Category: Kinskilaneous

Over Thanksgiving, I finally had a chance to settle down with the Criterion Collection edition of Tess. There was a while where I didn’t buy any physical media at all, but it’s something I’ve been getting back into, being aware that streaming is not a reliable or permanent way to have access to favored movies. One such purchase was the Criterion Blu-Ray of Tess, which in addition to the film, contains almost four hours of extras. Here, I don’t really want to discuss the movie. I’ve already talked about it, though the Criterion copy is gorgeous: it is truly one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Instead, I want to talk about the extras, and what they bring to my appreciation of the film.

Ciné Regards (49 minutes)

This is a 1979 episode of French television program Ciné regards. It mixes behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the film in the French countryside, and an interview with director Roman Polanski. I hadn’t realized how long the production was here. There’s footage of shooting at ‘Stonehenge’, labelled “Day 154“! It’s an impressively multi-lingual production, Polanski switching between discussions in English (for the cast) and French, when speaking to the crew. He’s also remarkably patient. After one take, apparently derailed by noise from spectators, he saunters over and – far more agreeably than I would – explains that the shot takes half an hour to set-up, and politely asks them to be quiet, otherwise, they will have to move back.

The most interesting section comes when they’re shooting the scene where Tess boards the train after killing Alec, and reunited with Angel. I didn’t realize this was done with rear projection, and from outside the carriage, you see Nastassja fake-“walking”, and also having major problems with the carriage door! There are also some great quotes from Polanski in regard to his lead actress:

She has this aura, this atmosphere she creates, that’s just like what I most love about old movies. She reminds me of a young Audrey Hepburn or Vivien Leigh. When men see her onscreen, they want to protect her. It’s an essential quality for a woman on the screen… She has one of those vulnerable faces that can move us even when still. She has a face that can handle every angle, every light, without worrying about her “best side”.

On the other hand, he says had he realized the work involved in the role, he might not have cast someone so inexperienced. Still, worked out in the end! I didn’t know Polanski started out as an actor. Frankly, having seen the comic mugging which passes for a performance in The Fearless Vampire Killers, I think he was considerably better behind the camera!

Once Upon a Time… Tess (53 minutes)

This extra looks to be an episode from a 2006 French series called A Film and Its Era. As the clip above shows, it’s particularly interested in putting the film in the context of the its era. Directed by Daniel Ablin and Serge July, it contains interviews with Polanski, Kinski, actor Leigh Lawson, plus producer Claude Berri, costume designer Anthony Powell, and composer Philippe Sarde. It talks about how it was the most expensive film ever made in France to that point, with Berri having to put all his own money into the production, which had to have been utterly nerve-wracking (fortunately, it turned out well enough from a financial perspective).

One interesting point is Nastassja saying she could relate to Tess and her trauma. “Because she was so young… and many serious and painful things happened to her.” That quote immediately caused me to think about the subsequent claims of abuse made about their father, Klaus, by her sister, Pola, Later, she says Polanski was “Often a father figure to me… That comes from not really having a family background.” Read into that what you like. She also discussed her brief time in juvenile detention. Powell is a very good interview, and discussed in detail his choices with regard to Tess’s wardrobe. In particular, how he avoided color until after her murder of Alec, when the character then dons a dress the shade of dried blood. He says of Nastassja, “I think that her great gift was an instinctual intelligence – intelligence that came not from the head but the heart… She is a perfect director’s tool.”

Polanski talks about his early life, and his experience of soup. He was actually born in Paris before his family returned to Poland, but his mother died in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. This section is almost the only one to mention the awkward elephant in the room, and the reason why the film could not be made in England where it’s set. Though the doc seems rather friendly, calling what happened a “consenting sexual relationship with a 14-year-old.” That kind of thing might fly in France, but America and the UK feel differently. Another interesting nugget though: Polanski was so depressed by the post-production experience (more on which later), he went off to do theater, and wouldn’t direct another film for almost seven years.

