The Oppressiveness of a Place

The Stone Tape (1972 Peter Sadsy adapted from Nigel Kneale's play watch here.) is a British horror sci-fi hybrid television play, mostly studio shot. Sexism and racism abound and over the top, macho television acting of this era is hard to take seriously now it's been mocked so wonderfully in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. But, as is so often the experience of horror films we have to tolerate a certain amount of the truly dreadful to reach the true dread. I first saw The Stone Tape in Brighton in the amazing Cinemateque independent cinema.

A group of scientists have been housed in a haunted renovated Victorian mansion to research into new recording media. One of the scientists, Jane Asher, witnesses the ghost of a maid who walks up an old stair case but screams in horror when she reaches the top. This starts a Blue Peter style, ernest investigation by the scientists. Their hypothesis is that the actual Victorian stone has recorded a psychic resonance and the ghostly appearances are the stones playing it back. Or rather the recordings are activated by the human 'receiver', the playback is unmaterial and exists as physical or energetic matter in the stones which is only manifest at the register of perception. Sensory perception is the stage which is missed out. (A nod here perhaps to Gibson's projected idea about implants which would enable us to see virtual worlds. Experience via intraenus drip as it were.) Their final desired result is to find out how the stones record events, if they can do this they can produce the most outlandish and lucrative recording format ever to reach the modern shelves. If they can harbor this means of recording they can conquer the media market. Sadly, they manage to wipe this signal but Asher's character discovers another signal underneath, as she tries to discover its source she dies with terror. Also, consider Brainstorm (1983 Douglas Trumbull) where Christopher Walken's character discovers a means to record his experiences onto tape to play back to others via inventively called 'The Hat'. The highlight being the 'sex tape' which is made that kills a 'viewer' from sensory overload. In each instance the researchers go too far. The message seems to be that all too often humans push too hard and die as a result of 'playing god'. Any findings that do arise in the films are either coveted for the arms trade or for consumerism.

Video format warfare was rife in the early seventies, for years Britain had lagged behind Japan in video tape development. In 1969 Sony released the widely used broadcast U-matic format which is still just about being used as the cheap good quality duplication format in industry today. In someways the film touches on the anxiety of the 'black magic' ability of video to record. Its technology is not visible like film's, which respectfully and comfortingly records a frame of the scene in front of us. Film's materiality is stable and reassuring. Video was a shift from visible technology of film to the virtual and the unseen. Here the ghostly presence stands in for the haunted video tape, by finding a way to control it the researchers exert their power over the unseen. So effectively they are finding a way to create their own ghostly presence (in their data recordings) of a ghostly recording (i.e. the signal which the stones occasionally broadcast) which in turn is an image of a ghostly happening (the death of the original unlucky maid); recordings of recordings of recordings. But Jill (Asher) discovers another signal beneath the maid's screams. A more chilling and terrifying sound, that only she can hear.

But aside form all of this, what I find compelling about the film is the idea that a room could preserve the memory of a traumatic event in its very materiality. The Stone Tape story is a crude homage to the idea that a psychic resonance can remain in a place long after the angsty inhabitants have left. But what is the cause? Is the psychic resonance an actual psychic entity which can be recorded physically, or is a psychic resonance simply resurrected by the effect of its materiality: its architecture; location; the local weather; the visitor's knowledge of its history? In seventeenth century Church St in North London, near where I live, land was bought to build houses. The material for the bricks was gathered from the ground here and then bricks themselves were produced on this site. These bricks were then used for the buildings constructed on the land. Some traces of these walls are still evident. So here, people literally were surrounded by traces of past lives. Interestingly, the Stone Tape theory is a term used by paranormal investigators to describe the research into residual hauntings rather than beliefs on the actual metaphysical properties of stone.

But the remaining impression of the film is of the confused theories and the way you can't really work out what the scientists believe. If you unravel it then the final supposition is that the signal has recorded the memory of an entity some 7,000 years old. An entity which resided deep past excavations of excavations. An unnameable terrifying primordial force which once encountered kills the listener with shock. This serves as a metaphor for many concepts. But I think the film gives us the option not to think too much. It strives to find a shape for a force beyond rationalisation. I think it is effective in this. The green ghostly smokey shapes, choric growling merged with abstract electronic sounds and scifi red blobs are subtly rendered, and firmly nod to structuralist film. Asher is seen climbing to the top of the staircase, which we learn had no real function and was built as a folly. At the top as she tries to escape the source of terror she falls into a void. I refer you to my Winchester House post. There seems to be a history of people living in terror of 'the others'. The staircase reminds me of how Sarah Winchester may have built anomolous architectural spaces to fool the spirits of Native American Indians, killed by the Winchester rifle, who persecuted her. Asher then replaces the maid and her cries are 'played over and over again'.

Jane Asher also makes cakes. Her cake decorating book Party Cakes (1982) has uncanny pictures of her cake designs. Maybe its the scale of cakes which is not quite right as is the way often with amateur miniaturisation.

The Secret Beyond The Door Fritz Lang 1948

Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond The Door is a take on the Bluebeard story by Charles Parrault in fifteenth century France. Bluebeard married a young wife and forbade her to use the key he temptingly gives her to open a secret room in his mansion. Why have all his previous wives disappeared, why does she marry him at all knowing this? of course she unlocks the room and discovers BB's true identity, a knife wealding lady dismemberer: arms, legs and blood litter the room like a butchers. What's the fascination with testing a ladies instinct to be curious? The Bluebeard story seems to be saying that beyond 'curiosity got the cat' that a man has a right to his secrets and a lady better get used to that now - and resist the desire to interfere -- just get away woman SHOOO! Pah! what a load of old tripe. What the advocates of this kind of myth didn't realise was that ladies have MUCH better things to do with their time than snooping around. A n y w a y Lang's film is gem none the less. Dear Joan Bennett, how I love her, the leading lady here: Celia Barrett Lamphere. We see her many times throughout the grand era of the silver screen, my favourite is her invocation of head witch Madame Blanc in Argento's Suspiria. She falls in love while on holiday and doesn't really 'get to know' her beau until they get home. Not until her wedding reception does she get the guided tour of her new pad. She is mortified to realise that hubby's habit for collecting rooms is a bit dark. He likes to reconstruct the spaces where men have horribly killed their wives and questions whether the rooms themselves had caused the aberrant behaviour or the evil was always there in the vicious beasts. All very macabre - but this is also coupled with his odd psycho twitching when he smells lilac. Its not looking good girlfriend! But, putting her best foot forward she plays amateur psychoanalyst, a favourite late forties past-time. Unlock his secret she must and where better to start than with the room he has said she must never enter. She's smart and gets a cast of the key, breaks in and oh, oh dear - she wishes she hadn't because the room is a replica of her bedroom, she runs over to the window, pulls back the curtains - brick. You guess the rest - the films quite hard to get hold of so lobby your local arthouse cinema to show it. You can see a clip of it here.

Again this gives texture to my favourite quandry of whether architectural spaces can have a psychic resonance, a melancholia that leads to brooding. I can feel a Stone Tapes blog in the pipeline. I'm also intrigued by films whose spaces are both a metaphor for the psychic state of its inhabitants and the sites of their acting out of their traumas. Psychoanalysis and the whole development of the unconscious as a psychic place heralded the rethinking of criminology. The late forties dramas sit on the cusp of the essentialist moralistic noir era of the thirties and forties and the forward thinking modern psychological thrillers of the early fifties. Another example of how cultural forms, including theatre and film, become testing grounds for new social ways of being. Arguably, Joan Bennetts face carried us through this transition.

Bricklaying for Bergson

As I've noted in previous posts, the architectural uncanny is a metaphor and often the arena for intimate states in literature and film. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000, Pantheon) involves parallel narratives and arguably parallel universes. There are several realities that the book suggests. A young man, Johnny Truant, finds a study of a documentary written by Zampano, who is blind, in his new apartment. This film is the legendary work filmed by Will Navidson. He made the film under abstract and strange circumstances. As we learn about these circumstances we become closer to the psychology of the young man. There are also letters from Johnny's mother and transcripts of interviews by Karen Navidson, Will's wife. These different worlds are visualised by the use of the layout of text on he page. Text may appear in a square shape with footnotes, or a page may just contain a few words. the words and the relationship to the space of the page resonates with the way the people in the films are resonating with the architectural and psychological spaces they inhabit.

The content of the Navidson story documentary interests me most. The Navidsons move into a house, they are a married couple with young children. As they embark on DIY they realise the inside measurements of the house from furthest wall to furthest wall are not equal to the outside measurements, they are bigger. It seems that the house has started to grow. This idea is not new, but this is no tardis. The house has agency and grows at its own pace, the inhabitants, unlike our beloved doctor, have no control over this expansion. Oh how the Islington property developers would swoon! No need now to knock down treasured council estates. But this creeping growth, like a cancer is deeply disturbing and seems to reflect the couple's relationship more than effect it.

A door appears, a corridor starts to grow, a set of stairs leads down into a pitch black labyrinth. Navidson and his brother set out to explore, the tone of the documentary suggests a Scott like headstate, as he heads into the void. In moments of pressure couples writhe around in their own vomit. This surely is the privilege of intimacy, the ability to go there into the abject, to absorb this lack which is too full and suffocating, and to navigate back out together, sometimes with little more than the knowledge that together, neither will get lost or stuck their forever. A mutual acknowledgement of their own mess, and a restoring to order. Lovers are the ultimate horror film directors.

The book throws into question the reliability of any text which professes to be non-fiction. The psychological quandry Danielewski seems to be obsessed with is the idea of the endless mind, the endless perceptual shifting created by a psychotic hermeneutics, freefalling interpretation.

So far, I think the thread which connects all these spaces and the intimate relationships which they house is the idea of the ambiguity which must be at the heart of intimacy. Intimacy brings two people as close as possible, physically and mentally, we say 'I know him inside and out' but the truth is we never can, and even if we could by some feat of telepathy, our own internal voids pervade. The endlessness of interpretation, the never really knowing, the void, the unreliable narrator, paranoia, the space that isn't itself. If a relationship is about the space between two people then the knowledge that that space can never be measured or controlled can result in morbid ambiguity or a revelling in the instability of giving up control. Here the uncanny is the ambiguity of interpretation. More to come. Next up, Fritz Lang.

