by Gregg Williard.
I’ve never felt so close to friends as in that matinee dark, seeing Journey to the Center of the Earth in the summer of 1961. Many of that 5th grade class are now gone from drugs, war, age. I visit them again, going into the dark, down the depths. My guide is no muse of the past or angel of the future, but duende out of Lorca, red devil of the edge, the dance right now. Look down, it says. Come closer. See them, now. At the movies.
Henry Levin, director of Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) was best known for a string of romantic comedies in the 1960’s (“frothy romps”) like April Love (1957), Where the Boys Are (1960) and Come Fly with Me (1963), though his filmography covers everything from fantasy to westerns to crime and spy adventures. Journey’s haunting poetry seems all unconscious, atmospheric, and aural, owing everything to Cinemascope, the over the top Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, the hyperreality of Emil Kosta Jr.’s matt paintings, and (most significantly) the overwhelming musical score of Bernard Herrmann, imparting a sense of gravitas and eighteenth-century sublime (the wondrous-terrifying variety out of Kant). This is Jules Verne and Pat Boone refracted through Casper David Friedrich as explorers James Mason, Boone, Arlene Dahl and Peter Ronson descend into a secret tunnel from the extinct Scartaris volcano in Iceland. They encounter crystalline chambers, caverns of steaming salt, phosphorous pools, a forest of giant mushrooms, the lost Atlantis and an underground ocean out of centuries of Hollow Earth mythologies. And to the probable horror of stop-motion artists like Phil Tippet, dinosaurs, (optically enlarged Iguanas with glued-on back fins). Their evident sacrifice under lava flows (cascades of painted, boiling oatmeal) provides a sharp poignancy to the monster scenes. Viewing this movie in vast dark theaters was the early childhood baptism of the Vietnam-Woodstock-Watergate generation, in the throes of a mysterium tremens freighted with meanings we could scarcely apprehend. (The film’s producer Charles Brackett even boasted that he had created a straight-up adventure “with not a hint of Freud…I’m sick of all these films based on thoughts at the back of sick minds…”) But Freud, and Jung, and the terror of the sublime could not be crooned away with interludes of Pat Boone. The drop, and the descent, goes on. Any movie can do, in a dark theater, streamed on TV, played from you tube on a computer. The movies take me to the edge of a well, to dance on the edge, to look down.
Another film of drop, and descent: a figure in diesel-punk helmet, goggles and gas mask descends by bathyscaphe into an underworld of monsters, mazes, torture and endless war, on a dogged but enigmatic mission to explore, discover or destroy some undisclosed “X”. Welcome to Mad God (2020), a staggering hand-made hell by stop-motion and effects master Phil Tippett, who devoted thirty off-and-on years of crowd-sourcing and communal collaboration to create a film that gives new and visceral meaning to the phrase “passion project”: (Promotional blurbs identify him/her as “the assassin”). The episodic story is a dazzling procession of set pieces a la German expressionism, Bosch and Geiger, Piranesi and Escher, where Metropolis-like proles made of lint and dust are crushed beneath juggernauts of industrial death run amok. With a haunting and ambient score by Dan Wool, it makes the unreasonable, resonant sense of a dream.
Tippett is part of the Spielberg-Lucas generation, changed forever in childhood after seeing the 1933 King Kong rereleased on TV in the mid-1950’s, and 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958. For these kids (and I count myself among them) the stop-motion process pioneered by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen (which involves filming hand-crafted, articulated models in minutely changing increments, run together to simulate movement) offered an indescribable frisson of the inert and dinky made alive, and giant. (Tippett calls it “sculpting in time.”) Nothing “moves” like stop-motion. At once life-like and artificial, full of delicate, vibrating portent, it is as unique and poetic as Martha Graham or Kabuki. Many of those ’50’s monster kids went on to create their own effects and films, but few have followed childhood enthusiasms as far or with comparable artistry as Tippett. Over his career he has won accolades and awards for scores of films and projects, including work on Dragon Slayer, The Empire Strikes Back, Robo Cop, Jurassic Park, and Starship Troopers, to name a few.
