Watch Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices For Free

Powerful

Just perfect...

best movie i've ever seen.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Werner Herzog, in his storied film career, has made many a good documentary and mockumentary. Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices (Tod Für Fünf Stimmen), made in 1995, is not one of them. Coming from a master of cinema, like Herzog, though, that still means Gesualdo is a pretty good film, but don't expect anything of depth. Ostensibly, the film is a chronicle of the life of a 16th and 17th Century prince and musical composer named Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. One might think that the sordid tale that emerges in the 60 minute, made for television documentary, was crafted just to satisfy Herzog's own dictates about 'ecstatic truth.' The film centers around Gesualdo's murder of his first wife, one Maria D'Avalos. The legend is that Gesualdo hired goons to rub out his wife in her bed, with an aristocratic lover. The bodies were then tossed into the street where a passing necrophilic monk supposedly copulated with Maria's corpse. No, I'm not making this up, as it seems to be a fact. There are also scenes on various estates of the prince where Herzog seems to just happen upon wacky locals (although he has admitted that they were staged events designed to get at a deeper reality about Gesualdo). There is a poor bagpipe playing musician who comes every week to the castle to play music to ward off the prince's evil spirit. At another time we see a supposed attractive red haired female mental patient running through ruins (never being able to lose Herzog's camera- a tip off to the setup), who, when trapped, claims she is the reincarnation of Maria, and that she lives in heaven, which may or may not be an opera box. It just happens that this Italian 'mental patient' speaks English, has a boom box with her, and is wearing a pushup bustier that enhances her massive mammary glands. She was hired by Herzog for the role, and is an Italian opera singer of some note called Milva.But, the worst thing about the film is the hagiographizing of Gesualdo as a musical genius, simply because several modern composers have tried to link him to their work. Yet, when one listens to the compositions played by an amateur ensemble, well, genius is not the word one feels evincing itself. The music is certainly not bad, but it is merely competent. There is none of the instant recognition of greatness one gets from listening to an Erik Satie piano etude nor the internal spark of seduction that a Vivaldi concerto for classical guitar imparts. Yes, there is a certain legitimacy to the gripe that the singers and conductor in the ensemble are not exactly top notch, but even adjusting a bit for amateurishness, the music simply will never be mistaken for something Mozart or Beethoven penned. Yet, this is exactly what Herzog intends- to build a dissonance between the mediocrity of his music and the flamboyance (mostly because of his wickedry) of the man. Why is he profiling this rather obscure (deservedly so) artist? Simple. It is what Werner Herzog must do to be Werner Herzog. In that sense, Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices reveals far more about its creator than it does about its subject. Witness the multiple breaks of the fourth wall, and the sometimes absurdly long takes of people babbling on about Gesualdo's life whilst Herzog's camera strays to a cobweb upon a window or across a once verdant valley that Gesualdo reputedly chopped down himself over the course of several months.What all this might have to do with revelation of something deeper is....well, nothing. If anything, this film's quirky style is its raison d'etre. One feels that, had Herzog not settled on Gesualdo as fodder. He would have made a film about the very next thing that popped into his mind. And the film's style of embellishment upon already wacky reality seems designed to make Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices a This Is Spinal Tap of classical music, or an F For Fake for music. Why? Again, because it's Werner Herzog. Unfortunately, the lack of depth is what ultimately dooms this film. Other than Herzog's interest in the composer and his luridness, there really is no reason for anyone else to be interested, unlike other great documentaries he's done. Lessons Of Darkness, My Best Fiend, Grizzly Man, and Little Dieter Needs To Fly, all had reasons for their making and/or provided a new twist on something not seen before. Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices is just a quirky little television documentary, possibly a made for hire production.Regardless, intent means nothing, and the end result of all the confabulations, half-assed expertise, and staged incidents is a mediocre film, possibly the worst Herzog's ever made, and certainly the worst film of his I've watched. But, again, the caveat is that Herzog is a great artist, so even his worst has moments of artistic and journalistic redemption that makes a viewer smirk, despite his better angels. The film claims that Gesualdo spent the last 16 years of his life as an increasingly insane and reclusive madman. Whether or not this is true is of no real import, but by the end of this 'documentary' I was of the opinion that had Herzog shot the film as a fiction, along the line of his earlier The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, the film would have been better for its odd flourishes. A touch of his patented 'eye level realism,' a dash of 'ecstatic truth,' and participants that seem to be a bit more engaged, and Herzog could have really bamboozled a fictive account of the wacky composer that his 'straight' mockumentary misses. As it is, Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices is merely a curio, even if from a master. But, after a curio is in one's grip, it ends up in a corner with dust upon it. Swiffer, anyone?

After suffering through Tous les Matins du Monde and Farinelli, both atrocious, over-romanticized films on "early music," Death for Five Voices is refreshing. Herzog's films walk the line between fiction and nonfiction, but always seek to express truth. I am a huge fan of his work, but do have some issues with this film.Perhaps after directing a few Wagner operas, Herzog couldn't resist the temptation to go with the Wagner and Strauss comparisons many of the subjects in the film made, but this sort of romanticizing detracts from the film and misplaces the true context for why Gesualdo's music has a message valuable to contemporary society, in fact, a message that I think is quite in line with Herzog's approach to film making.Herzog has said that all of his films are documentaries. I think this is evident when looking at his casting, for example. Could you imagine anyone else playing Stroszek or Kaspar Hauser besides Bruno S.? So many actors become the roles they are playing and work very hard to do so, but there's a certain emptiness to it. Someone like Bruno S. is a real person and the story is just an elaboration on his own humanity which shows through the films. I think Kinski, though more trained as an actor, expressed deep humanity in the films he was in with Herzog in the same way. This is to say that Herzog's films contain an element of subjectivity and individuality on a case by case basis, not a systematic basis.Music composed in Gesualdo's time also contains this sort of subjective element. Vocal music was the ideal. Scores weren't reduced onto two staves like piano music, each vocal part had it's own staff. Each line was as important as any other. There was no system of tonal harmony to bind the music together. This is as true for Gesualdo's music as it was for his contemporaries - he wasn't alone in this as the film would otherwise lead you to think - only his chromaticism is a bit more extreme than most. In all actuality, the late romantics that Gesualdo is incessantly compared to in the film represent the ultimate fruition of the harmonic system that is antithetical to the height of renaissance polyphony.Personally, I attribute the rise of instrumental music and equal temperament tuning to this shift in musical composition. If the piano had not become the dominant medium for music in the ensuing years, I suspect music would have developed very differently. Perhaps Gesualdo's music is a glimpse of what could have happened if western civilization had gone in a different direction.There is a very obnoxious scene where the composer/prince plays the opening chords of Tristan and Isolde, something that obnoxious conductors and college music theory professors enjoy doing over and over again for some reason to demonstrate how amazing chromaticism is. I don't think Gesualdo's music has anything to do with Wagner.It's not Herzog's fault (if you don't count his refusal to sing while a teenager). It is just his sometimes naive enthusiasm for things - this beautiful quality which makes his films so charming and extraordinary in other cases, particularly The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner and How Much Wood Would a Wood Chuck Chuck: he is able to look at things at face value without preconceptions. Herzog can even be pardoned for stretching the truth in many cases. This time, though, I think his stretch of the truth which in other cases leads to a deeper truth, distracts from it. It's almost as if Herzog is trying to make the film about Wagner. Gesualdo's troubled story seems like an act from a tragic opera.With that said, I loved the Italian feel of the film. I am sure Herzog would say he dislikes Fellini (if he's even watched any of it), but the pace of the film reminds me of the circus-like atmosphere of the typical Fellini film. One memorable scene in a kitchen with an elderly man and woman, both speaking exuberantly and constantly at the same time, going on and on, quite directly to the camera. What beautiful humanity Herzog captured in this shot. Another shot at a mental institution was very intriguing. The shots on location of the castles and locations haunted by the story were wonderful. This film is well worth watching as long as you don't let the Wagner thing bother you too much!

(EDIT): As of 2005, this was my introduction to Herzog, and a fitting one. As a documentary I watched by him about a 16th century composer, it was captivating, strange, and of a certain macabre style that is probably in much of Herzog's work. I'd heard of his films Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Fitzcerraldo, both with stories that boggle the mind with their approach on life and dark subject matter (he's also worked with Klaus Kinski, a rather eccentric actor, if one can point out as such). This film, Gesualdo, puts focus on the 16th century composer in a fashion like Godard did with the Rolling Stones in Sympathy for the Devil. Half of the film is just music playing, giving an idea of what the musicians had to do. The other half skims the line between fiction and documentary, as the director sets up staged scenes to add to the deliberate atmosphere. It's still a documentary, but only in that you see it in the documentary style- some of this is scripted (likely).The story of Gesualdo in and of itself could have made for a terrifying, awesome bio-pic from Herzog, but hearing the history anyway is fascinating enough. The composer of concertos was a Don in Italy, who in between composing his strange harmonies killed his first wife and child, and lived in exile for many years, including the last few of his life. There is the usual scholarly type who gives information about his life, but then there are also local historians, locals of the area, chefs, caretakers, and the buildings where he once lived and held his grand, renaissance-era parties and gatherings. The climax of the film- a celebration out in the streets, is something to see. It's not a long film at one hour, but it's worth the view.

At a pinch, I suppose I'd accept that some of the lurid carryings-on and local legends that have gathered around the figure of the composer Gesualdo, and are retailed here with a gleeful lack of critical scrutiny, might actually be true. Perhaps quite a lot of them are, but it doesn't really matter, because Herzog seems at least as interested in the way that people create, exploit and enjoy the legends, as in the composer himself or his music. Some sequences are very obviously staged for the camera, and Herzog seems almost to be daring us to believe that we really are talking to, say, a mad ex-opera singer who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Gesualdo's murdered first wife. The results are certainly very, very funny -- but everything pales before the irrepressible wife of a local chef, who disrupts his efforts to tell us about Gesualdo's extravagant menus with a torrent of abuse dedicated at the composer, whom she regards as the devil incarnate.But then, for all its contrivances, the whole film has a deadpan, dishevelled feel about it. No effort is made to disguise that the resident expert Gerald Place is talking from notes or keeps developing a nasty frog in his throat: as one of the few people in the documentary who seems basically sensible, he has to be quietly sent up some other way! Only the intelligent and rather sympathetic Principe d'Avalos seems to escape with his dignity intact -- perhaps because he's aristocracy.Musical duties are divided between two groups of singers. The Gesualdo Consort of London mostly sing in tune, the Complesso Barocco mostly don't -- the avant-garde quality is certainly exaggerated by the problems with intonation in what is very difficult music. As with the interviews with Gerald Place I get the impression Herzog didn't want to do retakes if things went slightly wrong, and the singing certainly has plenty of enthusiasm. Only he can be blamed for the way the audio and visual get out of sync by a couple of seconds in close-ups of the director in one of the musical performances; but somehow it all seems to add to the effect of cheerful bizarrerie. How a specialist in Renaissance music would react to this documentary I dread to think (I'm sure there'd be some swearing and gesticulation) but as social comedy it's priceless.