Underwater at the Spacex

The new exhibition at the Spacex Gallery in Exeter, Underwater, is all about submersion. All the works on display depict underwater worlds and their denizens, and the human incursions into and explorations of this alien environment. Several evoke the feeling of floating in this supportive medium, thicker than air, which becomes like the dream depths of the unconscious. The art reflects the responses of the imagination to this highly suggestive realm, which forms such a large part of our planet and yet is at a remove from our experience of it, a place where human presence can only ever be provisional and temporary. It is a reminder of the strangeness of the world, of the explosion of life-forms vented from its depths. There is a strong strain of the fantastic in these works, the undersea worlds being sufficiently alien to prompt visions of strange landscapes, mutations of recognisable forms and the broadcast of eerie sounds of obscure provenance. The association of oceanic depths with the subconscious has also led to some deep diving into the wide and murky sea of archetypal symbols, uncovering the embodiments of buried desires and dimly recollected illumination.

The first work you see is Janaina Tschape’s Moss, one of three videos which feature women floating in serene suspension just below the water’s surface, neither wholly of one world nor the other. All three are imbued with an air of languid and sensuous female sexuality. Tschape’s video has a slightly disconcerting, vertiginous effect in that the woman’s face which we look down upon never breaks the surface. The video is evidently, though not perceptibly, playing on a loop. We see her head, haloed in thick, mossy weeds, roll from side to side as if drifting with the rhythm of a tidal flow. Her features are relaxed in a look of pleasure and fulfilment. Rather than Millais’ passive Ophelia, waiting to sink beneath the surface into death, she is a nymph returned to her natural element. The impact of the video is slightly lessened by its proximity to the gallery windows, which let too much light onto the wall on which it is projected. We could have been more wholly immersed in its slowly rolling swell if the room had been a little darker.

Entering the main space of the gallery, you immediately become aware of the regular echoing blips of sonar, occasionally embedded in a diffuse cloud of diffuse, muffled rumbling. This extra dimension of sound, which in fact emanates from one particular piece, adds to the overall atmosphere of the exhibition, maintaining a feeling of having entered a zone separate from the world beyond the walls. In the corridor space between the main display areas, you come across the second of the three floating woman videos. This is Dorothy Cross’ Jellyfish Lake (you can see a bit here), and in this case, the film is shot from beneath the water’s surface, looking upward. The artist’s face is hidden, breathing the air as her body floats in the lake, half in one world, half in the other. It thus provides a reflective contrast with Tschape’s video, and the two works are a good introduction to the exhibition; submersion first observed from above and then experienced below at the borderlands between the worlds of air and water. Jellyfish float and pulse in a translucent dance about Cross’ head and upper torso, like thoughts made manifest. Her hair billows about her, once more resembling water weeds wafted by tidal flow, or by the currents of dreams. This sets off cinematic associations in my mind, and I recall the water weeds trailing beneath the flowing stream of his home which cosmonaut Kris attempts to replicate in the arid technological surroundings of the space station orbiting the oceanic planet of Solaris; and the corpse of Willa Harper in Night of the Hunter, rooted to her car at the bottom of the local lake with her long hair waving upwards, achieving an eerie beauty in death which her harsh life had denied her.

Turning to the right, we come across works on paper by two artists who conjure new forms to populate the Atlantics or Pacifics of an evolutionary future, or perhaps oceans elsewhere in the Universe. Ellen Gallagher’s strangely aestheticised creature is perhaps a part of some new, revivified post-human coral reef ecology, self-assembling itself from the detritus of the ocean floor; part living creature, part baroque fantasy architecture. Ed Pien covers a wall with his drawings of mutated forms. His pictures are like elaborations of doodles swiftly set down on paper as they are scooped from the unconscious. His half-formed, embryonic creatures seem either to be undergoing some violent birth or to be in the process of tearing themselves apart. They are like pages from the sketchbook of a Victorian travelling showman, recording the imaginary life of the specimens displayed in his cabinet of curiosities. The rank of sketches is best glanced over in sweeping fashion, leaving an impression of an aggressively teeming subaquatic environment, possibly contained within the confines of some laboratory tank which corresponds to the churning imaginative pool from which the artist draws.

On the other side of the room from Ed Pien’s drawings, we come across the object which is emitting the sounds that fill the rest of the gallery. This is Cut and Scrape’s Submarine II, a sculpture of a giant squid wrapping its tentacles around a submarine, which evidently takes its inspiration from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The submarine is mounted on what looks like an old telescope stand, with the telescope itself incorporated by the looks of it, and the whole tableau has the look of a magnified version of an old model kit of the kind produced by Airfix or Revell. The giant squid is fashioned from a plastic bottle and plastic tubing, the detritus of the human world, and pulses with bright, shifting LED colours, its tentacles thrashing with movement driven by a tiny motor. It drags the black, featureless vessel (a nuclear sub?), an intruder from the surface world of human rationality and empirical logic into the deeper waters of undifferentiated dream and imagination, a place where monsters dwell. This is the piece which emits the sounds which fill the gallery (from a speaker within its base plinth), and the precise definition of the sonar’s measuring blip set against the deep and billowing rumbles from the depths further delineate the divisions between these two worlds, which are also the twin halves of the human mind. If the women of Tschape and Cross’ videos take to the water with natural ease, the masculine form of the submarine has to be dragged down forcibly. The sculpture is also just enormously good fun and, in the way that any ingenious automata will, raises a gleeful smile.

The main room of the gallery houses the work of three artists. Shirley Kaneda’s paintings again have the feeling of elaborated doodles, although this is carried a little further than with Ed Pien’s sketches. Perhaps there’s something about the liquid forms of waves and bubbles which naturally flow from the unconsciously doodling hand (I know that tends to be what I produce when my mind wanders before the blank page). Kaneda’s paintings seem like frozen images, the shapes and bright, clearly defined colours waiting to be set into morphing, shifting patterns of motion once more, like the kind of liquid light shows projected behind the likes of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead in the 60s. Seunghyun Woo’s plaster sculptures, which take up the opposite corner of the room, are similarly bright and colourful, and have the feel of three dimensional doodles; forms suggested by the pouring of the plaster and then given further shape. The gloss paint with which they are dappled suggest a cheery children’s underwater world, and Octopus’ Garden, although the ill-defined shapes and their air of immobility suggest that they have accumulated many years of oceanic silt and deposit. This is a petrified garden. Daniel Gustav Cramer’s large framed photograph of a murky seabed landscape opposite has an almost three-dimensional quality, particularly in the late afternoon sunlight, and you can almost imagine that you are looking through a window at this underwater scene. The vista we look out on is bleak and arid, a post-catastrophe landscape lacking any trace of human presence, the colours of life bleached out. It provides a stark, monochrome counterpoint to the brightness of the other works in the room.

The enclosed room opposite houses the works of two artists. Klaus Osterwald’s Donatus Subaqua is a sound sculpture. Four long silver horns hang from the ceiling, their bells pointing inwards to create a sound arena within which the listener can stand. These look like fog horns, but rather than blasted warnings of treacherous conditions, they broadcast the amplified sounds dredged up from the waters of a forest lake, a barren environment created by human activity which nature has swiftly re-colonised. The clicks, wailings and chitterings conjure up pictures of all manner of creatures strange and bizarre in the imagination of the listener. These evocative noises, which could so easily be mistaken for electronic music, accompany the video which is projected onto the opposite wall, blended in with the ubiquitous soundings of the sonar. There was some concern expressed to the exhibition curator Angela Kingston following her introductory talk about this unintentional combination of separate works, with the rather painful phrase ‘sound bleed’ being used. To my ears, it was a chance meeting which worked like a dream, however. Bill Viola’s Becoming Light is a slowed down film of a man and a woman entwined in gently shifting underwater embrace involving only the lightest of contact. Light from an unseen source cast upon the shifting water and the revolving human bodies below creates shifting patterns of brightness and shadow, and the motion of the waters refracts the bodies into wavering shapes, distorting their outlines and creating an ever-changing form. This suggests an ongoing transformation affected by the medium, or emotional state, in which they are immersed. The digital clarity of the photography means that this video lacks the mystery of the murkier waters into which human forms were plunged in Viola’s Five Angels for the Millenium, which was on display in the Tate Modern for a while, and which did have its own rumbling, immersive soundtrack. Perhaps this is appropriate for a piece which casts its gaze nearer to the surface. Finally, the couple, having perhaps gained each other’s trust through their tender non-embrace, sink down into the obscurity beneath the surface waters, prepared for a deeper understanding. An air bubble released by their mutual breath slowly ascends, and bursts on the surface with the ecstatic efflorescence of an expanding ring nebula. It’s a fitting end to an exhibition in which the artists’ imaginations cause their material, as Shakespeare put it in The Tempest (always leave ‘em with a bit of the Bard), to ‘suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange’. Come along, dive in and submerge yourself.

Lorenza Mazzetti's Together

Lorenze Mazzetti

Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together was originally included as part of the first Free Cinema programme organised by Lindsay Anderson as a showcase for non-commercial cinema and shown on 5-8 February 1956 alongside Anderson’s own O Dreamland and Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson’s Momma Don’t Allow. Anderson, Reisz and Richardson went on to produce some of the key works of the British cinema of the 50s and 60s, with films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz) A Taste of Honey (Richardson) and If…(Anderson). But for me, it is Mazzetti’s film which really stands out from this original programme, and provides the highlight of the BFI’s Free Cinema box set in which it can be found. Mazzetti was born in Florence and came to Italy in 1952 to study painting at the Slade School of art. She received a grant from the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund after they’d seen her adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Some of the same air of alienation and everyday estrangement which Kafka made his own can be found in Together. The grant gave Mazzetti access to a 35mm camera, and as a result the film has a more assured cinematic feel than some of the other, more rough and ready Free Cinema offerings. Mazzetti returned to Italy soon after Together was completed and shown. She went on to make documentaries and also wrote two successful novels, published in England as The Sky Folds and Rage. The former (a story set during the Second World War drawing on her own traumatic childhood experiences) was made into a film in Italy in 2000, starring Isabella Rossellini, and was known as The Sky Will Fall in America.

The odd couple - Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews

Together is a film set around the Shad Thames area of East End London, which is seen through the eyes of two deaf mute friends who work on the docks and who are inseparable. They provide an outsider’s perspective, their limited ability to communicate shutting them off from the world of sound around them. Mazzetti, in the interview included in the box set documentary, admits that ‘I was the outsider’, and that through these characters ‘I was projecting my feelings’. The protagonists are played by two of her artist friends, the sculptor and pop surrealist Eduardo Paolozzi and the painter Michael Andrews, both of whom give beautifully naturalistic performances. They form a visually distinctive odd couple, Paolozzi stocky and stolid and Andrews wiry and full of nervy expressiveness. The area is full of noises (this is in part a documentary mapping the sounds of the docklands and its surrounds) but the soundtrack occasionally cuts out, inviting us to enter the silent world of the two friends and share their perspective. There is a moment in the film in which Andrews watches as the daughter of the family in whose house they lodge gazes dreamily through a window at a passing barge and smiles as if she is for a moment seeing the world as they do. Whereas Paolozzi’s character retreats into himself and lives inside his isolation, Andrews tries to reach out to the world around him. There’s a scene in a pub in which an old geezer sitting on the bench beside him engages him in animated conversation. The jazz blasting out of the juke box falls silent and we see the old boy in clear focus. Andrews, struggling to comprehend him, slips in and out of focus, with fluctuating light creating a progression of shadow and illumination which expresses the concentrated workings of his mind. The film introduces the sudden cessation of sound on several occasions, and it’s a very effective device. Stripped of the hubbub of a busy working environment and its attendant and equally bustling social life, we are able to view this world afresh, with visual senses re-awakened. When the sound crashes back in, it hits us with the force of a physical blow.