Stop motion is notoriously slow and painstaking, and in the early 1990’s seemed to be rendered obsolete by CGI. (During pre-production of Jurassic Park, Tippett saw a CGI dinosaur and famously said, “I’ve become extinct.”) He became seriously ill and depressed, but fought his way back with help from Spielberg, Lucas and many others to develop a stop-motion digital sensor technology that was a critical bridge between the two techniques. While Tippett still maintains that the hand-crafted, real objects of stop motion are superior to the “3-D cartoons” of CGI, he (unlike his beloved dinosaurs) was able to learn, adapt and prevail. Mad God can be read as a kind of autobiography, and parable, of death, resurrection and transformation.
(Other stop-motion masters include The Quay Brothers, Jan Svankmajer, Karel Zeman, Joaquin Cocina and Cristobel Leon, to name a few).
Another movie, Ben Rivers’ Look Then Below (2019) creates an immersive spell of deep time far exceeding its mere 23 minutes. Filmed in the Wookey Hole Caves near Somerset, England, (where Rivers was born and grew up), it is the third of a collaborative trilogy with science fiction writer Mark Von Schlegell, whose incantatory text is read with mesmerizing understatement by screenwriter Therese Hennington, and perfectly complemented by Christina Vantzou’s spare soundtrack. The look of the film combines the grit, blur, double exposure and solarization of indie 16 mm, with smooth tracking shots of hallucinatory clarity. Moments of under and over-exposure feel like the imprint of some unknown grotto ore.
“Wookey” comes from the Celtic ogof, “cave”, “Wookey Hole Caves” thus meaning, “cave cave cave.” As described in Von Schlegell’s narration, the film’s underworld is “a hole in a hole.” In our world, Wookey leads to multi-chambered galleries and the largest underground river system in Britain, with a 45,000-year history of human habitation and use as shrine, shelter, and attraction. (More recently, its unearthly vibe has served as a location for several episodes of Doctor Who, and housed theater circus shows, penny arcades and magic mirror mazes). But Rivers avowed intentions are not to represent the Wookey Cave of this world in either its natural or profaned form, but “to use actual people and places and transform them into something that isn’t the world, it’s new.”
An impressively prolific filmmaker, Rivers’s explorations of outsider communities, blighted landscapes, social dislocation, and environmental crisis are unconstrained by the dictates of documentary film. His films consider utopia as both a communal project and a private realm and set an acutely observed present against larger scales of time and value. Especially noteworthy is his Slow Action (2010) that imagines a world where rising sea-levels have created separate island societies of isolated and eccentric utopias. Efforts to classify his work usually create a whiplash of compound descriptors: fictional-documentary, experimental-science fictional, political-apocalyptic-dystopian, ethnographic-fantasy, darkly-optimistic-visionary-eco-catastrophic, personal-post-human realism. (Unsurprisingly, one of his literary heroes is J.G. Ballard, especially his cycle of apocalyptic science fiction novels of the 1970’s). Among them, Crystal World looks like an especially strong influence on the vision in Look Then Below, where the world and everyone in it is changing into crystals of hypnotic, deadly beauty that may or may not be alive. Rivers also points to Ballard’s fascination creating human characters who choose to stay behind and adapt, mutate, or go mad in vision, rant and hope. Look Then Below and Rivers’s other work may come to be guides for those of us who, in times to come, choose to stay behind.
