The Films of Val Lewton - Part Twenty

Isle of the Dead (1945) - Part One


Isle of the Dead was the first of what could be considered a historical trilogy of films starring Boris Karloff. The collaboration with the horror star was a happy one, Lewton allowing Karloff to create characters of complex moral shading. The imposition of the star by RKO was not initially something about which Lewton was at all happy, however. He felt that it was an attempt to direct him towards making the more generically predictable material for which Karloff was well known. The studio bosses appeased him by promising that this would be his last horror film before he graduated to other, better funded projects. It was a promise that was never honoured, of course. But as it happened, Karloff and Lewton found themselves to be fellow spirits, both men of some cultural refinement who longed for a more nuanced approach to the tales of terror they had found themselves locked into making. Karloff was returning from a lengthy and extremely successful stage run in Arsenic and Old Lace, a play which emphasised grotesque humour over horror. So successful was his performance that he was denied leave to reprise his role in Frank Capra’s film version, his place being taken by Raymond Massey. Several in-jokes refer to Massey as looking like Boris Karloff, an indication of how well known he was for this part. In returning to the screen, he was loath to fall back into the old stereotypes of lumbering brutes or refined madmen which had previously been his lot. Lewton offered him the opportunity to develop beyond the limited range of these stock bogeymen. He might still be playing monsters; after all, his image was by now too well established to allow him to essay characters of unblemished nobility. But these monsters were deeply and understandably human, their monstrous behaviour arising from a psychology located within particular historical and social contexts. Karloff was always grateful for Lewton’s friendship and the films which allowed him to give some of the greatest performances of his career; performances which make us see into the heart of the seemingly inhuman. As he himself put it, Lewton had ‘rescued him from the dead, had restored his soul’.

The filming itself was not without problems. These chiefly centred around a serious back problem which plagued Boris Karloff. Although he gamely struggled on with filming, taking to a wheelchair in between shots, it eventually became clear that he would have to undergo surgery. This resulted in a considerable break in filming. In fact, due to difficulties in re-assembling all of the original cast, Lewton ended up shooting The Body Snatcher with Karloff before Isle of the Dead was completed, and it was that film which was released first. Whether it was this hiatus which resulted in wholesale alterations to the original script is a moot point. The film as shot varies significantly from the story as originally written, however. This not only results in some characters being superimposed over others, but in others being removed altogether. The thematic underpinning of the film is shifted by these changes and in the opinion of some critics is thereby left confused and inconsistent. I don’t think that’s entirely fair, but I shall highlight some of the major points of variance along the way.


As the RKO radio mast appears, we are immediately cast into the world of the film; rather than the usual theme which accompanies the famous studio introduction with its beeping, radiating emissions, we have a dramatic and tragic piece of romantic music. This break with convention establishes a mood almost in the manner of an overture, and suggests that this will be a film of atmospheres, a mood piece. The music draws on two famous pieces which depict the passage to the isle of the dead; Sibelius’ Swan of Tuonela, which depicts the black swan which patrols the waters around the isle in the Finnish mythology of the Kalevala; and Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead, which is inspired by the Arnold Bocklin painting of the same name. These musical references lend the film itself the air of a tone poem, a piece which attempts to summon up a mood of sombre mystery. We are introduced to the Bocklin painting which inspired Rachmaninov in the titles. Lewton had already used the picture once before, in I Walked With A Zombie, where it hung on the wall of the undying Jessica’s room, a western counterpoint to the Caribbean isle of the dead which was the film’s setting. Lewton, as we’ve seen, was strongly influenced by the visual arts in creating the look of his films, and this influence reaches a new level here. The film’s central locale is a reproduction, in spirit if not absolutely literally, of the isle in Bocklin’s painting. Bocklin did in fact paint five versions of his most famous work, so perhaps we can regard Lewton’s isle as a composite of various common elements. The view of the painting here seems to be a close-up, focussing on the island itself and trimming away some of the surrounding sea, giving it a feeling of claustrophobia, of being a closed-off world. Boris Karloff’s name appears bold and large above the film’s title, making it clear that he is the star, the film’s main attraction. As far as the studio is concerned, this a Boris Karloff rather than a Val Lewton picture.


After the titles, we get a screenful of introductory writing, which sets what is to follow in its cultural and historical context and also, in traditional form, alerts us to the fact that this is a Historical Picture. This is at variance with Lewton’s usual practice of introducing his films with a literary quote. He did indeed have one ready for use in his original screenplay (co-written with and credited to Ardel Wray) which was taken from Herodotus: ‘when war and tumult torment the Earth, the dead are disquieted: there is frenzy in the grave’. The introductory words which are actually used are less poetic, and serve as a practical primer for the themes of the film, as well as giving us a date and a geographical location upon which to hang the events which follow. They run as follows: ‘Under conquest and oppression the people of Greece allowed their legends to degenerate into superstition; the Goddess Aphrodite giving way to the Vorvolaka. This nightmare figure was very much alive in the minds of the peasants when Greece fought the victorious war of 1912’. This is the Balkan War in which Greece and its allies established an uneasy independence after many years of occupation by the Turks. The idea of the decline of civilisation into self-devouring barbarity and the tantalising introduction of a new regional addition to the familiar gallery of monsters are quickly sketched in.

The very first image we see in the first scene is of Boris Karloff’s character General Pherides washing his hands over a bowl. This is an image which will recur throughout the film, acting as both a literal and symbolic representation of the attempt at cleansing. Here, in the interior of a military tent, the General is introduced as a modern day Pilate, unwilling to venture beyond the strict dictates of duty. This washing ritual also serves to indicate that he has just come in from some strenuous endeavour. He listens with cold indifference to the voice of a Colonel, which pleads on behalf of his troops, emphasising their human weakness and weariness. ‘It wasn’t my fault they didn’t arrive on time’, this voice concludes. The battle was won anyway. We see this voice embodied in the play of shadows against the tent wall, a makeshift screen upon which this man’s humiliation is projected as he is stripped of his marks of rank. With a shift of camera angle, we see him in the flesh, stepping out of his own shadow. Another man who is not in uniform watches from his vantage point of a bench to the rear. We will later learn that this is Oliver Davis, an American reporter from the Boston Star. His position as passive observer is essentially maintained until the end. Despite the occasional strongly asserted viewpoint, when he acts it is usually in concourse with the general or with the male authority figure on the island, Dr Albrecht.

Passive aggressive pistol

The General finishes washing his hands and dries them, an indication that he is now ready to confront the man directly. But still he doesn’t address him. His eyes pointedly fall to the revolver which lies in the middle of the table, and then are raised to look directly at the Colonel. He picks the gun up, reverses it and pushes it barrel first towards him. No words are spoken, but with a slow, grave nod of his head, a command has been made, a man condemned. The business is concluded with a cursory ‘that’s all gentlemen’, the report of the revolver sounding from outside. The General is seen as the authoritative master of fate, who determines who shall live or die. The lack of any direct order and the presentation of the revolver which makes the soldier both executioner and executed indicates the degree to which his power has become a matter of almost intuitive, reflex understanding. The Colonel’s self-execution is also an indication of the film’s preoccupation with a country’s people turning inward and devouring themselves. The central conflict in the film is between the General, Thea and Kyra, the native Greek characters. The influence of the foreign characters on the course of Greek culture and history goes unremarked by them, even when it is guiltily drawn to their attention. The presentation of the weapon is mirrored towards the end of the film with the taking up of Poseidon’s trident from Albrecht’s desk and suggests the playing out of a pattern of fate in a display of passive aggression. The weapon becomes almost an embodied agent of fate, directing the actions of those into whose hands it falls.

When all have left the tent and Davis is left alone with the General, he feels free to question what he has seen, although in far from harsh terms. He asks whether it is just ‘to condemn a man to death just because some other men happened to lag behind’. But the General’s response is without any shade of moral doubt. The fact was simply that ‘they were his troops’. His world is rigidly codified, with absolute values and unwavering consequences of actions. He himself is an unquestioning agent of powers who determine the nature of the conflicts which he conducts. Their moral underpinning or the innocence or otherwise of those who become embroiled in them is not something which he finds it necessary to contemplate. He is the classic soldier of the ‘I was only obeying orders’ variety. ‘And I’ve been wondering why they call you the watchdog’, Davis states, not entirely disapprovingly. This is the first reference to the General’s nickname, which will be a key signifier of the nature of his character. It is also a nickname which conjures up archetypes from Greece’s classical past, and the analogy with Cerberus will be underlined later. More echoes of Greek mythology will emerge as the film unfolds. Karloff’s hair in Isle of the Dead is light and curly, giving an added visual touch to his canine reputation. This is not entirely complimentary, of course, carrying with it the suggestion of subjugation to a master and the need for guidance, the inability to draw on one’s own resources in order to decide a course of action.

