killing
the piano player
by Douglas Messerli
Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director, based
on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem) War Requiem / 1989
I love British composer Benjamin Britten’s
operas and many of his orchestral works, but I have to admit that his 1963 War
Requiem, composed for the opening the new Coventry Cathedral, is not among
my favorites—despite the fact that Dmitri Shostakovich told conductor and
cellist Mstislav Rostropovich the he believed it to be the greatest work of the
20th Century.
The
work includes a Latin mass along with chorale renditions of six poems of the
poet Wilfred Owen, who fought and died the World War I, during which he became
perhaps the most outspoken anti-war poet of England. The choice was a
significant since Britten himself along with his lover Peter Pears had left
England in 1939, among other reasons, for the difficult position of pacifists,
which he and Pears attested to being, leaving behind a Europe when everyone
believed it their patriotic duty to join the war efforts.
Along with the recent exodus of his friends W. H. Auden, and Christopher
Isherwood, the current attacks in the British press of Britten’s music, as well
as he and Pears having finally consummated their relationship as a gay couple
in a time when it against British law, Britten saw fit to remain in the US as a
government-identified “artistic ambassador” throughout much of the war.
Owen was also most likely gay or certainly moving in that direction. He
had enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles in 1916, and for the seven months trained
at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. In June of 1916 he was commissioned as a second
lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. A number of terrible incidents followed,
beginning with his falling into a shell hole where he suffered a concussion,
and soon after being caught in the blast of a mortar shell which left him for
several days unconscious, lying on an embankment among the bodies of dead
soldiers. After, Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia (shell shock) and sent to
the Craighlockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.
It
was while he was there that he met and became good friends with the poet
Siegfried Sassoon, not yet openly gay, who maintained close friendships with
other significant figures, several of them being gay. Sassoon introduced Owen
to Robbie Ross, Robert Graves, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet, Osbert Sitwell, and
C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Ross had been a close friend to Oscar Wilde and
Moncrieff was the British translator of Marcel Proust. Certainly, Robert Graves
and Sacheverell Sitwell were convinced that Owen was gay; and he may have had a
brief affair in 1918 with Moncrieff. There are a great many homoerotic elements
in his poetry, one of the poems, “Shadwell Stair,” for many years seen as a
mysterious work, being later identified as a quite straightforward elegy to the
homosexual soliciting in the area of the London docks once famous for such
behavior.*
Sassoon, who obviously had grown quite close to Owen, forbade him to
return to the front, and even threatened to shoot him in the leg if he
attempted to. But upon their parting in 1917, Owen having been discharged from
the hospital, secretly returned to duty without telling his influential friend.
Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, exactly one week before the
signing of the Armistice which ended the war.
The confluence of two British homosexual pacificists, in turn, almost
inevitably became an immediate attraction for yet another anti-war gay man who
himself had been traumatized as a child when he was forced to spend a few days
alongside recovering victims of World War II in a military hospital.
All of these experiences and images were brought together, accordingly,
in Jarman’s 1989 film containing no dialogue except the score of Britten’s
work. The entire War Requiem is performed with the accompaniment of
Jarman’s images almost as if it were a music video akin to those Jarman made
for The Smiths and Marianne Faithfull.
Like such works as The Angelic Conversation of the year before
and The Garden (1990), although there are many hints of story, there is
no general narrative coherence.
Several characters are also employed: an old soldier (Laurence Olivier
in his last screen role), a mother (Patricia Hayes), Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel
Parker), a nurse (Tilda Swinton, who also plays a grieving woman and other
roles), the unknown soldier (Owen Teale, who plays as well Owen’s best friend
and perhaps lover in the film), a German soldier (Sean Bean), and figures such
the Biblical Abraham (Nigel Terry), as well as business men, numerous other
soldiers, and a young boy playing a tin drum (representing perhaps Jarman
himself as a child).
