Abstract
In the essay, I make an attempt to present several ways, in which the Western canon of literature, music, and cinema has influenced Noc Walpurgi. With regard to this, Marcin Bortkiewicz’s film turns out to be a work made of many citations, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, drawn extensively on Goethe’s Faust, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, and Puccini’s Turandot, and the film noir poetics elaborated in the 40s and 50s of the twentieth century. Based on Magdalena Gauer’s monodrama Diva, Noc Walpurgi illuminates in the highly expressionist manner an alienated, cynical, and despotic psyche of Nora Sadler, a great opera singer, who is tormented by the Holocaust past.
Highlights
In the essay, I make an attempt to present several ways, in which the Western canon of literature, music, and cinema has influenced Noc Walpurgi
Marcin Bortkiewicz’s film turns out to be a work made of many citations, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, drawn extensively on Goethe’s Faust, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, and Puccini’s Turandot, and the film noir poetics elaborated in the 40s and 50s of the twentieth century
Based on Magdalena Gauer’s monodrama Diva, Noc Walpurgi illuminates in the highly expressionist manner an alienated, cynical, and despotic psyche of Nora Sadler, a great opera singer, who is tormented by the Holocaust past
Summary
In the initial part of the essay, a paradoxical aspect of the titular theme must be revealed, and subsequently commented from the view-point of a certain cultural procedure, for reason of which I tend to consider the genocide crime as a necessary and piercing act of the circulating, or still returning commemoration. The substitution itself establishes a sort of “security system”, in which realm the genocide theme stands for a serious warning against the real possibility concerning the repetition of the past, and it preserves the absent experience of those who were slaughtered and those who survived the horror of the extermination. In order to retain this absent experience (the number of the survivors drastically diminishes all the time), which shapes our view of the world by constituting the phenomenon of the so-called post-memory, European (and world) culture keeps exploiting the Holocaust theme. The central part of the essay is devoted to this film, since it attempts to undertake an intriguing, intertextual and perverse play with the genocide motif, in which a fictional existence of Nora Sedler (the main character of Bortkiewicz’s film starring a famous opera singer) is tragically embroiled
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