In The Black Cat, (1934), David Manners tells Bela Lugosi that his disquisition on the evil and immortality of black cats “sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney.” Lugosi replies, “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” The movie is playing on You Tube while I write. Lugosi has returned to Hungary after fifteen years in prison to avenge the treachery of his old war friend Boris Karloff, Austria’s greatest architect and a satan worshiper. Karloff sold out Lugosi to the enemy and stole his wife, now dead and embalmed upright behind glass in the basement of his Bauhaus/funhouse mansion somewhere in Eastern Europe, on the site of “the biggest graveyard in the world.” Even worse, he has seduced Lugosi’s daughter, (or maybe his own? It’s not clear), eventually murdering her. David Manners and his young wife Julie Mitchell have ended up trapped in the house after a car crash. Julie is injured, and in a sexualized fugue from drugs after treatment from Lugosi. She sleeps. There are long, odd stretches of emptiness and voice overs as the camera roams the haunted modernist halls and stairwells and tunnels. Deep beneath the house, Lugosi skins Karloff alive and sets off buried explosives. Manners and Mitchell escape. The end. This is classic “pre-code” Hollywood, with a stylish strangeness all its own. Director Edgar Ulmer established himself in the German film industry of the ‘20’s, working on The Golem, Metropolis, and later Sunrise as a production designer (a category originating with him). His big studio career began and ended with The Black Cat, destroyed after he fell in love with a film executive’s wife and eloped with her to New York. Banned from Hollywood, he went on to make zero-budget masterpieces like Detour, Man from Planet X and Beyond the Time Barrier, infused with a brilliant design sense despite no time or money, for the East Coast bargain basement studio PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation). His daughter said he was never bitter and had no care for fame or wealth. Peter Bogdonovitch and others revere Ulmer as the ultimate lemonade-from-lemons artist, whose brilliance flourished under impossible constraints. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
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When I write a story and finish it, it becomes a small dwelling that may be reached, and then extended, through tunnels. Tubes. These are lined by pipes and wires and lit with utility lights. These tunnels and tubes become more stories. Digging them to connect to other dwellings, or burrows, makes more stories, and travelling through them from one to another dwelling, and then building them out to establish new dwellings, makes more stories. In this sense I feel all my work is one big story, underground. My own haunted bargain basement. But perhaps this way of working only perpetuates isolation, imaginative constriction, and perhaps I should blow the whole fucking thing up, like Karloff’s mansion in The Black Cat. Or perhaps not.
Perhaps these tunnels under the The Black Cat, or into the Scartaris volcano, or within the Wookey Hole Caves, or the Tippet underworld are like blood vessels, arteries, that convey narrative blood from one organ to another. Or perhaps not. Perhaps these arteries become blocked with cholesterol or other deposits and must be opened by stents or bypassed with surgery. But perhaps not. Perhaps these blockages, these bulges, represent the beginnings of new story dwellings. My tubes. Your Tubes. You Tubes. They get propped up, opened and supported with stents, like prop posts in a mine shaft. As these spaces are secured, they become stops, break areas for the miners. These are places to drink coffee from thermoses, eat sandwiches from metal lunch boxes, and tell stories. Over time they are further reinforced and insulated, wired and heated, and made into dwellings of stories themselves. From here new tunnels are started and dug into new directions and destinations. Or perhaps not.
One of the first things I think of is having a heart attack and getting two stents put in when I was sixty. OK. Those prop posts were good things. And the cardiac medications I take are good things. They have given me more time to dig the tunnels. Surely that is a good thing. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Perhaps it’s all in the basement of the house. My house in Wisconsin was built by a German immigrant named Clarence Koster in 1927. His peculiar design sense included odd juttings and not quite right-angled walls and doors, reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. In the basement, twin bomb shelter chambers were hacked out of stone, with walls built around them of cement. The ceiling, in my imagination, is choked with pipes—plumbing, ventilation, insulated wires—that resemble the interior of the industrial tunnels that I carried around in my files to use, sometime. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Now when I go to Clarence Koster’s basement alone, I have visitors. It happens when I go from the chamber on the left to the one on the right; somewhere in-between the two are processions of women, and men, or girls, and boys. My friends from school, sitting around me in the theater, watching Journey to the Center of the Earth. One of us will die in Vietnam, another will be lost in another tunnel of drugs and violence, another live to write an essay called “Films of Drop and Descent.” It’s a prayer for those friends who died or lost their way in dark tunnels, for the spirits that still visit me, in between the shelters in the basement, in the words on the page, the in between, and beneath.