Reviews and notes

FESTIVALS:
2006 Wellington
2010 Greece
2011 Leeds
2013 Traverse City (USA)
2013 Vilnius (Lithuania)


Beneath the splendid riches of the Paris Opera House lie ancient catacombs with a dark and forbidden secret. These vast underground rooms and hidden passages were once used as torture chambers to satisfy the blood lust of a crazed population. Rumors abound that the Opera Ghost lives there still, vowing vengeance on the human race. When film director Rupert Julian was presented with the script for The Phantom of the Opera, he declared simply: "Lon Chaney, or it can't be done!" For the film, "the man of a thousand faces" transformed himself into his most recognizable character. Using chemicals to dilate his pupils, cotton and celluloid discs to heighten his cheekbones, fanged teeth to create a horrific grin and wires to pull his nose upwards, Chaney became the menacing Phantom who lurks in Box 5 of the Opera - and in the dark cellars below. This spine-tingling, macabre masterpiece can now be viewed in all its grand guignol glory. Using the finest restored 35mm print of the 1929 reissue, and materials from archives around the world, and employing the latest in digital technology, Photoplay Productions created a stunning video master. The Photoplay team was also able to restore the stunning Technicolor bal masque sequence and has painstakingly re-created the Handschiegl color process used in the famous "Apollo's Lyre" scene on the roof of the Opera.
- Gary Tooze, DVD Beaver.



Erik the Phantom's miserable history seems to change with each new telling: in Gaston Leroux's original novel (first published in 1910), he was born a freak, worked in a travelling circus and helped in the construction of the Opera building; in the present version he is an escapee from Devil's Island who spent the Second Revolution imprisoned in a torture chamber on the Opera site; the 1943 remake saw him as the composer of a great concerto, embittered and disfigured after a clash with his publisher and a bottle of acid; in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise he is a rock composer whose soul and music is sold to a Mephistophelian impresario and whose face is squashed in a record press. But no matter what the embellishments of different screenwriters, Leroux's basic story remains a thumpingly good one: its events echo Greek myths and fairytales (Raoul descends into the underworld to rescue his loved one; Christine is Beauty ensnared by a Beast); its environment is both realistic and fantastic (like Quasimodo's Notre Dame, the Opera is a familiar public building, but underneath it are nightmarish labyrinths).

After Universal's success with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Leroux's novel was an obvious choice for a spectacle of matching size, and the result far outdistances Hunchback in visual power; contemporary audiences had the added benefit of Technicolor for some scenes (such as the masked ball). Erik the Phantom proves to be among the simplest and best of Chaney's thousand faces, although almost half the film goes by before he is fully revealed. At first, the Phantom is only a menacing shadow, flung against a stone wall backstage, momentarily framed inside the Mouth of Hell, causing the chorus girls to scuttle away in fright. Then he materialises before Christine as a cloaked figure with a mask, the mouthpiece flapping like a fish's gills when he speaks. Finally, Christine tears the contraption away: we see a skewered nose with distended nostrils, craggy teeth barely encompassed by fleshless lips, hollow eyes, hollower cheeks with cheekbones almost poking through the wizened skin.

[A hundred] years later, the shock of the unmasking is undiminished. The interiors of the Paris Opera provide the drama with a rather conventional backdrop, and the camera, as in Hunchback, doesn't always find the best position to catch the enormous sets: the Grand Stairway, faithfully reproduced, is so grand that the cameraman seems to lean back half a mile to get it all in frame (though it provides a superb setting for the appearances of Erik's Red Death during the masked ball); while with the descent of the chandelier, the camera seems too close for any sense of perspective to emerge.

Backstage, however, a bizarre mood of mystery hangs over the ill-lit jumble of props, pulleys, drapes and stairways, and the mood deepens as Erik and Christine descend to the underground, by horse and by gondola, until the Phantom's lair is reached — a plushly furnished suite crammed with oddities. Erik's bedroom, shielded by curtains, boasts an open coffin guarded by stout candles; Christine's room — she timorously discovers — has a little row of shoes lying in wait, splendiferous dresses, a mirror engraved with her own name.

The Phantom aside, Rupert Julian [a New Zealander] is best known as the man who took up Merry-go-Round where Stroheim left off; coincidentally, this film also suffered production wrangles, being completed by Edward Sedgwick after Chaney and Julian fell out. Whether for this reason or not, The Phantom does suffer from bad patches and lacunae: Snitz Edwards' Florin Papillon seems destined to provide a ration of light relief, yet isn't seen after the opening scenes; Norman Kelly's Raoul is a peculiarly lacklustre lover, and his quest for Christine, with Ledoux of the Secret Police, becomes unintentionally comic as the two stand in darkness tossing apprehensive glances at each other. But nothing can destroy the movie's general success, both then and now.
- Geoff Brown, Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1975.


To be accompanied by a new score composed and performed by local musicians:

Dr Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician, and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has performed with the likes of Yo-yo Ma, Trinity Roots, Whirimako Black, French For Rabbits, and Marlon Williams. As a writer, she has two books of poetry published under Te Herenga Waka University Press; Tōku Pāpā (2020) and The Artist (2023). In 2024, Ruby graduated with a doctorate in public health, investigating the use of taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments) in hauora Māori.

Seth Boy is a double bassist and composer and has been based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara for the last eight years, working as a sideman and bandleader of numerous jazz and improvising music groups in the city as well as being involved in many cross-disciplinary projects. Born in the Philippines and raised in Pukekohe, Boy’s composing and arranging sensibility draws from the starkly different perspectives of the spaces in which he’s grown up and grown.

Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa is a chameleonic drummer, percussionist and composer of Ruawaipu, Ngāti Porou and Ashkenazi descent who works in Te Whanganui a-Tara, Aotearoa. He studied improvised music in the Black American tradition at Te Kōkī (the New Zealand School of Music) and has brought his eclectic tones and approach to Aotearoa and the world with artists including Dawn Diver, Dateline, Ebony Lamb, French for Rabbits, DARTZ, Mā, Chris CK, Mireya Ramos (Flor de Toloache, Mariachi El Bronx), Glass Vaults, Whirimako Black, the late Aaron Tokona, Ben Shepherd (Chance the Rapper, Schoolboy Q), Tom Warrington (Buddy Rich) and Rodger Fox. Hikurangi’s greatest musical accomplishment is being mistaken for a drum machine by Hugh Sundae.

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