Edgar Allan Poe – Page 2

Weekend links 674

The Far Side of the Moon, as photographed by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

• “It goes against centuries of traditional belief to accept that the moon is barren, that it is indifferent, that it is innocent of any role in monthly spikes in the crime rate or in the cycles of menstrual unreason. When telescopic observation had found nothing on the near side (Roger Boscovich had established by 1753 that it lacks even an atmosphere), the far side still remained a site for the projection of fantasies of a different, neighbouring world.” Justin EH Smith working his way towards a history of the dark side of the moon.

• “It shocks me that movies still lean in so hard to all these outmoded gay narrative tropes: coming out, coming of age; very identity-oriented representations of gay characters. It’s much easier to represent a gay boy who’s repressed in high school and comes out and makes friends. It’s very mainstream, and kind of played out.” Bruce LaBruce on cinematic trends in relation to his new film, a gay-porn take on Pasolini’s Teorema.

• At Cartoon Brew: Pavel Sannikau explains how he developed his own techniques of digital animation in order to create the ever-expanding Floor796.

• There’s always more Poe: Mysterium, Incubus et Terror, Poe-inspired music by a variety of artists, plus illustrations by John D. Chadwick.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: The results of a themed contest in the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Challenge.

• Mixes of the week: In Praise of the Saddest Chord at Ambientblog, and The Funky Eno Pts 2 & 3 by DJ Food.

• Steven Heller talks to Hungarian artist István Orosz about his Escher-like drawings.

• At Unquiet Things: Caitlin McCormack’s ghostly chains of knotted memory.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Intricate and organic sculptures by ceramicist Eriko Inazaki.

• New music: Illumina by Call Super with Julia Holter.

• Dark Side Of The Mushroom (1967) by The Chocolate Watchband | Dark Side Of The Star (1984) by Haruomi Hosono | On The Dark Side Of The Sun (live) (2003) by Helios Creed

A theme for maniacs

The theme in question.

When did the first few bars of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 become a signifier of an unhinged personality, and thereby a horror cliché? The question was raised by my film viewing in the run-up to Halloween following a return visit to The Black Cat, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Universal oddity. Ulmer’s film is the best of a trio of Universal horrors packaged by Eureka in a double-disc set, part of the company’s ongoing programme to reissue obscure films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The three films in the set—Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935)—all star Lugosi, with Karloff co-starring in The Black Cat and The Raven. The Bach piece was impossible to ignore after watching all three films together. In The Black Cat we see a villainous Karloff regaling a potential victim with a performance of Toccata and Fugue on his home organ. Bela Lugosi does the same in The Raven, where he portrays an equally villainous but much more demented doctor obsessed with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The Universal horror films have been the source of many cinematic clichés of which this is a further example, even if the use of Toccata and Fugue to signify villainy or madness predates The Black Cat.

Wikipedia’s incomplete list of the composition’s cinematic appearances states that Toccata and Fugue was already a theatrical cliché by the early 1930s but offers no evidence for the claim. It’s likely there were silent films using the piece for their scores when so much silent orchestration borrows from pre-existing classical music. But silent films, today as in the past, can be scored in many different ways, the score isn’t always permanently attached to the film. The one silent film that you might expect to use the Bach piece, the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera, has a fine score by Carl Davis in its restored form, but no Toccata and Fugue. A brief history of the cinematic life of the piece would go something like this…

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)
Rouben Mamoulian’s excellent adaptation opens with a view through the eyes of Dr Jekyll (Frederic March) playing another Bach piece on the organ; prior to this the film’s titles had been scored with an orchestral arrangement of Toccata and Fugue. An hour later the composition returns when Jekyll plays an extract from the fugue section, an ominous sign despite his joy at his impending marriage.

The Black Cat (1934)
Despite the title, this one has nothing at all to do with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of another spurious adaptation we get Boris Karloff as Hjalmar Poelzig, cinema’s only Satanist architect. The character is a bizarre amalgam of Aleister Crowley and Hans Poelzig, a German architect who designed the sets for Paul Wegener’s third and best Golem film.

The Raven (1935)
This one does at least contain a number of Poe references. Lugosi is a brilliant doctor who also happens to be a homicidal maniac, his Poe obsession having led him to fill the secret rooms in his house with torture devices.

A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Not a horror film but included here because Powell & Pressburger’s war-time drama is about the last time you find the Bach piece being used in an unironic manner, intended to evoke religious awe rather than madness or doom. Prior to this the piece had also been used to soundtrack an abstract animation by Mary Ellen Bute, Synchromy No. 4: Escape (1938), two years before Disney did something very similar in Fantasia. In A Canterbury Tale Dennis Price is a conscripted cinema organist finally arrived at Canterbury Cathedral prior to being shipped to the front. Before he leaves, the cathedral organist allows him to play the music for the departure service which in turn allows us to hear Bach’s piece illustrating views of genuine Gothic grandeur.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Its fitting that the self-conscious use of Toccata and Fugue begins with a supremely self-conscious film. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece isn’t a horror film either but it is a full-blown Gothic drama, being narrated by a dead man whose first encounter with the mentally fragile Norma Desmond sees him being mistaken for an undertaker. The Bach piece is played by Desmond’s butler, Max, a washed-up film director portrayed by a genuine (and genuinely great) washed-up film director, Erich von Stroheim. Max may not be a maniac but his employer (and ex-wife) is certainly unhinged, while Stroheim himself was notorious in his directing days for his megalomania, overspending lavishly and refusing to compromise with the studios over the editing of his films. (The first cut of his mutilated epic, Greed, ran over nine hours.) Since the 1925 Phantom of the Opera was mentioned earlier, it’s worth noting that Norma Desmond’s boat-shaped bed is the same prop that appears in the silent Phantom’s underground lair.

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The ghost at the window

I’ve been taking advantage of the Spook Season to finally watch some of the horror films that I’ve known about for decades but never managed to see until now. Among the collection has been Ishiro Honda’s fungal nightmare, Matango (1963), and the Poe-themed Spirits of the Dead (1968), one of those Italian anthology films that proliferated in the 1960s, this one featuring episodes directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. Still to come is Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi’s ghost film.

Topping the list was Curse of the Dead (1966), another ghost film directed by Mario Bava. Ten years ago I wrote a post about a black-and-white still from Bava’s film (see above) which has proved surprisingly popular, finding its way onto a number of book and record covers. The still is one of many that fill the pages of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), and had intrigued me long before I started to notice its use elsewhere. Gifford, however, wasn’t much help when trying to find out more about the film itself. Curse of the Dead is one of the few films that he doesn’t discuss in his book, and its title compounded the mystery when nothing with that name was listed in film guides. The problem turned out to be one that plagues horror films, especially the older variety, whereby a film’s title changes each time it crosses a national border. Gifford was using the British name given to something originally released in Italy as Operazione Paura (Operation Fear). Curse of the Dead is rather vague—it would suit any number of other films—but it’s preferable to the Italian one, which makes it sound like a spy thriller, and far better than the other alternatives. Since America dominates the film business it’s usually the American title, Kill, Baby, Kill, that you see this one listed under, a typical piece of overkill (so to speak) from US distributors AIP. In Germany it was released as The Thousand Eyes of Dr Dracula, a ridiculous play on Fritz Lang’s final Dr Mabuse film.

Curse of the Dead.

Whatever the title, Bava’s film is well worth seeking out. The story concerns a doctor who arrives at a small Carpathian village to perform an autopsy on a young woman who has died in mysterious circumstances. The death is one of several that have blighted the village, all caused by a blonde ghost girl whose appearance at night—always dressed in white, and playing with a bouncing white ball—seals the doom of anyone who encounters her. A story that in other hands might be rote and predictable (hello, Hammer Films) is anything but, thanks to Bava’s visual artistry and inventiveness in the face of a severely limited budget. Halfway through the film the narrative logic dissolves into an extended nocturnal investigation punctuated by remarkable dreamlike moments, notably a scene in which the doctor ends up chasing himself through a succession of doors in identical rooms twenty-five years before Agent Cooper did something similar in Twin Peaks. The “Carpathian” exteriors are mostly Italian countryside, filmed in a mountain village whose ruined nature adds a great deal to the atmosphere. As for the intriguing hands-at-the-window moment, I was prepared to be disappointed by its eventual appearance but Bava makes it a key moment after teasing us with other shots like the one above, showing spectral hands and faces at windows.

Toby Dammit.

Bava’s ghost (or a version of her) reappeared two years later in the Fellini episode of Spirits of the Dead, a detail I’d forgotten about until this week. Fellini’s Toby Dammit is the best part of the anthology feature but the Poe story he was adapting, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, doesn’t involve any blonde ghost girls. Terence Stamp is the title character, playing an actor rather like himself who succumbs to an alcohol-fuelled breakdown while being flattered and harassed by fans, paparazzi and a gallery of grotesques from the Italian film business. The ghost haunting him for inexplicable reasons is less a homage than an outright theft (she even has a bouncing white ball), something that apparently dismayed Mario Bava, understandably so after the problems he had to get his own film made. That said, Toby Dammit still carries a spooky charge even if Fellini’s spectre is a poor relation to Bava’s, with the whole episode playing like a particularly nightmarish out-take from 8 1/2.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Juliet of the Spirits
• A Pictorial History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford
• Design as virus 14: Curse of the Dead

Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe

The Haunted Palace.

There’s always more Poe. Which means, in the context of these pages, there’s always another illustrated edition to be found. It’s good to finally discover a complete edition of The Bells, and Other Poems; I’d seen a few of these paintings before—Alone was used on the cover of a biography of Poe by Wolf Mankowitz—but the collection tends to be overshadowed by Dulac’s other books. The Internet Archive has had a scan available for several years but most of the colour plates are missing, picture theft being a common hazard for library books. These copies are from a more recent addition to Project Gutenberg.

The Bells.

The Bells was published 12 years after W. Heath Robinson had produced his own illustrated edition of Poe poems in 1900. The two books complement each other more than you might expect; all of Robinson’s illustrations are line drawings with an Art Nouveau quality that soon vanished from his work, and was long gone by the time he found a popular audience for his drawings of whimsical inventions. Dulac’s edition includes a few monochrome drawings but these are little more than spot illustrations scattered among the watercolour plates. Several of the paintings, especially the one for Israfel, are Symbolist art as much as they’re illustration. This might seem inevitable given the Symbolist tendencies of Poe’s verse but not all illustrators manage to reflect these qualities.

The Bells.

Annabel Lee.

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The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928

Halloween approaches, in case you hadn’t noticed. This silent short had eluded my attention until this week even though I knew the directors, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, via a later film, the homoerotic Biblical fantasia Lot in Sodom (1933). Watson and Webber’s Poe adaptation was made in the US the same year as a longer French version of the same story directed by Jean Epstein with partial assistance from Luis Buñuel.

The American Usher was described by its directors as an amateur work but it fills its running time with a remarkable range of visual effects: slow motion, tilted angles, multiple exposure, kaleidoscope views, even a touch of animation in the caption lettering when Madeline breaks out of her tomb. The visuals overwhelm the storytelling but that’s the advantage of using a familiar tale, the narrative can be subordinate to the style which in this case extends to the Caligari-derived sets. Watson and Webber’s Usher is less an imitation of Robert Wiene’s thriller than a condensation of everything that German Expressionist cinema had been doing throughout the 1920s, a fitful dream or hallucination.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mask of the Red Death, 1969
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA