tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70156158142401476182024-02-07T14:24:10.348-08:00Waxing Gibbously Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-8224014185374904972022-09-26T02:22:00.000-07:002022-09-26T02:22:07.203-07:00Rooms<h2 style="text-align: left;"><br /></h2><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkuiLIuOp6Al605bxvMIa5xLe8L34ZWj8pQj6pjWqFUSh04iEM-1zRC3P8Rtml0eKPVqvcqOzdf8Z69yTIhjSN_NRKrN2KA970mCmQJNz38jGPlOHnD8DTVhr4lxqSQqtI2yr_YN-GwZlraJVn90xY_VKY3jmtyDA72ykW0_i8Ls2uIzaTHprWa5c/s4032/IMG_9982.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkuiLIuOp6Al605bxvMIa5xLe8L34ZWj8pQj6pjWqFUSh04iEM-1zRC3P8Rtml0eKPVqvcqOzdf8Z69yTIhjSN_NRKrN2KA970mCmQJNz38jGPlOHnD8DTVhr4lxqSQqtI2yr_YN-GwZlraJVn90xY_VKY3jmtyDA72ykW0_i8Ls2uIzaTHprWa5c/w480-h640/IMG_9982.HEIC" width="480" /></a></div><p></p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"><br /><b><i>"We cover the universe with drawings we have lived" - Gaston Bachelard</i></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">There is a little game played by cog-psycho disciples which is designed to get you thinking about cognitive load. It goes like this: think of the house you grew up in, count the windows and, at the same time, hum the theme of your favourite TV show. The objective is to illustrate the difficulty of balancing different thought processes simultaneously. It's a valid exercise, but what the architects of this 'game' don't realise is that there is another process being channelled at the same time which involves the part of my brain that is concerned with being uncool and cogitating over which tune to hum. At the risk of being uncool, what should it be? <i>Breaking Bad</i> or <i>The Sopranos</i>? Unfortunately, just like the moment in <i>Ghostbusters</i> when Stantz conjures up Mr Stay-Puft, I was unable to separate the imagined space of my council house semi from the memories that inhabits its mind-rooms; suddenly, from the phantoms of the past, Mike Post's theme tune to <i>Hill Street Blues</i> began to play in the jukebox of my mind. If it wasn't <i>Hill Street Blues</i>, then it would have been the bob-along simplicity of the theme from Soap. So no <i>Twin Peaks</i> or <i>Red Dwarf</i> - the urge to be 'cool' was swamped by other associations, and the rational part of my brain simply surrendered to the onslaught of memory. </p><p style="text-align: left;">The memories evoked by rooms and by the dwelling places of our youth is entwined by the experiences therein. In his <i>Poetics of Space</i>, Gaston Bachelard talks of topoanalysis, which is "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives" and that memories of our houses, our homes, "[furnish] us dispersed images and a body of images". I am unable to think about the childhood home without this onslaught of images; the floodgates of the mind are rent asunder, splintered, by these spaces of the past and the torrent of memory rushes in: "And of all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us". </p><p style="text-align: left;">I've been reading Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Not a Novel' and in one of the essays therein, 'Literary Role Models', she writes about the texts that have affected her, tales of transformations she has read in Grimm, Hoffmann and Ovid, for example. What is interesting is that, in may instances, she does not go into great depth about the tales themselves apart from the odd quotation here or image there. Much of what she discusses is sparse paraphrase, key moments. What I enjoy about this essay is that way that it skips across different stories, books, musical pieces: she attempts to catch the 'mood' of the thing rather than its reality. The fact that she recalls images ("a tress of long, strawberry-blonde hair that flies through the room" in one of Maupassant's short stories, for example) fills me with some reassurances. I who sometimes forget the details of a book even as I put it back on the shelf!</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"Those are images that I absorbed through the language, but language was only the instrument that transferred then from one head to another, what arrived in my head and remained there was the image, the force or feeling, the shock ... Some books haven't left any concrete turns of phrase in my memory, I nay have even forgotten the authors, but they have taken hold of me, they live on to this day in my feelings, in my eyes, in my ears" (Not a Novel, p.53).</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Indeed, just as the rooms in my childhood home on the Wrens Nest estate evoke the sound of Mike Post, so the house of words that we inhabit for a while leave us with their residual mood, the ghost of a scent, a tangential event, a place ...</p><p style="text-align: left;">I remember a book entitled 'The Ghost Diviners' - I don't recall the author and don't want to Google it either, it's irrelevant to this piece - but I do recall fragments of the cover image, two children, seated on the ground, perhaps a spectral face looming over them. I remember it was a hardback book that I borrowed from Dudley Central Library: I am unable to remember much of the story although I do remember the central idea of two children 'divining' for ghosts and that I was moved to have a go at this myself. </p><p style="text-align: left;">And libraries. I remember, as a child, visting the library every week, and even now the scent of books, the lignin, cellulose, decaying paper, fills the air around me as I write. An early teenager, borrowing <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i> and <i>The Invisible Man</i> from the library. Everyman Classics editions - I can see the yellowed edges of the pages even now. Were the covers pale blue or grey? With the former, I can recall the tiny print, the fine paper, the sense of being part of something eternal, the empathy for Quasimodo, unrequited love. And Wells' tale? I've read it again since then, but from that first reading I recall being fascinated by the scene when the narrator describes the processes and experiments that lead to his scientific breakthrough. The effects of water on matter and, somehow, how it affects the transparancy of solids, and how I experimented with paper under a running tap. I am no scientist. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I remember Leon Garfield's faux-Dickensian novels - <i>Smith</i>, <i>The Ghost Downstairs</i>, <i>The Devil in the Fog</i> - and being drawn into a world of spectral mists, London rooftops and uncertain lineage ...</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL9k31L1nvOEHJDOEnwvUb_YFiHQc3h1wzX02F-bPKOE0R5msX9yXVkHkCNw4OVfChritGvRQ7DzjYhxcdRy6NCPIhnyerq9uT1tijATTYL_YwBanMm9SjYTzwC7RNgh9nfmw1xyXxdeompSnY2oVSTIpD0WIng5K0ryNGX9d0MDiEifqsxBU2oAE/s4032/IMG_9982.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL9k31L1nvOEHJDOEnwvUb_YFiHQc3h1wzX02F-bPKOE0R5msX9yXVkHkCNw4OVfChritGvRQ7DzjYhxcdRy6NCPIhnyerq9uT1tijATTYL_YwBanMm9SjYTzwC7RNgh9nfmw1xyXxdeompSnY2oVSTIpD0WIng5K0ryNGX9d0MDiEifqsxBU2oAE/s320/IMG_9982.HEIC" width="240" /></a></div>I possessed a Bancroft classics edition of <i>Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</i>. As a young boy, not even ten years old I'd imagine, I wrestled with the words, words such as 'incident' that seemed ubiquitous in the contents page, but more than anything I recall the frontispiece image of a top-hatted man leaping over railings, the sort you see outside a house in Harley Street, an image I copied time and time again in my sketch books. Later, as an adult, I found a copy of the book in a charity shop, and I am transported back to the rooms of my childhood. <p></p><p style="text-align: left;">I found solace and escape in these books (and many others - why, even now, Alfred Hitchcock's 'Three Investigators' comes to mind and then the book people coming to school, ordering books, waiting ages for them to arrive...). I recall the rooms I read them in, the light falling through the windows as I turned the pages. Often, the television was on, entertaining others in the room (I had no 'room of my own') but I closed myself off from that world to enter another. </p><p style="text-align: left;">And even now, as I inhabit these spots of time, I am able to see how lonely I must have been, or perhaps how anti-social! An invisible man, out of place, a dreamer, a boy of uncertain past, a dual personality. I am a ghost diviner, searching the landscape for a presence and some meaning. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Even as I walk through the rooms of the memory-house I find the remnants of the past wrapped in ink and paper. And all along they tried to tell me something. <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p>Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-87556046533239983282014-10-12T07:27:00.000-07:002014-10-12T07:27:11.987-07:00Wake in Fright<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilK2Evvxm9hitAS2RM2EEgkcsHvEGdSQN_XsxOce5rssgdxi1UGK3npowNxPOohRJ3LU08xQeDO_4CAcqPpaRLDse7fBqjnbByCoG-afaOIpsUHpVHiBDKGm-pApOQdnVDNuKCgBN2Z1Y/s1600/Unknown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilK2Evvxm9hitAS2RM2EEgkcsHvEGdSQN_XsxOce5rssgdxi1UGK3npowNxPOohRJ3LU08xQeDO_4CAcqPpaRLDse7fBqjnbByCoG-afaOIpsUHpVHiBDKGm-pApOQdnVDNuKCgBN2Z1Y/s1600/Unknown.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Donald Pleasance in <i>Wake in Fright</i></td></tr>
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There is a moment in Ted Kotcheff's 'Ozploitation' film 'Wake in Fright' (1971) when the melancholic and despairing protagonist John Grant (Gary Bond) falls into a delirium brought on by a drink-fuelled binge in the wastelands of the Australian outback. In it, he sees Donald Pleasance as Doc Tydon, the embodiment of Grant's death-drive towards oblivion, appear as a manic Bacchanalian figure who seems to be revelling in the despair into which Grant has fallen. With two Australian dollars pressed into his eye-sockets, Tydon becomes a death-in-life figure, the coins his meagre payment for the ferryman who will eventually carry him across the Styx. The image is important in that it suggests that Tydon is playing the role of the <i>psychopompos</i> who is guiding Grant through the underworld that is Yabba, the desolate, hyper-masculinised outback town in which Grant becomes trapped on his way to Sydney to spend his Christmas vacation. Indeed, Tydon's first line in the film is to tell Grant that "all the little devils are proud of hell" as he checks off the occurrences of 'heads/tails' in the coin-flip game that has become, for the men at least, the town's favourite pastime.<br />
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In Yabba, Grant becomes caught within the macho world of endless drinking, kangaroo hunting and fist-fighting that turns the outback into a nightmarish doubling of the wild west. Beginning the film as a schoolteacher trapped in the non-space that is Tiboonda, he escapes for Christmas and on his train out of the village he dreams of returning to the city, Sydney, fantasising about his girlfriend who appears to him like Aphrodite from the ocean. The character of Tydon, a doctor of medicine who lives au naturelle from the freebies he gets from the locals in exchange for his medical expertise, becomes a mentor for Grant, teaching him the ways of the outback and watching as Grant spirals out of control. Ultimately, Grant tries to escape but finds himself unable to do so: even hitching a ride to Sydney in the back of a lorry ends up with him returning to Yabba. In the end, a botched suicide attempt enables him finally to get back to his life: but it is not life in Sydney, only a return to Tiboonda where he is fated to work through his bond to the Australian Education system.<br />
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Although Tydon as psychopomp is a persuasive reading, there is another way of seeing the image of the benighted doctor. In his blindness, it is tempting to see Tydon as a Tiresias figure, the oracular asexual who haunts Eliot's <i>Waste Land </i>(1922). "Old man with wrinkled dugs", Tiresias is blind and yet sees everything. In Eliot's poem, Tiresias as "awaited the expected guest ... the young man carbuncular" upon "whom assurance sits/As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire". The mythical figure of Tiresias has crossed between the world of men and women, a figure of transgression and liminality, as Tydon is in the film. Tydon's wisdom is emphasised throughout the film, even if it is relative to the boorish, feral nature of the company he keeps. He talk of Socrates, plays opera, discusses the functions of the digestive system whilst standing on his head and drinking beer. His approach to sex is casual: he takes Janette (the daughter of a drinking friend) - and she takes him - as and when the need arises, pithily echoing the sixties hippy communes from which the world has just emerged. Yet it is also clear that he finds solace in the company of men and in a later scene there is more than the suggestion that he has had sex with Grant. Tydon removes the testacles from a kangaroo, asking a bartender to put them in the fridge. The bartender jokes with Tydon and asks him if they are his. It is easy to see Tydon, at the centre of Grant's journey into the heart of darkness, as a Kurtz-like figure: in the end, Tydon serves as a warning to Grant, perhaps even foreshadowing his own fall from grace. In the same nightmare scene discussed above, Grant sees his girlfriend naked in the arms of Tydon: the father figure has become his replacement, a doppelgänger. In this Freudian sub-text, Tiresias as 'father' stands for Grant's own insecurities (in a drunken state, he fails to 'perform' for Janette). <br />
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It would be interesting to read the film alongside Eliot's poem: from the parched mise-en-scene of the outback ("a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter"), to the unflattering presentation of working class culture and the sense of alienation that ultimately pervades the film. The absolute claustrophobia which fills the screen, despite the prevalence of wide-open spaces, offers little hope to the protagonists.Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-58983431904291502562014-01-30T15:44:00.003-08:002021-02-18T08:05:00.185-08:00An Inbetweener<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBO4NjLxUAyUwQx7VFYo0-zysJCRiF1XvmQhmiPqIiItFLpJhYy3L5FlQSVI514TpTD49Nte1q9Hd05F4LMws4pCdcH0zmzz1CSNow0uPxnmZCn35IMy6Mm2RBb8Uq8NkFc16GI920Yjc/s1600/IMG_0054.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBO4NjLxUAyUwQx7VFYo0-zysJCRiF1XvmQhmiPqIiItFLpJhYy3L5FlQSVI514TpTD49Nte1q9Hd05F4LMws4pCdcH0zmzz1CSNow0uPxnmZCn35IMy6Mm2RBb8Uq8NkFc16GI920Yjc/s1600/IMG_0054.jpg" width="240" /></a><span lang="EN-US">I am a child of the edgelands. The Black Country where I grew up, and
where I still live, occupies a space between the</span> city-sprawl of Birmingham and the woodlands that border the Severn and the Stour rivers which wind their way through its scarred landscape. The districts of Netherton and
the Wrens Nest formed my understanding of the world, labyrinths of winding streets with
pebble-dashed council houses piled up on one another, claustrophobic semis with
paper thin walls. And yet within a few yards, a few moments walking, you could
find yourself amidst unkempt scrubland, on the edge of motionless canals forming silent ribbons of rust, or scraping new trainers in the dust of dirt-tracks that opened onto industrial
estates and scrap-yards like a new book.</div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I was savaged by dogs in Blackbrook Road in the early seventies. The
animals had escaped from a compound: they were security dogs and like me they
were displaced, the edgelands as a dead zone, the liminal space between. I had
no place there and neither did they. They won. My four-year old self was no match for their street-wise ferocity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The wastelands that surrounded the old Gibbons factory and the old Burton
Road Hospital was a refuge for children aching for space and freedom from the
confines of the Wrens Nest council estate. These swathes of nettles and grass bordered the main Dudley to Sedgley road and swept back onto the
old coal heaps that loomed like great mole-hills on Dibdale Road. We often
stood on the wall that formed the boundary of the hospital grounds, the
‘loony-bin’ as we so unkindly christened it, and from this vantage point you
could cast your gaze across to the Black Hills and the Malverns, great curves on the horizon that might as well have been landscapes on the moon. Or else you could see high over the estate (if
you wanted to) and then beyond to the Wrens Nest caverns. The estate where I
grew up was trapped between these two areas of beauty, for there was beauty in
the edgelands of ‘the top fields’ as we called them. Disappearing from home for
long stretches of the summer, armed with a bottle of warm dandelion and burdock
and a bag of Walkers, we would exhaust ourselves with endless games of football
or cricket depending on the time of year. The old factory that squatted in the
weeds and dust of the ‘bottom fields’ as we called it had always been
abandoned, the ghost of a ghost of some past that we heard only our
grandparents talk about. It was a magnet to boys eager for adventure and
claimed the life of at least one poor soul who strayed too high, too far. The
top fields have long gone, buried beneath red-brick houses,
taking with it the memories of a thousand children.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As a child I found a strange beauty in the Shaver’s End waterworks. Its
sloping walls could have been the walls of a castle: so incongruous, this
edifice that stood proudly between the main roads of Burton Road and The
Broadway. I was told it was a reservoir, and I imagined an immense sea lapping
at the edges of its green walls. It is still there, a relic of my past, and my
story ‘An Inland Sea’ is based on this fascination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">And when I left home and moved into my first house, that too was an
edgeland place. I remember the estate agent calling it a ‘semi-rural property’:
an end of terrace that would have belonged to a mining family perhaps. It lay
back from a dog-legged lane that led out to the main road out of Gornal to
Kingswinford. There was no back garden: only a disputed track that backed on to
open fields that had long withstood the developer’s advances and was home to a
few sorry horses that my neighbour, the scrap merchant, kept for business. The
view from my front window was of an electricity pylon that crackled with
bitter scorn whenever the rains came to form muddy red rivers that ran outside my
back door. Lorries swept along the lane, shaking the foundations of my house. The road was a
short cut to the breaker’s yard that skulked at the end of the road. We had a
coal fire that didn’t quite work because the draw on the chimney was shot, and when
the winds came, they caused smoke to belch back into the living room.