From Novel to Screen (29 minutes)

This, as well, as the next two extras, were all directed by Laurent Bouzereau in 2004, to accompany the regular DVD release of the movie. They’ve been ported over from that edition to the Blue-Ray. This one covers the pre-production process, and it appears the original version of the script, by Polanski and Gerard Brach, was in French. Producer Berri remembers Roman showed up on the doorstep of producer Claude Berri around midnight, with Nastassja in tow. “I was mesmerized by her beauty… I immediately thought, this is going be fantastic.” However, the British actor’s union Equity were very unhappy about a German girl playing the lead in a British movie. However, the casting people simply couldn’t find anyone better.

The question of whether she could master the Dorset accent was a significant one. Before Nastassja signed, she worked with dialogue coach Kate Fleming and then shot some test footage. Polanski said, “We were all astonished by the progress and how well she spoke with the accent.” This section also has a great discussion on the costumes and locations used in the film. As well as the, um, legal reasons, it appears the French landscape was a better reflection of what farms looked like in Hardy’s time. In England, the process of agricultural modernization had taken significant hold, with fields no longer looking like they had in the nineteenth century.

Filming Tess (26 minutes)

A documentary dealing with the production, and Berri says “It was clear that Roman was the orchestra leader.” He remembers once visiting the set and giving some advice to Leigh Lawson. Roman just glared at him. Part of the reason why the shoot took so long was because Polanski took however long was necessary to achieve perfection. Powell remembers a time where Kinski was kept standing in one place for so long, that a spider actually began weaving a web between her and the camera. It became something of a standing joke between them, over the rest of the film’s extended production. Co-producer Timothy Burrill remembers, “The extraordinary professionalism of Nastassja, who worked like nobody worked. I don’t think there was one day where she fluffed a line, she was word-perfect always.”

On the first day, the greenhouse location looked far more run-down than it should, so everyone had to pile in and help paint it. It was also the day when they shot arguably the most famous scene in the film, when Tess eats a strawberry out of the fingers of Alec. This section also discusses the death during filming of Geoffrey Unsworth, who passed away from a heart attack about three months into shooting. Nastassja gets visibly choked up discussing this, and it’s amazing how replacement Ghislain Cloquet was able to take over and reproduce Unsworth’s style. The two men shared the 1980 Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and it’s one which I would say was fully deserved.

Tess: The Experience (20 minutes)

I’m not quite sure what the general topic is here. It’s a little about production, a little about the post-production process. Leigh Lawson praised the unified cast/crew dynamic, which saw them often hanging out together after filming was over for the day, sometimes taking over whatever local facility was available. Nastassja turned eighteen during the production (presumably in January 1979). She was thrown a surprise party for her birthday, and was given a car by Roman as a present. There were problems at the end, because the set intended for use during the movie’s finale at Stonehenge, was locked up due to a strike, and they were lucky it was released in time for shooting to proceed.

As mentioned before, the post-production process was fraught, editing the film down from its initial cut of 187 minutes, and dealing with Dolby sound issues. At one point, Polanski and his editors worked on the film for twenty-six and a half hours without stopping. The director came under pressure, including from Francis Ford Coppola, to edit the film down, but largely held his ground, with the director-approved version coming in with a running time of 170 minutes. Though according to Polanski here, he hasn’t seen the film for years: I wonder if that still remains the case today? He was in attendance for the premiere of the restored version in 2012 at Cannes, but did he actually watch it?

The South Bank Show: Roman Polanski (50 minutes)

It was one of the longest-running arts shows in British TV history, with over eight hundred episodes between 1978 and 2023, all hosted by Melvin Bragg. This edition, originally aired on May 25, 1980, features an interview with Polanski. While certainly interesting, since it covers his entire career, is probably the least of direct relevance to us here. He does mention Nastassja, saying of her, “At least physically, she was exactly the description of Hardy’s… But there’s something more about her, she’s got this vulnerability that certain women of the screen have.” These comments echo the ones made previously in the extras, as quoted above.

In the introduction, Bragg does mention Polanski’s status as a fugitive, but makes it clear this interview would not be covering the topic. It does leave me curious to see some early Polanski, like Knife in the Water. I also realized my first exposure to the director was back in school, where they showed us his version of Macbeth. This play was covered every damn year in English class, because it took place in the area of Scotland where I grew up – my home town is even name-checked in the first scene. But I suspect whoever organized the screening didn’t quite realize the amount of sex and nudity present in this version! The fact it was partly funded by Hugh Hefner of Playboy fame, might have been a clue!

Conclusion

No doubt, I’d have been entirely happy had the Blu-Ray simply included a good quality transfer of the film, without any extras. That’s what truly matters, and I’m more likely to revisit the movie again, than any of the supplementary features. That said, I did gain an additional appreciation for the film from the wealth of information regarding its production, and the next time I watch it, this will inform my enjoyment. I was left wondering if this kind of movie is a product of a bygone era, when committed artists were allowed to spend ten months assembling, what’s basically a three-hour art-house flick.

If you would like to just check out the additional features, all of them, except for The South Bank Show, are available (at least, here in the US), on the Criterion Channel, along with the movie itself. You can even get a seven-day free trial of the service if you want to do so. But I’d have no qualms about recommending you get the Blu-Ray, It’s a top-tier presentation of what’s arguably Nastassja’s highest quality movie.

“She rose to the occasion. The snake rose to the occasion. I rose to the occasion.”

  — Richard Avedon

There is no more iconic image of Nastassja Kinski than the portrait of her, naked – save for a Patricia von Musulin bracelet – with a Burmese python decorously wrapped across her, its tongue flicking into Kinski’s ear. The photograph was taken by renowned photographer Richard Avedon on June 14, 1981, in a shoot for Vogue magazine, and became one of the best-selling posters of the decade. It subsequently inspired a host of other women to adopt similar poses, including Nastassja’s daughter, Sonia, and in a 2014 shoot for Vanity Fair, Jennifer Lawrence. But nor was its imagery created out of nowhere. Let’s look at what came before, as well as the act of its creation, and those which followed in its wake.

The origins of the archetype

Intertwined with a boa constrictor, grappling with temptation, seduction and power, Kinski is clearly referencing deeply rooted concepts in classical art and mythology.
  — Sotheby’s catalogue, February 2018.

Women and snakes have been connected for, literally, thousands of years. The most obvious link is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, where Satan, in the form of a serpent, convinced Eve to pick forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Christian mythology is certainly not the origin of the archetype. As with much of Christianity, this story may have been a more or less conscious co-opting of pre-existing traditions, turning one of the numerous pagan snake deities, such as the Sumerian Nirah, into the villain of the piece.

Tales of women and snakes span the globe and the centuries, often depicted in a more positive light than by Judeo-Christian lore. The indigenous Pomo tribe of California have a legend telling of a woman who married a rattlesnake-prince, and gave birth to four snake-children. Or in Africa, we find water deity Mami Wata, about whom Wikipedia says, “A large snake frequently accompanies her, wrapping itself around her and laying its head between her breasts.” Perhaps the most iconic of mythological reptile/female combinations is Medusa, a woman with living snakes for hair – and much like Nastassja in the photo, her gaze could turn a man to stone.

It’s perhaps worth quoting at some length what Plutarch wrote about Alexander the Great’s parents, Olympias and Philip, around the beginning of the second century AD: “Once, moreover, a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept, which more than anything else, it is said, abated Philip’s passion for her.” He goes on to state Olympias was a member of a snake cult and, “was wont in the dances proper to these ceremonies to have great tame serpents about her, which sometimes creeping out of the ivy in the mystic fans, sometimes winding themselves about the sacred spears, and the women’s chaplets, made a spectacle which men could not look upon without terror.”

