Scala Forever

Last Saturday saw the beginning of a lengthy season of films and events celebrating the golden days of repertory cinema in London, and in the Scala Cinema in particular – Scala Forever. There’s a fantastic trailer for the season, made by Justin Harries of the Filmbar 70 (cult film and a pint of beer – I like the sound of that) which filters various clips through a dizzyingly unfocused two-toned tint, which both emulates the off-centred visual style of the Scala programmes and gives a wry nod to the imperfect nature of some of the old Scala prints. The Hilarious opening quote, in which a chap styled for the lounge, with cravatte daringly worn outside his shirt, stridently declares ‘this is my happening and it freaks me out’ is taken from Russ Meyer’s 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and was directly quoted by Mike Myers in the first of his Austin Powers films. There follows a delirious eyeflash progression of images from Zombie Flesh Eaters, Once Upon a Time in the West, Valerie and her Week of Wonders, Zardoz, Pink Flamingoes, Black Sunday, Dawn of the Dead, Seconds, Deep Red, Jules et Jim, After Hours, Glenn or Glenda, A Night At the Opera, King Kong, A Clockwork Orange, and Aguirre, Wrath of God, with the comic end title music from Dawn of the Dead to round it off. Last Saturday's edition of Jonny Trunk's OST show on Resonance fm was also dedicated to the season, and to the kind of films the Scala used to show, and should hopefully turn up on the station's podcast archive page sometime soon. Of all the old repertory cinemas in the capital, from the Everyman in Hampstead and the Ritzy in Brixton, to the Electric in Portobello Road and the Riverside in Hammersmith, the Scala seems to be remembered with the greatest affection. A ramshackle and barebones operation, it offered more than just a wildly eclectic programme of cult, classic and arthouse films. The Scala was an experience, a clublike hangout and for some a welcoming and familiar home from home – a church of cinema which was open to all believers and seekers alike. The Scala Forever site has already begun to amass an anecdotal drift of fond memories, and a book gathering together further reminiscences is promised for everyone who buys a ticket to any of the season’s screenings. I was one of the Scala regulars in the mid to late 80s, and see no reason not to add to this nostalgic outpouring with my own remembrance of the place where I received my formative film education (a significant improvement on my parallel formal schooling, and with a longer-lasting impact).


I would travel up from the south-eastern suburbs several times a month to see double or triple bills and occasionally test my endurance with a Saturday all-nighter. I would eagerly collect the latest programme, which was a highly desirable artefact. It folded out into a four A4-panelled poster, which would be attached to my bedroom wall. These posters were fabulous graphic works in themselves, assemblages bringing together cult actors and actresses and thrillingly evocative stills and posters, often printed in striking shades of gold, green or red. I would cut out various of these pictures to add to my own ever-growing collages, where Marlene Dietrich would find herself mingling with Peter Cushing, Daffy Duck with Bob Dylan. I still have a couple of panels of this wall-spanning, vaguely obsessive product of teenage toil, those fragments now all that remains of the old programmes. The Cinema Museum promises to put some of them on display on its Scala Day on 17th September. You can also see one from the Scala’s latter days accompanying the Lost World of the Double Bill article in the August 2008 Sight and Sound. The circular entrance on the corner of Pentonville and Caledonian Roads immediately gave a sense of occasion, of crossing over into a magical space. You got your tickets from an attendant in an old fashioned booth, a small enclosed room which looked rather cosy. Climbing the turning stair, you arrived in the lobby where people gathered before going in to see the film or refreshed themselves in the interval with a cuppa or something stronger from the serving hatch at the far end. At some point during my Scala years, a couple of artists who I believe styled themselves the Urbanites painted the walls and ceilings with a mural depicting famous film scenes (or scenes which would be familiar to regular Scala-goers), all reduced to witty stick figure form. You could crane your neck and pan across the barrelled expanse of the ceiling, scoping in an eccentric pattern, connecting one to another and thus creating your own random double and triple bills. You can see some pictures of the lobby and the auditorium over here.

Walking up another short set of steps, you entered the auditorium halfway up its fairly steeply graded slope. You could either continue upwards into the larger seated area or head down past the partition barrier to the lower depths where, a couple or rows at the top apart, it was a question of sprawling on the tiered, carpeted steps and gazing up at the screen. Whichever direction and mode of disportment you opted for, you had had to stumble along in near total darkness. I remember performing a spectacular trip and forward sprawl on one occasion, a piece of slapstick whose perfection could only be achieved through complete lack of intention. Sometimes, if you arrived a little early and didn’t fancy lingering in the lobby, you could wander in and catch the latter stages of whichever favourite was just reaching its climax. I remember opening the doors and entering the auditorium to hear Charlton Heston cry ‘you maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you!’, as he fell to his knees on the shore and stared out at the half-buried ruin of the statue of liberty in Planet of the Apes. Walking in during a scene of a well-loved film was a real thrill – an anticipation of a pleasure which would be more fully and completely enjoyed later.

The recurrence of particular films, either in the same programme or in changing combinations, meant that you could become thoroughly acquainted with their every detail and nuance; a precious and rare opportunity in the early days of video when the availability of less mainstream fare was very limited (and even when issued, limited by the unsatisfactory nature of the medium). Films to which I returned again and again became like familiar landscapes, complete with the scratches and jumps etched into the prints, and other peculiarities particular to the Scala’s copies. The white onscreen subtitles accompanying Cocteau’s Testament D’Orphee became completely illegible whenever they weren’t superimposed over a darker area of the projected scene. Entering the cinema and seeing one of these films or programmes was like coming home, or perhaps returning to a regular holiday haunt. You could lose yourself for hours, for whole days or nights in here. No-one was about to kick you out if you decided that you’d like to sit through that whole triple bill again. Indeed, some did effectively make their home there. Richard Stanley, the director of Hardware and Dust Devil (and contributor to the upcoming anthology picture The Theatre Bizarre) writes about his Scala experiences in Dying Light: An Obituary for the Great British Horror Movie, a piece published in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley’s 2002 critical anthology British Horror Cinema. He recalls coming to London at 16 years of age, where he ‘took refuge in those aisles…as much for warmth as anything else…The Scala became my sanctuary, my alma mater, a house of dreams redolent of an opium den with its haze of psychoactive smoke and its delirious, half-glimpsed denizens. I would camp with my bedroll on the front tiers of the red-lit, cat-haunted auditorium’. Not sure about the smoke haze; as I recall, the auditorium was a no-smoking area, although a vague waft of aromatic herbal scents would drift across during films such as Easy Rider or 200 Motels (Frank wouldn’t have approved). Later, exhausted and bankrupted by the production debacle of his would-be magnum opus Dust Devil, Stanley once more found himself ‘taking refuge in the only sanctuary left to me: the Scala cinema, where Jane Giles allowed me to spread my bedroll in a room above her office’.

Others have recalled the cinema as being a refuge in which outsiders and misfits could take up regular residence in an otherwise unforgiving era, and also a place in which revelatory experiences were possible. Peter Strickland, who spent years struggling to produce his first feature Katalin Varga, remembers (in the November 2009 issue of Sight and Sound) ‘when I was 16, I went to the Scala in London to see Eraserhead. It was unlike anything I was accustomed to…Suddenly here was something that conveyed a state of mind. The cinema smelled of cats, dope and beer. The Northern Line ran underneath. It was a huge epiphany’. The August 2008 Sight and Sound contained a celebration of the Scala and the lost era of repertory cinema with an article written by Jane Giles, a former programmer at the cinema who went on to head of acquisitions at Tartan films (and there’s no doubt that the Scala would’ve been at the forefront of the discovery of the new wave of Asian horror films, the likes of Ring, The Grudge and Audition). Giles recalls how ‘the cinema’s extraordinary atmosphere affected the audience profoundly, acting on their senses in a way that is hard to imagine in more mundane or domestic environments’. She also quotes Derek Jarman, writing in 1989, declaring that ‘The Scala is one of very few, and I’m afraid, a shrinking number of venues where it is possible for a young audience to see our film history. Any threat to the cinema is indirectly a threat to the industry as a whole, for here new audiences are educated and a whole generation that is active in our cinema has found its task’. It’s certainly a statement which is backed up by the experiences of the young Strickland and Stanley. Sight and Sound editor Nick James, in his editorial for the June 2007 Grindhouse issue, he remembers how ‘at the Scala…in the 1980s I was one of the many watching scratchy prints of the likes of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Pink Flamingos, Reefer Madness, Detour, The Warriors, Thundercrack!, and Assault on Precinct 13’. He also remarks, in the August 2005 Sight and Sound, on the intense experience of seeing related films one after the other, recalling a film noir all-nighter featuring three Robert Mitchum films (Out of the Past, The Big Steal and Where Danger Lives). ‘It was a formative cinematic experience for me’, he writes, ‘not least because I drifted off occasionally so the three films intermingled to become one unforgettable epic that was like a paradigm for the best of Mitchum’s early films and for noir itself’.

The auditorium had its own particular acoustic imprint, as if the building were subtly altering the films to make them its own. Every one became a Scala film – they were never quite the same elsewhere. The speakers may not have been of the highest quality, but there somewhat crude and echoing sound seemed perfectly suited to the old place, adding a certain time-haunted quality (instant hauntology before its time). The sonic mix was occasionally added to by trains which periodically rumbled by beneath, also giving your seat a bit of a William Castle tremble. Although these were probably just on the City Thameslink line headed for Blackfriars and beyond, I believed at the time that they were Northern Line underground trains, and that there was therefore a connection with a whole world of subterranean tunnels (perfect if you were watching Death Line or An American Werewolf in London). There was also a cat who wandered along the backs of the seats, sometimes brushing the nape of your neck with its tail, which could be rather unnerving, particularly if you were watching The Tomb of Ligeia, Cat People or, indeed, The Black Cat at the time (but pretty cool if you were watching Breakfast at Tiffanys). There were never any luxuries like heating or air conditioning, but somehow the ambient temperature always remained comfortable. You could always keep your coat on if it got a bit chilly.

As Nick James notes above, the cinema was particularly associated with camp, trash and gay cinema. Many of the films could be said to fall within the catch-all definition of a chapter title from Kim Newman’s recent update and rethink of his survey of contemporary horror Nightmare Movies (first published when the Scala was still up and running, and indeed christened with a launch party at the cinema in 1988): The Weirdo Horror Film or: Cult, Kitsch, Camp, Sick, Punk and Pornography. The films of Russ Meyer, Walerian Borowczyk, John Waters, Paul Morrissey and George Kuchar were often all of the above at once. Kuchar’s Thundercrack! (these films often require that exclamation mark in the title) seems to be one which brings back particularly strong memories in the old Scala crowd. It certainly appears to be something which few have been able to forget (even if they wished they could). Newman notes that ‘since it joined Pink Flamingoes on the late-night cult circuit, Thundercrack! has become the most walked-out-of film this side of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale’. Couples shared intimate moments during these screenings (and Jane Giles recalls the popularity of the women-only Russ Meyer nights) watched over by the oversized tutelary spirits of Divine, Joe Dallessandro or Tura Satana, celluloid gods and goddesses of love and genii loci.

