Weed respite: Bongwater where art thou?

Ben Kingsley puffs tuff in The Wackness; click to enlarge.

New on the Flickhead website

Flickhead at age 5

The following recent Flickhead blog entries have now been added to the Flickhead website (www.Flickhead.com), some with new or additional photographs:

Screen Jens: When Salome Shook Her Groove Thang for The Lord
“How many actresses are named Salome? The one who beguiles me is Salome Jens.” Looking back on her career and the 1961 film, Angel Baby. The original text has been improved with minor alterations and reconsiderations (hattip, Peter). Read it here.

At the Gallery
“What is most powerful to me about…Au Café…is what might be described as its aural dimension. Once you have seen it and studied it, surrounded in this room by the pastoral and bucolic relics of Impressionism, Degas’s canvas, modestly situated in a far corner, could almost be about to speak.” After hours with Richard Armstrong. Read it here.

Sisters of Mourning
“I watched Cléo de 5 à 7 recently on DVD and it made me jump! I was astonished by its similarity to Carnival of Souls, the little horror film which I have written about in the past.” Cinema considerations by Irene Dobson. Read it here.

I’d Walk a Mile for a Cammell
“Less the Holy Grail of Donald Cammell’s sketchy oeuvre than one of its many missing links, Duffy (1968) is a psychedelic heist film making a long overdue debut on home video.” DVD review. Read it here.

Kubrick by brick

Above, an original newspaper ad for the New York premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. (Click to enlarge.) Because the blog which originally posted it has chosen not to publish comments I’ve left there, I can only assume its owner would rather remain anonymous than to risk connection with yours truly — therefore, no credit where credit is due. Regardless, this advertisement’s main draw — “IN PERSON…producer/director Stanley Kubrick, co-author Arthur C. Clarke, stars Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood…and many more!” — tends to blow my mind far more than the film itself. (Of the “many more,” did William Sylvester — aka Heywood ‘Pink’ Floyd — show up?) Below is an all-too brief interview with Kubrick from the event, a pivotal moment when the science fiction genre would be infiltrated by intellectualism and High Art; when the mainstream would be baffled, if not a little perturbed, by the unorthodox positioning of science over fiction. The interview is from a Dutch TV program, Stardust; there’s a longer clip from it here.

At the Gallery

Au Café (click to enlarge)

By Richard Armstrong

There is a little painting by Edgar Degas at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge which, from time to time, I like to look at. It is an oil of two young women sitting at a café table. While the woman on the left sits pensively with her head slightly to one side looking down at the table, the woman on the right, and half out of frame, is leaning over as though about to say something. What is most powerful to me about the painting, simply entitled Au Café (At the Café, c. 1875-1877), is what might be described as its aural dimension. Once you have seen it and studied it, surrounded in this room by the pastoral and bucolic relics of Impressionism, Degas’s canvas, modestly situated in a far corner, could almost be about to speak. It is as though there is a presence in the room…the lost communicant of some forgotten séance conducted long ago, a girl whose voice you cannot yet hear, whilst knowing that she is longing to be heard, like a desire which rejoices in its imminent satisfaction.

    Of all the French art of that period, there is something uniquely cinematic about Degas. His unusual cropping and perspectives, the negative space, characters caught in odd or unbecoming attitudes, suggest the influence of photography, the hastily taken snapshot long before its time. Photography emerged in the mid-19th century and Degas, like many educated men of his generation, was keenly interested in the new medium. Yet Degas’s captured moment figures a very different photographic era than that anticipated at the time. Far from the stiff and starched portraits of the medium’s infancy, with their laborious setting-up and a fastidious commemorative mise-en-scène, Au Café was ‘taken’ on the hoof, an Instamatic moment ninety or more years before the Instamatic came onto the market.

Degas self portrait (click to enlarge)

    For art historian Charles Stuckey, what is ‘impressionist’ about Degas’s work is precisely this embodiment of the distracted glance of the passer-by, at a café, at the ballet, in the Place de la Concorde (1875). I am reminded of the ‘smearing’ effect of that shot in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) as someone scans the opera crowd before them, a trace perhaps of Degas’s legacy in modern cinema. Or in an admittedly very different time and place, the arresting cut, cut, cut of Oliver Stone’s montages, in JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), resonating in the mind as impressionistic flourishes teetering on the brink of art and history. For Phoebe Pool, “Degas’s […] rapid line and uncluttered pictures are the counterpart of his own swift, epigrammatic wit. To a considerable extent their economy and directness were adopted by the Impressionists who ceased to include small details in their pictures just as they ceased to labor for a high finish.”

