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CAPSULE: ARCANA (1972)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Lucia Bosé, Maurizio Degli Esposti, Tina Aumont

PLOT: An enterprising widow and her son try to make their living practicing witchcraft.

Still from Arcana (1972)

COMMENTS: Arcana begins with a message “[t]o the spectators: this movie is not a story, but a game of cards. Both the beginning and the ending are not to be believed. You are the players. Play well and you will win.”

We open onto a busy city street; a figure emerges from a manhole cover then a group of men quickly construct a blanket fort around the hole, in which they all huddle together to observe the passers-by. I won’t spoil the ending (unbelievable as it is), because seeking out this unique movie proves to be worth the effort.

For all intents and purposes, Arcana is basically a lost film. After distributing only five prints, the production company went bankrupt and the film never made it into theaters in any major cities. Attempts to find a workable print for restoration have so far been unsuccessful. At the end of his life, even Questi himself was apparently trying to locate a copy. It’s a real shame, as Arcana reveals the obscure auteur in fine form, working again with frequent collaborator, editor and co-writer Franco ‘Kim’ Arcalli. There’s donkey levitation, frog regurgitation, and Questi’s trademark obsession with chickens and eggs, but this isn’t your typical Satanic horror film. The narrative unfolds in two parts, but as we’ve been warned, the beginning and the end are not to be believed. Is there a middle? What does it all mean? Let’s consult the cards, shall we?

Imagine I’m handing you a tarot deck – shuffle the cards thoroughly, then cut the deck into thirds. First we’ll examine the card to my left, representing the past: Death, a skeletal figure brandishing a scythe. A man known only as Tarantino has died, leaving behind his wife and son in straightened financial circumstances. Vague insinuations imply he may have been the victim of a bizarre scam. His widow (Bosé) never confirms nor denies this. She simply complains of how he left them in poverty and declares the pension checks hardly worth claiming.

The middle card reveals to us the present: mother and son riding The Wheel of Fortune, eking out their living in what at first appears as a phony psychic con, a la Nightmare Alley. Mrs. Tarantino desperately seeks wealthy clients to pay top dollar for their new-age therapy. Her son (Degli Esposti), a young man in his late teens or early twenties, grows increasingly disgusted with both his mother’s money-grubbing ways and the petty pathetic lives of their clients. He possesses actual psychic ability, but completely lacks compassion and pity. Mother agree that many of their clients are unpleasant and stupid people, but they’re also rich, so she begs her son not to frighten them away.

As the film progresses, various seekers of arcane advice consult with Mrs. Tarantino in a series of subtly surreal scenes. Red velvet curtains surround her psychic parlor, aglow with crimson lampshades in what would today be called a “ian” style. The son continues to rebel against her, interfering in their client’s lives in ever more disturbing and intrusive ways. His mother repeatedly warns him that he risks the wrath of Hell, but part one ends with a violent confrontation in which the son demands his mother reveal all her secret wisdom.

A classic Arcalli montage follows, an extended dialogue-free trance in which the mother dances with a multi-generational family all solemnly dressed in black. They move from side-to-side in unison, in slow shuffling steps, to the mesmerizing tune of a lone fiddler traversing a landscape of barren dunes. Elsewhere curious onlookers watch men with a rope pulley hoisting a donkey onto the roof of a church.

And now, the card to my right, a possible future: The Tower, a teetering structure ready to topple. Groups of armed soldiers roam the city arresting people at random. Subway laborers revolt over unsafe work conditions. An overbearing patriarch concerned with the respectability of his family, wakes in the middle of the night to find his relatives all making out with each other while the grandmother feeds upon the baby’s blood. “We make a good team,” the son tells his mother after orchestrating this last escapade, “they’re all scared shitless.” She laughs in reply.

As the two leads, Bosé and Degli Esposito both give equally intense performances despite the threadbare storyline. Aumont, as their gullible client, harbors a secret she’s afraid her fiancé will discover. As she demands to know what will happen in her future, Mrs. Tarantino becomes more and more reluctant to tell her. Her entanglement with both mother and son soon leads to tragedy.

So, what does all this Arcana mean? Have we played the game well? We may not believe in the beginning or the end, though they both present more gritty realism than the surreally fanciful middle. Or perhaps, as the mother tells the nervous young bride, there is nothing more the cards can tell us. Re-shuffle them and return them to their box, for we should prefer not to know everything.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Very weird supernatural horror movie by the maker of Death Laid an Egg.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972)

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La mansión de la locura; AKA Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon

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DIRECTED BY: Juan Lopez Moctezuma

FEATURING: , Arthur Hansel, Ellen Sherman

PLOT: A journalist visits a celebrated mental health asylum in this loose adaptation of ‘s 1845 short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.”

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A surrealist exploration of insanity from within the walls of a 19th century asylum should be a shoo-in for us. Add to this premise Panic Group-style theatrics, trippy sequences blurring the line between delusion and reality, and low-budget constraints which up the surrealism factor, and it becomes an even stronger contender.

COMMENTS: Poe’s satiric tale “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether” begins in Gothic style: “Through this dank and gloomy wood we rode some two miles, when the Maison de Santé came in view. It was a fantastic chateau, much dilapidated, and indeed scarcely tenantable through age and neglect. Its aspect inspired me with absolute dread. . .” The Mansion of Madness begins with a horse-drawn carriage swallowed up by fog. The image then solarizes into contrasting pale blue light and blood red shadows, plunging the viewer into a psychedelic journey.

American journalist Gaston (Hansel) has finagled an assignment to report on the innovative methods of treating mental illness developed by renowned Dr Maillard. After a disturbing encounter at the mansion’s gate with armed guards dressed as rejects from Napoleon’s army, Gaston’s traveling companions desert him. His friend Couvier has an abhorrence of the mentally ill and his female cousin is near to fainting. He assures Gaston his card will serve as an introduction; their carriage turns around and the intrepid reporter proceeds on his own.

While Gaston meets the distinguished Maillard (Brook), and his charming young niece Eugénie (Sherman), Couvier’s carriage succumbs to a violent attack by the “guards” before it can leave the forest. With his coachman overpowered, Couvier proves himself comically useless in a fight; after commanding his cousin to flee, he leaves her to save herself. The trio end up being taken captive, while Maillard takes Gaston on a tour of the sanitarium while explaining his “system of soothing.”

Sensory overload best describes the experience of entering The Mansion of Madness. Artfully arranged actors and still-life accumulations of everyday objects fill every frame. We never see a single establishing shot. Gaston appears to enter the maison through its boiler room, passing through a maze of industrial piping and blazing furnaces as curious faces stare out of the machinery. The “soothing system,” as Maillard explains, allows the inmates their freedom; there are no straight jackets here.

Moctezuma studied art in college before turning to film making (which he called “painting at 24 frames per second”). He began his directing career in television. On one of his shows none other than destroyed a piano as a musical performance; Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FATA MORGANA (1966)

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AKA Left–Handed Fate; Fata/Morgana

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DIRECTED BY: Vincente Aranda

FEATURING: Teresa Gimpera, Marianne Benet, Antonio Ferrandes, Alberto Dalbés

PLOT: When a literature professor predicts an advertising model will be the next victim of a black-gloved serial killer, a secret agent sets out to save her life.

Still from Fata Morgana (1966)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Inspired by quick-change artist extraordinaire Leopoldo Fregoli, Fata/Morgana dons the garb of several genres (fumetti, spy thriller, science fiction, giallo) only to disrobe just as quickly. Set during an unspecified cataclysmic event anticipating ‘s The Falls, the viewing experience mirrors an unsettled narrative reality. The killer’s identity is revealed early on but leads to an entirely unexpected outcome, and a closing scene eerily similar to Blow–Up‘s contentious and equally inconclusive ending (released the same year). Like the main character, the viewer is adrift amidst a world of shifting symbols. The eclectic style, along with the mysterious backdrop, ambiguous characters, and a uniquely bizarre murder weapon combine to create a Pop Art concoction with a seriously unhinged vibe.

COMMENTS: What would you do if you accidentally bumped into a blind man on the street and he said you were going to be murdered today? Poor Gim understandably freaks out. She doesn’t want to die, but she’s decided to stay behind while the rest of her unnamed city’s residents flee en masse. A mysterious catastrophe has occurred in London, and fear of it happening in other cities has rapidly spread around the globe.

