Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Gothic Pastorale
Essentially in order to direct your attention to the Gothic cinema season at Bath beginning this week and the accompanying notes at From Out of the Shadows, here are a couple of pictures by Samuel Palmer which have always reminded me of the woodland setting of The Company of Wolves. I watched the dvd with the accompanying Neil Jordan commentary recently and was happy to discover that he cited various artists as being a particular influence on the look of the film, but singled out Samuel Palmer as being the primary source of the film's painterly look. See if you agree.
Art Holiday - Part One
Cecil Collins - Fools and Angels
Our recent fortnight’s break gave us the opportunity to see a couple of excellent exhibitions in the course of our wanderings about the capital and the bicycle-filled streets of Cambridge (and if you want a top-class, old-fashioned wicker bicycle basket, this is the place to come). In the Central St Martin’s School of Art, just off the busy streets of Holborn, with their old tram underpasses currently undergoing reconstruction, there was an unmissable exhibition of Cecil Collins’ art entitled Angels and Fools. The line of posters on the walls outside set his painting The Divine Land, with its plump golden angel hovering above a veil-like mountain, against the steady and noisome stream of cars and busses. Inside the building, two rooms were given over to his paintings and graphic works. This was an exhibition which was evidently a labour of love for its curators, who showed a real personal passion for and even pride in the art on display. This was, after all, the college where Collins taught for many years; And he was an immensely popular teacher. When asked to retire in 1975, a move motivated by internal politics and a desire to dictate the manner of art which was deemed ‘official’, students and fellow artists wrote so many letters in support that he was allowed to stay on.
One of the ladies in the gallery remembered her own experiences as his pupil with real affection. He encouraged the view of art as a spiritual pursuit, something which put him at odds with the more materialistic concerns of the modern postwar generation. His work is certainly the opposite of pop art, focussing on the personalised expression of universal archetypes rather than the celebration of the ephemera of a consumer society. It didn’t share the political engagement of the 60s and 70s, either, preferring to partake of a wider sense of morality which saw the source of conflict in the divided self. This was also indicative of the strongly religious, if non-denominational, nature of his art, which put him definitively beyond the pale at this time.
Collins stayed true to his vision throughout his life, as the consistency in the themes of the works here displayed testifies. He stood outside of contemporary movements, his brief confluence with surrealism which saw two of his works displayed in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 alongside Dali and de Chirico soon diverging once they discovered the religious content of his paintings; he was summarily exiled, something which probably didn’t trouble him too much. His visions were too solid, too real to fit with the intellectual play of Freudian subconscious spectres and abrupt juxtapositions which was the matter of the Surrealist imagination. His work didn’t share the violent sexuality which haunts much surrealist work, either. If his work did have any affinity with the movement, it would be more likely to be with the neglected works of its female exponents, such as Dorothea Tanning. He can loosely be placed in a tradition of visionary British artists springing from William Blake and Samuel Palmer; but only in the sense that they focussed their inner eye through the expression of a personal symbolic transformation of figure and landscape. The outer world re-shaped by the inner.
It’s interesting to discover some of the artists with whom he formed friendships over his lifetime, themselves often mavericks and outsiders viewed with a suspicious eye by the artistic establishment. Through them, we can sense some kind of alternative stream of British art and culture running through the mid twentieth century, aware of the modernist orthodoxy and happy to use elements of it without buying into it wholesale. He met David Jones, the poet, engraver and illustrator whilst he was living with Eric Gill in his commune at Pigotts, near High Wycombe. The two followed a similarly idiosyncratic path, although Jones’ pictures, with their complex Celtic intertwinings of pencil, ink and watercolour drew on established forms as subject matter, weaving classical, Arthurian, Welsh and modern figures and landscapes together to form a cross-cultural and temporal tapestry (you can see one of these paintings later in the Kettles Yard exhibition). Eric Gill himself might also have been a fellow spirit, but whilst they enjoyed intense discussions, Gill’s autocratic nature and, shall we say, personal interpretation of the Catholicism to which he directed his art precluded any close friendship. His blank refusal to address Collins’ wife Elisabeth directly also marked a view of women wholly antithetical to Cecil’s own views (not to mention being incredibly rude).
Paul Nash was a good friend (see a previous post for more on this artist) and at one point wanted Cecil to write the text for the first book of his art to be published. Nash’s imbuing of familiar landscapes such as the Whittenham Clumps with the potency of a personal symbolism can be likened to the inspiration which Collins took from the hills, rivers and trees around their homes in Totnes and Dartington in Devon. Cecil and Elisabeth were first drawn to this area by the artist Mark Tobey, then director of the art studio at Dartington Hall, the progressive centre for arts and rural crafts set up by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. Tobey shared with him his interest in Eastern cultures and religious traditions (he practised the Baha’ai faith himself). He also became friends with the potter Bernard Leach, whose absorption of zen ideas of rough form and the acceptance and incorporation of ‘imperfections’ into the work were also influential. The poet and translator Arthur Waley, an expert on Chinese culture, was also a regular at the Hall at this time. One of the books he translated was Wu Cheng En’s Monkey, a classic 16th century tale of a pilgrimage of Fools which may well have impinged on Collins’ consciousness.
Collins also met the painter and set designer Hein Heckroth, who had come over to England with the Ballet Joos, who had emigrated en masse to escape Nazi Germany. Heckroth went on to be a designer on some of the great Powell and Pressburger films of the post-war, such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. When he was interned as an enemy alien during the war, Collins took over his position as the director of the art studio. The dancing figures of his fools may reflect the presence of the ballet at Dartington, and there’s something very familiar about Heckroth’s dancing newspaper figure in The Red Shoes. Collins began to teach and Dartington and found he was really very good at it. When he took up a teaching post at the Central St Martin’s School of Art in 1951, he shared the life drawing classes with Mervyn Peake, with whom he became good friends; a good job, really, since apparently Peake tended to let him get on with it whilst he sat in a corner working on Gormenghast. Both shared a belief in the primacy of the artistic imagination, in its ability to transform the world of perception into a rich landscape of personal and universal archetypes (and you can see how Peake portrayed this through his poetry in a previous post).
Collins was also friends with several musicians, and music plays an important role in some of his work. An early work of 1933 is titled The Music of the Worlds, and the ‘matrix’ works which he produced in the late fifties and early 60s approach the condition of improvisation in their initial spontaneous composition. He had met Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears during their visits to Dartington, and the couple became lifelong enthusiasts for and collectors of his works. He met Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1972 and the two enjoyed each others company so much that the composer would always invite the artist to sit in at rehearsals when he came into the country. When Collins designed stained glass windows for the church of St Michael and All Saints in Basingstoke, John Tavener, another musical friend, wrote an anthem especially for the dedication service.
But the greatest influence on Collins was his wife Elisabeth, to whom he was married for 58 years, from 1931 to his death in 1989. She was much more than a muse. A significant artist herself, with two paintings included in this exhibition, she represented for him a feminine ideal. Not that he was putting her on a pedestal (although he did seat her in a tree) or reducing her individuality in any way. His portraits of her are filled with a calm self-possession, a remote detachment combining with a beatifically benevolent regard. Gazing at these pictures seems to bring you into contact with some ideal state of the soul, of balance within the world. Of Happiness, in short (several Collins pictures are entitled The Great Happiness, often depicted as a sunlike circle towards which subjects gaze). These pictures reflect both the artist’s love of his wife and his realisation of a more universal quality in her which he is also drawn to discover in himself, and to which the well known painting (a copy of which hangs in our flat) The Artist and his Wife from 1939 attests.
The 88 works in this exhibition (which include two a piece from Elisabeth and from Mark Tobey, alongside portraits and a poem from others) represent most of the major periods and themes of Collins lifework. Here are some that were displayed:
Fool Picking His Nose (1940)
Collins acknowledged the idea of the Fool originating with a suggestion from Elisabeth. The Fool, as the title of the exhibition would suggest, became one of his signature figures. The Fool represents many things, but is essentially an innocent, who views the world directly and joyfully, unclouded by the intervention of intellect or the souring of experience. He is very much in the mould of the characters depicted in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, then. Here, the Fool picks his nose not out of any calculated disrespect for the religious authority. He is oblivious of the Bishop’s presence and simply doesn’t recognise his power. That nose needs picking, and picking now. The Fool walks under his own personal raincloud in a cartoonish fashion, but he doesn’t seem concerned by his soaking. George Harrison’s Beatles song Rain expresses a similar disregard for the exigencies of the weather. Collins uses watercolour washes over the ink drawn figures, but later Fool pictures would concentrate on the calligraphic pen lines alone. The Fool would become a more spindly figure, the twisting lines of his limbs suggesting a constant state of movement, life as a dance. As such, he is congruent with the author Charles Williams’ view of the Fool in his 1932 novel The Greater Trumps, which draws on the depiction in the traditional Tarot deck. The calligraphic effect with which the Fools were portrayed could become extremely complex and dense, as if they contained whole worlds of particulate flux and wavelike motion within their fragile frames. As in The Procession of Fools from 1940 (see above).
Sleeping Figure (1942)
This shows how the feminine form and the landscape become congruent. The sleeping figure could be the river between the banks. Her hair echoes the curlicued lines of the tree foliage, her limbs its branches. She fits into the contours of the land. Is it dreaming of her, or she of it. Both, maybe.
The Bride (1944)
The female form once more seems to merge with the tree trunk, as if it were a dress she was putting on. The hills undulate like a surging sea. The fish, with all the symbolism, Christian and otherwise, which it bears, lies calmly (dead?) in a protective circle of water, onto which the rays of the sun pour in a very physical rain. Indeed, the sun seems to be almost spitting its rays out into the land. In the background, some enormous glowing form seems to be emerging out of the mountains. Or perhaps it is the mountain itself which is being transformed.
The Island (1944)
A grove within a turbulent sea, with its own tutelary spirit. A place of sanctuary. From the waves at the side, it almost seems as if the island is moving, charting a course through this endless ocean. Typical broad-based Collins trees here, which seem to be an emergent form of the land, rather than something separate which is rooted down in it.
Elizabeth, the Artist’s Wife (1950)
One of his portraits of Elisabeth as feminine ideal, here with moonlit night landscape, an open book (the book of wisdom?) and the shining light of the Grail, a feminine symbol, behind. The veil drawn back from the window suggests the threshold between inner and outer worlds. Hymn to Night (1951) draws a similar parallel between the feminine and nighttime worlds. Again, the girl’s hair echoes the curving trails of foliage and river. The hands are crossed over the breast in a gesture which could be sacred, or could be adolescent modesty. It’s interesting to compare this with Edvard Munch’s Puberty, in which the young girl covering up her nakedness is menaced by a looming mass of dark shadow, which seems to be about to engulf her. Here the landscape offers no such threat, and the girl is calm (and once more emerging from a tree) and ready to go out into the nightlands, illuminated by the enormous moon and watched over by the drifting angel who may be an emanation of it.
Eternal Bride (1963)
This comes from the period when Collins was working with what he termed the matrix. This was a form of spontaneous composition in which he opened himself up to the chance workings of unconscious creation by crossing the canvas with sweeping brush strokes (sometimes even going so far as to close his eyes). He would then let his conscious mind contemplate the results and draw out the figures or archetypes which he perceived in and between the lines. Here, the feminine figure walks through a fiery landscape cradling the grail. At her feet lies a translucent egg and in the background some kind of forge sparks with violent creation.
Nocturne (1987)
A late painting soaked in the gradations of a single blue tone. The figure is very Marian, with her traditional veil of blue reflecting and reflected by the rest of the painting’s palette. Is her veil the colour of the moonlit night or is the moonlit night the colour of her veil? Here she is haloed in moonlight, which seeps out hazily from behind cloud. Again, Collins equates the feminine with the night and the moon, a traditional archetypal correspondence. The halo before her face also suggests a hand upon which the head rests in contemplation. The lines stretching out to a curved horizon behind her, following the outline contours of her body, seem to measure out some sort of plain or ploughed field.
Cecil Collins is an artist who means a lot to us. We take the train to Totnes and Dartington frequently and walk along the river next to which Cecil and Elisabeth lived and up to the Hall where he taught and worked, through the landscape which inspired so much of his work. Seeing all these pictures gathered together, some seen before in books, some at High Cross house in Dartington was an intense and powerful experience, like meeting someone in the flesh who you’ve previously only seen in photographs. It felt as if it was a similarly personal response which drew the curators to mount this exhibition. Hopefully it marks a further stage in the rediscovery of Collins as an important and individual British artist, part of a parallel tradition of visionary outsiders who stand outside the canons of orthodox art histories.
Next, to Cambridge and Kettles Yard.
The Divine Land (1979)
Our recent fortnight’s break gave us the opportunity to see a couple of excellent exhibitions in the course of our wanderings about the capital and the bicycle-filled streets of Cambridge (and if you want a top-class, old-fashioned wicker bicycle basket, this is the place to come). In the Central St Martin’s School of Art, just off the busy streets of Holborn, with their old tram underpasses currently undergoing reconstruction, there was an unmissable exhibition of Cecil Collins’ art entitled Angels and Fools. The line of posters on the walls outside set his painting The Divine Land, with its plump golden angel hovering above a veil-like mountain, against the steady and noisome stream of cars and busses. Inside the building, two rooms were given over to his paintings and graphic works. This was an exhibition which was evidently a labour of love for its curators, who showed a real personal passion for and even pride in the art on display. This was, after all, the college where Collins taught for many years; And he was an immensely popular teacher. When asked to retire in 1975, a move motivated by internal politics and a desire to dictate the manner of art which was deemed ‘official’, students and fellow artists wrote so many letters in support that he was allowed to stay on.
One of the ladies in the gallery remembered her own experiences as his pupil with real affection. He encouraged the view of art as a spiritual pursuit, something which put him at odds with the more materialistic concerns of the modern postwar generation. His work is certainly the opposite of pop art, focussing on the personalised expression of universal archetypes rather than the celebration of the ephemera of a consumer society. It didn’t share the political engagement of the 60s and 70s, either, preferring to partake of a wider sense of morality which saw the source of conflict in the divided self. This was also indicative of the strongly religious, if non-denominational, nature of his art, which put him definitively beyond the pale at this time.
Procession of Fools (1940)
Collins stayed true to his vision throughout his life, as the consistency in the themes of the works here displayed testifies. He stood outside of contemporary movements, his brief confluence with surrealism which saw two of his works displayed in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 alongside Dali and de Chirico soon diverging once they discovered the religious content of his paintings; he was summarily exiled, something which probably didn’t trouble him too much. His visions were too solid, too real to fit with the intellectual play of Freudian subconscious spectres and abrupt juxtapositions which was the matter of the Surrealist imagination. His work didn’t share the violent sexuality which haunts much surrealist work, either. If his work did have any affinity with the movement, it would be more likely to be with the neglected works of its female exponents, such as Dorothea Tanning. He can loosely be placed in a tradition of visionary British artists springing from William Blake and Samuel Palmer; but only in the sense that they focussed their inner eye through the expression of a personal symbolic transformation of figure and landscape. The outer world re-shaped by the inner.
It’s interesting to discover some of the artists with whom he formed friendships over his lifetime, themselves often mavericks and outsiders viewed with a suspicious eye by the artistic establishment. Through them, we can sense some kind of alternative stream of British art and culture running through the mid twentieth century, aware of the modernist orthodoxy and happy to use elements of it without buying into it wholesale. He met David Jones, the poet, engraver and illustrator whilst he was living with Eric Gill in his commune at Pigotts, near High Wycombe. The two followed a similarly idiosyncratic path, although Jones’ pictures, with their complex Celtic intertwinings of pencil, ink and watercolour drew on established forms as subject matter, weaving classical, Arthurian, Welsh and modern figures and landscapes together to form a cross-cultural and temporal tapestry (you can see one of these paintings later in the Kettles Yard exhibition). Eric Gill himself might also have been a fellow spirit, but whilst they enjoyed intense discussions, Gill’s autocratic nature and, shall we say, personal interpretation of the Catholicism to which he directed his art precluded any close friendship. His blank refusal to address Collins’ wife Elisabeth directly also marked a view of women wholly antithetical to Cecil’s own views (not to mention being incredibly rude).
Cecil and Elisabeth at Dartington
Paul Nash was a good friend (see a previous post for more on this artist) and at one point wanted Cecil to write the text for the first book of his art to be published. Nash’s imbuing of familiar landscapes such as the Whittenham Clumps with the potency of a personal symbolism can be likened to the inspiration which Collins took from the hills, rivers and trees around their homes in Totnes and Dartington in Devon. Cecil and Elisabeth were first drawn to this area by the artist Mark Tobey, then director of the art studio at Dartington Hall, the progressive centre for arts and rural crafts set up by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. Tobey shared with him his interest in Eastern cultures and religious traditions (he practised the Baha’ai faith himself). He also became friends with the potter Bernard Leach, whose absorption of zen ideas of rough form and the acceptance and incorporation of ‘imperfections’ into the work were also influential. The poet and translator Arthur Waley, an expert on Chinese culture, was also a regular at the Hall at this time. One of the books he translated was Wu Cheng En’s Monkey, a classic 16th century tale of a pilgrimage of Fools which may well have impinged on Collins’ consciousness.
Collins also met the painter and set designer Hein Heckroth, who had come over to England with the Ballet Joos, who had emigrated en masse to escape Nazi Germany. Heckroth went on to be a designer on some of the great Powell and Pressburger films of the post-war, such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. When he was interned as an enemy alien during the war, Collins took over his position as the director of the art studio. The dancing figures of his fools may reflect the presence of the ballet at Dartington, and there’s something very familiar about Heckroth’s dancing newspaper figure in The Red Shoes. Collins began to teach and Dartington and found he was really very good at it. When he took up a teaching post at the Central St Martin’s School of Art in 1951, he shared the life drawing classes with Mervyn Peake, with whom he became good friends; a good job, really, since apparently Peake tended to let him get on with it whilst he sat in a corner working on Gormenghast. Both shared a belief in the primacy of the artistic imagination, in its ability to transform the world of perception into a rich landscape of personal and universal archetypes (and you can see how Peake portrayed this through his poetry in a previous post).
Not your average teachers - Cecil and Mervyn in self-portraits
Collins was also friends with several musicians, and music plays an important role in some of his work. An early work of 1933 is titled The Music of the Worlds, and the ‘matrix’ works which he produced in the late fifties and early 60s approach the condition of improvisation in their initial spontaneous composition. He had met Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears during their visits to Dartington, and the couple became lifelong enthusiasts for and collectors of his works. He met Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1972 and the two enjoyed each others company so much that the composer would always invite the artist to sit in at rehearsals when he came into the country. When Collins designed stained glass windows for the church of St Michael and All Saints in Basingstoke, John Tavener, another musical friend, wrote an anthem especially for the dedication service.
The Artist's Wife Seated in a Tree (1944)
But the greatest influence on Collins was his wife Elisabeth, to whom he was married for 58 years, from 1931 to his death in 1989. She was much more than a muse. A significant artist herself, with two paintings included in this exhibition, she represented for him a feminine ideal. Not that he was putting her on a pedestal (although he did seat her in a tree) or reducing her individuality in any way. His portraits of her are filled with a calm self-possession, a remote detachment combining with a beatifically benevolent regard. Gazing at these pictures seems to bring you into contact with some ideal state of the soul, of balance within the world. Of Happiness, in short (several Collins pictures are entitled The Great Happiness, often depicted as a sunlike circle towards which subjects gaze). These pictures reflect both the artist’s love of his wife and his realisation of a more universal quality in her which he is also drawn to discover in himself, and to which the well known painting (a copy of which hangs in our flat) The Artist and his Wife from 1939 attests.
The 88 works in this exhibition (which include two a piece from Elisabeth and from Mark Tobey, alongside portraits and a poem from others) represent most of the major periods and themes of Collins lifework. Here are some that were displayed:
Fool Picking His Nose (1940)
Collins acknowledged the idea of the Fool originating with a suggestion from Elisabeth. The Fool, as the title of the exhibition would suggest, became one of his signature figures. The Fool represents many things, but is essentially an innocent, who views the world directly and joyfully, unclouded by the intervention of intellect or the souring of experience. He is very much in the mould of the characters depicted in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, then. Here, the Fool picks his nose not out of any calculated disrespect for the religious authority. He is oblivious of the Bishop’s presence and simply doesn’t recognise his power. That nose needs picking, and picking now. The Fool walks under his own personal raincloud in a cartoonish fashion, but he doesn’t seem concerned by his soaking. George Harrison’s Beatles song Rain expresses a similar disregard for the exigencies of the weather. Collins uses watercolour washes over the ink drawn figures, but later Fool pictures would concentrate on the calligraphic pen lines alone. The Fool would become a more spindly figure, the twisting lines of his limbs suggesting a constant state of movement, life as a dance. As such, he is congruent with the author Charles Williams’ view of the Fool in his 1932 novel The Greater Trumps, which draws on the depiction in the traditional Tarot deck. The calligraphic effect with which the Fools were portrayed could become extremely complex and dense, as if they contained whole worlds of particulate flux and wavelike motion within their fragile frames. As in The Procession of Fools from 1940 (see above).
Sleeping Figure (1942)
This shows how the feminine form and the landscape become congruent. The sleeping figure could be the river between the banks. Her hair echoes the curlicued lines of the tree foliage, her limbs its branches. She fits into the contours of the land. Is it dreaming of her, or she of it. Both, maybe.
The Bride (1944)
The female form once more seems to merge with the tree trunk, as if it were a dress she was putting on. The hills undulate like a surging sea. The fish, with all the symbolism, Christian and otherwise, which it bears, lies calmly (dead?) in a protective circle of water, onto which the rays of the sun pour in a very physical rain. Indeed, the sun seems to be almost spitting its rays out into the land. In the background, some enormous glowing form seems to be emerging out of the mountains. Or perhaps it is the mountain itself which is being transformed.
The Island (1944)
A grove within a turbulent sea, with its own tutelary spirit. A place of sanctuary. From the waves at the side, it almost seems as if the island is moving, charting a course through this endless ocean. Typical broad-based Collins trees here, which seem to be an emergent form of the land, rather than something separate which is rooted down in it.
Elizabeth, the Artist’s Wife (1950)
One of his portraits of Elisabeth as feminine ideal, here with moonlit night landscape, an open book (the book of wisdom?) and the shining light of the Grail, a feminine symbol, behind. The veil drawn back from the window suggests the threshold between inner and outer worlds. Hymn to Night (1951) draws a similar parallel between the feminine and nighttime worlds. Again, the girl’s hair echoes the curving trails of foliage and river. The hands are crossed over the breast in a gesture which could be sacred, or could be adolescent modesty. It’s interesting to compare this with Edvard Munch’s Puberty, in which the young girl covering up her nakedness is menaced by a looming mass of dark shadow, which seems to be about to engulf her. Here the landscape offers no such threat, and the girl is calm (and once more emerging from a tree) and ready to go out into the nightlands, illuminated by the enormous moon and watched over by the drifting angel who may be an emanation of it.
Eternal Bride (1963)
This comes from the period when Collins was working with what he termed the matrix. This was a form of spontaneous composition in which he opened himself up to the chance workings of unconscious creation by crossing the canvas with sweeping brush strokes (sometimes even going so far as to close his eyes). He would then let his conscious mind contemplate the results and draw out the figures or archetypes which he perceived in and between the lines. Here, the feminine figure walks through a fiery landscape cradling the grail. At her feet lies a translucent egg and in the background some kind of forge sparks with violent creation.
Nocturne (1987)
A late painting soaked in the gradations of a single blue tone. The figure is very Marian, with her traditional veil of blue reflecting and reflected by the rest of the painting’s palette. Is her veil the colour of the moonlit night or is the moonlit night the colour of her veil? Here she is haloed in moonlight, which seeps out hazily from behind cloud. Again, Collins equates the feminine with the night and the moon, a traditional archetypal correspondence. The halo before her face also suggests a hand upon which the head rests in contemplation. The lines stretching out to a curved horizon behind her, following the outline contours of her body, seem to measure out some sort of plain or ploughed field.
Cecil Collins is an artist who means a lot to us. We take the train to Totnes and Dartington frequently and walk along the river next to which Cecil and Elisabeth lived and up to the Hall where he taught and worked, through the landscape which inspired so much of his work. Seeing all these pictures gathered together, some seen before in books, some at High Cross house in Dartington was an intense and powerful experience, like meeting someone in the flesh who you’ve previously only seen in photographs. It felt as if it was a similarly personal response which drew the curators to mount this exhibition. Hopefully it marks a further stage in the rediscovery of Collins as an important and individual British artist, part of a parallel tradition of visionary outsiders who stand outside the canons of orthodox art histories.
Next, to Cambridge and Kettles Yard.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Hammer Goes Sweeney: The Satanic Rites of Dracula
Here are some notes for a film which will not now be shown in the upcoming Gothic cinema season in Bath (stay tuned for further news). But rest assured, you will still be able to see the Count struggling to adjust to a life in London in Dracula AD1972. Meanwhile, I present, for your edification and entertainment:
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula is a sequel of sorts to Dracula AD72, reprising the contemporary London setting and reintroducing a number of the characters who managed to survive the previous film. There is a feel that this could have been developed into an ongoing series, a supernatural Sweeney. Inspector Murray is back on the case, called in by MI5 and soon turning to his old cohort in occult crimebusting, Lorrimer Van Helsing, when its diabolical nature is revealed. Van Helsing is once more portrayed by Peter Cushing with absolute authority and immaculate articulation. Granddaughter Jessica soon enters the scene, tray of tea in hand, and is greeted with a ‘nice to see you again’ by Murray, who discreetly refrains from noticing her metamorphosis from Stepahanie Beacham into Joanna Lumley. William Franklyn, who persuaded millions that Schweppes was the acme of urbane sophistication in the 70s, plays secret service man Torrence, and gets to air his sardonic tones and arch glances with customary flair. Freddie Jones, playing Van Helsing’s old college friend Professor Keeley (‘not the Nobel Prize winner?’, Murray conveniently asks) exudes his usual aura of sweaty intensity and twitchy paranoia in his role as the bio-chemist who is seduced by ‘the thrill of disgust, the beauty of obscenity’. Most importantly, of course, this is Christopher Lee’s last appearance as Dracula, the role which he definitively made his own, and whose darkly seductive presence is the default image of the Count in the minds of many.
Director Alan Gibson once more indulges his penchant for wide-angle pans of London scenes, and in the title sequence, these are overlaid with the slowly growing shadow of a caped form, clawlike hands extended in a predatory grasp. The figure of Hammer’s Dracula has at this point become such a readily recognisable icon that it can be reduced to its charicature elements in a simplified silhouette. Therein lies the problem in doing anything new with the character. The expansion of his dread shadow over London lets us know that the Count will no longer be confined to islands of Victorian gothic revival. He’s now as modern as a neon Cinzano ad over Picadilly Circus. Writer Don Houghton continues to mix generic elements in order to create a fresh context within which Christopher Lee’s Dracula can operate. The film opens with a modish Satanic ritual, that titillating mainstay of 70s horror on film and tv, and on the the taste-free covers of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and his emulators which stuffed the revolving wire bookracks found in chemists and railway newspaper booths. Representing the fag end of the sixties counter-culture, this was the inverse side of the hippies’ woolly-minded engagement with eastern philosophies. The sexual revolution had filtered through into the mainstream, and immediately adopted the old poses of devilish libertinism, taking its cue from arch-suburbanite Mick Jagger’s performance of Sympathy for the Devil. The flipside of such lubricious Satanist shenanigans were the slew of ‘comedies’ partaking of the supposed permissive society with leering and beady-eyed desperation. Hammer’s biggest moneyspinner of the 70s was, after all, its big screen adaptation of On the Buses. And if you want a film emblematic of the tenor of the times, look no further.
The henchmen in Satanic Rites are like the Hell’s Angels hired for security at the relentlessly grim Altamont festival, where an uneasy Jagger had sung his devil’s music in front of a crowd seething with violence. Having been momentarily seduced by the utopian anarchism of the Summer of Love, the glamour has now worn off, and they’ve gone back to cracking heads, whilst retaining the kaftans as a relic of their brief dalliance with notions of peace and love. Van Helsing alludes to the twilight following the brief dawn of this era of creativity and optimism when he refers to the ‘cult of blood’ being ‘more potent and addictive than heroin’. It would be left to New York directors Paul Morrissey and Abel Ferrara to draw out the metaphoric link between the blood addictions of vampirism and hard drugs in Blood for Dracula and The Addiction. Dracula himself provides the voice of the Establishment crackdown when he declares that the foundation which his Corporation backs is formed of ‘a group of us that is determined that the decadence of the present day can and will be halted’. He’s lying, of course, but the promise of a new fascistic order is an irresistible lure to those for whom such a world is a secret ideal. The Georgian country house in which this rite takes place looks not dissimilar to the one to which John and Yoko retreated in the latter days of the Beatles (it is in fact High Canons at Well End in Hertfordshire), but its period façade hides the very latest in surveillance equipment and the general banks of technology with blinking lights and flickering dials essential for any supervillain’s lair. We are soon plunged into the world of the espionage thriller, replete with silencers, stake-outs and stunt motorcycle crashes. Dracula almost comes to be identified with the Cold War threat of Eastern Europe, which provides the fearful subterfuge fuelling such spy movie fare.
Dracula has clearly learned his lessons from his experiences in AD1972, and has made his fortune in property. The mist-enshrouded steel and glass skyscraper at whose summit he is discovered is the new gothic edifice from which he exerts his influence, its domineering tower emerging from the site of the demolished church of St Bartolphs, within whose stone walls he had seemed confined. This is now commemorated with a blue plaque, a symbol of the continuity with a landscape of the past which has been transformed into a new anti-sanctuary, sympathetic to the tenor of the times. This modern capitalist fortress represents an adaptation to new models of power far more dynamic and far-reaching than the feudal patterns of old. Having had to make do in the past with lording it over the local village peasantry, Dracula is now able to take advantage of modern technologies and business practices to expand into a globalised world. With holdings in chemicals, oil and banks, he has created a corporation around himself, adapting swiftly to a new business class system which credits a CEO with far greater authority than a Count. A suitably anonymous name, DD Denham, acts as a front, as well as a nod to the Denham Studios where many of Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films were made. The triple D displays a hint of a towering ego, as well as providing a justification for the prominent signet ring, which is always ferreted away along with his ashes or a sample of dried blood subsequent to a climactic disintegration. Using a combination of his wordly and supernatural power, he recruits four pillars of the establishment, including a Lord Carradine, presumably a nod to horror legend John, who had taken over Lugosi’s cape in the later Universal Dracula films. These will be his four portly horsemen of the apocalypse, who will spread disease and famine across the world. The Count’s goals are apocalyptic, and place him once more in the position of a very biblical Satanic figure.
When Van Helsing and Dracula finally come face to face, it is as two archetypal adversaries who recognise that they are locked in an eternal struggle. ‘Denham’ awaits expectantly, sat behind a large executive desk, an interrogatory lamp blinding Van Helsing’s vision. In this new castle of gothic modernity, Dracula hides in a dazzling blaze of electric light, the white circle of the desk lamp the misplaced halo of a fallen angel. Christopher Lee gets to try on an East European accent, perhaps in an attempt at achieving the faithful adherence to Bram Stoker’s original conception of the character for which he was always lobbying. Thankfully, he soon reverts to the imperiously aloof and coldly authoritative tones which he had first displayed in Terence Fisher’s 1958 film. It always seemed a shame that Lee was subsequently denied all but the most simplistic dialogue and the occasional evil declamation, since the aristocratic hauteur of his delivery perfectly offset the hissing bestiality which he also conveyed so well. Here, his demonic nature by now taken as read, urbanity is cast aside and he gets to spit lines such as ‘my revenge has spread over centuries and has just begun’ with undeniable relish.
In the manner of a Bond villain, a role which Lee was to adopt two years later in The Man With the Golden Gun, Dracula eschews the opportunity to swiftly and efficiently dispose of his nemesis. He needs him to witness his ultimate triumph in this battle between dark and light. As an embodiment of evil, or as the central figure in a successful series of movies if you want to be more prosaic, Dracula can never die. He has by this stage been through many a definitive death and perfunctory resurrection and on this occasion an explanation for his return is considered redundant. It can really just be taken for granted now. The headquarters of DD Denham is a forbiddingly spartan place, a 70s corporate wasteland which seems to actively repel the idle passerby, rather like Canary Wharf. Its eerily depopulated air of desolation is a preview of the world which Dracula aims to create. The lonely nightwatchman is like a guardian at the gates of an underworld which has gone overground, a ferry replaced by an express lift in this architecture of modernised myth. The building is a giant tombstone, a monumental mausoleum in which Dracula stokes the Armageddon which will represent his ultimate triumph and also serve to end his cursed existence.
Christopher Lee’s final bow takes the form of an inverted Passion, once more reflecting the Manichean nature of the struggle in which good and evil, darkness and light, need each other’s existence against which to define themselves. Van Helsing has earlier given a quick run through of the traditional methods of vampire despatch, a list into which the debilitating effects of hawthorn has been casually inserted, in the hope that we might not note its swift addition to the standard repertoire. Inevitably this comes into play, and the Count ends with his crown of thorns, Van Helsing driving a spike into his side like the soldier at the foot of the cross. The Count will rise once more, Don Houghton pushing generic hybridity to new heights of absurdity in the martial arts co-production The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Peter Cushing will gamely reprise the role of Van Helsing, this time the original Victorian model, relocated to a nineteenth century China of dubious historicity. But the Count is not Christopher Lee, it is an absurd imposter and not the real Dracula at all. So as he once more frame-dissolves into a pile of quivering jelly and windblown ashes, this really is The End.
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula is a sequel of sorts to Dracula AD72, reprising the contemporary London setting and reintroducing a number of the characters who managed to survive the previous film. There is a feel that this could have been developed into an ongoing series, a supernatural Sweeney. Inspector Murray is back on the case, called in by MI5 and soon turning to his old cohort in occult crimebusting, Lorrimer Van Helsing, when its diabolical nature is revealed. Van Helsing is once more portrayed by Peter Cushing with absolute authority and immaculate articulation. Granddaughter Jessica soon enters the scene, tray of tea in hand, and is greeted with a ‘nice to see you again’ by Murray, who discreetly refrains from noticing her metamorphosis from Stepahanie Beacham into Joanna Lumley. William Franklyn, who persuaded millions that Schweppes was the acme of urbane sophistication in the 70s, plays secret service man Torrence, and gets to air his sardonic tones and arch glances with customary flair. Freddie Jones, playing Van Helsing’s old college friend Professor Keeley (‘not the Nobel Prize winner?’, Murray conveniently asks) exudes his usual aura of sweaty intensity and twitchy paranoia in his role as the bio-chemist who is seduced by ‘the thrill of disgust, the beauty of obscenity’. Most importantly, of course, this is Christopher Lee’s last appearance as Dracula, the role which he definitively made his own, and whose darkly seductive presence is the default image of the Count in the minds of many.
Joanna joins the team
Director Alan Gibson once more indulges his penchant for wide-angle pans of London scenes, and in the title sequence, these are overlaid with the slowly growing shadow of a caped form, clawlike hands extended in a predatory grasp. The figure of Hammer’s Dracula has at this point become such a readily recognisable icon that it can be reduced to its charicature elements in a simplified silhouette. Therein lies the problem in doing anything new with the character. The expansion of his dread shadow over London lets us know that the Count will no longer be confined to islands of Victorian gothic revival. He’s now as modern as a neon Cinzano ad over Picadilly Circus. Writer Don Houghton continues to mix generic elements in order to create a fresh context within which Christopher Lee’s Dracula can operate. The film opens with a modish Satanic ritual, that titillating mainstay of 70s horror on film and tv, and on the the taste-free covers of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and his emulators which stuffed the revolving wire bookracks found in chemists and railway newspaper booths. Representing the fag end of the sixties counter-culture, this was the inverse side of the hippies’ woolly-minded engagement with eastern philosophies. The sexual revolution had filtered through into the mainstream, and immediately adopted the old poses of devilish libertinism, taking its cue from arch-suburbanite Mick Jagger’s performance of Sympathy for the Devil. The flipside of such lubricious Satanist shenanigans were the slew of ‘comedies’ partaking of the supposed permissive society with leering and beady-eyed desperation. Hammer’s biggest moneyspinner of the 70s was, after all, its big screen adaptation of On the Buses. And if you want a film emblematic of the tenor of the times, look no further.
Wide-angle pan and 'don't mention S%!%n' US title
The henchmen in Satanic Rites are like the Hell’s Angels hired for security at the relentlessly grim Altamont festival, where an uneasy Jagger had sung his devil’s music in front of a crowd seething with violence. Having been momentarily seduced by the utopian anarchism of the Summer of Love, the glamour has now worn off, and they’ve gone back to cracking heads, whilst retaining the kaftans as a relic of their brief dalliance with notions of peace and love. Van Helsing alludes to the twilight following the brief dawn of this era of creativity and optimism when he refers to the ‘cult of blood’ being ‘more potent and addictive than heroin’. It would be left to New York directors Paul Morrissey and Abel Ferrara to draw out the metaphoric link between the blood addictions of vampirism and hard drugs in Blood for Dracula and The Addiction. Dracula himself provides the voice of the Establishment crackdown when he declares that the foundation which his Corporation backs is formed of ‘a group of us that is determined that the decadence of the present day can and will be halted’. He’s lying, of course, but the promise of a new fascistic order is an irresistible lure to those for whom such a world is a secret ideal. The Georgian country house in which this rite takes place looks not dissimilar to the one to which John and Yoko retreated in the latter days of the Beatles (it is in fact High Canons at Well End in Hertfordshire), but its period façade hides the very latest in surveillance equipment and the general banks of technology with blinking lights and flickering dials essential for any supervillain’s lair. We are soon plunged into the world of the espionage thriller, replete with silencers, stake-outs and stunt motorcycle crashes. Dracula almost comes to be identified with the Cold War threat of Eastern Europe, which provides the fearful subterfuge fuelling such spy movie fare.
Christopher's magic act
Dracula has clearly learned his lessons from his experiences in AD1972, and has made his fortune in property. The mist-enshrouded steel and glass skyscraper at whose summit he is discovered is the new gothic edifice from which he exerts his influence, its domineering tower emerging from the site of the demolished church of St Bartolphs, within whose stone walls he had seemed confined. This is now commemorated with a blue plaque, a symbol of the continuity with a landscape of the past which has been transformed into a new anti-sanctuary, sympathetic to the tenor of the times. This modern capitalist fortress represents an adaptation to new models of power far more dynamic and far-reaching than the feudal patterns of old. Having had to make do in the past with lording it over the local village peasantry, Dracula is now able to take advantage of modern technologies and business practices to expand into a globalised world. With holdings in chemicals, oil and banks, he has created a corporation around himself, adapting swiftly to a new business class system which credits a CEO with far greater authority than a Count. A suitably anonymous name, DD Denham, acts as a front, as well as a nod to the Denham Studios where many of Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films were made. The triple D displays a hint of a towering ego, as well as providing a justification for the prominent signet ring, which is always ferreted away along with his ashes or a sample of dried blood subsequent to a climactic disintegration. Using a combination of his wordly and supernatural power, he recruits four pillars of the establishment, including a Lord Carradine, presumably a nod to horror legend John, who had taken over Lugosi’s cape in the later Universal Dracula films. These will be his four portly horsemen of the apocalypse, who will spread disease and famine across the world. The Count’s goals are apocalyptic, and place him once more in the position of a very biblical Satanic figure.
When Van Helsing and Dracula finally come face to face, it is as two archetypal adversaries who recognise that they are locked in an eternal struggle. ‘Denham’ awaits expectantly, sat behind a large executive desk, an interrogatory lamp blinding Van Helsing’s vision. In this new castle of gothic modernity, Dracula hides in a dazzling blaze of electric light, the white circle of the desk lamp the misplaced halo of a fallen angel. Christopher Lee gets to try on an East European accent, perhaps in an attempt at achieving the faithful adherence to Bram Stoker’s original conception of the character for which he was always lobbying. Thankfully, he soon reverts to the imperiously aloof and coldly authoritative tones which he had first displayed in Terence Fisher’s 1958 film. It always seemed a shame that Lee was subsequently denied all but the most simplistic dialogue and the occasional evil declamation, since the aristocratic hauteur of his delivery perfectly offset the hissing bestiality which he also conveyed so well. Here, his demonic nature by now taken as read, urbanity is cast aside and he gets to spit lines such as ‘my revenge has spread over centuries and has just begun’ with undeniable relish.
Hey! Leave Joanna alone
In the manner of a Bond villain, a role which Lee was to adopt two years later in The Man With the Golden Gun, Dracula eschews the opportunity to swiftly and efficiently dispose of his nemesis. He needs him to witness his ultimate triumph in this battle between dark and light. As an embodiment of evil, or as the central figure in a successful series of movies if you want to be more prosaic, Dracula can never die. He has by this stage been through many a definitive death and perfunctory resurrection and on this occasion an explanation for his return is considered redundant. It can really just be taken for granted now. The headquarters of DD Denham is a forbiddingly spartan place, a 70s corporate wasteland which seems to actively repel the idle passerby, rather like Canary Wharf. Its eerily depopulated air of desolation is a preview of the world which Dracula aims to create. The lonely nightwatchman is like a guardian at the gates of an underworld which has gone overground, a ferry replaced by an express lift in this architecture of modernised myth. The building is a giant tombstone, a monumental mausoleum in which Dracula stokes the Armageddon which will represent his ultimate triumph and also serve to end his cursed existence.
The final Passion
Christopher Lee’s final bow takes the form of an inverted Passion, once more reflecting the Manichean nature of the struggle in which good and evil, darkness and light, need each other’s existence against which to define themselves. Van Helsing has earlier given a quick run through of the traditional methods of vampire despatch, a list into which the debilitating effects of hawthorn has been casually inserted, in the hope that we might not note its swift addition to the standard repertoire. Inevitably this comes into play, and the Count ends with his crown of thorns, Van Helsing driving a spike into his side like the soldier at the foot of the cross. The Count will rise once more, Don Houghton pushing generic hybridity to new heights of absurdity in the martial arts co-production The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Peter Cushing will gamely reprise the role of Van Helsing, this time the original Victorian model, relocated to a nineteenth century China of dubious historicity. But the Count is not Christopher Lee, it is an absurd imposter and not the real Dracula at all. So as he once more frame-dissolves into a pile of quivering jelly and windblown ashes, this really is The End.
Thursday, 13 August 2009
The Films of Val Lewton - Part Nineteen
The Curse of the Cat People - Part Four
The end of the Christmas period is marked by the taking down of the tree. Miss Callahan is here too, as she often is now. Is she another isolated soul, seeking refuge. Or maybe Ollie’s eye has started roving again. It indicates that the seasonal spell in which the family becomes a sacrosanct circle is over. Amy throws pine branches on the fire, re-enacting some long-forgotten pagan ritual. We are reminded of Irena throwing leaves on the garden fire, and once more it is apparent how much Amy is learning from her. Miss Callahan is reminded of Twelfth Nights gone by, of ‘burning pine and mummers plays’, whilst Alice remembers ‘St George and the Dragon, all kinds of crazy sword dances’. Even in this all-American setting, there are echoes of old traditions, which summon up a vestigial sense of connection with the passing of the seasons, the cycles of the year. As these memories prompt a look back through old photographs, one falls out, and Amy picks it up. It is the one of Irena which Ollie kept. Her lullaby theme appears on the soundtrack, this time in a minor key, suggesting that the harmony and happiness which Amy and Irena have bought to each other may be about to end.
Amy impulsively says ‘daddy, you know my friend too’. This immediately triggers a reaction from Ollie. It must have been obvious that Amy was still playing on her own for much of the time, and that a deal of imaginary creation was a necessary part of such solitude. But as soon as the shadow of Irena is re-introduced, reminding him of what has become in his mind her self-destructive retreat into imaginary fears, he feels compelled to act. He speciously declares that he thought that she’d ‘forgotten that dream life of yours’. A glance out of his workshop window would evidently have disabused him of such a belief. Now that her pact of secrecy has been broached, Amy affirms that Irena ‘plays with me in the garden all the time…she’s there whenever I call her’. Ollie marches her out into the garden, which is snowbound and empty, and feels rather desolate.
Amy sees Irena under the tree, but Ollie tells her there’s no-one there. He makes this statement of aggressive certitude without taking the trouble to actually look, or ask Amy where she can see her. He tells her to look again, and that if she still says that she’s there, ‘I’m afraid I shall have to punish you’. This is a very prescriptive way of getting someone to adhere to the truth which you want to establish. There is no attempt at establishing why that truth might be valid. Irena is still there, and puts her finger to her lips with a worried frown. This is why she made a pact of silence with Amy. She was protecting her from Ollie. But Amy takes after her in finding it difficult to lie. We see a reverse shot from behind Irena as Ollie leads Amy inside. This shot seems once more to emphasise her substantiality. As well as suggesting that she is watching as her cherished duty of care over Amy is ceded to Ollie’s coercive and impatient parenting, it shows that she remains watching from her garden bower after they have turned their backs on her to go inside. By adopting her viewpoint, the camera affirms her reality.
Alice is uneasy about Ollie’s punishment and retreats to the kitchen. When Ollie returns, looking broody, Miss Callahan is still there, alone in the room. She is evidently now quite at ease in this household, and she and Ollie seem quite close. She starts quoting poetry at him, even though he’s evidently not the literary type. This is the first time we’ve had any of Lewton’s customary literary quotations in this film, references to Sleepy Hollow notwithstanding. Miss Callahan seems to be trying to use literature to rouse Ollie’s dormant sense of empathy with his daughter, to make him see the world as others perceive it and break through his stubborn intransigence. She cites a couple of couplets from Stevenson’s The Unseen Playmate from A Child’s Garden of Verses: ‘When children are playing alone on the green/In comes the playmate that never was seen/When children are happy and lonely and good/The friend of the children comes out of the wood’. This is a poem which takes a very benevolent view of such imaginary playmates, portraying them as guardian figures who watch over solitary children. The unseen playmate’s association with the green, the wood, the laurels, the grass and the caves also gives him/her the same pantheistic connection with the manifest spirits of nature that we find in Curse of the Cat People.
Miss Callahan, with her professional knowledge and experience of childhood behaviour, defends Amy’s creation of an imaginary friend and the creative mind of which it is a sign. But Ollie rejects her informed point of view and returns to what is, for him, the crux of the matter; his self-justifying revisionist view of Irena’s fate. It is notable that Alice has retreated from the situation, once more taking a non-interventionist approach to her daughter’s upbringing. Perhaps she has become resigned to Ollie’s intransigence and ability to justify his behaviour in any situation by now. He is certainly a lot less confrontational with Miss Callahan, and the confidences they share remind us of the similar intimacies he let Alice in on in Cat People, the prelude to his rejection of Irena. ‘I’ve lived through something like this before’, he states, a comparison of immense hyperbole. Speaking of Irena, he says ‘you don’t know what happened to her because she told lies to herself and believed them’. Once again, he chooses to forget the words he uttered at the scene of her death: ‘she never lied to us’. He proceeds to spin a fiction which, whilst self-critical on the surface, serves to portray himself as the victim. ‘Everything I did was wrong…in the end she went completely mad…she killed herself’. The sought for sympathy is duly proffered, as Miss Callahan says ‘you can’t let this stand between you and your child’.
Upstairs, Irena comes up to see Amy, who has been left crying on her bed. But everything has changed. Irena’s explanations of why she came to Amy now have a valedictory air, the feeling of a final summation. ‘Out of your loneliness you called to me and brought me into being’ she says, ‘so that your childhood could be bright and full of friendliness’. Now she bows to Ollie’s coercive power, which insists upon the imposition of a dogmatically rationalist worldview. She is not here to battle for control of Amy, merely to respond to a need, which only incidentally fulfils her own. Realising that she has no inherent right to be here, she is willing to immediately accept her banishment. Her parting remarks aim to alleviate Amy’s feelings of desolation, and it is a parting for which she has already partially prepared her through drawing her attention to the transience and transformation observed in the passing of the seasons. ‘You’ll remember me for a while, mourn a little, but then you’ll forget, and that is as it should be’. These are words for a future Amy, for they are insights far too bittersweet for a young girl. Amy says that she’ll never forget and that she’ll follow her, but Irena replies that ‘no-one can follow me’. This suggests that she will be returning to an existence of isolation and solitude. It is a place to which Ollie and Alice’s erasure of her from memory has consigned her. Irena walks backward into shadow, just as Amy had first walked backward into the Farren house, another place of forgetting. The camera observes her retreat whilst gliding sideways across the room. It moves behind a chair and when it emerges from this occlusion, Irena is gone. The curtains blow inwards, the snow falls and Amy is alone in her desolation.
Downstairs, Ollie is as sensitive as ever in his attempt to maintain the comfort of his certainty. ‘But you’re a teacher, not a parent’, he splutters. She immediately puts him in his place, telling him that he, a designer of ships, has no special qualifications to raise children. ‘I’m a teacher, I’ve studied children’ she says, asserting her authority. When she tells him that ‘unhappy and frustrated children like Amy build companions for themselves as means of escape’ he immediately contrives to interpret this to his advantage, stubbornly asserting ‘you see, you agree with me’. His primary instinct is always to prove that he is right. Whilst they argue about her, for all the world as if they were a couple engaged upon the discussion of private matters from which Alice has politely absented herself, Amy has put on her coat and gone out into the empty garden, calling for Irena. Irena’s theme plays on the soundtrack, with ominous strings now providing uneasy harmony. She goes out of the gate, leaving the protected space of the enchanted garden, and heads out into the wild winter woodland. This is the primal region of chaos and danger, the fairytale realm into which innocents like Hansel and Gretel and Little Riding Hood wander. If the garden is the protected world of childhood, then the land beyond is the world of confused adult emotion and responsibility. It is a world also represented in the film Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s Freudian recasting of fairytale matter. Here, the forest surrounds the peasant village beyond which the pubescent heroine, Rosalie, wanders ever more widely as she emerges from childhood. Irena’s parting words to Amy have suggested that she must one day leave the garden of childhood, but it is much too early as yet. She is a lost babe in the woods, blundering blindly through the snow.
Miss Callahan is telling Ollie that he must be Amy’s friend so that she won’t have any need of an imaginary one. Alice finally returns, and the two women, with their differing ways of negotiating their ways around Ollie’s self-righteousness, convince him to go upstairs, something he agrees to only with a gruff conciliatory ‘I’ll go up and see if she’s gotten to bed alright’. Finding her gone, he and Alice pursue her, following her footsteps in the snow, whilst the pragmatic Miss Callahan calls the police. Amy walks with stumbling speed along a path through the woods, a wintry reminder of the sun-dappled path which the children had skipped along at the start of the film. As she comes to a small stone bridge across a brook, she pauses, cowering with fear. Julia’s citation of the Sleepy Hollow legend reverberate in her mind, transforming the bridge into a another transitional space filled with menace and mortal terror. ‘And if you stand on the bridge at the wrong hour, the hour when he rides by, his great cloak sweeps around you’. We hear the sound of beating of hooves swiftly approaching from around the corner, only to have them revealed as the juddering thud of a loose snow-chain on the wheel of a car. This is the traditional Lewton ‘bus’, the moment of bogus shock which provides a mechanical jolt and release of tension. Here, it is used in an interesting fashion, however. Realistically, we are perfectly well aware that this is not the phantom horseman approaching. But, as with the scene in Amy’s bedroom immediately following Julia’s relation of the tale, we are asked to empathise with her terror, to share her fear. Effectively, if her fears become manifest, then we will experience them with her as they appear on the screen. We will share with her the distorted perceptions of madness. After the car has passed, she runs off in a panic, straying from the path. ‘Don’t stray from the path’ is a tenet which is always held up as a dire warning to characters in fairytales, but it is something which they have to do in order to assert themselves as individuals and as adults. Rosalie eventually does so quite deliberately in Company of Wolves, going against the repeated warning of her grandmother.
We cut from Amy’s aimless wanderings through the stormy night to the interior of the Fallon house, the focal point to which she is inevitably being drawn. Barbara says ‘I hate this storm’, in a highly strung voice. ‘I don’t hate the storm,’ Julia half replies, more in rhetorical than conversational mode. ‘It blows beyond me’. This statement could effectively apply to all atmospheric conditions, indeed, to reality in general. With a sense of something obsessively re-iterated, she dreamily intones ‘it was on a night like this that Barbara died’. Once more, Barbara tries to insist upon her own reality, pleading for recognition. Julia blankly declares ‘everything you say is a lie. You are a poor lost woman’. This is the first time that she has displayed anything approaching pity for Barbara. It is a form of recognition which is almost worse than her usual cold repudiation. Calling her a lost woman also draws a parallel between her and Amy once again. Amy is at this very moment a lost girl out in the snow. Perhaps there is a slight nod to the lost boys of another fairy tale of parental neglect, Peter Pan. These are the female equivalent, the lost girls. Julia’s assertion that it was on a night like this that her daughter died also brings a sense circularity, of recurrence to the events currently unfolding, and links the Farren and Reed households. The Farren house is a shadow of what might be. Julia’s denial of her daughter’s existence is almost like a surrender to her worst fears. Maybe at some time in the past, she became so terrified at the idea of something happening to her daughter, and at the idea that she was unable to safely raise her, that her mind recast that fear as reality, just to exorcise it. This scrap of pity which she has been thrown is a bitter offering for Barbara, and she reacts with coldly introverted violence. ‘You’re always worse when that little girl’s been here. If that child comes here again…I’ll kill her’. The casual determination with which she voices this vow makes us believe in its sincerity.
Amy stumbles through the storm, and finally collapses against the bole of a tree, at the end of her endurance. But this is a tree of the wild world outside of the garden, and has none of the properties of the one which has stood guard over her protected realm. Ollie and Alice are now searching with the state troopers and their dogs. Ollie guiltily says that if they find her, he will believe her and trust her. He has waited for the crisis to come to fruition before deciding to act. But will he do as he says, or will old patterns be re-established? Will he once more rewrite events as he had done with Irena? Amy, half-buried in the snow, hears the dogs barking and lights flashing through the trees, and her primal fears are awoken. The wolves are coming! She staggers off towards the house where the wolves’ female equivalent lives. The fear of the wolves drives her towards the cat, which is waiting to pounce, like the stuffed specimen on the branch.
Julia is asleep on the couch when she is awoken by Amy’s feeble knocks at the door. The house and its inhabitants always seems to be asleep or sleepwalking until some visitor from the world outside comes to bring it to life once more. Mrs Farren limps to the door, looking more worn than ever, and greets the shivering figure of Amy with a sympathetic ‘poor little girl’, a direct echo of her ‘poor lost woman’ to Barbara. Snow swirls in through the open door and the glass of the gas lamps tinkles in the wind, the lights flickering. Mrs Farren struggles to shut the door, but it blows back open. The world outside has entered and refuses to be excluded any more. The storm no longer ‘blows through’ Julia, but must now be confronted. The stage is set for a repeat performance of the night Barbara ‘died’. Julia must now accept some level of responsibility for the safety of Amy, a displaced confrontation with the guilt and fear which she has retreated into a lifetime of fantasy to evade. ‘I’ll have to hide you’, she says, as if this were a game. Amy is to become part of the house, perhaps like one of the dusty and lifeless ornaments in the room behind the curtain. Julia’s empty stage.
Julia decides on a hiding place. ‘We can go upstairs. There’s a little room under the eaves’. She is guiding Amy towards becoming a nascent madwoman in the attic, the guise under which she herself had first invisibly made her presence felt. But the curtains blow inwards in a menacing fashion, like the classic shrouded ghost. The house has been a mausoleum, a place of the dead where emotions are suppressed and confrontations stubbornly evaded. Now it is coming to life as the upheaval of the storm outside, which is an externalisation of Amy’s inner turmoil, is transferred inside, bringing things long buried scrabbling their way violently to the surface. The lights flicker and their glass casings rattle as if they are about to burst into savage incandescence. Mrs Farren hauls herself up the stairs, but the exertion, both emotional and physical, is too much for her and her heart gives out. Amy is frozen, not wanting to leave her dead body, and with spectral curtains flapping frantically both above and below to ward her off. We see a shadow rising from below, and then Barbara slowly ascends from her crypt-like quarters. Her face is a fixed mask of hatred, a dead face with no movement of animating emotion. She halts at the foot of the stairs, bracketed by two large candles, as if this is to be the culmination of a pre-planned ritual. Tears stall in her eyes as she sees her dead mother. ‘Even my mother’s last moments you’ve stolen from me’ she says, immediately beginning to revise memory to displace the blame. Amy has taken nothing from her since her mother gave her nothing in the first place. She calls Amy down like a predator mesmerising its prey into meekly submitting to its fate.
Amy, her voice quivering with terror, calls for her daddy, as if new priorities are already beginning to impose themselves, but he is not there to help. So she calls for ‘my friend’, who appears to have abandoned her. As she looks down at Barbara, Irena’s benevolent form becomes superimposed over her. Amy’s fear immediately dissipates and she descends the stairs and calls Barbara ‘my friend’. Barbara’s hands, rigid and clawlike, stretch around her head as if to throttle her, but Amy repeats the words ‘my friends’, as if to create the condition through verbal repetition, and hugs Barbara to her. There is a close up of Barbara’s face, and her hands relax and hold Amy. Her face loses its rigidity and sinks into a sorrowful look of self-awareness. This is a moment and a moment only of human warmth and contact before she retreats once more into the prison of self, but it is a moment which she can hold onto, and which may one day help her. Amy cannot ‘save’ Barbara in the way that she has Irena, but she can give her a small crumb of hope to hold onto, a hint of unconditional love to set against the contemptuous pity which was all her mother left her with. The hounds approach followed by the others, and Barbara slowly backs away, separating from her double, the shadows of past and future possibilities now diverging.
Ollie comes in and sweeps her up in his arms, saying ‘I thought we’d lost you. I thought we’d never find you again’. He is talking of an actual physical loss, although he had already almost as good as lost her in a less tangible fashion. As they approach their home once more, Ollie makes a solemn declaration which echoes the pledge which Amy made with Irena. ‘From now on you and I are going to be friends. I’m going to trust you. I’m going to believe in you. You’ll like that won’t you?’ This is like the obverse of the litany of ways in which she will try to please her father that Amy reeled off as her birthday wish. Rather than requiring her to act and think in ways which he prescribes in order to be a ‘good girl’, he is now promising to indulge her in an equally unquestioning way, which is not necessarily any better. But the gesture is important, and some equilibrium will hopefully be achieved in the future. But now, the snow is melting, the long freeze is coming to an end. Ollie is asking ‘is your friend in the garden? Can you see Irena now?’ He is asking to be allowed into Amy’s world of imagination, rather than attempting to block it off. Irena is indeed there once more, having now been given official permission to return. Ollie’s recognition of the validity of Amy’s creative imagination is also a reconciliation with his memory of Irena. ‘Yes, I can see her’ says Amy, and Ollie concurs; ‘I see her too darling’. He doesn’t really, of course; He’s not even looking in her direction. But she does live inside him again, and he can see her once more in this sense, as memory clears from the fogs of self-justification. Amy smiles at him, and they all go in. It is her reconciliation with her father which is all-important. Alice looks on from the sidelines again. This may reflect the autobiographical element of Lewton’s reflection on his relationship with his own daughter as much as anything. This was the relationship which was important to him.
As they all go in, the camera positions itself so that we see them from the point of view of Irena, watching from over her shoulder so that her presence is solidly registered. The bole of the tree is in the foreground. Once they are inside, she fades away from view, as if merging with the tree. She has selflessly negotiated a position whereby she will be needed less and less. But she waits in the tree, a guardian spirit from the old world waiting to be summoned once more.
Next, the first of the Boris Karloff historical European ‘trilogy’, Isle of the Dead.
One saved memory
The end of the Christmas period is marked by the taking down of the tree. Miss Callahan is here too, as she often is now. Is she another isolated soul, seeking refuge. Or maybe Ollie’s eye has started roving again. It indicates that the seasonal spell in which the family becomes a sacrosanct circle is over. Amy throws pine branches on the fire, re-enacting some long-forgotten pagan ritual. We are reminded of Irena throwing leaves on the garden fire, and once more it is apparent how much Amy is learning from her. Miss Callahan is reminded of Twelfth Nights gone by, of ‘burning pine and mummers plays’, whilst Alice remembers ‘St George and the Dragon, all kinds of crazy sword dances’. Even in this all-American setting, there are echoes of old traditions, which summon up a vestigial sense of connection with the passing of the seasons, the cycles of the year. As these memories prompt a look back through old photographs, one falls out, and Amy picks it up. It is the one of Irena which Ollie kept. Her lullaby theme appears on the soundtrack, this time in a minor key, suggesting that the harmony and happiness which Amy and Irena have bought to each other may be about to end.
The empty garden
Amy impulsively says ‘daddy, you know my friend too’. This immediately triggers a reaction from Ollie. It must have been obvious that Amy was still playing on her own for much of the time, and that a deal of imaginary creation was a necessary part of such solitude. But as soon as the shadow of Irena is re-introduced, reminding him of what has become in his mind her self-destructive retreat into imaginary fears, he feels compelled to act. He speciously declares that he thought that she’d ‘forgotten that dream life of yours’. A glance out of his workshop window would evidently have disabused him of such a belief. Now that her pact of secrecy has been broached, Amy affirms that Irena ‘plays with me in the garden all the time…she’s there whenever I call her’. Ollie marches her out into the garden, which is snowbound and empty, and feels rather desolate.
Amy sees Irena under the tree, but Ollie tells her there’s no-one there. He makes this statement of aggressive certitude without taking the trouble to actually look, or ask Amy where she can see her. He tells her to look again, and that if she still says that she’s there, ‘I’m afraid I shall have to punish you’. This is a very prescriptive way of getting someone to adhere to the truth which you want to establish. There is no attempt at establishing why that truth might be valid. Irena is still there, and puts her finger to her lips with a worried frown. This is why she made a pact of silence with Amy. She was protecting her from Ollie. But Amy takes after her in finding it difficult to lie. We see a reverse shot from behind Irena as Ollie leads Amy inside. This shot seems once more to emphasise her substantiality. As well as suggesting that she is watching as her cherished duty of care over Amy is ceded to Ollie’s coercive and impatient parenting, it shows that she remains watching from her garden bower after they have turned their backs on her to go inside. By adopting her viewpoint, the camera affirms her reality.
Alice is uneasy about Ollie’s punishment and retreats to the kitchen. When Ollie returns, looking broody, Miss Callahan is still there, alone in the room. She is evidently now quite at ease in this household, and she and Ollie seem quite close. She starts quoting poetry at him, even though he’s evidently not the literary type. This is the first time we’ve had any of Lewton’s customary literary quotations in this film, references to Sleepy Hollow notwithstanding. Miss Callahan seems to be trying to use literature to rouse Ollie’s dormant sense of empathy with his daughter, to make him see the world as others perceive it and break through his stubborn intransigence. She cites a couple of couplets from Stevenson’s The Unseen Playmate from A Child’s Garden of Verses: ‘When children are playing alone on the green/In comes the playmate that never was seen/When children are happy and lonely and good/The friend of the children comes out of the wood’. This is a poem which takes a very benevolent view of such imaginary playmates, portraying them as guardian figures who watch over solitary children. The unseen playmate’s association with the green, the wood, the laurels, the grass and the caves also gives him/her the same pantheistic connection with the manifest spirits of nature that we find in Curse of the Cat People.
Miss Callahan, with her professional knowledge and experience of childhood behaviour, defends Amy’s creation of an imaginary friend and the creative mind of which it is a sign. But Ollie rejects her informed point of view and returns to what is, for him, the crux of the matter; his self-justifying revisionist view of Irena’s fate. It is notable that Alice has retreated from the situation, once more taking a non-interventionist approach to her daughter’s upbringing. Perhaps she has become resigned to Ollie’s intransigence and ability to justify his behaviour in any situation by now. He is certainly a lot less confrontational with Miss Callahan, and the confidences they share remind us of the similar intimacies he let Alice in on in Cat People, the prelude to his rejection of Irena. ‘I’ve lived through something like this before’, he states, a comparison of immense hyperbole. Speaking of Irena, he says ‘you don’t know what happened to her because she told lies to herself and believed them’. Once again, he chooses to forget the words he uttered at the scene of her death: ‘she never lied to us’. He proceeds to spin a fiction which, whilst self-critical on the surface, serves to portray himself as the victim. ‘Everything I did was wrong…in the end she went completely mad…she killed herself’. The sought for sympathy is duly proffered, as Miss Callahan says ‘you can’t let this stand between you and your child’.
Upstairs, Irena comes up to see Amy, who has been left crying on her bed. But everything has changed. Irena’s explanations of why she came to Amy now have a valedictory air, the feeling of a final summation. ‘Out of your loneliness you called to me and brought me into being’ she says, ‘so that your childhood could be bright and full of friendliness’. Now she bows to Ollie’s coercive power, which insists upon the imposition of a dogmatically rationalist worldview. She is not here to battle for control of Amy, merely to respond to a need, which only incidentally fulfils her own. Realising that she has no inherent right to be here, she is willing to immediately accept her banishment. Her parting remarks aim to alleviate Amy’s feelings of desolation, and it is a parting for which she has already partially prepared her through drawing her attention to the transience and transformation observed in the passing of the seasons. ‘You’ll remember me for a while, mourn a little, but then you’ll forget, and that is as it should be’. These are words for a future Amy, for they are insights far too bittersweet for a young girl. Amy says that she’ll never forget and that she’ll follow her, but Irena replies that ‘no-one can follow me’. This suggests that she will be returning to an existence of isolation and solitude. It is a place to which Ollie and Alice’s erasure of her from memory has consigned her. Irena walks backward into shadow, just as Amy had first walked backward into the Farren house, another place of forgetting. The camera observes her retreat whilst gliding sideways across the room. It moves behind a chair and when it emerges from this occlusion, Irena is gone. The curtains blow inwards, the snow falls and Amy is alone in her desolation.
Leaving the garden
Downstairs, Ollie is as sensitive as ever in his attempt to maintain the comfort of his certainty. ‘But you’re a teacher, not a parent’, he splutters. She immediately puts him in his place, telling him that he, a designer of ships, has no special qualifications to raise children. ‘I’m a teacher, I’ve studied children’ she says, asserting her authority. When she tells him that ‘unhappy and frustrated children like Amy build companions for themselves as means of escape’ he immediately contrives to interpret this to his advantage, stubbornly asserting ‘you see, you agree with me’. His primary instinct is always to prove that he is right. Whilst they argue about her, for all the world as if they were a couple engaged upon the discussion of private matters from which Alice has politely absented herself, Amy has put on her coat and gone out into the empty garden, calling for Irena. Irena’s theme plays on the soundtrack, with ominous strings now providing uneasy harmony. She goes out of the gate, leaving the protected space of the enchanted garden, and heads out into the wild winter woodland. This is the primal region of chaos and danger, the fairytale realm into which innocents like Hansel and Gretel and Little Riding Hood wander. If the garden is the protected world of childhood, then the land beyond is the world of confused adult emotion and responsibility. It is a world also represented in the film Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s Freudian recasting of fairytale matter. Here, the forest surrounds the peasant village beyond which the pubescent heroine, Rosalie, wanders ever more widely as she emerges from childhood. Irena’s parting words to Amy have suggested that she must one day leave the garden of childhood, but it is much too early as yet. She is a lost babe in the woods, blundering blindly through the snow.
Miss Callahan is telling Ollie that he must be Amy’s friend so that she won’t have any need of an imaginary one. Alice finally returns, and the two women, with their differing ways of negotiating their ways around Ollie’s self-righteousness, convince him to go upstairs, something he agrees to only with a gruff conciliatory ‘I’ll go up and see if she’s gotten to bed alright’. Finding her gone, he and Alice pursue her, following her footsteps in the snow, whilst the pragmatic Miss Callahan calls the police. Amy walks with stumbling speed along a path through the woods, a wintry reminder of the sun-dappled path which the children had skipped along at the start of the film. As she comes to a small stone bridge across a brook, she pauses, cowering with fear. Julia’s citation of the Sleepy Hollow legend reverberate in her mind, transforming the bridge into a another transitional space filled with menace and mortal terror. ‘And if you stand on the bridge at the wrong hour, the hour when he rides by, his great cloak sweeps around you’. We hear the sound of beating of hooves swiftly approaching from around the corner, only to have them revealed as the juddering thud of a loose snow-chain on the wheel of a car. This is the traditional Lewton ‘bus’, the moment of bogus shock which provides a mechanical jolt and release of tension. Here, it is used in an interesting fashion, however. Realistically, we are perfectly well aware that this is not the phantom horseman approaching. But, as with the scene in Amy’s bedroom immediately following Julia’s relation of the tale, we are asked to empathise with her terror, to share her fear. Effectively, if her fears become manifest, then we will experience them with her as they appear on the screen. We will share with her the distorted perceptions of madness. After the car has passed, she runs off in a panic, straying from the path. ‘Don’t stray from the path’ is a tenet which is always held up as a dire warning to characters in fairytales, but it is something which they have to do in order to assert themselves as individuals and as adults. Rosalie eventually does so quite deliberately in Company of Wolves, going against the repeated warning of her grandmother.
We cut from Amy’s aimless wanderings through the stormy night to the interior of the Fallon house, the focal point to which she is inevitably being drawn. Barbara says ‘I hate this storm’, in a highly strung voice. ‘I don’t hate the storm,’ Julia half replies, more in rhetorical than conversational mode. ‘It blows beyond me’. This statement could effectively apply to all atmospheric conditions, indeed, to reality in general. With a sense of something obsessively re-iterated, she dreamily intones ‘it was on a night like this that Barbara died’. Once more, Barbara tries to insist upon her own reality, pleading for recognition. Julia blankly declares ‘everything you say is a lie. You are a poor lost woman’. This is the first time that she has displayed anything approaching pity for Barbara. It is a form of recognition which is almost worse than her usual cold repudiation. Calling her a lost woman also draws a parallel between her and Amy once again. Amy is at this very moment a lost girl out in the snow. Perhaps there is a slight nod to the lost boys of another fairy tale of parental neglect, Peter Pan. These are the female equivalent, the lost girls. Julia’s assertion that it was on a night like this that her daughter died also brings a sense circularity, of recurrence to the events currently unfolding, and links the Farren and Reed households. The Farren house is a shadow of what might be. Julia’s denial of her daughter’s existence is almost like a surrender to her worst fears. Maybe at some time in the past, she became so terrified at the idea of something happening to her daughter, and at the idea that she was unable to safely raise her, that her mind recast that fear as reality, just to exorcise it. This scrap of pity which she has been thrown is a bitter offering for Barbara, and she reacts with coldly introverted violence. ‘You’re always worse when that little girl’s been here. If that child comes here again…I’ll kill her’. The casual determination with which she voices this vow makes us believe in its sincerity.
Amy stumbles through the storm, and finally collapses against the bole of a tree, at the end of her endurance. But this is a tree of the wild world outside of the garden, and has none of the properties of the one which has stood guard over her protected realm. Ollie and Alice are now searching with the state troopers and their dogs. Ollie guiltily says that if they find her, he will believe her and trust her. He has waited for the crisis to come to fruition before deciding to act. But will he do as he says, or will old patterns be re-established? Will he once more rewrite events as he had done with Irena? Amy, half-buried in the snow, hears the dogs barking and lights flashing through the trees, and her primal fears are awoken. The wolves are coming! She staggers off towards the house where the wolves’ female equivalent lives. The fear of the wolves drives her towards the cat, which is waiting to pounce, like the stuffed specimen on the branch.
Shutting out the storm
Julia is asleep on the couch when she is awoken by Amy’s feeble knocks at the door. The house and its inhabitants always seems to be asleep or sleepwalking until some visitor from the world outside comes to bring it to life once more. Mrs Farren limps to the door, looking more worn than ever, and greets the shivering figure of Amy with a sympathetic ‘poor little girl’, a direct echo of her ‘poor lost woman’ to Barbara. Snow swirls in through the open door and the glass of the gas lamps tinkles in the wind, the lights flickering. Mrs Farren struggles to shut the door, but it blows back open. The world outside has entered and refuses to be excluded any more. The storm no longer ‘blows through’ Julia, but must now be confronted. The stage is set for a repeat performance of the night Barbara ‘died’. Julia must now accept some level of responsibility for the safety of Amy, a displaced confrontation with the guilt and fear which she has retreated into a lifetime of fantasy to evade. ‘I’ll have to hide you’, she says, as if this were a game. Amy is to become part of the house, perhaps like one of the dusty and lifeless ornaments in the room behind the curtain. Julia’s empty stage.
The unclimbable stair
Julia decides on a hiding place. ‘We can go upstairs. There’s a little room under the eaves’. She is guiding Amy towards becoming a nascent madwoman in the attic, the guise under which she herself had first invisibly made her presence felt. But the curtains blow inwards in a menacing fashion, like the classic shrouded ghost. The house has been a mausoleum, a place of the dead where emotions are suppressed and confrontations stubbornly evaded. Now it is coming to life as the upheaval of the storm outside, which is an externalisation of Amy’s inner turmoil, is transferred inside, bringing things long buried scrabbling their way violently to the surface. The lights flicker and their glass casings rattle as if they are about to burst into savage incandescence. Mrs Farren hauls herself up the stairs, but the exertion, both emotional and physical, is too much for her and her heart gives out. Amy is frozen, not wanting to leave her dead body, and with spectral curtains flapping frantically both above and below to ward her off. We see a shadow rising from below, and then Barbara slowly ascends from her crypt-like quarters. Her face is a fixed mask of hatred, a dead face with no movement of animating emotion. She halts at the foot of the stairs, bracketed by two large candles, as if this is to be the culmination of a pre-planned ritual. Tears stall in her eyes as she sees her dead mother. ‘Even my mother’s last moments you’ve stolen from me’ she says, immediately beginning to revise memory to displace the blame. Amy has taken nothing from her since her mother gave her nothing in the first place. She calls Amy down like a predator mesmerising its prey into meekly submitting to its fate.
Barbara-Irena
Amy, her voice quivering with terror, calls for her daddy, as if new priorities are already beginning to impose themselves, but he is not there to help. So she calls for ‘my friend’, who appears to have abandoned her. As she looks down at Barbara, Irena’s benevolent form becomes superimposed over her. Amy’s fear immediately dissipates and she descends the stairs and calls Barbara ‘my friend’. Barbara’s hands, rigid and clawlike, stretch around her head as if to throttle her, but Amy repeats the words ‘my friends’, as if to create the condition through verbal repetition, and hugs Barbara to her. There is a close up of Barbara’s face, and her hands relax and hold Amy. Her face loses its rigidity and sinks into a sorrowful look of self-awareness. This is a moment and a moment only of human warmth and contact before she retreats once more into the prison of self, but it is a moment which she can hold onto, and which may one day help her. Amy cannot ‘save’ Barbara in the way that she has Irena, but she can give her a small crumb of hope to hold onto, a hint of unconditional love to set against the contemptuous pity which was all her mother left her with. The hounds approach followed by the others, and Barbara slowly backs away, separating from her double, the shadows of past and future possibilities now diverging.
Ollie comes in and sweeps her up in his arms, saying ‘I thought we’d lost you. I thought we’d never find you again’. He is talking of an actual physical loss, although he had already almost as good as lost her in a less tangible fashion. As they approach their home once more, Ollie makes a solemn declaration which echoes the pledge which Amy made with Irena. ‘From now on you and I are going to be friends. I’m going to trust you. I’m going to believe in you. You’ll like that won’t you?’ This is like the obverse of the litany of ways in which she will try to please her father that Amy reeled off as her birthday wish. Rather than requiring her to act and think in ways which he prescribes in order to be a ‘good girl’, he is now promising to indulge her in an equally unquestioning way, which is not necessarily any better. But the gesture is important, and some equilibrium will hopefully be achieved in the future. But now, the snow is melting, the long freeze is coming to an end. Ollie is asking ‘is your friend in the garden? Can you see Irena now?’ He is asking to be allowed into Amy’s world of imagination, rather than attempting to block it off. Irena is indeed there once more, having now been given official permission to return. Ollie’s recognition of the validity of Amy’s creative imagination is also a reconciliation with his memory of Irena. ‘Yes, I can see her’ says Amy, and Ollie concurs; ‘I see her too darling’. He doesn’t really, of course; He’s not even looking in her direction. But she does live inside him again, and he can see her once more in this sense, as memory clears from the fogs of self-justification. Amy smiles at him, and they all go in. It is her reconciliation with her father which is all-important. Alice looks on from the sidelines again. This may reflect the autobiographical element of Lewton’s reflection on his relationship with his own daughter as much as anything. This was the relationship which was important to him.
As they all go in, the camera positions itself so that we see them from the point of view of Irena, watching from over her shoulder so that her presence is solidly registered. The bole of the tree is in the foreground. Once they are inside, she fades away from view, as if merging with the tree. She has selflessly negotiated a position whereby she will be needed less and less. But she waits in the tree, a guardian spirit from the old world waiting to be summoned once more.
Irena watches
Next, the first of the Boris Karloff historical European ‘trilogy’, Isle of the Dead.
Archers' Restraint
Sammy and Susan
The Small Back Room is a lesser known Powell and Pressburger film, perhaps because of its essential quietude, it's lack of the usual fireworks and fantasy. As a small scale black and white film which followed in the footsteps of the dazzling technicolor fantasias of A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, it's perhaps unsurprising that it has been occluded by their gaudy splendour. It's noticeable that commentators almost immediately refer to the hallucinatory scene of exaggerated expressionism which evokes the protagonist's battle with alcoholism and by extension despair, in which ranks of oversized clocks thunder out the passing seconds and a giant whisky bottle threatens to roll over him and crush him into the ground. But this is a scene which goes against the grain of the rest of the film, which relies much more on looks and glances, feelings unspoken but somehow known in order to portray the psychological effect of the war on those working at home. It is a film which won critical respect at the time, but attracted a meagre audience. It is ripe for rediscovery, for although it is very different in tone from their other works, it still ranks amongst Powell and Pressburger’s finest, which is praise indeed.
The film opens with a point of view shot through the windscreen of a car which is speeding through blackout London, until it is brought to a halt by a traffic light which commands it to ‘stop’ through the crossed shades which serve to reduce its luminosity. This serves as an opening metaphor for the way in which lives are interrupted and effectively put into suspension by the disruption of wartime. The titles locate the film as taking place in Spring 1943, when the war had become a long-established reality. The film focuses on the self-tormenting personality of Sammy Rice (played with aching stoicism by David Farrar), an expert in military ordinance, but as usual, Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell give rich life to even the most minor of characters. There is a pre-Carry On Sidney James (yet to the more familiarly matey Sid) as the sympathetic but no nonsense ‘not in my gaff’ publican ‘Knucksie’; Cyril Cusack giving a portrayal of touching hesitancy as Corporal Taylor, who is wracked by the knowledge that his marriage is breaking up during the long hours of his absence; the bluff and almost confrontational indifference of Colonel Strang, with his steely gaze (you can see that those eyes are blue even in black and white) and calculated distance failing to disguise his concern and sense of personal responsibility; and the extraordinarily moustached (in the military fashion) Colonel Holland, with his aptness to call a spade a spade.
We follow Captain Stuart, played by a very youthful Michael Gough, who was the occupant of the car whose viewpoint we shared, as he enters a plush marbled lobby which is filled with the muti-lingual and cultural babel of an international locus. It is a scene which displays Emeric Pressburger’s delight in mixing such disparate voices and accents, so richly demonstrated in A Matter of Life and Death. As we listen to this aural collage, the camera pans down a series of neatly lettered notices which provide a visually analogous set of signposts to the nationalities chattering in the background: Norwegian Merchant Seamens’ Enquiry Office; Czechoslovak Cultur Institut; American Red Cross; Free French Information Bureau; Polish Enlistment Office; International Red Cross London Office; Ministry of Supply S.E. Regional Offices. These all carry an air of importance global co-operation which is borne out by the smartly uniformed people we see engaged in meaningful conversation. At the bottom of this impressively variegated column of signage is taped a piece of scrap cardboard on which is a hastily penned ‘Professor Mair’s Research Section – first left’ with an accompanying arrow to point the way. This seems a rather more provisional and marginalized outfit, an impression not dispelled by Captain’s Stuart’s trek across an unlit courtyard to a building dwarfed by a large and looming block of flats of offices behind. This is the small back room of the title, where the beleaguered research team tries to carry out its work, with much unwanted intervention.
The story is essentially two-fold. Stuart is here to enlist the aid of the team in investigating the nature of a new secret weapon which the Germans may be using, but which is so shrouded in mystery that it might not even exist. This is a fairly straight war story, although it is complicated by Powell and Pressberger’s emphasis (taking their cue from Nigel Balchin’s novel, which drew on his own experiences) on the interdepartmental rivalries which are thrown up by the efforts to develop a new artillery gun. Sammy’s ostensible boss, ‘RB’ Waring, played with unctuous charm by Jack Warner, is more interested in his own self-promotion than in producing an efficient weapon. There is a very modern-sounding emphasis on figures, a word which makes Colonel Holland harrumph with contempt, and the ways in which they can be manipulated to give the required results. RB is there to sell an idea, and the tedious details of its actual applicability are considered unimportant, even though lives may be at stake as a result. There is a lovely scene which visually summarises the world in which Sammy has to operate, in which the camera pans along the rack above a long bench in a pub where lunch is being served. It is filled with the bowler hats of civil servants, broken only by one military cap until we come to the end of the row and Sammy’s trilby. This is the arena of faceless bureaucracy where the real games of power are played out and whose rules must to some extent be learned in order to make any progress.
The centre of the film is the love story between Sammy and Susan, superbly played by Kathleen Byron. In many ways, it is a reversal of the roles they played in Black Narcissus. In that film, Byron’s iconic depiction of the breakdown of Sister Ruth came after her rejection by Farrar’s indifferent Mr Dean. Here, it is Sammy who suffers the breakdown after Susan has apparently left him. But it is Susan upon whom he depends, and who is his strength throughout the film, and she never abandons him. Sammy’s ‘tin foot’, which we assume has been lost in a previous attempt to defuse a bomb, acts as a symbol of his feelings of impotence and powerlessness, and of his resultant bitterness. This is made evident in the nightclub scene, when he is left at the table as Susan goes off to dance with the partner of an old acquaintance of hers. Sammy gives her his blessing to thus enjoy herself, but we can sense that this is one more element to add to the mix of poisonous self-abnegation.
conflagration of the repressed
We never learn precisely the origins of this self-loathing, but it threatens the relationship he has with Susan. It is she who must prop him up without seeming to control him. They have a routine whereby she offers him a drink, and he refuses, the decision therefore appearing to be his. It is his need for her which triggers the expressionist nightmare scene mentioned above (oddly enough, not a dream sequence – rather a representation of inner torment) when she fails to turn up at a pre-arranged time. There is a palpable sense throughout the film of emotions being suppressed, put on hold. But they constantly threaten to flare up, something symbolically represented by the newspaper which Susan holds across the mouth of the fireplace to let it draw bursting into flames. Sid James is reluctant to let Sammy have a drink, too, partly out of personal concern, but also because he knows he is capable of breaking the place up, something he has evidently done before. The details of the relationship in this film, the sense of its strength, is conveyed in looks and glances. It is a film of close-ups, which convey both intimacy and the claustrophobia of lives dictated to by the exigencies of wartime duty which can suddenly call Sammy away to an unknown place like Bala, or insist upon Susan working through a lunch hour which they had intended to spend together. Ultimately, Susan is trying to guide Sammy towards regaining his sense of self-respect, something which also requires him to take responsibility for his work and do something to assert its importance and integrity. She wants him to become the self which she can see, and which she loves, but which is in danger of being destroyed by forces outside and within.
Finally, Sammy gets the chance to confront himself after he has reached the depths of self-destructive despair. He’s driven the sympathetic Knucksie to kick him out of the pub, finds that he has also forced Susan to leave him (she’s taken her picture out of the frame) and proceeds to destroy his own home, having hit the whisky bottle which has served as the symbol of his resistance to his alcoholism. It at this point that he receives the call informing him that one of the new bombs has been discovered. It is a crisis which offers him the chance of salvation.
Ancient sanctuary
The landscape in which the finale of the film takes place is a highly symbolic one. Sammy meets Colonel Strang outside St Catherine’s Chapel, the clifftop remains of Abbotsbury Abbey. This is the last of a line of sanctuaries in which Sammy has found refuge throughout the film. We have seen him observing the testing of a gun from within the stones of Stonehenge, and as he leaves this protected circle the screen has faded to show him walking to the entrance of the research rooms, which are another area of safe retreat. His rooms are another sanctuary, as is Knucksie’s pub. Now he must leave the sanctuary of St Catherine’s chapel and descend to the wide, desolate sweep of Chesil Beach where the bomb has landed. This is a landscape made for existential confrontations. It is empty and gray, the pebble bank divided by the salt lake behind and the flattened strips of sea and sky. The naked sound of wind, with no vegetation to temper it, provides the aural dimension to this desolation. Concrete blocks are scattered at regular intervals, giving the landscape the surrealistic flavour of a Paul Nash painting. From the slope of the beach where the bomb has been isolated in a mini-bunker, Sammy is completely alone. He has a speaker which connects him with the others, but it is one way. There will be no reply. The instability of the shingle surface is an externalisation of Sammy’s personality, and of the disruptions and daily uncertainties which he and Susan, and many others, have experienced and which has taken its gradual toll on their psyches. The defusing of the bomb is more than just his effort towards saving lives. Through purposeful action, the realisation of his own worth, he is defusing the rage which is always threatening to erupt from just beneath the surface of his fragile self-control. As he says, this is personal. The depiction of the romantic English landscape is beautifully done in itself (as it was in the Welsh scenes) as we would expect from Powell and Pressburger, who had ranged from the Hebridean Isles to the North Devon sands in previous films.
The film ends with Sammy having regained some measure of self-respect, taking on the responsibility of working directly for Colonel Holland, which will connect his work more directly with those who will be using it. The final scene finds him returning home, where he finds Susan waiting for him. Dawn is breaking outside (indicated by a slightly awkwardly operated mechanical bird which launches itself from a fence post) but she draws the curtains, shutting the outside world out. She turns on the light, and the chaos which he has wreaked on his own inner sanctum has all been repaired. The photo is back in its frame and even the whisky bottle whose contents he had decimated is back in its place. As Tim Lucas has pointed out in his review of the film, there is something very moving about the quiet restoration of order which this scene depicts. Kathleen Byron looks so joyful at the fact that Sammy has finally come back to her in spirit, that he has at last lived up to what she has known he could become. Her radiant face is the last thing we see in the film, which is an indication of her absolute centrality. It is her finest hour (and that includes her stunning depiction of the breakdown of Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus). In the second volume of his autobiography, Million Dollar Movie, Michael Powell wonders ‘why didn’t I make more picture with Kathleen Byron, if I thought so highly of her?’ I wonder too. Kathleen died in January of this year. Do watch this film as a tribute to her unique presence.
Kathleen's joy
The Films of Val Lewton - Part Eighteen
The Curse of the Cat People - Part Three
Safely back home, Amy is tucked up in bed. The camera slowly prowls around the dark bedroom, and we hear the echoing sound of horses hooves getting louder as they come closer whilst Julia’s voice once more recounts the approach of the headless horseman. We are inside Amy’s head, which has been infected by the power of Julia’s storytelling performance. Her imaginative landscape has been invaded. There is a blaze of light outside as the sound of hooves reaches a crescendo and a swiftly moving shadow is cast from outside the window and engulfs Amy’s terrified form. She cries out in fear. The wind blows with an expressionistic howl outside, amplifying the resonant frequencies of Amy’s fear. The inappropriateness of Julia’s tale is now all too clear. The scene invites us, the viewers of this film which is nominally placed within the horror genre, to share in her terror. It is a complex form of identification, for we know full well that the horseman is a figment of her imagination, but we are afraid of what that imagination might reveal to her, and by extension us, and of the way in which that will effect her. It is also a scene which argues against the exposure of children’s impressionable minds to material which might disturb them. Miss Callahan has deliberately refrained from telling her class the nature of the legend of Sleepy Hollow to which she alludes at the start of the film, but Julia, for whom Amy is merely a convenient audience, has shown no such consideration and has gone for the full theatrical effect in her performance. Amy’s waking nightmare is the direct result.
Alice and Ollie are playing bridge downstairs, and Alice chooses to remain in this adult world rather than investigate the cry which she thinks she may have heard from upstairs. Once more, she seems disengaged from the needs of her daughter. As a result, Amy turns elsewhere, and uses the device of her ring, another element of her imaginative landscape which has been introduced from an outside source (Edward). As she turns the ring, she implores ‘my friend, I’m frightened, my friend’. The repetition of ‘my friend’ is like an invocation, a statement which will become true through reiteration. A light shines through the window, but it is softer and less threatening than that which accompanied the horseman’s approach. Irena’s appearance is generally preceded by a change in the nature of the light, which suggests that we are entering a fairytale world which is at a slight remove, though not wholly detached from, the everyday.
As this light shines, the curtains gently billow inwards on a gentle breeze, which is at the other end of the scale to the swirling ghost wind from which she has previously cowered. This is reminiscent of the scene in Jean Cocteau’s fairy-tale adaptation La Belle et La Bete when Beauty drifts down a corridor in the Beast’s castle, with the curtains fluttering inwards like wisps of cloud. A similar dreamlike quality is evoked in both cases. With the camera now focussed on the contented figure of Amy, we see the shadow of a human figure cast on the wall behind her as it approaches the foot of the bed. We have yet to see Irena take substantial form, but she is evidently real to Amy. ‘I’m glad you came, my friend’, she says, and ‘sing me that song again, my friend’. We hear Irena’s song, softly sung with French lyrics. We may not have seen her in the flesh, but this is definitely Irena, although she seems to have shed her Serbian identity and reverted to actress Simone Simon’s native tongue. So maybe she’s not quite the same Irena. Downstairs, Ollie has come over all wistful and dreamy, and when his attention is drawn back to the game, he admits ‘I was somewhere else’. The alertness to the re-awakening of a ghost from his past further suggests that this is a real visitation, not a mere projection of Amy’s need. Upstairs, Irena’s shadow stands guard over the peacefully sleeping girl, singing its bewitching lullaby. It is not dispelled once Amy is asleep. Its presence seems independent of her waking consciousness.
In the morning, Amy is bright and cheerful. She finds some photos and picks out one of Irena, asking Alice ‘mummy, who’s this?’ At this point, she doesn’t identify her as her friend. Whether that’s because she has yet to take a particular form, or because Amy has learned to be more circumspect about revealing the details of her private world is left unspoken. If it is the latter, then it is a new form of behaviour which she has learned, a break from her previously scrupulous honesty through omission rather than direct untruth. The power of the photograph as a fragment of concretised memory is manifested here. A person can be effectively excised from the past, their name never mentioned and stories in which they are involved never told (or retold to cast them in a negative light which justifies their erasure). But a photograph can make an immediate connection which belies such rewriting of the past, perhaps even providing a moment of epiphany which can illuminate the fog of self-deception. Amy repeats the name Irena, which her mother reveals to her, to herself, a re-iteration of the previous night’s repetition of the more abstract ‘my friend’. It is as if she is testing the name out, exploring its contours and flavour. Alice clearly didn’t know about these photos, and Amy is once more exiled to the garden so that she can confront Ollie on the matter. She tells him to look through for any more of Irena that may be there. She is editing, or to put it more strongly, censoring their past. There is a direct parallel with Julia Farren, who has edited her past, whether consciously or as the result of mental breakdown, to excise her daughter Barbara from her life.
In the garden, Amy repeats Irena’s name several times. This is an invocation, summoning the powers inherent in a name in fairy tales (think of Rumpelstiltskin or even Peter Pan). The summoning of magical beings is a commonplace in fairy tales, as it is in their dark inversions, tales of horror and the supernatural. The garden darkens and is then suffused with that quality of light which we have already noted as betokening a step sideways into a world of enchantment. The garden becomes luminous, with clearly delineated shadows. Everything takes on air of heightened reality, as if the ideal forms (the platonic forms behind the shadows of the real) of the surroundings have been brought forth. Amy’s face is filled with joy and she throws her ball into the shadows cast by the tree, from which Irena emerges to return it. It is as if she has emerged from the tree herself, like a classical dryad.
Both cats we have seen in the film thus far (alive and stuffed) have been perched on tree branches, and so Irena’s association with Amy’s magic tree subliminally links her with these, and with the ancestral curse with which she was afflicted in Cat People. She is certainly associated with the garden and with nature and her later manipulations of its appearance suggest that she has become something of a pantheistic spirit, retreating into a deep pagan past to become rooted in natural forms. This would have been the ancient history, shading into myth, which was represented on the lower floors of the museum in Cat People, below the gallery of boats in which Alice and Ollie elected to linger. It is the history which lies in the lower levels of the subconscious, and in the coded symbols of folklore and fairy tales. Irena is in full long-sleeved fairy tale dress, white having replaced the black which she favoured in Cat People. This indicates that she is now a spirit of the daytime and the light, rather than a creature of darkness and night as she had been in Cat People. With the lullaby theme playing in the background, we hear Irena speak for the first time. ‘You called be my name’, she says, acknowledging the power to be found therein. This seems to have been the final step in her conjuration into substantive form. The fact that we only see her thus after Amy has seen the photograph creates an air of ambiguity. Is this just the new shape in which she has cast her imaginary friend. That ambiguity is never wholly dispelled, but Irena is given enough of an identity of her own to make us share Amy’s belief in her reality.
Irena tells Amy that ‘I’ve wanted a friend too…I’ve been lonely’. This sense of two lonely souls coming together out of mutual need furthers the impression that this is an Irena who is more than merely a product of Amy’s imaginary worldbuilding. It is as if she has been waiting for this summons, the calling of her name. When asked, she says ‘I come from great darkness…and deep peace’, a description which sounds like non-being, a state of limbo into which are consigned those souls who lives were left unresolved. When Amy asks her ‘will you be my friend for always’, Irena replies ‘for as long as you want me’. And it is this need which has called her forth, meeting her corollary need to be needed. ‘I shall want you for always’, Amy says with the solemn certainty of childhood, to which Irena replies ‘for always then’. This formal oath is sealed with a kiss upon the forehead. But there is a sub-clause. Irena tells Amy that ‘you must promise never to tell anyone about me. This must be a friendship only we shall have. Amy and her friend.’ This is an oath of secrecy which seems designed to protect Amy from the aggressive rationality of her father. Irena has learned from her own bitter experience that Ollie’s worldview is intransigent and not to be challenged. He creates the need to evade the truth, which he defines too narrowly. Inside, he edits memory, throwing pictures on the fire, but is unable to bring himself to entirely erase her from his past, and keeps one photograph back.
The following scenes are interspersed with the watercolour illustrations which we saw at the start of the film, which suggests that Amy has now entered the kind of story which they would have been used to accompany. We see Amy and Irena playing in the garden, and Irena teaching Amy about numbers in terms of fairytale characters. Perhaps this is a way of showing that such stories are not mere escapism, but meaningful escapism, which serves to teach us something about the ways of the world. The fact that Amy has such an active relationship with her ‘imaginary’ friend, learning new things from her, again suggests a substantiality to her presence. Another fade reveals leaves covering the garden, the seasons turning. The film observes the cycles of the seasons, from the summery scenes of the opening to the wintry snow of the conclusion, in a poetic way, which again touches on a pagan sense of the processes of death and rebirth in the natural world. Irena has been through her place of great darkness and peace (the soil?) and has returned for another season. But the falling leaves acknowledge the impermanence of all things and the inevitability of death.
Irena and Amy have lit a bonfire in the centre of the garden (could a figment of a child’s imagination have done this? What are Amy’s parents doing letting her create fires?) and Irena stands over it, looking very witchy. She casts in leaves and utters what sounds like a spell which will turn the flames blue. But Amy is not interested in such eldritch mummery and leads her off to her playhouse instead. ‘You be the friend who comes to see me…I’ll show you my children’, she orders. ‘Your children?’ Irena asks, drawn away from her chants. ‘My dolls’, Amy says, making it clear that she knows exactly where the dividing line between the imaginary and the real lies. ‘We can pretend’. Thus Amy, with great self-awareness of the artificiality of play and the way in which it can be directed, leads Irena away from her world of haunted isolation, of the dark superstitions under which she has been occluded.
Amy, having entered this fairytale world, has also begun to shed some of the otherworldliness which had led to her becoming so isolated. Her play has now become a lot less dreamy, the certitude with which she recreates the routines of a ‘normal’ family with her dolls indicating the newfound sense of security her relationship with Irena has provided. Irena herself has began to achieve the sense of belonging, of being needed, which she longed for in her previous incarnation (for this does feel like a re-incarnation). ‘Button your sweater, darling, it’s getting cold’, she tells Amy. It is the kind of offhand, casual remark which betokens a mother’s care and affection. Irena is now helping Amy in her education and looking after her wellbeing. Alice’s earlier denial of there being any part of Irena in Amy, and her assertion that she is ‘my child’ now begins to appear a little uncertain. But the negative connotations of Ollie’s suggestion that Irena’s influence might be exerting itself on Amy have been wholly inverted. Her influence is nothing but benevolent.
Amy acknowledges the approach of winter with little enthusiasm. But Irena offers her a divergent viewpoint, one which accepts the possibility that beauty may be found in all things. ‘Winter’s fun,’ she says. ‘There’s the wind and the snow. You will like the warm fire upon the hearth and the long, long nights’. She is subtly inculcating the idea of the acceptance of the changing patterns of the seasons, of death and rebirth, of the progress of time; In the end, of her own disappearance. She herself embodies this pantheistic sense of a divine presence in all seasons, her dress sparkling like morning frost. Amy introduces her dolls. Irena looks on. She is happy. Irena and Amy fade away, leaving only the shadowed garden, another indication of impermanence. The falling leaves turn into falling snow and finally the twisted tree trunk, bare now of foliage, is darkly outlined against the wintry white background, a steady and permanent presence.
From the tree outside, we fade to the putting up of the tree inside, a domesticated paganism (just as the tree in the garden is a tamed memory of the wild wood). Amy is very serious about the importance of ritual, as if aware of a forgotten meaning underlying the rote tradition. She says of the presents ‘you can’t open them yet. You have to put all of them under the tree until morning’. Ollie displays his essential childishness once more, shaking his in his eagerness to discover what might be inside. Amy keeps one present aside and won’t tell them who it’s for, keeping to her oath. The arrival of a group of carol singers spares her further evasion. They all go to the half-open door to listen. They are posed as if in a smiling portrait, a picture of the perfect family Christmas. It is, as we know, an ironic portrait, a representation of the false unity insisted upon by a sentimentalised view of the spirit of Christmas, which is endured in the knowledge that it will soon be over.
The carol singers are invited in and the local gossip, given the Dickensian name Miss Plummett, proceeds to spread her insinuations. These are the petty dynamics which underly the surface piety. Amy shrugs off the comments of one snooty girl who suggests that they are not doing things like a ‘proper family’ by retorting with genuine indifference ‘I guess we’re not a proper family’. Starting up another carol around the piano, the choir choose ‘Shepherd, shake off your drowsy sleep’, a call to wake up which could be addressed to the whole room. Amy, in the corridor, hears Irena’s voice from the garden singing a carol in French. There is a sort of duel of carols, both being heard in counterpoint to each other. Irena stands beneath the tree in the garden in a long white cape. With her lyrics sung in French in this American small town Christmas scene serving to emphasise her defiant difference, she resembles the angel who has come to tell the shepherds to wake up, and her carol thus becomes a response to the choir’s.
Amy goes out into the garden, showing where her loyalties lie. The pagan over the status-conscious Christian. There is now a long icicle hanging from the bough of the tree, a decoration of natural beauty to which those on the tree inside can only attempt a pale emulation. Amy gives Irena her present, a brooch of shooting stars. This is a symbol of glorious impermanence which perhaps indicates that she has absorbed the lessons which Irena has been indirectly teaching her. As they sparkle as if with their own light, Amy reverts to her strangely formal, poetic mode of speech, declaiming ‘O, that is more beautiful than I ever imagined’. Irena now asks Amy ‘shall I show you my Christmas gift to you?’ and when she receives her assent, produces a magic show of winter illumination. A shadow passes across the garden and a different luminosity is revealed, in which everything in the garden seems to unveil its own core of light. Irena once more appears as the presiding spirit of the garden, able to show Amy the essential nature of all the forms within it. There is a look of wonder, almost of ecstasy, on Amy’s face. Then she is called in by Alice, and the light shifts back into its normal shade. As Amy goes in, the camera focuses on Irena’s radiant face, glowing with happiness and contentment.
In the Farren house, the focus is on an unopened present, lying by the stuffed cat. The juxtaposition of the neglected present with those which have just been exchanged with such joy provides an obvious symbolic counterpoint, redolent with suppressed feelings and emotions. The offering which remains wrapped up, rejected. Julia is biting on a biscuit, which she casts aside with a sour look, as if she is casting aside the whole idea of Christmas as a time of familial unity. Barbara, in her usual position behind the curtain, waiting silently in the wings, moves aside to let Amy and Edward into Julia’s domain. Amy gives her a present, but points out the unopened one. ‘Oh, that’s from her; that woman’, she snarls, once more denying Barbara, who watches from behind the curtain, a name. She accepts Amy’s gift of a ring with great theatricality, once more delighting in her audience, which gives her full reign to indulge her world of dreams. Perhaps her rejection of Barbara is partly motivated by fear of being called away from the self-indulgent world of fantasy into which she has retreated so comfortably. She represents a threatening connection to the real world of emotional attachments and responsibilities. Barbara, in that sense, is the opposite of Irena, her dark twin. Whereas Amy draws Irena out of the shadows, makes her more real, Julia forces Barbara in the opposite direction. Amy recognises Irena as a real person and calls her by her name. She invites her into her imaginative world, away from the haunted one which she has been inhabiting. Julia repels Barbara with cruel words and a refusal to even grant her a name. She is driven down into the shadow world below (the basement, in this case) from which Irena has been lifted, unable to release herself from the bonds of obligation she still feels to her mother. This parallel between Irena and Barbara is made manifest at the end of the film, as we shall see.
Amy, however, is an occasional guest, and easily impressed with gaudy flummery, although, as we have seen, she is able to draw the distinction between the real and the imaginary, perhaps more clearly than Julia. The ring given to her by the ‘King of Spain’ is tossed aside in favour of Amy’s cheap offering, ‘a ring given me out of friendship and love’. This is a friendship and love which is more perceived than real. There is none of the care and consideration displayed by Irena here. Amy is someone who Julia uses for her own self-gratification, an impressionable audience. She has no compunction in creating that impression by scaring the little girl out of her wits. There is no sense, as there is with Irena, that Julia would ever become involved in Amy’s world of imaginative play. She is far too firmly entrenched in her own unassailable fantasies to bother with anyone else’s concerns. As Edward ushers Amy out, Julia says ‘you’ve made my Christmas a very happy one’, enabling her to come to life through performance. Barbara points out that ‘you didn’t even open my present, and I’m your daughter’. ‘My daughter died, long ago’, Julia re-iterates, dull and lifeless once more now her audience has gone. The house has become a mausoleum again. Barbara slowly descends the stairs to the darkness of the basement, and the screen fades to black.
A somewhat specious poster
Safely back home, Amy is tucked up in bed. The camera slowly prowls around the dark bedroom, and we hear the echoing sound of horses hooves getting louder as they come closer whilst Julia’s voice once more recounts the approach of the headless horseman. We are inside Amy’s head, which has been infected by the power of Julia’s storytelling performance. Her imaginative landscape has been invaded. There is a blaze of light outside as the sound of hooves reaches a crescendo and a swiftly moving shadow is cast from outside the window and engulfs Amy’s terrified form. She cries out in fear. The wind blows with an expressionistic howl outside, amplifying the resonant frequencies of Amy’s fear. The inappropriateness of Julia’s tale is now all too clear. The scene invites us, the viewers of this film which is nominally placed within the horror genre, to share in her terror. It is a complex form of identification, for we know full well that the horseman is a figment of her imagination, but we are afraid of what that imagination might reveal to her, and by extension us, and of the way in which that will effect her. It is also a scene which argues against the exposure of children’s impressionable minds to material which might disturb them. Miss Callahan has deliberately refrained from telling her class the nature of the legend of Sleepy Hollow to which she alludes at the start of the film, but Julia, for whom Amy is merely a convenient audience, has shown no such consideration and has gone for the full theatrical effect in her performance. Amy’s waking nightmare is the direct result.
Alice and Ollie are playing bridge downstairs, and Alice chooses to remain in this adult world rather than investigate the cry which she thinks she may have heard from upstairs. Once more, she seems disengaged from the needs of her daughter. As a result, Amy turns elsewhere, and uses the device of her ring, another element of her imaginative landscape which has been introduced from an outside source (Edward). As she turns the ring, she implores ‘my friend, I’m frightened, my friend’. The repetition of ‘my friend’ is like an invocation, a statement which will become true through reiteration. A light shines through the window, but it is softer and less threatening than that which accompanied the horseman’s approach. Irena’s appearance is generally preceded by a change in the nature of the light, which suggests that we are entering a fairytale world which is at a slight remove, though not wholly detached from, the everyday.
As this light shines, the curtains gently billow inwards on a gentle breeze, which is at the other end of the scale to the swirling ghost wind from which she has previously cowered. This is reminiscent of the scene in Jean Cocteau’s fairy-tale adaptation La Belle et La Bete when Beauty drifts down a corridor in the Beast’s castle, with the curtains fluttering inwards like wisps of cloud. A similar dreamlike quality is evoked in both cases. With the camera now focussed on the contented figure of Amy, we see the shadow of a human figure cast on the wall behind her as it approaches the foot of the bed. We have yet to see Irena take substantial form, but she is evidently real to Amy. ‘I’m glad you came, my friend’, she says, and ‘sing me that song again, my friend’. We hear Irena’s song, softly sung with French lyrics. We may not have seen her in the flesh, but this is definitely Irena, although she seems to have shed her Serbian identity and reverted to actress Simone Simon’s native tongue. So maybe she’s not quite the same Irena. Downstairs, Ollie has come over all wistful and dreamy, and when his attention is drawn back to the game, he admits ‘I was somewhere else’. The alertness to the re-awakening of a ghost from his past further suggests that this is a real visitation, not a mere projection of Amy’s need. Upstairs, Irena’s shadow stands guard over the peacefully sleeping girl, singing its bewitching lullaby. It is not dispelled once Amy is asleep. Its presence seems independent of her waking consciousness.
In the morning, Amy is bright and cheerful. She finds some photos and picks out one of Irena, asking Alice ‘mummy, who’s this?’ At this point, she doesn’t identify her as her friend. Whether that’s because she has yet to take a particular form, or because Amy has learned to be more circumspect about revealing the details of her private world is left unspoken. If it is the latter, then it is a new form of behaviour which she has learned, a break from her previously scrupulous honesty through omission rather than direct untruth. The power of the photograph as a fragment of concretised memory is manifested here. A person can be effectively excised from the past, their name never mentioned and stories in which they are involved never told (or retold to cast them in a negative light which justifies their erasure). But a photograph can make an immediate connection which belies such rewriting of the past, perhaps even providing a moment of epiphany which can illuminate the fog of self-deception. Amy repeats the name Irena, which her mother reveals to her, to herself, a re-iteration of the previous night’s repetition of the more abstract ‘my friend’. It is as if she is testing the name out, exploring its contours and flavour. Alice clearly didn’t know about these photos, and Amy is once more exiled to the garden so that she can confront Ollie on the matter. She tells him to look through for any more of Irena that may be there. She is editing, or to put it more strongly, censoring their past. There is a direct parallel with Julia Farren, who has edited her past, whether consciously or as the result of mental breakdown, to excise her daughter Barbara from her life.
In the garden, Amy repeats Irena’s name several times. This is an invocation, summoning the powers inherent in a name in fairy tales (think of Rumpelstiltskin or even Peter Pan). The summoning of magical beings is a commonplace in fairy tales, as it is in their dark inversions, tales of horror and the supernatural. The garden darkens and is then suffused with that quality of light which we have already noted as betokening a step sideways into a world of enchantment. The garden becomes luminous, with clearly delineated shadows. Everything takes on air of heightened reality, as if the ideal forms (the platonic forms behind the shadows of the real) of the surroundings have been brought forth. Amy’s face is filled with joy and she throws her ball into the shadows cast by the tree, from which Irena emerges to return it. It is as if she has emerged from the tree herself, like a classical dryad.
Tree spirit
Both cats we have seen in the film thus far (alive and stuffed) have been perched on tree branches, and so Irena’s association with Amy’s magic tree subliminally links her with these, and with the ancestral curse with which she was afflicted in Cat People. She is certainly associated with the garden and with nature and her later manipulations of its appearance suggest that she has become something of a pantheistic spirit, retreating into a deep pagan past to become rooted in natural forms. This would have been the ancient history, shading into myth, which was represented on the lower floors of the museum in Cat People, below the gallery of boats in which Alice and Ollie elected to linger. It is the history which lies in the lower levels of the subconscious, and in the coded symbols of folklore and fairy tales. Irena is in full long-sleeved fairy tale dress, white having replaced the black which she favoured in Cat People. This indicates that she is now a spirit of the daytime and the light, rather than a creature of darkness and night as she had been in Cat People. With the lullaby theme playing in the background, we hear Irena speak for the first time. ‘You called be my name’, she says, acknowledging the power to be found therein. This seems to have been the final step in her conjuration into substantive form. The fact that we only see her thus after Amy has seen the photograph creates an air of ambiguity. Is this just the new shape in which she has cast her imaginary friend. That ambiguity is never wholly dispelled, but Irena is given enough of an identity of her own to make us share Amy’s belief in her reality.
Irena tells Amy that ‘I’ve wanted a friend too…I’ve been lonely’. This sense of two lonely souls coming together out of mutual need furthers the impression that this is an Irena who is more than merely a product of Amy’s imaginary worldbuilding. It is as if she has been waiting for this summons, the calling of her name. When asked, she says ‘I come from great darkness…and deep peace’, a description which sounds like non-being, a state of limbo into which are consigned those souls who lives were left unresolved. When Amy asks her ‘will you be my friend for always’, Irena replies ‘for as long as you want me’. And it is this need which has called her forth, meeting her corollary need to be needed. ‘I shall want you for always’, Amy says with the solemn certainty of childhood, to which Irena replies ‘for always then’. This formal oath is sealed with a kiss upon the forehead. But there is a sub-clause. Irena tells Amy that ‘you must promise never to tell anyone about me. This must be a friendship only we shall have. Amy and her friend.’ This is an oath of secrecy which seems designed to protect Amy from the aggressive rationality of her father. Irena has learned from her own bitter experience that Ollie’s worldview is intransigent and not to be challenged. He creates the need to evade the truth, which he defines too narrowly. Inside, he edits memory, throwing pictures on the fire, but is unable to bring himself to entirely erase her from his past, and keeps one photograph back.
The other mother
The following scenes are interspersed with the watercolour illustrations which we saw at the start of the film, which suggests that Amy has now entered the kind of story which they would have been used to accompany. We see Amy and Irena playing in the garden, and Irena teaching Amy about numbers in terms of fairytale characters. Perhaps this is a way of showing that such stories are not mere escapism, but meaningful escapism, which serves to teach us something about the ways of the world. The fact that Amy has such an active relationship with her ‘imaginary’ friend, learning new things from her, again suggests a substantiality to her presence. Another fade reveals leaves covering the garden, the seasons turning. The film observes the cycles of the seasons, from the summery scenes of the opening to the wintry snow of the conclusion, in a poetic way, which again touches on a pagan sense of the processes of death and rebirth in the natural world. Irena has been through her place of great darkness and peace (the soil?) and has returned for another season. But the falling leaves acknowledge the impermanence of all things and the inevitability of death.
Leading Irena from witchery
Irena and Amy have lit a bonfire in the centre of the garden (could a figment of a child’s imagination have done this? What are Amy’s parents doing letting her create fires?) and Irena stands over it, looking very witchy. She casts in leaves and utters what sounds like a spell which will turn the flames blue. But Amy is not interested in such eldritch mummery and leads her off to her playhouse instead. ‘You be the friend who comes to see me…I’ll show you my children’, she orders. ‘Your children?’ Irena asks, drawn away from her chants. ‘My dolls’, Amy says, making it clear that she knows exactly where the dividing line between the imaginary and the real lies. ‘We can pretend’. Thus Amy, with great self-awareness of the artificiality of play and the way in which it can be directed, leads Irena away from her world of haunted isolation, of the dark superstitions under which she has been occluded.
Doll's dinner
Amy, having entered this fairytale world, has also begun to shed some of the otherworldliness which had led to her becoming so isolated. Her play has now become a lot less dreamy, the certitude with which she recreates the routines of a ‘normal’ family with her dolls indicating the newfound sense of security her relationship with Irena has provided. Irena herself has began to achieve the sense of belonging, of being needed, which she longed for in her previous incarnation (for this does feel like a re-incarnation). ‘Button your sweater, darling, it’s getting cold’, she tells Amy. It is the kind of offhand, casual remark which betokens a mother’s care and affection. Irena is now helping Amy in her education and looking after her wellbeing. Alice’s earlier denial of there being any part of Irena in Amy, and her assertion that she is ‘my child’ now begins to appear a little uncertain. But the negative connotations of Ollie’s suggestion that Irena’s influence might be exerting itself on Amy have been wholly inverted. Her influence is nothing but benevolent.
Recognising winter's beauty
Amy acknowledges the approach of winter with little enthusiasm. But Irena offers her a divergent viewpoint, one which accepts the possibility that beauty may be found in all things. ‘Winter’s fun,’ she says. ‘There’s the wind and the snow. You will like the warm fire upon the hearth and the long, long nights’. She is subtly inculcating the idea of the acceptance of the changing patterns of the seasons, of death and rebirth, of the progress of time; In the end, of her own disappearance. She herself embodies this pantheistic sense of a divine presence in all seasons, her dress sparkling like morning frost. Amy introduces her dolls. Irena looks on. She is happy. Irena and Amy fade away, leaving only the shadowed garden, another indication of impermanence. The falling leaves turn into falling snow and finally the twisted tree trunk, bare now of foliage, is darkly outlined against the wintry white background, a steady and permanent presence.
Mystery present
From the tree outside, we fade to the putting up of the tree inside, a domesticated paganism (just as the tree in the garden is a tamed memory of the wild wood). Amy is very serious about the importance of ritual, as if aware of a forgotten meaning underlying the rote tradition. She says of the presents ‘you can’t open them yet. You have to put all of them under the tree until morning’. Ollie displays his essential childishness once more, shaking his in his eagerness to discover what might be inside. Amy keeps one present aside and won’t tell them who it’s for, keeping to her oath. The arrival of a group of carol singers spares her further evasion. They all go to the half-open door to listen. They are posed as if in a smiling portrait, a picture of the perfect family Christmas. It is, as we know, an ironic portrait, a representation of the false unity insisted upon by a sentimentalised view of the spirit of Christmas, which is endured in the knowledge that it will soon be over.
Playing happy families
The carol singers are invited in and the local gossip, given the Dickensian name Miss Plummett, proceeds to spread her insinuations. These are the petty dynamics which underly the surface piety. Amy shrugs off the comments of one snooty girl who suggests that they are not doing things like a ‘proper family’ by retorting with genuine indifference ‘I guess we’re not a proper family’. Starting up another carol around the piano, the choir choose ‘Shepherd, shake off your drowsy sleep’, a call to wake up which could be addressed to the whole room. Amy, in the corridor, hears Irena’s voice from the garden singing a carol in French. There is a sort of duel of carols, both being heard in counterpoint to each other. Irena stands beneath the tree in the garden in a long white cape. With her lyrics sung in French in this American small town Christmas scene serving to emphasise her defiant difference, she resembles the angel who has come to tell the shepherds to wake up, and her carol thus becomes a response to the choir’s.
Irena's carol
Amy goes out into the garden, showing where her loyalties lie. The pagan over the status-conscious Christian. There is now a long icicle hanging from the bough of the tree, a decoration of natural beauty to which those on the tree inside can only attempt a pale emulation. Amy gives Irena her present, a brooch of shooting stars. This is a symbol of glorious impermanence which perhaps indicates that she has absorbed the lessons which Irena has been indirectly teaching her. As they sparkle as if with their own light, Amy reverts to her strangely formal, poetic mode of speech, declaiming ‘O, that is more beautiful than I ever imagined’. Irena now asks Amy ‘shall I show you my Christmas gift to you?’ and when she receives her assent, produces a magic show of winter illumination. A shadow passes across the garden and a different luminosity is revealed, in which everything in the garden seems to unveil its own core of light. Irena once more appears as the presiding spirit of the garden, able to show Amy the essential nature of all the forms within it. There is a look of wonder, almost of ecstasy, on Amy’s face. Then she is called in by Alice, and the light shifts back into its normal shade. As Amy goes in, the camera focuses on Irena’s radiant face, glowing with happiness and contentment.
The rejected present
In the Farren house, the focus is on an unopened present, lying by the stuffed cat. The juxtaposition of the neglected present with those which have just been exchanged with such joy provides an obvious symbolic counterpoint, redolent with suppressed feelings and emotions. The offering which remains wrapped up, rejected. Julia is biting on a biscuit, which she casts aside with a sour look, as if she is casting aside the whole idea of Christmas as a time of familial unity. Barbara, in her usual position behind the curtain, waiting silently in the wings, moves aside to let Amy and Edward into Julia’s domain. Amy gives her a present, but points out the unopened one. ‘Oh, that’s from her; that woman’, she snarls, once more denying Barbara, who watches from behind the curtain, a name. She accepts Amy’s gift of a ring with great theatricality, once more delighting in her audience, which gives her full reign to indulge her world of dreams. Perhaps her rejection of Barbara is partly motivated by fear of being called away from the self-indulgent world of fantasy into which she has retreated so comfortably. She represents a threatening connection to the real world of emotional attachments and responsibilities. Barbara, in that sense, is the opposite of Irena, her dark twin. Whereas Amy draws Irena out of the shadows, makes her more real, Julia forces Barbara in the opposite direction. Amy recognises Irena as a real person and calls her by her name. She invites her into her imaginative world, away from the haunted one which she has been inhabiting. Julia repels Barbara with cruel words and a refusal to even grant her a name. She is driven down into the shadow world below (the basement, in this case) from which Irena has been lifted, unable to release herself from the bonds of obligation she still feels to her mother. This parallel between Irena and Barbara is made manifest at the end of the film, as we shall see.
The accepted present
Amy, however, is an occasional guest, and easily impressed with gaudy flummery, although, as we have seen, she is able to draw the distinction between the real and the imaginary, perhaps more clearly than Julia. The ring given to her by the ‘King of Spain’ is tossed aside in favour of Amy’s cheap offering, ‘a ring given me out of friendship and love’. This is a friendship and love which is more perceived than real. There is none of the care and consideration displayed by Irena here. Amy is someone who Julia uses for her own self-gratification, an impressionable audience. She has no compunction in creating that impression by scaring the little girl out of her wits. There is no sense, as there is with Irena, that Julia would ever become involved in Amy’s world of imaginative play. She is far too firmly entrenched in her own unassailable fantasies to bother with anyone else’s concerns. As Edward ushers Amy out, Julia says ‘you’ve made my Christmas a very happy one’, enabling her to come to life through performance. Barbara points out that ‘you didn’t even open my present, and I’m your daughter’. ‘My daughter died, long ago’, Julia re-iterates, dull and lifeless once more now her audience has gone. The house has become a mausoleum again. Barbara slowly descends the stairs to the darkness of the basement, and the screen fades to black.
Watching from the wings
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