    Even the titles of Degas’s quotidian moments — At the Milliner’s (1885), Manet Listening to his Wife (1868-1869), Café-Concert (1875-1877) — seem reminiscent of the hastily-coined, simple and matter-of-fact titles of the Lumière ‘actualités’ a few years later — Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), Baby’s Feeding Time (1895), The Waterer Watered (1895), or of some Renoirs — Boudu Saved from Drowning (1935), A Day in the Country (1936/1946). In Manet Listening to His Wife, M Manet lounges on a canapé while Mme Manet, half in the frame, half out of the frame, plays the piano. As with the ‘missing’ voice in Au Café, it is as though we are left to ‘hear’ the sound of her playing. The sense in both paintings that the image hails, or ‘expects’ the sound recalls a silent era cinema in which sound was always ‘present’ to the spectator, yet technically absent from the artwork. Whilst perhaps themselves impressionistic, such cinematic parallels as I am suggesting seem conjured up by Au Café with a strong sense of aesthetic and historical purpose, voices off perhaps, as yet unbidden and unheard.

    At the time, critic Edmond Duranty echoed his contemporaries’ perception of Degas, describing him as “the inventor of social chiaroscuro.” The sense of chiaroscuro, of a strange exchange between light and dark, black and white, hope and despair, permeates Au Café. While the woman on the right has a lively complexion and is dressed in bright colors, her friend is dressed in black and her complexion is pallid, grey, even death-like. The dynamic between the two women in Au Café recalls that between the anxious Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) in I’ve Loved You So Long (2007) urging her pale grief-stricken sister Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) to “Talk to me…” Interested only in the rapport between these figures, Degas characterizes the table top as, well, nothing, indistinct blurs on a white tablecloth, a misty fog on a wintry field. Meanwhile, the ‘friend,’ a sister perhaps, is only half in the picture, as though within her presence, as within us all, there will always be the capacity for absence, for non-existence, for death. Is her pensive friend in mourning, we may ask? Who has she lost? How long ago…? But this is only one aspect of the mystery, for in Au Café we are in the presence of a double enigma; while the woman entreats her friend to speak, we will always await the voice in the corner of the room.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Armstrong

The World Bank Is Not Enough

“Moby Dick? Isn’t that a social disease?”

The following is my contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon and fundraiser for the Film Noir Foundation to help preserve our film heritage. The Blogathon is hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand and Self-Styled Siren. Please visit their sites for further information.

Based on Newton Thornburg’s novel of sleepy SoCal decadence — minus the toddler character (“old brown pants”) and a haunting breakdown set in an amusement park — Cutter and Bone was released by United Artists in 1981 to unanimous indifference, save for the few sharp critics who recognized its sun-blanched brilliance. Believing the film’s two stars, Jeff Bridges and John Heard, were hovering in Oscar territory, UA re-issued the picture through their boutique “Classics” division, changed the title to Cutter’s Way to yet more consumer apathy and another handful of rave reviews. Two years later, you could see it on cable TV every other night of the week. And, no, it won no Oscars.

    The YouTube clip posted above is the film’s opening seven minutes. The slo-mo parade (“Old Spanish Days”) is infused with a creeping sense of history and tradition, about to be juxtaposed with Heard and Bridges’ woozy, boozy friendship, and a bitter murder mystery that lands at the feet of a corporate authority figure, a great white whale in a tailored suit. That such a knowing reflection of alternate Americana came from director Ivan Passer, a Czech émigré, still boggles the mind.

    Film noir? No doubt. The musical score by Jack Nitzsche, combining glass harp, glass harmonica, zither and electric strings is far removed from the noir staple of bluesy sax and tinkling ivories, but nonetheless captures the sad, tenuous nature of noir and its rootless, luckless people. The sinuous theme playing over the credits in this clip is used sparingly throughout the movie.

    The scene then shifts to a motel room where Bridges’ Bone has just had sex with Nina van Pallandt — the Baroness van Pallandt, that is, formerly of the singing duo Nina & Frederik before the Baron was gunned down in a drug deal and Nina went on to act in some Robert Altman movies. (Bond aficionados, take note: she sang “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.)