We carted coal in an old wheelbarrow the hundred yards from the coal merchants. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">It was the mid-1990s but it could have been the fifties. <span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-7858318843802681292014-01-30T14:18:00.003-08:002014-01-31T09:29:21.502-08:00“Musing on primitiveness”: eerie presences within the British edgelands<div class="MsoNormal">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">“The
edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one
another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and
utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs
and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail
parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.” (Robert
McFarlane).<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">Edgelands were a prominent feature
of 1970s public information films that appeared regularly on television. In
‘Dark and Lonely Water’, the spectre of a Grim Reaper voiced by Donald
Pleasance warns unsuspecting children of the dangers of finding pleasure
amongst the canals and rubbish dumps of a Britain still being rebuilt after the
ravages of the second world war. Or else there is the threat of electricity
pylons and sub-stations which loom on the borders of council estates and draw
children towards them like skeletal sirens. Train lines in the ‘Finishing
Line’, farmland in ‘Apache’ all spell out the dangers of the uninitiated and
the innocent exploring the edges of their community. Children’s literature of
the Cold War period was also drawn towards such liminal spaces: from Robert Swindells’
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Z for Zachariah</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daz 4 Zoe</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stig of the Dump</i> and the folk horror of Alan Garner, In literature,
suburban concrete dystopias of J.G. Ballard inscribed a degree of eroticism
onto the high rise flat, the underpass, the airport car park, a compulsion to
both desire and repel these images of non-spaces. And of course, the
fascination with other spaces continued throughout the late seventies and early
eighties with the music of new-wave/post-punk bands such as Joy Division,
Cabaret Voltaire and Human League who all name-checked Ballardian dystopias in
their songs, celebrating the ‘underpass’ (John Foxx) and urban wastelands. It
seemed as if writers and film-makers engaged in a counter-response to the
zeitgeist of annihilation and immersed us in both a nostalgia for a pagan past
as well as preempting the anonymity of destruction by imagining narratives that
resided within landscapes that effaced modernity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">And now the edgelands have
become a focus for cultural interest once more. A plethora of web-sites that
celebrate these heterotopias can be found in a quick search: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">www.derelictplaces.co.uk</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">www.abandoned-britain.com</i> both offer
images of run-down and neglected spaces, monuments, buildings that are decaying
spectres of the past; elsewhere, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gerryco23.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the-edgelands-a-zone-of-wild-mysterious-beauty/</i>
offers the juxtaposition of objects such as iconic red telephone boxes set
against a backdrop of urban desolation offering what Farley and Roberts call
the ‘overlooked ordinary’. A recent London Short Film Festival offered within
its programme a body of short films that engaged with Britain’s liminal spaces;
and Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Edgelands</i> appropriated Marion Shoard’s term and embarked on an
exploration of Britain’s wastelands, abandoned buildings and non-spaces. Films
such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gallivant, The Selfish Giant,
Byzantium</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eden Lake<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353; font-family: Cambria;">[1]</span></b></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></i> engage with modern
edgelands in ways that recall the desolate landscapes of Loach and Antonioni. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">What is it about these liminal
spaces that fascinates and lends itself to cultural investigation? Perhaps
within the notion of psychogeography<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353; font-family: Cambria;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> we
might be able to find some way of understanding our on-going discourse with
these derelict spaces and unclaimed edgelands. As Alastair Bonnett writes: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">“British
psychogeography should be understood as a site of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">struggle over
the politics of loss within the radical imagination. …[It] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">is an arena of
conflict between two important strands within British radicalism: the use of
the past to critique industrial modernity and the suppression of nostalgia.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">Squeezed as we are for space
in ‘this worryingly crowded isle’<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353; font-family: Cambria;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>,
the danger of Britain’s edgelands becoming subsumed beneath a narrative of
progress and modernity has given way to an outpouring of nostalgia. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">Folk horror and demonic presences<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">Folk horror encompasses a
trend of films, television programmes and novels that appeared from the late
sixties throughout the seventies that explored the demonic presences within
Britain’s landscapes. Often rural, sometimes urban, they dealt with the
unearthing of medieval relics or artefacts or the discovery of hidden sects,
the landscape itself becoming a palimpsest of the uncanny. Piers Haggard’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man</i>,
the BBC’s adaptations of M.R. James’ ghost stories all explored the hidden demons
that lay beneath the British countryside. Peter Sasdy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stone Tapes</i> explored supernatural narratives captured within
the very fabric of an abandoned building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353;">There has been over the last few years a revival of the
folk horror genre. In September 2014, Queen’s University Belfast is holding a
symposium on the topic entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Fiend
in the Furrows</i> that according to one blogger “l</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #2a2a2a;">ooks
set to be an important milestone on the journey to establish Folk Horror as a
defined genre”. Ben Wheatley’s ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Field
in England’</i> (2013) is an exercise in psychogeography that examines the
impact of the landscape on soldiers escaping the English Civil War whilst
recent revivals of M.R. James by folk horror enthusiasts such as Mark Gatiss
have brought the genre to the front of cultural consciousness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">“Primal
images … are but so many invitations to start imagining again.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;">[5]</span></b></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Britain is crumbling into the sea – literally. With recent floods, the
harbingers of doom claim that this sceptered isle is being eroded by the
elements. Yet it is not merely Nature itself that is laying waste to the
landscape of modern Britain: the threat of immigration, a nation opening its
borders to the ‘poor’ of Romania, Bulgaria and other former eastern Bloc
countries brings with it the rhetoric of decay, and with it a retreat into
itself. Demonic presences reside within the British landscape once more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Perhaps the reason we are fascinated (obsessed?) with our edgelands and
with our derelict symbols of a ruined modernity is precisely because the
landscape echoes our uncertainty with our own identity. There is no such thing
as a folk horror revival or a new psychogeography. Truth is, it was there all
along.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: x-small;">1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #535353; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eden Lake</i>, the
encroachment of new ‘yuppie’ property onto a rural area bordered by a housing
estate emphasizes the presence of opposing cultural forces within the
landscape.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span><b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">PsychoGeography:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;"> “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of
the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and
behavior of individuals.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> <a href="http://www.academia.edu/968812/The_dilemmas_of_radical_nostalgia_in_British_psychogeography">http://www.academia.edu/968812/The_dilemmas_of_radical_nostalgia_in_British_psychogeography</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> Headline in the Daily Mail, 27<sup>th</sup> December (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530125/This-worryingly-crowded-isle-England-officially-Europes-densely-packed-country.html)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: x-small; mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space p.33</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-18123018136015111882013-12-13T16:14:00.000-08:002013-12-13T16:14:08.028-08:00An Inland Sea - a short story<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Penelope pressed an ear against the green rough-cast wall of
the water station. Often she came here, drawn towards this strange edifice which
rose up like a fortress in the middle of her world, and dreamed of a time when
she would stand triumphant atop its battlements, to look out across a vast bowl
of blue water. Like Tess throwing herself upon Stonehenge would hold herself to
the cold stone to become part of it, part of its mystery, its otherness,
listening hard for the lapping of water on the other side. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
She hadn’t noticed the boy until
now; he had slipped out of the door that opened into one of the small
watchtowers that flanked the corners of the water station. Had he been watching
her? She was sure that he had, for as she had turned her head to the east he
had darted back into his lair, staying long enough for her to see his wiry
frame, a shock of red hair. Leaning back against the wall, she felt the pulse
in her forehead, thrumming the beginnings of one of her headaches again. What had
he seen? How long had he been watching her there, pressed against the stone? She
felt a surge of embarrassment, of ridicule, which filled her brain with an
urgent flow of blood. How dare this boy spy on her, she thought. Or did she
speak it out loud, to herself? She was never quite sure; so much time did she
spend alone. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
She was at the foot of the metal
staircase now that led up to the doorway; like a medieval princess hunting for
her knight, a fantasy in reverse. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Hello,” she called. “Who are
you?” Heels clanking against the black steel as she ascended the stairs,
winding round, now facing east, now south and each step taking her closer to
the dark portal. What if he was in the tower itself? What if, when she crossed
the threshold into the darkness he was there, inside, waiting for her? She
shuddered and called anew. “Hello, hello! I know you’re there.” The one forty
bus crawled by, plume of grey smoke from its tail, a red dragon swallowing a
queue of people. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
This time her call was answered. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You shouldn’t be here, you know.
Shouldn’t be here. “<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope stopped. It was the
boy’s voice, slightly deeper than the other boys at school; older, more brutish.
She stopped at the landing and gripped the rail, for the first time seeing the
sun-bruised grass through the slots in the metal beneath her feet. A dizziness
passed over her and she felt for a moment that she might fall. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Neither should you,” replied Penelope,
still holding onto the rail. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Yes, I should. I live here.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The boy’s voice became more
confident, as if he had played a trump card against an inexperienced player. Now
the blood was in the porches of her ears, tiny canals of dull sound. She looked
down at the cracked paintwork which mapped out time and weather on the rusted
surface of the railings; pressing her palms onto its dirt, she felt the
pock-marks, the abrasions, the rust-toil of years. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Do not,” said Penelope. “How can
anyone live here?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Still the voice from within
answered: “I do. Look there, just over the wall. The house. The white house.
That’s mine.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The breeze brushed against Penelope’s
skin and she felt the sickness pass. Feeling a little bolder, she took a step
forward towards the entrance, perhaps to see through the gap between door and
frame; to see and not to be seen. Like mother used to do. But the voice inside
cried out. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You can’t come no further.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Why not?” said Penelope, feeling
now that she had the upper hand, for she felt the fear in the other’s voice. Through
the gap, she saw a shape prowling in the darkness, caged and cornered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From inside, the voice trembled. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Because.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Because?” scoffed Penelope.
“That’s not a reason.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I know,” said the other. “But that’s my
reason.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Okay,” said Penelope, backing
away from the door. “I’ll sit here then, until you come out.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“That will be a long time,” said
the other. “I know a short cut down to my house from here.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Don’t be silly,” said Penelope.
“There is no other way down. You’re stuck.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope arched her back over the
railings to peer round the other side of the little green turret and raised one
leg up higher, just a little, like they do in the movies; her cotton skirt
above her knee, small welts, their scab-masks having fallen away that morning.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Well,” said the voice, “maybe
I am. But you are too.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Why’s that?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Because I know who you are, I’ve
seen your face and if you don’t go now, when I get home I’ll tell my father
that you’ve been trespassing on his ground and then you’re in for it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trespass</i>. Penelope bridled and straightened up immediately. She had
seen the word, trespass, on signs everywhere. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trespassers will be prosecuted. Trespassers will be fined</i>. It was a
fearful word, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trespass</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Not so cocky now, are you?” he said. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Then I’ll go,” said Penelope.
“But not until I can see your face. After all, you’ve seen mine.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Down below, a child rode past on
his scooter, the wheels clattering over the cracked paving stones. Penelope
ducked down, although the boy had eyes only for the ice-cream van that was
singing its siren song at the end of the road.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I can’t.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What do you mean, you can’t? You
mean you won’t.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Won’t then. Why do you have to
be so picky?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Then I’ll come back tomorrow,
and I’ll wait for you at the foot of these stairs.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“And I’ll tell my father and
he’ll chase you away. He doesn’t like girls.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Well my father doesn’t like
boys. Or fathers who chase away girls, so maybe you’ll want to take it up with
him then.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope thought for a moment. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You say you live over there, in
that cottage?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
From inside the gloom, there was
a mumble of agreement. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“So are you the caretaker?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“My father is.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
A plan began to form in Penelope’s
mind. She wanted adventure and it had found her. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Then I’ll go. I know when I’m
not wanted.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You must. Don’t look back.
Please,” said the boy; this time Penelope detected something besides defiance.
It came from far away, that sound, she had heard it in her mother’s voice once.
At the end. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The mid-morning sun warmed her
neck; she unpinned her hair to protect her skin from its searching gaze,
pirouetting on her right foot towards the stairs, so graceful; she hoped that the
boy had waited to see her do that. Her father said she was his princess; he
liked to watch her dancing in the kitchen as he made tea and toast for
breakfast, laughing as he bowed down before her with a flourish of his long
wiry arms. On her right, the curtained wall, a jealous guard holding captive
the fierce waters of the reservoir and she too felt jealous; jealous that the
boy should be able to see the secret that lay behind the walls. But he would
show her today for didn’t her father say that if you don’t ask, you don’t get?
The heavy wooden door snicked to and she turned, breaking her promise, to see
only the boy’s burnished hair sink behind the other side of the turret like a
sad sun. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope marched up the rough
paved path, stepping over the clumps of gorse and gyp that gathered between the
cracks, careful not to scuff the brown leather sandals that her father had
polished the evening before whilst they listened to the story on the radio. It
had been her father’s favourite, of a beautiful princess (was she a princess?
she should have been) buried alive by her mad brother and their house that
crumbles into the water just as she arrives to claim her revenge. Penelope had
asked whether the priest had made sure that her mother was dead too; her father
tried to smile and kissed her on the forehead. All through the night she had
wondered about the girl in the story, Madeleine, and how she had clawed at the
thick oaken lid of her casket, tearing her skin down to her fragile bones and
screaming and screaming until it was the power of her soul itself that had
broken through the darkness. Of course, when the thick dust motes gathered
around her window in the warm light of day, Penelope knew that her mother had
been truly dead. She knew. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
This was the house. This was
where he lived. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The front door was set back into
a small porch which shut out the warmth of the sun; she wished that she had
brought her cardigan. After knocking against the blistered paintwork, she stepped
back, fidgeting with the hem of her skirt, pulling it down below her knees to
hide her bruises. There was no answer and she imagined shades of people
gathering around the hallway, like in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Listeners</i> which she had copied into her scrapbook and which reminded her of
all the times when she and her father hid behind the sofa from the rent
collector, stifling their laughs as the old man pressed his bearded face
against the window. “I know you’re in there, Ellis,” he would say. “It’s no
good hiding”. This time, she pushed against the metal letterbox to peer through
and saw only a long hallway with pale green tiles that made it look like the
public toilets in the market place. From somewhere behind the door, out of
sight of her searching grey eyes, she imagined shadows laughing at her
confusion. Fearing what was behind its dull grey lid, she let the steel flap
close, careful not to trap her fingers, until it sealed the hole in the door
before stepping back into the sunlight to peer up into the upstairs windows.
Perhaps the boy is alone, up there watching her. Or perhaps he isn’t there at
all. With the sudden realisation that she had been outsmarted, she turned back
towards the watchtower, at the pathway that led down to the house. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The door to the little turret
room was open again. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A panic caught in
her throat and she wanted her father, caught as she was between the house and
reservoir walls. The front of the house seemed to lean in towards her, its
shadow lengthening across the ragged skirts of pebble and weed that spread out
before it; she imagined a scar tearing across its face, like in the story from
the night before; imagined it falling down around her, and the gun-metal
letterbox clattering to her sandaled feet, opening up its cold grey lid and
staring at her, accusing her of that word, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trespassing</i>.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
She ran. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Head down, watching as the hem of
her dress flapped against her thighs, bringing her bruised knees as high as
they would go. Up to the foot of the stairs which led to the watch tower,
clambering up the stone steps, fingers gripping their ragged ridges, back to
where she had come from. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When she got to
the top, out of breath, her chest damp with sweat, she began to gather herself
together. From a little pouch in her dress, she took out a handkerchief which
carried her name, Penny, embroidered there by her mother, and wiped the soil
from her fingertips, the grit that had lodged into the palms of her hands, before
pressing her dress back into shape against her body. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
If he was in there, he was
trapped, she thought. She had him now and he would have to show her what it was
that lay behind the green walls. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The door was open just wide
enough for her to slip through without disturbance. Inside was a space no
bigger than a telephone booth and her senses were assailed by the smell of
nasty things in the darkness. She thought that this must be what a tomb felt
like. Pale light speared through one of the little slits in the wall, and
Penelope could read the dirty things that had been written there over the
years. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Something rose up towards her
from a corner. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I thought I told you to go
home?” The voice was stronger this time, because nearer. Penelope turned around
to find the boy slumped against a wall, his head against his chest, face hidden
beneath an upturned collar. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I didn’t want to.” Voice in the cold
darkness. Her voice. “I called for you.” To stop herself from gagging, she
buried her face in the crook of her arm, and tasted her own moist flesh on her
lips. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The boy gave no answer; instead his
head seemed to collapse inwards until he was just shoulders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You’re alone, aren’t you?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The boy sidled crab-like along
the wall towards the open door, and the edges of his red hair caught fire in
the sunlight. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Don’t go,” said Penelope. She
didn’t want to be alone; not in this cold chamber. The boy’s curls licked at the
darkness and she was drawn towards them, like a moth to a candle. But she
stopped herself, and held out her arm as a barrier, to stop the boy from
leaving. Only a sliver of light crossed the floor between them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Don’t go,” said Penelope. “I can
keep you a secret.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
A shadow inside a shadow, the boy
edged back towards the other corner of the room. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What do you want?” His voice
emerged from the stone, like a moment of time escaping from inside its tiny
cavities. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope knew what she wanted.
She wanted him to show her the secret behind the wall, she wanted to see the
smooth waters of the reservoir and feel the warm breath of summer glide across
its glassy surface. And he would take her there. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Perhaps we can be friends. You
are alone, aren’t you? There is no-one in your house. You’re the king of your
own castle.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Perhaps it isn’t a castle.
Perhaps it’s a dungeon.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“But you’re not locked in here,
silly.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Then he laughed and Penelope
heard a jangle of keys. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“No, but perhaps I can lock you
in here.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You wouldn’t dare,” said
Penelope. There was no intention in his voice, no malice although she edged
just a little closer to the door, just in case. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
There was moment of silence. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I can be your friend.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You wouldn’t want to.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Why not?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Because I’m ugly,” declared the
boy, his voice daring her to deny this. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I’m sure you’re not,” she said
“and it doesn’t matter anyhow. We can be friends.” It was true, she thought, it
didn’t matter. But she had to get out of this place. “I’m going outside. It’s
horrible in there. I don’t know how you can put up with it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Before he could answer, she
opened the door, wide this time, and stepped into the sunlight, breathing in
the scent from the lavender bushes that hugged the green stone walls. Even as
she did so, she turned around and saw that the boy had turned his face towards
her in defiance. Or revelation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“God.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The word fell out of her mouth
like an insect before crawling away into the shadows. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I told you,” cried the boy and was about to
return to his lair when Penelope dashed between him and the door. The boy
turned away, hiding his face from the light as if it might turn to ash. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I’m sorry,” said Penelope. She
felt opportunity slipping away, and this time she dared to touch the red flames
that licked out from the boy’s collars. Beneath her fingers, the hair was soft,
silken even, not flaxen the way it really should have been, exposed as it was
to the filth and stench of the dark parapet that he had made his home. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Really I am.” She turned her gaze to the
green walls of the reservoir, noticed for the first time dark stains around its
upper edges as if it had been weeping. She would be his friend, the kind
princess. She can brave the taunts. What does she care? After all, she is the witch-child.
She let her hand fall onto his shoulder, and as he began to turn around, she
steeled herself once more against the sight, locking away all expression. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“My father...” said the boy, the
rest of his sentence carried off by history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I don’t know your name,” said
Penelope, looking at the seared flesh without inquiry.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Jason. It’s Jason.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Like the Argonauts?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Like the Argonauts.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope followed Jason’s gaze
which had turned towards his father’s house, felt his weakness trapped between
the clashing rocks of his new friend and his father’s prohibition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A dog barked, high pitched, discordant, and
somewhere off in the distance she heard music carried on the breeze.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What happened?” said Penelope.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“There was a fire.” The boy
lifted up his face towards hers. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
That day when she had found her
mother in her pyjamas, outside, crouching amongst the milk bottles, the rain
settling in pools around her shivering frame, dark rings forming around the
hems of her trouser legs, spreading further and further upward, turning sky
blue cotton to grey slush as if her mother was being absorbed into the elements.
That’s what Penelope remembers. She shouldn’t have listened to her father; she
shouldn’t have gone to school, and he shouldn’t have gone to work. When he had
finally collected her from school, after the long wait in the walnut panelled
room outside the headmistress’ office which smelled of musty bed-sheets like
her grandmother’s bedroom, the rain had stopped. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conflagration</i>. That was the word they’d used. Her father said that her
mother had made her own funeral pyre and Penelope thought this made her mother
sound like a Viking warrior. Penelope had liked that. And now this boy with the
melted face; this is what her mother would have looked like. And beneath the
flame of his hair, beyond the hunched silences, between these two remnants of
ash and smoke that stood frozen in the July sun, something flickered like the
smouldering embers of last night’s fire, enough to make her reach out a
trembling hand and touch the bubbled flesh. The girl felt the presence of the
walls behind her, felt their impassive gaze as she stared into the deep set
eyes of the boy with the marbled skin, her dirty fingertips exploring its scars.
There was no resistance from the boy; it was as if the moment were a
continuation of his own history, an inevitability that in the end it would be
pity, as his own father had warned him, which would find him at the centre of
things. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
There were no more words for she
understood his pain. And what could he say in return for her silences? For in
them was acceptance without judgement; and as she let her hand fall from his
wounds, he fell softly to the ground and laughed as he cleared a patch of grass
from pebbles and dried dog droppings so that together they may sit down and
pass the mid-day hour together in silence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Mopping her brow, Penelope smoothed
out the lap of her dress and picked at a rash of daisies, breaking open their
juicy stems to feed one inside another until she had a crown of wilting flowers
that she placed ceremoniously over her head. She saw that the boy had begun to
grow in the light and even though he remained just a little behind Penelope,
scared perhaps that he might turn her to stone if she were in full sight of his
horror, he began to yield to her. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“They normally stare at me. Other
kids. Not you. You look at me differently. Like you don’t see the scars.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Finally, she stood and walked
towards the shade of the green stone walls, placing her hands once more on the
surface.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“That’s what you did earlier,”
said the boy. “Why do you do that?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“You wouldn’t understand.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Because I’m ugly?” mocked the
boy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Because you don’t live inside my
head.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
She turned to face him, resting
her back against the wall. It was in her blood now, in her veins, the sound of
the vastness behind these walls. She must see it, she must. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Can you take me to the top of
the wall?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I don’t know, I’ve never been up
there before. My father forbidded me.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Forbade,” said Penelope. “ You
said forbidded. It’s forbade.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Does it matter?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Well can you?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Are you still my friend?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Even if I didn’t take you to the
top of the wall?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Sighing, Penelope turned her back
to the boy. “My mother died in a fire.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Jason lifted his head and put a
hand to his scarred brow. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“So, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">understand</i>,” she continued. “They call me a witch-child. Say that
my mother burnt at the stake.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“But it doesn’t bother you?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Why should it?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“It bothers me. I can’t look in
the mirror; I despise myself. They call me yoghurt-face.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Penelope laughed. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“They didn’t let me see her. It
would have been too distressing. Do you think she would have looked like you?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I’m not dead.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Would she have suffered? Did
you?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I don’t remember. It was the
smoke.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“She set fire to herself.
Paraffin.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Jason shifted uncomfortably, felt
the skin around his eyes and mouth tighten. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“I like it here, but I stay out
of the house as much as I can. That’s why I go up into the tower. It’s cool,
away from the light.” He laughed again. “It makes me sound like a monster,
doesn’t it? A vampire.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What do your parents say?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“It’s hard for them. They feel
responsible. I suppose they were, in a way.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
His words seemed to trail off and
Penelope understood that the subject had drawn to a close. And she too wanted
to get away from this death. Jason stood up and held out a hand which Penelope
took and together they walked in the shadow of the green walls. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“How come you’ve never been to
the top?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Perhaps I’m not as adventurous
as you. What do you expect to find behind the walls?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“My destiny.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Jason laughed again. “I like the
way you talk. You talk like you’re in your own story. You must read a lot.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“It’s my father. He’s a writer
and he likes to read stories to me. We write down all the good words, the juicy
plump words that you can squeeze and squeeze.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
The boy’s finger closed tight
around the girl’s hand and with his free hand he opened the gate which led on
to a flight of green iron steps that dog-legged back on itself; ugly, brutish
things that reminded Penelope of a prison that she’d seen on television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even as he warned her to watch her step, her
foot slipped through the open riser, grazing her shin on the ragged edge. Blood
trickled onto her polished sandals. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Do you want to go back?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Of course not, Jason.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
At the sound of his name from her
lips, he smiled and vowed that she would not fall again. Raising his face to
the sun and mindless of the heat, he marched on, looking back at every step to
make sure that his new friend was safe. She saw him turn around, saw his watchfulness
and she knew that the time had come. Warm blood fell in the dark spaces between
her toes but she would not turn back. In a few moments, she would be there with
the tremulous grey-blue waters filling the vast expanse of her imagination. The
prospect of this made her dizzy and she threatened to fall yet again until
Jason grabbed her wrist. Only in her father’s hands had she felt protected
before and she looked up to this boy, his red hair haloed by the full sun. She
felt the blood in her cheeks, in her throat; she felt its pulsating rhythms and
imagined the waters beyond swelling in sympathy to her body, as if she had
become the moon itself. Through the open risers, she could see the boy’s house
far below, no longer a threat; instead its blank white face stared up at her in
admiration at her courage, at her determination. A procession of figures
crossed the landscape of her imagination: princes who climbed towers to
liberate enchanted maidens; poor village boys clambering blindly up magical
beanstalks in search of lost treasure; Babylonians in a tower of stone,
reaching blindly for God. And all was one to her now and they would no longer
mock her for soon she would have possession of the gold at the end of the
rainbow. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Here we are,” said Jason. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
They were on the parapet and
Penelope looked across the estate below them, slate grey roofs spreading out on
all sides, a sea of black caps pronouncing a sentence of death or worse on all
those who stayed there. The wind picked at her hair and wrapped it over her
eyes to save them from the trouble of seeing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“We just need to go up this
ladder here,” said the boy. It was his turn to make contact, lifting the hair
from her face, folding it behind her ears, stroking it into place. They smiled
to each other and Penelope knew that here indeed was a friend. Her heart beating
anxiously, she imagined her mother and herself standing at the edge of this
man-made lake, the water cooling her mother’s searing wounds, extinguishing the
pain of memory and loss. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Thank you,” she said to the boy,
pressing her lips to the hard ridges of his forehead and placing his hand on
her heart. Jason looked away, angry at his unforgiving skin, at its taut,
leathery response to something so soft. He let his hand fall and mounted the
three metal steps onto the tiny wall. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
And waited for her to come to
him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Following in the boy’s footsteps,
she took the three steps slowly and deliberately. In the stories she had read,
the princess would close her eyes, or else she would be blindfolded and the
hero would tell her when it was time before revealing the glorious sights to
her. But she wanted to absorb every moment, wanted to be able to write down
each second so that she might relate it to her father and to her mother, in her
prayers that night. As she ascended the staircase, the green walls on the
opposite side came into view and surely now she would behold the vast expanse
of water that had called to her daily from the other side. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What do you think?” asked the boy,
oblivious to the chaos in the other’s mind from which no form or design could
be made. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
She could not speak. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
In front of her was not the
inland sea that she had hoped for, that mighty expanse of water tamed by the
hands of man; not for her the sunlight glinting off ripples of grey-blue that
caressed its stone boundaries. She began to cry. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What is it, what’s wrong?” said
Jason, fearful for her safety and already regretting<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the fact that he had brought her to this
height. If she fell in, he’d be for it from his old man. “What’s wrong?” He
followed her gaze to the labyrinth of pipes and tubes that spread out before
them, the cold steel innards of some huge beast left open and naked to the
skies. If he bent forward, he could hear the steady hum of the motors or the
pumps as they worked tirelessly to flush out the waste and the filth, cleansing
and remoulding the detritus of the estate into something else. He saw the
beauty in this act of rebirth. He smiled again at Penelope but a fierce darkness
had crossed her face; her hair had fallen down around her cheeks and she had
the look of a Maenad. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“What is this?” she cried. “What
have you brought me to?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Jason looked back at the pipes
and the machinery then at Penelope, confused. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“But this is it. This is what it
is. I ... I thought you knew.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“It’s vile, ugly. I thought ... I
thought ...”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Jason could only repeat himself.
“It is what it is,” he said, chanting it as a mantra and pointing at the sight
before them to help his new friend to make sense of it all. Penelope screamed
and tore at her hair and Jason, beginning to fear for his own safety, backed
away. She turned to the boy and saw his weak smile collapse into the stunned
flesh that barely covered his grotesque face. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
“Ugly, vile,” she whispered. “How
can it be?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
In the chasm below, the sun
flared off the steel pipes. The boy crept away into his isolation, fulfilled in
the knowledge that all things will be, just as his father had said so. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Lance Hanson – May 30<sup>th</sup>
2013<span style="display: none; mso-hide: all;">ness. o too Beth would press her
young frame to the cold stone in a desire to become part of it, </span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-58624188819303223472013-12-13T16:09:00.002-08:002013-12-14T01:13:20.591-08:00Possession part one<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtwXwsCZ_7qDBSoeEgmIerJPwVniUriupG81lntOoXQcZzE0BquptwmMs3t55VlsErzC9D9dep64ur8iWMyoKN8d4ivln_uNmdiEQ4dDr_DdjZ-Ot4FjVsSRtnpFs3c4KTtgQiVoyEDKo/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-27+at+17.33.00.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtwXwsCZ_7qDBSoeEgmIerJPwVniUriupG81lntOoXQcZzE0BquptwmMs3t55VlsErzC9D9dep64ur8iWMyoKN8d4ivln_uNmdiEQ4dDr_DdjZ-Ot4FjVsSRtnpFs3c4KTtgQiVoyEDKo/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-27+at+17.33.00.png" width="320" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Possession</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> – Andrezj Zulawski
1981<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Two worlds exist within Zulawski’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Possession</i> (1981); set in Communist
Berlin, the film’s location presents the tear in the psycho-geographical fabric
of both characters and place, depicted in the opening shots of scare-crow like
metal rails that line the concrete wall. This divided setting also pre-empts
the divided selves within the film, where doppelgangers fall from nowhere and a
woman’s psychological breakdown is physically embodied in a monstrous other
that exists outside of her self. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">A psychoanalytical reading via
Kristeva would suggest that the reptilian creature that Anna lives with is the
personification of a sexuality that cannot be controlled by either her husband
Mark (played by Sam Neill) or her Tantric lover Heinrich. In fact, there is
much in Possession that lends itself to psychoanalytic readings, not least the doppelgangers;
the return of repressed drives that fuel the destructive relationship between
Anna and Mark. But to do so might well ignore some important motifs and images
in the film, not least its setting in post-war Berlin, but also the apocalyptic
imagery that accompanies its bizarre conclusion. As </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #646464; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Victor Galstyan writes: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Is
[the film] meant to critique the patriarchal/capitalist structures of Western
society, the stifling repression of the Communist system or is it a Freudian
poison-letter to the castrating horror of the female body? The film’s lasting
power lies in its omnifariousness, which enables it to withstand any number of
readings.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">[1]</span></b></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I have recently been reading Gaston
Bachelard’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetics of Space. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his book, Bachelard approaches domestic and
intimate spaces from a phenomenological viewpoint. I was struck by his
discussion of the dialectics of outside and inside space, space which from a
phenomenological perspective suggests the notion of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">being</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothingness</i>.
Thinking of the self, the subjective ‘I’ that forms the basis of
phenomenological thought, he states that “outside and inside are both intimate
– they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility”. Narrative
spaces are full of these dialectics – the Jekyll and Hyde schism of inner and
outer self, but having recently watched <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Possession</i>
I was stuck by the impact of place upon self, and how the divided world of
Berlin in the 1980s, itself a hostile environment with an all-too-visible
architectural wound cutting through its geo-political landscape. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">“intimate space loses its clarity” write
Bachelard, “while exterior space loses its void, void being the raw material of
possibility of being. We are banished from the realm of possibility.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I couldn’t help thinking of
Zulawski’s film at this point; its geographical spaces seem interlinked with
psychological space. But to understand Zulawski’s images, the spectator must
attempt to bracket out the context of the film – and this is difficult when you
consider the powerful impact that the grey landscapes have upon our
understanding. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR2dBFNnUGNwA92A3x12YG-KvtW6jO1aCasOWkRNhEOuFquOi9vpsXQla8K1cyHDjrcq8xqRvvSkpc_StT0QG67jLLnd4uEfvN_vdWqhOWOlceNgFwdNt-TdeJuxbpiEgEUf7m0nhHzIQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-27+at+17.57.57.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR2dBFNnUGNwA92A3x12YG-KvtW6jO1aCasOWkRNhEOuFquOi9vpsXQla8K1cyHDjrcq8xqRvvSkpc_StT0QG67jLLnd4uEfvN_vdWqhOWOlceNgFwdNt-TdeJuxbpiEgEUf7m0nhHzIQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-27+at+17.57.57.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Anna’s psychological space is crowded;
she is claustrophobic and Zulawski underscores this with repeated close ups of
her, the mise-en-scene confining her between multiple doorways which evoke both
escape and the utter absence of escape. Amongst the clutter of domesticity, inner
space provokes breakdown, mentally, physically. With outer space should come
freedom, but she is followed, if not by a camera that pushes in on her bloodied
body, then by her two lovers, two men working for a detective agency. Men
surround her, own her, try to possess her. Anna’s subjectivity is lost amongst
men; in the scene where Mark plays back a home movie made by his rival, Anna
stares at the screen, talking to the two men in her life when she says “that’s
why I’m with you. Because you say ‘I’ for me”. Later on, she ridicules Mark by
saying “you look at me as if I need you to fill me up.” In essence, Anna’s feels
that her sense of self is defined by men and her descent into madness is
accompanied by the destruction of Mark and Heinrich for whom Anna is simply a
receptacle for their own insecurities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Anna’s sexuality cannot be
contained by the two men in her life. Mark admits to Anna that when she’s away
“I think of you as an animal as a woman possessed.” Mark admits here that he
needs Anna to be a beast, because this is the only way he can explain her
behavior. And yet, in thinking of Anna as a beast, Mark is also admitting the
desire for the Other, this beast that exists within her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His attempt to control Anna is depicted
during their scenes of self-mutilation when he binds Anna to him with a
bandage: dog-like, on a leash. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Her presence in outside space
produces mayhem – a breakdown truck spills its load trying to avoid her. She
cannot wait to be inside again, rushing to her other home, the home which
provides sanctuary for her away from the possessiveness of patriarchy. Here,
yellowed wallpaper, grimy, the very opposite of the clean domesticated spaces
of her apartment with Mark; this is a place of decay. Freudian’s might call it
a womb-space, the slimy Lovecraftian thing which clings to the walls could well
be a mucal representation of some disgusting embryonic creature. Anna feeds it
with blood, as if she is feeding the schism in her self. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Anna says that goodness is only
some kind of reflection upon evil; the film embodies this in its depiction of
doppelgangers but also the domestic spaces within the film. Marital harmony
depends upon tidy spaces – note the clean lines of Mark’s apartment. When Helen
comes to stay, he admires her domesticity, running his fingers along clean
surfaces, caressing appliances as if they were a substitute for the female body,
thanking her for being the obverse of his feral wife. For Anna, the domestic
space reflects her own psyche; at one point she stuffs laundry into the fridge,
suggesting the interchangeability of the domestic appliance, it’s heterogeneous
shape and colour. Groceries are smashed off the walls of the subways in the
abjection of the miscarriage scene; severed heads reside in the vegetable tray
giving new meaning to the fridge’s ‘drawer of death’. In fact, Zulawski points
up the inner violence and frustration contained within the straitjacket of
domesticity: in one remarkable scene, Anna stuffs meat into a grinder and
clothes into a washing machine even whilst she and Mark scream at each other. Wardrobes
– scattered clothing; symbols of struggle. Clothes thrown in, thrown out<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I can’t think of another film
which strips away the mask from cosy domesticity and reveals the utter
frustration and psychological meltdown that waits at its core. The kitchen, the
bathroom, corridors, hall-ways – all become scenes of psychosis, breakdown,
underscored by Mark’s search for order even in the maelstrom: “. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Earlier, Mark claims to Helen
that he is at war with all women to which Helen replies: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">“There is nothing in common among women except menstruation… I
come from a place when evil is easier to pinpoint because you can see it in the
flesh. I find pathetic these stories of women contaminating humans.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The notion of Woman as embodiment
of disease is as old as Eve; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Possession</i>,
disease is the phenomenology of division, the thing that is borne from angst
and paranoia. Anna recognizes it in the abjection of her being: “We are all the
same – different versions in different bodies; like insects” she says. There is
so much rage in Anna, in her world. Rage and pain. Think of the scene in which
she all but tortures a young protégé in a sadistic ritual that emphasizes the
notion that only through pain will the female body know ambition and a desire
for success. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">“Fear does not come from the outside. Nor is
it composed of old memories. It has no past, no physiology. Nothing in common,
either, with having one’s breath taken away. Here fear is being itself. Where
can one flee, where find refuge? In what shelter can one take refuge? Space is
nothing but a ‘horrible outside-inside’”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Possession</i> does is make this fear manifest in the body of both Anna
and the thing that she has given birth to. To move beyond narrative absurdity,
the spectator must equate the thing with Anna’s inner space<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Anna’s breakdown is a breakdown
of being, a spiral into the madness of division. She feels the world as a
crumbling decaying wreck and the thing that lives in the house is not merely an
exterior manifestation of her sexuality; this would be too simplistic and the
scene in which she is having sex with this Other would suggest narcissism.
Instead, if the thing is the exterior manifestation of fear itself, fear of
what is to come, then it no longer becomes narcissism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7015615814240147618#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/35/possession_dvd/<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-10611218884978328102013-07-24T12:55:00.000-07:002013-07-26T05:05:58.088-07:00Sleeping Jesus and the Green Goblin<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOvb7IAlFrsQwhimp8D2TObnVnsyc4KEBYoIMBcri8Nm2Syr3pLJJoOeKI6DdrVBEXOx45q-6CT1WkJW7zs82cNFYgvtL2bgoRC_WtKPCkf102gmM9WvJn-iJfyLtpAY-mdA8Qf9hyphenhyphenVqM/s1600/IMG_1252.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOvb7IAlFrsQwhimp8D2TObnVnsyc4KEBYoIMBcri8Nm2Syr3pLJJoOeKI6DdrVBEXOx45q-6CT1WkJW7zs82cNFYgvtL2bgoRC_WtKPCkf102gmM9WvJn-iJfyLtpAY-mdA8Qf9hyphenhyphenVqM/s320/IMG_1252.JPG" width="237" /></a>My short story entitled 'Sleeping Jesus and the Green Goblin' has been published in the Early Works Press anthology, 'Significant Spaces'. It is available to purchase here: http<a href="http://www.earlyworkspress.co.uk/publications.htm" target="_blank">://www.earlyworkspress.co.uk/publications.htm</a><br />
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<br />Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-53303915765298350872013-05-12T14:02:00.001-07:002013-05-12T14:10:52.985-07:00Vampire Weekend: the hotel and Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness<strong></strong><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXcshQz21k0nwMU0BF5_VIihtJm-puApP4IqiBv6_QTrzyYVXe7DSX3n4uROAweyPOY2uFgJ4V8egh732HgeJXqI_FSTqXWMiZ3CiFJ6K1m_JXr4Fvu0bgVCJsvZi-xxMDoUot77lsIDo/s1600/DaughtersOfDarkness19713994_f.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXcshQz21k0nwMU0BF5_VIihtJm-puApP4IqiBv6_QTrzyYVXe7DSX3n4uROAweyPOY2uFgJ4V8egh732HgeJXqI_FSTqXWMiZ3CiFJ6K1m_JXr4Fvu0bgVCJsvZi-xxMDoUot77lsIDo/s320/DaughtersOfDarkness19713994_f.jpg" width="224" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Eagles, Hotel California</i></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the oneiric emptiness of its hotel setting, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters of Darkness</i> (1971) directed by Harry Kumel is both a
contemporary of Visconti’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death in
Venice (1971)</i> as well as foreshadowing the primal horror of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Look Now</i> (Nic Roeg, 1973). In
fact, the parallels between all three films are uncanny and seem to capture an
early 1970s zeitgeist of the unwitting traveller under threat from repressed
desires that manifest themselves in the shape of a destructive other. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters of Darkness</i> begins
with a journey. A train shoots across the screen in low angle, as if the camera
itself is buried beneath the earth. Like Romero’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martin</i> some years later, we cut inside the train to a darkened
cabin, close ups of frenzied love-making, fragmented bodies writhing in feral
pleasure. However, unlike <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martin</i>’s
eponymous young sociopath who will kill his lover with a combination of urgent
physicality and the surgical precision of the syringe (looking forward to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dexter</i>, the serial killer/vigilante who
drops his victims with a dose of horse tranquiliser before carving them into
pieces), these lovers collapse in a post-coital confessional in which the husband, Stefan,
hints at the cruelties to come by refusing to admit that he loves his new wife, Valerie.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The vampire film will often begin
this way: the traveller in an unknown land seeking the monster in his lair
(Todd Browning’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dracula</i>, 1931,
Terence Fisher’s re-visioning of the same from 1958) or else chancing upon a
crumbling Gothic pile which holds within its soil the monster waiting to be
freed (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dracula: Prince of Darkness</i>,
1966) as well as a series of later Hammers, the so called Karnstein trilogy,
for example, based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s prototype lesbian vampire, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Carmilla</i>. Stefan and Valerie are no
exception then: they miss the boat that will take them back to England and book
themselves into the grandest hotel in Ostend, checking into the Royal Suite.
Stefan, it might seem, comes from noble stock and the admission to his wife
that his mother will frown upon his hasty marriage to a commoner suggests that
Stefan is perhaps concealing more than he reveals.</span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Travelling in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death in Venice</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Look Now</i> are supposed to be
cathartic. Gustav von Aschenbach is recuperating from an illness, haunted by
memories of his own failures, only to find himself drawn towards the angelic
Tadzio, a young Polish boy with whom Aschenbach becomes obsessed and, after
following him through the labyrinths of a Venice diseased with a cholera
epidemic brought by the siroccos from North Africa, he himself dies alone and
exhausted on the beach, his maquillage melting in the unforgiving sun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Roeg’s film, John Baxter and his wife Laura
(played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) are trying to escape the
tragedy of their daughter’s death. Venice here is also diseased: this time with
the physical threat of death embodied in the serial killer who is cutting the
throats of their victims. Here again, death finds its male protagonist, this
time in the form of the red-garbed dwarf whom John Baxter mistakes for the
figure of his dead daughter and who slashes his throat in a shocking
denouement. Of course, both films are not vampire narratives, but there is
something in the city of Venice that fastens itself onto the bodies of its male
protagonists, something inherently destructive. Venice has of course throughout
history been assigned a monstrously feminine role (see Ruskin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stones of Venice</i>)and in its womb-like
labyrinths and watery arteries, it is itself a femme fatale waiting to consume
the fragile and the transgressive who enter its dark passages. Some years
later, in 1992, Paul Schrader’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Comfort
of Strangers</i> dealt with a similar narrative, with Rupert Everett and
Natasha Richardson playing a naive<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>young
couple who become embroiled in a destructive relationship with the murderous Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. </span><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></div>
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Insofar as location
is concerned, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters of Darkness</i>
could almost be a harbinger for the watery deaths that we encounter in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Look Now</i>: Bruges stands in for
Venice, the boats less glamorous but the stench of death is the same. Stefan
and Valerie stumble into a quayside crowded with prurient spectators hoping to
catch a glimpse of a dead girl, the latest victim of the Bruges Vampire who
cuts the throats of young girls’ necks. As the paramedics bring out the
stretcher, an arm, lifeless, falls out of its loose wrappings and Stefan
becomes transfixed by this fragment of a corpse. We have already seen glimpses
of his sadistic personality in the way that he treats Valerie, but here his
fascination with the macabre sight is noticed by his wife.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Roeg’s film, John Baxter also steps into a Venice in turmoil, a serial
killer is on the loose and he watches as the authorities fish out a woman’s
body from the dank canal waters. Like Stefan, he develops a morbid fascination
with the murder and like Stefan he becomes too close to its terrible consequences.</span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvZi6gV2np3ehCqW841m7PLKiMHl17wPPHtL-SomJ1-7b62O82m9M03716b7tJ6RgcGKJJ73YyZ3g0U3Z-6mNNvETR7vwn33gqrXy5hY2Ep0jpct5bGlcnf1Xr1f8TO6zjfdsbNCNwRKM/s1600/Hotel+12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvZi6gV2np3ehCqW841m7PLKiMHl17wPPHtL-SomJ1-7b62O82m9M03716b7tJ6RgcGKJJ73YyZ3g0U3Z-6mNNvETR7vwn33gqrXy5hY2Ep0jpct5bGlcnf1Xr1f8TO6zjfdsbNCNwRKM/s1600/Hotel+12.jpg" style="cursor: move;" unselectable="on" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIAabJ-7zRDxKl2cRvzbWyVUXtx8a_02aP8usaUgWwLBdbDGkeqhEJgs3TjmvH-dTC7OhidC3zmRxxason-J3s9qSKlmDNWqBs7qzI39wc-HK2_q2WdbZlCtcY3drgNishcPeKfD1oPho/s1600/Hotel+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIAabJ-7zRDxKl2cRvzbWyVUXtx8a_02aP8usaUgWwLBdbDGkeqhEJgs3TjmvH-dTC7OhidC3zmRxxason-J3s9qSKlmDNWqBs7qzI39wc-HK2_q2WdbZlCtcY3drgNishcPeKfD1oPho/s1600/Hotel+1.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Ostend of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters of Darkness</i>
although historically and architecturally less glamorous than Venice shares the
sense of isolation both in the out-of-season Venice depicted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Look Now</i> as well as the decaying
necropolis of Visconti’s film. Kumel shoots the outside of the hotel with a
wide angle lens, emphasising its sightless windows which overlook over the plain,
flat Flemish coast, a landscape which recalls the East Anglia of M. R. James’
folk horror tales such as </span><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_22" o:spid="_x0000_s1033" style="height: 87pt; margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; mso-position-horizontal-relative: margin; mso-position-horizontal: left; mso-position-vertical-relative: margin; mso-position-vertical: top; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 168pt; z-index: -8;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad</i>, in which the quotidian
becomes mystical, yielding its dark secrets to the various travellers who find
themselves wrapt in the uncanny world that James creates in his narratives. The
weather is harsh, cold, relentless: rain and mist, a cold blue and grey world
that scratches at the splendour held within the hotel walls. But isolation is
not only outside: a journey back from Bruges in an (almost) empty bus allows
Stefan and Valerie to confess their scopophilia: “we are getting to know each
other” says Stefan as Valerie becomes aroused by his fascination with the dead
body they witnessed in Bruges. Waves crash against the breakers and groynes,
visual shorthand for the ecstasy that threatens to drown everyone once it
erupts. In one of the most beautiful, because eerie, shots of the film, the
Countess envelops Valerie in the folds of her gown, an action silhouetted in
long shot against the breaking light of dawn which might destroy her once and
for all. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In its languorous depiction of empty hotel spaces, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters of Darkness</i> seems to come from the same gene pool as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Last Year in Marienbad (1961) , The Shining
(1980), Lost in Translation (2003), </i>as well as<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Death in Venice, and Don’t Look Now</i>. Just as in those films, the
hotel is a character in itself, filling the space of the screen with its
remembrances of things past. The decor is grand and exotic, but it is dressed
for no-one. Characters sit in isolation, present wounds marking out its slow
descent into oblivion. Stefan and Valerie dine alone, an audience of empty
chairs listening to their talk of nothing; the Countess sits in the lobby,
knitting, whilst the marbled walls and grandiose mise-en-scene yearns for a
past glory that can never return. </span><br />
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<v:imagedata cropbottom="23636f" cropleft="11138f" cropright="26979f" croptop="16832f" o:title="" src="file:///C:\Users\Lance\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image011.png">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why is the empty
hotel a site for the uncanny and the eerie? It is a lost world, a place of dead
roads; its silent rooms have witnessed pleasure and pain and its aural and
psychic fingerprints lay like ur-texts of the lost and the absent. In their
collection of essays on the motel and hotel in film (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moving Pictures/Stopping Places</i>) Clarke et al comment on the fact
that hotels are almost paradoxical: fixed, constant places within a world in
motion:</span></div>
<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“Hotels and motels ... create their own disadjusted temporality,
erasing the traces of previous occupants on a daily basis, whilst reappearing
ready-and-waiting for each and every new arrival” (page 9)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In a way, the hotel becomes
an architectural metaphor for the vampiric Countess in that she is also looking
for a replacement for her lover, Ilona who as the film progresses becomes
increasingly alienated from the Countess’ side. Ilona, like the hotel room
being prepared for the new arrival, is ultimately discarded, buried without
ceremony in a cold beach and replaced by Valerie who herself displaces the
Countess as the matriarchal vampire figure beginning the chain anew with
another young couple as the closing credits roll. </span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Following Lefebvre’s notion that representational space is ‘directly
lived through its associated images and symbols”, Dilek Altuntas writes that
hotels become a metaphor for loneliness, melancholy and isolation (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Altuntas p100</i>). They are in effect a
palimpsest of memory and of desire, where the echoes of the past commingle with
the present; where presence (in the shape of the new arrival) is dependent upon
the loss of the old. They are self-perpetuating spaces, dependent upon the
process of renewal. For Aschenbach in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death
in Venice</i>, the hotel room dissolves into memory, the figures of his past
crowd in around him in a cluttered mise-en-scene: the photographs and
