When I arrived in California in the late 1970s, I had already heard of him. Robert Snyder is now dead, at 88, the same age that another monster of American culture, Henry Miller, whose association made Snyder a documentary icon of that time, died, in 1980.
Miller and Snyder had one thing in common: their accent and origin.
They were both born in Brooklyn and having met other men and women from that part of the world, they are a sort of intellectual tribe holding together like they came from a special planet. Their accent is innimical and tremendously seductive.
While finishing film studies at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara my friend Anne de B. introduced me to Bob at her beach side cottage. I had heard about and seen some of his films, notably the Academy Award winning Titan: Story of Michelangelo, whose stunning black and white photography, expert editing, music score, and narration by Frederic March were a rivetting example of classic documentary as few have been made since.
The next morning we took a walk on the beach and Bob, who was a devilishly romantic character on the marge of Hollywood film making looking like a young version of Tony Savalla, seduced me with the idea of assisting in the editing a film on Claudio Arrau, the Chilean pianist, who he had been filming for five years and that needed to be finished. He was convinced that being born in Chile, and having experience editing according to Eisenstein’s theory, I could handle the massive amount of 16mm footage accumulated. Some shooting may still be needed, but all that would happen later. Would I come to L.A. and check out the production?
Naturally inclined to get away from commercial film making I was more or less destined to pursue, I drove my broken VW van down to Master&Masterworks Productions – as his company is called – to the Wilshire boulevard office, and sat down in a darkened room watching his documentaries he had made since Michelangelo. The award winning The Hidden World, Stravinski, Pablo Casals, DeKooning, Anaïs Nin, Caresse Crosby, Buckminster Fuller, and finally the overwhelmingly effective Henry Miller Odyssey.
Henry Miller had something so real in the film that he was there, it was real reality, as Bob liked to call his movies. That I was to meet the greatest American living writer soon thereafter was not even on my mind. But I had read all of his books and here was the man who had written them, eternalized by a documentary film maker who had caught the essense of the person he was filming through some kind of kinetic magic.
Bob’s chat was enrapturing, he spoke of his early apprenticeship with Richard Flaherty – the father of documentary – , had known Pare Lorenz and those dedicated artists working during the war at the department of film.
He had swept Richard Flaherty’s editing room where he was assistant editor on a moviola on his film of the Louisiana swamps. Later on Flaherty honored him with his name introducing The Titan, the Story of Michelangelo. Being caught in the spell of all this, hoping Bob Snyder would do the same for me, I swept the editing room each night after putting order into the Claudio Arrau footage. In those days we were still working on an upright moviola, the strings of footage hung on a metal peg into a bin. The organization of the 10 hours of footage for an hour long documentary consisted of classifying the material, arranging it for easy access and tedious cutting and splicing – some of which was still done with glue and a heating pad, and keeping track where all the boxes where stored. The 16mm sound track was another problem, since it was coded, but often out of sync, and lap over sound on several tracks needed to be spliced carefully. John Ferry was there to help carry out office tasks and the production seemed to be running successfully.
One day Bob seemed more uptight than usual and approached me as I was climbing into my rusty VW van late at night, where I used to sleep in the back on a quiet Beverly Hills street; he wanted to be paid for the apprenticeship I was doing, it was usual in the time of the renaissance, I should put down 50 dollars or something a week.
I was a bit flabberghasted and declined, saying I was short of cash and if that was the deal, we may just call it off. I’d find something else. In the meantime my work on Claudio Arrau had been for nothing.
Our argument apeased him and soon afterwards he offered me a regular weekly pay. Perhaps he realized that in order to finish the film he needed someone obsessed with film making. I learned later that he had had several apprentices who had helped him either shoot or edit his films. Amongst them were Rob Fitzgerald, Tom Schiller, and Gary Conklin, whose documentaries can be classified as oeuvres d’admiration, as well as documents of living masters. I soon also met the more hazardous company of editors and producers who were roaming around Hollywood trying to get into the movie business, make a buck, or become famous and take over Universal pictures.
Documentary in those days was considered a handicaped child of regular film making and given the status of an underling, far below the profitable television serials and studio productions or commercials. Yet a dedicated group of people were still doing just that, documenting their surrounding, their friends, their territory, and it was generally socially oriented, humanist film making. It was, unlike today, very personal, since each documetary film maker had his or her personal vision.