    Mature and intelligent (unlike most of the characters in the book and on the screen), Cutter’s Way delivers noir to a voyeuristic conclusion, observing seedy outcasts behind closed doors. Bridges is excellent, as is Lisa Eichorn as the third point in a triangle (her line, “Get fucked, sweetie” still packs a wallop), but Heard steals the show as Alex Cutter, half a man (one eye, one arm, one leg) devising a plan to bring the world’s powerbrokers to their knees. Crashing through windows on his grand charger, the Nitzsche music swelling to its glorious crescendo, he confronts his Moby Dick, but needs the hand of a friend to take the bastard down. Which is where noir meets some kind of poetry.

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Screen Jens: When Salome shook her groove thang for The Lord

Click images to enlarge…

How many actresses are named Salome? The one who beguiles me is Salome Jens. As I wrote in my memoirs, remembering Saturday matinee screenings of that science fiction/horror anti-masterpiece Terror from the Year 5000 (1958):

“[The film] was not without merit, for playing the ‘terror’ was Salome Jens. Awakening — nay! setting afire! — one’s slumbering libido, she possessed a face tailor-made for the wide-angle lens: stately cheekbones nearly as epic as Faye Dunaway’s, almond-shaped eyes slanted toward depression. Her voice quivering with Nordic ancestry and a suggestion of neurosis, Salome arrived from Y5K in a black leotard aglitter with sequins, twirling hypnotic talons at the poor fool scientists responsible for unleashing this thing on humanity.”

    Twenty years after those hot buttered encounters, I revisited the picture only to find boredom (Salome or no Salome) persuading me to parcel its grueling sixty-six minutes over three nights. Back in my article, I plugged her brief onscreen stint with Rock Hudson in 1966:

“Salome put the whammy on me a few years later, in Seconds, playing a Pod variant of Holly Golightly. Stomping grapes in its orgasmic centerpiece, my nude Venus gave James Wong Howe some of his finest images. After that, it was the gradual descent of guest spots in forgotten episodes of obsolete TV shows.”

    Regardless of its nightmare scenario, Seconds suggested something of the bohemian in Jens’s character Nora. Grooving in Malibu, hooking up with Rock’s Tony Wilson (a landscape painter by desire, sadly lacking the skill), Nora joyfully yells to the wind “Who are you Tony Wilson?!” to a man clueless about his true self — a malady indigenous to ‘The Sixties.’ Nora is all about big, puffy sweaters, corduroy slacks and sandals; an accommodating hausfrau from the pages of an Eddie Bauer catalog, providing comfort with a smile to a ‘straight’-laced guy so completely out of his element (and mind). Arriving within spitting distance from the Beat Generation, one would like to believe Jens was just like that in real life.

    
Above, Salome as the Terror from the Year 5000, and with Rock Hudson in Seconds

    Cue the bongos, professor: I envision a blonde gamine all in black, reading from Nietzsche with a dog-eared volume of Kerouac curled up in her back pocket, snapping those sinewy fingers to Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Born in 1935 in Milwaukee — a dreary locale prompting her infamous quip, “the only time I can imagine contemplating suicide would be if I was told that I had to go back and live in Milwaukee forever” — she split for Greenwich Village and gave marriage a spin, first to the actor Ralph Meeker. That gig lasted for two years (1964-66). Later, Salome was wed briefly to TV personality Lee Leonard. As far as I know, she’s been a free spirit ever since.

    She’s had a long, respected career in the theatre, and presides over a flock of Trekkers for her Changeling character on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Give me Angel Baby (1961) over any of that. Made in Florida and Hollywood, Salome (or, as she’s listed in the credits, Salomé) heads a cast of George Hamilton, Mercedes McCambridge and Joan Blondell, as well as newcomer Burt Reynolds as a horny ruffian quivering from ‘the torments’ in Salome’s presence. It all takes place in the deep south, the Bible Belt, a hotbed of feverish little daisy duke melodramas like Baby Doll (1956), God’s Little Acre (1958), and the Steinbeckian Russ Meyer flicks Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1965) — ‘hicksploitation.’

    Not that anyone cared or noticed. The press wrote it off as “a cut-rate Elmer Gantry” (that’s Eugene Archer in the New York Times), or complained that it “reeks too much of Elmer Gantry” (Time magazine), and not without reason. Released a few short months earlier, Elmer Gantry (1960) covered similar ground: working its way across the south, an evangelical tent show supervised by a too-attractive young minister takes on a first-time preacher who may be a genuine faith healer or a manipulative fake, sparking a power play between the two at the expense of the minister’s repressed sexual urges. Back when winning an Academy Award could prolong coffee klatch controversies and first-run engagements, the Oscars for Elmer Gantry’s Burt Lancaster (actor), Shirley Jones (supporting actress) and director Richard Brooks (for his adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel) quickly dashed the hopes of any and all competition.

    Not that it’s fair to compare the two. I give Elmer Gantry high marks for the punchy, pulp-twinged approach to lofty theological ideals, and for Jean Simmons… to say nothing of the brilliant casting of Ms. Jones as a hooker named Lulu. “Oh, he gave me special instructions back of the pulpit Christmas Eve,” Lulu says of her private one-on-one with Gantry. “He got to howlin’ ‘Repent! Repent!’ and I got to moanin’ ‘Save me! Save me!’ and the first thing I know he rammed the fear of God into me so fast I never heard my old man’s footsteps!” You really can’t beat that.

    Whether or not Angel Baby was intended to cash in on Elmer Gantry seems moot, since both were filmed around the same time, and Angel Baby producer Thomas Woods would’ve needed a crystal ball to predict Gantry’s enormous success. He bought the movie rights to Jenny Angel, a forgotten novel written by the equally obscure Elsie Oakes Barber, who patterned her title character after evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in a plot hinged on the then-current controversies over sham faith healing snaking its way through radio and television. Unlike the character of Gantry, however, Jenny may be the real deal.

    And unlike the film of Gantry — so hale, so hearty, so commercial — Angel Baby benefits from its modest means. Mercedes McCambridge, Joan Blondell and Henry Jones (remember the judge who disses Scotty in Vertigo?) were recognizable character actors. Add to the mix the unknown Jens and future tanning guru Hamilton (who scratched the public’s consciousness a year earlier in Where the Boys Are and All the Fine Young Cannibals), and the viewer was denied any preconceptions over acting styles, no soft comfort in stargazing, all in glorious black and white.

    The screenplay adaptation was written by Paul Mason, Samuel Roeca and Orin Borsten. The latter, incidentally, wrote the “Corpus Earthling” episode of an Outer Limits episode from 1963, in which we’re told “there’s nothing wrong with our television set” as Jens falls under the spell of an extraterrestrial rock. Teetering on exploitation, sidestepping any verbose Bible thumping, Angel Baby zeroes in on sex. It opens with Burt (as ‘Hoke’) in the throes of his ‘torments,’ pawing at Jens’s Jenny in the parking lot of a revival meeting. Her mom has brought her here, hoping that God can save her from getting knocked up — and to regain her speech, as she’s been dumbstruck after years of abuse at the hands of her alky father. Checking in for salvation with ‘Sister’ Sarah (McCambridge) at the reception area, Jenny’s distracted, wandering eye (the script makes an educated correlation between sexual promiscuity and attention deficit) lands on a photo of ‘Brother’ Paul (Hamilton), the congregation’s young and impeccably coiffed minister.

    As it turns out, Brother Paul and (the decidedly older) Sister Sarah are husband and wife, their wobbly Oedipal union about to be rocked by firm young Jenny’s yearnings and Paul’s sorely neglected libido. For a scenario immersed in hootin’ and hollerin’ Christianity, Angel Baby sure has its doubts about holy matrimony. The sexless union of Paul and Sarah (whom, after several years together, finally offers her sagging virgin body out of desperation), Jenny’s sadistic upbringing, and the old married musicians (played by Blondell and Jones) bound together by alcoholism (and broadly slurred ‘drinkie-poo’ stage enunciations) offer very little in defense of wedlock.

Above, Paul Wendkos

    While I recognize Barber’s novel and the sharp screenplay for the picture’s thematic qualities, there’s an equally smart and fluid sense of direction, especially during Brother Paul’s sermons, his heated discussions with Sister Sarah (kudos to George Hamilton and Mercedes McCambridge for going the distance), his dejection when the jazz combo stops playing because he’s a preacher, and Jenny’s budding eroticism during Paul’s “illustrated sermons,” a series of outrageous hootchie-mama dance interpretations of Biblical events used to lure in the Saturday night crowd. (Despite her namesake, Salome does not perform the Dance of the Seven Veils.)