paraphernalia of a life gone by; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t
Look Now</i>, time itself fragments. In the film’s famous love scene, in which John
and Laura’s lovemaking is intercut with later shots of them getting dressed for
dinner, there is a temporal disjointedness which again points towards renewal:
this time of lives placed on hold by the death of a daughter. In Resnais’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Last Year in Marienbad</i>, the hotel
becomes itself a labyrinth of memory, a multi-layered narrative of loss and
repressed desire in which characters become as static as the stone statues that
inhabit its exterior spaces. As in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters
of Darkness</i>, the hotel’s frontage looms over the imagination. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHXb_4aGp27IZuZNx8FkkGF2PU7er5VVC2FbZ7TjnwY6FccC9uVGTlpZ4KlNGdnm-WWfiJMmhrZtAqmy9XAE1isWoI7Mvx9ZP4r5va6Wzl1JYFdEteUla4Id9ju8FIO3nKvdur81257o/s1600/Hotel+9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHXb_4aGp27IZuZNx8FkkGF2PU7er5VVC2FbZ7TjnwY6FccC9uVGTlpZ4KlNGdnm-WWfiJMmhrZtAqmy9XAE1isWoI7Mvx9ZP4r5va6Wzl1JYFdEteUla4Id9ju8FIO3nKvdur81257o/s1600/Hotel+9.jpg" /></a></div>
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</div>
Perhaps it is
no coincidence that Delphine Seyrig inhabits both narratives: as the Countess
Bathory in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daughters</i> and as ‘the
woman’ in Resnais’ earlier film. In both films, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">her alabaster beauty, combined
with a sense of other-worldly poise and movement, seem to offer the spectator a
vision of a woman from another world and another life: be it a memory that
never existed or a medieval murderer who refuses to die.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9LtzdHGJ-p5uHT_jyj-cDIhfV9SB3-2ZW3vdmJtj5b2Gx5VGsfbG7NP_2WrRGSymVP7FzfSVzX8UbxslU6as2hsGKj78_5sP454P6ttACbXjW569WsPgactjgeotDvGq6jKbQjKwIspo/s1600/Hotel+10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9LtzdHGJ-p5uHT_jyj-cDIhfV9SB3-2ZW3vdmJtj5b2Gx5VGsfbG7NP_2WrRGSymVP7FzfSVzX8UbxslU6as2hsGKj78_5sP454P6ttACbXjW569WsPgactjgeotDvGq6jKbQjKwIspo/s1600/Hotel+10.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> <span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hotels are uncanny spaces; as a home from home they are familiar and yet
unfamiliar. We move around them as if we belong but all too often we can be
surprised by the unfamiliar. What happens when we return to our room and the
door is open, the maid, a stranger, amongst our private things, invading our
intimate space. Think of the scene in Clouzot’s film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Les Diaboliques (1954)</i>: the protagonist Christina (Vera Clouzot), believing
that the husband she thought she had murdered has returned from his watery
grave and taken up residence in a Parisian hotel, waits for him in his room
only to discover one of the hotel staff who tells her that her husband is not
at home. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Look Now</i>, a naked John Baxter, poring over the designs of the
cathedral that he is renovating, is surprised by a female cleaner. The
awkwardness of these moments is because of their incongruity, their liminality:
when the protagonist finds themselves in a space which no longer belongs to
them, that twilight zone when the hotel room becomes a neutral and open space
to be reclaimed by the maids and cleaners, figures who move around the shadowy
interstices of the guest and the tourist. Cinema history is replete with the
uncanny stopping place: the inn in Dreyer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vampyr</i>
(1932) in which the young man Gray experiences shadowy encounters that lead him
into a labyrinth of repetition and death; the McKittrick Hotel in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vertigo, </i>a haunted and haunting uncanny
presence which conceals Madeleine Elster from James Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson
as if she is a phantom, absorbed into its architectural fabric. And not to
mention the Bates Motel or the Overlook! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">In all
these films, the hotel is a place of crisis, akin to Michel Foucault’s
heteropias, places outside of time and space even. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Idleness,” writes Foucault in his essay ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Other Places’</i> in which he develops
his theory of heterotopical space “is a sort of deviation” and in its
inscription of the leisurely body, the hotel is another form of deviant space
alongside the prison, the hospital, the care home. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t
Look Now</i>, the Baxters are in crisis; so too is Aschenbach in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death in Venice</i>. The hotel can be a
space in which crisis is shut out, deferred or erased – see also Jim Jarmusch’s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mystery Train</i> (1989); but it can also
be the catalyst for crisis itself, as in Kubrick’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Shining</i>. Of course, the history of film is filled with places
of crisis, but what makes the hotel lend itself to investigation is that it
fits most of Foucault’s defining ‘principles’ of heterotopic space.</span><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"> One of these is a space which is open
only to those who submit to its rites of entry or to those who are compelled to
enter. And yet entry is only an illusion: the very condition of entry depends
upon exclusion; exclusion from societal norms, for example, from its mores and
ethics. He cites “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the famous American
motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit
sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without
however being allowed out in the open</i>”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And film history is littered with such places, places of retreat, where
the exiled can escape to, if only for a short while, before dying in showers
perhaps. </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> A</span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">nother,
more telling principle of heterotopic space is “</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">the will to enclose in one
place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a
place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its
ravages”. </span></i><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_7" o:spid="_x0000_s1026" style="height: 107.25pt; margin-left: 210.75pt; margin-top: 66.75pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: margin; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: margin; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 219.75pt; z-index: -3;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In its eerie
emptiness, the unnamed hotel (it was filmed at <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Astoria
Hotel</i> in Brussels and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hotel des
Thermes</i> in Ostende) could well be a place of limbo, much like The Overlook
in many ways. Like the Countess, it has stood still over time. It is out of
time; a stopping place for the dead or those marked for death and the man at
the desk who fills the role of porter, bell-boy and manager is trapped too in
this place, working there as he has done since he was a boy, and imprisoned in
the endless recycling of uncanny encounters. Yet he might also be the gate-keeper,
Charon even, guiding these dead souls to their final resting place. Stefan and
Ilona will not leave this place alive; the detective who makes a brief visit to
the hotel will die on the road later on in the film. At various points in the
film, the characters are shot in high angle, is if the hotel itself is marking
them out for death. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></span> </div>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thus,
the hotel is a non-space; a space which resides in and outside of the narrative
worlds; it can be a hub, or a panopticon; a place where all roads meet or from
which narratives escape like spokes on a wheel perhaps. They are a metaphor for
travel and for stasis, a paradox perhaps. Maybe that is why cinema finds in the
hotel a mirror to its own identity, for what is cinema if it is not a place
where we can venture into a multiplicity of narratives, to an infinity of
spaces and places without moving from within the dark communal other space in
which we experience them?<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">References:</span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Foucault - </span><a href="http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Altuntas - </span><a href="http://www.academia.edu/521447/Hotel_as_a_Double_Metaphor_Space_Representation_Reality_and_Beyond"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.academia.edu/521447/Hotel_as_a_Double_Metaphor_Space_Representation_Reality_and_Beyond</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Clarke et al: </span><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/80751414/Moving-Pictures-Stopping-Places-Hotels-and-Motels-on-Film"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.scribd.com/doc/80751414/Moving-Pictures-Stopping-Places-Hotels-and-Motels-on-Film</span></a></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<img height="46" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnVP6_C5sdAaYErjJvN3GOHl48o26TfowjKvnf1lyx8K8_hG19trwccJ-vIZ4TqHXwBsIPyRnClYYtYiXPR_2e_gmMYFWEllCt0-hS5bBnziqQsKL7lDz_XRU_L2C9VLP3LpDHVjiRr6A/s1600/Hotel+5.jpg" style="filter: alpha(opacity=30); left: 154px; opacity: 0.3; position: absolute; top: 2687px;" width="96" />Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-53678847006428393932013-04-08T06:50:00.000-07:002013-04-10T15:00:28.222-07:00"You dream too much of water": abjection and defilement in Les Diaboliques<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Two women, one man and a swimming pool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><em>Sunset
Boulevard</em> meets <em>Bound</em> in a film
that might have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I am talking about Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s <em>Les Diaboliques</em>, a film
made in 1955 which is a noir thriller with the usual roles reversed. Instead of
the steamily seductive femme fatale enticing her disposable lover into her web
of intrigue (see <em>The Postman Always Rings
Twice, Double Indemnity, The Last Seduction</em>), in Clouzot’s film the figure
of the naive male is replaced by a woman, in this case boarding school owner Christina
Delasalle (played by Clouzot’s wife, Vera), a woman with a heart condition who
is seduced into ‘murdering’ her bullying and
salacious husband<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Michel by her
colleague and ostensibly her lover Nicole (played by Simone Signoret) with whom
Michel – who is also the school principal, benefitting from his wife’s money
and generosity - is having a less than secretive affair. Together, the two women
do away with Michel by drowning him in a bath after first sedating him with
some mysterious chemical and a few glasses of Red Label, then dumping him in
the school swimming pool only to find that his body disappears, triggering
several mysterious incidents, notably the dead man’s suit delivered to Christina from a dry-cleaners and a particularly lively child, Moinet, claiming that the
dead Michel has appeared to him. In the film’s surprise ending, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we learn that (and I’m going to give the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>game away) all along Michel and Nicole have
conspired to dupe Christina, hoping that the stress of covering up the murder
combined with the sheer terror of the apparent supernatural reappearance of her
husband will prove fatal to her weak heart. In the final climactic moments,
when Christina sees the body of her dead husband rise from a bath full of water
in a macabre reversal of his death scene, their plan succeeds as Christina
collapses and dies, clutching at her ruined heart. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>Les Diaboliques</em> is
a remarkable film, not only because of the strength of its narrative but also
for the way it deals with the inversion of gender roles. Clouzot had adapted
the film from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(who were also responsible for <em>D’Entre les Morts</em> or <em>Amongst the Dead</em>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>later filmed by Hitchcock as <em>Vertigo</em>) in which the lesbian
relationship between the two killers was ‘more pronounced’. I use quotation
marks because Clouzot had supposedly toned down the homosexual content and yet I
feel that its presence remains throughout , in the dialogue and the
mise-en-scene. Simone Signoret adopts the butch masculine role: short blonde
hair, tall and athletic, she is the decisive partner. Vera Clouzot as Christina
plays the more fragile and submissive role of the femme: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she is both infantilised (with her braided
hair and chequered dress she looks more like Dorothy Gale in <em>The Wizard of Oz - </em><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>even Nicole upbraids her for thinking ‘like a
child’) and sexualised (on several occasions, Clouzot draws the spectator’s
gaze towards his wife’s body – in one scene, she lifts her skirt to reveal bare
thighs and then there is the diaphanous night-gown which she wears during the
film’s denouement and which Clouzot lights in such a way to reveal surprisingly
more of his wife than might one might have thought permissible in the 1950s). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is this inversion of roles, or as Virginie Selavy puts it
“the dissolution of certainties” (</span><a href="http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2011/03/04/les-diaboliques/"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2011/03/04/les-diaboliques/</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">),
which makes <em>Les Diaboliques</em> such an
engaging film. For me, on watching the film for the first time, I was aware not
only of the inversion of gender roles but of how the motif of water pervades
the film. Water is a symbol of femininity and of health, but it is also a
harbinger of death and disease. Elsewhere, (http://www.cathoderaytube.co.uk/2011/04/world-cinema-classics-les-diaboliques.html
) Frank Collins has written about ‘the foetid quality’ of the film, connecting
watery motifs – from the opening close-up of the swamp-like swimming pool to
the bathroom scenes which foreshadow Hitchcock’s <em>Psycho </em><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- to the atmosphere
of decay as well as Christina’s deteriorating health. But water can also be
seen as a liminal space, a space of fantasy: as Fichet, the Columbo-like
detective, tells Christina “You dream too much about water”. It is a site of
that which is to be feared. Christina constantly surveys the pool for fear of
what secrets it might reveal: gazing at it on the morning after she and Nicole
have dumped Michel’s corpse into its murky depths or apprehensive whilst<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the pupils play ball around its perimeter.
Anxious eye-line matches during a mathematics lesson connect her fear to the
site of death as she waits for the caretaker to empty the pool. Water both
engorges and disgorges human bodies and creates in the process something abject
and in the two scenes in which Michel is first immersed in his watery grave and
then rises from it, Lazarus-like, his bulging eyes suggest something amphibian
and beyond human, repulsive and abject. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This brings me to
Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject which I believe is another underlying
motif within the film. A psychoanalytical concept, I cannot do justice to Kristeva’s
labyrinthine thinking here, but the abject for her is that which defies
borders, that which is sickening and repulsive: filth, waste, dung, the corpse:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">“It is ... not lack of
cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system,
order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules... The clean and proper
... becomes filthy...” (Kristeva pp. 4 - 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I like to think of films by David Cronenberg – <em>The Brood, Videodrome, Slither, Crash, The
Naked Lunch </em>– as films which portray narratives of abjection. Think of
bodies turned inside out, of the fascination for wounds and viscera. There is
both a celebration and a revulsion at the body and its borders. IN <em>Les Diaboliques</em>, water is that marginal
space between worlds; it both cleanses and defiles. Interestingly, one of the
teachers at the school is called Monsieur <em>Drain
</em>and when Nicole flings her keys into the pool, they are retrieved by one of
the pupils who claims that the bottom of the pool is like ‘chocolate soup’:
water and excrement seem<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to converge in
these two images. But if we think of Kristeva’s idea that the abject is the
defilement of the clean and proper body, then Michel seems to be at the centre
of this abjection: his is the clean body defiled by its immersion in water.
Bedecked in his Prince of Wales suit, Michel is the narcissist who needs to
women to satisfy his ego. Only when Christina spills the ‘drugged’ whiskey onto
his suit does he lose control over his clean and proper self, striking out at
her in his rage. Before he is ‘drowned’, the women put his shoes back on, and
his first act as a corpse is to send his suit to the dry-cleaners: even in
death, his narcissism remains intact. He recognises that water has polluted his
self and there is irony in this act of cleansing. Another strikingly effective
instance of abjection is when Michel’s body is wrapped up in the plastic
tablecloth and we discover that it leaks, threatening to betray the women to a
petrol station attendant who mistakes it for the waste fluids of a drunken
soldier who tries to hitch a ride with the women on their way back to Paris
from Niort. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">For Kristeva, “food loathing is perhaps the most elementary
and most archaic form of abjection” and Michel is also a symbol of bad
consumption. For one of the teachers at the school, Michel’s absence means that
he can now drink his wine ‘chemically pure’. Buying fish past its sell by date
on sale from the local fishmonger, Michel <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>then feeds it to pupils and teachers alike. When
Christina takes a mouthful of the fish and, finding it repulsive, gags on it
she is exhibiting that most elementary form of abjection. Monstrous in his need
for male egotistic control, Michel demands several times that she swallow the
food, humiliating Christina in front of the whole school. Later he will rape
her, thus linking abjection with sexual humiliation, defiling the borders of
the clean and proper self. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why does <em>Les
Diaboliques</em> reveal such a rich ‘abject’ reading?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that, at its roots, the film deals
with the inversion of gender roles and power only to submit to traditional
power relations at the end with Nicole falling into the arms of Michel who, it
appears, has been pulling the strings all along. But beneath this lapse into traditional
narratival norms, there lurks beneath the surface of this film a longing to
reveal more subversive elements: of women taking control, wrenching power away
from the dominant male. In his adaptation of the source material, Clouzot
humiliates Michel: a narcissist who needs to control and dominate two women to satisfy
his ego. Although he plays, in the end, the powerful patriarchal role and Nicole’s
masculinity is subsumed into the maternal one (note the three-shot after the humiliating
dinner scene in which Nicole and Michel sit together whilst Christina sits
alone, chastised for not finishing her meal), his body is abject and is treated
as something foul. Although Clouzot is working within the parameters of an
industry and culture that limits transgressive images on screen, he also
subverts these by turning Michel into a figure of filth. </span></div>
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Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-32899329596158729142013-03-17T14:55:00.001-07:002013-03-18T14:59:08.733-07:00Death Line and the sociology of cannibalism<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Two years before <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i>, a British film weighed into the 1970s gloomfest
with a more socially conscious narrative about an army of dispossessed wreaking
their vengeance on the corrupt and the pampered who inhabit the streets of
London. No, this isn’t a documentary on the miners’ strikes but Gary Sherman’s
1973 film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deathline</i> (aka <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raw Meat</i> in the United States), and as
far as British horror goes,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>many horror aficionados,
from Kim Newman to Edgar Wright postulate this film as one of the best British
horror movies of the seventies.</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The remark about miners’ strike is not a flippant one: one
Rotten Tomatoes reviewer calls this film “the first (or only) ethnographic
urban legend horror film”* and as a social commentary it is quite powerful: as
striking as the spade through the head delivered to a hapless victim in one of
the film’s most memorable scenes. As the film tells us, in 1892 a small group
of workers (conveniently for the narrative eight men and four women) are
trapped during the excavation works for a tube station; left to fend for
themselves by unscrupulous employers who have gone bankrupt and thus cannot
afford to rescue them, the workers survive first through cannibalism and then
by snatching waifs and strays from lonely tube stations. Paul Weller take note.