Not one of us

The film opens with a dedication to the people of the East End, but they are hardly portrayed in a warm light. They are suspicious of and unwelcoming to the two strangers in their midst, their attitude typified by the two stony-faced matriarchs who watch them arriving at their lodgings with arms folded in blunt and disdainful appraisal. Armstrong makes a hat-raising attempt at civility, but their sideways glances spell out the fact that he is ‘not one of us’. Children make a recurrent appearance throughout the film, their songs and games providing interludes between other scenes featuring Andrews and Paolozzi. The opening scenes suggest that they will be presented in a typically cute if scampish manner, but as the film progresses, they become more like the shock troops of the local community. They hang from lampposts and crouch atop stacks of barrels and crumbling walls, sending advance warning of the arrival of our two innocent protagonists, who just want to be left alone. They chalk stick figures of them onto the towering walls of dockside buildings which look like they could easily be the end product of some sinister variant of hangman. Childhood chants form the backdrop to their play, with Michael Finnegan and Eenie, Meenie, Minie Moe carrying a faintly menacing charge. These are the Bash Street kids swollen in number and looking for an easy target for their merciless childhood scorn. The rubble-strewn bomb sites which are still prevalent in the area (it was only a decade on from the war in which the docklands were a prime target) form the open spaces of their playgrounds, and they form a mini-mob of grubby kneed anarchists, with plenty of ammunition to hand. One of the children can be seen picking up a couple of bricks as Andrews and Paolozzi walk through their swarming throng. They plague and pester the two deaf mutes, pulling faces behind their backs, and darting up to and away from them, touching and poking on a dare. Several make that peculiarly English face achieved by thrusting the tongue out beneath the lower lip. It’s a gesture full of cruelly mocking intent, and one much favoured by John Lennon in the early days of The Beatles, an indication that a part of him was still lodged firmly back in the playground.

Bombsite Frankenstein's monster and brick-wielding mob

The deaf mutes have a childlike air themselves. Andrews’ character is awkward and shy but eager to connect with people, to be liked. He has an ache of romantic yearning, gazing longingly at the daughter of the family they lodge with, and at the dark-haired dancer at the fair he visits, with whom he conjures up a passionate encounter in his nighttime reveries. But his obvious neediness only succeeds in alerting the professionally attuned radar of a prostitute at the pub. Paolozzi’s character is withdrawn and expressionless, his broad block of a head creased into a look of permanently furrowed inward concentration. He has shut the world out, retreating into an inner space. He gazes at the children’s marbles, which he has scooped up earlier, in the pub, as if they contain some profound reflection of this inner world. For this odd couple, throwing contrast off each other in both shape and manner, not only the bombsites but the docks and the residential areas surrounding them are a harsh and unforgiving playground in which they have to fend for themselves. They have no gang, only each other. Just for a moment, Paolozzi turns on his tormentors and picks one of them up, shaking him above his head, his square frame outlined against the backdrop of buildings behind like an East End Frankenstein’s monster. In the original script, written by Denis Horne (with whom Mazzetti was going out at the time) it was Paolozzi’s inadvertent theft of the marbles which he finds lying abandoned in the street which prompted the children’s persecution of the duo. The plot was largely lost in the edit, however, and Horne’s co-creator credit seems more a generously inclusive gesture than an accurate indicator of his contribution.

Thames barges through a rainy window

In the end, the children’s incipient violence becomes manifest. They slip through alleys and pour through the window shells of bombed out buildings like soldiers seeking cover amongst the wreckage of war. Paolozzi has nipped off to the loo, which seems to be built into the end corner of a row of terraced houses. It’s the kind of convenience which Geoffrey Fletcher would no doubt have found fascinating, several pages of his book The London Nobody Knows being devoted to quirky lavs. Andrews perches on a wall, gazing at the light on the water in the dock basin beneath his feet. The children creep up on him and one of them tips him over to flounder in the water, his cries for help unheard by the returning Paolozzi, who looks around in puzzlement. The implication is that he slips below the surface and drowns. The final shot is of a tugboat pulling upstream, trailing a chain of empty skips. The sweet thames flows slowly on, as indifferent to the fate of these two outsiders as to any who’ve worked on its shore throughout history. The melancholy tenor of this conclusion, and of the film as a whole (much enhanced by the lonely, hushed tone and dislocated melodies of Daniele Paris’ oboe and violin based score) with its pervasive aura of menace and suspended violence may reflect something of Mazzetti’s own traumatic childhood. Orphaned at an early age, she was raised by her uncle and aunt. Her aunt and cousins were killed by the SS towards the end of the Second World War, and her uncle committed suicide a year later. She later admitted to being in an emotionally distraught state whilst in England, especially after her break up with Denis Horne, and was unable to complete her follow up project, which was to have been a documentary on the teddy boys. She managed to exorcise some of these early traumatic experiences in her novel Il Cielo Cade (The Sky Falls), which is strongly autobiographical in nature. She seems cheerful and happy in the interview included on the bfi disc.

Junk shop installation

Lindsay Anderson proved a key influence and was generous with his help in editing the film. This was after an initially prickly meeting, in which, as she remembers in the interview, he was ‘so unkind’. He agreed to assist her if thought her film was any good and not just a load of rubbish. She characterises their working relationship in military terms, with him as a general and her as ‘a simple soldier’. Elsewhere, she describes him as being ‘tenderly rude and grumpy’, and they did become friends after this awkward start. It was Anderson who encouraged her to abandon the rigid structure of Horne’s story, and to go out and shoot some more footage of the area. It thus became as much an evocative documentary as seen through the eyes of an outsider. It’s interesting that several others of the Free Cinema films view London from an outsider’s perspective. Frenchman Alain Tanner’s Nice Time observes the night-time crowds around Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square; Robert Vas, who had fled Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956 drew on his own experiences for his Refuge England; Karel Reisz, who was co-director on Momma Don’t Allow and director of We Are The Lambeth Boys, had left his native Czechoslovakia after the Nazi’s invaded; and Lindsay Anderson (O! Dreamland, Every Day Except Christmas and Wakefield Express) and Tony Richardson (Momma Don’t Allow) were gay and bisexual, and so effectively exiles in their own land at this time. It could be said that artists naturally tend to be outsiders, anyway, and deliberately cultivate a certain distance from that which they wish to observe and creatively transform. Casting two artists as her characters works perfectly for Mazzetti in this sense too, even if it lies outside the framework of the film’s narrative. They certainly look different from everyone around them. The dancer at the fairground looks like she too might have been one of Mazzetti’s Slade art school friends, with her left bank, Juliette Greco-esque look, bare footed with wild, dark hair and black sweater. The scenes of the two in their attic room, or browsing outside a second-hand shop, or Andrews alone wandering through the market and at the fair, reminded me of Ken Russell’s Monitor film Pop Goes The Easel, in which he follows pop artists Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips around some similar London locations.

Shad Thames canyon

The documentary aspect of the film is now particularly fascinating in its glimpses of a world which is now gone for good. The cavernous canyons between warehouses which are filled with clangorous industrial sound worthy of Einsturzende Neubaten during the film, and which are threaded with bridging walkways, are now luxury (and in this case the term really does apply) flats, as indeed is pretty much all of the Thames riverside from Tower Bridge down to Greenwich. You can see the Shad Thames warehouses on the cusp of their 80s redevelopment in the 1984 Doctor Who story Resurrection of the Daleks, in which the narrow street is the focus for some particularly violent action, with inevitable stunt tumbles from gantries. Butler’s Wharf, where Armstrong and Paolozzi are seen working, was home to Derek Jarman’s studio from 1973-79, with the adjoining Thameside terrace the stage for many of his super-8 films (including some of the footage which made it into Jubilee). His room backed onto one of the walkways across the Shad Thames canyon. Butler’s Wharf now houses more luxury apartments, with fancy eateries attached. The criss-crossing, vorticist latticework of cranes and chimneys, the barges and tugboats and cargoes waiting to be winched into warehouses are all fascinating records of the working docks. At the end of the film, we see a steam crane in action, snorting out fuming billows as it dredges the canal basin to deposit bucketloads of river mud into a waiting lighter. In the commentary to the recent re-issue of the film Separation, made a decade or so later, director Jack Bond notes of a steam crane working near to the Royal Oak pub in Isleworth that it was the last one in London at the time. So these beasts’ days were numbered even whilst Together was being filmed. There are some great weathered and worn faces to be seen, too. In the pub scenes, we get the old drunkard offering his boozy ballad, and the louche lothario by the jukebox, twisting his way through his come-on dance in his shabby suit. The ale is dark and the benches occupied with old ladies as much as young men. At the fair and in the market, there are buskers and beggars and bargain hunters scrutinising the goods with an unimpressionable eye. With this film, Mazzetti offers both a documentarist’s view of another side of London, away from the neon advertising of Piccadilly and the theatres of the West End, and a deeply personal reflection on the feeling of being rejected, of being an outsider. As the work of someone who was still a student at the time, Mazzetti is right to look back on it with pride.

Cranescape

The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff - Cameraman

I went to see the prosaically titled The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff – Cameraman at the cinema the other night, a film which now sadly stands as a tribute to the great cinematographer, who died last year. Cardiff is a great subject for such documentary treatment, being a congenial and modest man, with an amused anecdotalist’s ear and an apparent ability to get on with pretty much anybody, even stereotypically irate Hollywood tyrants such as Henry Hathaway. And of course, there is the unmissable opportunity to see examples of his work on the big screen. The Powell and Pressburger films were the undoubted highlights of his career, and it’s all the more remarkable that these were the first films that he shot as principal photographer. The scenes from A Matter of Life and Death, with June tearfully listening to David Niven’s Peter as he pours forth a final rush of romantic eloquence from his crashing plane, and Black Narcissus, with Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth gliding through the corridors of the Himalayan nunnery like a demented spectre before appearing at the outer door with a stare of focussed hatred and red-eyed wildness which could melt the surrounding snow in a wide radius, never fail to send a shiver down my spine. The emotional impact of both is hugely amplified by Cardiff’s expressionistic use of colour; the red glow in both the airplane cockpit and the radio communication room; and the red of Sister Ruth’s dress and eyes set against the whites and muted pastels of the nunnery and distant mountains. Although a dvd is set to be released on 19th July, these really do benefit from being seen on the big screen. As do the original films, of course. A revival of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is doing the rounds as an accompaniement to the documentary, which looks like it will show off Cardiff’s Technicolor to dazzling effect. A Matter of Life and Death is also being screened at our local Picture House. In most moods, I would cite this as being my favourite film of all time (for reasons outlined in previous posts). It does seem to be the default choice of Powell and Pressburger for screening outside London, however (last year’s re-issue of The Red Shoes aside). It would be great to have been given the opportunity to see Cardiff’s work on Black Narcissus this time (it is being shown over the Summer at Somerset House, for all you big city folk). Indeed, I’d love to be able to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on the big screen again, or lesser known Powell and Pressburger gems such as the lush rural melodrama Gone To Earth, the brooding and intense The Small Back Room, or the dreamy evocation of the Kentish countryside A Canterbury Tale.