General Pherides tells Davis that ‘it’s my way. The only way I know’. This is the world he has been brought up in, the behaviour into which he has been trained (like a dog). He reveals that the man who he has sent to his death was a personal friend, Colonel Tolditis. Perhaps his granting him the means to end his own life was his idea of granting him an honourable death. Davis continues to question Pherides’ worldview, and it is indicative of a certain understanding between the two that he is allowed to do so. Davis is a journalist on the Boston Star, rather than the New York for which he wrote in the original script. Perhaps this migration to the cradle of the American Revolution is designed to suggest a certain sense of fellow feeling with the General and his struggle to assert his country’s independence. Nevertheless, he suggests that the General’s notion of patriotism takes it almost to the level of psychosis, both personal and national. ‘I think you’d kill your wife or child for your country’s sake – if you had a wife’. Davis voices the theme of a people turning their savagery on themselves. The latter addendum indicates how implausible Davis feels that the General could have any connection with the feminine. But he is instantly disabused of this notion. ‘I had a wife’, the General says, giving us a glimpse of a personal life beyond the fields of war. He smiles for the first time, as if to ease the journalist’s apologetic awkwardness. Again, we sense a certain flickering of friendship and fellow feeling in these exchanges. Perhaps even the sense that, given the right circumstances, Davis wouldn’t shirk from such ruthless ferocity himself. ‘You think I’m a cold man. Cold and brutal’, the General rhetorically speculates. ‘If you’d asked her, she would never have said so’. Thus he hints at a female influence in his life which has faded over the passage of the years. Perhaps the bitterness of its absence has contributed to his coldness, his ability to countenance the brutality of dispassionate justice ruthlessly meted out. He reveals that she is buried on the island off the nearby shore. It is as if the female influence on his warlike, masculine life has been isolated there, quarantined by the straits which separate it from the mainland. They both plan to go there, Davis eager to connect with the General on a personal level beyond the all-consuming arena of war.

Goya - The Disasters of War: Bury Them and Keep Quiet

To reach the island, they must first cross the battlefield, however. Davis leads with a lantern, which is a tiny beacon of light in the darkness. Lanterns are a recurrent motif throughout the film, and suggest the journey of the living into the underworld, into the nightlands to which they are not acclimatised. This is a journey across the land of the dead. It is a landscape in which the dead outnumber the living. It presents us with an inverted order in which the isle of the dead provides a refuge for the living beyond the waste land which the world has become. It is reminiscent of the trajectory of George Romero’s zombie films, which culminates in the world of Land of the Dead, in which the living are reduced to small survivalist enclaves. In that film, the dead wade across a Styx-like river to re-enter the land of the living, with no Cerberus on the shore to deter them.

Goya - The Disasters of War: Cartloads for the Cemetery

The blasted plain across which they travel is again influenced by the visual arts, this time by the black and white prints of Goya which fall under the title The Disasters of War. These were inspired by and were perhaps even direct representations of the Peninsula War which followed the invasion of Spain by Napoleon in 1808. They depict war in a very unheroic manner, and emphasise its devastating effects on ordinary people. The prints all focus on the aftermath of battle, and these scenes of a landscape strewn with corpses, often with a dead tree acting as an impromptu gallows in the centre, are perhaps still the definitive images of the sickening reality of war. They remained unpublished until many years after Goya’s death and even now evoke strong reactions. Sadly, they were recently subject to a ‘re-interpretation’ by the Chapman brothers, which reduced them to the level of jeering adolescent heavy metal cover art, draining them of any of their poignancy or stark horror. Lewton clearly had to tone down their graphic content, but retained the sense of a devastated landscape with people reduced to an animalistic essence, their outer layers of humanity eroded away. When Davis sees a group of men dragging a cart loaded with dead bodies, and is appalled by their exhausted exertions, he asks why horses can’t be used. He is told that ‘horses cannot understand why they have to work beyond endurance for their country’. But there is little sense of noble purpose behind their reduction to beasts of burden.

Goya - The Disasters of War: They Don't Know the Way

The soundtrack is full of the subdued groans and moans of the dying and the weary labouring at the limits of their ebbing strength. There is the mournful sound of a trumpet in the score, which evokes the sounding of the last post. The whole blasted landscape looks forward to the devastation of nature seen in World War 1, only two years away from the events of the film. Perhaps Lewton and his art director were also influenced by the pictures which Paul Nash painted during this conflict, particularly his famous paintings ‘We are Making a New World’ and ‘The Menin Road’. The world has become an open graveyard. In the middle of the battlefield, Davis and the General meet the masked figure of Doctor Drossos, who is to become a central character later in the film. Removing his mask, he explains the threat of the typhus and the septicimic plague, which necessitates the swift clearing of the corpses from the area. The General intones, in a portentous oracular voice, ‘the horseman on the pale horse is pestilence. He follows the wars’. This is a reference to the fourth horseman of the apocalypse as outlined in the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible. This is the horseman specifically referred to as Death, and it is he, as a personalised and mythological embodiment of the invisible ‘enemy’ of the plague, who will be faced on the island.

Paul Nash - We Are Building a New World

We fade from the battlefield to a point of view shot over the shoulders of the General and Davis of the shore, with its boats and the island beyond. This is, if not a direct reproduction of one of Bocklin’s paintings, an assemblage of the elements which go to make up his isle of the dead. There are the tall cypruses in the centre, and rocky outcrops to either side with the black holes of tombs carved into them. There are also the ruined columns of a classical Greek temple, a reminder that civilisations fade and die just as people do. The view of the island in the near distance introduces us to the landscape elements amongst which the rest of the film will take place; rocks, trees and ruins. It is also a landscape which reminds of the New Mexican cemetery in the Leopard Man, which was also dominated by cedar trees, classical statuary and the graves of the dead, all enclosed and shut off from the outside wall by its high stone walls.

To the Island

Davis leaves his lighted lamp on the shore to act as a guiding beacon from the island, both of them intending to return as soon as the General has visited his wife’s tomb. This is the light of the land of the living, the spirit of life which can’t be carried over into the underworld. As they reach the further shore, Davis looks back and sees this light blink out. The untended lamp soon gutters and dies. This could also be read as a symbolic indication that the mainland which they have left behind is now the land of the dead. As previously mentioned, the isle of the dead has, in the inversion of wartime, become a refuge of the living. There is also a sense, which Davis automatically shrugs off, that their return passage has been shut off.

The light of the land of the living in its last glimmering

Art Holiday - Part Two

Kettles Yard in Cambridge is a small gallery and house just outside the centre of the city. The house was knocked together from three old cottages, with a further extension added later, by the art collector and former curator of the Tate Jim Ede. He lived here with his wife Helen from 1958 to 1973. His art collection hung upon the walls, part of the usual furnishings and objects of daily life. The house was opened as a gallery whilst they still lived there and remained as it was after they had moved out. It offers a unique opportunity to view works of 20th century art in a sympathetic domestic setting. The abstract works, in particular, seem to really gain from being juxtaposed against the domestic objects and ornaments, which are in themselves often things of beauty. The spiral of pebbles on the circular wooden table, graded according to a chiaroscuro scale of grey, have been adopted as a kind of house logo. The adjoining purpose built gallery shows temporary exhibitions, some retrospective and some by contemporary artists, as well as hosting concerts of chamber music and jazz.