Although the ‘monster's’ actions are brutal, we cannot help but feel sympathy
for his situation. Indeed, the film is effectively the American Sherman holding
a mirror up to British society at the time. Through the salacious antics of
James Manfred OBE who combs the flesh pits of Soho for his sexual kicks prior
to becoming the film’s first victim to Christopher Lee’s darkly forbidding
Government official, Stratton-Villiers, warning the working class coppers away from Manfred’s case,
there is a sense of darker forces at work above and below the tube-line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As he investigates Manfred’s disappearance,
Calhoun discovers that he is not the first to go missing at Russell Square tube
station. Previous missing persons – a man named Cohen and a grocer from Kilburn
named Panowski suggest that minorities in Britain do not merit a second glance.
However, as Calhoun puts it, Manfred’s disappearance cannot be shut away in a
file somewhere. Privilege and justice, in this picture of Britain, go hand in
hand. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death Line</i> is indeed
a film about consumption, corruption and exploitation. The monster’s cannibal
antics are mirrored in the Manfred’s own consumption of female flesh; his money
buys sexual release and provides him with enough arrogance to objectify any
lone woman who happens to pass him by as a receptacle for his lust. Thus, when
he himself becomes food for the monster and his dying mate, we can’t help
feeling some sense of karma. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a pervasive sense of grime and disease present in
the monster’s lair which sits at the heart of the labyrinth of tunnels nesting
beneath the streets of London. The famous tracking shot which pans across a
butcher’s shop of human remains, places the spectator knee deep in the filth of
maggots and rats taking their rightful place in the food chain. As one of my
students put it, the sense of dirt is inescapable and the accompanying sounds,
the steady metronomic dripping of water and the monster’s groans of despair,
lend a sense of realism to the scene which is missing from its recent remake,
2004’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Creep</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But consumption isn’t the domain of just the cannibals below
the surface. Inspector Calhoun is supplied with a constant stream of tea; he
stuffs sausages into his sidekick’s mouth and gets pissed in an afterhours bout
during which he jokingly threatens the bemused landlord with a summons if he
doesn’t continue serving drinks. Pat and Alex, the two young protagonists who
become enmeshed in the monster’s need to replace his dead mate, serve up a
fried breakfast in scenes of domesticity which ironically mirror those ‘down
below’. And of course there is the symbolic consumption: the machinery of
capitalism which Moloch-like chews up and spits out the unfortunate souls who
happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – the disenfranchised who
could stand for pretty much any of the impoverished who had so much truck with
the successive failures of British government in the early seventies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As a study in man-made monsters it offers a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankenstein</i> for the 1970s, the flotsam
and jetsam of society whose instinct to survive is defeated by a world that is
equally brutal and unforgiving. As Alex says when he and Pat encounter the
dying Manfred, “in New York we just step over [the bodies].” Pat’s response, as
the archetypal nurturing female, is to default to pity although if she had been
alone in the tube station only a few moments before, she too might have dealt
Manfred a meaty blow with her patent yellow thigh-highs. There is genuine pity
for the film’s monster, as much pity as revulsion: does he deserve to die? The scene
in which we see the bodies of his ancestors lying in state on storage racks and
buried with a token or trinket taken from other victims suggests that there is
innate dignity in even the most atavistic of human creatures. The need to build
a past amidst the chaos of the present offers a glimpse into what makes us
civilised. Surrounded by the bones of his ancestors, what does the monster make
of the world above? What does he see there? Furtive encounters between un-consenting
adults, lonely women left to fend for themselves on desolate platforms: no
wonder he is unable to make sense of a world which engenders alienation and discontent.
Could his mantra of ‘mind the doors’, the only words he hears and which he
repeats parrot fashion throughout the film, instead be a comment on borders and
boundaries? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The monster’s transgression
is not in murder and cannibalism: his mistake is in his attempt to breed anew
with a race of people who rejected him in the first place. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*(</span><a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/raw_meat/"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/raw_meat/</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">)</span></div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-5491312540363635942013-03-05T15:26:00.000-08:002013-03-05T15:28:15.260-08:00Picnic at Hanging Rock: a principle of uncertainty<br />
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<em><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“Everything begins and
ends at exactly the right time...”<o:p></o:p></span></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>“Each electron,
therefore, must be passing through both slits at the same time!” Stephen
Hawking- </em>A Brief History of Time</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYQ86KqVO20-kAX3uZAw_Zsi7-an5lBkrruJwqNmCbLGNkBH94_ph5EbnfULAZ-w44tme8lPWoKkqUry2JI48ujFYh3N3C7PcI72OPowOWDPlCen8i422GUfBjza6HHlNiGy2GTR3efn4/s1600/Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYQ86KqVO20-kAX3uZAw_Zsi7-an5lBkrruJwqNmCbLGNkBH94_ph5EbnfULAZ-w44tme8lPWoKkqUry2JI48ujFYh3N3C7PcI72OPowOWDPlCen8i422GUfBjza6HHlNiGy2GTR3efn4/s320/Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock_001.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A
principle of uncertainty underscores Peter Weir’s 1975 film version of Joan
Lindsey’s <em>Picnic at Hanging Rock, </em>a
film that is on the one hand about institutions and the physical and
psychological constraints of life in an Australia that is still politically
under the stranglehold of a monarch residing on the other side of the world but
which is also about the uncertainty of a landscape that is at once profoundly
new and yet primitive and preternatural. The narrative tells the story of four
Australian school girls and their Maths teacher who disappear on a trip to
Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day 1900. After several days of full scale
searching by the authorities, teachers and other members of the school, a
heroic (or is it guilt-ridden?) mission by two young men who might have had
some sort of encounter with the girls results in the finding of one of the
missing pupils, Irma. Note the multiple conditional clauses in the previous
sentence: this is a film that refuses, like the eponymous rock itself, to yield
its meaning to rational investigation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
other girls are never discovered and one of their friends, Sara, distraught at
the prospect of returning to an orphanage because of non-payment of her fees by
her guardians, throws herself from an upstairs window into a greenhouse and
kills herself.</span></div>
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<v:shape id="Picture_x0020_7" o:spid="_x0000_s1030" style="height: 108pt; margin-left: 294.75pt; margin-top: 6.65pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 146.25pt; z-index: 2;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
<v:imagedata cropbottom="24431f" cropleft="15445f" cropright="28882f" croptop="13185f" o:title="" src="file:///C:\Users\Lance\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image003.png">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The theme of imprisonment
pervades almost every scene; the girls and their mistresses struggle with their
own sense of institutionalisation in Appleyard College, a school administered by
a seemingly ruthless and ultimately corrupt matriarch and which is itself
struggling within the financial constraints placed upon it by a combination of
failing creditors and the need to dress itself in the affluence to be expected
by a fee paying school at the end of the Victorian era. The girls themselves
are caged in what Scout in Harper Lee’s <em>To
Kill a Mockingbird</em> calls the ‘starched walls of a pink cotton
penitentiary’, their burgeoning sexuality kept narratively and visually under
wraps in an opening scene in which the girls form a daisy chain in order to
tighten each others’ bodices with maximum efficiency. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ0r0phHlnPZxxvX2r4VLAkGKKMUAH1vTx6fg_KZIF7fxpbL-MzcxU0TW1P373Vn3BUhoxqrWKTdmbwK_ipvzg95mxtzX4CnaGXbY7hJwpkxcFtlANfZO9K6FMl_vLC0MUgDnJTjcZ5xM/s1600/MV5BMTYzMjY5ODk2NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjg0MTc4Ng@@__V1__SX640_SY635_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ0r0phHlnPZxxvX2r4VLAkGKKMUAH1vTx6fg_KZIF7fxpbL-MzcxU0TW1P373Vn3BUhoxqrWKTdmbwK_ipvzg95mxtzX4CnaGXbY7hJwpkxcFtlANfZO9K6FMl_vLC0MUgDnJTjcZ5xM/s320/MV5BMTYzMjY5ODk2NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjg0MTc4Ng@@__V1__SX640_SY635_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This scene, with its
nascent homoerotic undercurrent, points to Michel Foucault’s notion of a
Victorian sexuality that is both incited to discourse (the girls breathlessly
recite Poe’s <em>A Dream within a Dream</em>)
and yet is also buried beneath an opposing discourse of restraint. The
spectator is caught in voyeuristic pleasure (and I am reminded of Leopold Bloom
gazing on at the girls in the Nausicaa passage in <em>Ulysses</em>) and the result is an eroticism that succeeds because of
the <em>covering up</em> of bodies rather than
the revelation of them. Characters are imprisoned by the heat into shaded
enclaves. Perhaps one of the most explicit victims of imprisonment is Sara, who
is forced to remain behind (presumably for her guardian’s non-payment of fees)
and who is cruelly castigated by Mrs Appleyard for not being able to memorise
verbatim <em>The Wreck of the Hesperus</em> as
well as ridiculing the girl’s own attempts at verse<em>. </em>Longfellow’s poem, in which a the daughter of a ship’s captain is
lashed to the mast to prevent her from being thrown overboard by the storm, prefigures
perhaps the most startling of images in the film:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that of Sara physically restrained to a wall in
order to correct her posture by Miss Lumley whilst the other girls enjoy their
daily bout of callisthenics.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But against this background of restraint and imprisonment,
the girls’ disappearance can be read as a form of escape. </span><v:shape alt="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicwZRAKLPOkm0GF5Dz85uV3zGUG8Ghfzm-GYft2a1Evzn9e1ERg_icEX4AcdfdppHlZ9Mkt4QcDncgCQYjntPHC8UOtd9JE2EBm0e5P738VHgfcW8-vZcQ_xncP-A4_ifcZAQwg8G4d7o/s400/Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock_001.jpg" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=picnic+at+hanging+rock&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=nVxmelXih0YogM&tbnid=VfxZ2AbtUy9Y5M:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http://www.paganreading.altervista.org/main.php?doc=Film/Picnic%20at%20Hanging%20Rock&ei=C5gzUZnpAZDK0AWNsoHwAw&bvm=bv.43148975,d.d2k&psig=AFQjCNH3EuNLz29r_K7oGul15BKOz6IxRw&ust=1362421993808620" id="_x0000_s1029" o:button="t" style="height: 109.5pt; margin-left: 3pt; margin-top: 1.55pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 194.5pt; z-index: 4;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></v:fill></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Throughout the film, soft focus
photography places the girls themselves firmly within the gaze of a camera
which emphasises their youth and their aesthetic beauty in a series of filmic
equivalents of Pre-Raphaelite shots. As Miranda begins her ascent onto the
rock, her French mistress Mme de Poitiers comments on the classical beauty of
Miranda, one of the girls who disappears, referring to her as ‘a Botticelli angel’.
This erotic speculation of bodies is also reinforced later on when the two
young men who will eventually lead the search for the missing girls watch Miranda,
Irma and Marion make their tentative way across the terrain, considering what
the girls might look like </span><v:shape alt="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3568/3440363124_e96ce665a7_z.jpg?zz=1" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=picnic+at+hanging+rock&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=_5J3J6ISMpsZPM&tbnid=_t2jbLEke4WWEM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fthevamoose%2F3440363124%2Fin%2Fset-72157620267007513&ei=gm02Ua_ADYHHPP_cgIAG&bvm=bv.43148975,d.ZWU&psig=AFQjCNFq_tEwVtmGs1CbMFULNDXiWxDBqw&ust=1362607550664981" id="_x0000_s1028" o:button="t" style="height: 113.85pt; margin-left: -6pt; margin-top: 194.95pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 203.5pt; z-index: 6;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>beneath</em>
the layers of cotton which serve to conceal bodies rather than reveal. In the
film’s most erotically charged moment, when the girls reach the top of the
rock, the girls remove their stockings in slow motion close ups<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>which fragments their bodies in true <em>Mulveyan </em>fashion and these shots intercut
with low angles of the girls dancing in Pagan abandon beneath the midday sun signify
both a metaphorical and a physical release. Their barefoot ascent through the
dark recesses of the rock are met with indignant horror and revulsion by Edith
who later reports that she saw Miss McGraw <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>running up the rock in her bloomers, another
display of release and escape from the confines placed upon their gender and
their sexuality. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYZELuON5lCiNiEi8yJWCGJvys-H0D9zS9G1MloQd7wRAdBMh7-ccLxg1FaJ5E4zz9hAWrbGFtUaB4KoKd-Jeyv-gwqAw7zZXLYHR-IzBlnEwHzKeu6MqZFp2OapinDCBlKLhF3_6l4tw/s1600/pic31.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYZELuON5lCiNiEi8yJWCGJvys-H0D9zS9G1MloQd7wRAdBMh7-ccLxg1FaJ5E4zz9hAWrbGFtUaB4KoKd-Jeyv-gwqAw7zZXLYHR-IzBlnEwHzKeu6MqZFp2OapinDCBlKLhF3_6l4tw/s320/pic31.jpg" width="320" /></a><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_1" o:spid="_x0000_s1027" style="height: 115.5pt; margin-left: 250.5pt; margin-top: 121.6pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 192pt; z-index: 3;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Weir’s film possesses
the ambience of something akin to folk horror, only here the thing that is
unearthed and awakened is not some relic of a pagan past or a forgotten ritual
that will free the inhibitions of its protagonists; instead it is the mystical
and eerie presence of a landscape with which a Colonial European settler has
not yet (nor will ever) be able to fathom and which will ultimately absorb
whose who engage with its mystical being. The rock itself looms over the
narrative, shifting position and shape under the transformative light of the
unforgiving sun. Languorous shots of the girls seen through apertures and
orifices reinforce the sense of voyeurism in the film but in these point of
view shots, there is a sense that the landscape itself is the voyeur, watching
the human actors as they attempt to penetrate its mysteries. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In a lecture posted on the web, Paul Atkinson and Marcia Pope
comment on the use of sound within the film at the point when the girls
encounter the rock:</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 12pt 0cm 10pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">“it crosses an interesting boundary between
intra-diegetic sound — sound that is explicable within the framed onscreen
narrative, and extra-diegetic sound — sound that comes from outside the frame,
such as soundtrack music or a voiceover. The sound is actually identified in
the script as the sound of cicadas, but it is much more ominous, and we’re
never sure if it is a sound that the characters hear” (see </span><a href="http://velorum.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec10.htm"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://velorum.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec10.htm</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">)
</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; tab-stops: 174.75pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whether the characters hear the
sound is irrelevant: for me, the sound here suggests a heightened Eno-esque
ambience reminiscent of Ligeti’s soundscapes from Kubrick’s <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em> and the suggestion
that, like Kubrick’s monolith, the earth itself has a greater consciousness, one
that can manipulate the warp and woof of time and space. In an essay in this
month’s <em>Sight and Sound </em>(March 2013),
Mark Fisher discusses his own audio-essay <em>On
Vanishing Land</em>, and talks of how landscapes ‘[demand] to be engaged with on
[their] own terms’. For Fisher, we can discover in the landscape a sense of the
eerie which, he states:</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">‘usually concerns agency ...it
suggests an intentionality or an intelligence ... [it] is about the encounter
with the unknown.”</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">By this criterion, <em>Picnic
at Hanging Rock</em> moves from beyond the uncanny (that which should remain
hidden has resurfaced) to the eerie (for Fisher ‘the traces of a departed agent
whose purposes cannot fully be known’), and it is in the rock itself that we
must look for traces of the eerie. It is apposite that the school mistress that
disappears is a Mathematician; even as the girls ascend the rock, she is
contemplating dimension and space. In fact, the uncertainty principle at work
in the geological formations under which she shelters offer a more [im]precise
mathematical dilemma: that the observer can know where something is or where it
is going but not both simultaneously. In its depiction of the eerie, it might be
argued that <em>Picnic at Hanging Rock</em> is
that most Lynchian of films and in its soundtrack especially, one is reminded
of many of Lynch’s most nightmarish scenes:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the red room of <em>Twin Peaks</em>, the
opening scene of <em>Eraserhead</em>, the
seething mass of insect life in <em>Blue
Velvet</em>, or the atmosphere of evil that accompanies <em>Fire Walk with Me</em>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKnzLjzy4XnTvGEget4VrcJkjpjA0jJOVMLv6_zCZRTEGrm73LRGqri2Uj6BDnJ-J8oKANcIboJN81_fRFm78sNaocipWv8rM1SZKAKkoRv8iNvfivA2SBqWNR0STsDXKQ44FjaTpVCMY/s1600/picnic5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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<img border="0" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKnzLjzy4XnTvGEget4VrcJkjpjA0jJOVMLv6_zCZRTEGrm73LRGqri2Uj6BDnJ-J8oKANcIboJN81_fRFm78sNaocipWv8rM1SZKAKkoRv8iNvfivA2SBqWNR0STsDXKQ44FjaTpVCMY/s320/picnic5.jpg" width="320" /></div>
</a><v:shape alt="http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTMYLKEgHQNp9NTOW17p8zQ37TZJPKAkpEfjvsGLBcsPXYvhQ7ttA" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?q=picnic+at+hanging+rock&hl=en&biw=1366&bih=656&tbm=isch&tbnid=gMeN23ORYAsfhM:&imgrefurl=http://www.celtoslavica.de/chiaroscuro/films/picnic/picnic.html&docid=I8Q7s1nrvw3_kM&imgurl=http://www.celtoslavica.de/chiaroscuro/films/picnic/picnic5.jpg&w=405&h=250&ei=Pmw2UYGvFYXSPPrXAQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:31,s:0,i:211&iact=rc&dur=495&sig=114267518792130292674&page=2&tbnh=172&tbnw=270&start=17&ndsp=21&tx=163&ty=45" id="_x0000_s1026" o:button="t" style="height: 137.25pt; margin-left: 229.5pt; margin-top: 18.6pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 223.3pt; z-index: 5;" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
