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“I remember seeing this film in a small British Film Institute theater. Michael Powell had set up the screening for me. I was impressed then by its extreme rigor, its strangely luxuriant sobriety, and its great visual beauty. Seeing it again 40 years later is an even stronger experience. The friendly familiarity that I have formed with Powell’s films provides more keys, opens other doors through which the imagination can surge.
“Bluebeard’s Castle appears suddenly as the missing link that connects The Tales of Hoffman and Peeping Tom. It combines the incredible visual inventiveness, the surrealistic set design of the first one, and the moral rigor, the peremptory, inescapable and yet deeply compassionate tone of the second. Bluebeard is Mark’s twin brother. Both live in a universe of death and desolation, haunted by terrifying memories of their crimes and broken dreams. Flowers and clouds are tinted with blood like the images filmed by Karl Boehm or the magnetic tapes upon which he recorded the screams of his victims as well as his own cries of fear. In this funereal world, victims seem to long for their destiny or to stage it.
