Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan, The Thief of Bagdad (UK, 1940; 106 minutes)

As early as 1905, the pioneer film-maker Georges Méliès (1861–1938) drew on pantomime tradition to present in Le Palais des Mille et Une Nuits his version of The Thousand and One Nights. Many adaptations followed, and along with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1922–1975) Il fiore delle Mille e Una Notte (1974), both versions of The Thief of Bagdad (1924 and 1940) are worth pointing out. The Thousand and One Nights is a composite collection of texts with a complex textual story. The earliest tales probably come from India or Persia, having been translated into Arabic during the eighth century. This small original core of stories had some Arab tales added to it in Iraq during the ninth or tenth century. Starting in the tenth century, independent story cycles were integrated into the collection, and from the thirteenth century onwards, further stories were added in Syria or Egypt. Still more tales were added to the compilation during the early modern period.

 

When the prince awakens the sleeping princess, he seems to have materialised out of thin air. When she asks where he has come from, he replies ‘from the other side of time’. This could well apply to the layer upon layer of time and space embedded in each added tale of The Thousand and One Nights. The film itself, a beautiful Technicolor spectacle rich in special effects, presents many transformations – of time and space, of bodies and things. William Cameron Menzies (1896–1957), the art director of the 1924 version, worked on the (loose) remake and is even said to have directed a few scenes (uncredited). The film was produced by the Hungarian-British Alexander Korda (1893–1956) but finished in California due to the Second World War. The cast also had an international flavour: German actor Conrad Veidt (1893–1943), who fled the Nazi regime with his Jewish wife in 1933, played the Vizier; the Indian teenage star Sabu (1924–1963) played Abu, the young enthusiastic and likeable thief; the African-American Rex Ingram (1895–1969) played the Djinn. The author of the score, which a critic described as ‘a symphony accompanied by a movie’, was the Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa (1907–1995), who wrote scores for almost one hundred films.

 

One major difference between this film and the 1924 one is that in the silent version the thief and the romantic lead were one and the same (both played by Douglas Fairbanks [1883–1939]). In this 1940 version, they are made into two characters (the thief, Abu, and the king, Ahmad, played by the British actor John Justin [1917–2002] ‘with a Fairbanksian moustache’, as one critic put it). In 1936  Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) published a whole essay on the comparative merits of different translations – into English, French, and German – of The Thousand and One Nights, including the very influential ones by Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) and, even earlier, by Jean Antoine Galland (1646–1715), who was the first European translator of the work. Borges states that one specific German translation, by Enno Littmann (1875–1958) is always ‘lucid and readable’, not omitting a single word, and was (according to Borges) considered ‘the best of all those in circulation’ (into any European language, one assumes) by ‘Arabists’. However, Borges disagrees and suggests that this literal and precise translation failed to incorporate the past (‘the wake of a literature’) and its whole weight and influence (something which, according to him, Burton and Galland had done); he goes on to wish that Kafka himself had been the translator of the Nights into German, incorporating all the ‘literature of the fantastic’ of Germany, all the ‘Germanic distortion and unheimlichkeit’ in order to play with the ‘symmetries, contrasts, digressions’ of the Nights. Any film version of the Nights will necessarily incorporate a (filmic) vocabulary and tradition which are different from the ‘original’ written words (themselves incorporations) – and the more the adaptation will incorporate playfully ‘the wake of a literature’ (or of previous films), the more all digressions will be able to engage with the wake of personal (individual) memories.

 

Part of the Medieval Film Club, for more information go to the website.

This screening is open to all and free to attend. No booking required.

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