OCDIY

Gregor Schneider, German sculptor, inherited his family house in Reydt and this became the site of major reconfigurations and rebuilding. Visitors to the house or Haus u r spoke of rooms built within rooms, evidence of the false wall spilling out like guts for them to see. Or a glazed window that had a brick wall behind it for a view, or crawl spaces through which to get to another room. One room spun when you were inside it, delivering you to a different part of the house on your exit. I visited Totes Haus u r at the at the Venice Bienalle in 2001.For this he transported 150 tons of the Reydt house, 24 of the original rooms, brick, doors, frames, staircase and rebuilt a dwelling of sorts within the German Pavilion. Again in this space Schneider left the evidence of his DIY but this did not undercut the uncanny tension. What he created wasn’t just a mental puzzle, but this home was something more cloying and sinister. Visitors could go in groups of ten, signing in I felt a trepidation that I might not leave. The main trigger for this unease was the smell, old libraries, basement cupboards, garages, a stale inexplicable human odor. Fine touches like air holes bored into the doors of locked cupboards, both suggested old larders but also the site of Poe torture chamber. The decor, mostly white walls, red floors, basic furniture called up images of a soft room in a mental institution.

Schneider could have just finished the work by making these gestures of building and rebuilding. In this way it would be hard to see him as just artist, but more obsessive compulsive eccentric. But many gestures are the result of careful orchestration and the expectation of an audience. It’s a fun house with scares, reference to gothic literature and film and phantasmagoria sideshow. But not in a stylish way, more in a way that goes back to the idea of the obsessive compulsive persona at the heart of the activity. He is more like a teenage boy waiting for Mum and Dad to return from work, who might unknowingly turn there attention to the bucket of stagnant water under the kitchen sink, and be a bit freaked out by the prosthetic disembodied hand floating on the surface. This is picked up on in his work Die Familie Schneider, a work in Whitechapel London 2004 with Artangel.

More to follow

Location, Location, Location

I'm thinking about the connection between the film Burnt Offerings Dan Curtis 1976, The Mystery of Winchester House, Gregor Schneider, this blog's namesake House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielowski and one of my all time favourite films The Secret Beyond the Door Fritz Lang 1947. The architectural uncanny is well trodden ground and I am beginning to look for new pathways on this subject. So here goes.

In Burnt Offerings a house seems to feed on the psychological demise and breakdown of its inhabitants. Over time various families move in, go a bit mental and then leave in various states of disrepair. The house however seems to enjoy an entire renovation on their departure, exterior walls become blindingly bright again, roses bloom in the front garden, lawns glow.

Winchester House is the legacy left by Sarah Winchester, San Jose, 1840 - 1922. She married William Wirt Winchester in 1862, manufacturer of the famous Winchester rifle: 'The Gun That Won The West'. After her husband died she began work on her house, and didn't stop until she died. With her fortune, estimated at $20,ooo,ooo she built and rebuilt her small eight roomed Victorian house. 160 rooms remain, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys. Sarah valued her privacy, and there is no account of why she spent her life in this way. One theory is that she felt an immense sense of guilt for all the deaths caused by the Winchester gun, and that these spirits of the dead led her to build rooms to house them. It's believed she saw a medium after her husband's and her daughters death who said that their deaths were the revenge of the spirits of the American Indians and Civil War soldiers who had been killed with Winchester rifles and Sarah was next. To appease them she had to build them a house, and communicate with them for orders on how to build it. She built a seance room in the house and did practice Spiritualism, so this is not an impossible theory. The constant reconfigurations are thought to be a means to dupe and confuse bad spirits who haunted the house and by extension, Sarah. In the documentary, 'Mrs Winchester's House' (KPIX-TV, USA, 1960), Lilian Gish sums it up: 'Some of it can be explained in simple terms. Any building that is changed or constantly remodelled is bound to be odd; the short steps were to ease her arthritic legs; the passageways and doors that go nowhere are reminders of demolished wings or earthquake ruined doors. But try as one can, there is no explaining the size: the incredible sprawl of the hundreds of rooms, the miles of corridors, the unearthly quality of the the thousands of doors and windows and the rooms behind them. The real answer may be that most of Sarah died back in Newhaven, that day she buried her husband.' I like to think of her behaviour as a kind of OCDIY.

Moral Panics

Lots going on at present. I'm going to give a paper on the child witch panic in Nigeria at the Moral Panics conference at Brunel University in December 2010. this promises to be a great conference. The panel strands are :

• Environment & Risk
• War & Terror
• Lifestyle & Health
• Crime & Deviance
• Immigration & Security
• Economic Crisis & Political Scandal

I'll be presenting a paper entitled Witchcraft Children: Scapegoats and Scepticism I plan to address the moral panic about children accused of being witches in West Africa as well as discussing the difficulty of prosecuting the people who accuse these children.

Empty Orchestra