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I love this movie so much

Simply Perfect

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This DVD broke my resin-caked heart. Hans Jurgen Syberberg holds a special place in that same sticky heart for directing the longest stoner flick every made, the massive nine-hour Hitler - Ein Film Aus Deutschland. You had to have a kitchen garbage bag chock full of weed to get through all of it, but it is sooo worth it. So I was over the moon when Syberberg had directed a movie of Wagner's Parcifal but not because of the double-dose of self importance one gets from watching both New German Cinema and opera (the more bored you are, the more important you become for sitting through it). No, I was looking forward to puppets and outrageous visuals staged and projected onto those trademark black backgrounds, with a big buttery snow globe to balance it out. Syberberg is obsessed with snow globes and the one in Parcifal is a beaut: a Shining like hedge maze, covered in snow, in the middle of which a giant silver tree with no leaves grows, a fitting symbol for the innocent child-knight's journey to self-discovery through incest. It's great to watch stoned; Rosebud meets kind bud. We also have Wagner's death mask forming the landscape, with the decapitated heads of 19th century German superstars (Marx, Goethe, Nietchze und alles) lined in a row against puppets plunging drills into huge bloody ears . Just makes you're lungs water thinking about it, huh? Well, forget it. The fatal flaw of Parcifal is the singing. Every time someone sings Syberberg parks his camera on them and waits till they finish. And since this is opera, they never finish. He will lay a close-up on you and let his foghorns yap until your t-shirt is covered in drool. Then, in the rare instances no one is singing , the screen takes off into the Syberbergian stuff of dreams. Then someone starts huffing and the whole things crashes to Earth. I don't even think Syberberg was able to get to everything he wanted to in this picture; Hell, there's only one Swastika. How can you have a Syberberg picture, especially one of an opera who's meaning was high-jacked by the Nazis, and have only one Swastika? It's like having a Cheech and Chong picture without some weirded out vehicle for them to drive around in for the whole movie. Even the sex change has nearly no impact. Instead of close-ups, the director would have done better by doing most of the songs as voice-overs, showing the scenes the singers sing about instead of the singer. Or Syberberg could have had his tab of acid and dropped it too, if he had projected film images of the singers over otherworldly scenes of wonder. But no, instead we have a big, sticky kind bud of a dope picture that is riddled with seeds the size of gorilla nuts, nuts called songs. Also, this DVD is merely a transfer of the VHS version that came out in the late Eighties. This means it's full screen and you have to deal with the Nazi -era translation of this opera, something which I'm not sure is done on purpose; it's ironic either way. This film does deserve a wide-screen treatment, though, as well as new subtitles. Mein Deutsche Grammatik Sheisshaus ist, but even twice- baked Tiskit could tell that what they were singing did match what was on screen, especially during the pop-up incest segments. The great visuals over the instrumentals rate a full nine leaves, the best you can get, but the singing parts are little but seeds and stems. So, let's average it out and call it Four Leaves: Worthwhile. Will get a small, pleasant hum from.

Parsifal (1982) Starring Michael Kutter, Armin Jordan, Robert Lloyd, Martin Sperr, Edith Clever, Aage Haugland and the voices of Reiner Goldberg, Yvonne Minton, Wolfgang Schone, Director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg.Straight out of the German school of film, the kind that favored tons of symbolism and Ingmar Bergmanesque surrealism, came this 1982 film of Wagner's final masterpiece- Parsifal, written to correspond with Good Friday/Easter and the consecration of the Bayreuth Opera House. This film follows the musical score and plot accurately but the manner in which it was filmed and performed is bold and avant-garde and no other Parsifal takes the crown in its bizarre cinematography. Syberberg is known for controversial films. Prior to this film he had released films about Hitler and Nazism, Richard Wagner and his personal Anti-Semitism and a documentary about Winifred Wagner, one of his grand-daughters. This film is possibly disturbing in many aspects. Parsifal (sung by Reiner Goldberg but acted by Michael Kutter) is a male throughout the first part of the film and then, after the enchantment of Kundry's kiss, is transformed into a female. This gender-bending element displays the feminine/masculine/ying-yang nature of the quest for the Holy Grail, which serves all mankind and redeems it through Christ's blood. In the pagan sorcerer Klingsor's fortress, there are photographs of such notoriously sinister figures as Hitler, Nietzche, Cosima Wagner and Wagner's mistress Matilde Wesendock. The Swaztika flag hangs outside the fortress. Parsifal journeys into the 19th and 20th century throughout the film. The tempting Flower Maidens are in the nude. Kundry is portrayed as a sort of beautiful but corrupt Mary Magdalene or Eve from Genesis (played by Edith Clever but beautifully sung by mezzo-soprano Yvonne Minton). Ultimately, this film is for fans of this type of bizarre Germanic/European symbolic metafiction and for intellectuals who appreciate the symbolism, the history and lovers of Wagner opera. Indeed, the singing is grand and compelling. Reiner Goldberg's Parsifal is a focused and intense voice but it lacks the depth and overall greatness of the greater Parsifals of the stage - James King, Wolfgang Windgassen, Rene Kollo and today's own Placido Domingo. Yvone Minton is a sensual-voiced, dramatic and exciting Kundry, delving into her tormented state perfectly. While the production is certainly unorthodox and as un-Wagnerian as it can possibly get (Wagner's concept was Christian ceremonial pomp with Grails, spears, castles, Knights and wounded kings, a dark sorcerer, darkness turning into light, etc typical Wagnerian themes)..it is still an enjoyable, art-house film.

It must be assumed that those who praised this film ("the greatest filmed opera ever," didn't I read somewhere?) either don't care for opera, don't care for Wagner, or don't care about anything except their desire to appear Cultured. Either as a representation of Wagner's swan-song, or as a movie, this strikes me as an unmitigated disaster, with a leaden reading of the score matched to a tricksy, lugubrious realisation of the text.It's questionable that people with ideas as to what an opera (or, for that matter, a play, especially one by Shakespeare) is "about" should be allowed anywhere near a theatre or film studio; Syberberg, very fashionably, but without the smallest justification from Wagner's text, decided that Parsifal is "about" bisexual integration, so that the title character, in the latter stages, transmutes into a kind of beatnik babe, though one who continues to sing high tenor -- few if any of the actors in the film are the singers, and we get a double dose of Armin Jordan, the conductor, who is seen as the face (but not heard as the voice) of Amfortas, and also appears monstrously in double exposure as a kind of Batonzilla or Conductor Who Ate Monsalvat during the playing of the Good Friday music -- in which, by the way, the transcendant loveliness of nature is represented by a scattering of shopworn and flaccid crocuses stuck in ill-laid turf, an expedient which baffles me. In the theatre we sometimes have to piece out such imperfections with our thoughts, but I can't think why Syberberg couldn't splice in, for Parsifal and Gurnemanz, mountain pasture as lush as was provided for Julie Andrews in Sound of Music...The sound is hard to endure, the high voices and the trumpets in particular possessing an aural glare that adds another sort of fatigue to our impatience with the uninspired conducting and paralytic unfolding of the ritual. Someone in another review mentioned the 1951 Bayreuth recording, and Knappertsbusch, though his tempi are often very slow, had what Jordan altogether lacks, a sense of pulse, a feeling for the ebb and flow of the music -- and, after half a century, the orchestral sound in that set, in modern pressings, is still superior to this film.

Admittedly, Parsifal is not an opera that can appeal to everyone, although it is a favourite of mine, Knappertsbusch, 1951, in particular. Syberberg's entire approach is so static. Whenever the music suddenly begins to swell ... Syberberg keeps the cast moving at the same pace. The takes on Amfortas and Klingsor are endless. Whatever happened to film editing? The result is physically exhausting to watch. The viewer is never spiritually transported. Your impulse is to rush home and play a recording again to confirm that Wagner got it right, Syberberg got it wrong. And that set decoration with those "clever" reminders of Wagner's anti-Semitism -- will there ever be a viewer of this film with no prior knowledge of Wagner?