Possession part one

 

Possession – Andrezj Zulawski 1981

Two worlds exist within Zulawski’s Possession (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.

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 Victor Galstyan writes:

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.[1]

I have recently been reading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.  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 being and nothingness. 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 Possession 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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.  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.

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.

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

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: “.

Earlier, Mark claims to Helen that he is at war with all women to which Helen replies:

“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.”

The notion of Woman as embodiment of disease is as old as Eve; in Possession, 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.

“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’”

What Possession 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

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.

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[1] http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/35/possession_dvd/

Sleeping Jesus and the Green Goblin

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://www.earlyworkspress.co.uk/publications.htm

Vampire Weekend: the hotel and Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness

“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:

Foucault - http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

Altuntas - http://www.academia.edu/521447/Hotel_as_a_Double_Metaphor_Space_Representation_Reality_and_Beyond

Clarke et al: http://www.scribd.com/doc/80751414/Moving-Pictures-Stopping-Places-Hotels-and-Motels-on-Film

 

 

"You dream too much of water": abjection and defilement in Les Diaboliques

Two women, one man and a swimming pool.  Sunset Boulevard meets Bound in a film that might have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I am talking about Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, 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 The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, The Last Seduction), 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  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,  we learn that (and I’m going to give the  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.

Les Diaboliques 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  (who were also responsible for D’Entre les Morts or Amongst the Dead,  later filmed by Hitchcock as Vertigo) 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:  she is both infantilised (with her braided hair and chequered dress she looks more like Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz -  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).

It is this inversion of roles, or as Virginie Selavy puts it “the dissolution of certainties” (http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2011/03/04/les-diaboliques/), which makes Les Diaboliques 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 Psycho  - 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  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.  

 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:

“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)

I like to think of films by David Cronenberg – The Brood, Videodrome, Slither, Crash, The Naked Lunch – 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 Les Diaboliques, water is that marginal space between worlds; it both cleanses and defiles. Interestingly, one of the teachers at the school is called Monsieur Drain 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  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.

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  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.

Why does Les Diaboliques reveal such a rich ‘abject’ reading?  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.

Death Line and the sociology of cannibalism

Two years before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 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 Deathline (aka Raw Meat in the United States), and as far as British horror goes,  many horror aficionados, from Kim Newman to Edgar Wright postulate this film as one of the best British horror movies of the seventies.

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.  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.

Death Line 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.

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 Creep.

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.

As a study in man-made monsters it offers a Frankenstein 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?  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.

*(http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/raw_meat/)

Picnic at Hanging Rock: a principle of uncertainty

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time...”

“Each electron, therefore, must be passing through both slits at the same time!” Stephen Hawking- A Brief History of Time

A principle of uncertainty underscores Peter Weir’s 1975 film version of Joan Lindsey’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, 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.  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.

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 To Kill a Mockingbird 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.

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 A Dream within a Dream) 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 Ulysses) and the result is an eroticism that succeeds because of the covering up 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 The Wreck of the Hesperus as well as ridiculing the girl’s own attempts at verse. 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:  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.

But against this background of restraint and imprisonment, the girls’ disappearance can be read as a form of escape. 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 beneath 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  which fragments their bodies in true Mulveyan 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  running up the rock in her bloomers, another display of release and escape from the confines placed upon their gender and their sexuality.

 

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.

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:

“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 http://velorum.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec10.htm)

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 2001: A Space Odyssey 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 Sight and Sound (March 2013), Mark Fisher discusses his own audio-essay On Vanishing Land, 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:

‘usually concerns agency ...it suggests an intentionality or an intelligence ... [it] is about the encounter with the unknown.”

By this criterion, Picnic at Hanging Rock 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 Picnic at Hanging Rock is that most Lynchian of films and in its soundtrack especially, one is reminded of many of Lynch’s most nightmarish scenes:  the red room of Twin Peaks, the opening scene of Eraserhead, the seething mass of insect life in Blue Velvet, or the atmosphere of evil that accompanies Fire Walk with Me.

 

In many ways, Picnic at Hanging Rock 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.  In arguably Lynch’s greatest narrative of uncertainty, Mulholland Drive, 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.

Folk Horror: the return of the repressed

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 History of Horror documentaries, folk-horror became popular in the late sixties and early seventies, with its apotheosis perhaps in The Wicker Man and, later on, the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas tales such as Stigma. However, even into the eighties the Hammer House of Horror TV series and of course Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, offered us pictures of the urban/suburban uncanny.

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 Stigma, the discovery of parched ancient manuscript from behind oak panelled walls in Number 13, or the finding of ancient artefacts on the Norfolk coastline in Whistle and I'll Come to You all suggest the return of that which was meant to be hidden – or maybe that which desired to be found.

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 Cannibal Holocaust and Poltergeist. 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 Blair Witch Project and Ringu to [Rec], Cloverfield and more recently V/H/S, 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.

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?

See http://www.chrisvscinema.com/?p=821 for an interesting discussion of folk horror.