<v:imagedata o:title="ANd9GcTMYLKEgHQNp9NTOW17p8zQ37TZJPKAkpEfjvsGLBcsPXYvhQ7ttA" src="file:///C:\Users\Lance\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image011.jpg">
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In many ways, <em>Picnic at Hanging Rock </em>displays many of the characteristics of folk
horror. Is it nature that is disturbed? Or is it the linearity of time and
space? Just as quantum mechanics permits the existence of parallel narratives
so we must allow for such an event here. The girls’ removal of the trappings
and accoutrements of Victorian sensibility suggests a passing into a different
age. Time has ceased to be: all time has stopped and they are, quite literally
out of time. Their entry into the fissure of the eponymous rock is a re-entry
into the earth, a Venus in reverse perhaps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In arguably Lynch’s greatest narrative of uncertainty, <em>Mulholland Drive</em>, Betty/Camilla
disappear into another story, one that might or might not be a dream, beautiful
arrangements of electron particles which bounce off into a singularity beyond
the narrative into which they were born, only this time instead of the blue box
there is only the rock, the rock which has waited like a celestial guardian for
a million years for this moment.</span><br />Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-19429894056755745002013-01-10T15:22:00.001-08:002013-01-18T16:37:23.857-08:00Folk Horror: the return of the repressed<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">With its emphasis on finding relics from the past that, upon
discovery, release supernatural and malevolent forces on the world, folk horror
(that sub-genre which deals with the pagan, occult rituals of (normally) rural
Britain) has become popular once more. Name-checked on Mark Gatiss’ excellent
<em>History of Horror</em> documentaries, folk-horror became popular in the late sixties
and early seventies, with its apotheosis perhaps in The Wicker Man and, later
on, the <em>BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas</em> tales such as <em>Stigma</em>. However, even
into the eighties the <em>Hammer House of Horror</em> TV series and of course Roald
Dahl’s <em>Tales of the Unexpected</em>, offered us pictures of the urban/suburban
uncanny. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The uncanny is, of course, an apposite term. For Freud, the
uncanny is that which refused to lie down, to be repressed and whether it be
psychosomatic neurosis, suppressed sexual urges, the dread of the doppelganger,
or simply becoming lost in a labyrinth, the notion of the uncanny is wrapped up
in the endless return, the sense of something Other out there that threatens
the cosiness of our settled existence. And so, the uncovering of Menhir stones
in <em>Stigma</em>, the discovery of parched ancient manuscript from behind oak panelled
walls in <em>Number 13</em>, or the finding of ancient artefacts on the Norfolk coastline in <em>Whistle and I'll Come to You</em> all suggest
the return of that which was meant to be hidden – or maybe that which desired to be
found. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this sense, the contemporary resurgence of interest in
folk-horror is itself a return of the repressed. Perhaps only the aficionado, or the
nostalgic, had retained interest in such artefacts as the aforementioned film and TV programmes. They had passed into faerie, into legend of a
by-gone age when TV’s heart stopped at midnight and we were forced to go to bed
with the cackles of a hapless witch echoing down cold hallways. Instead, the
cosy horror of Hammer and Amicus, of Roald Dahl and MR James, was replaced by a
different suburban terror: of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, of Freddy
Krueger and Maphead; and then, when we had had our fill of vengeful
misanthropists, we fell into pastiche and torture-porn. Now there is a new type
of horror, bastard off-spring of <em>Cannibal Holocaust</em> and <em>Poltergeist</em>. It is the
found-footage horror, a different type of ‘folk horror’, itself reliant upon
the discovery of a lost text which will open up a new world of terror: from the
<em>Blair Witch Project</em> and <em>Ringu</em> to <em>[Rec], Cloverfield</em> and more recently <em>V/H/S</em>, we
find ourselves drawn to that which is hidden, legends not carved in stone or
hidden in the dark earth, but drawn with light onto ribbons of film, or stored
on a hard-drive, itself a mysterious, bottomless vault that when opened can
unleash a long forgotten evil. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And so we return, full circle once more, to folk horror
traditions. This summer, the BFI released a deluxe package of the Christmas
Ghost Stories. There is, in the digging up of these relics from seventies and
eighties TV/film, an element of archaeology in itself. In this digital age, are
we looking for something a little more tangible perhaps? Is the uncertainty or
even fear of a Britain being overwhelmed with concrete and steel directing us
back to a past where we could actually see the life-forces of a
pagan/rural/occult world before us? And are these films a way of restoring past
certainties and of course uncertainties? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">See <a href="http://www.chrisvscinema.com/?p=821">http://www.chrisvscinema.com/?p=821</a> for an interesting discussion of folk horror. </span></div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-4791216222813033662012-11-10T13:35:00.000-08:002012-11-10T13:35:11.454-08:00Vertigo, Borges and the deferral of death
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The relationship between film and dreaming is a well
documented one. In a darkened theatre, on our ipads and ipods, or in the
comfort of our own living rooms our fantasies are projected on to a liminal
non-space, a screen that offers up to us a surrogate existence, a life that we
might desire, a story in which we might want to exist. For an hour or two we
want to be trapped in this world (despite the urge to press pause and grab a
beer if you’re watching in DVD); we identify with its stars (Dyer) or we fetishise
the female form in voyeuristic pleasure (Mulvey). In these dreams, we can
indulge our desires, our pleasures, enter an uncanny world that re-presents our
own world, darkly, through its looking glass. And in absorbing the on screen
world, in transferring its uncertainty and fear onto our own lives, we
relinquish ourselves to masochistic abandon and the fear of death, the fear of
the Other, the fear of loss, </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fear of falling.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dreams and falling. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Powell and Pressbuger’s <em>A Matter of Life and Death</em>, David
Niven’s pilot falls to the ground and as he does so a new life opens up for
him; in <em>The Wizard of Oz</em>, as the tornado hits her Uncle’s farm, Dorothy Gale’s
fear of being swept into the air and dashed on to the Kansas fields elicits a
dream to end all dreams. In <em>Mulholland Drive</em>, the fall and the dream are one,
the descent into the Valley of Dolls and Death, the gunshot to the head that
releases guilt and dreams, and the psychopomps that lead us to the Other world.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And then there is<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Vertigo</i>.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Robin Woods and Chris Marker amongst others have made the tantalising
connection between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vertigo, </i>dreaming
and the oneiric world. For Woods, everything in <em>Vertigo</em> that occurs after the
opening sequence (which leaves Scottie Ferguson dangling from a San Francisco
rooftop) is a dream; for Marker, the second half of the film is the anguished
reverie of Ferguson’s diseased and guilt-ridden mind. Elsewhere, in his monograph
on<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Vertigo</i> Charles Barr draws
comparisons with that other great ‘dream-falling’ narrative, Ambrose Bierce’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Incident at Owl Creek</i> in which a
convicted man, at the moment of his being hanged, apparently escapes <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>only for the reader that the ensuing narrative
adventure is merely the dying wish fulfilment of the hanged man. Recently, I
read Jorge Luis Borges' short story <em>The Secret Miracle</em> in which the narrator,
Jaromir Hladik ruminates on the idea that if reality does not coincide ‘with
our anticipation of it’ then it is logical to surmise ‘that to see a
circumstantial detail is to prevent it happening’. So, with his own execution
imminent, Hladik begins to imagine the circumstances of his own death in the
expectation that they will fail to materialise and as the report of the guns
that are to kill him sound out, time stands still, long enough for Hladik to
conclude a drama that he had constructed in his imagination. And when the drama
is complete, Hladik dies. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>Vertigo </em>is less about Ambrose Bierce than about Borges’ Jaromir
Hladik. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cinema is masochistic; the deferred gratification of
narrative pleasure, the fort/da of both image and tale contains within itself
the jouissance of pain; in the masochistic longing of Hladik lie echoes (or
foreshadowing, for Jaromir Hladik precedes Ferguson by two years) of Scottie’s
own liebestod and our own agonies. In Borges' story, itself based on the premise
of Zeno’s paradox against time in which a moving object can never reach its
target because it first has to travel half its distance and so forth, the
object of desire is the focal point of reflection, the point of almost zero in
an always-disappearing perspective. Time, or the end of time, cannot be
reached. The irony with Hladik is that once he completes the narrative that
desires to be born in his imagination, the narrative that defers his death just
as Scheherazade’s narratives deferred her own execution in that 1001 nights,
then he dies. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And so Scottie Ferguson. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Madeleine Elster, Scottie Ferguson finds his home, that
place that all men desire. She reveals its presence to Scottie ("Remember that I
love you") even at the moment that she takes it away. Home – unheimlich – the
place where each man feels at home. The womb. The birth place. Good old Freud;
we can always return to him can we not? </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“I found myself in a district about whose character I could<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>not long remain in doubt. Only heavily
made-up women were to be seen at the windows of the little houses and I hastily
left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for
some time without asking the way I suddenly found myself back in the same
street, where my presence began to attract attention.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Freud’s repeated return to this spot is described as ‘uncanny’
and losing one’s way, ‘in the woods’, ‘groping around in the dark ... searching
for the door’ can all be seen as part of this ‘unintentional return’. But how unintentional?
There is, in Freud’s anecdote, a sense that ‘there the doctor must administer
to himself’ his own psychoanalysis and that Freud’s return is not unintentional
at all. It too is a deferral, the impulsive compulsion to repeat of the
unconscious mind, a deferral of jouissance, a masochistic desire to revisit
scenes of shameful desires. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And so Scottie must relive his own shameful desires. Haunted
by the memory of Madeleine he falls into the abyss of memory and become fixated
on the one thing that can perhaps free him from his despair – Carlotta’s
necklace, the red ruby, a blood red ovoid wound with all its Freudian
symbolism.. Good old Scottie: Scottie who chased pain, who dangled over its
precipices; Scottie who withdrew from his relationship with his mother, Midge.
And so, in his dream fever, when we the spectator sees the necklace not once
but two three times, in that moment, Scottie’s diseased brain conjures up a
narrative of desire that will allow him to achieve its fulfilment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as Hladik weaves a ‘lofty, invisible
labyrinth’, often returning to the original version before reworking the story
just as his physical universe has come to a halt, so we can read into the
second half of <em>Vertigo</em> a re-working of the first. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All we know about Scottie at the beginning of the second part is that
he is in a state of total catatonia, that he is ‘somewhere else’, that it
‘could last a long time’ (according to the doctor), that he loved a dead woman
‘and still does’ (according to Midge). Is it too absurd to imagine that this
agonizing, though reasonable, and obstinate soul (‘hard-hitting’ says Gavin),
imagined this totally extravagant scenario, full of unbelievable coincidences
and entanglements, yet logical enough to drive one to the one salvatory
conclusion: this woman is not dead, I can find her again?</i> (Chris Marker,
Free Replay)</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And so Scottie reworks the narrative of the first part of the
film into the dream-narrative of the second part, for in his deferral of Death,
Scottie is toying with us all; the story he has conjured up for himself is a
nightmare, ending in the uncanny repetition of the first narrative, a woman,
Madeleine, falling to her death on the burnished tiles that skirt the roof of
Mission San Juan Bautista. And so the film ends, just as the second part ends.
In his dream state, Scottie has at least managed to climb the stairs, to
overcome the acrophobia which condemned Madeline to her first death. Now he
looks on at the scurrying, beetling figures below, still lost in his dream,
deferring his death once more.</span></div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-80322961253371998022012-09-23T02:12:00.003-07:002012-09-23T15:00:24.863-07:00The Graduate and The Male Gaze<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Laura Mulvey’s influential 1970s essay <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema</i> discusses the idea of the
‘male gaze’ in classical Hollywood cinema. The concept of the male gaze rests on the idea that
women are objectified for the pleasure of men and that women on screen are
enjoyed in voyeuristic pleasure by male observers both in the narrative of the
film and in the audience. In fact, according to Mulvey, the cinema satisfies a primordial desire in all of us which is – to look.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mulvey’s theory rests on the three aspects of ‘the gaze’ in
both the narrative world of the film and the social contexts in which a film is
viewed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The gaze of the characters at each other</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The gaze of the camera</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">3.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The gaze of the spectator</span><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p><br />
</div>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Gaze of the Characters at Each Other</span></span></i></b><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">First, let’s take point number one. Mulvey’s argument is
that in classical Hollywood films, we are encouraged to see the world through
the gaze of a primarily male protagonist, mainly because of the dominance in Hollywood
editing of the combination of objective and subjective shots. Hitchcock built a
theory of editing around this (via Lev Kuleshov and the associative editing of
the Russian Formalists) – see this <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">youtube
clip</b> </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
to see how Hitchcock reveals his manipulation of the edit to emphasise the gaze
of the male protagonist and determine the spectator’s response to this gaze. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look for at these two shots from <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu0JgR2VIP4j04ih4xxrozBn2PxM6gtTfMJnn8DBQxHJB-0HxOGNMkBBJWqkoUtCSw4BF9FQjs7IWl3U6e_oeyBW4yw_FS2YZSp0-QOoxbnbWAZXSk95d-V_uqvux-tAZREI6omvFzpGA/s1600/PDVD_173.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu0JgR2VIP4j04ih4xxrozBn2PxM6gtTfMJnn8DBQxHJB-0HxOGNMkBBJWqkoUtCSw4BF9FQjs7IWl3U6e_oeyBW4yw_FS2YZSp0-QOoxbnbWAZXSk95d-V_uqvux-tAZREI6omvFzpGA/s200/PDVD_173.BMP" title="" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo_GdZrmHxaRcZIfUkTMew-atvuPhTU5g_xx1uSSnF5U0mcBKO9Dz8OvHNMb8oFTMjvinQuFHdIOSVSNPmcXytuc7s4eY86DaPACOr0HsB0oL2TVR1rjHcKhorJJd3Hc4qmA39sGNu_o0/s1600/PDVD_174.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo_GdZrmHxaRcZIfUkTMew-atvuPhTU5g_xx1uSSnF5U0mcBKO9Dz8OvHNMb8oFTMjvinQuFHdIOSVSNPmcXytuc7s4eY86DaPACOr0HsB0oL2TVR1rjHcKhorJJd3Hc4qmA39sGNu_o0/s200/PDVD_174.BMP" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
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</v:path></v:stroke></span></v:shapetype><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this sequence, we see first a shot of Ben looking and then a shot
of what he sees, in this case Elaine who is leaving home for Berkeley. Throught the obscured point of view shot, the spectator is placed securely in the position of a watching Ben. Of course, there are many eye-line
matches from Ben to other objects in the film but for Mulvey the dominance in Hollywood cinema of
shots involving a man looking at a woman is exemplified here and for Mulvey, this <em>look</em> is deeply sexualised and shows that
men’s pleasure of looking is very much bound up with desire. </span><span style="mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-no-proof: yes;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span><br />
<span style="mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-no-proof: yes;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br />
<span style="mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-no-proof: yes;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">According to Mulvey, when we watch a film we do two things (sometimes at the same time). </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-no-proof: yes;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 54pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We identify with the characters on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>screen (which can be called NARCISSISM) or</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 54pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We look at the characters with erotic pleasure (which is called VOYERURISM)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Think of the montage set to the music of <em>Scarborough Fair</em> in <em>The Graduate</em>. There are multiple shots of Ben alone gazing at Elaine; the music is wistful, melancholic and we are persuaded to feel sorry for Ben, to feel his sense of loss (this is narcissisism). So in this sense, Mulvey's theory makes absolute sense - or does it?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-no-proof: yes;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Interestingly (and fittingly for a film that was influenced by the French New Wave and should perhaps transgress traditional cinematic values) th</span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ere are many times
when we don’t follow Ben’s point of view, when the camera refuses to show us
what he looks at.
