 |
Haunted House: Cronenberg, Welles, Bava, Beckett, Brakhage, Švankmajer, Polanski
The register is completely different in the second path of the exhibition: choosing an iconography that always excited and fascinated audience and critics, we attempt to offer a look that completely investigate the subject “the haunted house” (haunted by ghosts, spectres, “presences”).
The haunted house (haunted by ghosts, spectres, “presences”), is one of the favourite subjects in the cinema, since its beginning (after all, cinema was born inside this double exposition: bodies and bodies’ ghosts – isn’t a ghost the negative of a body? – presence and absence, lights and shadows). So, the seven short films that will be present at this exposition face the question of ghostliness in a double perspective: a) one side shows the iconography of (horror) genre marked by a classical narration that repeats many clichés (apparitions, ghosts, contrasting lights, rarefied atmospheres and so on; between them Return to Glennascaul, The lie chair, Water drop and The Wurdalak), b) on the other side a more intimist dimension that transfers ghostliness to everyday life (Wedlock house: an intercourse), to oneiric-literary imagination (The Fall of the House of Usher) and to everyone’s self (Film). With the exception of the official opening of the festival (Sunday, 25th when only one work for every exhibition will be shown), the screening of the short films constituting “the haunted house” path has been thought “in pairs”: that is, every evening (on Thursday, Friday and Saturday) we will propose a short film from category a) and one from category b), so that the audience receive both what he expects to watch and what is hidden behind traditional iconography.
a) Hilton Edwards’ short film Return to Glennascaul (with Orson Welles) present us the almost canonized situation of ghostliness: a house haunted by other “presences”, lives and times interlaced to the sharing of spaces and “stories” (a man met two women, he took them home but when he took they back a lighter, he will discover that the house is uninhabited and that women have never existed…). Cronenberg’s short film The lie chair present us a haunted house and a divided temporality: a young couple find relief (their car has broken down) in a house inhabited by two old women, that address to them as if they were relatives. Fiction and reality mingle in a tv product (that Cronenberg shot for the Canadian tv) respecting the genre clichés: an isolated house in the storm, desolation, lightnings, mystery, lights and shadows. The two short films from Mario Bava’s episodic film Black Sabbath (1963), respectively Water drop (a nurse persecuted by the spectre of a medium) and The Wurdalak (interpreted by the icon Boris Karloff – this year is the 50th anniversary of his death, happened on 2nd February, 1969 in a house threatened by strange “vampires”), represent at best Italian horror films of the ‘60s. b) The three short films of the second part examine ghostliness in a completely independent way in comparison to genre’s convention: in Stan Brakhage (Wedlock house: an intercourse) we find the visions of a director that films himself, with his wife, in his flat, in special effects of lights and shadows, disguises with ghostliness his presence and the presence of other people (isn’t the negative of an image its ghost?). The protagonist of Film, subject by Samuel Beckett, is a man (the last film interpreted by an old Buster Keaton) who, chased by a “look”, takes refuge in a house, closes doors and windows, until the most frightening spectre, the death, will come. At last, The Fall of the House of Usher, based on a book by E.A. Poe, works on the separation between a voice telling about spectres and a house that, physically, falls to pieces (all through surrealistic animation by Švankmajer): the house beats, just like a living body; it lives and dies and to resurrect as a spectre. The projection (in collaboration with Lab80Film) of Roman Polanski’s masterpiece Rosemary’s baby (on Tuesday) and of a surprise film about “the haunted house” (on Friday evening marathon) will complete the exhibition.
|
