Symbolist theatre
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The same emphasis on an internal life of dreams and fantasies found in Symbolist visual arts and literature made Symbolist theatre difficult to reconcile with more recent tastes and trends such as Realism. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's drama Axel (rev. ed. 1890) is often held as the definitive Symbolist play; in it, two Rosicrucian aristocrats fall in love while trying to kill each other, only to agree to mutually commit suicide because nothing in life could equal their fantasies. From this play, Edmund Wilson took the title Axel's Castle for his influential study of the Symbolist aftermath in literature.
The Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck the foremost Symbolist playwright; his theatrical output includes both Pelléas and Melisande, and The Blue Bird, another theatrical fantasy.
As a drama critic for La Dernière Mode during the 1870s, Stéphane Mallarmé opposed the dominant Realist theatre and called for a poetic theatre that would evoke the hidden mystery of man and the universe. (Britannica) Rémy de Gourmont and Félix Fénéon were literary critics associated with the Symbolist movement and drama by Symbolist authors formed an important part of the repertoire of Paul Fort's Théâtre de l'Œuvre and the Théâtre d'Art.
Legacy
The later works of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov have been identified as being deeply influenced by Symbolist pessimism. Under Symbolist influence, the Russian actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold developed a balletic theory of acting in contrast to Konstantin Stanislavski's system, which focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing outward emotion. Meyerhold's method was influential in early motion pictures, and especially on the works of Sergei Eisenstein.
In film
Many early motion pictures, also, contain a good deal of Symbolist visual imagery and themes in their staging, set designs, and imagery. The films of German Expressionism owe a great deal to Symbolist imagery. The virginal "good girls" seen in the films of D. W. Griffith, and the silent movie "bad girls" portrayed by Theda Bara, both show the continuing influence of Symbolist imagery, as do the Babylonian scenes from Griffith's Intolerance. Symbolist imagery lived on longest in the horror film; as late as 1932, a horror film such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr shows the obvious influence of Symbolist imagery; parts of the film resemble tableau vivant re-creations of the early paintings of Edvard Munch.
See also
