Marjorie Cameron – Page 3

The Wormwood Star

I’ve waited about 20 years to see this one, after first learning of it via a Curtis Harrington interview in Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic magazine in the 1990s. The Wormwood Star (1956) is a 10-minute study of the occult art and witchy persona of Harrington’s friend Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995), best known these days for her memorable incarnation as the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a film in which Harrington also appeared. With her flame-red hair, green eyes and basilisk gaze, Cameron (as she preferred to be called) would have made an impression wherever she landed. Her presence in Anger’s film is so striking that stills of her face have often been used to stand for the entire Magick Lantern Cycle.

In The Wormwood Star Harrington ramps up the mystique with oblique shots and at least half the running time given to Cameron’s strange drawings and paintings. The subtitle, “Concerning the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” harks back to the 1940s and her husband, Jack Parsons, a rocket researcher and, for a time, the American head of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Harrington later gave Cameron a wordless role as the “Water Witch” in his low-budget horror film, Night Tide (1961), where she drifts around Venice Beach looking suitably mysterious. Night Tide is out-of-copyright so can be watched in full at YouTube. The Wormwood Star appeared on a Curtis Harrington DVD only last month which is no doubt where this copy originates. It may not stick around so watch it while you can.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Street Fair, 1959
• House of Harrington
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Street Fair, 1959

The street is upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco, seven minutes of local colour captured on silent 16mm film by Edward Silverstone Taylor:

This edited Ektachrome home movie with professional titles documents a 1959 street fair, upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco—the center of Beat culture. The film includes shots of filmmaker Dion Vigne and his wife Loreon, artist and occultist Marjorie Cameron, and artist Wallace Berman, displaying and selling their art works.

The presence of Marjorie Cameron (below) is what fascinates in these quarters, recognisable thanks to her red hair and the distinctive profile seen when she played the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome five years earlier. You also see what appear to be a couple of her paintings. The street fair looks pretty bohemian for the late 50s but a glance at Anthony Stern’s frenetic San Francisco short from a decade later shows a much wilder place. (Via Dangerous Minds.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• San Francisco by Anthony Stern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again

Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings

House of Usher (1960): Vincent Price and Mark Damon.

This post ought to have followed the one in January about the sinister portraits glimpsed in Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. I still don’t know who was responsible for those paintings but the artist who created the equally outré family portraits in Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960) was credited for his work. Burt Shonberg (1933–1977) was a friend of Corman’s who had to produce the six portraits at speed (the entire film was shot in fifteen days) so the results are sketchier than they might have been in a production with a bigger budget. I always liked the anachronism of these pictures, the way they look very much of their time; the effect is a jarring one that adds a note of much-needed strangeness to Corman’s otherwise sparse interiors.

Shonberg was a curious artist, the gallery page on his website shows a progression from Picasso-style early works in the 1950s to his own brand of mystical psychedelia. Some of his paintings from around the time of House of Usher have that stained-glass fragmentation one finds in the work of Leo & Diane Dillon from the same period. Shonberg’s biography says Corman used more paintings in The Premature Burial (1962) but I don’t have a copy of that to hand and haven’t found any examples. There’s also the detail that Shonberg was involved for a while with Marjorie Cameron, herself an artist who appeared as the mysterious “Water Witch” in another AIP production, Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, a year after House of Usher.

Continue reading “Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings”

House of Harrington

Curtis Harrington.

House of Harrington is a short documentary from 2008 about the late filmmaker Curtis Harrington which has just been posted to YouTube by its makers, and by a curious coincidence this appearance occurs in the week of Dennis Hopper’s death. Harrington gave Hopper the lead in his debut feature Night Tide (1961) at a time when the actor was ostracised in Hollywood after a falling out with director Henry Hathaway. Hopper’s diligent performance in Harrington’s film, a low budget horror, is a long way from the histrionics one usually finds in works of this sort and is a good reason to seek it out.

Marjorie Cameron in The Wormwood Star.

Also in Night Tide in a wordless role is the enigmatic occult artist Marjorie Cameron who drifts around looking spooky and mysterious. Cameron had earlier appeared with Harrington in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), he as Cesaré the Somnambulist from Caligari, she as Aleister Crowley’s Scarlet Woman. That encounter led to Harrington making her the subject of one of his experimental shorts, The Wormwood Star in 1956. I’ve wanted to see this film for years, if only to sate a persistent curiosity, and House of Harrington contains a few tantalising glimpses. With luck it may turn up on YouTube (or even DVD) in the future.

Lastly, Automat Pictures, the makers of House of Harrington, also have a lengthy filmed lecture in their channel, Queer for Fear, which “explores gay and lesbian subtext in the horror film, and examines the intertwining of queer history and monster movies.”

• House of Harrington: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007

Curtis Harrington, who died on Monday, was chiefly known as a director of low-budget horror films, the most acclaimed of which is his debut feature Night Tide (1961), a watery riff on Cat People (1942) starring a young Dennis Hopper. But Harrington should also be remembered for his associations with early American avant garde cinema, especially the productions of Kenneth Anger. Harrington was behind the camera for Anger’s Puce Moment (1949) and appeared in front of it as Cesare the Somnambulist in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). Harrington’s early films were similarly uncommercial experimental shorts, one of which, The Wormwood Star (1956), was based around the paintings and person of Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel aka Cameron. Harrington and Cameron both appeared in Anger’s Pleasure Dome and Harrington featured Cameron again when he came to make Night Tide, where she appears as a mysterious, witch-like presence.

Night Tide is well worth a look, despite the limitations of its budget. Dennis Hopper had been ostracised from Hollywood after a fall-out with director Henry Hathaway and was hanging around with various artists and experimental filmmakers (including Andy Warhol’s crowd), acting in TV shows and generally biding his time. Harrington gave him a starring role and the opportunity to pull some Method faces, and he’s very impressive as he falls for a girl who may or may not turn into a murderous sea creature with the next full moon. Good use is made of the crumbling beachfront of Venice, CA, and there’s some sly camp humour to be found in Hopper’s appearance (he’s dressed in a sailor uniform most of the time, looking like an extra from Anger’s Fireworks), and in the scene where he goes for a (chaste) massage. Night Tide isn’t as strange as Carnival of Souls (1962) but both films share enough of the same atmosphere and period detail to make a perfect double-bill.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!
• Freddie Francis, 1917–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally