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After the monumental corporeality of Jeanne d'Arc, a world forever on the verge of spectral dissipation. Pomaded fabulist Allan Gray (Julian West, aka Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg) is the wandering center, butterfly net slung over tuxedo, a guest at a most tenebrous Courtempierre chateau. "Creatures from the abyss" everywhere—the robed codger with a scythe by the river is just a greeter, disembodied silhouettes enjoy a shindig while a fiend skulks through the countryside in the form of a bent crone (Henriette Gérard). Night more luminous than day, a talkie quieter than any silent, that's simply Carl Theodor Dreyer seizing the horror genre. The lord of the manor (Maurice Schutz) expires on the floor, shot down by a Cocteau pistol, upstairs there's the widening grin of the daughter (Sybille Schmitz) with "the mark of damnation" on her neck. Le Fanu plus Kafka plus Poe, arcane hallucinations in engulfing mist. The malevolent village doctor (Jan Hieronimko) would later be transmuted into slapstick by Polanski, also in the vampiress' corner are skulls with glowing sockets and a gamekeeper (Georges Boidin) wielding peg-leg and mandolin. "Who can solve the riddle of life and death, or fathom the dark secrets hidden in the light of day?" Dollying and panning that distend and dissolve space, a symphony of uncanny figures gliding in and out of rooms and up and down staircases. Bosch's Death and the Miser is quoted, the patriarch's face glaring in the window is a Redon effect. Dreyer enjoys a set-piece and gives the POV inside the coffin the proper showstopper treatment, into 2001: A Space Odyssey it goes. The shattered grave, "Me and My Shadow," Griffith's flour mill (A Corner in Wheat). Renoir's La Nuit du Carrefour and Halperin's White Zombie are concurrent, then only Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me comes close. Cinematography by Rudolph Maté. With Rena Mandel, Albert Bras, and N. Babanini. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |