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Movie note.
Aug. 17th, 2006 04:16 pmI saw the 1962 Carnival of Souls last night.
(On the principle that it came out 44 years ago and that I'm not recommending it as groundbreaking earthshaking cinema, I am not trying to avoid spoilers.)
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I'd call it a ghost story. Car with (among others) very reserved woman in it goes over the side of a bridge. Attempts to retrieve the car by dredging the river are failing, when the woman stumbles up out of the water downstream.
A cold fish, this one, she carries on with her plans to move to her new job as a church organist--in the process making it clear that she views the church as just a place of business, doesn't intend to stop by to see her parents while she's driving off, and responding to an offer to stay in touch with "Thank you, but I'm never coming back."
Driving to the town where she is now employed, she twice sees the figure of a pale, hollow-eyed man in black (once looking through the passenger window, once standing in front of the car). We aren't treated to her thoughts, but she reacted very much as I imagine someone would if they believed themselves to be stressed, tired, and having their mind play small tricks on them.
The final scene is back at the bridge, where the dredgers have finally found the car. They pull it out of the water, and her body is inside it.
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It's not great--the score is annoying even if the organ/calliope switches are nice, and the pacing is slow, especially at the beginning. On the flip side, the acting didn't strike me as at all bad, just... in a different language, the way most movies from twenty years ago or more seem to be. There was much less dialogue than I expected. And there were mercifully no expository lumps or sledgehammer-subtle explanations or blatant art-school angsting.
And some of the scenes--when no-one in the world seems to be able to see her and she steps onto a bus only to find that it's filled with dead people who slowly get to their feet and start coming towards her, or when she sees the Dead Man dancing with her own corpse--are just beautiful. The execution isn't great--the music is crude, and the makeup effects are Hallowe'enish--but the ideas behind them are getting to me.
Fun way to spend an hour and change. I think it'd work better edited down to an hour, but I tend to prefer very dense fiction.
(On the principle that it came out 44 years ago and that I'm not recommending it as groundbreaking earthshaking cinema, I am not trying to avoid spoilers.)
========
I'd call it a ghost story. Car with (among others) very reserved woman in it goes over the side of a bridge. Attempts to retrieve the car by dredging the river are failing, when the woman stumbles up out of the water downstream.
A cold fish, this one, she carries on with her plans to move to her new job as a church organist--in the process making it clear that she views the church as just a place of business, doesn't intend to stop by to see her parents while she's driving off, and responding to an offer to stay in touch with "Thank you, but I'm never coming back."
Driving to the town where she is now employed, she twice sees the figure of a pale, hollow-eyed man in black (once looking through the passenger window, once standing in front of the car). We aren't treated to her thoughts, but she reacted very much as I imagine someone would if they believed themselves to be stressed, tired, and having their mind play small tricks on them.
-- I was typing a summary here, and it got to be way, *way* longer than I thought. Short version: woman sees strange figure more and more, breaks more and more ties with people and physical reality, and vanishes. --At the end, she's driven to distraction and ends up out at the abandoned carnival, pursued by a horde of Dead Man types (including the people who were in the car with her when it crashed). Come morning, the police officer looking for her finds only her footprints on the beach, leading out to where she fell to make a mark in the sand, and then nothing.
The final scene is back at the bridge, where the dredgers have finally found the car. They pull it out of the water, and her body is inside it.
========
It's not great--the score is annoying even if the organ/calliope switches are nice, and the pacing is slow, especially at the beginning. On the flip side, the acting didn't strike me as at all bad, just... in a different language, the way most movies from twenty years ago or more seem to be. There was much less dialogue than I expected. And there were mercifully no expository lumps or sledgehammer-subtle explanations or blatant art-school angsting.
And some of the scenes--when no-one in the world seems to be able to see her and she steps onto a bus only to find that it's filled with dead people who slowly get to their feet and start coming towards her, or when she sees the Dead Man dancing with her own corpse--are just beautiful. The execution isn't great--the music is crude, and the makeup effects are Hallowe'enish--but the ideas behind them are getting to me.
Fun way to spend an hour and change. I think it'd work better edited down to an hour, but I tend to prefer very dense fiction.