As far as Christian mythology is concerned, there’s an argument Kinski is less playing Eve than Lilith, a character first mentioned in Babylonian saga, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to 2400 BC. While only briefly mentioned in the “official” Bible, other religious works name her as Adam’s first wife. The Zohar, the main text of the Kabbalah, associates Lilith with Samael, King of the Demons, and says [emphasis added], “The female of Samael is called ‘snake,’ ‘a wife of harlotry,’ ‘the end of all flesh,’ ‘the end of days.'” As a result, many depictions from the Middle Ages, portray the snake with Lilith’s face, including Michelangelo’s Temptation and Fall in the Sistine Chapel. In recent times, Lilith has been reclaimed by feminists as a symbol of independence from the dominion of men and sexual freedom. Quite the journey for a five thousand year old, Babylonian she-demon.

In terms of artistic depictions, the other main item combining women and snakes is probably the death of Cleopatra – or as it was once called, “the greatest asp disaster in the world”… However, size does matter when it comes to snakes, and the fun-sized reptiles with which she is shown, appear to be from a different sub-genre. We should also mention in passing the extremely obvious Freudian symbolism. Creative director Polly Mellen, who was helping Avedon out that day, says, “When she held it, there was something really sensual about the snake. I don’t want to be vulgar, but… it reminded me of something else.”

Such elements are particularly apparent in Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Salammbo, about a Carthaginian priestess. For your consideration: “The python turned downwards, and resting the centre of its body upon the nape of her neck, allowed its head and tail to hang like a broken necklace with both ends trailing to the ground. Salammbo rolled it around her sides, under her arms and between her knees; then taking it by the jaw she brought the little triangular mouth to the edge of her teeth, and half shutting her eyes, threw herself back beneath the rays of the moon… Salammbo panted beneath the excessive weight, her loins yielded, she felt herself dying, and with the tip of its tail the serpent gently beat her thigh.”

Which seems like a good point to move on, pausing only to mop our brows.

The shoot

He was probably the only person who could have told me to take my clothes off and lie on the floor with a snake—and I’d do it.
  — Nastassja Kinski

There seems to be some doubt as to who came up with the idea of using a snake for the picture. Kinski recalls it being Avedon’s idea: “We were in the studio with designer clothes and makeup and jewelry. But he suddenly said, ‘This is not happening for me.’ He made a few phone calls, and before you know it we had a snake in the studio.” Mellen remembers things differently. While she agrees with Nastassja that the session  started as a normal fashion shoot, she remembers asking the model, “Do you have any special things that you like?” to which Kinski replied, “I like snakes.”

A reptile was duly procured, and Avedon then asked Kinski if she was willing to be photographed in the nude. She agreed – but getting her co-subject to comply proved to be quite another matter. According to the photographer, “It all looks so easy. She spent two hours on a cement floor, naked. The trainer would start anchoring the snake with her ankles, and then see where the snake would go. Hope that the snake — because there’s no talking to a snake — would creep up Nastassja in a way that was beautiful… It was really fashion hell.”

But finally the miracle happened, as the snake wound its way up unto her shoulder. Avedon says, “It was one of those absolutely magical things that happens, which nothing you plan could equal… I said, ‘Nastassja, this is it. Quickly, relax!'” Mellen was dumbstruck by the moment: “You couldn’t imagine being there. I mean, the snake kissed her! The snake wound up her little naked body and put its tongue in her ear, and the picture was done. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” However, Mellen later said she regretted the presence of the bracelet: “It became a fashion statement, and I thought the picture was something else.”

She also says, “The snake had been defanged, so there was no worry on that stance.” While she may know a great deal about fashion, she apparently doesn’t know much about snakes. For the Burmese python is non-venomous and kills its prey by constriction, wrapping its powerful body around them, and squeezing so that are unable to breathe. Its fangs are not the “worry” here. What probably does concern me though, is the number of sources who report to this day that Kinski was pregnant during the shoot. Looking at her belly, that seems plausible: except there’s a problem. Her first child, Ayosha, wasn’t born until July 1984, more than three years later. No explanation for this is comforting.