The film could almost be seen as a literary adaptation, since a lot of the material is familiar from Cardiff’s autobiographical volume of reminiscences of his life in film, Magic Hour. This has an introduction by Martin Scorsese, and it is only a few minutes before his inevitable appearance on the screen. He talks in his usual rapid, intense sentences, which tend to come to a sudden halt during which he inserts a nervous smile, as if self-consciously trying to bring a touch of levity to his almost violent expression of his passion for cinema. Despite his ubiquity, Scorsese’s presence is always welcome, as his knowledge is genuinely comprehensive, and his enthusiasm infectious (it seems rather churlish to suggest that he could do with being a bit more critical on occasion). The anecdotes which Cardiff both tells and sets down in writing have become fixed in form through the telling, and have reached a state of performative polish which makes them work perfectly against the backdrop of a photograph slowly panned across or zoomed in on, or as the prelude to a suitably chosen film extract. His position slightly outside the magic circle of stars and directors, whilst still being in close contact with them, gives him a degree of perspective which allows for fresh insight, free of the distortions of self-mythologising ego. Any slight embellishments, natural in the telling of a tale, can be forgiven in the light of the sheer range of his experiences in the film world, which date from the silent era right up until the time at which the documentary was filmed. There are scenes in which he is working on a recent movie, expressing his reluctance to retire and his hope that he’ll have a heart attack and die on the job (he has an unsentimental sense of humour, with a healthy instinct for the absurd).

Cardiff was born into an itinerant theatrical family, who toured theatres and halls as a variety act with him in tow, and soon taking to the stage himself. His reminiscences of his early life give a fascinating insight into the continuity between and intersection of the worlds of stage and screen. In Magic Hour, Cardiff tells us that his father, a comedian, performed on the stage with Charlie Chaplin in a Fred Karno show. When he met him much later in life in Switzerland and asked him about this, he was delighted to discover that Chaplin still remembered this show, and had clear recollections of working with his father. Cardiff’s parents took roles as extras in films whilst ‘resting’, and he relates the thespian scam of creating a circulating queue when collecting the day’s wage of a guinea, with a variety of disguises adopted to accumulate extra coinage. The camera picks out wee Jackie sheltering between the arms of his father, a dapper bow-tied and boatered figure, in a group photograph taken in front of the Hippodrome, and again, sitting at his side, in line with a black-face troupe at the seaside (a real sign of changing times).

Cardiff gravitated towards screen rather than stage, working his way up through the industry after early opportunistic experiences as a child actor gained through accompanying his parents in the search for roles as extras. He went from clapperboy to focus puller, to working on camera teams at Elstree and with Alexander Korda at Denham Studios (where he also worked on the special effects unit for Things To Come). He was a self-educated man, his early peripatetic lifestyle offering little opportunity for more settled schooling, and was an avaricious reader with a real thirst for learning. This autodidactic drive gave him an unorthodox range of reference points, which were well employed when he was examined by a board of big studio cheeses looking to select someone to send over to the USA to learn how to operate the new Technicolor equipment. Cardiff cheerfully admitted to his complete lack of technical knowledge, but impressed them with his appreciation of the representation of the effects of light in paintings by the Old Masters. He got the job.

Cardiff gives us a guide to this hulking piece of equipment, which is shot as if it is a monumental sculpture in enamelled chrome, which in a way it is now - a monument to a bygone age. This very unportable technology was hauled around the world at the behest of the eccentrically wealthy travellers the Count and Countess von Keller, and there are some marvellous pieces of footage shot at a variety of exotic locations. There’s the Taj Mahal, an Indian temple covered with sensuous wall sculptures, and Vesuvius, which was undergoing a minor eruption at the time, which resulted in burnt shoe soles and a significant shortening of the tripod of the very expensive camera equipment. Cardiff also lugged it onto the seas for the semi-fictional wartime drama Western Approaches, made for the Crown Film Unit in the style of the documentary movement. The footage from this was stunning, with the waves of the Irish sea swelling above the tiny lifeboat in which Cardiff, his equipment, director Pat Jackson and several merchant seamen were crouched. These scenes resembled a World War Two restaging of Hokkusai’s famous print The Wave. There’s a glorious shot of the sun on the sea’s horizon, whose colours were achieved using a combination of filters and film development techniques, and which strays slightly from the documentary ethos to express a more poetic realism. It’s a foretaste of the imaginative and unabashedly romantic uses to which Cardiff would put the Technicolor process.

Jack and Michael Powell on the Burrows

He was given the perfect opportunity to apply his painterly eye by Michael Powell, who noticed his camera work on the scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in which he conjures the heads of the Colonel’s hunting trophies onto the walls of his house with the crack of a gunshot until every space is filled. Powell was sufficiently impressed to offer an impulsive invitation to shoot his next film. This was to become A Matter of Life and Death. Although not strictly his debut (he’d shot The Great Mr Handel in 1942) this was an impressive film to be involved with so early in his career, and he brought all the knowledge he had accumulated to bear, both in terms of his technical expertise and of his appreciation of the use of the representation of light in painting. Set designer Alfred Junge tried to impose his own ideas of how to light his backdrops, but Cardiff stood his ground and did things his way. The contrast between the black and white, bureaucratic heaven and the vibrant colour of the Earth and the Universe allowed him to demonstrate that he could master the chiaroscuro gradations of monochrome and the enhanced realism of the Technicolor palette. Marius Goring’s famous line ‘one is starved for Technicolor up there’ could almost be seen as a small tribute to the sensuous quality of Cardiff’s colour photography. Photos of Powell and Cardiff on the dunes of Braunton Burrows above the wide expanse of Saunton Sands are testament to the closeness with which the two worked. One anecdote which underlines the pragmatism with which Cardiff approached technical challenges concerns the creation of a mist which gradually clears to reveal the landscape of sea and sand. He achieved this through the simple expedient of breathing on the lens. The fact that I now know that what I see on the screen is the dissipating condensation from Jack Cardiff’s breath, the transient imprint of a moment of his life, makes the scene even more magical. It provides an appropriately evanescent borderland between Heaven and Earth, life and the afterlife, black and white and Technicolor. Through the incidental improvisation of an effect, it creates a small poetic enhancement of the film’s meditation on the precious and fragile beauty of human life.

Cardiff went on to shoot Powell and Pressburger’s next film, Black Narcissus, which furthered his burgeoning reputation as a supreme cinematic colourist. In the documentary, he emphasises the degree to which various painters have influenced his cinematography and approach to lighting. The interiors of Vermeer, with figures engaged in the unremarkable minutiae of daily domesticity or simply lost in thought obliquely highlighted and etched by shadow via light slanting through windows, were a particular model. The muted tones of the nunnery are reminiscent of Gwen John, who herself painted several portraits from 1913 onward of nuns from the Order of the Sisters of Charity in Meudon, near Paris, where she had settled (whether Cardiff was aware of these I don’t know). This restrained palette is predominant throughout most of the film, before it is violently disrupted by the vivid primary colours which burst forth when Sister Ruth’s suppressed desire explodes into madness. Cardiff points to the expressionist reds and greens of Van Gogh as being an influence here.

Gwen John's nun

His love and knowledge of art was another facet of his self-education, and played a major part in forming his ideas of colour and lighting (and its corollary, shadow). He sits in front of paintings in the National Gallery and extols the virtues of the Dutch masters, the Impressionists and above all Turner. As he contemplates Rain, Steam and Speed (the richly atmospheric painting of an approaching train crossing a viaduct), he observes that he would have been a great cinematographer were he alive today. Cardiff ushers us into his own studio and shows us a selection of his own paintings, in which he copies the styles of his favourite artists. He is typically disparaging about his efforts, claiming that this is merely his way of analysing the work of his heroes and discovering how they achieved their characteristic effects. The results are, nevertheless, nothing to be ashamed of. He is completely in thrall to the great artists, and it is they, rather than other cameramen, who seem to have been his greatest inspiration. In Magic Hour, ostensibly a memoir about his life in the film world, he devotes considerable space to his encounters with various artists, such Utrillo, de Chirico (certainly an influence on parts of the Red Shoes ballet) and Braque. He also runs into Jean Cocteau, an artist who leapt with a light and airy step between the varied worlds of theatre, poetry, art, music, ballet and, of course, film. He seems overawed at the prospect of meeting the elderly Jane Avril, the model for some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most famous depictions of Montmartre night life. Alas, she died shortly after he learnt of her whereabouts, and the meeting never took place.

Expressionist reds

Cardiff went on to shoot one more film, The Red Shoes, with Powell and Pressburger. His Technicolor cinematography reached new heights of gaudy expressionism here, especially in the celebrated dance sequence in which Moira Shearer puts on the red shoes. The air of heightened expressionism is enhanced by his close-ups of the faces of the dancers, in particular Moira Shearer as the rising ballerina Vicky Page. Their exaggerated stage make-up, designed to make an impression at a distance, distorts their features and makes them look as if they have just stepped out of a painting by Munch or Ensor. The Red Shoes isn’t one of my favourite Powell and Pressburger films, perhaps because I have little interest in the high culture world of the ballet in which it is set. Powell himself would display an increasing tendency to breath the elevated airs of the classical art world, with adaptations of Die Fledermaus (transformed into Oh! Rosalinda and updated to post-war Vienna) and Tales of Hoffmann (much admired by George Romero and Martin Scorsese, but not so much by me). Apart from anything else, these marginalized Emeric Pressburger’s gift for characterisation and storytelling, which were of paramount importance to the partnership. Perhaps he was admitting to the failure of his high art pretensions when he had Moira Shearer murdered by the scopophiliac cameraman protagonist of Peeping Tom. He did go on to make an hour long film of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in 1964 for German TV, however. Powell always claimed that The Red Shoes was about being prepared to die for one’s art, a view repeated as orthodoxy here. But Vicky doesn’t die for her art, but rather through the mental torment caused by the competing attempts to control her exerted by Anton Walbrook’s dictatorial svengali Lermontov and Marius Goring’s Julian, her jealous young composer husband. The love story between Vicky and Julian doesn’t seem remotely passionate enough to inspire the wildly operatic act of self-immolation which forms the film’s abrupt conclusion. Marius Goring is frankly more convincing (and certainly more charming) as the foppish Conductor 71 wielding his barley sugar walking cane in A Matter of Life and Death than as an artist and lover who would drive a woman to despair and death.

Kathleen Byron

Moira Shearer is one of a triumvirate of Powell and Pressburger leading ladies in the film, and it’s great to see both her, Kim Hunter and especially Kathleen Byron, all of whom, sadly, have now passed away. During his years working in Hollywood, Cardiff enjoyed warm friendships with many of the most glamorous actresses of the era. He seems to have been the sort of person in whose company they naturally felt comfortable, and in whom they felt they could confide. Marlene Dietrich took a shine to the young Jack when they were both working on Knight Without Armour at the Denham Studios for Alexander Korda. He was fascinated by the way in which she directed her own lighting, applying her make-up to best advantage of its shadows and reflections, ending with a light sprinkling of gold dust in the hair. Cardiff evidently learnt from Marlene, and he discusses the great beauties with whom he worked with a coolly analytical eye. He falls under their spell yet also manages to maintain the degree of distance necessary for his work. His own photographic portraits are wonderful, although he dismisses them in a typically offhand manner as being the products of an amateur. The full face picture of Audrey Hepburn, whose dark eyebrows he finds a particularly distinctive feature, adorns the film’s poster. Marilyn Monroe specifically asked for him to take her picture, and the resultant portrait is gorgeously sensuous even by her standards, with windblown hair straying across her face. It was apparently Arthur Miller’s favourite photograph of her.

