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Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
I hope everyone for whom it is relevant had a good Easter. It is not in any capacity a religious holiday for my family, but we made our usual ham with pineapple, brown sugar, and mustard glaze and delivered the Easter baskets that we make for friends and family and my mother and I watched a movie that I need to write up before I start to forget the best lines, but not in this post. This post is about witchcraft. This past week, I saw two very good, very different witch movies in as many days. If I count Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Тіні забутих предків, 1965), this month might have a theme.
It is not difficult to describe Belladonna of Sadness (哀しみのベラドンナ, 1973), which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I saw on the opening night of the Boston Underground Film Festival. It is an early foray into animation for an expressly adult audience; it was produced by the pioneering Japanese studio Mushi Production, under the auspices of manga god Osamu Tezuka; it is loosely based on Jules Michelet's La Sorcière (1862) and follows the travails of a woman in fifteenth-century France who accepts power from the Devil after finding none reliably available to her on earth, not from her peasant husband, her aristocratic rapists, or her fellow villagers caught between war and famine. The voice acting is very good, especially Jeanne and the Devil. The action is narrated over a panoply of animation styles, constantly shifting registers from the pencil-sketch realistic to the cartoonish to the abstract to a scrolling panorama of still watercolor images like paintings on a church wall. The music is jazzy psych-rock with interludes of pop ballads and a genuinely spooky folk-styled refrain. The heroine's hair changes color with nearly every new art style, but only in the last third of the movie is it narratively significant. The Devil is quite cute when he only resembles a skullcapped pink dick.
Here we start to hit the problem with describing Belladonna: the difficulty lies in making it sound accurately good as opposed to merely mind-bendingly weird. Rather like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), it seems to call out from critics a kind of highly colored mash-up glossolalia: "Klimt, O'Keeffe, Op Art, Ralph Steadman and the higher class of Playboy illustration," "Yellow Submarine-meets-The Devils," "like if Egon Schiele drew an edition of The Dungeon Master's Guide." I think the best praise I can give it, aside from the attestation that it is visually marvelous to watch, is that it is the only film of its kind I have ever seen where the diabolical orgy is actually blasphemous. Nobody in Belladonna wastes time doing shocking things with a cross. We are talking sex like Hieronymus Bosch drew it, where people's genitals turn into trees or giraffes or spout forth fishes and there is a whole chain of naked human figures interlocked orgasmically (and floating, like you do) and then there are some snails and scallops and some more people and a dog. It's funny and horrifying and erotically portrayed and it made the audience uncomfortable; you could tell from the quality of the laughter. Of the heroine's three sex scenes with the Devil, the consensual one is the most disturbing. It's the one where she changes shape. What gets lost in this recommendation, of course, is that the film is not just a series of narratively significant sex scenes, although there are many and Belladonna is impossible to watch without a high comfort level with sexual violence and general female nudity (male nudity is contributed primarily by the Devil's character design), it is also a great depiction of medieval European witchcraft. The artistic fluidity means the narrative can play with metaphors and the audience's understanding of them—when the Black Death comes to town, its visual representation could be germ theory or gleeful demons and just as the audience is accustoming itself to seeing human figures starred with stylized blood-black like beauty patches, the entire landscape from cathedral steps to cottaged hillside graphically collapses into an apocalyptic tide and drains literally off the edge of the world, leaving in its wake a beach-wrack of skulls and ribcages and rotten harvest and a dead man whom the witch Jeanne awakens in a paradise of flowers because she feels like it. The story ends as most witch-hunts do, but with a terrific historical stinger.
I feel like Tanith Lee should have seen this movie before writing The Book of the Damned (1989), but I can't figure out when she would have had the opportunity. It was a commercial failure and a critical bewilderment, never officially released in the U.S. prior to the extensive digital restoration now touring North America, which I encourage anyone whom this account even faintly interests to catch if it comes through your city. Rush had seen it once ten years ago at a convention, sans subtitles and apparently semi-interpreted by a very enthusiastic fan at the front of the room; it made such an impression that I was able to recognize not only scenes but specific artistic techniques from their description. I thought it was fantastic. I am only sorry it has taken so many years for the critical mass of cult appreciation to equal popular availability.
I already raved about Robert Eggers' The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) tonineweaving, asakiyume, and handful_ofdust, but that doesn't mean I'm not still impressed. The title is truthful: in their subject matter, meticulous historical worldbuilding, and deeply alien sense of past, David Rudkin's The Ash Tree (1975) and Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013) are The Witch's closest equivalents, but this story is very definitely of New England rather than old. I think it is a combination of the landscape, the religion, and the specifics of the witchcraft that afflicts the protagonist's family that draws the distinction so clearly. The Devil in New England is a black man with a book. So he is, here.
