Beethoven once toyed with the idea of turning Goethe’s “Faust” into an opera. Such a collaboration could have produced a very winning combination. Such a collaboration was never to be, and exists only as an alluring possibility of what might have been, and leaving us with the version by Gounod, which despite its merits, leaves us to wonder even more what Beethoven might have come up with. In “Cigars and Brandy” Herman Weinberg tells of the prompting of von Stroheim to consider a film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” ending with von Stroheim asking if Mann thought his novel would make a good film. “No,” was the reply.
But one is tempted to imagine the alternate realities in which there is a Beethoven’s “Faust”, and “Greed” was followed many years later with von Stroheim’s “Magic Mountain.” In such a reality Beadsley’s “Under the Hill” could have also been completed before the author succumbed to tuberculosis, and the score of Scott Joplin’s rumored ragtime opera that preceded “Treemonisha,” “A Guest of Honor,” might not have been left behind in a trunk in a boarding house in St. Louis.
One could imagine an alternate reality in which there would be a Museum of Unfinished Works, such as the one Max Beerbohm writes about in “Quia Imperfectum” from “And Even Now,” but here with a Secret Collection of the recovered missing parts.
Such a Museum’s Secret Collection would of course include the playbill of the performance of Phillipe August Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “Axel” as presented during the author’s lifetime and to his specification. Our poor reality boasts no such thing. Villiers had the misfortune to die while completing his correction of the proofs of this supreme expression of Symbolist drama. The drama has only rarely been performed. However the Alternate-Villiers has faired a little better. Among the attendees of this phantom performance could very well have been the cinematographic experimenter Georges Méliès, who promptly ran backstage to congratulate the author and suggest its adaptation to the medium in which Edison had experimented before his creation of the Eve of the Future, as the same Villiers had predicted.
Looking back at “Axel” in the Screening Room of the Secret Collection we are not convinced that this is necessarily the definitive adaptation. Méliès, in his eagerness did not wait for the development of sound film to begin this project. The original play envelopes the audience in a perfume of words, while Méliès, in making a silent film, was limited with what he could do. However it does have certain redeeming characteristics, the foremost being the convergence of this Symbolist play with a cinema still in its infancy, not yet fixed into the little stockades of “genre” as we know them in this reality, and naïvely willing to take on the grand dream of this work, and as yet impressionable enough to accept the play’s strange, unearthly aesthetic.
According to Axel, imagining something is in many ways a superior experience to actually carrying it out. Perhaps that is why there have been so few attempts to actually put up a performance of the play that bears his name.
In honor of this sentiment I propose the following: Mount an expedition to the alternate reality in which such a film exists, and in a special chamber designed to withstand the strain of reality-dislocation, transport this print to our own reality.
Barring the practicalitly of this plan I propose an alternate compromise plan: Create a facsimile of such a production. Either with the epithet “inspired by...” or “fraudulent,” it hardly matters which. Needless to say it would be far cheaper to stay at home and merely create the counterfeit than go rummaging around through who-knows-how-many alternate realties in search of Méliès’s “Axel”. Seeing as the Alternate-Méliès himself has not bothered himself to emerge from behind the curtain of the-reality-in-which-the-film-“Axel”-exists and present it to us, it hardly seems deserving to award him the credit, rather than surrender it to the counterfeiter, and so the title of the facsimile shall thus read “a film by Joel Schlemowitz,” as the one to either credit and worship or defile and curse.
It is of utmost urgency that such a production be mounted as quickly as possible, for there is danger. Such a production is naturally enough guarded by St. Tula, the Patron Saint of Film, whose blessings ensure a properly exposed negative, but her powers are like those of St. Satyr, reliant on the improbable. If one Cynic were to make one doubtful remark as to the practicality of such plan the whole production, the whole of the film and everyone working on it would suddenly collapse to the floor as a pile of gray dust.
It is therefore of utmost urgency that you, reader of this grant proposal, place your faith in this project. For after all, we can’t have opera without singing.
Joel Schlemowitz
New York
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