Gashlight - Pia Santaklaus on Gaslight

Last week I watched GASLIGHT (1944) and though I arrived at the Chauvel a few minutes late, I don’t think I missed much of the start and had a very engrossing movie experience. I should like to offer a few comments.

GASLIGHT, despite its ‘happy’ ending, provided a melange of classic gothic story elements including Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Louis Stevenson and also shades of the Jack The Ripper legend.

In GASLIGHT, a beautiful newlywed woman Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) fears she is going mad as strange occurances happen in her manor-home. She is unawares that her own husband is deliberately causing the strange happenings in order to drive her mad.

Charles Boyer plays her two-faced pianist husband Gregory Anton. He is ultimately caught out by a friendly, noble investigator with Scotland Yard connections (played by Joseph Cotton). Angela Lansbury plays Nancy the servant of the manor.

GASLIGHT was perhaps inspired by some of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe used themes of physical and emotional decomposition and premature burial… In GASLIGHT, Paula becomes paler and sicker and feels trapped within her house.

POE often said that one of the most tragic themes was that of a dying beautiful young female; a device he used over and over again as might be seen in such works as The Raven, Annabel Lee, Ligeia, Berenice, Morella and The Fall Of The House Of Usher.

Poe also drew parallels between the souls of buildings and their occupants. One’s house reflected one’s disposition... A sick house could only carry a sick body, a sick soul.

In GASLIGHT, the house itself, already a place of terror (the site of an earlier murder) becomes very much Paula’s crypt. She was in a sense buried alive as the husband would not let her leave the building. Her many-roomed ‘coffin’ makes for a very grim ‘life’.

The male protagonist is a dark romantic figure. To the outside world, husband Gregory Anton portrays the dashing gentleman but we also see another darker side to him. He displays a Jekyll and Hyde split personality.

The STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1886) was written by Robert Louis Stevenson. The story set in London is about a lawyer investigating strange happenings between his friend Dr Henry Jekyll and horrible Edward Hyde. GASLIGHT has a very similar theme in that an investigator (Joseph Cotten) exposes someone with a psychopathological bent.

The way in which Gregory Anton slips out of the house each night to do his dark deeds is vampiric in a sense, but moreso, another aspect of GASLIGHT seems to reflect the JACK THE RIPPER story.
The unidentified London serial killer JACK THE RIPPER (around 1888) victimised women. With his non-English accent, Gregory Anton may represent one of the many immigrants pouring into England during the mid 1800s. This influx of humanity led to overcrowding, massive poverty and crime from a very low class. The infamous Jack The Ripper may have been a product of the social upheaval. The case was followed and unsuccessfully investigated by Scotland Yard. (Scotland Yard also featuring in GASLIGHT, was founded in 1829 and was the headquarters of the service which policed much of London )

A further influence on GASLIGHT may have been JANE EYRE. JANE EYRE (1847) by Charlotte Bronte is one of the most influential English novels of all time.

JANE EYRE was orphaned as a baby. In GASLIGHT, Paula was ‘orphaned’ after her aunt/guardian/opera singer (Alice Alquist) was strangled to death in their London home at No. 9 Thornton Square.

Paula’s husband Gregory has a romantic Byronic aura like Edward Rochester in JANE EYRE, but he also gradually reveals a cold, cruel, self-serving disposition like Mr Brocklehurst, a neglectful, dishonest man in JANE EYRE.

Like Rochester (in JANE EYRE), Gregory seems quite taken with Paula and repeatedly keeps her in his controlling presence.

JANE EYRE includes shallow socialites also featuring in GASLIGHT.

In JANE EYRE, Rochester blames a servant for various strange occurences. It perplexes and amazes Jane, but for love’s sake she ignores the issue. A very similar situation arises in GASLIGHT.

In JANE EYRE one character (Adèle) is the illegitimate daughter of a French opera singer. In GASLIGHT, Paula’s guardian was an opera singer.

JANE EYRE features a strange old gypsy woman who insists on telling everyone's fortunes, roughly echoed in GASLIGHT in the character of the eccentric old nosey neighbour who insists on finding the truth.

The idea of being locked up in a house features heavily in JANE EYRE. The young Jane was locked up in an unused red chamber room, in which she panics thinking she saw a ghost and she remained in there till she got ill and passed out.

In JANE EYRE Jane hears eerie laughter coming from inside the manor house. In GASLIGHT, Paula hears strange noises coming from the house as well.

In JANE EYRE, Rochester cannot marry Jane because it is revealed that he is already married to another woman. Rochester bitterly explains that his wife is a violent madwoman whom he keeps imprisoned in the attic, where a servant (Grace Poole) looks after her. In GASLIGHT Paula gradually becomes like a madwoman imprisoned upstairs and relying on servants.

In JANE EYRE, the manorhouse ‘Thornfield’ ultimately lies blackened and in ruins. Jane learns that Rochester's mad wife set fire to the house and committed suicide by jumping from the roof. Though this is not the grim end in GASLIGHT, the movie is powerful as one might imagine something like this happening if Paula isn’t rescued in time by her male friend (played by Joseph Cotten).

GASLIGHT is a cleverly woven tale of innocence versus experience, naivety versus ruthlessness. The power of suggestion in this movie leaves a hypnotic effect.

Great choice Brett. Thanks

Pia Santaklaus

I have a question: Was Jack the Ripper ‘Jumping Jack Flash’? Like the song says “It’s a GAS GAS GAS”

The Spiral Staircase - this week at cinematheque

SAT. 23/8/8 & MON. 25/8/8 HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC:

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE

USA/1945/B&W/84mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Robert Siodmak. Cast: Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Ken Smith, Rhonda Fleming.

A gothic melodrama set in a New England town in 1906 where a psychopathic killer is murdering young women he sees as "defectives". His next victim is to be Helen, a mute. According to Siodmak, the intention was to create "a sort of surrealist film which put the audience into a trance." Dorothy McGuire's playing as Helen was conceived as "a sort of ballet recovering some of the elements of silent cinema".

Screens with Suicide Squeeze USA/1986/B&W and Color/27mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Brady Lewis. A wry journey through the world of filmmaking, narrative and American culture. A private eye relates his tale over optically printed and staged scenes in the noir style, sequences of manipulated imagery including animation and high speed cinematography, a saxophone player and a class watching a film.

Introduction to Black Sunday

Hi everyone and welcome to this special World Youth Day screening of Mario Bava's 1960 gothic horror film, Black Sunday. Are there any pilgrims here today?.. No, it's probably just as well, because this film, like many of the best horror films, is a reminder of how the sins and evils of the past, in this case, the persecution of "witches", can come back to haunt the present.

I didn't program this film specifically as a response to the events of WYD. It was just one of those fortunate accidents that it happened to coincide with the Pope's visit to Australia and it only dawned on me earlier in the week that the film had some relevance, however tenuous, to the papal visit. I don't want to put the boot in too much, as I am a Catholic (lapsed) myself and have enjoyed seeing all the pilgrims about town. I even saw some singing nuns on the bus the other day and for a minuteI thought I was stuck in a 1970s disaster movie, but I did think it was a bit rich for the Pope to come all the way to Sydney just to preach about the perils of violence and sex in the media, especially considering the most violent film in recent memory is a film based on the crucifixion, and that collectors of erotica have long envied the Vatican collection, the largest collection of erotic art and literature in the world. With all the things wrong in this world, I think violence and sex on TV, in the movies, and on the internet are way down the list.

The star of today's film, Barbara Steele, is (like the Pope) a vehement critic of violence in the movies. Her role in this film made her a star, or at least a scream queen, and although she made a nice career and appeared in dozens of horror movies in Italy, the USA and Britain, Steele used to call the audience for her movies "sexually disturbed teenage boys." Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

This psychopathologisation of the audience for horror movies goes back at least to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s, but it was 1960, the year that saw the release of Black Sunday, Psycho and Peeping Tom, that the idea of horror movie viewer as pervert began to get some traction in the public consciousness. The film that best dramatises this idea is Michael Powell's once-derided, now classic Peeping Tom. The film explicitly equates movie viewing and movie making with voyeurism and even murder. As the sixties progressed this idea crops up in the work of Susan Sontag in her famous essay On Photography, in Yoko Ono's avant-garde film Rape and in Laura Mulvey's seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. This idea of the horror movie fan as psychopathic continues even today. The most recent example I can think of is the hit movie Scream, where the murderers are revealed to be the nerdy horror movie loving geeks. The teenage male murderers absorbed so many horror movie cliches they turned into one.

I haven't seen Black Sunday for over twenty years, so I'm not going to say much about it, except that there are several different versions of the movie. There's the Italian version, filmed in polyglot with the actors speaking in their native language and dubbed into Italian. There's the British version, which was revoiced by English actors and trimmed of its more violent excesses and then there's the version you are about to see, the American version, which was revoiced by American actors, again trimmed of some of the more grisly moments and rescored by the then popular composer Les Baxter. Although this is hardly the definitive version, no amount of censor trims or cheesy orchestral scoring can diminish the impact of Bava's eye for set design, lighting and cinematography or his ability to create a wonderfully spooky atmosphere. If you saw Barrie Pattison's recent lecture on the history of Italian popular cinema you would have seen the early Bava educational film, Geometry Lesson. Even in a staid educational film, Bava was able to weave his macabre magic.

If you like the film, I would recommend reading Tim Lucas' wonderful book on Mario Bava, All the Colors of the Dark. There is also a box set of his films available from Umbrella Entertainment in Australia. Enjoy the movie and hope to see you next week for Lady of Burlesque.

The Other Italian Cinema: Black Sunday

The Chauvel Cinematheque's mini season of popular Italian cinema concludes this week with a rare theatrical screening of Mario Bava's acclaimed gothic horror film from 1960, Black Sunday (La Maschera Del Demonio) starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson and Arturo Dominici.

Bava's first film as a director after a distinguished career as a cinematographer is a landmark of the horror film and the perfect foil for the World Youth Day celebrations, dealing as it does with the Catholic Church's historical oppression of women.

A 17th century witch and her lover are executed with a spiked devil's mask. Two centuries later they are revived and return to destroy her cursed family. The story verges on fable, while the images and prowling camera have the power of delicate nightmare with moments of rarely surpassed beauty and horror. Steele's double role as the virginal Katia and the sexual witch presents the only two options allowed for women in such religious imagery: Madonna and whore. The ending suggests the possibility of merger.

“One of the cinema’s preeminent examples of gothic horror.” Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness
“An elegant and disturbing film that discloses the strange beauty of horror.” David J. Hogan, Dark Romance

Screening with the film is Bruno Bozzeto's animated short, Self-Service, that satirises Prohibition and the madness of a petroleum-based economy.

Don't miss this timely and provocative intrusion of the past into the present - this week at cinematheque.

Transcript of Introduction to The Scarecrow

Hi everyone. Thanks for coming today to this screening of the Kiwi gothic melodrama, The Scarecrow. Being something of a Kiwiphile (I've been to New Zealand four times, mostly to work on The Incredibly Strange Film Festival) I am a great admirer of New Zealand films. During my visits there, I often talk to the locals about movies and inevitably the subject of New Zealand films arises. When I ask them what their favourite New Zealand films are, The Scarecrow is almost always cited as one of the very best.


The film was based on the novel by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, a musician and writer whose biography sounds like a gothic novel in itself. Born in 1922 in Hawera, Morrieson was an only child, indulged by a doting mother and an elderly aunt. He lived in the same rundown old house his whole life, and never left the town of his birth, except for a few nights spent in Auckland. He was a musician who played in local jazz bands and made a living as a music teacher. He also had a reputation as a drunk and a womaniser, evetually drinking himself to death in 1972.


In the last decade of his life he wrote four novels, the first of which was The Scarecrow. The novel was poorly received in New Zealand at the time of its publication, leading Morrieson to correctly predict that he would be one of those romantic fools who is discovered after his death. The people of his home-town were particularly appalled by Morrieson's morbid themes and cynical attitude,and commented, "Why can't you write about nice things." Anyone who specialises in the gothic will recognise this as a familiar lament.


Posthumous recognition has placed Morrieson among the top rank of New Zealand authors and he is the subject of at least one biography. Several films were made of his work. When his house was set to be demolished there was a modest uporoar among the NZ literati who wanted it preserved. A petition was organised to save the house, but a counter petition, signed by the residents of his old hometown, attracted four times the signatures and the house was demolished. There was still a lot of enmity felt towards him - for what reason - we'll leave to your imagination.


The film that you are about to see was directed in 1981 by Sam Pillsbury. At the time i was considered to be one of the most accomplished New Zealand films ever produced, equalled only by Sleeping Dogs and Goodbye Pork Pie. The cast includes Australian actress Tracy Mann and, in the title role, American actor and horror icon John Carradine, whose career spanned six decades and over four hundred movies. At the time of prodution, Carradine was well into his seventies, crippled by arthritis, and willing to work on any film no matter how shoddy, as long as the cheque cleared, which saw him appear in some of the worst horror movies of all time, including Satan's Cheerleaders, Astro Zombies and the abysmal Frankenstein Island. This was undoubtedly his best work of the period.

Freud describes the uncanny as something that is familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. The German word he uses is unheimlich, which translates into English as the unhomely. I can think of no better way to describe New Zealand, especially as an Australian. It is strangely familiar; the people, the place, the architecture, the type of society, the way of life, yet also strangely unfamiliar, although the unfamiliarity is hard to put your finger on, which only makes it all the more uncanny. There is a strong gothic underbelly to New Zealand, one that Morrieson captures perfectly in The Scarecrow. During my last stay in NZ, a psychotic P (or ice, as it is known in Australia) freak went amok in a 7-11 with a samurai sword. The place is full of stories of bizarre behaviour, grisly murders, and marvellously eccentric characters.

The one gripe that New Zealanders have about Australia is that no one ever visits there. It's all one-way traffic. So having fallen in love with the place, I suggets you consider it as a possible holiday destination. Just remember to stay out of the 7-11s. Enjoy the movie.