Robinson Film Award winners gathering on stage at the end of the festival
Tuesday, April 11 the Robinson Film Awards presented the best of their bimonthly awards season (“The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre“, my musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation had won Best international Short and Best Experimental Short and Best Soundtrack during their December awards). Short films and feature length films were shown all day, interspersed with live performances.
“The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” was scheduled for 14:00 (2pm).
I attended with co-producer, co-actor (and husband) Edward Elder.
Here we are with John Vamvas and Olga Montes, who would later win Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Feature for their movie “Scarpedicemente”.
The festival commandeered one of the theaters in the Cinema Multisale Eliseo, which normally shows your typical movie fair. (I got a kick out of “Cocainorso”, the one word Italian translation of “Cocaine Bear”.)
Ed and I took our seats early. It would be an all day affair.
Last Tuesday I attended “Der Rosenkavalier” for the first time.
Or rather I attended all three acts of Richard Strauss’ opera “Der Rosenkavalier” for the first time. Family lore has it that I attended Act 2 and Act 3 when I was a small child of three or four, but I don’t remember that event, even if it is a story my mother has recounted often.
The first opera I remember attending was “Hansel and Gretel” at the age of five. Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy tale adaptation is a far more appropriate first opera for a young child than “Der Rosenkavalier”. I remember the picture book gingerbread house and classically ugly witch, with extravagantly long and crooked nose and chin and hairy warts in ur-traditional Grimm fairy tale fashion. Although I knew even then it was all make believe, it was still daunting for a five year old to meet the singer playing the witch after the performance in the dressing rooms of the opera house and get a close up view of that grotesque make up. She was very sweet and attentive to me, but I looked up at that craggy visage dumbstruck and wary.
My mother was able to take me back stage because she too was a soloist at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and thus had privileged access.
My mother, Catherine Gayer, was part of the Deutsche Oper ensemble for 41 years before retiring. And the reason I was taken to see “Der Rosenkavalier” at an even more tender age than five is because she was singing the soprano role of Sophie in the opera. Sophie doesn’t appear until Act 2, and so my mother didn’t need to arrive at the opera to get ready until the curtain was raised for Act 1. Act 1 of “Der Rosenkavalier” is too long for a young child, my parents reasoned, but they thought I could handle Act 2 and Act 3, especially with my mother’s character prominent in both.
I could, but not without difficulties, which were not because of stamina or attention span, but because I got a bit too engaged and emotionally invested, as the story goes.
In Act 2 young dashing Octavian – per an ancient Viennese custom wholly invented by librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal – delivers a silver rose to sweet young Sophie to formalize her engagement to the odious Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau. Sophie and Octavian fall head over heals in love, even though he is secretly having an affair with The Marschallin (a powerful lady boss of Viennese High Society) and Sophie is, well, engaged to marry Baron Ochs. Then Ochs himself arrives and treats Sophie boorishly, manhandling her in physically demeaning and lascivious fashion, proving himself to be just thoroughly rotten and vile (he is basically a model for a certain imprisoned movie mogul and a certain eventually-to-be-imprisoned former never-popularly-elected president).
Quiet sniffles could be heard emanating from a little boy sitting in the orchestra seats while his mother was being awfully importuned on stage. My mother’s colleague, the bass singing Baron Ochs at that performance, heard my distress and went on to feel guilty about it for the rest of his life. It would be a story he too would tell again and again.
My mother, Catherine Gayer around the time I saw her as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier
During the second intermission, my father took me to my mother’s dressing room. My mother saw my wan, sad-eyed expression and said “Danny, are you tired? You don’t have to sit through Act 3. Would you like to take a nap on my dressing room couch?” I shook my head. My father explained my distress at what I had witnessed. “Don’t worry”, my mother promised, “Baron Ochs will get his comeuppance in Act 3.”
And so he does. In Act 3 Baron Ochs is roundly exposed and embarrassed in near farcical Commedia dell’arte fashion, and forced to give up his claim on Sophie. The Marschallin proclaims his defeat and then graciously leaves young Octavian and Sophie to their mutual happy end.
After the performance my father took me back stage to my mother. I lifted my chin and declared: “Act 3 is much better!”
Cut to 50 plus years later, and I am attending Der Rosenkavalier at the Met, musing at the vocal and physical similarities between Erin Morley, who is singing Sophie, and my mother from all those years ago. When Baron Ochs starts mistreating poor Sophie I felt a burgeoning sense memory of my three or four year old self’s broiling outrage.
I was also musing at the incongruity of what is essentially a knock about bedroom farce being set to Strauss’ lush, densely ornate and time-stretching music. Imagine if instead of Gilbert and Sullivan it had been Gilbert and Wagner. Or if Some Like it Hot had been directed by Stanley Kubrick. Or Tarkovsky. Hofmannsthal’s text is very witty and immensely Viennese but perhaps could have used some pruning before Strauss lengthens time even further by gorgeously and patiently setting every single precious line. The performance ran longer and moreover felt longer than even Lohengrin, which I’d enjoyed at the Met a month earlier. That said, the fun of the farce was still to be had – albeit in a leisurely canter rather a gleeful gallop. And the music is masterful and the singers all fantastic (They wisely cast a true Austrian, Günther Groissböck, as Baron Ochs, whose text is the most over-the-top low-brow Viennese slang – and with a name like Groissböck – which either sounds like or actually is Austrian dialect for Big Goat – it seems like fate he would be the bass to sing Ochs and garner the biggest ovations that night).
Karl Kaefer from the Deviant Legion Network wrote the following on the blog website:
“Join us as we welcome NYC SF Film Festival Award Winner Danny Ashkenasi- director of the featurette “The Pit and the Pendulum”- a “musicabre” based on the Poe short story.
Having seen this film at the festival, I was totally unprepared and astounded by not only the visuals, but also with the music score- which was composed and orchestrated by Mr. Ashkenasi.
So please join us for this very special episode on Thursday, April 6 at 4pm EST.”
Last Sunday Ed and I enjoyed another jaunt at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. While much is still in post winter slumber, here and there early spring blossoms – such as daffodils, early cherry, magnolias, and apricot – are writing the first act to a floral extravaganza for which the crocuses had been a mere prelude.
The BBG decided to restrict their daffodils not just to Daffodil Hill – which we will get to soon – but planted a welcoming brigade of them right by the Eastern Parkway entrance.
The main cherry trees at the Esplanade still have a month or so to go before they are in full bloom. (See some previous posts on that here and here.)
But some cherry tree variations at the outskirts of the Esplanade start blossoming before the majority.
I took the above selfie after the Q&A that followed the screening of my musical Poe adaptation “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” at the the New York Science Fiction Film Festival Saturday near Times Square.
And the screenshot below is from the on-line Q&A with Dan Abella, director of the NYSFFF, after the Sunday virtual screening of “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”.
Later that evening the award recipients of the festival were announced on Facebook Live. This clip is when “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” was awarded “Best Horror Featurette”.
Best Horror Featurette. Not bad… not bad at all ….
Group photo of some of the filmmakers represented by the NYSFFF Horror Shorts block:
From Left: Colin Francis Costello, director of STORAGE, Joe Leuben, director of FINGER, Kimberly David, director of CREEPERS, Arik Bariedl director of DILEMMA, and Lead Actor Elli Deja Bauriedl, Danny Ashkenasi director of THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM- A MUSICABRE, Dan Abella, director of The New York Sci-Fi Film Festival
On the first day of shooting “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”, we were not in the studio theater where sets were being built for the lion’s share of our 10 day shoot. On the first day we were in our own home, specifically shooting in our bathroom.
Most of that day required me sitting in the filled bathtub.
On the seventh day of shooting, late in the evening, we captured the underwater shots that were not possible in our own bathtub, mainly because it was just too narrow to get the camera underwater with enough distance to me to capture the shots we needed – like the one above.
