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Guest Posts

“The horror feels like home”: an interview with Hugo Max

Outside Prince Charles Cinema (photo credit: Bora Rex)

Hugo Max is a British-Austrian multi-hyphenate, with a career spanning music, film, and visual art. Among his most recent projects has been an extensive series of performances at UK cinemas, providing improvised viola scores to silent-era horror films. Among the ubiquitous films Hugo works with, such as Murnau’s Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, is Der Golem, an under-appreciated work by Paul Wegener that explores the Jewish folk tale of the golem, a clay warrior animated by Kabbalah to protect (or avenge) the Jewish people. Despite Wegener’s film often being forgotten in the shadow of more famous silent films of the era, Hugo Max revises the horror canon, centring Der Golem as a work as crucial to the horror genre as Caligari or Häxan. During the latter end of his tour last year, Hugo was kind enough to sit down with JHR to discuss his creative process, Der Golem, and how we confront the anti-Semitism of early horror.

MA: So where did this project of scoring silent films begin?

HM: I performed my first live soundtrack alongside Murnau’s Nosferatu in Oxford during the film’s centenary year. I hadn’t seen the film for over a decade and was amazed by how vividly it had remained in my imagination. Around this time I had been working on a personal film project at the Prince Charles Cinema. The venue hadn’t programmed a silent film with live music for a while and invited me to accompany several screenings of Murnau’s film.

I have always found that the viola facilitates a space for experimentation. While I began learning the violin at the age of four, my journey with the viola started a little later when looking to expand my experience of playing chamber music, particularly string quartets. The viola sits in the middle of this instrumentation and so has a conversational, dramatic responsibility, but it also has such range. It’s a chameleon, and it’s a character itself. Incorporating viola improvisation into my solo practice and performances allowed me to draw on its theatrical qualities which would become integral to scoring silent film.

MA: So this project started with horror?

HM: Yes, or rather with Expressionism. I wanted to approach the film aware of its relationship with the Other, and with Jewish traditional music, but I hadn’t fully worked out what it would become at this point. Doing these shows, learning while I was going, and collaborating with different cinemas and films, has helped me realise the connection I have, particularly with German Expressionist horror. I’m really interested in the heightened gestural language of this movement. Expressionist films utilise what are now seen as the aesthetics or conventions of horror to undertake a more symbolic exploration of contemporaneous concerns. It’s because of this that many Expressionist works continue to thrive in our collective psyche.

MA: What initially drew you to Der Golem?

HM: Der Golem is a wonderfully rare example of the materiality of Jewish culture presented within the context of genre cinema. Although I’d heard about Der Golem, it was amazing that it even existed. I first watched it in 2019 when the new restoration of it was released, and I thought it was an amazingly strange film, as both a genre film and an art film. I hadn’t seen this sort of texture anywhere else, but it gave me a way to connect with the Jewish spirit. Moving on from Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Der Golem felt like a very natural progression and an opportunity to wear my references on my sleeve.

MA: I think with German Expressionism there’s so much Jewish culture and antisemitism running parallel through it. It’s hard to avoid once you look for it.

HM: Paul Wegener, the director and star of Der Golem, was not Jewish. He paradoxically exoticises medieval Jewish customs while being empathetic towards fears building in the Jewish community in the 1920s. The film was a global success on its initial release. I find it slightly unsettling to think of the contemporaneous non-Jewish audience marvelling at the phantasmagorical realisation of the religious practices depicted on screen. The film concludes with the closed gates of the ghetto filling the screen, separating and so protecting the world of the audience from the ‘dark magic’ of the film’s environment.

MA: You said something at a recent screening of Der Golem about your own Jewish heritage… 

HM: Over the last five years, I have researched my Austrian-Jewish great-grandparents who fled Vienna in 1939. They shared a few details about their life before and during the war with their only daughter, my grandmother, and she has all these stories about her father which blur fact and fiction. I received my Hebrew name from my great-grandfather and so have always felt a connection with him even though we never met. Many of the silent films I have soundtracked tell stories that explore the Other, such as Der Golem and Nosferatu. Discovering the challenges faced by my great-grandparents intensified my approach to scoring them.

MA: I think it is a really interesting way to explore film, through your own heritage and practice, especially with the opportunity for contrast between Christian and Jewish liturgical music. Do you consciously incorporate those musical traditions when performing Der Golem? 

HM: Melodies from the synagogue service and the klezmer tradition influenced me growing up, while my relationship with the viola developed primarily through performing Western classical repertoire. I can’t escape either as a point of reference. I adore this music, but I am in tension with it. I’m interested in how these two musical traditions can enter into dialogue while soundtracking Der Golem, which also provides an opportunity to share little known Jewish liturgical music with wider audiences. I think this juxtaposition works narratively, especially when comparing scenes in the synagogue or the ghetto to the scenes in the court, where I pay reference to Bach with a very explicit reimagining of the cello suites. I never really know how these ideas will come out, but I do know the point that I work towards.

MA: When you’re improvising these scores on-stage, how much do you respond to your audience? Are you locked in with the creative process and the film or is that more of a three-way relationship? 

HM: I think it’s got to be a three-way relationship in service of the film and the audience. I’m foremost guided by the characters on screen and approach each performance as if they might behave differently and alter their fate, which I hope allows the film to take on new life. I feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to be so physically close to the projection and I notice new details with every performance. I think that there is a delicate path to tread whereby you respectfully infer the filmmaker’s intentions and find a present, more personal reading of a film in performance.

When I started doing this during the pandemic, what drew me to the process was that it’s an opportunity to maintain a creative intention for a sustained period of time, which gets so difficult when you’re working in these spaces to actually concentrate and do creative work. You’re there with an audience for an hour and a half, and you can’t lose conviction. I adore the intensity of that, I find it very compelling. The opportunity is so rare in the context of strict classical music training. There’s a sense in this that any sound can be developed, and you’re not not allowed to make anything. Anything can be beautiful.

MA: Do you have a preference between scoring comedy and horror? 

HM: Well, scoring a comedy takes less of a toll on my headspace than soundtracking an Expressionist work! But I find horror more personal, and I think something about the visual language makes a lot of sense to me. I feel strangely at home with horror.

MA: A lot of Jewish folklore, particularly the golem, tends to evolve to reflect contemporary anxieties. In post-Holocaust iterations of the golem, it became less protective and more of a vengeful figure. Is that historical context something that you’re aware of as a composer? 

HM:  It’s really interesting that the golem progresses from protective to vengeful, because that process actually happens even within the space of Wegener’s film. Thinking structurally about my improvisation, the transformation from protective angel to aggressive monster works musically as my thematic motifs introduced at the beginning of the film unravel, become more interwoven, angular and disturbed throughout. 

Wegener made three golem films of which only the last survives in full, 1920’s How He Came Into The World. He cast himself as the golem in each iteration, seeing something of himself in this creature sculpted out of clay. From what we know about the previous films, the golem is driven by jealousy and eroticism. In the 1920 version, it transforms from a protective figure to a violent one as it destroys the ghetto in the film’s climax. I feel that this change is inspired as much by Wegener’s awareness of growing anti-semitism in Europe and the historic persecution of Jews as his experience fighting in the trenches of World War I. The inner chambers of the ghetto look as if carved out of mud like the golem itself. I think creating this texture within the figurative context is very relevant to the process of creating the golem. When the rabbi is slapping clay on, he looks like Jackson Pollock in the studio. When you think about where Expressionist painting evolved to, it feels very much based on that context –  the idea of creating an illusion of weight, the illusion of living.

MA: Do you find the anti-Semitism that runs through many German Expressionist films like this difficult to deal with? Or is it a part of the work you’re less interested in giving space to?

HM: I’m definitely concerned about it, and I think it’s impossible to ignore it. I’m not really interested in reclaiming these films. I don’t know if we can do that. But I think the lovely thing about screenings with a live score is that it bends the idea of a film being a fixed thing. Every screening is its own event, with its own meaning. I am affected [by the anti-Semitic undertones], and there are times when scoring Der Golem or Nosferatu is deeply painful actually, but I think that’s also part of what we’re doing, it’s really engaging and conversing with that discomfort. 

MA: The fact that a lot of horror films from the silent era or from the German Expressionist movement are around 90 minutes in their runtime really works in your favour, not only with audiences’ shorter attention span after COVID, but also in terms of a sustained artistic exercise

HM: I think that there might be a limit to what the viola can do in this context but I want to keep pushing this, working with longer films and also celebrating those which are less regularly screened in the UK. Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, which isn’t an Expressionist work, has otherwise been the longest silent film that I have scored so far. The film plays out in episodic lectures rather than as a single narrative trajectory like Der Golem. I wasn’t sure how I would approach it at first and found it disturbing to practise with. It’s very illustrative of the power of mystery. Watching it by myself I was horrified, but performing alongside Häxan ended up being the most rewarding show of the tour, the film coming alive with an audience. It was a joyous experience. It has that thrill of making audiences ask “What’s that? What will you show us next?”

MA: Do you find yourself influenced by other film scores within the genre? I suppose it could get a bit anachronistic, but I don’t know if you or audiences would get a kick out of that. 

HM: Well, that’s also about whether your score is a simulation or whether you’re inhabiting the kind of world and soul of the film. You are the life of a character, when they make a decision you’re with that breath, you’re accompanying their gestures, which is so relevant with Der Golem because it’s about creating that sense of weight that the golem has. I don’t consider my musical approach to scoring silent films as constructing a soundtrack in the conventional sense, it’s much closer to theatrical performance.

I’m not particularly influenced by the music from other horror films. I do love the contemporary scores of Jonny Greenwood who imbues the films he soundtracks with a very distinct texture. The released soundtrack often differs slightly from the pieces of music featured in the film’s final cut. I think this allows films to expand in the imagination outside their runtime and hope that my improvised performances might offer something similar to the films of the past. I find that the most rewarding thing about this is after the screening, when people who weren’t aware that they were basically attending a solo viola recital come up to ask questions about the music process. It’s great, it’s bringing together an audience that has such respect for the music. 

Hugo Max will be touring the UK this spring-summer with Max Plays Murnau, a series focused on the work of acclaimed German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau (including his iconic 1924 Nosferatu). To find out more, head to https://hugomax.co.uk/max-plays-murnau

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Jewish Horror Theory

Kafka and the An-iconic Voice

In a note to his publisher when releasing ‘The Metamorphosis’, Franz Kafka was careful to specify that the cover-art for the story should not depict any specific insect. In the text, Kafka remains vague with regards to describing the insect Gregor becomes, his descriptions limited mostly to ‘his hard, as it were armor-plated, back’, a ‘domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments’, and ‘numerous legs’. While readers may assume Gregor’s appearance, the author refuses to grant the spectacle of confirming these assumptions, rejecting the iconography and symbols that we see so often in gentile and Christian horror. Kafka’s narrative voice therefore rejects the Christian mode of visualising narrative in favour of a Jewish mode, focusing more on description than direct representation.

The an-iconic (as in, rejection of icons) is a specifically Jewish tradition, as it corresponds both with Talmudic opposition to false idols and the social need to obscure Jewish themes and narratives within more mainstream works due to anti-Semitism. Henry Bial argues that Jewish-American artists do not have the privilege of transparency in their works due to their status as a marginalised community, and we can easily apply this to Jewish horror. Bial and Omar Bartov both point to a growing trend in the late 20th century of Jewish identity being normalised on screen through characters and scenarios that feature few overt references to Judaism, but give viewers a vague sense of ‘Jewishness’ (e.g. Seinfeld). Before such depictions were commonplace and in a far more aggressively anti-Semitic environment, the more subtle indicators of Jewishness, such as the an-iconic voice aid in smuggling Jewish undertones into the text and interrogating anti-Semitism in early 1900s Europe. By maintaining this an-iconic voice, Kafka again encourages the reader to sympathise with his unwilling monster: we are unable to discriminate against him in the same way as those who can ‘see’ him within the narrative, and therefore a counter-narrative is offered to his dehumanisation. In addition to this, Kafka is able to circumvent the need for specifically Jewish iconography, and instead establishes Jewish subtext via his use of an an-iconic narrative voice. 

What is perhaps less clear, however, is why Kafka does this and what we can infer about Jewish horror from the use of the an-iconic voice. Consider the Catholic iconography of martyrdom: Catholic art of figures such as St Sebastian, the patron saint of holy deaths, focuses on the beauty in suffering, the sacred experience of martyrs whose pain brings them closer to God. Little to no thought is afforded to the realities of such suffering – repulsive bodily fluids, tremendous amounts of pain, and the varied guts and gore one might typically associate with the horror genre. While there are films such as Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2009) which explore the physical, political, and emotional complexities of suffering, these are few and far between, and are widely considered too distressing to be within mainstream horror fare. Death and its associated spectacle in mainstream art is rarely explored in terms of the visceral realities: what Julia Kristeva would consider the abject elements of death (the aforementioned bodily fluids, guts, and gore), are rather oddly disregarded in much mainstream modern horror, with deaths made so rote that they are often robbed of their true terror. These operatic, aestheticized, and often even eroticised depictions certainly bear more resemblance to Catholic art, with suffering being elevated to the level of the sacred, and the realities of such suffering being side-lined. Therefore, one might infer the reverse from Kafka’s an-iconic voice. He refuses to provide readers with an explanation for Gregor’s transformation, keeping the magical, mystical, and possibly religious elements of it completely irrelevant to the narrative. Instead, the reader is made to pay attention to the squalor in which Gregor lives (‘he left traces behind him of the sticky stuff on his soles’, ‘his warm room…turned into a naked den’) and to face the abject elements of his slow decay and death. In ‘The Metamorphosis’, Gregor’s suffering is not noble, nor poetic, nor aestheticized; it is simply suffering, and is thus attended with everything that suffering entails.

For more on ‘The Metamorphosis’, check out A Swarm of Flies: Kafka vs Cronenberg, our piece on the king of horror’s iconic film adaptation of the story,.

Or if you want to learn more about Franz Kafka’s unique contributions to the horror genre, read our article on two of his other short stories, ‘A Country Doctor’ and ‘In The Penal Colony’

Categories
Case Studies

A Swarm of Flies: Kafka vs Cronenberg

In constructing a working definition of Jewish horror, one of my main analytic ports of call was comparing Jewish horror works with their counterparts across the horror spectrum. The most obvious route into decoding Jewish horror is to define what the sub-genre is not, and (to pretentiously quote Shakespeare), by indirection find direction out. Clear examples of ‘Christian horror’ texts, which focus on the occult or have implicitly Christian themes, are useful in comparing ideology and depictions of religion, but in my research, this also created a new problem: to position ‘Christian horror’ in opposition to ‘Jewish horror’ made monoliths out of the two, ones that I, of all people, am not entitled to make. In trying to avoid adopting hegemonic ideas of ‘Christianity’ and ‘Judaism’, I decided to drill a little deeper into one of my personal favourite examples of Jewish horror: The Metamorphosis. 

Not all Jewish writers and filmmakers are religiously devout, or may identify as Jewish while actually being atheist or agnostic in belief. These are crucially important distinctions in the study of Judaism as a religion versus ‘Jewishness’ as a cultural concept and identity, and by looking further into these distinctions, we can really get to the nuances at the heart of Jewish horror. Across its different iterations, The Metamorphosis always has some core tenets: through what is mostly unfortunate coincidence, a man is transformed into a gigantic insect against his will, radically altering his relationship with his own body and with his loved ones. The original author of the tale, Franz Kafka, was a pioneer of Jewish horror with stories such as ‘A Country Doctor’ and ‘In The Penal Colony’ laying the foundations for future generations of genre writers (read more on Kafka’s influence *here*). David Cronenberg, on the other hand, who loosely adapted the short story into his 1986 film ‘The Fly’, has admitted publicly that he does not identify with his Judaism. This example gives us a valuable example of the same story told in two different ways, the first of which is deeply aware of the prevalent anti-Semitism abundant in pre-Holocaust Europe, and one that by Cronenberg’s own admission is not attempting to engage with the idea of the Jew as ‘other’.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between the two stories is in their protagonists. In ‘The Fly’, the main character is Veronica (Geena Davis), the journalist girlfriend of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who is condemned to watch helplessly as her lover transforms into an insect. Kafka, on the other hand, chooses his victim of transformation, Gregor Samsa, as a protagonist. It would be easy to put this creative choice down to a difference in mediums (as critic Iris Bruce does): Gregor’s interior narrative works well in prose, but would be difficult to elegantly translate to the screen, whereas Veronica provides a good audience stand-in and source of conflict, ensuring that the film isn’t just Jeff Goldblum suffering alone in his apartment for 90 minutes. But beyond just being a creative choice inherent to adaptation, the addition of Veronica adds a voyeuristic boundary between the audience and the horror of Seth’s transformation. We see his suffering through her eyes, asked to relate to her grief in losing a lover, rather than to relate to Seth’s alienation from his own body. This isn’t the only time we see this dynamic in ‘The Fly’: the only time we see Seth’s suffering through his own perspective, it is through a video-diary, establishing another barrier between the audience and the horror we are witnessing.