For example, when Ben is on the travelator at the airport during the opening
scene, the camera tracking him as he moves forward, blankly, towards a future uncertain, he turns to look at a woman who passes by on the other side but we do
not get the accompanying eye-line match, suggesting that this look was not a desirous gaze. A few moments later, as Ben approaches
the glass doors that will lead him out of the airport concourse, he waves and
smiles at invisible bodies (parents perhaps?) beyond the shot and again we do
not cut to the object of his gaze. These instances of an audience’s frustrated
look help us feel Ben’s own sense of alienation and claustrophobia. Is this a contradiction to Mulvey's theory of the gaze? Perhaps, but these shots in which we are intricately linked to Ben's movements and his place in the frame merely serve to bind us closer to the male protagonist. In fact, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">during the
entire film, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>audience is forced to
see the world from Ben’s perspective (after all he is the main protagonist) and
this is conveyed not by the eye-line match but by the over-the-shoulder shot
which reveals the world from Ben’s standpoint if not his visual eye-line. In
this way, we are not Ben but we are very much on his shoulder and part of his
world. </span></div>
</div>
</span></span></span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span></i></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Gaze of the Camera</span></span></i></b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfYkczEmB69VzADaxK7lqc_YHh8zKHYe6pyNGcGWPNplR1eG9Zb42b1p0H-zGl0alEy_ixDMIuqESO2ZX0UIJIY2EF_Nhp_2Ji0wCNXh0oj0bGRAJIfG1m8RtCBc7Y9So0-EFU3mSJBQw/s1600/PDVD_035.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfYkczEmB69VzADaxK7lqc_YHh8zKHYe6pyNGcGWPNplR1eG9Zb42b1p0H-zGl0alEy_ixDMIuqESO2ZX0UIJIY2EF_Nhp_2Ji0wCNXh0oj0bGRAJIfG1m8RtCBc7Y9So0-EFU3mSJBQw/s200/PDVD_035.BMP" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">By claiming that the gaze of the camera also favours a
masculine perspective is not difficult to imagine. Think about how many film
directors are male, how many film studios are owned by men, how the companies
financing the studios might well be owned by men and you can see that a
PATRIARCHAL SYSTEM is in place to make the male gaze the dominant one. In this
memorable shot from <em>The Graduate,</em> we see Ben ‘trapped’ beneath the apex of Mrs
Robinson’s bent knee. Although the focus of the shot is clearly Ben and the symbolism
suggests a dominant and aggressive female sexuality, Mrs Robinson’s leg is
objectified: it frames the shot and the camera is placed in a sexually
suggestive position. There are other moments in the film when a woman’s body is
objectified: the scene in the Whisky-a-Go-Go when we see the stripper , the shot
of Mrs Robinson’s stockinged leg in the room at the Taft Hotel. All of these encourage
a woman’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (as Mulvey calls it) and suggest that the </span><v:shape alt="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSvNSz_rvVr9Pr5d8Sd_Ya6iBFF3TiPZ34R3-_HfpqUnVeauDnZ" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&hl=en&biw=1366&bih=656&tbm=isch&tbnid=N5jCWTUKVRSU3M:&imgrefurl=http://www.garboforever.com/Did_tey_meet.htm&docid=Yq6XMVdZsSUS4M&imgurl=http://www.garboforever.com/Bilder/Lover-Friends/Marlene_Dietrich-04.jpg&w=303&h=392&ei=5sdeUMz7GvTJ0AX2t4C4Cg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=1032&vpy=268&dur=323&hovh=255&hovw=197&tx=122&ty=166&sig=101347640553485742585&page=2&tbnh=142&tbnw=117&start=26&ndsp=33&ved=1t:429,r:6,s:26,i:232" id="rg_hi" o:button="t" o:spid="_x0000_s1031" style="height: 158.85pt; margin-left: 344.9pt; margin-top: 39.5pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 121.85pt; z-index: -1;" type="#_x0000_t75" wrapcoords="-266 0 -266 21416 21538 21416 21538 0 -266 0"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
<v:imagedata o:title="ANd9GcSvNSz_rvVr9Pr5d8Sd_Ya6iBFF3TiPZ34R3-_HfpqUnVeauDnZ" src="file:///C:\Users\Lance\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image009.jpg">
<w:wrap type="tight">
</w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;">gaze, even when it is not taken from Ben’s point
of view, is male. </span></div>
<div style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UpjbMJ4HqXXngyuzdmQPEJYLvupvzHEDXalPhqg1PGz2YlzypTmdsY5mxg87m-564PpiMasueoHgfr-IFaqiWVfngJrJfIIVD3CSfx03ksvg6DM5S1CUEc20sl1oKvyBPPSRt11ngt8/s1600/Dietrich.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UpjbMJ4HqXXngyuzdmQPEJYLvupvzHEDXalPhqg1PGz2YlzypTmdsY5mxg87m-564PpiMasueoHgfr-IFaqiWVfngJrJfIIVD3CSfx03ksvg6DM5S1CUEc20sl1oKvyBPPSRt11ngt8/s200/Dietrich.jpg" width="154" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UpjbMJ4HqXXngyuzdmQPEJYLvupvzHEDXalPhqg1PGz2YlzypTmdsY5mxg87m-564PpiMasueoHgfr-IFaqiWVfngJrJfIIVD3CSfx03ksvg6DM5S1CUEc20sl1oKvyBPPSRt11ngt8/s1600/Dietrich.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The role of lighting
also serves to highlight women as an object to be gazed at. Lighting systems
were specifically designed to emphasise a female star’s body, with high key
lighting bathing Hollywood icons such as Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe in
bright, dazzling glory. Other forms of lighting, low key lighting, for example,
have served to emphasise the contours of a woman’s body or face: look at his
image of Marlene Dietrich in which top lighting is used to bathe her face in an
angelic glow but serves to leave the rest of her body shrouded in darkness,
offering connotations of a dual persona <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- the Madonna and the whore<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- which Dietrich of course often presented in
her films. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i></b>, lighting is used
effectively to endow Elaine with an innocent glow, drawing our (and Ben’s)
attention to her. But it’s not only Elaine. And in the second shot, look at the way that our focus is
kept on Mrs Robinson whilst Ben is in shadow. </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span></i></b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Gaze of the Spectator</span></span></i></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Although Dustin Hoffman is the star of the film, it is the
women whose bodies are objectified and fetishised for the gaze of the viewing
audience. Elaine, Mrs Robinson and of course the stripper are all presented as
objects of Ben’s gaze and, through the positioning of the camera and lighting,
the audience are persuaded to see the world through his eyes. We cannot escape
what the camera puts in front of us. The publicity material for the film foregrounded
Mrs Robinson’s stockinged leg, with Ben looking down on this object of desire.
This famous image points up what Mulvey called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fetishisation</i>. To fetishise something is to focus obsessively on an
object that is part of the thing that threatens us: in this way, one can
reassert power and control over the thing itself. Men, scared of being ‘castrated’
(psychologically that is) by a woman will fetishise its body parts (you’ve
heard the rather crude phrase – “I’m a breast man” or “I’m a legs man” – well,
there it is!). By refusing to recognise a woman as ‘a whole’ then man reduces
her to a fragment. Look at these two shots from the scene when Mrs Robinson ‘traps’
Ben in Elaine’s bedroom:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The spectator sees Mrs Robinson’s body through Ben’s eyes in
a series of flashed shots that reveal breasts, stomach and hips: the woman’s
body is fragmented. Now you could argue that Ben certainly doesn’t feel in
control at this point: however, Ben fears Mrs Robinson’s body parts and the
camera emphasises these parts to the audience in an explicit and comical way. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Problems with Mulvey...</span></i></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What happens when we look at <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>men?</span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">For Mulvey, the male role in films was an active one. Men’s
role in films is ‘to do stuff’ – fight, chase, investigate whereas women tend
to slow down the narrative (they prevent the man from facing his destiny by
getting him to fall in love, or they put things in the way of the detective by offering
him sex instead of solutions – see films noir). Here <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i></b> seems to
contradict Mulvey’s theory. Ben doesn’t do much ‘acting’ in the first half of
the film: in fact, he spends his time drifting along in much the same way as he
sleeps on his sun lounger in his parent’s pool and it is Mrs Robinson who is
the ‘actor’, the catalyst for his own action. Perhaps Ben’s non-action is his
action, so to speak. The film is a rites-of-passage narrative: Ben only reacts
when he sees the pain he has caused Elaine in the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. Until then,
he has been infantilised, beginning a journey of non-discovery; the ultimate objective
for Ben is to find a future that doesn’t scare him and Mrs Robinson prevents
this, shunting him into a world of bodies and sex. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">And what about women who watch the film? Well, Mulvey says that women are either forced to identify with the ‘objectified female’ and measure herself against male expectations, or they inhabit a male point of view of the world and judge the female characters through his eyes. </span></span><br />
<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Male Body</span></i></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But what about male bodies? Does Mulvey’s argument about the
male gaze extend to viewing the male body? Mulvey didn’t discuss this in her
essay but many cultural theorists have done so since. Placing the male body on
display in films appears to feminise him, turn him into an object of ‘the
gaze’. To counteract this, whenever the male body is naked, it is often engaged
in ‘masculine’ activities such as combat, or it is being tortured or injured in
some way. If you look at the opening scene to <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saturday Night Fever</i></b>,
John Travolta’s character is strutting along the streets of Brooklyn,
immaculately dressed and carefully coiffured: to all extent his body is quite
‘feminine’. However, to counteract this, he carries a tin of paint which points
up a more masculine trait and, to emphasise his manly appetite, he orders two
pizza slices and devours them with atavistic pleasure. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So let’s look at Ben. On several occasions we see Ben’s
body. Look at these two shots. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the first he is lying on the sun-lounger and the dazzling
crystals of light suggest that his body too is being put on display for our
pleasure. However, we can see that he holds a can of beer; moreover, the can is
placed in quite a suggestive place and draws our attention to his crotch which
suggests his phallic power. In the second shot, once again we see Ben in a
female space: the bathroom. He is naked to the waist and joined by his mother
which not only links to his infantilism but adds to the femininity of the shot
(think of the moment when Ben goes to the student halls and talks to the
college boys – they are all together in the showers, not afraid to share their
bodies with each other). However, can you see how Ben’s masculinity is
confirmed by the liberal application of shaving cream and then, a little later
in the scene, he nicks himself with the razor drawing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>blood from his<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hand? Once again, the male body is ‘marked’
to avoid it being too feminine.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">On the whole, it is interesting to analyse <em>The Graduate</em> from Mulvey's theory of the male gaze. Through it's objectification of Mrs Robinson, the eye-line matches from Ben to the female body, his voyeuristic 'pleasure' in watching Elaine all seem to connect with the theory. But there are problems: in many shots, Ben is the object of the gaze (although we have argued that his 'to-be-looked-at-ness' is qualified by clearly masculine motifs); also, Ben is more often than not sharing the shot with either Elaine or Mrs Robinson, thus implicating the spectator in their own voyeuristic pleasure. </span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7015615814240147618.post-28662442905309712402012-08-07T15:09:00.001-07:002012-08-07T15:13:04.418-07:00California Dreaming - The Graduate<br />
Much has been made of <strong><i>The Graduate's</i></strong> lack of
engagement with the real issues of the sixties - its failure to make any
reference to Vietnam, the Berkeley campus protests or even the summer of love
which occurred on its very doorstep - but, having returned to the film recently
to prepare for teaching a Film Studies class, I was struck by the absence of
references to work or employment, and in a film which posits success on the
meritocracy of sixties USA, I found this rather curious. But before I go on to
this, let's back track a little. <br />
<br />
I don't believe that films should reflect every aspect of the era in which
they are produced: doing so can very quickly date a text and although of
interest to historicists perhaps, it can produce some cringeworthy effects. <em>Easy
Rider</em>, although a film that helped turn Hollywood on its head, can feel
alienating to a young audience. I have been teaching Dennis Kelly's DNA
recently and I was struck by the absence of contemporary references in the
play: there is a text about an alienated gang of youths in the modern world and
not once do they get their phones out. There is something 'future proof' about
the the elision of such contemporary references and I think that <strong><i>The
Graduate</i></strong> falls into such a category. It doesn't have to be a news bulletin to situate itself in its baby boomer world,
instead the sixties seems to permeate through its own particular, well, DNA.
Maybe Foucault might have something to say about this: his episteme or the
unconscious structures which underpin the production of knowledge in a
particular period might be one way to see the mode of discourse within the film
and that the conflicts between the two generations, Nichol's deployment of New
Wave cinematography, the contrasting soundtrack that marries Simon and
Garfunkel's pop-folk with the muzak of the Taft Hotel, the incongruity of a
Jewish New Yorker playing an upper-middle class WASP all combine to give the
film its own discourse of transgression. <br />
<br />
And yet, where is the work? There is talk of work, yes: the future is plastics
says one of Mr Braddock's friends, as if he were an oracle providing Benjamin
with the seeds of his own downfall. And there are people at work: the stripper,
the mechanic, the priest, the bell-boys and receptionists, but all these are
there to serve the purposes of the protagonists. None of the main characters
are defined by their particular occupations (we do learn that Mr Braddock and
Mr Robinson are business partners but what their business is remains unclear)
and therefore roles in society, despite Ben's father's anxieties about what his
son is going to do with his life. It as if the idea of work has been excised
from Benjamin's vision of the world, as ephemeral as the dancing crystals of
light that reflect from the dream-like surface of the pool on which he floats.
Work is for others, to provide the hero with the tools required to assist him
in his quest: the way to the church, a room for the night.<br />
<br />
<o:p> </o:p>One way of exploring this absence is to see the film as a projection of
Benjamin's own sleeping mind, perhaps. Nichol's locates the film's stylistics
firmly within the observational range of Ben. We never venture from his
viewpoint (Nichols did shoot some footage and voice overs that deviated from
this but they never made the final edit). It is as if Benjamin is stuck in a
dream-world where life revolves around desire and the transgression of the
prohibitions that surround it. The first shot in the film is an extreme
close-up of Benjamin as he sits immobile on an aeroplane about to touch down in
Los Angeles. Nichols then zooms out to show us the rest of the cabin and Ben
loses himself in this little crowd. He sleepwalks along the travelator and the
film then jump cuts to another shot of Ben, his head in front of a fish tank,
submerged, drowning. There are many scenes in which Benjamin is sleeping or
relaxing: on the sun lounger in his parents’ pool, for example; in front of the
TV whilst Mrs Robinson moves past in a hazy blur. Scenes involving glass,
mirrors, all suggest Ben’s alienation, yes, but they also suggest a screen
behind which Ben sees his own life unfolding in a steady procession of roles that
he might or might not fulfil. <br />
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<br />
Compare the opening shot with the closing two shots. Ben’s head fills the
space to the right hand side of the screen and in the penultimate shot the left
side of the screen is filled by Elaine’s angelic presence. Now look at the next
shot: it is taken from a 180 degree reverse of the previous shot. For
logistical purposes (to get the surprised/amazed faces of the other faces into
the shot, perhaps), Ben is turned slightly to his right and there is a clear
physical space existing between Elaine and he that was not present in the preceding
shot. Perhaps, in a fantastical reading of the film (just as, say, some critics
have suggested that the events of Vertigo all occur in Scotty’s imagination as
he dangles precariously from the San Francisco rooftops – just how did he get
down from there?) one could imagine that the events between Ben on the aeroplane
and Ben finding himself next to a beautiful woman on a bus all occur in Ben’s
imagination. Perhaps.Lance Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489076261751176365noreply@blogger.com2