Even the title of the piece is thoughtful, deliberately using “serpent”, perhaps to evoke the Biblical images. It’s not an insignificant difference. One lexicographer observed that “snakes are insidious, cold and contemptible, while serpents are terrible, powerful, and beautiful.” While it hatched a million posters –  actually two million, by one estimate – if you want one of the original prints, whose run was limited to only a couple of hundred, you’ll have to save up a bit more money. In a February 2018 auction at Sotheby’s, #52 was sold for £62,500.

The clones

Watch her take the pleasures from the serpent, that once corrupted man…
  — Blade Runner

We’ve established that Avedon and Kinski were certainly not the first to create art combining women and snakes, and equally certainly, they were not the last. However, their collaboration changed the landscape forever, with every subsequent such piece apparently taking influence from them. It’s similar to how movies had included scenes in showers before Alfred Hitchcock went there for Psycho But after he did, nothing was the same: to this day, if someone picks up a kitchen implement to use as a weapon, odds are that it’ll be what has become known as “the Psycho knife.” Nastassja and the Snake had a similar impact in the world of fashion photography.

And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, it appears – even if the fruit comes from the tree of forbidden knowledge. For Nastassja’s daughter Sonja has already embraced her mother’s fondness for snakes, on not one, but two separate occasions. In the 400th edition of Photo magazine in June 2003, Sonja posed with an albino Burmese python for Michele Comte. And eight years later, she played Eve in a 2011 advert for Pom Wonderful, certainly evoking the image of her mother’s iconic photo,three decades previously. Adding to the Kinski connection, the commercial narration is by Malcolm McDowell, who appeared alongside Nastassja in Cat People.

The sheer range of imitations is startling, even if we restrict ourselves fairly narrowly, to images specifically depicting a model lying naked on the ground, with the snake on top of her. [And that’s just the tip of a very large reptilian iceberg!] There are photographs involving women, men, puppets, animated characters and even Legos. Some of them put their own spin on the concept in one way or another. Others are shamelessly derivative, right down to the bracelet: perhaps that’s simply a metaphor for the Ouroboros which is the fashion industry, forever eating itself.

The most recent of note saw Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence pose with a Colombian red-tailed boa constrictor, in a shoot for Vanity Fair by photographer Patrick Demarchelier. Per reports, “Lawrence only became uncomfortable when the snake took a fancy to her neck.” [Are you listening, Polly Mellen?] At least this was an open Avedon homage, though not everyone was impressed. One writer criticized Lawrence’s “dead-eyed pout… look again at that Avedon portrait of Nastassja Kinski. Look at how grounded she looks, how serene by comparison. Though equally naked, she seems less exposed somehow.” Shot in July 2014, Lawrence’s pic wasn’t released until February the following year – perhaps due to the subsequent leak of her iCloud photos. It still promptly broke the Internet.

After having spent more time than I care to consider trawling various depths of the web, part of me has to wonder if the style has perhaps gone beyond iconic to cliched. However, such is likely the fate of all high art which achieves a place in popular consciousness, and all the subsequent copies, knock-offs and homages do absolutely nothing to detract from the qualities of the original. It remains iconic and much-imitated for good reason, an exemplary case in what happens when artistry and good fortune come together for a fleeting moment. The results are near perfection, and I would argue, Nastassja and the Serpent deserves to be ranked among the great art pieces of the twentieth century.

Sources

I want to mention some places on the web which were of particular help in writing this piece, both for information and images.

• Richard Nilsen’s series of articles, Lady and the Snakes
• The Vestustideces article: El icono Kinski-Avedon: yaciendo con serpientes (The Kinski-Avedon icon: lying with snakes)
• Two sites, one Russian and the other Japanese, were also particularly image-friendly.