Personal portrait gallery

Cardiff also took super 8 films on set, and these give a fascinating insight into the informal behaviour of actors and actresses whose images have been fixed by their screen roles, or presented in carefully pre-determined contexts such as magazine shoots or Parky-style interview schmoozes. Some seem little different from their screen personae. John Wayne still wears his cowboy gear and practices his gunslinging, even when he’s in the Sahara to play the role of foreign legionnaire. Ava Gardner seems broody and a little sad. But Sophia Loren comes to vivid, gleeful life. Seeing her act up to Cardiff’s camera with such playful ebullience, it comes as little surprise to read in Magic Hour that they had a very close relationship, a chaste semi-affair conducted in secret on the set of the otherwise forgettable 1957 film Legend of the Lost. Cardiff also filmed Kirk Douglas doing his own stunts on The Vikings, tiptoeing lightly across the oars of a longship (and falling in the water) and climbing up the gate of the castle perched vertiginously above the Croatian cliffs and sea (which stood in with surprising conviction for the Norwegian fjords). Douglas broke with his general reluctance to be interviewed since his stroke in 1996 to take part in this film, and this, together with the participation of many others, is a testament to the respect and affection in which Cardiff was held. The contrast between Douglas’ frailty and age in his contemporary interview and the youth and physical daring evident in the old super 8 films (those stunts look genuinely dangerous) has an inevitably poignant effect (something which seems to be ingrained in the super 8 medium). Cardiff gives short shrift to the idea that cinema is inherently tragic, however, having fairly brusquely gone along his row of photographic portraits and pointed out how many of them are dead.

Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Cardiff established himself as a major colour cameraman in Hollywood, and even if the films weren’t always of the finest quality (the 50s weren’t really a vintage era for American cinema) his visual contributions were always striking. We get to see glimpses of War and Peace (with its cavalry charge and dream-like duel in the dawn-lit snow), the fantasia of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (with Ava Gardner’s otherworldly siren), a sped up run through a highly complex ten minute take in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, and of course, The African Queen, which offers its own rich fund of anecdotes based around the trying conditions of its shoot, with crocodiles and rapids and other hazards. Lauren Bacall, who accompanied Bogie for the filming, is on hand to provide wry recollections. Everyone got dysentery at some point, since the water filter from which they were drinking was singularly failing to effect any filtration whatsoever, leaving them to drink pure African river water. Bogart and John Huston remained unaffected, however, since they only drank whisky.

It’s fair to say that Cardiff’s work as a director, which occupied him through the 60s and into the 70s, never rose above an efficient journeyman quality, and often the material on offer was simply bad. Sons and Lovers, the DH Lawrence adaptation to which most attention is paid here, was well received by the critics in its day, but has not gone on to be thought of as an enduring classic. Scorsese’s reply to a question about Young Cassidy, the Irish-set film which Cardiff took over from John Ford, is ‘I’ve got a print’, a reflexive response which falls short of his usual instantaneous effusion. Cardiff puts up a half-hearted defence of Girl On A Motorcycle, his attempt at an erotic reverie with Marianne Faithfull and Alain Delon, claiming that some of its notoriously awful dialogue made more sense in French, but the US title, Naked Under Leather, gives a more honest account of its appeal. Unsurprisingly, no mention is made of his final directorial effort, The Mutations (1973), a woeful horror movie in which meddlesome youths poke about in a suspiciously ill-attended fairground, a-la Scooby Doo, and fall foul of Donald Pleasance’s experiment-happy mad scientist, who turns his failed hybrids into sideshow freaks. Tom Baker leadenly plays his hideously scarred assistant, walking with patent henchman lurch, fresh from working with Pasolini on Canterbury Tales and biding his time before the call up for Doctor Who a year or so later. It’s worth seeing only for period 70s London detail and atmosphere (and attitudes).

Perhaps realising that he had reached rock bottom with a film which took a prurient interest in showing real sideshow freaks, Cardiff returned to working as a cameraman in Hollywood. The films he made in this final period are hardly the stuff of legend, and are interesting chiefly in the complete contrast they offer with the cinematic climate of the decades in which he had previously worked in this capacity. There’s a certain perverse fascination in discovering that the man who shot Black Narcissus, Under Capricorn and The African Queen was also behind the camera for Rambo 2: First Blood, Conan the Destroyer and The Awakening. At least the latter, a turgid adaptation of Bram Stoker’s dull novel The Legend of the Seven Stars (Hammer did it slightly better – and with a much catchier title – as Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb in 1973), allows for the participation of Charlton Heston. Cardiff’s work was never less than efficient and professional, however, and he maintained a high reputation which kept him in constant demand. There’s something lacking in their flat photographic realism, however (other shortcomings of the films themselves notwithstanding). Perhaps his greatest work was done in the artificial environs of the studios. It was here that he could create his own romanticised and highly coloured visions of reality, cinematic dreams which endure to this day.

Sinister Resonance in Electric Eden

Two absolutely essential books are appearing on the publishing horizon, both set to come out later this summer. They both look at music within wider cultural (and social and philosophical) contexts and both are by writers associated with the magazine The Wire. Both could be said to be connecting with current trends on the musical margins (the folk revival – or rather a revival of the 60s/70s folk revival – and the ‘hauntological’ summoning of the ghosts of the mediated past) but placing them at the crest of the broad sweep of history lends them a depth which gives us an idea of why they have made such an impact on a certain (admittedly small) section of the population.

The first book is David Toop’s Sinister Resonance, subtitled The Mediumship of the Listener. It comes with an impressive pre-publication collection of recommendations from a varied roster of artists, from musicians and composers such as David Sylvian, Alvin Curran and Christoph Cox, to writer Steve Erickson and film makers and puppeteers the Brothers Quay. This is testament to the breadth of cultural reference which Toop brings to his books. Part of their pleasure is in the unexpected juxtapositions which they introduce between seemingly disparate musicians (and, indeed, artforms). His first book (excepting Rap Attack, which as the title suggests, was more narrowly focussed), Ocean of Sound, ranged from Debussy to Indian dhrupad singing, free jazz noise attack to Eno-esque ambient calm. Exotica traced the invisible threads connecting the likes of Sun Ra with Martin Denny (well, maybe not so invisible there) and Haunted Weather set the radar to detect the music emerging from the cracks between sound and silence in the new millennium, taking in the wildlife sound recordings of Chris Watson and the digital minimalism of Toshimaru Nakamura and Ryoji Ikeda, with a fascinating detour to look at the soundscapes which Toru Takemitsu produced for the 60s films of Hiroshi Teshigahara (Japan always tends to be Toop’s centre of gravity when it comes to cultural reference).

Toop points out in his introduction (part of which you can read on the Continuum site, here) that this book is ‘more about listening than it is about music’. He begins by relating an experience of waking in the night to hear the dying echoes of a sound, whose source remained mysterious and which may indeed have leaked through the boundaries of dream. This is the Sinister Resonance of the title, which he goes on to explain thus: ‘sound is a sinister resonance, an association with irrationality and inexplicability, that which we both desire and dread’. Such an association leads on to hauntings and his fascination with supernatural fiction which he shares with many of the ‘hauntological’ artists. He gives his own interpretation of that horribly clunky academic neologism (invented, perhaps inevitably, by a French philosopher – Jacques Derrida) in terms of ‘exploring the ghostly and nostalgic affect of music’. ‘Sinister Resonance’, he states, ‘begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory’. The thinking behind the subtitle‘The Mediumship of the Listener’ is elucidated by noting that ‘listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history and what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter’. He talks of late night reading, which makes him more alert to the sound in silence, and also ‘to the importance of sound in literature, not only for the twentieth century authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett, but in the supernatural fiction and ghost stories of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins’. Two examples of the emotional impact of sound exaggerated by surrounding silence within supernatural fictions (in this case films) are given, the first arising from an interview with a member of The Animal Collective, who recalls the effect of the music and sound design of The Shining. Toop talks of the crunch of snow, the bounce of the ball, Danny’s car in the corridor driving over different surfaces (with their hard and soft sounds) and the distant echo of dance band music, whose obscured source is located in time as much as space (hauntological before its time). The second is the sound of the harp played without the touch of human hand in The Haunting, an effect which director Robert Wise may have borrowed from a similar scene in I Walked With a Zombie, produced by his mentor Val Lewton. Toop also points to the seemingly counterintuitive dimension of ‘listening’ within visual media, citing Nicolas Maes’ painting The Eavesdropper, and also mentioning Juan Munoz, Georges Seurat, Marcel Duchamp and Ad Reinhardt. He intriguingly posits that sound provides ‘a hidden if uncertain history within otherwise silent media’, perceptible through a species of clairaudience. It’ll be fascinating to hear what any accompanying CD might contain. A series of readings intermixed with resonant sound from film, maybe.

The second book is Rob Young’s Electric Eden, subtitled Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. This traces the changing ways in which British (although it looks like they’re predominantly English) traditions have found expression throughout the twentieth century and on into this one. It’s not shy of using the f-word (folk) to describe many of the impulses underlying the music which it looks at, but at the same time isn’t bound by it. This is a musical stream from which a wide variety of artists have drawn, effecting their own transformations whilst maintaining a sense of underlying continuity. The eclecticism of the Matter of Britain which Young draws together can be gleaned from the links which he provides at the book’s accompanying blog (which you can find here). These include Vaughan Williams, Sandy Denny, Ghost Box, Kate Bush and early music pioneer David Munrow amongst the musicians; William Blake, John Clare, Arthur Machen, William Morris, John Cowper Powys and Christopher Priest amongst the writers (the latter presumably for his A Dream of Wessex); and on the ‘magic box’, The Changes (when will the BBC get round to releasing this?), Smallfilms (Oliver Postgate), Derek Jarman, Powell and Pressburger and Peter Watkins. All indubitably British and the kind of names far more likely to conjure my nationalistic pride than the usual martial icons of Churchill and Nelson etc. Other links take you to the excellent Toys and Techniques blog; the fantastic graphic work of David Owen at the Ink Corporation, which re-imagines folk as a popular art form central to British culture; Subterraenea Britannica, which explores the man made underground spaces of the land; and the unclassifiable English Heretic.

The cover of the book is particularly fine, with its ploughman working his way around the pylon standing in the centre of the field. Big technology in a rural setting always tends to make me think of some post-catastrophe world in which pylons and cooling towers stand as memorials to a fallen civilisation in much the same way as Roman bridges and temples must have done in the early centuries of the last millennium. The pylon plays an important symbolic role in The Changes, which takes part in an England in which technology, and electricity in particular, is suddenly considered evil. Young also points to the post industrial fantasies of late Victorian and Edwardian society in his excellent Guardian article on Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia (find it here), mentioning William Morris’ News From Nowhere, Richard Jeffries’ After London and HG Wells’ The Time Machine (in which the bucolic future world of idle pleasures is, of course, a false Eden). The publishing blurb for the book offers an enticing glimpse of what we can expect:

‘In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism. A wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity, Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.’