Seth exerts his own agency, choosing specifically how a hypothetical audience will perceive him, and that includes us. The works of David Cronenberg are often noted for their somewhat clinical detachment, their willingness to stand back and observe horror, but in the context of Jewish horror this voyeurism adopts another meaning. One of my key hypotheses when it comes to defining Jewish horror is that in this sub-genre, the source of horror is often in suffering itself, rather than in the observation and spectacle of suffering. Cronenberg complicates this, perhaps because of his disinterest in engaging with ideas of ‘otherness’.

‘You talk about Kafka. You say of course he was the other because he was German-speaking. He was Czechoslovakian and he was a Jew, so he was the other twice removed. So on and so on. I don’t feel that about myself per se. I don’t think that’s what I’m expressing, at least not on a level I feel very strongly. Consciously anyway. I think the other is a seductive possibility. A dangerous one perhaps and a scary one, but something you could become. You’ve seen the example of someone else being that. That means it’s a possibility for you’

David Cronenberg

Kafka, on the other hand, dives head-first into detailing Gregor’s specific experiences of metamorphosis. His perspective is limited to the confines of his own body, his immediate surroundings, and what little he can hear of his family – it’s nothing short of visceral, and perhaps one of the reasons this tale has stood the test of time. Readers are forced into Gregor’s perspective, and just as Veronica’s perspective shapes the narrative into a tragedy of love, loss, and hubris, Gregor’s interiority and Kafka’s descriptions of abuse and physical pain make The Metamorphosis a gutting depiction of being othered.

The Metamorphosis and The Fly interact with the idea of horror in entirely different ways. For Cronenberg, horror is a spectacle, the unfortunate result of grand ideas gone wrong, while Kafka’s horror is random, a brutal stroke of bad luck that transforms the lives of all those who come fall in its path. Seth Brundle is punished for his hubris; Gregor Samsa isn’t punished for anything other than having poor luck. If we follow Robin Wood’s definition of horror as ‘Normality [being] threatened by the monster’, Cronenberg and Kafka fundamentally reconfigure the roles their respective monsters and their normalities play. The normality in the world of The Fly is forever changed by his transformation (with Veronica still carrying his unborn child, posing an evolutionary threat to humanity, and Stathis horrifically maimed by their encounter), while Gregor’s status quo is somewhat regained after his disappearance. Jewish horror allows no meaningful significance to Gregor’s suffering, which is treated as merely a drop in the ocean, largely forgotten once it is no longer an inconvenience. While he is sympathetic as a monstrous figure, Kafka emphasises his lack of agency; Gregor is not even afforded the hostility that Brundle eventually acts out, and as one of a small number of Jewish monsters, Gregor is defined not by hostility but by his passive refusal to be engaged with as a monster. Jewish horror does not just reconfigure audiences’ ideas of normality and the monster, but also forces them to confront which one is actually attacking the other.

For more on this subject, read Iris Bruce’s chapter ‘The Medium is the Message: Cronenberg ‘Outkafkas’ Kafka’, available in Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image, edited by Shai Biderman and Ido Lewit