So our production designer Mariana Soares da Silva ordered a kiddie pool and painted it white to approximate the underwater look of the bathtub.
And once again I had to peel off down to my swimming trunks for the art.
SPOILER ALERT!
Major spoilers for the end of “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” follow. You’ve been warned!
There are several shots of me underwater. But the main one, which required the use of a long rubber tube, is a close up shot of my left arm and torso as blood pours into the bathwater. You see, while the protagonist of “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” imagines himself the victim of Poe’s version of the Spanish Inquisition, he is slicing his wrists in a bathtub. During the fiery, surreal climax of Poe’s story in the film, quick cuts to the blood in the bathwater clue in the audience as to what is really happening in the here and now.
Mike Haberfelner, who already posted a very nice review of my musical short film Edgar Allan poe adaptation “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” on his website [re]Search My Trash, has now posted an extensive interview with me about not just “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” but also its musical sibling and my first short film “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre“. You can go read it here – or follow the transcipt of the full interview copied below:
INTERVIEW – Q: Michael Haberfelner – A: Danny Ashkenasi
Your new movie The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre – in a few words, what is it about?
“The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” is a musical adaptation of the classic horror story by Edgar Allan Poe. In my version, a modern day composer imagines himself both the victim and the judges of the Inquisition in Poe’s story. Fantasy and reality converge with frightening consequences.
Why did you pick of all of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story exactly The Pit and the Pendulum as source material for your movie?
My involvement with Poe goes way back when I started using the opening paragraphs of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” as an alternate audition monolog. Then the Metropolitan Playhouse, a theater in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, produced a literary theater festival focused on Poe for which I composed a one man (with three cellos) show “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre”. I performed that theatrically there and at other venues, and always wanted to create a companion piece for it, a second act, adapting “The Pit and the Pendulum”, but never got around to that. Four years ago I decided to make a short film of “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre”, which went on to play many festivals and win over 60 awards. While in post-production for it I finally came up with an idea of how to musically adapt “The Pit and the Pendulum” as a film. When the pandemic hit, and I found myself housebound with plenty extra time, I adapted/composed “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”. I see both musicabres, both short films, as companion pieces that have not only Poe but also certain musical and visual elements in common, as well as distinct differences. “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” also pushed me toward more sophisticated and complex musical and cinematic language.
Other sources of inspiration when writing The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre?
There were no direct influences I was consciously thinking of at the time; but upon reflection in the writing of the adaptation, any story that uses a framing device to illuminate or explain a central fantastical conceit is a model – the first example that comes to mind might be the movie “Jacob’s Ladder”; and visually for the mirror masks, which are arguably the most striking and idiosyncratic visual conceit in the film, I was inspired by cubism and any film that dealt with funhouse mirror imagery (perhaps most famously “The Lady from Shanghai”, like one audience member enthusiastically brought up in one Q&A) to want to explore what images one could discover when mirror pieces are contoured to apply directly perpendicularly to the face; and musically when it comes to composing for the cellos, most any 20th century score that features only string instruments, especially for unsettling effect – which would of course be Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Psycho” as well as a several scores by Bela Bartok or Arnold Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night”; and when it comes to the copious use of vocal overlap, I had explored that technique in previous work like “The Song of Job 9:11”, but the most likely prior inspiration for that technique might be Arnold Schoenberg’s opera “Moses and Aaron”, which impressed me mightily when I saw it performed years ago in New York City Opera.
You have also written the score for The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre – so what can you tell us about your movie’s music, and what actually came first, the script or the score? And do talk about your composition process as such?
As “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” is a companion piece to my first Poe musicabre “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre”, there were conscious choices about what they would have in common and how the second film would differ/build upon what was done in the first. So I knew it would be mostly a “one-man” show vocally, but this time unlike in its stage-originating forerunner, I could layer vocal lines to create harmonies and counterpoints with myself. I would use three cellos again, but I would add a piano and would be able to “add a third hand” for the piano or “double” the three cellos in the soundtrack – something you could not do on stage without hiring extra musicians (or using playback).
Poe’s story came first, but for the longest time (after staging Tell-Tale and considering Pit and Pendulum as a likely second act for a full evening of Poe musicabres) I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to adapt it. Once I recognized that the set up in Poe’s story could be seen as a metaphor or allegory for depression and self harm, and I conceived of the modern day framing device, the adaptation of Poe’s text into a script, the composing of the score, and the creation of the visual ideas all happened hand in hand in hand. There was no one thing, music or script or visual ideas, coming first. They each influenced the other and the third. It was a very interconnected creative process.
As to my composing process, sometimes I have musical ideas that I’ve been carrying with me for years or even decades that finally find a place and get developed and fleshed out for a particular project, and that is how some of the score for Pit and Pendulum evolved. But there are also musical ideas that were directly inspired by Poe’s text or the situations described within – most notably the sound the cellos make describing the swing of the pendulum and marking its step by step (or pitch by pitch) approach towards the protagonist, as well as the sound the cellos make when the blade starts cutting into fabric and skin. Those particular ideas were with me from the moment I first considered adapting this story, many years ago when I was first performing Tell-Tale on stage, and long before I thought about making short films.
Danny Ashkenasi has remained fairly faithful to Poe’s story but put it into a narrative context via his framing story, as well as setting everything to music, so much so that some of Poe’s words are actually sung on screen.
And this works remarkably well, as not only does Ashkenasi hit the right note when it comes to the film’s mood, he also enriches the story with nightmarish and often surreal imagery, often goes for associative rather than linear storytelling, and ultimately delivering an enjoyably disturbing piece of cinema.
Triborough Film festival director Phil Cappadora wore a snazzy sparkly suit as host of the awards ceremony February 11 at the Chian Federation Ballroom in Astoria, Queens. “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” was nominated for 6 awards as well as the People’s Choice Award.
Mt friends Ann and Rick joined me for the evening (a bad cold kept Ed at home).
One of the pre-show acts was Amazing Amy performing “Yoda Yoga” to the music from Star Wars.
The shot above is a look into the on-set monitor, a dramatic glimpse into the filming of “The Walls” segment of “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”, where the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story about the death traps of the Spanish Inquisition finds the walls of his prison cell glowing a searingly hot red and then closing in on him.
Remember the trash compactor scene from “Star Wars” (or any its many cinematic forerunners)? Well, it was Poe who first came up with that particularly imaginative death trap, in the same story that already features the bottomless “Pit” and slashing “Pendulum“.
Here you can get a view of some of the cell walls, as well as one version of the Pit hole (there were three built in total). In the photo below you can also see the platform – or the rack – from which the protagonist manages to free himself before this next set of horrors befalls him. (I suppose I should have earlier already said “spoiler alert” for those who haven’t read Poe’s story).
I can’t share photos of us actually shooting these particular scenes inside the cell, since all four sides of the cell’s walls had to be set up for most of those shots, and that meant only Jason Chua, the D. P. (director of photography), and I were inside the cell at those times. The rest of the crew had to watch from the monitors.
There were even shots where it was just me in the cell all alone, with the camera attached to the lighting grid in the ceiling, looking down. I’ll get to that later.
Below, one of the cell walls. Musical notes are etched into them, lit from behind with red lights.
Poe describes the views of red burning markings on the cell walls in this phrase, also quoted in the film: “Demon eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand directions and gleamed with the lurid lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal.” In my version, with the protagonist already established as a composer early on in the film, these “demon eyes” become musical notes. And the score is the composer’s own music, literally scalding and closing in on him.
The interview was conducted by Joe Mauceri. We actually spoke for 30 minutes, but it’s a 2 minute edit that has been posted. Still, even in that short bit, you can hear Joe say some very fine things about the film (never mind my ramblings):
Just the balance of the music, the dialog and some very interesting artistic chances that you take within the film, how did this all come about? I’m just mesmerized by what your creative process is and what it’s like to live in your mind. As an artistic piece it is very impressive, some of the visual stylings that you bring to the narrative.
Notes from a Composer 