DVD ADDICT
PLALAI FAIFA
One of the documentaries included in this edition of Herk Harvey's cult classic, Carnival of Souls is called "The Movie That Wouldn't Die". The film was made in 1962 for about US$30,000 as a personal project by Harvey and some friends, whose daytime job was industrial filmmaking. Their hope was to create a moody supernatural chiller that "looked like Bergman and felt like Cocteau".
Audiences who would have been able to spot such influences didn't get to see the movie for decades, though, because distributors butchered it and programmed it as a drive-in fodder shocker. Viewers expecting the kind of horror fest promised in the previews cited by the Criterion editors must have been puzzled by this oddly unnerving little movie about a young woman who survives an accident - her car plunges into a river - but finds that afterwards the world around her is subtly changed. Acting and production values are pretty basic, but the movie gradually generates a nightmarish mood that makes it linger in the memory.
It was only years later, when the film started turning up on late-night TV, that it began to attract devotees, including filmmakers who have been slipping references to it in their own movies ever since. Christian Petzold, the German director of Yella, must have looked at Carnival of Souls carefully and often, because he appropriates its entire premise for his film, including some of its recurrent symbols and motifs. He has acknowledged the debt, though, and puts the idea to a very different use from what Harvey did in his film.
Mary Henry (Hilligoss), the heroine of Carnival of Souls, is drag-racing when she loses control of her car and falls off a bridge. When she tries to resume her life after emerging from the river, she enters upon a weird spiritual journey which Harvey and his crew try to imbue with a metaphysical tinge. Pursuing her constantly is a phantom-like man (director Harvey himself in what looks like self-applied greasepaint) who seems to have some important connection to her that she senses but she does not understand. She is also drawn, for reasons she can't explain, to an enormous, abandoned amusement park on the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Most viewers will have guessed what is going on long before the conclusion, but that doesn't make this curious movie any less intriguing.
Yella (Hoss) is driving with her rejected and violent husband (Schoenemann) when he deliberately drives their car off a bridge in an attempt to kill them both. When she makes her way to the riverbank she immediately rushes to the train station to resume her interrupted trip to a new city and a new job. But like Mary Henry, she finds that the world - in this case the world of business - is a strange capable of springing constant surprises. And she, too, is being relentlessly pursued by a man - her husband Ben, who appears and disappears like a ghost but lashes out with very real physical abuse.
Yella teams up with a venture capitalist who is impressed by her almost supernatural acuity in scanning accounting sheets and her finesse in mastering the cruel playacting that is at the heart of the kind of business they do. But again, like her counterpart in the Harvey movie, she is knocked off base at every turn by things that are linked in various ways to her accident. Water, in particular, takes on an insidious character.
Carnival of Souls and Yella make a choice double bill. Seeing them together left me and the members of the Electric Eel Film Society with the feeling that, despite its very apparent technical shortcomings and mostly poor acting (Frances Feist as a kindly landlady gives the only praiseworthy performance), there really is something poetic about it, and the filmmakers' attempt to evoke the spirit of Cocteau wasn't too far off the mark.
Petzold's intent is more satirical than metaphysical. His living dead are the businesspeople he shows, soulless types with no human feeling and his film is beautifully shot and performed, with Hoss really excellent as the bewildered Yella. The supernatural premise isn't really at the heart of the movie, as it is in Carnival of Souls. Both can be purchased online from various Amazons and other online dealers.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Next