Except for Owen and the nurse, these figures float in an out of the
landscape of the World War I trenches where Owen is stationed and writing his
poems, reread by his close friend. Moreover, time is not presented
chronologically since we begin with the nurse/griever painfully attending to
Owen’s coffin and ends with his death was well.
In between, we see the injury and death of countless soldiers, at first
simply those of World War I, but later from the documentary footage of soldiers
of World War II, the Vietnam War, the war in Angola, and in the Congo as well
as other world locations.
As death becomes an everyday occurrence, the soldiers grow closer
together, Owen, in particular, coming to depend on his friend’s sharing of his
life; but in other tableaux vivants, Jarman shows the love between the
regular soldiers as well. At one point the camp engages in a rollicking
performance of three drag queens singing and dancing around the physical symbol
of Brittania, while outside the boy with the drum looks in (hinting at Günter
Grass’ The Tin Drum), and eventually brought inside by soldiers, the boy
drummer becomes part of the onstage comic celebrations.
At
one point, in a horrific playing out of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice the
life of his son Isaac, Abraham, bankers, and other cynical citizens looking on,
are dressed like cabaret figures. In this version, Abraham does not relent,
despite the attempted interference of an angelic puti, as Abraham slits his
son’s throat, clearly symbolic of what the parents of the millions of young
soldiers who had been bullied into battle had done to their children, a myth
relevant as well to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.**
One of the most shocking moments takes place in an interim space
surrounded by barbed wire, where Owen’s friend, soon to be the unknown soldier,
sits playing a piano that appears ridiculously out of nowhere. A German soldier
also enters the space, the piano player not even noticing him. The intruder
bends down and picks up some snow, rolling it into a snowball and throwing it
at the British soldier. Becoming aware of the other, he too makes a snowball
and lobs it back to the German, the two almost innocently playing until
suddenly the German takes out a knife and attacks the British man, killing him
as he falls back upon the barbed fence.
It
is at that moment that Owen enters and, seeing what has happened, takes up his
bayonet and stabs the German again and again until he dies. Owen turns back to
his best friend only to find him dead. Slowly bursting into tears, the poet
falls to the ground, coming to only a day later when officers discover the
bodies, bringing Owen back to life.
Throughout much of the end of the work, we see the ghost of the German
soldier carrying the body of the friend, now the unknown soldier, across the
fields, by the end of the work, the unknown
soldier himself appearing with a barbed-wire crown, appearing as a
Christ, held in the position of the pietà of Piero della Francesca, the
homoerotic symbol that we first encountered in this context in Kenneth Anger’s
1947 film Fireworks, and which would appear regularly as a symbol in the
“A” version of gay ”coming out” movies into the 1960s.
Oddly, Britten did not use one of Owen’s most beloved poems, but
features certainly one that contains a great many homoerotic images and even
the color blue which would become the title of Jarman’s final feature film
before his death. I include here as a sort of summary of Owen’s work in
relationship to both Britten’s War Requiem and Jarman’s music video,
with images of the “bayonet-blade,” so crucial of Jarman’s film, as well as the
teeth and curls of Owen’s young lover.
Arms and the Boy
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of
blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt
bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an
apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his
curls.
*That poem, with his statements of “firm and
cool flesh,” the purple street-arc,” and the blare of sirens and ghost with
whom he lays, certainly sounds very gay to me as well. Here’s the poem:
Shadwell Stair
I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Along the wharves by the water-house,
And through the cavernous slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.
Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,
And eyes tumultuous as the gems
Of moons and lamps in the full Thames
When dusk sails wavering down the pool.
Shuddering the purple street-arc burns
Where I watch always; from the banks
Dolorously the shipping clanks
And after me a strange tide turns.
I walk till the stars of London wane
And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.
But when the crowing syrens blare
I with another ghost am lain.
The poem seems to have been drafted in 1918,
the last year of his life.
**One of the poems included in War Requiem was
Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” his version of the Abraham
and Isaac story:
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So
Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My
Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and
straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son
And half the seed of Europe, one by one
Los Angeles, July 28, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