Dreams and hauntings, the daytime reveries of English pastoral Edens, and the nervous nighttime glances over the shoulder at small sounds real or imagined. The books look set to provide an ideal complementary pairing. I look forward to reading them both.

A Season In Hell

Between The Ears, BBC Radio 3’s occasional ‘radiophonic’ slot, gave a repeat airing to an abridged adaptation of Rimbaud’s symbolist/decadent (the two terms seem to alongside a blurred boundary) prose poem A Season In Hell (Une Saison en Enfer), read by Carl Prekopp from a translation by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, which you can listen to here until Saturday 26th June. Composer Elizabeth Purnell provided the music, which included three songs sung by Robert Wyatt, and the shifting contours and transformations of the soundscape. There’s been a long and fruitful tradition of radiophonic fusions of word and sound at the BBC, going way back to the 1957 productions of All That Fall, which Samuel Beckett had written specifically for such a treatment, and Frederick Bradnum’s Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, which was subtitled A Radiophonic Poem, the first use of such a term. The success of these productions, both made under the aegis of Desmond Briscoe, who was joined on the latter by Daphne Oram, led to the formation of the Radiophonic Workshop, in which they both played key roles, a year later. The Workshop would further experiment with experimental and concrete poetry in the 60s and 70s, an area of their work which is often overlooked in the understandable enthusiasm for their creation of a very British form of musique concrete and electronic music. Sound sometimes takes precedence over words or gives them a more associational meaning in programmes such as the 1960 collaboration with Brian Gysin on an adaptation of the cut-ups and permutated poems from his collection Minutes to Go, or Lily Greenham’s 1975 piece Relativity, which took Einstein’s energy/mass equation as its launching point. Interestingly, Greenham voiced the aim of her piece in terms akin to Rimbaud, pointing out ‘how a sentence can be given shape and driven in a musical sense beyond its meaning’. Perhaps one of the most readily available examples of the Radiophonic Workshop’s excursions into word and music is The Seasons, with music by David Cain and poems by Ronald Duncan, which was released as a BBC Drama Workshop album in 1969, and tracks from which are given a regular airing on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday afternoon show on BBC Radio 6. You can find it here, in fact.

In this sense, Rimbaud’s work, and A Season In Hell in particular, is ideal for a latter-day radiophonic approach, given its avowed intent to create ‘a poetic language that would one day be accessible to all the senses’, as he puts it in Alchemy of the Word, the second of the poems Deliriums. It’s almost as if he were waiting for the possibilities that a well-equipped modern sound studio provide. His famous statement of artistic abandonment from the ‘Lettre du Voyant’ to Paul Demeny in 1871 required the poet or artist to achieve a visionary state through ‘a prolonged, absolute and rational derangement of the senses’, something which he achieved through a combination of hashish, absinthe and possibly, during expeditions to the East End whilst he was living in London with Paul Verlaine, the smoking of opium. The results of reaching a level at which he ‘found (his) madness sacred’ are recorded in A Season in Hell in terms of hallucinatory transformations and a synaesthetic kaleidoscope of impressionistic collisions. He literally spells out such an apprehension of the spectrum of sound with his vowel colours from The Alchemy of the Word: ‘A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green’, although he slyly notes that he ‘withheld the translation’ for this new ‘poetic language’. ‘In the Farewell’ section of the poem he remembers, now in a spirit of having failed, ‘I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new bodies, new tongues’. The addition of sound furthers the advancement of a synaesthetic language, the attempt to move beyond the limitations of the written word. It allows the words to move into that wider dimension which he was seeking with his colour vowels and which led to him proclaiming, as he looks back at the damage which he inflicted on himself through the intensity of his quest, that he had been ‘damned by the rainbow’. If nothing else, Rimbaud was capable of producing great epigrams. ‘Morality is a weakness of the brain’ is another good one.

Elizabeth Burnell produces some great sounds to colour the words. She occasionally distorts and adds echo to the voice to enhance the mockery and torment of Rimbaud’s self-critical inner demon, and also produces a chorus effect to underline the self-aggrandising rallying calls or denunciations of his more grandiloquent statements. These latter make him sound as if he is addressing a stadium crowd from a triumphal balcony, a hint of the enormity of his ego. There are sounds of oceanic engulfment which might also be the rush of fiery blood as he offers ‘a few leaves of the notebook of a soul condemned to hell’, and the sounds of the ocean return throughout, possibly an indication of the passage across the English Channel on the way to London, where many of the experiences which informed the poem were gained, and where some of it was also written. As he describes his Night of Hell (Nuit de L’Enfer), which follows o from his announcement ‘now comes the punishment’, Burnell underlies his torments with a molten rumble of a drone which threatens to erupt in an engulfing flood of magma, and surrounds him with a swarm of jabbing trumpets. There are metallic clanging sounds which are introduced in the Bad Blood (Mauvais Sang) section in which he imaginatively explores his Gallic ancestry of pagan peasantry, and which could approximate the forging of swords (and of the language and culture of those who wield them which he has inherited), although the mutability of all sounds, in keeping with the general aura of synaesthesia, mean that they also morph into the clinkin. These sounds recur when he makes his claims for having developed a new poetic language in Alchemy of the Word. There are also the sounds of bird song which occur on several occasions, a wood pidgeon cooing as he recalls his childhood, ‘the road in all weathers’ and suggesting a bucolic paradise lost. After the initial roar of noise which introduces the programme, there is a ringing harmonic, a pure note like a singing wine glass or a clear sine wave tone. It is the fundamental from which all the words and sounds and chaos arise, the noise of life, and into which they all fade back at the end, dwindling into imperceptibility but implicitly eternal. It’s an idea which Pete Townshend hovered around in his abortive Lifehouse project, and which was expressed in the song Pure and Easy (now released on the CD reissue of Who’s Next after previously being thrown into the Odds and Sods collection). ‘There once was a note, pure and easy/Playing so free, like a breath rippling by’.

A low-key jazz arrangement backs his statement ‘I became a fantastic opera’, and this sets the tone for the songs which feature in the Alchemy of Words section. These are sung in inimitable style by Robert Wyatt, whose loose, jazzy style suits the words perfectly. The first song is Loin des Oiseaux, in which he is accompanied by a hallucinatory, quavering accordion sound. He sings the second and third verses in French, perhaps feeling that the sounds of the words within the context of the song are more important than the meaning; or perhaps just expecting us to make a little more effort to be more multi-lingual. Here are the words in English, from the translation by Enid Rhodes Peschel: ‘Remote from the birds, from flocks, from country girls/What did I drink, while kneeling in that heath/Surrounded by new growth of hazel trees,/Within a mild green mist of afternoon? What could I drink in that young river Oise,/- The voiceless elms, the flowerless turf, dark sky-/From yellow gourds, far from my cherished hut?/Some golden liquor that induces sweat. I made a doubtful signboard for an inn./- A storm arose and stalked the sky. At night/The forest water drained itself in virgin/Sands, God’s wind cast drift ice on the ponds; Weeping, I saw gold – and could not drink’. The second song is Song of the High Tower, which is accompanied by piano haloed by a sparkle of high, tinkling sounds which suggest intoxicated bedazzlement and the glimpse of a mirage-like paradise in the blurred distance (‘Let it come, let it come, the time we dote on’ sings a female voice – Burnell’s own, perhaps). Wyatt sings the whole song in French this time. In English, it reads thus: ‘I have endured so patiently/That I have lost all memory./My many fears and sufferings/Have taken flight into the skies./And now the health-destroying thirst/Is darkening my blood and veins. Such is the meadowland/Delivered to oblivion,/All overgrown, and flowering/With frankincense and tares,/Amid the frantic buzzing/Of the filthy flies’. The third song, ‘O Seasons, O Chateaux’, is sung in English until verse three, from where it reads: ‘Hail to it, every time/the Gallic cock announces dawn./ Ah! I shall have no more desire:/It has taken charge of my life entire./ That charm has captured soul and body/And dissipated my endeavours./ Alas! The hour that it flies/ Will be the hour of my demise’.

Verlaine and Rimbaud

The poem is essentially a progression of thought in motion, a quality which the radio production brings out particularly well. Rimbaud goes through wild mood swings, and contradicts or undermines his own statements and claims in an ongoing inner dialogue. Forces of self-aggrandisement, self-doubt and self-loathing battle each other for the key to knowledge of the self through which an apprehension of the true nature of the world can be gained. At one point he is proclaiming that ‘the poets and the seers will be jealous/ I am a thousand times richer than them’, the next deriding his efforts as a waste of time (‘so much for my fame as an artist and storyteller’). He veers from peaks of ecstasy and world-conquering ego, to wallowing in self-pity and revelling in his own degradation, convincing himself ‘I reek of charred flesh’, and recalling his ‘skin gnawed by dirt and plague, worms seething in my hair and armpits’. It’s all very self-absorbed, of course, and risks reducing the world to a mere reflection of the poet’s own particular neuroses, which can seem like an amplified version of the world-view of any despondent teenager. Rimbaud wrote Seasons in Hell when he was 18, and it bears the arrogant certainty of youth as well as its violent mood swings. Carl Prekopp, who reads the poem, captures a convincing air of brattish precociousness and the no doubt infuriating know it all conviction. It’s possible to have some sympathy for his patron, travelling companion and lover Paul Verlaine, who he drove out of his mind to such an extent that he ended up shooting him, thankfully with no great accuracy.

If viewed as an act of world building, the construction of artificial realities, Seasons in Hell becomes more acceptable, and allows you to revel in the play of imagination, the power of language to effect transformations of perceived reality. Perhaps it’s more digestible fare for someone who reads science fiction and the literature of the fantastic in general. Samuel Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand was intended as a diptych of novels, to be accompanied by a further volume entitled The Splendour and Misery of Bodies, of Cities. It never saw the light of day, in the end, but the influence of is clear in the title, and there are many Rimbaud-like characters in his early novels. At the end of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud envisages a time when ‘we will enter the splendid cities’ (the line which Delany draws on) and it’s easy to imagine these as the cities of science fiction dreaming. He also puts his faith in science, having dwelt on ‘pagan blood’ and the Christianity with which he was raised. Towards the end, after he has put the madness of his youth behind him, he declares ‘one must be absolutely modern’, and its easy to see in this the roots of a futurism and streamlined modernism, a Things to Come art deco. Rimbaud himself talks of his ‘dreams of monstrous loves and fantastic universes’, and professes his love of the more popular art forms, amongst which he lists ‘idiotic paintings, motifs over doorways, stage sets, mummers backdrops, insides, popular colour prints, unfashionable literature, church Latin, erotic books with poor spelling, the novels our grandmother’s read, fairy tales, small books for children, old operas, nonsensical refrains, galumphing rhythms’. Who knows what his modern day choices might be.

