Herbert Von Karajan - Maestro For The Screen - A Film By Georg Wubbolt [DVD] [2008]

This is another great Doco on Karajan. It's so brilliant. Clear, direct and great richness of colour to the man behind (and infront) of the camera.

This DVD is fascinating as it shows some of the (polite and less than polite) discussions between Karajan and his directors and editors. Other documentaries about Karajan show his absolute mania for control / perfection and tend to be one sided. This one shows how he developed his craft in the visual arts. There are good interviews with his directors, and the views are candid. There is acknowledgement to the trail blazing of Bernstein in the 'young peoples' concerts. The DVD is as technically assured as possible given the age and circumstances of the original material. The DVD is not a music DVD per se, but one that shows the development of a director.

I really enjoyed this unflattering documentary of Karajan. But to be clear, the documentary is not about Karajan the musician and his unreachable artistic/musical achievements--he was beyond question one of the greatest conductors of all time. Rather, the documentary focuses on Karajan the egomaniac, whose obsession with leaving a visual record of his performances (in contrast to the recordings alone) brought out the very worst in him.

The documentary is exclusively about Karajan's budding interest, which bloomed into a full obsession, with creating video recordings of his conducting. Being a total technophile, Karajan first worked with established film directors like Georges Cluzot and Hugo Niebeling to make his films, and after not too long rejected anyone else's vision for what they should be, for his own vision which he exclusively controlled. And as it were, Karajan's own vision for these videos was Karajan-centric, not orchestra- or music-centric.

Karajan soon taught himself all aspects of filmmaking, and his obsession with doing it as he wanted reached extreme absurdity. Bald orchestra members had to wear toupees. Orchestra members faked playing their instruments to a pre-recorded soundtrack so that their bowings, fingering, and facial expressions would be "perfect" (whether that perfection was about unison of movement within an orchestra section, or perfectly capturing their physical gestures while it was happening in the music). Student orchestras were hired to play the music in "rehearsal" so that Karajan could figure out the appropriate angles and cues for camera shots that were not of him. Fake audience photos were hung behind him to make it appear it was a real concert. Ultimately many of these became irrelevant as Karajan moved towards recordings of live concerts.

Most of the technical team that worked with Karajan, and several orchestra members, are interviewed, Few have many nice things to say about Karajan and this process. He may have been a truly great conductor who produced musical results others simply could never achieve, but there appears to be little warmth for the man himself or the process he used to achieve those results.

The absurdities that Karajan engaged are piled on in interview after interview, and none of it makes Karajan look good in his quest to achieve a visual legacy of his work (and that may have been the intention of this documentary). I don't doubt that this portrait of him is accurate.

Yet at the end of the day, all of this is a giant tangent, and is ultimately irrelevant to the legacy of Karajan the musician and conductor. His astonishing achievements exist in recording after recording, including the greatest set of Bruckner symphonies that has ever been recorded (or likely ever will be), superb Wagner, fantastic Beethoven and Brahms, Sibelius, Shostakovich, and many others. Whether or not his hair was perfectly coiffed or orchestra members weren't showing their actual bald heads is irrelevant to the music itself. And that legacy, the music, is to my ears unchallengable (even as Karajan has his detractors, who from what best I can tell are often motivated by non-musical matters).

I really loved this documentary and found it actually quite funny at times (but not in a nice way). The insanity of what Karajan pursued with his filmmaking is front and center and it makes him look like an egomaniac spinning so far out of control that it's laughable. I don't question its veracity. This is an interesting and entertaining documentary, well done, and a useful "data point" in understanding all of what Karajan was about. But when it comes to the music itself, this changes nothing.

We learn early in this 58-minute German film made in 2008 that conductor Herbert Von Karajan had one heck of an ego. Everyone agrees to that. He was self-centered, tyrannical and very possessive. He wanted to also be rich. But all those interviewed - and there are folks on both sides of the conductor's admiration society - agree he was a powerful conductor, and Beethoven was his specialty.

What is not obvious from listening to his CD recordings is that the conductor was fascinated with technology, especially that of videotape. We see a brief clip (all we ever see are excerpts of two minutes or less) of him conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (where he was principal conductor for MANY years) in Japan. He realizes that the concert, which was broadcast, was performed in front of 3,000 people but 3 MILLION viewers were watching. It was then he decided that he would videotape his concerts and they would be his memorial for future generations after he died. He hired directors but was not happy with the way they shot the concerts, particularly not showing him in close-up often enough. So he learned all he could about movie making and directed himself - even using pre-recorded music! He made friends with the CEO and President of Sony and made many trips to visit their factory to get the latest video taping equipment. He was fanatical about this.

The film includes recent interviews with members of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, his film editor and his personal secretary. These are woven together with archival film of Von Karajan himself from various interviews before his death. The film, which has no separate narrator, contains subtitles. In the few cases where the interviewee is speaking in English, the words are spoken by someone else in German. The subtitles are easy to read.

The only supplements are brief previews of other Arthaus DVDs, one of which is the memorial concert for Von Karajan in Vienna. You can tell from this brief clip that the Von Karajan, himself, would not have been happy with the video; there are very few close-ups of the conductor and the camera angles would be, to him, all wrong.

As a viewer not as well versed as some in classical music, I found this film engaging and entertaining as well as informative.

Steve Ramm
"Anything Phonographic"