missing piece of the puzzle has been re-discovered in the British Library. These seventeen sheets can not only tell us more about the composer, but could also contribute to a bigger picture of the early Soviet theatre and music scene.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead East European Curator (Russian)