My Scala favourites tended towards the fantastic and classic elements of their repertory. I always went to see their Cocteau triple: La Belle et La Bete, Orphee and Testament D’Orphee, and If…, which was usually shown with Blow Up and, if I was lucky, Performance, if not, Godard’s unbearable Sympathy for the Devil. I also caught any Powell and Pressburger films which were shown (they were just then being rediscovered, with new prints being released) and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Solaris, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. All of these remain firm favourites to this day, and I could probably quote chunks of them verbatim, or play back scenes with some detail in my head. The sublime Christmas angel double-bill of Wings of Desire and It’s a Wonderful Life was also essential, a highlight of the season. I also saw a rare John Cassavetes double bill of Gloria and Love Streams, having been introduced to his films at an ICA season in the mid 80s. Love Streams (John’s last film proper) remains incredibly hard to get hold of these days. A Hitchcock/Jimmy Stewart triple of Rope, Vertigo and Rear Window introduced me to the wonders of Hitch beyond Psycho. You really haven’t seen Rear Window properly until you’ve watched it on the big screen, and seen the blinds slowly pulled back at the start to unveil the view which you’ll be gazing at alongside Stewart for the rest of the film. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques was always a good, white-knuckle double (hmmm, or was that at The Everyman – memory has a tendency to compress and compact these experiences). Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage was definitely on at the Scala, however, and offered one of two scenes which I found myself having to look away from (the other being Martin’s first drinking of blood in George Romero’s film). A beautiful piece of dreamy black and white surrealism, it was one of those films which was perfectly in synch with the setting, the slightly unreal feel of the place enhancing its mood.

The Scala showed a fondness for 60s music and counterculture, and I saw many films from that era, which I preferred to the one in which I was growing up. Easy Rider was a regular, sometimes shown with Roger Corman’s The Trip, also featuring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (and with Hopper going characteristically off-script, inserting a ‘man’ between every other word). The Monkees’ Head was a real surprise, one of the best films from that era, self-mocking and full of wild pop surrealism and fantastic music (and Frank Zappa leading a large cow across a backstage lot). I remember a psychedelic all-nighter in which it played with Zappa’s incomprehensible mess 200 Motels, the rather dull Grateful Dead Movie, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (which vied with Sympathy for the Devil as the worst film I saw at the Scala – although I find both interesting these days for their background detail and the attitudes which they convey, as long as I have the remote to hand for fastforwarding and rewinding) and the Magic Roundabout feature Dougal and the Blue Cat. The beat connection was also made with a triple bill linked together by the presence of Allen Ginsberg (always the great connector and bridge between different scenes): The documentary Whatever Happened to Jack Kerouac, the Kerouac narrated Pull My Daisy and DA Pennebaker’s Dylan doc. Don’t Look Back. Pop 60s science fiction was represented by Barbarella and Thunderbirds Are Go, the latter with music provided by puppet versions of Cliff and the Shadows (spot the difference, an unkind observer might note). I think I may have seen a 2001 and Silent Running double too. I don’t see why I wouldn’t have. Nic Roeg was always a favourite of Scala programmers, and I recall seeing Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don’t Look Now and Performance in various combinations. There were also spaghetti westerns and eastern epics. I first saw Once Upon A Time in the West at the Scala, and also fell under the spell of A Touch of Zen. If I recall correctly, I also saw the amazing kabuki-style ghost story compilation Kwaidan here. There were also Woody Allen triple bills from his mid-Mia late prime, small black and white gems such as Broadway Danny Rose, Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Horror was a big focus of the Scala. Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley had established the Scala at the new venue (it had previously been based in Charlotte Street) and also used it as the base for their new distribution business Palace Pictures (which would eventually also expand into production). Palace acquired the rights to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, and its huge success (aided no end by the indignant furore which it stirred up as an exemplar of the ‘video nasty’) set the tone for the gaudy comic book horrors of the rest of the decade. I remember seeing several examples at the Scala, where they often received their premieres: The Return of the Living Dead, Re-Animator, Evil Dead 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (during which the audience let out a rousing cheer at the return of Heather Langenkamp’s character). Although enjoyable enough at the time, few of these made any long-lasting impact or made you want to go back and see them again. It was the dawn of the disposable multiplex horror movie, a mindless ghost train thrill ride with added entrails and buckets of blood liberally thrown in, and a line-up of good-looking but characterless teenagers lined up for the slaughter. The films which I did return to at the Scala were those of George Romero and David Cronenberg. Romero in particular featured often in the programmes, and I remember an all-nighter featuring Night, Dawn and Day of the Dead alongside Martin and (I think) Creepshow. Dawn of the Dead is another film which has the indelible imprint of the Scala for me.

Whilst Romero largely went off the radar during the latter half of the eighties, Cronenberg was still producing distinctive films, with a more mainstream sheen than before, but still with his characteristic mix of distanced intellectualism and an insistence on the physical nature of being: the likes of the Fly and Dead Ringers, both of which were released during my Scala era. I didn’t see either of those at the Scala, but I did (if memory serves) see what remains, to my mind, his best film, Videodrome (in which he splices and grafts elements of JG Ballard, Philip K Dick and William Burroughs and possibly also gives a nod to Harlan Ellison with the name of one of the characters) and also caught up with some of his earlier films, from his breakthrough picture Scanners (with a post-Prisoner role for Patrick McGoohan) to earlier efforts such as The Brood (featuring Oliver Reed in a role of typical sotto voce intensity), Rabid and Shivers. Dario Argento was the third of the feted 70s horror auteurs to feature at the Scala, but I’ve never enjoyed his films, which always seem to centre around lingeringly brutal misogynistic violence. Their undoubted stylishness and visual panache can’t distract from this essentially repugnant core, a depressing component of too much modern horror, and never justifiable no matter how often Poe is invoked. An auteur in terms of ideas if not in terms of polished technique, Larry Cohen was also a Scala mainstay, with satirical and sardonic films such as Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff retaining the social bite of the genre in the 70s, and also bucking the 80s trend by featuring well-drawn and adult characters.

The Scala building itself has an interesting and colourful history. Its construction was interrupted by the advent of the First World War and it became a workshop for the manufacture of aircraft parts for the duration. After the armistice, it became a labour exchange for the returning soldiers. It finally opened as a movie house in 1920, and was run as the Kings Cross Cinema under the management of Gaumont British Pictures. It was damaged during the blitz, and re-opened after an extensive refurbishment as the Gaumont in 1952. The Odeon took over from 1962 to 1970, when the general downturn in cinemagoing resulted in its led to it following the depressing trend of many London cinemas and switching to a programme of softcore porn. This didn’t work either, however (Soho cinemas had the benefit of local, Met-assisted economies of scale) and it returned to showing mainstream films in combination with a series of late night concerts. This memorably included a 1972 performance by Iggy and the Stooges, at around the time that they were recording Raw Power in London. The photos on the cover of that LP are all taken from the Kings Cross Cinema show. The live music came to a halt in 1974, with local residents perhaps understandably proving none to keen on the idea. The cinema, like so many others in the early and mid-70s, bowed to the inevitable and, offers from Bingo chains not forthcoming, closed down.

Then, five years later, came the really bizarre interlude in the building’s history. It was re-opened as a primatarium (a word I suspect the new owners made up), a hokey ‘ecological’ exhibition with a sorry collection of caged monkeys as its central attraction. Such a throwback to carnivalesque hucksterism would be unthinkable now, with its blatant exploitation of the animals involved, and shows once more what a wholly different country the 70s were. Richard Stanley, in his dying light article, remembers ‘a vast ape house, painted jungles crawling across its walls and its sepulchral auditorium filled with Astroturf. When I last looked there were still deserted cages in the basement and if you inhaled deeply enough you could just catch the faint hint of musk and dried urine, a safari smell that took me back to my earliest childhood’ (he was born in South Africa). Unsurprisingly, the primatarium didn’t last long, and Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell brought the building as a place to rehouse the Scala and their nascent Palace Pictures business in 1981, opening in July. Their first film, in acknowledgement of the previous use to which the building had been put (and in regard to what Stanley said above, perhaps intending to take advantage of the lingering aroma to present it in its first smell-o-rama version), was King Kong, which was also the film which launched the current Scala Forever season. The Scala was open for 12 years, until it was finally scuppered by a law suit from MGM over its illegal screening of A Clockwork Orange. I had though that this was a self-destructive final act, a deliberate decision to go down in a final blaze of glory (and possibly provide the publicity to reverse the absurd ban on a film which anyone could see with very little effort) given Michael Heseltine’s decision to plough the proposed cross channel rail link through the area. But Stanley claims that it was all down to a treacherous projectionist who bargained his way into a cushy job at the MGM preview theatre, betraying his former employers by testifying against them in court. A great postcard advertising the trial fund appeal (wittily titled droog in the dock) shows the Scala cat rising atop the rooftop dome of the corner tower in paws raised in playful feline fashion – a kitty Kong. In truth, the cinema had been struggling for some time in the face of Major’s recession. It’s time had come, whether through redevelopment, prosecution or simple bankruptcy. It finally closed down in May 1993. With a self-conscious gesture towards circularity and closure, its final film was King Kong.

The Scala may be dead, but its spirit has risen again. The range of venues in this seasons suggests that repertory cinema is once again in hale and hearty health in the capital, enabled by the ease and portability of digital projection. The old school cinemas are represented by the Phoenix in East Finchley, the Rio in Dalston, the Ritzy in Brixton and the Riverside Hammersmith. The Phoenix is covering the musical side of things with a double bill of the 1958 Newport festival film Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Peter Whitehead’s swinging sixties pop ‘concerto’ of studio and concert footage combined with interviews with the likes of Julie Christie, Mick Jagger and David Hockney (and, more bizarrely, Lee Marvin) Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. The Rio provides a programme of experimental cinema achieved with mixed levels of success, combining Jean Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour (surely crying out to be combined with Fassbinder’s Querelle, an old Scala favourite) with Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (as experimental as they come), and following it with the component parts of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle. Anger codified the Scala trash aesthetic in his book Hollywood Babylon, and so is an appropriate choice on several levels. The Riverside showed a Marx Brothers double to kick off (A Night At the Opera and A Day At the Races) and is following it up with a series of classy billings which reflect the spirit of the Everyman more than the Scala. The Ritzy meanwhile will be providing a pairing of two of Hitchcock’s blackest films, both of them centring around brutal stranglings – Rope and Frenzy - before moving on to two coolly observed depictions of psychotic breakdown within prescribed interiors: Polanski’s Repulsion and Kubrick’s The Shining.

There are a number of interesting smaller venues of varying degrees of permanence or peripateticism. The cinema at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn is offering a juicy double bill of Theatre of Blood, which gives Vincent Price full reign to camp and thesp it up, and Bunuel’s Viridiana. Both feature anarchic and murderous bands of tramps, and both have scenes centring around blasphemous and ill-mannered feasts: Viridiana with a Church-baiting restaging of Leonardo’s Last Supper, and Theatre of Blood with a Shakespeare-mauling restaging of one of the gruesome scenes from Titus Andronicus, in which Robert Morley is force-fed his two ‘babies’ – pampered poodles. The Lexi cinema, ‘the UK’s first social enterprise independent boutique digital cinema’, which is housed in what looks like a small church hall lodged between two suburban semis, is teaming up with the Screen on the Green to put on outdoor screenings, including Some Like it Hot and The African Queen in Holland Park and Richmond Park. Whirled Cinema (nice punning name) is located in what looks like a very cosy railway arch (no.260) near Loughborough Junction in South East London and will be showing a great double bill of recently rediscovered films set in London, Bronco Bullfrog (1969) and Private Road (1970), the latter of which stars Withnail and I writer and director Bruce Robinson. Close-Up cinema meanwhile takes over the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club to show the first four episodes of Kieslowski’s Dekalog series (the first of which I found deeply upsetting, so be warned). The Portobello Pop Up Cinema is a ‘microplex’ situated in an underpass beneath the Westway, and as if to offset the grey, Ballardian concrete surrounds, it will be showing Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranites, a sumptuous feast of intoxicating colour and obscure yet compelling symbolic tableaux. The Atomic Bark (and check out their excellent site here) film club takes up residence in Ryan’s Bar in Stoke Newington for what promises to be an excellent evening, with Fellini’s Toby Dammit section from the 60s Poe anthology Spirits of the Dead, featuring a dissolute Terence Stamp, providing a prelude for Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga, not a version of the Russian legend of the witch with a chicken-legged hut, but a weird and warped 1973 Italian giallo (described by Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies as ‘enormously boring’, but maybe it has some redeeming features) – and all for free, too!