Introduced via comic book panels set to an uptempo jazz beat, Fata Morgana aligns itself with the artistic sensibility of European adult comics and the beginnings of the giallo craze (‘s Blood and Black Lace was released two years earlier). The Professor (Ferrandis) prepares to present a lecture on the career of an unidentified serial killer, seen in black and white photographs clad in classic fedora with black trench coat and leather gloves. His victims are all young female models. The Professor’s careful study of horror literature, advertising imagery, and popular films leads to his “premonition” that cologne spokesmodel Gim (Gimpera) will be the killer’s next target.

Gim meets with friends and attends her modeling shoots, trying to retain some semblance of normality. Someone slashes her car tires, so she’s left to walk deserted streets between appointments. Her chance encounters with the city’s remaining inhabitants become increasingly threatening. A gang of silent teenage boys roams the city stealing billboards and appliances to create their own modernist clubhouse. The Professor gives a lecture on how to identify the victims of future crime, then stalks Gim while wearing a series of improbable disguises. Miriam (Benet), a survivor of the London event, spends hours in an “art chamber” staring at sculptures, before wandering the city in an aimless quest to find her lover Jerry (though enigmatic flashbacks suggest he’s already dead). Meanwhile, Agent JJ (Martí) desperately tries to save Gim from the killer while being thwarted by The Professor and everyone else he meets.

All Gim’s friends spout philosophy while trying to process their own impending doom in revealing yet pretentious dialogue:

“When we are awake, we all live in the same world, but when we dream, each lives in his own.”

“A chessboard has no place for dreams. Who wins in chess, loses in life.”

“To be or not to be. To die. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream,” Gim chants in stream of consciousness while displaying a bottle of cologne. “But I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

“Very good, very good. Repeat just the last sentence,” says the photographer, “but this time smile.”

Like Blow–Up seen from the other side of the camera, the female model grapples with the deceptive nature of photographic images, well aware of advertising’s false promises. In a collapsing world, do luxury goods and status symbols still have meaning? When official loudspeakers announce that people can actually live without “superfluous objects” and all you need to start a new life is a suitcase small enough to carry onto a plane? The anti-consumerism now seems like another random element in a narrative constructed of jumbled ideas, but Fata Morgana‘s themes obviously resonated at the time of its release. Echoes can be seen in films by directors as disparate as , , and Peter Greenaway.

The tone, alternating fatalism and optimism, still feels relevant today. In the end, the professor’s theory proves to be wrong, the London event goes unexplained, but Gim’s valiant struggle to maintain her humanity continues. She keeps walking, leaving the city behind as the camera moves away from her until a green field fills the frame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a wild, disorienting, surreal mash-up of Pop Art, science fiction, thriller, and horror.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters (Blu-ray)

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]
  • First U.S. Blu-ray release for this 1960’s psychedelic Euro-thriller.
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE COMING OF SIN (1978)

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La Visita del Vicio;  AKA Vice Makes a Visit

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DIRECTED BY: José Ramon Larraz

FEATURING: Patricia Granada, Lidia Zuazo, Rafael Machado

PLOT: An orphaned girl haunted by prophetic dreams becomes the maid of a wealthy young widow.

Still from the coming of sin (1978)

COMMENTS: If asked by a producer to make a “sexy movie,” not many directors would combine the unsettling atmosphere of Belgian weird fiction with the Tenebrism of the Spanish Baroque, and then mix it all up with an ancient Greek myth about bestiality. José Ramon Larraz does just that. The tale of Pasiphaë provides the surreal imagery; the painting of Diego Velazquez the light and shadows; and the setting, an isolated country manor house, is straight out of Thomas Owen, along with the film’s shockingly violent conclusion.

Trianna (Zuazo) suffers from a recurring nightmare. An orphan without any family, she ends up working for Lorna (Granada), an eccentric and independent widow living alone in the remote countryside. When Lorna asks Trianna about her dream, she says there’s a man on a horse and he frightens her, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. They drop the subject and soon fall into a cozy domesticity which eventually develops into a full-on Sapphic relationship.

When the subject of her nightmare appears in real life—a nude young man riding a black horse bareback—he terrifies Trianna (and tramples the rose bushes in the process). Trianna greets him with a double-barreled shotgun. “That’s no reason to shoot somebody,” Lorna tells her.

