MISSING PIECES: THE VISION OF A KILLER IN THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE
The third episode of Detours is now available on Vimeo.
The synopsis:
Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase tells the story of a series of stranger-murders happening in a small town in Vermont in 1906. The bulk of the action is set in an old dark house during a storm, where convalescing matriarch Mrs. Warren is tended to by a servant, the protagonist Helen, who cannot speak due to a childhood trauma. In the local village, a killer has struck three times, each time attacking a woman with a disability. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses the role of distorted vision in the film, a literal rendering of Borde and Chaumeton's thesis that the noir aesthetic of deep and unnatural shadows is a criminal’s perspective of the world; as well as the ways in which Siodmak's film anticipates the role of the first person perspective in the thrillers that followed.
While many of my earliest memories of film noir involved detective movies - The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Combo - the strongest experiences I have of the noir style are in films that belong, at least marginally, to what a glance may appear to be atypical genres (especially melodramas like Ruthless and Mildred Pierce). Raymond Durgnat wrote about the flexibility of genre classification when dealing with noir, an accommodating interpretation that reinforces my own long-held feeling that noir is more a posture, a style, an aesthetic, than it is a container (like a movement or a genre or an epoch). I found myself reflecting again on the purpose of these kinds of labels this week, watching Grace Lee’s What Isn’t a Video Essay, which raises some interesting questions about genres and classifications. I’ve given this topic a lot of thought as I work through Detours as study bound by convention (ex. 1941-1958). Anyone can say X is X, but Y? Classification systems tend to exist not merely to present spheres of common interests or aesthetics, but to set objective standards for an entrance into discourse. I’ve been writing a lot about erotic thrillers and neo-noir, and while the connection between these labels and certain off-the-beaten path movies seem obvious to me, I know there’s a burden of discourse that must be met because of the works and arguments that already dominate those topics.
Which brings me to one of those detours that informed my own flexible classifications. Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase is a horror movie made at RKO in the immediate wake of Val Lewton’s departure, and the film has much in common, thematically and stylistically, with Lewton’s horror films. As much as it follows in the tropes and thrills of the ‘old dark house’ movie, it’s also a prototype for the giallo films that would come in the 1960s and the American slashers that would follow in the 1970s. Like Cause for Alarm, The Spiral Staircase challenges what we might imagine a noir film to be, for example, because of its setting and because of its debts to the horror genre.
It features a killer who has his own malicious ‘classification standard’ for humanity, one which doesn’t allow for difference and disability. The film has a loose relation to a number of genres: a horror/thriller with romance and melodrama, set in the past (early 1900s) and in the broken idyl of a Vermont village. In this video essay, I try to deal with a few themes that present themselves within the film: the presence of the filmmaker’s own eyes as surrogate to the killer’s; themes of eugenics and human worth; what it means to be able-bodied in a world where ability can itself be treacherous. This last point is especially meaningful in the climax of The Spiral Staircase, as protagonist Helen, recovers her voice almost miraculously, as if to ‘meet’ the poisonous standards of the killer:
No longer an outsider, no longer disabled, no longer exceptional, she becomes, much as the killer saw himself, like everyone else.
In making Missing Pieces, I was most interested in the ways that the shadowy character of the film’s cinematography could be emphasized through superimposition: in doing so the eye, so often a subject of menacing zooms, becomes a corridor of many irises. Contrary to the popular imagination, very few Victorian-set ‘old dark house’ movies truly feature an atmosphere of formal menace. Whale’s The Old Dark House often reads as a broad comedy in terms of composition and light; much later, William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (made in Illusion-O!) virtually cements the undercutting of menace within such a setting with its bland, dispersed lighting. By contrast, The Spiral Staircase presents the Warren mansion as a house of deep shadows, which in its case does so much to reinforce the film’s themes of intergenerational trauma.
MOMENTS OF PERCEPTION: EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN CANADA
For the past several years, I’ve been working with Michael Zryd, Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg on a major survey of experimental filmmaking in Canada, to be released by Goose Lane Editions on November 16. To celebrate the announcement of the book (and its availability for pre-orders), I made this trailer:
The book features a comprehensive historical essay by Michael Zryd, dealing with the institutions, agencies, labs, etc. that have shaped this cinema. My contribution was a collection of 26 profiles on filmmakers, among them, Joyce Wieland, R. Bruce Elder, and Richard Kerr. Several of these profiles will become episodes of Art & Trash; in fact, two already have: Louise Bourque: Scene of the Crime and Josephine Massarella: One Woman Walking.
Next week on Detours, The Long Road: The Shape of Perspective in Where Danger Lives, on John Farrow’s nightmarish road movie.