It is the Roxy in Borough High Street which is becoming the proxy Scala for the duration, however. It is restaging a few themed all-nighters, including an 80s horror bill which includes Re-Animator, Basket Case, Humanoids from the Deep, Slugs (my god, they made a film of that – presumably with the tag-line ‘an agonisingly slow death’), and Phantasm (the original which, in its crazy way, achieves moments of delirious surrealism and even the odd bit of reflective sadness as it circles around the unacknowledged loss of an elder brother). The zombie all-nighter looks a bit of a treat, too, ranging from the sublime (Val Lewton’s majestic I Walked With A Zombie and Romero’s gore spattered epic Dawn of the Dead with its glacially paced core of self-examining interiority) to the logic-defying Euro weirdness of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980) and Amando de Ossorio’s Return of the Blind Dead, in which the Knights Templar return from the grave (this made at a time, lest we forget, when Franco was still in power). Further horror is on offer in the form of a completely unrelated but nevertheless enticing pairing of Mario Bava’s classic gothic chiller Black Sunday with the 1973 blackly comic British movie Horror Hospital, directed by sometime William Burroughs collaborator Anthony Balch, with Michael Gough relishing his role as a demented scientist. You’ve already either seen or missed the pairing of the magical Czech fairy tale Valerie and her Week of Wonders with Juraj Herz’s 1973 gothic melodrama Morgiana, intriguingly described as ‘opening the doors on a fetid, decaying snow-globe of a world where Hammer meets Chekhov with remarkably macabre results’. One to look out for on the Second Run DVD release. There’s an interesting 70s science fiction double, with Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius brought to the screen to distinctly underwhelming effect in The Final Programme, and John Boorman creating a strange, mythopoetic future world in the hills and valleys of Ireland in Zardoz (a much-derided film which I, for one, think is great). There are Fassbinder and Herzog doubles, and Klaus Kinski turns up in the spaghetti western Grand Silence, playing with that most magisterial example of the sub-genre, Once Upon a Time in the West. Finally, there is a screening of Powell and Pressburger’s ode to vanishing British values The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a deeply moving piece of romantic conservatism which always affects me even though I don’t agree with its outlook, which should hopefully be introduced by Tilda Swinton. The whole thing ends with a screening of A Clockwork Orange on the 2nd October. Only this time, the lawyers from MGM won’t be getting on the phone.

Lee Miller

Part Two - The War and After

n.b. Lee Miller's photographs are under copyright, but many of those discussed here can be found online at the Lee Miller Archive

After the invasion of Normandy, Withers sent an eager Miller to report for Vogue on the progress of the war on the continent (she had been accredited as an US army war correspondent in 1942). Her war coverage would prove to be an apotheosis for Lee, both professionally and personally. Her photos act both as documentation and as a revealing view of the effect of conflict on the individual. The camera is not a shield, so these images marked her as they passed through the lens and were developed and magnified in the mind’s eye. She also accompanied her photos with her own reportage, writing from the frontline, which combined her sharp eye for detail with a good deal of highly perceptive analysis of what she saw around her. This included a frank account of her own emotional responses, which gave her pieces an intense and personally revealing charge. She began in the field hospitals of Normandy, focussing on the work of nurses and doctors in the medical tents, and the patients whom they were treating. One of the earliest pictures is of a soldier how had suffered extensive burn injuries. He looks strangely and inappropriately jolly, black slits for eyes and nose, and a cartoon smile for a mouth in the round balloon of bandages which inflates his head, and which turns his hands into soft boxing paws. She reported that ‘a bad burns case asked me to take his picture as he wanted to see how funny he looked’. She added ‘it was pretty grim and I didn’t focus too good’. He died shortly thereafter. The blurred focus acts as an expression of her shock, of the sudden sense of dizzy disjuncture felt upon being plunged into a zone of conflict.

Lee then moved on to join the battalion HQ of the 83rd Infantry at St Malo, which had reportedly been liberated. This proved not to be the case. There were still pockets of German soldiers defending the town. She was now reporting from the frontline of a war in progress. With her photograph of billowing masses of smoke enveloping the town across the bay like a volcanic ash cloud, darkly framed through an upstairs window, she had inadvertently captured an image of one of the first ever uses of napalm bombs. In St Malo, she met up with David Scherman, who was there as a photographer for Life Magazine. They would continue to meet and journey together across the chaos of Europe throughout the rest of the war. As they progressed through Rennes, she witnessed the humiliation meted out to those judged to have been collaborators. Her picture and description of the event display a pitiless distance from the young women involved and a ruthless objectivity in pursuit of capturing the image. ‘In Rennes today’, she wrote in a letter to Audrey Withers, ‘I went to a chastisement of French collaborators – the girls had their hair shaved although the interrogation had merely confirmed that there was evidence enough for their trial later on. They were stupid little girls – not intelligent enough to feel ashamed’. Her photo of them shows their faces fixed in blank masks of stoical endurance as the crowds hustle and jeer them along. It’s difficult not to feel some pity for them. Even if Miller, caught up in the heightened (or deadened) emotional responses of wartime, would deny them any compassion, her objective eye offers the possibility of such a response from the viewer, even with the knowledge of their actions.

Lee arrived in Paris to record scenes of wild celebration following its liberation. She looked up old friends to check that they were still alive and well, and took their pictures to testify to their endurance. Jean Cocteau looks dapper and relaxed, leaning against the wall amongst the barred shadows of the Palais Royal Arcade. In another picture, Jean Marais leans out of the window of the apartment he shared with Cocteau, flashing a winning smile at a cluster of young female admirers. Miller visited Colette in a neighbouring apartment in the Palais Royal and wrote a characterful profile to accompany her pictures. She also photographed Maurice Chevalier, elegant and unruffled on the balcony of Louis Aragon’s flat, freshly cleared of all accusations of collaboration. She had an emotional re-union with Picasso, who was portrayed standing amongst his paintings in his studio. Marlene Dietrich is shown seated on the floor, her stylish evening coat pooled in artfully disarrayed folds around her. Miller also took a series of pictures for an article entitled Paris Under Snow. These brought her surrealist eye into focus once more, showing statues given new contours and features by their mantles of snow. Her bawdy sense of humour comes out in her picture of an outdoor lavatory, with offputting public information posters about syphilis posted to its entrance. There’s also a shot of her own balcony outside the room at the Hotel Scribe in which she was based. Champagne bottles and jerry cans are stood in incongruous juxtaposition against the iron grillwork. There is a jerry can shaped declivity in the snow. Lee may have taken command of the one which she kept filled with a try-it-and-see cocktail of whatever alcohol had been ‘liberated’ from cellars along the way. Fuel for the road.

Her impressions and feelings whilst travelling through Luxembourg go towards making up one of her most profoundly insightful Vogue articles on the psychology of war, which was published under the title Patterns of Liberation. In this piece she attempts to describe the difficulties of adjusting to liberty, of starting the shift away from what had become ingrained patterns of thought and behaviour. She wrote to Audrey Withers, describing her assessment of the mental state of those she came across. Her conclusions might indicate that the shock of war was causing her to delve into her own psyche and conjure up some long dormant demons. ‘There were no visible signs or changes in manner’, she wrote, ‘but none the less they are ill – some kind of hidden and devitalizing microbe. The mental malnutrition of the last four years has sapped their strength’. In her article, she makes the point that liberation does not provide an instant solution to ongoing problems, and may indeed resurrect old, or create entirely new ones. ‘The pattern of liberation is not decorative’, she observes. ‘There are the gay squiggles of wine and song. There is the beautiful overall colour of freedom but there is ruin and destruction. There are problems and mistakes, disappointed hopes and broken promises. There is wishful thinking and inefficiency. There is Military Expediency. There is grogginess like after a siesta, a sleeping-beauty lethargy’. She notices the way in which language becomes expedient and adaptable during such inbetween times, hearing one of the American soldiers, upon seeing a medieval ruin, ask ‘well, I wonder who liberated that!’ This leads her to the realisation that ‘the word was bound to degenerate. Now we liberate a church when we wreck it, we liberate a bottle of brandy when we beat down a mercenary publican, we liberate a girl when we detach her from her chaperon. We liberate like we win or swipe a packet of cigarettes, or my field glasses, for instance. I got liberated last night, means I went on a particularly super drunk’.

The photograph Young Evacuee perfectly sums up the stunned confusion following the ending of occupation and the sudden cessation of conflict. A small boy with a satchel on his back sits on a pile of sacks and packing cases, as if he is just another piece of luggage. Temporary signs, quickly knocked up, point in each direction behind him. This makes him look even more lost, stuck at a junction with no idea of which way to go. His face wears an expression of weary anxiety which has a look of habitual fixity. Miller moved on from this area of uneasy liberated stasis awaiting new signs towards a more certain future. She marched with the army through the bleak wintry landscape of Alsace, icy, snow-slushed roads winding through bare woodland and the wreckage of towns. A picture of the bombed out ruins of a church, amongst the rubbled mounds of which ‘a small group of nuns clawed…searching for their padre’, is a particularly powerful depiction of the fresh destruction and accompanying human loss and confusion which she came across.

Lee received clearance to continue into Germany. From here on, her reports began to become increasingly anti-German in tone. As the Life photographer John Phillips, whom she met later in Hungary put it, ‘she hated the fascists – we were all anti-Nazi, but the strength of her hatred was unusual’. There is a barely suppressed fury, a violent rage expressed through visceral loathing (and no doubt voiced at the time with the wider vocabulary of profanity in which she was well versed and with which she could let loose outside the constraints of magazine publishing), which makes her pieces convey a powerful sense of immediacy to this day. She begins her first article from Germany by describing it as ‘a beautiful landscape dotted with jewel-like villages, blotched with ruined cities, and inhabited by schizophrenics’. As she travelled through the ruins of Cologne and Frankfurt, she continued to frame startling images of ruin. The iron grillwork of the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne forms a pattern of geometrical order which belies the fact that its central span lies in a collapsed tangle in the river beyond. In the bombed chemical plant of Ludwigshaven, the dislodged storage tanks lie cradled amongst the jagged tangle of pipes and gantries as if they themselves were the missiles which had wrought such destruction.

But it is Miller’s pictures of people from this period which are some of the defining images of the end days of the war. She records the suicides of the family of the Burgomaster of Leipzig, all looking peaceful, as if they had posed themselves for just such a post-mortem photo. These portraits of easeful, almost ecstatic death represent a perversion of German Romanticism. The soul has turned inwards and become infected with a corrupting morbidity, more in love with death than life. Miller’s fascination with the ruins of gothic churches and cathedrals make up a further composite allegorical portrait of the wreckage of the German romantic soul. In her article accompanying this tableau of death, Lee memorably describes the daughter: ‘leaning back on the sofa is a girl with extraordinarily pretty teeth, waxen and dusty. Her nurse’s uniform is sprinkled with plaster from the battle for the city hall which raged outside after their deaths’. It’s disturbingly reminiscent of some of Man Ray’s photographs of Lee herself sleeping. She arrived in Buchenwald some days after it had been liberated. The inmates here had been granted no such decorous and pictorial ends. She photographed an SS guard who had tried to disguise himself as a prisoner. He had been recognised and beaten. He stares directly into Lee’s lense, his face bloody, wide-eyed and blank with animal fear. You almost feel as if she has added a few blows herself. Another guard is shown hanging from a radiator. She remarks that ‘he was taken out on a stretcher, stripped and thrown on a heap of bony cadavers where he looked shockingly big, the well fed bastard’. Such savage feelings, no matter how immediate, honest and well justified, feel like they might also be reaching back into the past, to memories of abuse, and spitting out long accumulated reserves of bile. It’s invidious to think of war in terms of personal therapy, but any extreme experience is liable to shake the elements of an individual’s psyche into new kaleidoscopic configurations.

Miller joined up with David Scherman again as US forces met with the Red Army at Torgau. They travelled together to Dachau, where Miller confronted the full horrors of the camp there, which were more evident than they had been at Buchenwald since it had been liberated only the previous day. She pictured the bodies piled up in the long stationary train stretching towards the camp with an artistic, ordering eye which some have found inappropriate. But these were the first time many people were confronted with these images, and such an imposition of visual order and language made them more readily comprehensible. Her carefully composed shots have nothing of the blurred sense of shock found in her earlier picture of the burns victim. These pictures place soldiers as witnesses to these appalling scenes of amassed dead bodies, standing in for the stunned viewer. Miller realised the importance of creating an indisputable record of scenes which would be scarcely believable back in the USA. The article in the US edition of Vogue in which they appeared featured her subtitle, in bold lettering, Believe It! The UK edition, focussed on victory, didn’t publish these pictures, including only one close-up of skeletal bodies stacked atop one another in Buchenwald, filling the entire frame as if part of a mountainous slope.

Lee and David went on to Munich, where Hitler’s former home was now the command post of a US regiment. It was here that Scherman took an astonishing and genuinely iconic picture which is filled with immense symbolic power, Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub. She sits looking wearily out, to the side rather than directly at the camera, looking lost in thought. A small portrait of Hitler rests on the rim of the tub, and a commonplace nude statuette on the bathside table opposite. Its pose echoes her own in a photo Man Ray had taken of her a decade or so previously. She looks at it as if realising this and contemplating its meaning. She represents the life force set against the death impulse which has infected the German soul. Sitting in the bath in Hitler’s house (and water is traditionally viewed as an archetypally female element), she has occupied the inner sanctum of the country, its hidden core. Here she sits, a female presence at the heart of the masculine endeavour of war. The picture, taken by her sometime lover David Scherman, is a celebration of the body in the face of its desecration and systematic decimation. Lee’s presence, exhausted but unbowed, is a symbolic gesture of defiance in the face of the repression and self-hatred inherent in the urge towards fascism. Such conventional notions of femininity represented by the nude are counterbalanced by the heavy combat boots, in which Lee had trudged across Europe, standing on the bath mat beneath her bare arched back. The mat is filthy, as if she had wiped them thoroughly on it before taking them off. As she put it in a later interview, ‘I even washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub’. Lee also looked around Eva Braun’s apartment, noting the objects and décor which reflected a life ended in suicide mere days previously. They both went to Berchtesharden, where they witnessed the burning of Hitler’s cabin, set aflame by SS guards who then fled into the surrounding mountains. They both took their pick of memorabilia, the personal effects which she referred to in her article as Hitleriana. Lee took a fancy silver tray etched with the initials AH.

Miller continued to travel through Europe after the war was over, observing the continuing chaos, the course of justice, and the opportunistic profiteering and political manoeuvring which was played out amongst the ruins. She was present for the trial of Marshal Petain, the head of Vichy France, in Paris. Her picture of an emaciated child, a tiny figure amongst the white folds of a Viennese hospital bed, is a heartwrenching image, a depiction of the true effects of war. As she wrote to Audrey Withers, ‘there was nothing to do. In this beautiful children’s hospital with its nursery-rhymed walls and screenless windows, with its clean white beds, its brilliant surgical instruments and empty drug cupboards there was nothing to do but watch him die’. Her photograph of the dying child inspired (if that’s the right word) Graham Greene as he was writing the screenplay for The Third Man. This is the human face of the tiny dots which the blackmarket profiteer Harry Lime points out from the top of the carousel, the face from which he and those whom he represents found it all too easy to distance themselves. Miller’s picture of the soprano Irmgard Seefried posed in dramatic silhouette against the wreckage of the Vienna Opera House as she sings an aria from Madame Butterfly is an image of the human spirit continuing to find a voice. Art offering some hope for renewal.

Miller travelled on through Hungary and Romania, photographing peasants and nobility alike. She took a dramatic picture of the execution of Laszlo Bardossy, the ex-prime minister of Hungary. He stands up straight against a neatly stacked wall of sandbags on a roadside pavement, the rifles of the four man firing squad pointing in at him just a few feet away. To the side, a priest and a small crowd of craning faces bear witness to his death in the early dawn light. She also visited King Michael of Romania, who had acted as the head of the anti-Nazi coalition which had ousted General Antonescu’s fascist government in 1944. She photographed his mother, Helen, leaning on the balcony of the summer palace. With its dark and mysterious spaces, twisting wrough-iron starircases, baroque weaves of balconies and balustrades, and sculpted heads looking on from all directions, this could be the interior of the beast’s castle from Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete, a timeless world unto itself. It was a huge place, expansive enough for King Michael, no respecter of hallowed tradition, to drive his jeep down the stairs. Naturally, Lee got on with him, and with his resourceful mother too.

In Bucharest, she met once again with Maritza Lataretu, a Gypsy singer whom she had met on previous travels. The gypsies had returned to the cities once more, now that the fascists were no longer in power. Lee availed herself of one of their unique services, a bear massage. As she wrote, ‘the bear knew her business. She walked up and down my back on all fours as gently as if on eggs’. It was a mark of the fearlessness of this bold adventuress that she actively sought out a form of relaxation which involved being sat upon by a bear. The adventures were about to be brought to a halt, however, as she received a letter from Roland Penrose which was couched in the form of an ultimatum. Having given her the freedom to do as she wished within their relationship, he had now decided that enough was enough. He was currently living with a young art restorer by the name of Gigi, and intimated that this might be turning into a permanent arrangement in her continued absence. Needing some sense of underlying stability, she decided to return to England and attempt to patch things up. For a time, this involved living alongside Gigi in the house at Hampstead. Penrose seemed to find this an amenable set up, but Gigi eventually decided that it would be better if she left.

The work for Vogue continued, but Miller no longer felt any real involvement in it. The resumption of fashion and celebrity shots couldn’t seem like anything other than an anti-climax, a retreat into distracting triviality. She continued to produce some fine personal portraits of artistic friends however, such as those of Max Ernst and his wife, the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning, and Man Ray and his wife, the dancer Juliet Browner, in their new homes in America. In 1947 she became pregnant, and she and Penrose married, Aziz having granted her an instant and unquestioning divorce. Before she went into hospital to have a caesarean birth, she wrote a letter which amounted to summation of her attitude to life, set down in the event of her death. ‘I keep saying to everyone, I didn’t waste a minute, all my life – I had a wonderful time, but I know, myself, now, that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection. Above all, I’d try to find some way of breaking down, through the silence which imposes itself on me in matters of sentiment’. She gave birth to a boy, Antony. It couldn’t be said that she was a natural mother. It wasn’t a role to which she was ideally suited. When she fell pregnant, she had written in no uncertain terms ‘my work room is not going to be a nursery’. Antony would remember his nanny Patsy Murray as a closer presence during his childhood than his mother (or, for that matter, his father).

Roland Penrose, meanwhile, was busy making a steady ascent towards the pinnacle of the art world hierarchy. He established the ICA (the Institute for Contemporary Arts) in Fitzroy Street (it would move to its current premises in The Mall at a later date) in 1948. The following year, he realised another dream, that of becoming a gentleman farmer, moving to a big country house from which he could take on a leading role in the local squirearchy. He chose a place called Farley Farm, near the village of Chiddingly in Sussex, a short drive from Lewes and therefore within easy reach of London. Lee’s attitude to the prospect of a rural lifestyle was pithily summed up in her remark ‘fuck living in the country’. She went along with him, nevertheless. In the years to come, she would appear to many to be little more than an adjunct to his ambitions. A lot of the fight seemed to have gone out of her. Not that she wasn’t capable of raising sheer hell at home.

She found work increasingly difficult and felt aimless and depressed, a state of mind which led to her taking solace in the bottle. Penrose didn’t seem to care. She never told him about her experiences at Buchenwald or Dachau, just as she never told him about her childhood abuse. Perhaps he just never took the trouble to find out. He was frequently more occupied with a series of young lovers. He was a post-war art world Ronnie Wood or Rod Stewart, clinging on to an endlessly prolonged bohemian adolescence, refusing to accept any personal responsibility. A high culture sugar daddy inviting a succession of impressionable young women to come up and see his Picassos. At one point, he fell for a Parisian trapeze artist named Diane Deriaz (you really couldn’t make it up) and tried to get her to marry him, but she was having none of it. Farley Farm was thrown open to all their artistic friends, with Lee expected to play host. Penrose had no patience with her mood swings, and no notion that there might be serious emotional troubles causing such turbulent behaviour. He even wrote to Audrey Withers at Vogue asking her not to offer her any more work. ‘I implore you’, he implored, ‘please do not ask Lee to write again. The suffering it causes her and those around her is unbearable’. He was effectively trying to draw the curtain down on her career. His surreptitious intervention also effectively put an end to a close and long-lasting personal and professional relationship. Withers let Miller know that there would always be an opening for her at the magazine whilst she was in charge, however. Unsurprisingly, Miller was absolutely furious when she discovered what her husband had done. She realised that she was effectively being put in her place. But she no longer had the energy to resist with anything more permanent than a display of foul temper. Her last article for Vogue was published in July 1953. Entitled Working Guests, it showcased photographs she had taken of various renowned artists and prominent figures in the artistic establishment, all of whom had been put to work doing tasks of manual labour around the farm. Lee made no distinction between the visitors to the farm as regarded their social status, treating all as equals, whether they were the local gardeners or the head of some national artistic institution. In the last photo, she herself was shown enjoying a nap inside on the sofa.

Roland Penrose rose steadily in the ranks of the English establishment, as befitted the scion of a rich banking family, dalliance with revolutionary artistic credos notwithstanding. He was awarded a CBE in 1961, and in 1966 became a knight of the realm. Miller therefore became a lady to his sir. She viewed the whole thing with great amusement and refused to take it seriously, insisting that she be known as Lady Lee. In 1960, Penrose curated a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery, for which a fund-raising Picasso Party was held at the ICA. Miller wrote an article for the accompanying brochure entitled Picasso Himself, which drew on personal insights gained from her longstanding friendship with the artist. She sat next to Prince Philip at the party, with whom she apparently got on very well. Blunt speakers both. She wasn’t invited to the Tate opening, however, since it was feared she might say something inappropriate to Her Majesty. A shame, since she could have given her a showing to really remember.

Back at the farm, Penrose filled the house with his art collection and works of his own, with sculptures scattered around the garden. Lee’s pictures and negatives gathered dust in boxes in the attic. Denied artistic outlets, she threw herself into the running of the house, and in particular to the creative environs of the kitchen. Her highly individual dishes sometimes displayed a provocative side which expressed her irrepressible character. She reacted to one guest’s snobbery about everyday American food by whipping up a marsmallow and coca-cola ice-cream, the ingredients of which she revealed to him after he had declared how much he’d enjoyed it (a generous apportionment of rum may have helped). You can find the recipe for it at the back of Carolyn Burke’s biography of Miller. Another dish was known as Muddle Green Green Chicken, which was indeed green, thanks to its heavy concentrations of celery, parsley and leeks. The kitchen became a warm haven for some of the genuinely unconventional guests at Farley Farm, such as the artist John Craxton. He joined her in her culinary explorations, and became a good friend. She still took photographs ofv visitors for personal pleasure. Her picture of the New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg seeming to have just finished sketching the Long Man of Wilmington on the Sussex Downs is especially witty and inventive. She always got her camera out when Picasso was visiting, and her pictures of him form a fine informal record of this most famous of twentieth century artists through the years.

Lee conquered her dependence on alcohol and continued to travel the world in her later years, although she resolutely refused to explore the countryside around the farm, sticking firmly to her initial dictum. She always favoured more exotic climes, and was more a creature of the city. It seems strange that she became stranded in the confines of the Sussex Downs, in damp and chilly England, for the latter part of her life. She died in 1977. Her son, Antony, discovered more about her after her death than he had known during her lifetime. He sorted through her long-unseen photographs and worked towards producing the biographical volume The Live of Lee Miller, enjoying the benefits of a close consultation with David Scherman. Antony Penrose did much to resurrect his mother’s reputation. It could be said that this now eclipses that of her husband, Roland Penrose, much as Gwen John’s reputation posthumously eclipsed that of her brother Augustus John. Penrose now regularly conducts tours of Farley Farm, which now features Miller’s work hanging prominently alongside her husband’s, and holding its own amongst the illustrious company of his collection of twentieth century art. David Scherman wrote the introduction to the volume of war photography and reportage which Antony Penrose edited, Lee Miller’s War. His final sentence provides his own personal and heartfelt summation of a life well-lived: ‘She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century renaissance woman. In the less grandiose but perhaps more appropriate pop culture patois of her native land, she was a mensch’.

There are a number of good books about Lee Miller which are available in Exeter library, if you happen to live in Devon (and remember, you can always use the inter-library loan system). Or maybe they’re in your own libraries if you live elsewhere.
I’ve got out (but will soon be returning):
The Live of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose
Lee Miller: Portraits From a Life by Richard Calvocoressi
Lee Miller by Carolyn Burke
Lee Miller’s War edited by Antony Penrose with a foreword by David Scherman
The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm by Antony Penrose

Lee Miller

Part One - Model, Muse and Artist

Blood of a Poet - card playing Fate

I went to see Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet a couple of weeks ago with a live score by Steve Severi. It was great to see the film on the big screen and I was particularly struck by the literally statuesque presence of Lee Miller. She appears as an armless classical statue who goads the poet protagonist into passing through the mirror (one of several characteristic Cocteau images in the film which recur throughout his work) and into the world of the imagination beyond. Scenes are played out behind the doors which stretch along the corridor (which, as with the underworld reached through mirrors in Orphee, seems subject to a weight of gravity and spatial laws all of its own) of the Hotel des Folies Dramatiques. Miller later appears, freed from her plaster carapace and more recognisably herself, as a card playing Fate, her restored arms now holding the hand which will determine whether the artist sitting opposite her at the table will triumph or face ruin. She warns him, with chilling intimacy, ‘without the ace of hearts, my dear, you are lost’. Lacking such a card, her prophecy proves accurate, and his blood is spilt on the snow in the midst of which their wintry al fresco game of death has been played out. Miller is then transfigured back into the statuesque goddess, her arms concealed by long black evening gloves to simulate their previous truncation. She moves slowly offscreen, relying on the inner vision of eyes painted over closed lids. She leads a bull alongside her, its hide a map to some unknown territory, and whose horns metamorphose into the frame of a lyre, the muse’s emblematic instrument. The film has often been categorised as a surrealist work, perhaps because it was made shortly after L’Age D’or (and indeed, funded by the same wealthy and unsuspecting patrons). But its symbolism is highly personal, and it aspires to the status of a poetic dream rather than a surrealist provocation. Besides, the surrealists weren’t at all keen on Cocteau, peevishly accusing him of stealing their ideas. Which seems rather rich, since these had supposedly arisen unbidden from the unconscious and were therefore symbolic archetypes which presumably had a certain common currency.

Blood of a Poet - statuesque muse

Miller talked about how she came to be involved with Blood of a Poet, and the tribulations and privations on set in a 1967 conversation with Francis Steegmuller, included in his 1970 biography of Cocteau. ‘One night Cocteau stopped at the table where I was sitting with Man Ray at the Boeuf sur le Toit’, she begins. ‘Do you know anybody who wants to be tested tomorrow? (Cocteau asked) I did, and told Man so when Cocteau had moved on. Man disliked the idea, but told Cocteau anyway. The tests were marvellous: I fitted Cocteau’s idea of a face. The script was constantly altered. Feral Benga, the black jazz dancer who played the angel, sprained his ankle and had to be a limping angel – Cocteau liked it better that way, but people have read all kinds of things into it. The star on Enrique Rivero’s back was put there by Cocteau to cover a scar – he’d been shot by his mistress’s husband. After nineteen retakes of the card-playing scene Rivero tore up the cards so there wouldn’t be a twentieth – there was a party he wanted to go to. The chandelier was delivered in 3822 pieces, each wrapped in tissue paper, the very day shooting was to begin. The studio was lined with mattresses to keep out sound – the mattresses were full of fleas and bedbugs that kept falling out. My armour – when I was the statue – didn’t fit very well: they plastered the joints with butter and flour that turned rancid and stank. They covered me with Nujol to make the costume cling: it cooked under the lights. The bull (really an ox) was supplied by an abattoir and had only one horn: time and money were running out, so Cocteau made a second horn himself’.

I was vaguely aware of Lee Miller’s name; that she was a photographer and had been associated with Man Ray. The common, reductive summation of her reputation is that she was a ‘surrealist muse’, a description which Angela Carter, oddly enough, repeats in a couple of her essays and reviews (collected in Shaking A Leg). A trip to the library unearthed a few books about her, and I discovered that she was an extraordinary woman for whom such a passive designation is wholly inapt. She was born Elizabeth Miller in 1907, in the (at the time) quiet and gentile city of Poughskeepie, in New York state. At the age of 7, she suffered the horrific trauma of being raped by a family acquaintance into whose care she had been left. The ordeal was made all the more terrible by the fact that it left a legacy of VD which she had to deal with for years afterwards. Shortly thereafter, her father, Theodore, began taking photographs of her which revealed a level of intimacy which seems deeply uncomfortable. She was very close to him throughout his life (and it was a long one) but these pictures suggest a fundamental betrayal of the bond which exists between a father and his daughter. Such unsettling childhood experiences may have contributed to the sense of restlessness, and the resultant wild and impulsive behaviour, which characterised her adult life.

Lee on the cover of Vogue - March 1927

She first travelled to Europe in 1925 to study set design at a school run by the Hungarian artist Ladislas Medgyes, which he had immodestly given the name of L’Ecole Medgyes Pour La Technique du Theatre. A noted Lothario, it’s likely he had an affair with his young student. At any rate, Elizabeth’s parents, possibly alerted to such goings on, travelled to Paris and escorted her back to the States in early 1926. That year, she took dancing lessons and found brief employment in the chorus of George White’s Scandals, a slightly more daring variant on the Ziegfield’s Follies style of Broadway show. One of her predecessors in the chorus line had been Louise Brooks, whose short, bobbed hair and liberated persona was very much akin to Miller’s. Both would go on to embody the spirit of the age. Miller didn’t last long in the Scandals. She moved on once more, this time to study painting at the Art Students League of New York. But she didn’t find her metier here, either. Legend has it (and with Miller, the legend is seldom at great variance with the truth) that she was dreamily wandering out into the street one day, and was pulled back from the path of an oncoming car by a passing stranger. He happened to be Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine, and he was immediately struck by her looks. She had the short haircut and boyish look of ‘moderne’ fashionability, and was stylishly attired in clothes she’s bought in Paris. He asked her back to his office and invited her to model for Vogue. She was soon greatly in demand, and was shot by some of the most famous photographers of the age, principal amongst them being Edward Steichen. He was an artist who was almost as feted as those whom he portrayed, and he had the attendant wealth to prove it. He created an aura of unassailable glamour around his subjects, a look which became part and parcel of the elevated world of celebrity. He essentially created a new pantheon of demi-gods and goddesses. Miller would later credit him with giving her the idea of taking up photography. She was certainly absorbing some of the techniques being employed on the other side of the camera lens, remaining always at a slight remove from the fantasies of which she was the object (a distance which she would maintain later in her career, both as model and photographer). This merely enhanced her mystery, of course. She had always had an interest in technical matters, something which she no doubt inherited from her father, who worked in engineering and was an inveterate tinkerer. The possibilities of photography, which could harness technological means to express an artistic view of the world, seemed like it just might be the medium she had been searching for.

It was while modelling for Vogue that Miller changed her Christian name, Elizabeth becoming Lee. It seemed more suited to the boyish style which she had first gleaned from Anita Loos, and to her modern outlook. It was a self-willed transformation which seemed to indicate a distancing from her path, and attempt at rebirth and the beginning of a completely new life. In a reversal of the general pattern of the early 20th century, she left the new world for the old in order to be reborn. She returned to Paris in 1929, determined to find her way to the other side of the camera, or ‘to enter photography by the back end’, as she later put it with characteristic fruitiness. She looked up Man Ray at his Montparnasse studio. He wasn’t in, so she retired to the neighbouring café, where she bumped into him and announced that she was his new student. She was obviously persuasive, as she was soon much more; his lover, his model, his muse, his studio assistant and eventually (whether acknowledged or not) his collaborator. Madame Man Ray, as she became known. She learnt a lot from him, and really became a serious photographer from this point on. She can lay claim to be the true inventor of his famous solarization technique. Her discovery of it occurred when she accidentally exposed some negatives which she had been developing to light. She went on processing them anyway. The results were striking, surrounding the main subject with a dark outline which separated it sharply from the background, and highlighted black and white contrasts, lending the whole thing a texture of haze and dapple. Further experimentation refined the accidental discovery and subjected the technique to greater control, although a chance element always remained, which lent the process an element of the magical. The best of the solarized portraits by both Man Ray and Miller have a visionary, hyper-real (or surreal, if you wish) air, as if some essence of the subject has been drawn through the lens and filtered onto film.