Lorna insists Trianna’s nightmare results from her fear of sex and/or men; she has books that will explain it all to her, but illiteracy saves Trianna from having to read volumes of pop psychology. Instead, she visits the local fortune-teller, who asks why she even bothered to come, since her fate is sealed. Trianna is the devil’s child; and if she and the man on the black horse ever become a couple then someone will die.

After this disturbing revelation, the young man on the horse becomes a regular guest at Lorna’s house; she insists he learn some manners, so he begins wearing pants when he joins the ladies for tea. Eventually Chico (Machado) becomes the lover of both Trianna and Lorna, despite Trianna’s fears. Though Chico wants Trianna, Lorna begins aggressively pursuing him, unbalancing their fragile love triangle.

In between orgies, they visit the local museum, a nightclub where two female dancers perform a tango, and Lorna convinces Trianna and Chico to pose half-naked together for her latest painting. Lorna insists the pair would make a fine couple, even as she continues her clandestine visits to Chico’s shack down by the river. To make her assignations, Lorna passes through towering reeds, a landscape vividly described in Owen’s “The Conquered Beauty and the Troubadour,” wherein gunshots obliterate the post-coital calm of a summer afternoon.

Larraz started his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, and Spain’s then-restrictive censorship laws drove him to other parts of Europe. He turned to directing films after a chance meeting with Josef von Sternberg in Brussels, where Larraz also met Owen, friend of Jean Ray, the author of the novel Malpertuis. The influence of these two men shaped the course of Larraz’s idiosyncratic film career. The Coming of Sin was made in Spain upon his return at the end of the Franco regime.

In interviews, Larraz claims that every one of his films is actually a Thomas Owen story. Larraz wears this inspiration on his sleeve, but anyone who hasn’t read Owen’s work won’t recognize him as Larraz’s muse, and he’s never mentioned in the credits. Owen was a fan of old dark house stories (one of his collections is titled “Les Maisons suspectes”), and Larraz clearly shares this obsession. His first film, 1970’s Whirlpool, takes place in an isolated house outside of London, where the protagonists get up to artsy, sexy, and occasionally murderous menages á trois, as they do in The Coming of Sin.

In Owen’s stories uncanny events fracture mundane life. Old mansions reveal to strangers worlds unto themselves, where the normal rules of everyday existence no longer apply. The Coming of Sin exists in numerous cuts and under a plethora of titles (S&M scenes were excised from some versions, or augmented with hardcore footage in others), but Owen’s themes are the focus in Larraz’s original. When Trianna and Chico intrude upon Lorna’s den of solitude they set in motion the hand of fate.

The films of Larraz (AKA J. R. Larrath) are admittedly something of an acquired taste. Like and , his pacing can be slow, the scenery repetitive, the amateur acting impeded by stilted dialogue. He had the makings of a genuine auteur; his film Symptoms was England’s submission to Cannes in 1974, where it received favorable notice from French audiences. Despite that success, Larraz primarily worked in low budget Eurotrash productions, his wild imagination sacrificed to excessive sex scenes and gore at the behest of producers. But no matter how cheap or sleazy the film, Larraz always retained his artist’s eye, and he speaks in his own voice, a unique downbeat tone with a heart of weird fiction hidden at the core.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

‘…another Larraz offering that is almost weirdly suffused with a near hallucinogenic, dreamlike ambience, despite some of the more shocking aspects of the visuals.”–Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Arrow box set)

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool /
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POSSESSED (1965)

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La Donna del Lago

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DIRECTED BY: , Franco Rossellini

FEATURING: , Salvo Randone, , Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Virna Lisi

PLOT: A writer visits a childhood vacation spot at a lake and investigates the mystery of a missing acquaintance.

Still from The Possessed (1965)

COMMENTS: “It’s difficult to look inside oneself honestly, eh?”

Is this why award-winning author Bernard (Baldwin) claims to have never written anything autobiographical? His friends seem skeptical. He returns to a lakeside village to begin work on his next book, one inspired by memories of his childhood summers. But instead of writing, Bernard begins a routine of gossiping with the locals and spying on the staff of his hotel, “a hotel. . . filled with memories,” where “everything seem[s] normal on the surface.”