Before first Communion

Rimbaud’s influence can be felt, for better or worse, in the work of many popular artists, who often respond as much to his youth and wildly rebellious attitude as his small body of work. The Surrealists admired his life, including his later years in Africa, as a work of art in itself. He’s exerted an influence in the world of rock and pop music which is certainly rare amongst nineteenth century poets, perhaps his only rival being William Blake. Elizabeth Burnell’s music acknowledges this influence with an initial opening crescendo of formless noise, rising bass rumble and guitar feedback squall building to sensory overload. His appeal to the 60s and 70s countercultures lies partly in his youthful image. He was only 18 when he finished Seasons in Hell in 1873, and it proved to be his valedictory work. In the final section, Farewell (Adieu), he makes his mind up to ‘bury my imagination and my memories’, and declares himself ‘firmly back on the ground, eager for the rigours of the real’. He tells us in The Impossible that ‘I’m about to disappear, to give you all the slip’, and the fact that he did so with such success, settling after an itinerant life in Abyssinia and scorning any contact with the literary world in which his poems were making a belated impact, fixes his artistic persona in a state of eternal youthfulness. His offhand comment (again in the Farewell section) ‘who cares – I’ll make it to 20 if everyone else has the same plan’ has the ring of the ‘hope I die before I get old’ cult of youth.

Patti and Robert- Rimbaud in NY

Patti Smith relates, in her recent book on her early years in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, how they would read his poems to each other. Her song Easter imagines the young Rimbaud walking to his first Communion with his brother Frederic and sister Isabelle, a scene inspired by the picture of the two young boys solemnly posed with white armbands tied above their elbows. The song Horses replaces Chuck Berry’s Go Johnny Go with Go Rimbaud. Bob Dylan also regarded Rimbaud in iconic terms, perhaps due to his association with Allen Ginsburg, and in his song You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, he ruefully observes ‘Situations have ended sad,/Relationships have all been bad/Mine’ve been like Verlaine and Rimbaud.’ Elizabeth Hand, in her short story Wonderwall, has her protagonist, a young woman with a clear resemblance to Patti Smith living the Bohemian life in New York with her Robert Mapplethorpe like room mate, David. She writes ‘Je suis damne par l’arc-en-ciel’ (I have been damned by the rainbow) on her wall and reads Le Lettre du Voyant. She pushes through some sensory wall in a nightclub after a determined and sustained derangement of her faculties, and encounters a young man who may or may not be Rimbaud. He looks over the scene with interest, noting ‘cela s’est passe’. It’s as if he’s saying this particular dream is over, it’s become a routine, an empty ritual. The narrator has her moment of epiphany: ‘I was nineteen. When Rimbaud was my age, he had already finished his life work. I hadn’t even started yet. He had changed the world; I could barely change my socks. He had walked through the wall, but I had only smashed my head against it, fruitlessly, in anguish and despair. It had defeated me, and I hadn’t even left a mark’. The makers of the programme choose to end their adapatation with the penultimate paragraph. Rimbaud leads the way towards a shining future, and foretells the time when ‘at dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the cities in all their splendour’. He is then absorbed into his own myth, which these and others have drawn on ever since.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Thirty Two

Bedlam - part two

Holding a prostrate posture

Inside Lord Mortimer’s bedroom, we see Sims holding on to an awkward pose in which his upper body is folded over in a bow of self-negating prostration. His cane props him up and precludes total collapse. It is a self-consciously mannered and theatrical adoption of a subservient posture, with which body language he opens himself to the full blast of the chastisement he is receiving. In the script, Lewton describes him as ‘making an elegant “leg” before his Lordship’. Lord Mortimer vents his outrage at the death of his acquaintance, Colby, in a conspicuous display which falls just short of accusing Sims of murder. His reference to ‘that murderous window’ gives a hint that this is an incident which is not without its precedents. Sims folds himself back up to a height (still slightly stooped) from which he can defend himself. He talks of Colby as having been his ‘guest’, who ‘chose to leave by the window before I could open the door for him’. It is for all the world as if he has been staying at a hotel which Sims runs. This is the language of evasion, with the use of witty, pointed phrases defusing the truth by presenting it in the form of an amusement. It is not a refutation of Lord Mortimer’s implied accusation, but a redefinition of the frame within which the events are viewed. The transformation of the harshness of the world into an amusement, viewed through a carefully contrived and positioned lens, maintains a distancing affect. This makes it easier to remain aloof from the suffering and injustice from which the viewers, for whom such entertainments are fashioned, are sheltered. Tragedy is turned into comedy, and outrage into farce. Sims knows his audience, and knows how to work Lord Mortimer’s shallow attentions, to play on his desire for everything to be light and amusing, and to avoid at all costs any matter which requires serious, moral examination.

Protesting his innocence

Nell intervenes at this point, realising that Sims is beginning to turn Lord Mortimer’s weak and easily diverted outrage to his own ends. She exercises her own scathing wit on him, effectively turning their encounter into a dual. Where Sims’ language of amusement has been used to defuse the seriousness of the situation, to ease ire, Nell’s wit is deliberately inflammatory, full of anger and contempt. It is analogous to the scabrous prints and paintings of Hogarth. Beneath her carefully cultivated air of indifference, an essential bearing in this world of elegant facades, there is something within which reacts with instinctive revulsion to Sims’ obvious attempts to avoid responsibility. He is a rival for the patronage of the fickle Lord, and she is doubtless resentful at being reminded that she too is a part of his household hierarchy. She slyly suggests that he is redefining the word ‘accident’, redirecting the exchange towards the issue of his culpability for Colby’s death. She draws attention to the flexible nature of language, the way in which its skilful use can reshape meaning, and even alter the perception of reality. It can be used as weapon or shield, imposing itself at the boundary between truth and convenient fiction. Sims response demonstrates such use of language. He speaks carefully, measuring up this woman who has ostentatiously declared herself his adversary, and who now stands as an unexpected obstacle to his re-establishment of his position with Lord Mortimer. He disarmingly takes her mocking sarcasm at face value and inverts its bitter force by replying with a statement of studied reason, delivered in an even and serious tone. ‘Exactly, Miss Bowen’, he affirms, with cool politeness. ‘This was a misadventure contrived by the victim and executed by nature’s law that all who lose their grip on gutters must fall’. This is the kind of legalistically careful choice of language with which he is able to manipulate the world of appearances to his own ends. He reframes what we are well aware was a murder as an enactment of natural law, the inevitable outcome of a series of events, with any element of contrivance or intervention removed. He can equally well present sanity as madness, social discontent as dangerous psychosis. He is a very dangerous man for Nell to be antagonising.

Having dammed Nell’s attempt to rechannel the course of the conversation, Sims turns back to Lord Mortimer and reverts to a lighter mode of address with which to relate his story. He modulates the tenor of his tale according to the character of his audience, adapting it to their particular tastes. He is a pragmatic artist, producing work to order. Introducing the revisionist version of his story which he is presenting to Lord Mortimer, he says ‘I could never invent one half so droll’. Amusement is once again used as a device to create distance from the world of everyday suffering. This ability to absorb outrage into a worldview of all-encompassing levity, a determined and tirelessly maintained façade of bright gaiety, is what drove satirical artist like Hogarth to ever more extreme depictions of depravity and violence in order to drive their message home. There’s a striking similarity with much of the ‘extreme’ art of the modern age, which vies for our attention in an overstuffed and desensitised world by promising to push the boundaries a little further, or to offer new forms of violent sensation, although this is more allied with marketing techniques than with any moral agenda. The anger which burns beneath the surface of cool indifference which Nell presents to the world, and which is raised by Sims’ manipulative manner and evident evasions, drives her savage wit. But as with satirists throughout the ages, there is a danger that their attentions are worn almost as a badge of honour by those who are their targets. Nell is kept by Lord Mortimer partly for this very purpose, thus demonstrating what a good sport he is. By having his own satirist on call, he pre-empts what might be more wounding attacks from those better placed to make their barbs widely felt. Similar impulses made politicians in the 80s welcome their appearance as latex puppets on the broadly satirical TV show Spitting Image, many even claiming affection for their grotesque caricatures. Peter Cook, who regularly contributed to the satirical journal Private Eye, and effectively maintained its financially viability for several years, seemingly damned his own efforts through his comments on the limited effectiveness of humour which seeks to mock the powerful or influence the course of events. When setting up The Establishment club in Soho in the 60s, he claimed to have modelled it on the Berlin cabarets of the thirties ‘which did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler’.

Animal analogues - Nell and parrot

Sims, introducing the characters of his story as if he is setting the scene for a play, refers to ‘two poets, Colby and myself’, thus revealing his self-perception as an artist. He goes on to further outline his credentials, providing an introduction for us, the audience, whilst also asserting his superior position of authority in the hierarchy of human value for Nell’s benefit. ‘I am not only a poet’, he pronounces, ‘but also, by your Lordship’s favour, the Apothecary General of St Mary’s of Bethlehem Hospital’. We see Lord Mortimer nod and smile at Sims’ recognition of the munificence of his patronage. He is easily flattered by any inflation of his already puffed up sense of self-importance. Sims’ approach, of tactical unctuousness, is quite the opposite of Nell’s flagrant insults. He tells the story ‘like a romance’, life and death as performance, a staged amusement tailored to his Lordship’s tastes. Lord Mortimer retorts that ‘it’s a romance that cost me 20 guineas a night of laughter’. Colby’s life is weighed in precise fiscal terms. He is part of the human currency exchange, the base rate of individual worth which is evident throughout the film. It is made quite clear that his Lordship regards art as a commodity, with financial rather than aesthetic values taking precedence. The true cause of Lord Mortimer’s distress at Colby’s death becomes apparent. He had commissioned verse from him and, as Nell points out, was ‘foolish enough’ to pay in advance. She is able to get away with such insults, even to the extent of calling Lord Mortimer’s judgement into question, because of her beauty and carefree vivacity, and Sims’ glance takes this in and makes note of it. Ultimately, her cutting remarks have no more impact than the learned phrases squawked by her parrot. She is like the exotic bird, a bright adornment, and she can say what she likes because nothing she says is considered of moment. It is all mere drollery.

Making the pitch

It turns out that Colby was due to write a masque for a fete which Lord Mortimer is to host. Sims once more adopts the mannered pose of a supplicant, his cane as his theatrical prop, and his stance provides the accompaniment to his pitch. ‘If I might offer my humble talents’, he interjects, as if the thought had just occurred to him. Nell barks out a curt, dismissive laugh. It’s a humourless sound which suggests that she finds the very idea ridiculous, or that the transparency of his scheming is absurdly obvious. Sims has effectively used incarceration and murder as a tool to create a vacancy for a position which he covets. There is an analogy with the Hollywood studios in this scene, the first of several such allusions to Lewton’s own milieu in the film. Lord Mortimer could be seen in part as Lewton’s own Hogarthian caricature of Jack Gross, the head of his production unit, whom he regarded as a heavy-handed philistine. The brief span of Lord Mortimer’s outrage at Colby’s demise, and his openness to Sims’ pitch for the work which he was to have undertaken, is perhaps a rueful reflection on Lewton’s part of the dismissive regard in which producers and scriptwriters were held, and the ease with which they could be axed and replaced.

Face off

Sims, alerted by her dismissive bark of non-laughter, faces up to Nell, and they are shot in profile, Lord Mortimer now excluded from the frame. They are like pugilists sizing each other up before the bell rings to start the bout. Both vie for the attentions of a man for whom they have nothing but contempt. She holds her horsewhip between her hands (she is clearly prepared to go out riding, but has lingered to enjoy what she had assumed would be Sims utter humiliation) and flexes it with barely controlled rage. She evidently wishes to use it. Sims talks of Bedlam as a place where he offers ‘wit and laughter’, as if it is the theatre in which he stages his dramas, and where visitors find the entertainment is worth ‘the tuppence they paid’. This is the cheap entertainment of the masses, the pulp fiction or exploitation cinema (or indeed reality tv) of the day. It is at the opposite end of the scale from the exclusive, purpose tailored masque which Sims is preparing for Lord Mortimer. The co-option of the theatre of Bedlam for such a supposed piece of high art reflects Lewton’s own attempts to use the popular form of the horror genre, generally perceived as base entertainment, for higher ends more in line with the genre’s literary antecedents. The range of amusements offered in Bedlam for such a paltry price also position it as the shadow realm to the bright, glittering world of self-absorbed wit which will be celebrated by the masque.

Nell shrugs off his claims with a disdainful ‘you do not entertain me, Master Sims’, the ultimate put-down in these environs. He turns her implication that his wit does not meet the required standard around by taking a passive aggressive stance, observing that ‘most people laugh at my ugliness’, a response which invites pity or at least a polite negation. Nell simply replies, with brute affirmation, ‘it offends me, sir’. There is in fact a deeper and less readily perceptible ugliness which is offending a part of her she wishes to remain suppressed; her moral sense. Its emergence would upset the carefully maintained balance of shallow, superficial jibes enlivened by bold asperity which, combined with her beauty and cleverness, has gained her advancement in these circles. The way in which Sims draws attention to his own ugliness demonstrates an awareness of the values of surface appearance prevalent in this world. We have already heard the small black boy mocking his ugliness before was ushered in, so his self-perception is fairly acute. His plain, dark clothing and lack of powder or elaborate wig make his intrusion into these glittering surrounds all the more apparent, and his attempts to adopt its elegant gestures merely accentuate his incongruity in Nell’s eyes. Sims is aware that by raising her ire, he is making her stand out and betray her roots, cracking the protective shell of her frosty hauteur. He gives a bow, as if conceding the point, and thus brings this opening bout, a practice spar, to an end. ‘To move a lady so beautiful in any way’, he concludes. The camera pulls back to include Lord Mortimer in his bed within the tableau. His laugh adjudges Sims to be the victor of this preliminary exchange, having maintained an even manner and fashioned his language with pointed precision throughout. ‘He’s gallant too’, his Lordship points out, prompting the immediate response ‘I am as you wish, milord’. Sims’ tactical unctuousness and calculated subservience has won him an elevation in the ranks of the Lord’s esteem.

Childish delight

Now he can make use of such favour by suggesting a performance by his ‘company of wits’, an idea which clearly delights his Lordship (‘have your loonies perform?’ he exclaims like an excited child). Lord Mortimer introduces a party political element by animatedly musing that ‘not John Wilkes himself nor his whole Whig party could think of anything so clever as that, eh Nell?’ Wilkes is a historical personage of the time, a Whig politician who was one of the genuine characters of the age, a popular hero to some and an embodiment of the devil to others. He was something of a radical reformist within the parameters of the parliamentary system. He is included amongst the film’s characters not only because of his association with the impulse towards social change, but also on account of the caricature which Hogarth produced of him, which we see later on. The way in which Lord Mortimer talks of upstaging him with this novelty performance suggests a Westminster Village mentality which has more to do with personal rivalries than a principled espousal of a particular social or political agenda. Nell points out to him that he didn’t think of the idea either, but he responds that ‘my friend here thought of it’. Sims and Nell both act, through his patronage, as extensions of himself. They provide the second hand wit of which he is bereft, and which is guided towards his meeting his own ends. Sims is aware of this, and accepts it as part of an essentially venal view of the world and its workings. He knows the value of flattering the powerful, and says ‘let us say you inspired the thought, milord’.

Prideful countenance

He goes further by adding that they have both inspired him, ‘milord and the beloved of milord’. By including Nell with apparent generosity, he is underling his ascendancy, from which height he can now bestow his patronisation upon her. The shifting of their positions is given physical embodiment by the fact that he is now placed by milord’s bedside, whilst she has drifted off into the middle distance. His reference to her as the beloved of milord is made with deliberate provocation, and she immediately responds to his goading words. She sets him straight with a refutation into which he has manipulated her. ‘I am milord’s protégé’, she says with a look of defiant pride. ‘I entertain him and he takes no more freedom with me than any other man’. Lord Mortimer’s grinning face drops quite suddenly at this declaration of independence, and Sims gives a cough, seemingly of embarrassment, but also to slyly draw attention to the indiscretion implicit in Nell’s self-definition. She displays a degree of self-deluding presumption as to the importance of her position which is in contrast to the self-awareness displayed by Sims of the contingent nature of the Lord’s favours. He knows that there are certain codes to be observed in order to build and maintain those favours. There is a suggestion that Nell may be something of a smokescreen to disguise Lord Mortimer’s real inclinations, which is seemingly confirmed later in the film, but it is a clumsy social blunder to make this so apparent. Nell can’t bear anyone to think that she is milord’s mistress even on a notional level. Her pride has lost her the point and further relegated her in the ever-shifting balance of hierarchical influence and favour. Sims, on the other hand, has transformed what was initially a summons for a stern dressing down into an audience from which he has been able to gain himself an important commission. His talent for tactical subservience, delivered with a silver tongue, has paid dividend.

He assures Lord Mortimer that he will ‘prepare a masque of madness that will set you howling’, a line which could be seen as a bit of self-reflexive commentary on Lewton’s part. He was, after all, no stranger to the kind of hyperbole which adorned the posters of his films (the tabloid style byline ‘sensational secrets of infamous madhouse exposed’ is splashed across the top of the Bedlam poster) and he himself had laboured under soubriquets such as the Sultan of Shudder, Titan of Terror, Maharajah of Mayhem etc (although I suspect that he may have made some of these up himself). Sims gives a cursory bow to Nell as he passes her on his way out. He’s left with exactly what he wanted, and has subtly undermined her position in the process.

A world of surface appearances

Lord Mortimer is a picture of quivering jollity, declaring Sims to be a ‘capital fellow’ and his use of the Bedlamites ‘a merry notion’, amusement and novelty being an end in itself. Nell re-adjusts her appearance in her mirror, collecting herself after the duel. As she does so, she lambasts Sims, largely in terms which set him apart from the powdered and perfumed climes of Lord Mortimer’s bedroom. ‘He’s a stench in the nostrils’, she begins in a matter of fact tone, ‘a sewer of ugliness, and a gutter brimming with slop’. ‘But witty’, Lord Mortimer appends, as if this obviates any such base characteristics. The vehemence of her portrayal, arrived after only the most cursory of encounters, suggests that Sims has aroused uncomfortable feelings within her. As she looks in the mirror, she readjusts her appearance to try to regain the sense of poise which he has upset. He has given her a reminder of her own essential servitude. She takes up Lord Mortimer’s suggestion that she go and see how funny the Bedlamites really are, a look of calculation fixing itself upon her face as she muses ‘perhaps I will’. Not being one to leave a meeting at a disadvantage, she sets off to further this adversarial encounter, and face the challenge that Sims now offers to her standing in moneyed society and to her perception of it.

Disdaining the neighbourhood

There is a dissolve to a street scene set to the side of Bedlam’s imposing façade. Lavender sellers sing their wares and a woman scrubs the steps of the doorway which leads to Sims’ office, both implying an attempt to ward off the stink and dirt of a grimy, impoverished neighbourhood. The script suggests that plate one of Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress is a reference point for the set design, but there seems little actual resemblance, aside from the notional matching of the passing cart. The buildings in Hogarth’s print are cracked, with plaster having sheared off in geological slabs. The set through which we now see Sims walking is perhaps a little too well-dressed. It all seems quite genteel, when a little Dickensian squalor would have been more appropriate. Sims walks through these streets with a look of scornful distaste, as if he finds the everyday commerce and human transactions of the commonality unbearably coarse. He enters the office, pausing to frown down at the cleaning woman to let her know that he finds her presence an unacceptable impediment to his progress. His bearing in general suggests that he considers himself lord of this particular manor. His obsequious manner in Lord Mortimer’s presence has been inverted and the keen awareness of social position which it displayed now converted into a general disdain for those he considers his inferiors. It’s an attitude which serves to shore up his sense of his own status, his self-perception as an intellectual artist leading him to regard the more corporeal pleasures on offer (which are certainly more evident in Hogarth’s print) with a lofty contempt.

The labour of art

He enters his office and once behind his desk, takes off his wig. This is his inner sanctum and he feels secure in his position, and feels no need to observe the formalities and attentions to appearance necessary for the negotiation of the social maze beyond these doors. Unlike Lord Mortimer, who seems to take a genuine delight in the careful preparation of his outward appearance, the choice of peacock finery with which he will, in all due time, strut out of his bedroom into the world, Sims seems only too eager to cast such dandyish fripperies aside. He certainly feels no need to maintain any pretence of formal etiquette in the presence of his subservient clerk, a man blessed with the Dickensian name, indicative of his mindlessly functional role, of Podge. He calls for Podge to fetch his rhyming dictionary, which suggests that his is not a natural wit, and that his masque will be more of an artisanal work, relying on labour more than inspiration. His mind is now focussed on his ‘important commission’ and he has no time for the ‘snivelling quaker’ stone mason who he is told is waiting outside to inquire about work. His bitterness and anger at his treatment by his patron find momentary release as remarks that ‘I waited four hours before Lord Mortimer would give me a dog’s word’. Hierarchies of power are related to the treatment of animals, with which particular people are related (a recurrent Lewton theme). Sims’ experience is not translated into any empathy or fellow feeling for his supplicant, however. Rather, he takes pleasure in being able to treat someone with the same contempt which he has been shown. It is only when the cheapness of the quaker’s rates are mentioned that his interest is piqued. Once more, the currency of human exchange, the fiscal valuation of a person’s life, comes into play.

The quaker, in contrast with the tense posture of chin on cane in which we had seen Sims waiting earlier, sits calmly with folded hands. He rejects Sims’ frankly offered bribe, and offers to turn a blind eye (or deaf ear) so that ‘I can believe no evil of thee’. The adherence to a moral code which such a rejection indicates (not to mention the implied superiority) enrages Sims, for whom such backhanders are ‘simple business’. He has accepted that the world is inherently corrupt and that you make your way in it by adapting to its ways. The quaker earns his contempt through his high-minded idealism, which he sees as a self-defeating refusal to accept the self-evident nature of society. The idea that change could be effected within the world is seen as absurd. As we have seen, Sims is acutely aware of the limitations of his own power. The quaker, for his part, sees such financial wrangling, which comes before any mention of the labour involved, as an abstraction, and tries to direct the conversation back to the physical actuality of the work at hand (‘my friend, about the stone-masonry’). The relationship between finance and labour is already beginning to come adrift.

Re-wigging

Before the exchange can go any further, Nell sweeps into the room, obviously having cast aside any attempts at a more formal announcement of her arrival. The importance of appearance and the concomitant play of words reassert themselves, and Sims quickly reaches for his wig and smoothes it into place. His tone reverts to an unctuous formality, his manner adjusted according to the perceived social standing of his company. ‘I have a curiosity to see the loonies in their cages’, she announces imperiously. This is like a visit to the zoo, the human inhabitants regarded as no more than animals. The link between the world of Bedlam and the moneyed world in which Lord Mortimer and his peers move is made through the constant reference to humans as animals. Right at the start, Lord Mortimer has been likened to a pig, and Nell’s parrot familiar is effectively an extension of herself. Sims has just likened his treatment to that of a dog. As we shall see, some animals are treated better than others.