Man Ray made many photographic portraits of Lee. One, in which she raises her arm and rests her hand on the back of her head, revealing her armpit in a pose of axillary eroticism, was to be echoed in the small plaster-cast piece of faux classical statuary which stands on the bathroom cabinet in the famous wartime photograph of her sitting in Hitler's bath. It's also reminiscent of the pose which Patti Smith strikes in a rather more assertive fashion on the cover of her Easter LP. As was the case with the surrealists in general, Man Ray's pictures often express a violent and misogynistic sexuality. A photograph in which she turns away from the camera and looks upward, exposing her neck, was later slashed, red ink poured onto the gash in murderous anger. He encases her head and arm in wire mesh, crops her naked body so that its head and legs are truncated, crosses her torso with jagged lines of electricity, reduces what is probably her to a ball of back and buttocks (a photograph which he titles The Prayer, as if it’s expressing her desires) and generally divides her body into its component parts. His Object of Destruction, a personalised refinement of the earlier Object To Be Destroyed, attaches a cut out of one of her eyes onto the spike of a metronome, there to be set into blinking motion, adding the instruction that the whole should be smashed with a single hammer blow once the limits of endurance have been reached. He would later paint her lips floating huge and disembodied in a cloud-speckled sky above a mountain-bordered lake.

Her full, sensual mouth obviously exerted a certain fascination. It is the first part of her which appears in Blood of a Poet. The poet wipes it off the canvas on which he is painting a portrait after it starts to move, only for it to appear on the palm of his hand. After kissing it and allowing it to kiss his body, he smears it onto the head of a statue which appears in the corner of his room, Lee in truncated form once more. Cocteau was never part of surrealist movement, which was, paradoxically for a group supposedly valuing the free expression of the unconscious, fiercely prescriptive in its decisions as to who was or was not allowed into its hallowed circles. Neverthleless, he followed in their stead by having the poet smash Lees static form into pieces. He does, however, face retribution for this act of violent desecration. He himself becomes a statue, and centuries later, warring schoolboys denude his body for use in their snowball battle, subjecting it to an instant process of erosion. Miller’s insistence on sharing the libidinous release which the surrealist painters and poets claimed for themselves as an essential adjunct to their art exposed the inherent conservatism which lay underneath their loud declarations of revolutionary intent and expressions of contempt for bourgeois values. This emerged in the sadism which was such a prevalent feature of their art (and was enshrined in their elevation of de Sade to their cultural pantheon), particularly when it came to depicting women. The muse was there to inspire the unbounded and violent expression of their sexual energy (and was even interchangeable amongst their number for that purpose), but she was herself supposed to remain a passive and submissive object. This was a role which Lee Miller was never likely to conform to.

Miller set up her own studios in Paris in 1930, nearby to Man Ray’s. She began to take portrait pictures, some of them for French Vogue (known informally by its crashed name Frogue). She also walked the Paris streets, taking pictures of incongruous details which her eye, versed in surrealism, detected around her; eruptions of the strange onto the surface of the everyday. This seems almost literally the case in her photograph A Strange Encounter, in which the edge of a wave of viscous asphalt seems to be reaching out towards the shiny surfaces of a bystander’s black shoes; The Blob hits 1930s Paris years before lowering its sights to small town USA. Exploding Hand shows the said appendage, draped in an impressively angular sleeve, reaching for a door handle behind a pane of glass and seemingly sparking a sizzling discharge of electrical energy. They are in fact merely scratches on the window, appearing more luminous against the darkness of the trees reflected in the background. But they are transformed by the eye of the imagination which has captured them. Miller returned to New York in 1932, her apprenticeship and affair with Man Ray over. She set up her own studios in Manhattan and became a very successful freelance portrait photographer, shooting some of the most renowned celebrities and artists of the day. These were mostly conventional, professional jobs, expertly executed. She did occasionally experiment which solarization, as with her 1935 portrait of Lilian Harvey. In 1933, she held her first one woman show in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. She had established herself in her chosen art form and was respected and successful. Which made her decision to marry an Egptian industrialist, Aziz Eloui Bey, in 1934 and go and live with him in Cairo all the more surprising. Perhaps it was the lure of the exotic, the air of mystery which the Near and Middle East held at the time, perhaps the attraction of a wealthy father figure. Anyway, as Carolyn Burke puts it in her biography of Miller, ‘Lee embarked on marriage as if it were a holiday’. It was one which lasted 3 years.

She was utterly unsuited to life in Egypt. Women were expected to remain sequestered from men in their household harem, having no contact with those beyond their immediate family. Bey was a liberal modern Egyptian, and essentially let Lee do whatever she pleased (perhaps recognising that she would do it whether he wished it or not), but she was surrounded by those for whom such liberties were not afforded. She hated the climate, too. She stuck it for as long as she could, making several trips out into the desert. One of her best pictures emerges from these excursions. Portrait of Space from 1937 looks out at the vast empty expanses of the desert through a ragged hole torn through the gauze veil of a tent window. It is a mysterious, almost mystical image, and inspired Magritte, whose 1938 painting The Kiss (Le Baiser) draws directly from it. She stuck it in Egypt for as long as she could, and then headed back for Paris, to the bohemian artistic milieu in which she was more comfortable.

She attended a fancy dress ball with Julien Levy (the gallery owner who had staged her New York show) and there met the English artist Roland Penrose, who had come along with Max Ernst. Penrose had been instrumental in staging the first major exhibition of surrealism in England in the previous year. It had created something of a stir, principally on account of Salvador Dali’s attempts to deliver a speech from within a deep sea diving suit, from which he had to be unscrewed after he began to suffocate. Penrose immediately fell for Miller, and thus began a golden summer and a lifelong relationship. She joined him in Cornwall, where she met up with Man Ray again, there with his new girlfriend Ady Fidelin. Also there were Max Ernst , the artists Leonora Carrington and Eileen Agar, the surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, and, on a short visit, Henry Moore and his wife Irina. Lee and Roland then went to the continent and called on Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux in Brussels. They stopped off to have a look around the Palais Ideal, the concrete castle of the imagination built by the postman Cheval in his spare time. It’s a classic work of so-called outsider art, which means the kind of creative endeavours made by people who neither know nor care about art history or art markets. They then joined up with some of the others to spend the rest of the summer with Picasso and Dora Maar, one of his two alternating mistresses and muses. Picasso painted six ‘Portraits of Lee Miller as an Arlesienne’ during this period, the same year in which he had also produced Guenica and The Weeping Woman, two of the most famous pictures of his entire career. Lee later said of him ‘you do not sit for Picasso, he just brought it to me one day having painted it from memory’. Lee Miller’s photographs from this summer sojourn capture the dreamy spirit of their sun-kissed idyll. The best known is Picnic, in which the participants (the Eluards, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, and Roland Penrose) seem to have their mind on other things than sandwiches and ginger beer.

Miller returned to Egypt and Aziz, whilst remaining in frequent contact with Penrose and agreeing to meet again as soon as possible. She travelled through Egypt and surrounding countries before finally conceding the inevitable and deciding to leave the country, and Aziz, for good. As she wrote to him, she had seen ‘as many changes of scenery and weather here as there are kinds of religions and races of people… (but) all of them (were) vaguely disappointing because of my own state of mind’. She moved in with Penrose in his house at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead in 1939. You’ll find a blue plaque on its wall now to identify it. London was bracing itself for German assault, in whatever form it might take. Miller joined the staff of British edition of Vogue (Brogue, naturally) and formed a close relationship with its editor Audrey Withers, a woman in whom she felt she could confide and who encouraged her to develop her work. Withers, a strong-minded socialist, was interested in the changing nature of women’s role in society brought about by war. Miller photographed women at work or in uniform, some of which were published in Vogue, others collected in a book called Wrens In Camera. Many of the shots of working women show them mastering the kinds of mechanical and technical tasks in which Miller herself took an interest. Some are characterised by a poignant absence, such as A Canadian Wren’s Cabin from May 1944. This frames a cluster of personal belongings adjacent to the iron frame of a functional bed frame. A stuffed toy dog leans against the rim of a tin hat, jewellery and family photos and a small stack of books sit on the bedside table and sporting pennants form a descending flight on the wall. These are traces which sketch the barest outline of the person who is the invisible subject of the picture. Effects which are all the more precious given the possibility that this absence may become permanent. In US Army Nurses’ Billet from 1943, the white uniform hanging against the darkness of the interior and the crumpled shapes of underwear outlined against the light, draped in front of the window, seem presentiments of potential hauntings, awaiting the return of bodies which is no longer as assured as once it was. Her shots of ATS searchlight operators offer the perfect opportunity for the contrast of light and darkness, with the profiles of the women clearly etched against the powerful beam.

Miller’s surrealist eye came in to play on her pictures taken in London as it prepared for whatever was to come. Particularly striking is Fire Masks, taken at the entrance to the shelter in the garden in Hampstead. These masks, made to protect those who were on the watch for incendiary bombs, look like a modernist version of the sinister carnivelesque masks worn by figures in Goya’s paintings. They resemble the simplified rendering of the human face in a few bold curves and lines found in the African and Polynesian masks which had so inspired Picasso and the cubists. The grotesque distortion of the human head created by the gas mask is also represented in her photograph of her friend David Scherman, a young photographer from Life magazine who had joined her and Penrose for a time in their Hampstead home. Miller’s shots of the aftermath of raids during the blitz also focus on the surrealist disruptions of the cityscape, the odd inversions of the normal order. Her 1940 picture Nonconformist Chapel shows the solid porticoed door framing a torrent of rubble pouring out onto the street, as if the bricks of the building have themselves become the congregation and are rushing to exit into the open air.

She photographed portraits of many of the artists, musicians and actors in London at the time, as well. Hein Heckroth, the set and costume designer who was to work with Powell and Pressburger on films such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, looks nervous and guarded, his face half in shadow, half in the light shining through the window through which he is casting a sideways glance. His downturned mouth is largely concealed by the hand which holds the cigarette he is taking a drag from. This picture was taken shortly after his release in 1942 from his internment as an enemy alien. Humphrey Jennings, the film-maker who produced such landmark wartime films as Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started and A Diary for Timothy, and who had also been a surrealist painter, leans back and looks pensively into the distance to one side of the frame. A cloud of cigarette smoke, illuminated against the inky black background, hangs before him like a comic book thought bubble. It's a picture which is used on the cover of Kevin Jackson's biography of Jennings. Miller shot Henry Moore sketching the huddled bodies sheltering in the London underground at Holborn station during a documentary called Out of Chaos, which focussed on the work of Official War Artists. There’s also a very glamorous shot of Charles Hawtrey in full evening dress drag; he’s almost unrecognisable from the cheerfully weedy characters he would become known for in the Carry On films after the war. Her informal portrait of the journalist Martha Gellhorn pictures her sitting cross-legged on her chair having a fag break, her typewriter awaiting her on the dressing table turned work desk behind, pictures of her husband Ernest Hemingway clipped to the mirror. She looks like she has been captured turning around in a momentary pause from work to which she will soon feverishly return.