    There’s been some hubbub (exclusively, I’m sure, among the handful of us who spend way too much time pouring over old b-movies) concerning who deserves credit for directing Angel Baby. Paul Wendkos is the name on the screen, but the project began with Hubert Cornfield, an artiste who made some interesting pictures, most of them barely stitched together, all with sporadic glimmers of excellence. In his book, The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris observed, “Cornfield seemed to be striving for a Europeanized elegance of form even when his scripts seemed too sordid for serious consideration.” Perhaps it was that elegance, combined with a lofty temperament, that worked against him in the business; his career as a director barely got out of the gate. (Four of his films are presently available for instant viewing at Netflix: Lure of the Swamp (1957); Plunder Road (1957); the odd, Stanley Kramer-produced Pressure Point (1962); and the quasi-surreal Night of the Following Day (1968), which completists should check out on DVD for the director’s brief and very raspy commentary.)

    Prolific in television, Wendkos directed fifteen theatrical features, beginning with The Burglar (1957) before wandering into the cash cow trilogy of Gidget (1959), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). Despite all that he’s done, however, it’s difficult if not impossible to distinguish any identifying trademarks to unify the work. As Sarris points out, Wendkos’s career is “consistent only in its inconsistency,” where “the Gidget movies are not all that bad, and The Burglar and Angel Baby are not all that good.” Adding insult to injury, Wendkos doesn’t even rate an entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film.

    There’s also been a question over who-did-what in the cinematography, as Hollywood veteran Jack Marta and the young, barely known Haskell Wexler share the credit. Thankfully, Stephen Bowie put in a call to Angel Baby herself to clear up the mystery: “According to Jens,” he wrote on his blog, “Cornfield was fired after one or two days (‘he had a lot of ideas, but none of them worked’) and all of his footage was reshot by Wendkos. Of the two credited cinematographers, Jens remembered Haskell Wexler as Wendkos’s primary collaborator; Jack Marta…was there mainly to protect the picture’s union status. (Wexler was not yet a member of the A.S.C.)”

Above, a rare color publicity photo of George Hamilton and Salomé Jens taken by Ralph Crane for Life magazine

    With its distribution handled by Allied Artists (the poor man’s American International), Angel Baby was destined for limited rotation on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit. No matter that George Hamilton was being primed as a teen idol, the picture simply slid into oblivion. And stardom dodged Salome, who commenced a long, fragmented career of guest spots and supporting characters on any number of television programs and made-for-TV movies, ongoing and extensive work in the theatre, cartoon and documentary voiceovers, and secondary roles in a jumble of films: with Anthony Perkins in The Fool Killer (1965); as an over-the-hill go-go dancer in Fred Coe’s Me, Natalie (1969); James Ivory’s faux Buñuelian Savages (1972); with Hector Elizondo in Diary of the Dead (1976); narrating Michael Chapman’s unfairly maligned The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986); and part of an ensemble cast in I’m Losing You (1998).

    The loss is ours. Her one starring role, Angel Baby is a unique character without ties to the day-to-day. Abused by her father and the local boys, rejected by her own mother, looking to God for salvation from the sins of others, sexually drawn to a man trapped by a domineering mother figure; motivated by drunks and crackpots, Jenny is stuck somewhere between the lines of truth and desire. This is a rich, subtly nuanced performance in a film packed with golden moments. Perhaps one day it’ll find its audience.

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Sisters of Mourning

Corinne Marchand in Cléo de 5 à 7

By Irene Dobson

I watched Cléo de 5 à 7 recently on DVD and it made me jump! I was astonished by its similarity to Carnival of Souls, the little horror film which I have written about in the past. Why is this? Well, in Cléo de 5 à 7, Cléo, a singer on the rise who must await the result of a biopsy to see if she has a cancerous lump, wanders about Paris on a spring afternoon, talking to someone here, having a coffee there, and the camera follows this sad pilgrim through its lovely Montparnasse streets and parks. Agnés Varda’s film was released in 1962 and, like the French New Wave releases with which it is frequently mentioned in the history books, it was shot away from fusty studios in real places to catch a slice of contemporary life. In her little book on Cléo, Valerie Orpen quotes Betsy Ann Bogart on the use of synchronized sound: “Nearly every image has its corresponding sound, including the kittens meowing in Cléo’s apartment, chisels of art students working on sculptures in the studio, snatches of conversations from passersby, and birdsong and the waterfall in the Parc Montsouris.” Valerie goes on to say: “That said, some sounds are manipulated to express the character’s aural point-of-view, such as the heightened sound of footsteps or ticking clocks….”

    In my little piece on Carnival of Souls, I have already noticed the birdsong and the realistic toing-and-froing in the department store. I may have noticed too the manipulation of sound when the soundtrack stops, then starts again as we see the sun glinting in the trees and the birds resume their chorus. Valerie writes: “Cléo de 5 à 7 is memorable for its urban walking, particularly solitary female walking, which is unusual in itself.” In Carnival of Souls and in Cléo de 5 à 7 we have a young blonde woman wandering around in a daze, not quite knowing what she’s about, and meeting different people who talk to her but are unable to know what she is knowing and feel what she is feeling, so are unable to relate to her. In the department store in Carnival of Souls, Mary changes into a little black dress, while Cléo does exactly this after her rehearsal.

Cléo wandering the streets; click to enlarge

    Both films involve women who wander close to Death without knowing it. Both star actresses who are blonde and they look like ‘blondes,’ not, as Varda realized, the quintessential bobbed New Wave girl (Karina), nor quite the pneumatic American blonde (Monroe) of the moment. But self-aware and statuesque girls who seem to rise above and perhaps comment on the blonde ambitions of 1962. (It is ironic that Marilyn died that year…) Both use sound in a particular way to express something of these girls’ emotional muddle. And both films were released in 1962.

    In his book Movie Mutations, Jonathan Rosenbaum has written of a phenomenon which he calls ‘global synchronicity’: “the simultaneous appearance of the same apparent taste, styles and/or themes in separate parts of the world, without any signs of these common and synchronous traits having influenced one another – all of which suggest a common global experience that has not been adequately identified.”

    My original article was called Marie de 7 à 7 and, when I wrote it in 2005, I had no real inkling of a relationship between Carnival of Souls and Cléo de 5 à 7. But I now realize that two very similar films appeared within months of each other. Did one influence the other? I doubt if this was historically possible. Did director Herk Harvey even know of Agnés Varda? I doubt it; she had only made a few small films and was not well-known in her native France, and Carnival of Souls was Herk’s only film.

    These seem to me to be good examples of ‘wandering’ films, films through which the heroine wanders for sure, but also films which ‘wander’ near to one another, sharing the same apparent tastes, style and themes without showing any signs of mutual influence or knowledge.

— Irene Dobson

Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls

The following is Irene’s piece on Carnival of Souls, originally posted here on May 15, 2006:

Dance with a Spectre

“Something separates me from other people,” says Mary in Carnival of Souls. It is the editing with its unconventional splitting of an action. When Mary dashes around the streets and the bus station, an action seems incomplete, say her walking towards a car seeking help or walking around the station. Only when Mary goes back to the disused fairground do the takes become more fluid, even if there is causal disjunction between her and the space she is in as gongs sound for no reason, a mattress glides down a slide.

    Carnival of Souls has a New Wavey look to it. It must be the improvised tone of the acting, the sudden shifts of perspective from high angle long shot to close-up in Mary’s first job, or those shots of places to which she feels she must go, zooms suggesting that the fairground pavilion and the mountains are landscapes of Mary’s unconscious perceived by her in innocuous places like the car wash. This would all seem to make sense as Carnival of Souls was released in 1962 when the French influence on low budget filmmaking must have been pronounced.

    Even more unusual is the debt Herk Harvey’s little film owed the experimental films of Maya Deren. Carnival of Souls is, like Deren’s At Land, exploring a woman’s odd odyssey like Mary’s from water to land. In At Land, Deren’s beautiful amphibian makes her progress from sea to land and back again, exploring her soul in a topographical way as Captain Ahab does in Moby Dick. Like in Carnival of Souls, the woman is the only unifying principle in At Land. We never see the landscape in its entirety and never when Deren is not there. The film is in thrall to Deren’s looks, where she looks and how she looks, and her curiosity, her own compulsion to reveal the strange universe of the film. As in all of At Land, Mary’s odyssey is without sound, and she too determines how we negotiate the funfair, and how we feel desire and curiosity before the image. She makes me feel like her, for her. As in At Land, I always want to be somewhere where I am not. Both films invite me to travel into, as well as over, the landscape, rather like the free association I find in my sleep. Deren herself said that At Land deals with the “inability to achieve a stable, adjusted relationship to (the world’s) elements.” Carnival of Souls too is about a woman who isn’t really there. Yet while the slippage can be felt in Mary negotiating the dilapidated and decaying pavilion, there are also moments, shots smuggled in, when something looks at her. Finally, we see her dancing with her suitor at the carousel. Maya Deren’s girl chases a chess pawn from place to place. Mary is the pawn, found at last.

— Irene Dobson

Anita on top

Anita Pallenberg riding cowgirl on John Phillip Law in a Playboy promo shot for Barbarella (1968), via Playmates;
click to enlarge.