Taking the entrance fee

Sims asks Nell to hang up her crop, as there are ‘no weapons’ allowed. He has evidently noted her flexing it with barely suppressed violence at the earlier encounter. This disarming foreshadows the later smuggling in of a supposedly defensive weapon later on, and Sims explanation of why such confiscations are necessary also turns out to be an accurate anticipation of how it will be used. He casts this explanation in the form of a literary quote, which he ascribes to ‘Dekker, a second rate dramatist of the last century’. Nell makes a disparaging remark about forgetting that he was ‘a man of letters’, one of several script additions suggested by Karloff, according to Tom Weaver’s commentary on the dvd. Sims demands his tuppence entry fee for the personalised tour. The rate of human exchange is debased here, the inmates worth measured in devalued currency. Their incarceration takes them out of society, and therefore even such pitiful value as they can still command goes directly into Sims’ pocket.

The act of seeing

As he leads her through the corridor leading to the hall of Bedlam itself, Sims’ face takes on a gloating look of control, full of the certitude of his own power within this domain. The shadows of bars are cast across the passageway, sketching in the confinement of the cages which they are approaching. Their insubstantial form suggests confinement which is as much mental as it is physical. Shadows in Lewton’s films often hint at the existence of a world which parallels that of daylit reality, but which is nonetheless connected to it. Shadow worlds suggest the contingent nature of consensus reality or social assumptions. By stepping sideways into them, there is a sense that characters become at one remove from the normal operations of the everyday world, which in itself becomes shadowy. Once they’re through the door, the camera focuses on Nell’s face, her eyes wide with fear whilst she consciously makes an effort to maintain a semblance of composure. We see Sims carefully observing her reactions with evident enjoyment. The hall is filled with the echoing sounds of human chaos; screams, moans and shouts. These are the uncontrolled forces of the street penned up within a circumscribed space. The sights are initially withheld from our view, and we gain an impression of their horror and piteousness from Nell’s reaction. They are conveyed through the mirrors of her eyes. We see how the scene affects her, and sends a trembling convulsion through her air of aloof disengagement. Then the camera slowly pans back to reveal, stage by stage, the world of ‘the loonies’ which we’ve caught an emotional preview of in her gaze. Straw is cast upon the floor to further underline their status as animals.

Restaging Hogarth - The Pieta

The scene which we see reproduces the main figures from plate 8 of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, placing them on a wider and deeper stage. The fact that this is the final scene of Hogarth’s narrative furthers the impression that Bedlam is an endpoint, a place where the stories of its inmate’s lives reach a permanent conclusion, sometimes tapering off into vacuous stasis, sometimes ended with brutal finality. It is a hospital in which a cure or release seems a remote possibility. The soundtrack of the asylum’s main hall is provided by a discordant fiddle, the music of detuned wit and sense, played by the figure from Hogarth’s painting who wears his sheet music for a hat, and who is given embodiment here. Sims points to a young man intently spinning a cat’s cradle, ‘all day long weaving nets to catch peacocks for the royal dinner’. He’s another figure who’s stepped out of Hogarth’s painting. We gain a glimpse of the dream logic behind this character’s mad actions, and perhaps of the story which led him here, just as we know of the events which have led to Tom Rakewell’s presence here. In the foreground, where the gradual expansion of the frame is completed with the halting of the camera’s slow backward track, we see a scene which resembles a pieta. This is the central focus of Hogarth’s painting, in which his protagonist, Tom Rakewell, is comforted and wept over by his rejected fiancée (and mother of his child) Sarah Young. It is evident, however, that Tom is cut off from her, utterly locked into the fixed orbit of his madness. Nevertheless, compassion can still be found even in these despairing depths, and Nell will later demonstrate that such care can bear fruit.

Weaving the peacock's net

Nell’s reaction to encountering these figures is very direct and personal, and demonstrates a deep and instinctive sense of sympathy for their plight. There may be a degree of empathetic connection sparked off by a recognition that she is herself disconnected from the world in which she moves. Her caustic manner has melted away, and she is full of compassion as she observes, to herself as much as to anyone, ‘they’re all in themselves and by themselves’. It’s a state familiar to characters in other Lewton films; Irena in Cat People; Jacqueline in The Seventh Victim; Captain Stone in The Ghost Ship; and Amy in Curse of the Cat People. In the contemporary world of Cat People and The Seventh Victim, such isolation and its attendant crises attracts the coolly appraising attentions of the modern arbiters of madness, psychiatrists.

The compassionate gaze

Sims defines his patients as being a different order of being, claiming ‘they have their world and we have ours’. It is of course the same world. His is a social as much as a clinical (or philosophical) diagnosis. We will discover how similar this enclosed world and the circumscribed circles within which Sims and Nell hustle for position are. Nell muses that they are ‘like separate dreams’, an observation which calls to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s couplet ‘all that we see or seem/but a dream within a dream’. Both describe the contingent and fragile realities of Lewton’s shadow worlds. Nell’s comment is also an admission, made whilst her defensive armour of bright cynicism has been lowered and she is in her truth-speaking reverie, that the world in which she has gained a foothold is based on the illusory reflections and glamours of mirrors, powders the spells of language.

Sims now goes on to elaborate on what he sees as the basic division between the world of the mad and that of the sane, the world inside and that without. ‘Ours is a human world’, he muses. ‘Theirs is a bestial world. Without reason, without soul. They’re animals’. He is like a petty god, defining the terms of being. In reducing his patients to such a dehumanised state, he can treat them as he would animals. He elaborates on the nature of that treatment. Hogarth produced another narrative series of plates called ‘The Four Stage of Cruelty’, in which he depicted, in unsparing detail, the natural progression from the pleasure taken in childhood from the torment of animals to the unthinking and pitiless use of violence against human beings. Here, such a progression is concentrated by making a direct connection between animals and human beings from the outset. The Nazi propaganda Jew Suss, in which Jews are likened to swarms of scurrying rats, is another notorious example of such dehumanising analogies being made.

The Four Stages of Cruelty - plate one

As Sims continues his tour, he dispassionately divides his patients into taxonomic subdivisions, as if they are representatives of different species. The divisions of the animal kingdom provide a suitable symbolic reflection of the divisions of power in the world outside these walls, the world of which Bedlam is the shadow cast. ‘Some are dogs’, he observes, raising his arm to send a young man cowering out of the way on all fours. ‘These I beat’. The first plate of ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’ depicts some children, including the protagonist Tom Nero, who will go on to lead a short and brutish life which ends at the gallows and the dissection room, torturing a dog to death. ‘Some are pigs’, he continues. ‘Those I let wallow in their own filth’. We see a man, mostly in shadow, sprawling on the floor, his stench causing Nell to wrinkle up her nose. Her reaction once more causes us to imagine what we cannot see, although in this case, it’s a sight which remains hidden. The historical vagaries of censorship mean that we are shielded from the kind of scene which Hogarth wouldn’t have flinched from depicting in merciless detail if he thought that it would serve a moral purpose. The cool detachment with which Sims outlines the degradation of a man lying in his own filth, and his utter indifference to such a state of suffering, brings to mind Pasolini’s controversial final film Salo, his satirical display of disgust at the modern world and its systems of power and coercion as filtered through the madness of the final days of fascism in Italy. As in these and future scenes in Bedlam, Salo encloses its characters within a large building in which strict hierarchies of power dividing master, servant and prisoner are observed, providing a distilled and magnified model of social structures beyond its walls.

Cages of the soul

Nell and Sims pass a large cage standing on its own at the end of the hall, and Sims indicates its hulking occupant, chained within. ‘Some are tigers. These I cage’. This is the most obvious literalisation of the metaphorical (if only barely so) notion of Bedlam as a zoo. It reminds us of the zoo cage in Cat People whose limits the panther paces out; and of Charlie’s mobile cage in The Leopard Man, which also contains a panther. The caging of the wild beast carries obvious symbolic overtones, as Doctor Judd is only too happy to outline to Irena in Cat People, alluding to the suppression of the wilder, untameable aspects of the human psyche. The cage containing the wild man, the unbounded id, is a particularly apt metaphorical symbol made real to apply to the world of carefully controlled appearances in which Nell exists. We have already seen how she barely suppressed her rage in Lord Mortimer’s bedroom. Of course, as Hogarth so clearly illustrated in his narrative sequences, such a refined milieu existed alongside a world of considerable license, where such wild impulses could be easily indulged (for a price), and there was regular traffic between the two.

The Virgin - holy innocent

Sims now guides them to a woman, who stands with catatonic immobility against the wall, like a sculpted relief. ‘Some are doves’, he says, touching her unresponsive face. He leaves it to our imagination as to what he does with these. Her utter withdrawal from outward sensation means he can do what he will. The prospect of such abuse is too horrific for Nell to contemplate, and she calls the tour to a halt at this point, saying ‘I’ve seen enough’. Enough to know that Sims runs the hospital like the autocratic lord of his private fiefdom. ‘But you haven’t seen the other cages’, he protests with mock distress. The varieties of prisons for the human soul are innumerable. As they leave, the camera focuses on the face of the catatonic woman, her raised skyward and filled with light. She looks like a portrait of the Virgin Mary, with her veiled head; a holy innocent privy to what ecstatic visions we cannot know. The idea of the holy fool is taken up in Roberto Rossellini’s film Europa 51. This is a depiction of a woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, who might once have been declared a saint, but whose behaviour in the modern age leads to her being put into an asylum. The resemblance of the catatonic woman to a religious icon is here largely ironic, given her apparent vacancy, and will prove even more so in the light of future developments.

Moral outrage

Nell strides out of the door, with Sims struggling to keep up with his almost comical bow-legged scuttle (although any such comedic potential in his character is snuffed out by what we’ve just discovered about his nature). He persists in telling her how amusing his ‘loonies’ can be, with an implicit mockery of the shallow preoccupations of her social circle. Having been handed back her riding crop, she immediately uses it to strike him on the cheek, with a gesture which more harshly echoes his stroking of the catatonic woman’s cheek. It was the blow which she had itched to administer in Lord Mortimer’s bedroom. She treats him as if her were a beast, using the crop with which she would strike a horse, in just the way he has demonstrated he would treat the patients whom he regards as animals. ‘Amusement!’ she spits out. ‘From that mad girl with the staring eyes’. It is this woman with whom she identifies, and who becomes for her the embodiment of all that is wrong with Bedlam. She is like a mirror twin, a reflection of her deepest fears over what she might become, the state to which she most dreads being reduced. A woman who is a vessel of mute passivity, locked into her mind behind a blank, wide eyed gaze. A holy fool or innocent, maybe, or just an empty presence upon whom such qualities, or any others, can be projected. Sims immediately takes up a defensive position, preserving his anger for a more considered and pre-planned response; the cold meat of revenge. ‘If I have offended you, Miss Bowen’, he meekly offers in the meantime. She storms out, followed by the quaker, whose half-focussed outline we have noticed in the background observing the encounter. Sims looks after her with a look of pensive calculation, fingering the welt on his cheek raised by her blow, as if only now permitting himself to feel the pain which her blow has inflicted. Nell has created a very dangerous enemy.

Nursing wounds