“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” The Eagles, Hotel California
In the oneiric emptiness of its hotel setting, Daughters of Darkness (1971) directed by Harry Kumel is both a
contemporary of Visconti’s Death in
Venice (1971) as well as foreshadowing the primal horror of Don’t Look Now (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.
Daughters of Darkness 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 Martin 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 Martin’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 Dexter, 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.
The vampire film will often begin
this way: the traveller in an unknown land seeking the monster in his lair
(Todd Browning’s Dracula, 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 (Dracula: Prince of Darkness,
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, Carmilla. 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.
Travelling in Death in Venice
and Don’t Look Now 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. 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 Stones of Venice)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 Comfort
of Strangers dealt with a similar narrative, with Rupert Everett and
Natasha Richardson playing a naive young
couple who become embroiled in a destructive relationship with the murderous Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren.
Insofar as location
is concerned, Daughters of Darkness
could almost be a harbinger for the watery deaths that we encounter in Don’t Look Now: 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.
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.
The Ostend of Daughters of Darkness
although historically and architecturally less glamorous than Venice shares the
sense of isolation both in the out-of-season Venice depicted in Don’t Look Now 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
Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad, 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.
In its languorous depiction of empty hotel spaces, Daughters of Darkness seems to come from the same gene pool as Last Year in Marienbad (1961) , The Shining
(1980), Lost in Translation (2003), as well as Death in Venice, and Don’t Look Now. 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.
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 (Moving Pictures/Stopping Places) Clarke et al comment on the fact
that hotels are almost paradoxical: fixed, constant places within a world in
motion:
“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)
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.
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 (Altuntas p100). 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 Death
in Venice, 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 Don’t
Look Now, 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’ Last Year in Marienbad, 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 Daughters
of Darkness, the hotel’s frontage looms over the imagination.
Perhaps it is
no coincidence that Delphine Seyrig inhabits both narratives: as the Countess
Bathory in Daughters and as ‘the
woman’ in Resnais’ earlier film. In both films, 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.
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, Les Diaboliques (1954): 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. In Don’t Look Now, 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 Vampyr
(1932) in which the young man Gray experiences shadowy encounters that lead him
into a labyrinth of repetition and death; the McKittrick Hotel in Vertigo, 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!
In all
these films, the hotel is a place of crisis, akin to Michel Foucault’s
heteropias, places outside of time and space even. “Idleness,” writes Foucault in his essay ‘On Other Places’ 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. In Don’t
Look Now, the Baxters are in crisis; so too is Aschenbach in Death in Venice. The hotel can be a
space in which crisis is shut out, deferred or erased – see also Jim Jarmusch’s
Mystery Train (1989); but it can also
be the catalyst for crisis itself, as in Kubrick’s The Shining. 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. 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 “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”.
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.
Another,
more telling principle of heterotopic space is “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”.
In its eerie
emptiness, the unnamed hotel (it was filmed at the Astoria
Hotel in Brussels and Hotel des
Thermes 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.
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?
References:
“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” The Eagles, Hotel California