We’ve been here on many occasions, but this time the current exhibition followed through on its promise to turn things ‘Upside Down/Inside Out’. The house where Ede’s collection normally hangs was given over to ‘interventions’ by artists who had exhibited over the past 14 years, thus giving it something of a ‘best of’ flavour. This idea was particularly effective if you were familiar with the usual arrangement of the contents of the house, as these changes disrupted the experience to which you’d grown accustomed, making you look afresh at objects and spaces which you may otherwise have ignored through casual recognition. The house is well known for the way the light pours in and plays over its objects and furnishings throughout the day. Kathryn Faulkner makes use of this by creating images on photographic paper imprinted by the spectral shadows thrown by sunlight through various glass objects. Literal impressions of light. Judith Goddard put up a fixed door of transparent Perspex barring entrance to Helen Ede’s old bedroom, and set up a security camera inside to sweep it eye across the enclosed space. The slowly moving image could be watched on a tv screen set up on a chest of drawers. Its clinical digital picture seemed both somehow more sharply real and less present than the actual space it reproduced. You half expected to see a digital HD spectre walk across the screen, reluctantly reconfigured from the past and reduced to a diminished virtual existence; a gigabyte ghost. It reminded me of Gwen John’s Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, with its empty chair by an open window, and I found its similar record of absence extremely moving.

The table where the radio sat

My favourite piece was probably David Sheppard’s interactive sound art object, a re-tooled old wooden radio from the pre-transistor age. This allowed you to create your own live mix of music by manipulating the three control knobs for band, volume and tuning, which gave access to different sounds, rhythms and pitch variations. Both Stockhausen and John Cage had incorporated the spontaneous sounds of tuned radios into their music, so this was perhaps a nod to their memory. In any case, it was great DIY avant-garde composition fun.


The walls of Kettles Yard are painted white, the better to reflect the shifting shadows cast as the sun measures out the hours of the day. Michael Craig-Martin’s painting of one alcove room in a violent shade of magenta was thus particularly startling, and difficult to ignore. He had removed all the furniture whilst he redecorated, replacing it all again in exactly the same place, save for one chair, which he painted in relief outline on the wall. His intervention was perversely effective for being so wholly out of character with the rest of the house, and for being hidden in a well chosen nook which meant that you came across it unexpectedly.


Along the lengthy gallery of the extension, Douglas Allsop had strung his ‘Blind Screen’, fashioned from lengths of video tape. These shimmered gently in the breeze, which I admit was caused by my blowing on them. The use of what is now an all but redundant recording medium as the material for this installation could have been just another piece of weakly punning conceptual art, but its shiny, shimmering and inherently fragile surfaces made it visually appealing in itself. The mystery of what further images were locked into its magnetic depths merely added to its allure. Just opposite, Mary Lemley had set up a small monitor atop an empty glass-fronted cabinet, which slowly reeled through photographs of every object in her house. This was interesting enough for a while, particularly in the juxtapositions it threw up between, say, an art book and a more practical item such as a mug. It did seem a bit redolent of the ‘let’s look at me’ art of recent times which reflects or perhaps just seeks to be a part of the modern malaise of celebritocracy.

David Jones, Vexilla Regis (1947-8)

The converse side of this disruption of the normal display in the house was the use of the gallery for pictures which had been displaced, alongside further works not normally on show. This was a good opportunity to see these displayed in a more conventional gallery space, and grouped together by artist. There were several prints and etchings by David Jones, including his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was interesting to mentally compare with those of Mervyn Peake and Gustav Dore. Also on display was his Vexilla Regis from 1947, one of my favourite Kettles Yard paintings. This is a complex interweaving of Roman and Celtic landscapes with a plethora of pagan Christian symbolism. There are Roman temples and what looks like a statue of Diana in a woodland grove alongside a stone circle and a Glastonbury-like mount. The three trees in the foreground, one topped with a Roman legionary eagle, are the trees of Calvary, the foremost of which has flowered into a riot of life at its crown. It is a wonderful picture which really needs to be seen close up to appreciate its dense detail. You can imagine Jones himself, his eyesight failing, leaning close to the surface of the paper to create these thickets of tangled symbolism. It was probably actually better seeing it in this context than in its usual position in the house, where the confined space and domestic furnishings militate against a closer and more detailed inspection.

Elizabeth Vellacott, Bare Trees and Hills (1960) in the house

Winifred Nicholson, Primula and Cyclamen (1923)

Jones worked at least partly in pencil, and there were also several beautiful works in pencil by Elizabeth Vellacott, whose depiction of trees is particularly fine. She somehow manages to convey the mysterious haze which hangs silently over some afternoons. The musical equivalent would by Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, in whose particulate layers of drift you can almost synaesthetically see the dancing motes of dust in beams of sunlight. Winifred Nicholson was represented by one of her many flower paintings and by a seascape of paradoxical solidity. The flower paintings always seem to convey the idea of some kind of threshold. The flowers on the windowsill and the landscape beyond suggest a boundary between inner and outer worlds, of ordered experience and unmediated nature. The flowers themselves, contained in vases, bottles or jugs, positioned on this threshold, are somewhere in between. Their subtly variegated colours could act as a symbol of the act of vision with which we perceive and interpret the world, and of the inner eye through which the artist seeks to transform it in order to express some underlying essence. Nicholson would, in later life, experiment with the use of prisms on the windowsill in order to split light into its spectrum, cracking it open to reveal and examine its contents.

Ben Nicholson, Christmas Night (1930)

Ben Nicholson, at one time married to Winifred and later to sculptor Barbara Hepworth, is represented by abstract work which is more in line with European and Russian currents of modernism and constructivism. But there is also an earlier work from 1930, a domestic interior of his bedroom at night. Painted at a time when his life was in a state of transition, having left Winifred and his children, it has a rather melancholy feel of loneliness. His monogrammed brush set takes on a monumental presence in the emptiness of the room, his occupation of what would traditionally have been considered a primarily female space serving to emphasise his solitude. Outside, the church is swallowed by the darkness, and a horse (or a donkey?) looks longingly in at the light of the domestic interior from which it is excluded. The viewer’s perspective is from the interior of the room, but the curtain is drawn back to frame a wide expanse of the winter night. The depths of this cold darkness threaten to engulf the fragile comforts of the home.

Christopher Wood, Building the Boat, Treboul, 1930

Another Kettles Yard artist featured in the gallery, a friend of both the Edes and the Nicholsons, was Christopher Wood. His Building the Boat, Treboul from 1930 is very familiar from its customary position in the house, and was one of many pictures painted during his stay on the Breton coast. The half-built boat resembles the beached skeletal ribcage of a beached whale, the woman in the foreground sadly cradling a plank of wood as if she is carrying away a relic. The painting seems haunted by death, although this maybe a judgement influenced by the knowledge of Wood’s own tragic passing shortly thereafter.

Christopher Wood, Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat (1926)

Wood was born in Liverpool, but took the traditional artist’s passage over the channel to France, and it was here that he established himself in the fevered atmosphere of the golden age, the ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 20s. The portrait ‘Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat’ is of one of the young men in Jean Cocteau’s circle. Wood himself shared a studio with Cocteau in 1924/5, and it was through him that he met Jean and Jeanne Bourgoint, a brother and sister with a very close bond. They were to become the models for the central characters of Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles, later filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Wood’s full length portrait depicts Jean as frankly sensuous, with his relaxed, crossed-ankle posture, red lips and blue-eyed gaze. This sensuality is further reflected in the Persian cat which he strokes, and which shares his blue eyes. The cats claws are spread out and digging into his leg, however. Maybe Wood is alluding to a vicious and parasitical side to his charms, of which he is all-too conscious. He is like the cat in that he expects to be taken in, fed and loved but feels under no obligation to give anything in return. There may even be an element of jealousy here, Wood digging in his own catty claw. The rumours amongst Cocteau’s gossipy hangers-on were that he was now favouring Jean over Wood. The visible fragments of sketches in the background of the painting suggest that Wood abandoned it before applying the finishing touches, perhaps tiring of the subject and of the Parisian demi-monde in general. What remains, however, is the perfect portrait of the gilded and offhandedly destructive youth of the period. Sadly, it was during this period that Wood, and Jean’s sister Jeanne, picked up and addiction to Cocteau’s drug of choice, opium (and Cocteau has, fairly or unfairly, been accused of wrecking a succession of lives at this time). Neither was able to shake their addiction, and both ended up committing suicide, Wood beneath the wheels of a train at Salisbury station.

Alfred Wallis, Boats Before a Great Bridge (c.1935-7)

When living in St Ives, Wood became friends with the ‘naïve’ artist Alfred Wallis, moving into a house a few doors away from him. Many of Wallis’ paintings, confined by the space of the scraps of card or packing-case wood which he used as canvasses, can be found in the upper gallery of the house extension, and several made it into the gallery exhibition too. Wallis intuitively reached some of the same compositional distortions of perspective which modern artists were adopting, the flattening out into clearly separated blocks and shapes of colour, perhaps making a virtue out of technical limitations. Both Wood and Ben Nicholson, and through them others, took inspiration from him and his untutored and thus, to them, somehow purer eye. Wallis made the break with tradition that they were seeking by virtue of being unencumbered by knowledge of it. The fact that he was a retired man (an ex-fisherman) who painted out of personal need rather than with a commercial imperative made him all the more appealing.

Jim Ede at Kettles Yard

Wallis is now seen as an important, if eccentric, English (Cornish, if you prefer) artist, largely, but not solely, for his influence on others. It is interesting to speculate as to how others like him have existed in parallel with the recognised figures of art history, their work lacking the patronage of well-placed artists which Wallis’ received and destined for the bonfire after their deaths. There is something very satisfying about seeing these vivid paintings on their scraps of discarded packaging hanging on the whitewashed walls of a modern gallery. No conceptual commentary behind the use of material, it was just what lay to hand. They are so very far from a small Cornish fishing village at the corner of the country, and also from the commodified ArtWorld ™ which often seems to exist largely to reflect upon itself and its market processes. The exhibition, and Kettles Yard in general, serve to remind us of some great British artists, but also that they didn’t exist in isolation. Their work may have been distinctively British, but it was also fully aware of and had strong links with the European movements. This is no little Englander art. Ultimately this is a place which retains the atmosphere of a home, and as such is a tribute to the openness and generosity of Jim and Helen Ede, who did so much to accommodate and encourage the artists who were also often their friends.

Gothic Pastorale

Essentially in order to direct your attention to the Gothic cinema season at Bath beginning this week and the accompanying notes at From Out of the Shadows, here are a couple of pictures by Samuel Palmer which have always reminded me of the woodland setting of The Company of Wolves. I watched the dvd with the accompanying Neil Jordan commentary recently and was happy to discover that he cited various artists as being a particular influence on the look of the film, but singled out Samuel Palmer as being the primary source of the film's painterly look. See if you agree.

Art Holiday - Part One

Cecil Collins - Fools and Angels

The Divine Land (1979)

Our recent fortnight’s break gave us the opportunity to see a couple of excellent exhibitions in the course of our wanderings about the capital and the bicycle-filled streets of Cambridge (and if you want a top-class, old-fashioned wicker bicycle basket, this is the place to come). In the Central St Martin’s School of Art, just off the busy streets of Holborn, with their old tram underpasses currently undergoing reconstruction, there was an unmissable exhibition of Cecil Collins’ art entitled Angels and Fools. The line of posters on the walls outside set his painting The Divine Land, with its plump golden angel hovering above a veil-like mountain, against the steady and noisome stream of cars and busses. Inside the building, two rooms were given over to his paintings and graphic works. This was an exhibition which was evidently a labour of love for its curators, who showed a real personal passion for and even pride in the art on display. This was, after all, the college where Collins taught for many years; And he was an immensely popular teacher. When asked to retire in 1975, a move motivated by internal politics and a desire to dictate the manner of art which was deemed ‘official’, students and fellow artists wrote so many letters in support that he was allowed to stay on.

One of the ladies in the gallery remembered her own experiences as his pupil with real affection. He encouraged the view of art as a spiritual pursuit, something which put him at odds with the more materialistic concerns of the modern postwar generation. His work is certainly the opposite of pop art, focussing on the personalised expression of universal archetypes rather than the celebration of the ephemera of a consumer society. It didn’t share the political engagement of the 60s and 70s, either, preferring to partake of a wider sense of morality which saw the source of conflict in the divided self. This was also indicative of the strongly religious, if non-denominational, nature of his art, which put him definitively beyond the pale at this time.

Procession of Fools (1940)

Collins stayed true to his vision throughout his life, as the consistency in the themes of the works here displayed testifies. He stood outside of contemporary movements, his brief confluence with surrealism which saw two of his works displayed in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 alongside Dali and de Chirico soon diverging once they discovered the religious content of his paintings; he was summarily exiled, something which probably didn’t trouble him too much. His visions were too solid, too real to fit with the intellectual play of Freudian subconscious spectres and abrupt juxtapositions which was the matter of the Surrealist imagination. His work didn’t share the violent sexuality which haunts much surrealist work, either. If his work did have any affinity with the movement, it would be more likely to be with the neglected works of its female exponents, such as Dorothea Tanning. He can loosely be placed in a tradition of visionary British artists springing from William Blake and Samuel Palmer; but only in the sense that they focussed their inner eye through the expression of a personal symbolic transformation of figure and landscape. The outer world re-shaped by the inner.

It’s interesting to discover some of the artists with whom he formed friendships over his lifetime, themselves often mavericks and outsiders viewed with a suspicious eye by the artistic establishment. Through them, we can sense some kind of alternative stream of British art and culture running through the mid twentieth century, aware of the modernist orthodoxy and happy to use elements of it without buying into it wholesale. He met David Jones, the poet, engraver and illustrator whilst he was living with Eric Gill in his commune at Pigotts, near High Wycombe. The two followed a similarly idiosyncratic path, although Jones’ pictures, with their complex Celtic intertwinings of pencil, ink and watercolour drew on established forms as subject matter, weaving classical, Arthurian, Welsh and modern figures and landscapes together to form a cross-cultural and temporal tapestry (you can see one of these paintings later in the Kettles Yard exhibition). Eric Gill himself might also have been a fellow spirit, but whilst they enjoyed intense discussions, Gill’s autocratic nature and, shall we say, personal interpretation of the Catholicism to which he directed his art precluded any close friendship. His blank refusal to address Collins’ wife Elisabeth directly also marked a view of women wholly antithetical to Cecil’s own views (not to mention being incredibly rude).

Cecil and Elisabeth at Dartington

Paul Nash was a good friend (see a previous post for more on this artist) and at one point wanted Cecil to write the text for the first book of his art to be published. Nash’s imbuing of familiar landscapes such as the Whittenham Clumps with the potency of a personal symbolism can be likened to the inspiration which Collins took from the hills, rivers and trees around their homes in Totnes and Dartington in Devon. Cecil and Elisabeth were first drawn to this area by the artist Mark Tobey, then director of the art studio at Dartington Hall, the progressive centre for arts and rural crafts set up by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. Tobey shared with him his interest in Eastern cultures and religious traditions (he practised the Baha’ai faith himself). He also became friends with the potter Bernard Leach, whose absorption of zen ideas of rough form and the acceptance and incorporation of ‘imperfections’ into the work were also influential. The poet and translator Arthur Waley, an expert on Chinese culture, was also a regular at the Hall at this time. One of the books he translated was Wu Cheng En’s Monkey, a classic 16th century tale of a pilgrimage of Fools which may well have impinged on Collins’ consciousness.

Collins also met the painter and set designer Hein Heckroth, who had come over to England with the Ballet Joos, who had emigrated en masse to escape Nazi Germany. Heckroth went on to be a designer on some of the great Powell and Pressburger films of the post-war, such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. When he was interned as an enemy alien during the war, Collins took over his position as the director of the art studio. The dancing figures of his fools may reflect the presence of the ballet at Dartington, and there’s something very familiar about Heckroth’s dancing newspaper figure in The Red Shoes. Collins began to teach and Dartington and found he was really very good at it. When he took up a teaching post at the Central St Martin’s School of Art in 1951, he shared the life drawing classes with Mervyn Peake, with whom he became good friends; a good job, really, since apparently Peake tended to let him get on with it whilst he sat in a corner working on Gormenghast. Both shared a belief in the primacy of the artistic imagination, in its ability to transform the world of perception into a rich landscape of personal and universal archetypes (and you can see how Peake portrayed this through his poetry in a previous post).

Not your average teachers - Cecil and Mervyn in self-portraits

Collins was also friends with several musicians, and music plays an important role in some of his work. An early work of 1933 is titled The Music of the Worlds, and the ‘matrix’ works which he produced in the late fifties and early 60s approach the condition of improvisation in their initial spontaneous composition. He had met Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears during their visits to Dartington, and the couple became lifelong enthusiasts for and collectors of his works. He met Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1972 and the two enjoyed each others company so much that the composer would always invite the artist to sit in at rehearsals when he came into the country. When Collins designed stained glass windows for the church of St Michael and All Saints in Basingstoke, John Tavener, another musical friend, wrote an anthem especially for the dedication service.

The Artist's Wife Seated in a Tree (1944)

But the greatest influence on Collins was his wife Elisabeth, to whom he was married for 58 years, from 1931 to his death in 1989. She was much more than a muse. A significant artist herself, with two paintings included in this exhibition, she represented for him a feminine ideal. Not that he was putting her on a pedestal (although he did seat her in a tree) or reducing her individuality in any way. His portraits of her are filled with a calm self-possession, a remote detachment combining with a beatifically benevolent regard. Gazing at these pictures seems to bring you into contact with some ideal state of the soul, of balance within the world. Of Happiness, in short (several Collins pictures are entitled The Great Happiness, often depicted as a sunlike circle towards which subjects gaze). These pictures reflect both the artist’s love of his wife and his realisation of a more universal quality in her which he is also drawn to discover in himself, and to which the well known painting (a copy of which hangs in our flat) The Artist and his Wife from 1939 attests.

The 88 works in this exhibition (which include two a piece from Elisabeth and from Mark Tobey, alongside portraits and a poem from others) represent most of the major periods and themes of Collins lifework. Here are some that were displayed:


Fool Picking His Nose (1940)
Collins acknowledged the idea of the Fool originating with a suggestion from Elisabeth. The Fool, as the title of the exhibition would suggest, became one of his signature figures. The Fool represents many things, but is essentially an innocent, who views the world directly and joyfully, unclouded by the intervention of intellect or the souring of experience. He is very much in the mould of the characters depicted in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, then. Here, the Fool picks his nose not out of any calculated disrespect for the religious authority. He is oblivious of the Bishop’s presence and simply doesn’t recognise his power. That nose needs picking, and picking now. The Fool walks under his own personal raincloud in a cartoonish fashion, but he doesn’t seem concerned by his soaking. George Harrison’s Beatles song Rain expresses a similar disregard for the exigencies of the weather. Collins uses watercolour washes over the ink drawn figures, but later Fool pictures would concentrate on the calligraphic pen lines alone. The Fool would become a more spindly figure, the twisting lines of his limbs suggesting a constant state of movement, life as a dance. As such, he is congruent with the author Charles Williams’ view of the Fool in his 1932 novel The Greater Trumps, which draws on the depiction in the traditional Tarot deck. The calligraphic effect with which the Fools were portrayed could become extremely complex and dense, as if they contained whole worlds of particulate flux and wavelike motion within their fragile frames. As in The Procession of Fools from 1940 (see above).


Sleeping Figure (1942)
This shows how the feminine form and the landscape become congruent. The sleeping figure could be the river between the banks. Her hair echoes the curlicued lines of the tree foliage, her limbs its branches. She fits into the contours of the land. Is it dreaming of her, or she of it. Both, maybe.


The Bride (1944)
The female form once more seems to merge with the tree trunk, as if it were a dress she was putting on. The hills undulate like a surging sea. The fish, with all the symbolism, Christian and otherwise, which it bears, lies calmly (dead?) in a protective circle of water, onto which the rays of the sun pour in a very physical rain. Indeed, the sun seems to be almost spitting its rays out into the land. In the background, some enormous glowing form seems to be emerging out of the mountains. Or perhaps it is the mountain itself which is being transformed.


The Island (1944)
A grove within a turbulent sea, with its own tutelary spirit. A place of sanctuary. From the waves at the side, it almost seems as if the island is moving, charting a course through this endless ocean. Typical broad-based Collins trees here, which seem to be an emergent form of the land, rather than something separate which is rooted down in it.


Elizabeth, the Artist’s Wife (1950)
One of his portraits of Elisabeth as feminine ideal, here with moonlit night landscape, an open book (the book of wisdom?) and the shining light of the Grail, a feminine symbol, behind. The veil drawn back from the window suggests the threshold between inner and outer worlds. Hymn to Night (1951) draws a similar parallel between the feminine and nighttime worlds. Again, the girl’s hair echoes the curving trails of foliage and river. The hands are crossed over the breast in a gesture which could be sacred, or could be adolescent modesty. It’s interesting to compare this with Edvard Munch’s Puberty, in which the young girl covering up her nakedness is menaced by a looming mass of dark shadow, which seems to be about to engulf her. Here the landscape offers no such threat, and the girl is calm (and once more emerging from a tree) and ready to go out into the nightlands, illuminated by the enormous moon and watched over by the drifting angel who may be an emanation of it.


Eternal Bride (1963)
This comes from the period when Collins was working with what he termed the matrix. This was a form of spontaneous composition in which he opened himself up to the chance workings of unconscious creation by crossing the canvas with sweeping brush strokes (sometimes even going so far as to close his eyes). He would then let his conscious mind contemplate the results and draw out the figures or archetypes which he perceived in and between the lines. Here, the feminine figure walks through a fiery landscape cradling the grail. At her feet lies a translucent egg and in the background some kind of forge sparks with violent creation.


Nocturne (1987)
A late painting soaked in the gradations of a single blue tone. The figure is very Marian, with her traditional veil of blue reflecting and reflected by the rest of the painting’s palette. Is her veil the colour of the moonlit night or is the moonlit night the colour of her veil? Here she is haloed in moonlight, which seeps out hazily from behind cloud. Again, Collins equates the feminine with the night and the moon, a traditional archetypal correspondence. The halo before her face also suggests a hand upon which the head rests in contemplation. The lines stretching out to a curved horizon behind her, following the outline contours of her body, seem to measure out some sort of plain or ploughed field.

Cecil Collins is an artist who means a lot to us. We take the train to Totnes and Dartington frequently and walk along the river next to which Cecil and Elisabeth lived and up to the Hall where he taught and worked, through the landscape which inspired so much of his work. Seeing all these pictures gathered together, some seen before in books, some at High Cross house in Dartington was an intense and powerful experience, like meeting someone in the flesh who you’ve previously only seen in photographs. It felt as if it was a similarly personal response which drew the curators to mount this exhibition. Hopefully it marks a further stage in the rediscovery of Collins as an important and individual British artist, part of a parallel tradition of visionary outsiders who stand outside the canons of orthodox art histories.

Next, to Cambridge and Kettles Yard.

Hammer Goes Sweeney: The Satanic Rites of Dracula

Here are some notes for a film which will not now be shown in the upcoming Gothic cinema season in Bath (stay tuned for further news). But rest assured, you will still be able to see the Count struggling to adjust to a life in London in Dracula AD1972. Meanwhile, I present, for your edification and entertainment:

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA.


The Satanic Rites of Dracula is a sequel of sorts to Dracula AD72, reprising the contemporary London setting and reintroducing a number of the characters who managed to survive the previous film. There is a feel that this could have been developed into an ongoing series, a supernatural Sweeney. Inspector Murray is back on the case, called in by MI5 and soon turning to his old cohort in occult crimebusting, Lorrimer Van Helsing, when its diabolical nature is revealed. Van Helsing is once more portrayed by Peter Cushing with absolute authority and immaculate articulation. Granddaughter Jessica soon enters the scene, tray of tea in hand, and is greeted with a ‘nice to see you again’ by Murray, who discreetly refrains from noticing her metamorphosis from Stepahanie Beacham into Joanna Lumley. William Franklyn, who persuaded millions that Schweppes was the acme of urbane sophistication in the 70s, plays secret service man Torrence, and gets to air his sardonic tones and arch glances with customary flair. Freddie Jones, playing Van Helsing’s old college friend Professor Keeley (‘not the Nobel Prize winner?’, Murray conveniently asks) exudes his usual aura of sweaty intensity and twitchy paranoia in his role as the bio-chemist who is seduced by ‘the thrill of disgust, the beauty of obscenity’. Most importantly, of course, this is Christopher Lee’s last appearance as Dracula, the role which he definitively made his own, and whose darkly seductive presence is the default image of the Count in the minds of many.

Joanna joins the team

Director Alan Gibson once more indulges his penchant for wide-angle pans of London scenes, and in the title sequence, these are overlaid with the slowly growing shadow of a caped form, clawlike hands extended in a predatory grasp. The figure of Hammer’s Dracula has at this point become such a readily recognisable icon that it can be reduced to its charicature elements in a simplified silhouette. Therein lies the problem in doing anything new with the character. The expansion of his dread shadow over London lets us know that the Count will no longer be confined to islands of Victorian gothic revival. He’s now as modern as a neon Cinzano ad over Picadilly Circus. Writer Don Houghton continues to mix generic elements in order to create a fresh context within which Christopher Lee’s Dracula can operate. The film opens with a modish Satanic ritual, that titillating mainstay of 70s horror on film and tv, and on the the taste-free covers of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and his emulators which stuffed the revolving wire bookracks found in chemists and railway newspaper booths. Representing the fag end of the sixties counter-culture, this was the inverse side of the hippies’ woolly-minded engagement with eastern philosophies. The sexual revolution had filtered through into the mainstream, and immediately adopted the old poses of devilish libertinism, taking its cue from arch-suburbanite Mick Jagger’s performance of Sympathy for the Devil. The flipside of such lubricious Satanist shenanigans were the slew of ‘comedies’ partaking of the supposed permissive society with leering and beady-eyed desperation. Hammer’s biggest moneyspinner of the 70s was, after all, its big screen adaptation of On the Buses. And if you want a film emblematic of the tenor of the times, look no further.

Wide-angle pan and 'don't mention S%!%n' US title

The henchmen in Satanic Rites are like the Hell’s Angels hired for security at the relentlessly grim Altamont festival, where an uneasy Jagger had sung his devil’s music in front of a crowd seething with violence. Having been momentarily seduced by the utopian anarchism of the Summer of Love, the glamour has now worn off, and they’ve gone back to cracking heads, whilst retaining the kaftans as a relic of their brief dalliance with notions of peace and love. Van Helsing alludes to the twilight following the brief dawn of this era of creativity and optimism when he refers to the ‘cult of blood’ being ‘more potent and addictive than heroin’. It would be left to New York directors Paul Morrissey and Abel Ferrara to draw out the metaphoric link between the blood addictions of vampirism and hard drugs in Blood for Dracula and The Addiction. Dracula himself provides the voice of the Establishment crackdown when he declares that the foundation which his Corporation backs is formed of ‘a group of us that is determined that the decadence of the present day can and will be halted’. He’s lying, of course, but the promise of a new fascistic order is an irresistible lure to those for whom such a world is a secret ideal. The Georgian country house in which this rite takes place looks not dissimilar to the one to which John and Yoko retreated in the latter days of the Beatles (it is in fact High Canons at Well End in Hertfordshire), but its period façade hides the very latest in surveillance equipment and the general banks of technology with blinking lights and flickering dials essential for any supervillain’s lair. We are soon plunged into the world of the espionage thriller, replete with silencers, stake-outs and stunt motorcycle crashes. Dracula almost comes to be identified with the Cold War threat of Eastern Europe, which provides the fearful subterfuge fuelling such spy movie fare.

Christopher's magic act

Dracula has clearly learned his lessons from his experiences in AD1972, and has made his fortune in property. The mist-enshrouded steel and glass skyscraper at whose summit he is discovered is the new gothic edifice from which he exerts his influence, its domineering tower emerging from the site of the demolished church of St Bartolphs, within whose stone walls he had seemed confined. This is now commemorated with a blue plaque, a symbol of the continuity with a landscape of the past which has been transformed into a new anti-sanctuary, sympathetic to the tenor of the times. This modern capitalist fortress represents an adaptation to new models of power far more dynamic and far-reaching than the feudal patterns of old. Having had to make do in the past with lording it over the local village peasantry, Dracula is now able to take advantage of modern technologies and business practices to expand into a globalised world. With holdings in chemicals, oil and banks, he has created a corporation around himself, adapting swiftly to a new business class system which credits a CEO with far greater authority than a Count. A suitably anonymous name, DD Denham, acts as a front, as well as a nod to the Denham Studios where many of Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films were made. The triple D displays a hint of a towering ego, as well as providing a justification for the prominent signet ring, which is always ferreted away along with his ashes or a sample of dried blood subsequent to a climactic disintegration. Using a combination of his wordly and supernatural power, he recruits four pillars of the establishment, including a Lord Carradine, presumably a nod to horror legend John, who had taken over Lugosi’s cape in the later Universal Dracula films. These will be his four portly horsemen of the apocalypse, who will spread disease and famine across the world. The Count’s goals are apocalyptic, and place him once more in the position of a very biblical Satanic figure.

When Van Helsing and Dracula finally come face to face, it is as two archetypal adversaries who recognise that they are locked in an eternal struggle. ‘Denham’ awaits expectantly, sat behind a large executive desk, an interrogatory lamp blinding Van Helsing’s vision. In this new castle of gothic modernity, Dracula hides in a dazzling blaze of electric light, the white circle of the desk lamp the misplaced halo of a fallen angel. Christopher Lee gets to try on an East European accent, perhaps in an attempt at achieving the faithful adherence to Bram Stoker’s original conception of the character for which he was always lobbying. Thankfully, he soon reverts to the imperiously aloof and coldly authoritative tones which he had first displayed in Terence Fisher’s 1958 film. It always seemed a shame that Lee was subsequently denied all but the most simplistic dialogue and the occasional evil declamation, since the aristocratic hauteur of his delivery perfectly offset the hissing bestiality which he also conveyed so well. Here, his demonic nature by now taken as read, urbanity is cast aside and he gets to spit lines such as ‘my revenge has spread over centuries and has just begun’ with undeniable relish.

Hey! Leave Joanna alone

In the manner of a Bond villain, a role which Lee was to adopt two years later in The Man With the Golden Gun, Dracula eschews the opportunity to swiftly and efficiently dispose of his nemesis. He needs him to witness his ultimate triumph in this battle between dark and light. As an embodiment of evil, or as the central figure in a successful series of movies if you want to be more prosaic, Dracula can never die. He has by this stage been through many a definitive death and perfunctory resurrection and on this occasion an explanation for his return is considered redundant. It can really just be taken for granted now. The headquarters of DD Denham is a forbiddingly spartan place, a 70s corporate wasteland which seems to actively repel the idle passerby, rather like Canary Wharf. Its eerily depopulated air of desolation is a preview of the world which Dracula aims to create. The lonely nightwatchman is like a guardian at the gates of an underworld which has gone overground, a ferry replaced by an express lift in this architecture of modernised myth. The building is a giant tombstone, a monumental mausoleum in which Dracula stokes the Armageddon which will represent his ultimate triumph and also serve to end his cursed existence.

The final Passion

Christopher Lee’s final bow takes the form of an inverted Passion, once more reflecting the Manichean nature of the struggle in which good and evil, darkness and light, need each other’s existence against which to define themselves. Van Helsing has earlier given a quick run through of the traditional methods of vampire despatch, a list into which the debilitating effects of hawthorn has been casually inserted, in the hope that we might not note its swift addition to the standard repertoire. Inevitably this comes into play, and the Count ends with his crown of thorns, Van Helsing driving a spike into his side like the soldier at the foot of the cross. The Count will rise once more, Don Houghton pushing generic hybridity to new heights of absurdity in the martial arts co-production The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Peter Cushing will gamely reprise the role of Van Helsing, this time the original Victorian model, relocated to a nineteenth century China of dubious historicity. But the Count is not Christopher Lee, it is an absurd imposter and not the real Dracula at all. So as he once more frame-dissolves into a pile of quivering jelly and windblown ashes, this really is The End.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Nineteen

The Curse of the Cat People - Part Four

One saved memory

The end of the Christmas period is marked by the taking down of the tree. Miss Callahan is here too, as she often is now. Is she another isolated soul, seeking refuge. Or maybe Ollie’s eye has started roving again. It indicates that the seasonal spell in which the family becomes a sacrosanct circle is over. Amy throws pine branches on the fire, re-enacting some long-forgotten pagan ritual. We are reminded of Irena throwing leaves on the garden fire, and once more it is apparent how much Amy is learning from her. Miss Callahan is reminded of Twelfth Nights gone by, of ‘burning pine and mummers plays’, whilst Alice remembers ‘St George and the Dragon, all kinds of crazy sword dances’. Even in this all-American setting, there are echoes of old traditions, which summon up a vestigial sense of connection with the passing of the seasons, the cycles of the year. As these memories prompt a look back through old photographs, one falls out, and Amy picks it up. It is the one of Irena which Ollie kept. Her lullaby theme appears on the soundtrack, this time in a minor key, suggesting that the harmony and happiness which Amy and Irena have bought to each other may be about to end.

The empty garden

Amy impulsively says ‘daddy, you know my friend too’. This immediately triggers a reaction from Ollie. It must have been obvious that Amy was still playing on her own for much of the time, and that a deal of imaginary creation was a necessary part of such solitude. But as soon as the shadow of Irena is re-introduced, reminding him of what has become in his mind her self-destructive retreat into imaginary fears, he feels compelled to act. He speciously declares that he thought that she’d ‘forgotten that dream life of yours’. A glance out of his workshop window would evidently have disabused him of such a belief. Now that her pact of secrecy has been broached, Amy affirms that Irena ‘plays with me in the garden all the time…she’s there whenever I call her’. Ollie marches her out into the garden, which is snowbound and empty, and feels rather desolate.

Amy sees Irena under the tree, but Ollie tells her there’s no-one there. He makes this statement of aggressive certitude without taking the trouble to actually look, or ask Amy where she can see her. He tells her to look again, and that if she still says that she’s there, ‘I’m afraid I shall have to punish you’. This is a very prescriptive way of getting someone to adhere to the truth which you want to establish. There is no attempt at establishing why that truth might be valid. Irena is still there, and puts her finger to her lips with a worried frown. This is why she made a pact of silence with Amy. She was protecting her from Ollie. But Amy takes after her in finding it difficult to lie. We see a reverse shot from behind Irena as Ollie leads Amy inside. This shot seems once more to emphasise her substantiality. As well as suggesting that she is watching as her cherished duty of care over Amy is ceded to Ollie’s coercive and impatient parenting, it shows that she remains watching from her garden bower after they have turned their backs on her to go inside. By adopting her viewpoint, the camera affirms her reality.

Alice is uneasy about Ollie’s punishment and retreats to the kitchen. When Ollie returns, looking broody, Miss Callahan is still there, alone in the room. She is evidently now quite at ease in this household, and she and Ollie seem quite close. She starts quoting poetry at him, even though he’s evidently not the literary type. This is the first time we’ve had any of Lewton’s customary literary quotations in this film, references to Sleepy Hollow notwithstanding. Miss Callahan seems to be trying to use literature to rouse Ollie’s dormant sense of empathy with his daughter, to make him see the world as others perceive it and break through his stubborn intransigence. She cites a couple of couplets from Stevenson’s The Unseen Playmate from A Child’s Garden of Verses: ‘When children are playing alone on the green/In comes the playmate that never was seen/When children are happy and lonely and good/The friend of the children comes out of the wood’. This is a poem which takes a very benevolent view of such imaginary playmates, portraying them as guardian figures who watch over solitary children. The unseen playmate’s association with the green, the wood, the laurels, the grass and the caves also gives him/her the same pantheistic connection with the manifest spirits of nature that we find in Curse of the Cat People.

Miss Callahan, with her professional knowledge and experience of childhood behaviour, defends Amy’s creation of an imaginary friend and the creative mind of which it is a sign. But Ollie rejects her informed point of view and returns to what is, for him, the crux of the matter; his self-justifying revisionist view of Irena’s fate. It is notable that Alice has retreated from the situation, once more taking a non-interventionist approach to her daughter’s upbringing. Perhaps she has become resigned to Ollie’s intransigence and ability to justify his behaviour in any situation by now. He is certainly a lot less confrontational with Miss Callahan, and the confidences they share remind us of the similar intimacies he let Alice in on in Cat People, the prelude to his rejection of Irena. ‘I’ve lived through something like this before’, he states, a comparison of immense hyperbole. Speaking of Irena, he says ‘you don’t know what happened to her because she told lies to herself and believed them’. Once again, he chooses to forget the words he uttered at the scene of her death: ‘she never lied to us’. He proceeds to spin a fiction which, whilst self-critical on the surface, serves to portray himself as the victim. ‘Everything I did was wrong…in the end she went completely mad…she killed herself’. The sought for sympathy is duly proffered, as Miss Callahan says ‘you can’t let this stand between you and your child’.

Upstairs, Irena comes up to see Amy, who has been left crying on her bed. But everything has changed. Irena’s explanations of why she came to Amy now have a valedictory air, the feeling of a final summation. ‘Out of your loneliness you called to me and brought me into being’ she says, ‘so that your childhood could be bright and full of friendliness’. Now she bows to Ollie’s coercive power, which insists upon the imposition of a dogmatically rationalist worldview. She is not here to battle for control of Amy, merely to respond to a need, which only incidentally fulfils her own. Realising that she has no inherent right to be here, she is willing to immediately accept her banishment. Her parting remarks aim to alleviate Amy’s feelings of desolation, and it is a parting for which she has already partially prepared her through drawing her attention to the transience and transformation observed in the passing of the seasons. ‘You’ll remember me for a while, mourn a little, but then you’ll forget, and that is as it should be’. These are words for a future Amy, for they are insights far too bittersweet for a young girl. Amy says that she’ll never forget and that she’ll follow her, but Irena replies that ‘no-one can follow me’. This suggests that she will be returning to an existence of isolation and solitude. It is a place to which Ollie and Alice’s erasure of her from memory has consigned her. Irena walks backward into shadow, just as Amy had first walked backward into the Farren house, another place of forgetting. The camera observes her retreat whilst gliding sideways across the room. It moves behind a chair and when it emerges from this occlusion, Irena is gone. The curtains blow inwards, the snow falls and Amy is alone in her desolation.

Leaving the garden

Downstairs, Ollie is as sensitive as ever in his attempt to maintain the comfort of his certainty. ‘But you’re a teacher, not a parent’, he splutters. She immediately puts him in his place, telling him that he, a designer of ships, has no special qualifications to raise children. ‘I’m a teacher, I’ve studied children’ she says, asserting her authority. When she tells him that ‘unhappy and frustrated children like Amy build companions for themselves as means of escape’ he immediately contrives to interpret this to his advantage, stubbornly asserting ‘you see, you agree with me’. His primary instinct is always to prove that he is right. Whilst they argue about her, for all the world as if they were a couple engaged upon the discussion of private matters from which Alice has politely absented herself, Amy has put on her coat and gone out into the empty garden, calling for Irena. Irena’s theme plays on the soundtrack, with ominous strings now providing uneasy harmony. She goes out of the gate, leaving the protected space of the enchanted garden, and heads out into the wild winter woodland. This is the primal region of chaos and danger, the fairytale realm into which innocents like Hansel and Gretel and Little Riding Hood wander. If the garden is the protected world of childhood, then the land beyond is the world of confused adult emotion and responsibility. It is a world also represented in the film Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s Freudian recasting of fairytale matter. Here, the forest surrounds the peasant village beyond which the pubescent heroine, Rosalie, wanders ever more widely as she emerges from childhood. Irena’s parting words to Amy have suggested that she must one day leave the garden of childhood, but it is much too early as yet. She is a lost babe in the woods, blundering blindly through the snow.

Miss Callahan is telling Ollie that he must be Amy’s friend so that she won’t have any need of an imaginary one. Alice finally returns, and the two women, with their differing ways of negotiating their ways around Ollie’s self-righteousness, convince him to go upstairs, something he agrees to only with a gruff conciliatory ‘I’ll go up and see if she’s gotten to bed alright’. Finding her gone, he and Alice pursue her, following her footsteps in the snow, whilst the pragmatic Miss Callahan calls the police. Amy walks with stumbling speed along a path through the woods, a wintry reminder of the sun-dappled path which the children had skipped along at the start of the film. As she comes to a small stone bridge across a brook, she pauses, cowering with fear. Julia’s citation of the Sleepy Hollow legend reverberate in her mind, transforming the bridge into a another transitional space filled with menace and mortal terror. ‘And if you stand on the bridge at the wrong hour, the hour when he rides by, his great cloak sweeps around you’. We hear the sound of beating of hooves swiftly approaching from around the corner, only to have them revealed as the juddering thud of a loose snow-chain on the wheel of a car. This is the traditional Lewton ‘bus’, the moment of bogus shock which provides a mechanical jolt and release of tension. Here, it is used in an interesting fashion, however. Realistically, we are perfectly well aware that this is not the phantom horseman approaching. But, as with the scene in Amy’s bedroom immediately following Julia’s relation of the tale, we are asked to empathise with her terror, to share her fear. Effectively, if her fears become manifest, then we will experience them with her as they appear on the screen. We will share with her the distorted perceptions of madness. After the car has passed, she runs off in a panic, straying from the path. ‘Don’t stray from the path’ is a tenet which is always held up as a dire warning to characters in fairytales, but it is something which they have to do in order to assert themselves as individuals and as adults. Rosalie eventually does so quite deliberately in Company of Wolves, going against the repeated warning of her grandmother.

We cut from Amy’s aimless wanderings through the stormy night to the interior of the Fallon house, the focal point to which she is inevitably being drawn. Barbara says ‘I hate this storm’, in a highly strung voice. ‘I don’t hate the storm,’ Julia half replies, more in rhetorical than conversational mode. ‘It blows beyond me’. This statement could effectively apply to all atmospheric conditions, indeed, to reality in general. With a sense of something obsessively re-iterated, she dreamily intones ‘it was on a night like this that Barbara died’. Once more, Barbara tries to insist upon her own reality, pleading for recognition. Julia blankly declares ‘everything you say is a lie. You are a poor lost woman’. This is the first time that she has displayed anything approaching pity for Barbara. It is a form of recognition which is almost worse than her usual cold repudiation. Calling her a lost woman also draws a parallel between her and Amy once again. Amy is at this very moment a lost girl out in the snow. Perhaps there is a slight nod to the lost boys of another fairy tale of parental neglect, Peter Pan. These are the female equivalent, the lost girls. Julia’s assertion that it was on a night like this that her daughter died also brings a sense circularity, of recurrence to the events currently unfolding, and links the Farren and Reed households. The Farren house is a shadow of what might be. Julia’s denial of her daughter’s existence is almost like a surrender to her worst fears. Maybe at some time in the past, she became so terrified at the idea of something happening to her daughter, and at the idea that she was unable to safely raise her, that her mind recast that fear as reality, just to exorcise it. This scrap of pity which she has been thrown is a bitter offering for Barbara, and she reacts with coldly introverted violence. ‘You’re always worse when that little girl’s been here. If that child comes here again…I’ll kill her’. The casual determination with which she voices this vow makes us believe in its sincerity.

Amy stumbles through the storm, and finally collapses against the bole of a tree, at the end of her endurance. But this is a tree of the wild world outside of the garden, and has none of the properties of the one which has stood guard over her protected realm. Ollie and Alice are now searching with the state troopers and their dogs. Ollie guiltily says that if they find her, he will believe her and trust her. He has waited for the crisis to come to fruition before deciding to act. But will he do as he says, or will old patterns be re-established? Will he once more rewrite events as he had done with Irena? Amy, half-buried in the snow, hears the dogs barking and lights flashing through the trees, and her primal fears are awoken. The wolves are coming! She staggers off towards the house where the wolves’ female equivalent lives. The fear of the wolves drives her towards the cat, which is waiting to pounce, like the stuffed specimen on the branch.

Shutting out the storm

Julia is asleep on the couch when she is awoken by Amy’s feeble knocks at the door. The house and its inhabitants always seems to be asleep or sleepwalking until some visitor from the world outside comes to bring it to life once more. Mrs Farren limps to the door, looking more worn than ever, and greets the shivering figure of Amy with a sympathetic ‘poor little girl’, a direct echo of her ‘poor lost woman’ to Barbara. Snow swirls in through the open door and the glass of the gas lamps tinkles in the wind, the lights flickering. Mrs Farren struggles to shut the door, but it blows back open. The world outside has entered and refuses to be excluded any more. The storm no longer ‘blows through’ Julia, but must now be confronted. The stage is set for a repeat performance of the night Barbara ‘died’. Julia must now accept some level of responsibility for the safety of Amy, a displaced confrontation with the guilt and fear which she has retreated into a lifetime of fantasy to evade. ‘I’ll have to hide you’, she says, as if this were a game. Amy is to become part of the house, perhaps like one of the dusty and lifeless ornaments in the room behind the curtain. Julia’s empty stage.

The unclimbable stair

Julia decides on a hiding place. ‘We can go upstairs. There’s a little room under the eaves’. She is guiding Amy towards becoming a nascent madwoman in the attic, the guise under which she herself had first invisibly made her presence felt. But the curtains blow inwards in a menacing fashion, like the classic shrouded ghost. The house has been a mausoleum, a place of the dead where emotions are suppressed and confrontations stubbornly evaded. Now it is coming to life as the upheaval of the storm outside, which is an externalisation of Amy’s inner turmoil, is transferred inside, bringing things long buried scrabbling their way violently to the surface. The lights flicker and their glass casings rattle as if they are about to burst into savage incandescence. Mrs Farren hauls herself up the stairs, but the exertion, both emotional and physical, is too much for her and her heart gives out. Amy is frozen, not wanting to leave her dead body, and with spectral curtains flapping frantically both above and below to ward her off. We see a shadow rising from below, and then Barbara slowly ascends from her crypt-like quarters. Her face is a fixed mask of hatred, a dead face with no movement of animating emotion. She halts at the foot of the stairs, bracketed by two large candles, as if this is to be the culmination of a pre-planned ritual. Tears stall in her eyes as she sees her dead mother. ‘Even my mother’s last moments you’ve stolen from me’ she says, immediately beginning to revise memory to displace the blame. Amy has taken nothing from her since her mother gave her nothing in the first place. She calls Amy down like a predator mesmerising its prey into meekly submitting to its fate.

Barbara-Irena

Amy, her voice quivering with terror, calls for her daddy, as if new priorities are already beginning to impose themselves, but he is not there to help. So she calls for ‘my friend’, who appears to have abandoned her. As she looks down at Barbara, Irena’s benevolent form becomes superimposed over her. Amy’s fear immediately dissipates and she descends the stairs and calls Barbara ‘my friend’. Barbara’s hands, rigid and clawlike, stretch around her head as if to throttle her, but Amy repeats the words ‘my friends’, as if to create the condition through verbal repetition, and hugs Barbara to her. There is a close up of Barbara’s face, and her hands relax and hold Amy. Her face loses its rigidity and sinks into a sorrowful look of self-awareness. This is a moment and a moment only of human warmth and contact before she retreats once more into the prison of self, but it is a moment which she can hold onto, and which may one day help her. Amy cannot ‘save’ Barbara in the way that she has Irena, but she can give her a small crumb of hope to hold onto, a hint of unconditional love to set against the contemptuous pity which was all her mother left her with. The hounds approach followed by the others, and Barbara slowly backs away, separating from her double, the shadows of past and future possibilities now diverging.

Ollie comes in and sweeps her up in his arms, saying ‘I thought we’d lost you. I thought we’d never find you again’. He is talking of an actual physical loss, although he had already almost as good as lost her in a less tangible fashion. As they approach their home once more, Ollie makes a solemn declaration which echoes the pledge which Amy made with Irena. ‘From now on you and I are going to be friends. I’m going to trust you. I’m going to believe in you. You’ll like that won’t you?’ This is like the obverse of the litany of ways in which she will try to please her father that Amy reeled off as her birthday wish. Rather than requiring her to act and think in ways which he prescribes in order to be a ‘good girl’, he is now promising to indulge her in an equally unquestioning way, which is not necessarily any better. But the gesture is important, and some equilibrium will hopefully be achieved in the future. But now, the snow is melting, the long freeze is coming to an end. Ollie is asking ‘is your friend in the garden? Can you see Irena now?’ He is asking to be allowed into Amy’s world of imagination, rather than attempting to block it off. Irena is indeed there once more, having now been given official permission to return. Ollie’s recognition of the validity of Amy’s creative imagination is also a reconciliation with his memory of Irena. ‘Yes, I can see her’ says Amy, and Ollie concurs; ‘I see her too darling’. He doesn’t really, of course; He’s not even looking in her direction. But she does live inside him again, and he can see her once more in this sense, as memory clears from the fogs of self-justification. Amy smiles at him, and they all go in. It is her reconciliation with her father which is all-important. Alice looks on from the sidelines again. This may reflect the autobiographical element of Lewton’s reflection on his relationship with his own daughter as much as anything. This was the relationship which was important to him.

As they all go in, the camera positions itself so that we see them from the point of view of Irena, watching from over her shoulder so that her presence is solidly registered. The bole of the tree is in the foreground. Once they are inside, she fades away from view, as if merging with the tree. She has selflessly negotiated a position whereby she will be needed less and less. But she waits in the tree, a guardian spirit from the old world waiting to be summoned once more.

Irena watches

Next, the first of the Boris Karloff historical European ‘trilogy’, Isle of the Dead.