As the war moved into its final phases and armies began to do battle in the heart of Europe, Miller was given the opportunity to witness events at first hand. She took it and threw herself into her work with fierce fearlessness and wholly committed dedication. There was something very personal and revealing about her series of war reports for Vogue. The war shook up elements of her psyche which had been held at a distance. It was to be the making of Lee Miller.

n.b. Miller's photographs are under copyright, but you can find many of the pictures discussed here at the Lee Miller Archive

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Twenty Two

Isle of the Dead - Part Three

Noir Vermeer

Kyra is framed through a doorway pouring water from a jug into a bowl. It is a lit interior scene which resembles a Vermeer painting, particularly with Kyra’s head covering. The camera moves in to reveal Dr Drossos and Albrecht to either side of her, with Davis and the General accompanying them as if they are Seconds the metaphysical duel of ideas which is about to begin. Kyra, ever the voice of doom, declares that ‘you cannot wash away evil’. In her mind, illness and evil are equated, since she cannot accept that pain and death can be arbitrary and without moral cause or meaning. Dr Drossos mocks her superstitious attitude with a dismissive laugh, and the General smirks along with him. While the Doctor prevails, Kyra’s malign influence is diminished, but the tenets of science and rationalism are thinly layered strata over the instinctive bedrock of magical thinking, which seeks to impute meaning into the processes of the natural world. The Doctor’s outlook has to be repeatedly asserted and proved, and is constantly in danger of being eroded away by the tides of general fear and disbelief. Albrecht decides to play devil’s advocate and take up a counter position to the Doctor’s rationalist worldview. He points to his talk of ‘good winds and bad winds’ and suggests that this kind of language is little different from Kyra’s.

The Doctor explains the scientific underpinning of his statement, explaining how the disease is transmitted by fleas which have an 80% consistency of water, so that ‘the hot wind from the south literally burns them away’. This serves only to underline the fact that they are at the mercy of the winds of fate, however. Knowing the mechanism by which they will find salvation does them little good since they have no way of affecting its outcome. The knowledge that the disease is spread by fleas also makes the obsessive washing of hands and the instruction to avoid contact little more than a psychological salve to make everyone feel that they are doing something to keep the plague at bay. The washing of hands does in effect become a symbolic act of cleansing, which makes Kyra’s remark seem particularly pertinent.

Albrecht continues his devil’s advocacy by pointing out that, from Kyra’s point of view, ‘the gods send plague to punish men for harbouring the Vorvoloka’. The exchange may be an academic play of ideas between the Doctor and the archaeologist, but in the background we see the General following its to and fro intently, his face a picture of doubt and confusion. The nature of the debate is very real for him, the folk tales which are an object of study for Albrecht tapping into a deeper native vein which re-awakens something in his soul. Doctor Drossos, the disbelieving rationalist, provides the traditional professorial definition of the nature of the monster, which is for him is an element of folk history. A Vorvoloka is ‘an elemental wolf-spirit, some such thing in human form. They say it drains people of their strength and vitality until they die’. Again, this detailing of the nature of the beast has a visible impact on the General, with the camera focussing in on his face. The fact that the recitation comes from a man who would dismiss belief in such a creature as utter nonsense merely seems to strengthen its authority for him. It is as if it is being read from one of the ancient leather bound tomes of vellum-paged wisdom which denote unquestionable authority in horror films.

Albrecht goes on, providing the shading for the Doctor’s textbook sketch. ‘Kyra would tell you there’s more to it; that the Vorvoloka is an evil for which the gods punish us mortals’. These are the old gods which must be appeased. The punishment is not so much for moral misdemeanour as for neglect of tradition. This view of the Vorvoloka casts it very much in the mould of the Erinyes, or Furies of Greek myth. These were the three female avengers of broken oaths and matricide (and in some versions patricide) who were born from the castration of Uranus by the titan Cronus. Cronus threw the genitals into the sea, but three drops of blood fell upon the earth and gave birth to the Furies. Robert Graves, in his two volume Greek Myths, describes these figures as representing the Triple Goddess, the three stages of which are present in Isle of the Dead; the youthful Thea, Mrs St Aubyn, the wife, and Kyra, the crone in mourning black. As Graves puts it was the Furies’ ‘original function to avenge injuries inflicted only on a mother, or a suppliant who claimed the protection of the Hearth-goddess’. These were creatures protecting women from male power, which had usurped their former ritual authority. With this island on which female power seemed to prevail invaded once more by male command, maybe the Fates are stirring once more.

The General, whose inner struggle has been plain to see, gets up in a decisive manner and issues his verdict as to the outcome of the debate. The two participants perhaps do not realise the importance of the debate from his perspective. For them, it has just been an intellectual game, and interplay of ideas. But these have represented the General’s divided soul. His conclusion is delivered in the manner of a command. The Doctor is the Doctor and we’ll do as he says’. This decisiveness on the General’s part indicates the absolutism of his world view. He must wholly believe in one thing or another at a level of complete certainty. This all or nothing mentality makes him vulnerable to the insinuations of others should the basis of his belief be undermined. Albrecht bows to the General’s authoritative air, which doesn’t invite debate or disagreement, but fatalistically adds ‘one might as well go out on the cliff and build a votive fire to Hermes’. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is something of a misnomer here, altered from Hades in the original script. As the god of the underworld, this would have been a more apposite figure to invoke, but no doubt the studio felt that the audience would confuse the name with the Christian (or Jewish) appropriation of Hades as an alternative name for Hell.

A dangerous metaphysical duel

Albrecht then proposes a wager, an extension of the game which he and the Doctor are playing. ‘The Doctor can use his science, I’ll pray to Hermes. We’ll see who dies and who is saved’. It is a dangerous game, which seeks to make light of death but which threatens to have a far more serious effect on the non-participants. It is the General’s faith in rationalism rather than the world view of Albrecht and the Doctor which is at stake. If Albrecht ‘wins’ then the General is in effect offered up to Kyra’s influence. The General, once more asserting his authority, allow the wager to go ahead. It is sealed with a handshake, a gesture which immediately breaks the no contact rule and which seems to thereby carry with it the signature of doom. But both sides are basing their actions on false precepts. With fleas as the vector of the disease, such brief contact is of no consequence. And Albrecht is praying to the wrong god. Their assertion of male authority over the areas of science and tradition is highly questionable. The General once more declares that the Doctor’s orders must be obeyed, but his sense of his own authority seems slightly shaken. All the while, Davis watches over the tense scene, the non-intervening journalistic observer.

The Three Fates divided

Mrs St Aubyn is in her room with Kyra, in black as ever, and Thea waiting hesitantly in the background. Youth, middle and old age gathered in one room, they appear as three aspects of the one figure. They are reminiscent of the three archetypal aspects of the divine found throughout religion and mythology. But here, whatever unity may once have been shared has been fractured. Mrs St Aubyn upbraids Kyra over her treatment of Thea, telling her that ‘evil breeds evil’, as if it is a virus. Kyra contemptuously interrupts her warning, voicing the fatalistic opinion that ‘we die when we must’. In her mind, Thea has not adhered to this natural law, living beyond death.

Gazing at Death in the mirror

In the next room, Mr St Aubyn is very ill, and regards himself in a small hand mirror. Mirrors are associated with death in the film in much the same way as the are in Jean Cocteau’s Orphee. In that film, Death’s chauffeur Heurtebise explains to Orphee the secret of mirrors. ‘Les miroirs sont les portes par lesquelles la mort vient et va. Du reste, regardez-vous toute votre vie dans une glace et vous verrez la mort travailler comme les abeilles dans une ruche de verre.’ (mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. And look at yourself in a mirror throughout your life and you will see death working like bees in a glass hive.)

Orphee - Approach of Death in the mirror

Mirrors in Isle of the Dead also serve to detect whether the breath of life has left the body, although in this function they prove deceptive. Thea comes in to tell him that Mrs St Aubyn ‘has her illness again’. It is perhaps significant that this has occurred after her confrontation with Kyra. In the original script, Mrs St Aubyn’s equivalent Miss Wollsten confronts Cathy, the character whose corrosive influence most resembles that of Kyra, telling her that she rather than Thea resembles the Vorvoloka; ‘a weak, pale half-dead thing that drains all the life and joy from those who want to live’. Mrs St Aubyn isn’t given the opportunity to articulate her feelings so clearly in the film itself, but her comment about evil breeding evil makes the analogy between Kyra and the Vorvoloka which she is so keen to invoke in others. She is the psychic vampire, who replicates her fear fuelled ideas in a similarly viral maner.

Mr St Aubyn lays down on his bed to die. There is an intercut shot of the statue of Cerberus. The statue serves the same role as symbolic insert which we have already seen with the figurehead in I Walked With a Zombie and the fountain in The Leopard Man. Here, it is immediately followed up by a shot of the General pacing up and down the corridor. The General’s role of watchdog in the tomblike corridor of the house’s upper floor is made clear. He is patrolling outside the deaths door of Mr St Aubyn. Finally he pushes the door in and finds Thea sitting by the bedside. The Consul is dead. Evidently she had sat with him, keeping him company as he faded away. The General asks her where Mrs St Aubyn is, and when Thea tells him ‘she sleeps’, he orders her to go and wake her and bring her in. Thea refuses, and the General is furious at this seemingly nonsensical act of defiance. She is frightened by his anger, but stands her ground, leaving him to repeat her no as an incredulous question.

The needle test - inflicting the compassionate wound

At her husband’s bedside, Mrs St Aubyn stands with Doctor Drossos and refuses to concede his death. The Doctor makes further tests, including using the mirror into which St Aubyn had gazed at his approaching mortality to detect for signs of the faintest breath of life. Mrs St Aubyn is at the edge of panic, asserting that ‘the breath can stop, the heart can stop; it still doesn’t mean death’. It’s as if she believes that there is some deeper component of death, one which takes place beyond the physical. Doctor Drossos offers a clinical definition for her fears, introducing us to the term cataleptic trance, which will become an important element later in the story. But this is not such a case. The General begins to pull the sheet over St Aubyn’s face; the bed has become the tomb. Mrs St Aubyn stays his hand and he defers to her, relinquishing control under these circumstances. ‘What difference does it make’ he shrugs. ‘Uncovered or covered, the eyes see no more’. But is there some other mode of vision which is still active? Once the others have left the room, Mrs St Aubyn takes out a clothing pin and pricks her husband’s flesh. When she sees that there is no reaction, she covers him with the sheet and weeps in earnest. Her anxiety was over the possibility of his being stranded in a half-dead limbo. Actual death comes almost as a relief. Now she can mourn.

Rationalist prayer flag

Outside, on the terrace adjacent to the openings to the tombs, Davis stands with Doctor Drossos, erecting a flag to indicate the wind direction. The elements assert their presence throughout the rest of the film. As the characters place themselves in the hands of fate, these elements take on the mythic significance with which they were embodied by ancient cultures. We have already seen the washing of hands in bowls of water, which has more of a ritualistic than practical rationale. Davis’ fabrication of a wind direction indicator is as much prayer flag as means of scientific divination. The situation of the flag near to the temple of Hermes suggests that maybe the invocation of this god’s aid is not so misguided after all. His winged golden sandals gave him the power to travel as fast as the wind, and thereby identify him with this element. He was also a god of boundaries who guided souls into the Underworld of Hades and had the gift of augury, of seeing into the future. Davis tells the Doctor that the General has put all his hope in him, and he replies ‘yes, I know. That frightens me more than the plague’. He bears the burden of the General’s belief, of propping up the flimsy construct of his faith in man’s control over the mechanisms of a rational world.

Connecting without contact

Mrs St Aubyn emerges from the darkness of the tomb and asks to have a word with the Doctor alone. She confides in him her overwhelming fear of premature burial, and outlines her history of illness, speaking of ‘trances with almost complete suspension of heartbeat and respiration’. In the original script, it was the General whom Miss Wollsten, Mrs St Aubyn’s equivalent, took into her confidence. Thus, she awoke the second of his sleeping ‘Cerberus’ heads. One was fixed on watching over Thea, who he believed had come back from the dead, and one on Miss Wollsten, who feared entering the Underworld before she was dead. Thus the General fulfilled the two traditional duties of Cerberus. In the film, it is the Doctor assures her that should she appear to fall victim to the plague, he will make every possible test. They almost shake hands, before remembering that this small gesture of human contact is denied to them. Their small microcosm of society has become atomised, everyone isolated inside their own solipsistic worlds. But Mrs St Aubyn’s voicing of her fears has reassured her, restored her to some measure of calm acceptance of the proximity of death. ‘Now that you understand, I am no longer afraid’, she says. Her condition also goes some way to explaining the secretive behaviour of Thea, who evidently also knows of her condition and who has been acting out of a sense of protectiveness. In the mouth of the blackness of the tomb, everyone seems to be pinning their hopes on the Doctor. He has become the living embodiment of rationality, of a world which can be measured, understood and managed.

The Rituals of Time

There is now a sequence in which the elements are given full voice. There is an insert shot of the statue of Cerberus, in the manner of Lewton’s symbolic punctuations. Then we see waves crashing against rocks, the interaction of the elements of water and earth. The ebb and flow of the waves measures the passing of time, as well as hinting at the build up of violent forces which work to erode the seemingly solid and indestructible fortress of the rocky shore. We see the vortex of a whirlpool urgently circling inside a bowl, with a montage of hands desperately seeking to cleanse themselves in its rushing waters. Then there is another glimpse of Cerberus preceding another shot of waves and rocks, all conveying a sense of waiting and watching. Then we complete our tour of the elements with a shot focussing on fire in a brazier.

Sacred Flame

We are back at the still point of the ruined temple to Hermes. Albrecht is performing his prayer to the deity who he still erroneously believes to be the god of physicians. Dr Drossos arrives, announcing ‘I just came to see if your prayer would entertain me as much as my medicine seems to amuse you’. It’s a remark made in friendly good humour, with no trace of rancour. Having listened for a while, Drossos adds his own stick to the ritual pyre, adding that it’s ‘my way of saying amen’. In conceding defeat and drawing an end to their game, Albrecht realises that Doctor Drossos is letting him know that he has recognised the symptoms of plague within himself. ‘My friend, what can one say?’ he says, his respect for the Doctor demonstrated by his admission of the emptiness of language in the face of death. Drossos accepts his fate with equanimity, announcing ‘I’ll meet my old familiar enemy, death’.

The flickering lifeforce

Mrs St Aubyn walks along the dark corridor of the upper floor of the house, which has again come to resemble that of the catacombs. The General has taken up his guard dog position outside the Doctor’s bedroom door, which has again become the door to a tomb. He asks Mrs St Aubyn whether she is afraid, and she pointedly says ‘I’m not afraid of dying’. This meeting at death’s door is between the two who have most to lose from the Doctor’s death, the two who have placed their hopes in his abilities as a physician and scientist. There is some kind of understanding between them, and the General allows her passage.

Guardian of Death's door

Inside, the Doctor refuses the opiates Mrs St Aubyn offers to ease his death. He wants to remain aware and observant. His words, weakly voiced but strongly phrased, are unsparingly unsentimental and offer little in the way of hope or comforting faith. They are a rationalist’s prayer; ‘fight death all your days then die, knowing you know nothing’. The General, entering the room at this moment, looks crushed on hearing this. This was the man upon whom he had pinned all his hopes, and whose certainties he used as his anchor. His face is a picture of pitiful sorrow, both for the Doctor and for himself. You can almost hear the sound of his belief in the rational order of the world crashing into a ruin of dusty rubble.

Hearing the Doctor's philosophy laid bare

The General paces restlessly behind Mrs St Aubyn and Thea. Mrs St Aubyn is doing some needlework, her manipulation of the thread to create a picture making her resemble a modern descendant of the Fates. These three inseparable women, physically joined together in some versions of the myth, spun, measured out and cut the thread of life of each living soul. They are essentially another version of the three aspects of the goddess whose dominant influence on earlier societies is preserved in later myth. Thea sits next to Mrs St Aubyn, intently watching her work as if she is involved with it herself.

The Fates - benevolent

Doctor Drossos is dead and buried, and Albrecht now recommends prayer as a preferable and equally efficacious alternative to the washing of hands. He admits he’s been mocking in his advocacy of it up until now, and starts to drift into aimless reminiscences of a platitudinously sentimental nature; just the sort of thing which the Doctor rigorously eschewed on his deathbed. Mrs St Aubyn interrupts, and suggests they offer a prayer to a god who is ‘the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers’. It is an appeal to a more feminine god, one who is an embodiment of compassion and protection; New rather than Old Testament. The General conspicuously refuses to join in the group prayer, standing aside and warming his hands over the indoor brazier.

A prayer for the weak

Albrecht offers a rather patronising view of belief as a source of comfort, as if Mrs St Aubyn’s intervention needs the blessing of his seal of authority. The General dismisses this out of hand, seeing it as a retreat into an illusory world. ‘When I was a boy’ he says, ‘I was taught by the village priest and old women like Kyra’. He makes no distinction between Christianity and the old beliefs; they are all to be put aside in favour of ‘what I can feel and see and know about’. Albrecht cruelly punctuates his declaration of faith in the material with the words ‘like Doctor Drossos’. Such a materialistic philosophy loses its practical value when you are dealing with something which you can neither feel nor see nor know about. The Doctor’s dying words have seemingly pointed to the despair which such materialistic self-reliance invites. It is a male philosophy which seeks to wrest the world according to the pattern of one’s needs, and it has no place for powerless, or indeed for the weak. It is the complete converse of the worldview conveyed by Mrs St Aubyn’s prayer, which is why the General, who is no hypocrite, has refused to join in. But he has no response to Albrecht’s unwise and unkindly goading jibe, and walks on out on the assembly. Davis, with customary sympathy for the General, suggests that he felt he could guard them all against death.

A mocking shadow

The General has walked out to stand at the pyre in the temple of Hermes, to which he adds a stick as a votive offering, an immediate refutation of his remarks inside. Kyra emerges from the shadows, as if she has been waiting for him, and laughs with mocking triumphalism. She senses that he is on the verge of wholly surrendering his ‘modern’ worldview, and ready to plunge headlong back into the deep past. She changes her tone as she seeks to draw kinship with him. We see her putting aside her sly, ever-suspicious distance as she seemingly speaks from the heart. Whilst the General has just been fuelling the votive fire of Hermes’ temple, Kyra suggests that they feel the pulse of an even earlier age, one which predates the flowering of classical Greek civilisation. ‘We are dark people out of an old soil, with old blood that moves to ancient sorceries, magic; good spirits and bad spirits’.

The reference to ancient sorceries may be Lewton’s nod to the Algernon Blackwood story of that title, which was a major influence on Cat People. This statement is as close as Kyra gets to a direct articulation of the core of her beliefs, of the world as she sees it. The identification with the soil, the element of earth, suggests a chthonic origin which predates the gods of the Greek pantheon. Perhaps she traces her roots back to the Titans, the race and culture analogous to the gods which were usurped by Zeus and his brethren. Some versions of the mythic stories have the Titans confined to Tartarus, the lowest depths of the Underworld. The linking of blood and soil also suggests a peasant identification of people and land, a localised and national sense of identity bound up in place. In the original script, this is reduced to the level of village blood feuds. The General had defied one such in order to marry his wife, who came from the neighbouring village. But she was forcibly repatriated by her own kin, and died shortly thereafter.

"We face death here"

Kyra draws the General’s attention back to the central fact of their situation, which has become so self-evident that it may have lost some of its gravity. ‘We face death here’, she says, speaking with emphatic directness. ‘And worse things than death’, she continues. ‘Evil things that I know and that you know and Thea knows’. She introduces Thea into their bond of native kinship, invoking an almost mystical vein of inherently intuited cultural knowledge which flows in the blood. She attempts to further elucidate this exclusive, nationalist form of mysticism, describing ‘things that we cannot tell in words, but which we feel – feel and fear’. Her assertion of a level of knowledge which language lacks the capacity to describe seeks to put her beliefs beyond the rational analysis of intellectuals like Albrecht and Doctor Drossos. She could almost be describing the unconscious, the demons and malevolent shadows which she conjures up being culturally specific forms given to universal dreads.

Kyra immediately starts to direct her suspicions towards Thea once more. The Titan Cronus devoured his own children for fear of being displaced. A similar fearful hatred of youth, of the younger generation emerging to displace the old seems to be playing out in Kyra’s mind. It is a pattern which can be seen on the personal and the cultural level, as she seeks to preserve the old ways in the face of mocking contempt from the inhabitants of the modern world, the new Greece. Kyra’s insinuations have now all but fully metamorphosed into direct accusations. With her uncertain origins as well as her youthful bloom in a place of sickness and death, Thea provides a convenient figure for embodying unconscious fears and dreads. Casting her as a demon, a vorvoloka, is a way of deflecting a genuine existential terror of the void, the prospect of the nullity of death. Evil becomes a comforting concept, allowing the creation of something concrete against which to battle. Digging further into the realms of the subconscious, Kyra points to the hours of sleep as a time when suppressed urges are allowed free reign. ‘Think on the hours when one sleeps’, she says. The body may lie still in bed, but what happens to the thoughts, the spirit? With what ancient demons does it spend its time and in what deeds?’ Kyra is quite insightful in pointing to the continuity at the essential or subconscious level of an unchanged human nature, which underlies the surface sheen of modern rationalism. But she lacks the language to formulate these insights in any terms other than projections of peasant bogeymen and night ghouls. She looks pleased at the effect she has had on the General, the purchase her ideas have evidently taken on his mind. He walks back into the house in a speechless daze, as if trying to break free of the mesmeric influence which her proximity casts. The suspicious glance which he throws at Thea as he passes her indoors affirms Kyra’s colonization of his fragile ego.

Identity crisis

Retreating to the solitude of his room, the General wearily takes to his bed. His physical, moral and psychological strength seems to have ebbed to a low level of dazed confusion. At total odds with his customary air of brute strength and certitude, he now seems almost pathetically vulnerable. Davis comes in, and the General addresses him as Oliver for the first time. At a moment of existential crisis, the affinity which these two men feel for one another comes to the fore. The General asks a series of circling questions, spiralling in on the core of the doubts which trouble him. Oliver finds it difficult to answer. The General has been the object of his journalistic portrait, the man whose opinions and views he has sought, and it is disconcerting to have the roles reversed. The General asks whether he is different from other men, and then tries to refine this by asking whether his thoughts are different. He then opens the question out from the personal to a more general ‘are Greeks different?’ He is trying to re-establish some sense of his personal identity, to account for his sense of isolation here. He continues to worry away at the nub of the matter, and asks whether his attitude towards the plague is different. To this question, Davis immediately agrees. He tells him he differs from the others in his insistence on fighting it, like he’s fighting ‘something bigger than the plague, wrestling with something you can’t see’. He likens this to Kyra’s attitude, emphasising a kinship which only serves to direct him further towards her. The General is listening anxiously to Davis, with the same eager and hungry look with which he listened to Doctor Drossos during his debate with Albrecht. He is looking to Davis to provide him with an alternative outsider’s viewpoint with which he can counter the influence of Kyra. He fails to do this. When he asks him about Thea, Davis, rather than provide a definitive refutation of his fears, merely says ‘she’s young’. This evasive answer seems to re-awaken some resolve in the General and he warns Davis against going out to see her. The journalist brushes him off, telling him that they may all be dead tomorrow. But his dismissal of the General is too lighthearted. He has failed to notice a dangerous new sense of certitude which has settled in his mind.