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ing surface. Unfortunately, only Wagner's forehead, eyeballs, and nose-rather cuttingly arched-were playable, limiting the space available. There were other startling images, true, but they recurred without much impact , since they were largely static, and Syberberg really doesn't know how to make such a movie move. ABOVE THE VILLAGES Directed by Wim Wenders Salzburg Festival Glenn Loney Peter Handke is now virtually an Austrian National Treasure. He lives in a tower on the romantic Moenchsberg which looms above Max Reinhardt and Mozart's Festival City. Austria is very good about supporting native artists; even a lackluster composer like the late Gottfried von Einem (Danton's Tod) can be assured of performances, often lavish ones on Austria's major stages. This summer, Handke's Ober die Ddrfer (Above the Villages) had its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival on the vast stage of the outdoor Felsenreitschule. Written in 1980-81 as a "Dramatisches Gedicht," or dramatic poem, the work raises ordinary folk to an almost symbolic plane, as representative of masses of others like them. It is effective as a philosophical examination of the problems such people confront in a modern world where the social values and patterns of small-town life have been so changed and threatened by rampant industrialism. That is, it's comprehensible-if a bit portentous -read as a closet drama or Socratic dialogue. The decision to stage it seems to have been motivated more by Handke's current reputation than by its innate dramatic merits, which are slight. Part of the problem of the world premiere production, however, proceeded from the fact that this was the first stage direction undertaken by filmmaker Wim Wenders, who demonstrated that some attenuated visual effects which can be sustained on a cinema screen rapidly pall in living 3-D on stage. A program note indicated that the poem was not autobiographical, but some commentators found relationships in it to other Handke writings about his family. (After the premiere at a press conference, he admitted as much.) Briefly, the plot of Handke's moral fable involves the writer, Gregor (Martin Schwab), now a city-dweller, with a feminine counterpart, Nova (Libgart Schwarz), in a return to his natal village. He's the eldest and has inherited his late parents' house, in which his brother Hans (Rijdiger Vogler) is liv79 Salzburger Festsplele ing. His brother wants him to turn over the house to him and to his sister, Sophie (Elizabeth Schwarz), so they can mortgage it and enable Sophie -tired of working as a clerk for others-to open a small shop. Gregor, who has lost touch not only with his kin but also with the ways of village life, rediscovers some elemental truths. His brother, commonly regarded as a "good-for-nothing," has never had any kind of success, even as a laborer. He is the eternal victim, portrayed with a kind of wounded, defeated nobility: the Worker as Martyr. Sophie, short with her older brother, knows what she wants, but she's represented as being regressive , seeking to set up as a mini-capitalist. Villagers, especially an old woman (Else Quecke) Gregor meets at the cemetery, describe the plight of their lives, affected by an outside world they cannot control or rightly understand . The old woman pleads with Gregor to return and help them. Gregor decides to give up the house, but he sees little promise in his brother's seed. Nova, who has followed him, then launches into a moral panegyric sorting out the problems, and at the close, she literally crowns the boy, who will carry on. In the production, the coronation was the speech itself, ascending in emphasis each time Nova climbed another rung of a ladder leaned against the wall of the cemetery, the better for Nova to reach her silent auditors. 80 The premiere began at 10:30 on a Sunday morning and ended at three in the afternoon-leaving just time enough for a snack before audiences watched Maximilian Schell in the Cathedral Square as Jedermann. Even critic Rolf Michaelis, often most sympathetic to innovations in drama and poetry, found the production-marathon excessive, with insufficient returns either in dramatic action...

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