Moody black and white photography heightens the suggestion that everything isn’t quite normal in this unnamed locale. The cinematography emphasizes shadows; picturesque tree-lined lanes become sinister and otherworldly. The light dappling the lake’s surface could be the sun or the moon. The immersive sound design features a menacing whisper of wind which begins at Bernard’s first sight of the lake.

It’s the off-season, and characters furtively scurry about, either to escape from the cold or from prying eyes. The camera slides around corners, rendering the layout of both the town and the hotel endlessly labyrinthine. It sidles up to the cracks in doors, providing his point of view whenever Bernard’s voyeurism in the present day is intercut with his memories of Tilde, a beautiful blonde chamber maid (Lisi). As we search through the hotel and the village along with him, we quickly come to realize that, though he never fully admits it, Bernard is completely infatuated with the memory of Tilde.

After mistakenly following another woman, he discovers that Tilde died under mysterious circumstances since his last visit the year before. Determined to find out what happened to her—was it suicide or murder?—Bernard enlists the help of Francesco (Anchisi), a cynical local photographer. He willingly shares photographic evidence along with his own theories, but becomes increasingly reluctant to dig too deeply into the mystery. As Bernard becomes ever more obsessed with Tilde, he begins having nightmares about her case. Gradually he comes to suspect the hotel owner’s family must be somehow implicated.

When it was first released in 1965, La Donna del Lago (“The Lady of the Lake”) was poorly received. Italian critics lambasted its art-house style, including the use of washed out high-contrast in dreams and flashbacks, and creative editing that consistently blurs the lines between past and present. Cultural and historical baggage may also have sunk it. The screenplay is loosely based on a novel of the same name, which was in turn was inspired by a true crime1.

News of the actual case was still fresh in the popular consciousness while the film was being made, but if the filmmakers had hoped to cash in, they misread their audience. By the mid ’60s, color was in, and The Possessed seemed hopelessly pretentious and out of date. Instead of a typical crime thriller, it’s an Expressionist and hallucinatory fever-dream tour through the corridors of memory and imagination. Like Last Year at Marienbad, only with faster pacing and moments of ian suspense, The Possessed is both beautiful and occasionally confusing to watch, but it’s never boring.

Later re–branded as a giallo, The Possessed features some tropes of the genre, but even though pretty girls are dying mysterious deaths, there is no black-gloved killer (and the young women may not have been murdered at all). The writer protagonist is a familiar figure, the outsider trying to carry out his own investigation while becoming further mired in mystery. Renzo Rossellini’s orchestral score swells to ironic crescendos whenever Bernard fails to uncover any meaningful clues. There are plentiful red herrings: ambiguous photographic images, scraps of paper scrawled with obscure sentence fragments, women who wear each other’s coats so they become unrecognizable when bundled up in scarves against the wind. Ultimately The Possessed resists easy genre categorization, and for this reason its hybrid qualities make it weird-adjacent. It conjures a pervasive unsettling atmosphere, even though nothing overtly surreal appears on screen.

The fact that the screenplay was originally drafted by (Death Laid an Egg, If You Live, Shoot) may account for some of the film’s more unusual qualities, and makes The Possessed of interest to Questi completists. The original novel by Giovanni Comisso describes a writer’s journey to the scene of the crimes where he receives psychic impressions of the suspects, and Questi focuses heavily on this aspect. Cues such as the high contrast lighting and a repeated mournful bird cry provide hints for interpreting Bernard’s thoughts, imaginings, memories, and dreams, but in the end these images from inside his head all become tangled up together. Anyone familiar with the story’s background would of course already know who the killers will turn out to be, but Questi’s script isn’t a whodunit. He isn’t afraid to leave questions unanswered. As Bernard is subtly implicated as an unreliable narrator, a true crime story becomes a study of subjectivity and desire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story’s a feverish dream-narrative in which Bernard is often literally fevered and dreaming… For its amplified layers of bafflement within its hallucinations, I prefer [the title] The Lady of the Lake to The Possessed, but this highly polished mirror of uncertainty and obsession is a lovely discovery under any identity.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters [Blu-ray]

1 The Alleghe killings were a series of murders that began in the 1930s in a small village in Northern Italy, and after being interrupted by WWII, they continued, still unsolved, into the 1950s. The case had been closed, then reopened, and the killers were only convicted in 1964.

The Possessed

The Possessed
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