Bob Snyder stood out because he made passionate films on artists – masters – who inspired him to film their life and times as though the camera didn’t exist. He was intuitive as an observer, and made himself at ease with his subjects. He watched, listened and sometimes asked questions, but the questions were asked in such a way that the subject always answered intimately and relaxed.
Claudio Arrau, a Life in Music, became an excellent film. It is a moving documentary of a misunderstood artist, a pianist who devoted his life to perfecting the art of the interpretation of great composers. We were immersed in classical music and life seemed a dream.
We moved offices to Marina de Rey, where Bob had a house boat. It was a remakably relaxed place to be making high quality documentary films. It was the time, also, when tax loops allowed money to be invested in these kind of films without asking for a return and life was easy.
In order to accomplish the editing of various projects (there was a film on San Francisco artist Ruth Asawa, re-editing of Pablo Casals, De Kooning and others) I lived in the office. Bob often stayed late, sharing my cooking and being rather enthusiastic about it, asked one night whether I would cook for Henry Miller.
That was the evening I met Henry Miller who was then living in Pacific Palisades, and became his life long friend.
A few projects later, a remake of the Michelangelo film was being discussed.
I never quite understood the meaning of the project, trying myself to develop original projects, but the remake was considered seriously and the tempers heated.
The Michelangelo project became an obsession to Bob; the Vatican was involved, and we started putting a script together with the late Michael Sonnabend who flew in from New York.
Bob worked on recutting parts of the original 35 mm to suit the new version; the original UFA production he had found was shot by a Swiss production and released in 1940. He recut the material, added the voice of Frederic March, had Flaherty “present” the film which won an Awademy Award in 1950.
The subject was majestic and Bob got involved, very much like Michelangelo himself, in a production that would take nearly a decade to be finished. The beginning was exhilarating, we were shooting in Rome the Sistine Chapel and I was flown first class to scout the Moses and the virgin Marie. Roberto Galiassi was the cinematographer and this was all too much of a Dolce Vita, being in Rome with Robert Snyder as some sort of humanist documentarian of the Rennaissance. The struggle making the film became a tango between oportunity and obsession. We moved post production to Switzerland where the rest of the story of the origins of the movie were revealed to me, as I was editing the footage in a country village while living in an alcohol free hotel.
Oertel had shot the original version of Michelangelo in 1939, having the documentary released through UFA in 1940, using new techniques of film making by moving the camera on tracks specially built for the occasion. Leni Riefenstahl had preceded the creation of the movable camera in Triumph of the Will and the Berlin Olympic documentary, in 1936.
The motion of the camera gliding over sculpture made these still objects come alive. And Bob did everything to immitate this with cranes and rails and all the lightings money could buy.
The tracking shot of the Last Judgement became perhaps the most overwhelming image after a long set-up of rails and the movement of the camera only an intrepid artist like Galeassi could achieve.
While editing in Switzerland I realized that we may never finish the production. It was up to Charlton Heston to record the voice of Michelangelo, written by Michael Sonnabend with the intimate knowledge of the Rennaissance masters. But for one reason or another it never materialized or Chuck was busy recording the bible.
Finally Bob recorded the voice himself, which was not exactly our goal, yet his voice made the film stand out even closer to the viewer who may be anyone and doesn’t care to hear the original voice of Michelangelo recorded by a Hollywood star. Michelangelo’s voice is annonymous, well, it is from Brooklyn.
This last film with him was an intense production that took us shuttling between the US and Europe for many years, yet remains a startling realization in film making. Bob was filming his own struggle of accomplishing the Sistine Chapel, crying I am not an artist, just a Brooklyn boy, like Michelangelo would say. He seemed so obsessed with the subject that had he been stronger, he might have been a sculptor. He certainly was a scultpor of documentary and there are few who I have seen handle film like he did: cut that frame! he would cry, and he was often right, for the films all have the same rythm that was art and heartbeat in his life: a certain nervousness, a keen sense of perfection in the midst of chaos.
Edwin Jahiel says of the film: “Worried as I am about MICHELAGNIOLO’s true paternity, I cannot deny that the work is not only 85 minutes of fascination but a totally humbling experience too.”