The images are not the only important thing about this movie, but they are crucial to its success; they tell perhaps even more of the story than the stark, spiritually freighted dialogue. Everything is beautifully photographed in an aspect ratio now uncommon in the U.S. (1.66:1), in natural light that looks like paintings until all of a sudden it looks like the forest turning itself inside out to swallow the characters, the camera, the audience. The soundtrack is a mix of folk themes and the kind of eerie ambient score that often accompanies contemporary horror, but it is being performed on instruments like nyckelharpa and fiddle. That low, buzzing, agitated drone that comes up over a nightmare-slow zoom into the woods is not electronic. Some scenes were shot at Plimoth Plantation, others in north Ontario, which preserves the old-growth forests that Massachusetts has mostly clear-cut since the film's early seventeenth century. There is a witch in the shape of a hare. There is the Devil in the form of a goat. (There is the Devil in the form of a man; he is barely seen, a deep voice, a spurred boot, a dark face shadowed by a hat-brim, and he is magnificent. He does more of the diabolical with his three minutes than some actors do with two hours, Al Pacino.) There is human horror and there is a decent amount of gore, though it is only part of the folklore. Anya Taylor-Joy as the protagonist is astonishing. Her eyes are so wide-set, they look a little off true, as if she herself has some animal's vision, as if she is always looking past what she is supposed to see. She is the oldest child of an English Puritan family whose patriarch has taken them into self-exile from the Plymouth Colony, a second immigration to an even less promised land. The God-given sunlit field of their first encounter fades into a fall-starved farmstead, flint corn rotting in the husk, a lightless wind shivering constantly in the pines. Drawn into the labyrinth of the wilderness, the characters encounter figures like the oldest bones of a folk story: a low tumulus of a house with stone for the door and a roof of tree, a dark young woman with a sly smile emerging in a cloak so violently scarlet, it looks like the warning coloration of a poisonous creature; it is the same color as the spilled blood of a child. A grief-maddened mother in a dream or a hallucination or a bewitchment gives suck to her lost infant; only later do we see that it is a raven perched upon her breast, tearing blood from it instead of milk. When a tormented boy chokes up the cause of his affliction, it is a small, sour apple, artificially reddened with his own tongue-bitten blood. All of this is new and strange to the family; it is presented of such a piece with chores and prayer that it is made strange to the audience. The English language is antique and organic and partly drawn from documents of the period; it is never self-important or stilted, but it can be terribly constrained. I don't know what the non-English language is.
I love especially the direction in which the film chooses to set its ambiguity. In a setting as famously self-consuming as the Puritan isolation of New England that would, about a generation after this story, give rise to the Salem witch trials, The Witch could have gotten away with the obvious horror: is the supernatural real? Is the family tormented by a witch or only turning on themselves out of the expected advantage and paranoia, Arthur Miller's The Crucible in microcosm? Instead the script favors a much scarier question: the supernatural is real, but how much of it is the family correctly perceiving? Does it matter? Within their form of Christianity, witchcraft is the answer to all manner of natural and communal calamities; they are right this time, but will the knowledge help them? Can it help them? What does it mean—personally, theologically—if it can't? At the film's height of hysteria, two parents with their hands interlinked and outstretched pray fast and terrified above the body of their afflicted child as if warding it with the desperate angles of their bodies: if the exorcism works, it saves only the soul. Their faith tells them that should be enough. With agonizing clarity, it isn't. If the love of God is no longer a consolation, what does it matter whether the Devil is abroad in your cornfields or not? But that is a modern question, and no one in this film is modern: if the Devil has come among them, the cost to their souls is beyond reckoning. A mother fears that her vanished child is in hell, being unbaptized; a son fears that he may be a damned sinner for glimpsing his sister's budding breasts. A father loves his children, but cannot assure them of their entrance into heaven, which is as real to them and inaccessible as England. Taylor-Joy's Thomasin is not sure if heaven is what she desires after all, but does that make her, automatically, the lens through which her family's damnation is bent upon it? These are not abstract issues. We have to believe in them, because they are the life or death of the world. All the day scenes in this film are by Vermeer; all the night ones are Goya.
I saw the film on its last night at the Somerville; the ticket-taker told me as I went out that he's never seen anyone ambivalent about it—either people come out smiling like me or they come out swearing it was the worst movie they ever let themselves in for. A little less than halfway through the showing, in fact, a couple sitting a few rows ahead of me got up and left, already muttering to one another as they came up the aisle, ". . . so stupid . . ." So I can't guarantee that you will not feel the same way about The Witch, but I loved it. I had read things like the world it showed me. I had never before seen them onscreen. That novelty is not the only thing the film has going for it.
I must try to sleep; I have a doctor's appointment in the morning. This double feature brought to you by my spellbinding backers at Patreon.
It is not difficult to describe Belladonna of Sadness (哀しみのベラドンナ, 1973), which
rushthatspeaks and I saw on the opening night of the Boston Underground Film Festival. It is an early foray into animation for an expressly adult audience; it was produced by the pioneering Japanese studio Mushi Production, under the auspices of manga god Osamu Tezuka; it is loosely based on Jules Michelet's La Sorcière (1862) and follows the travails of a woman in fifteenth-century France who accepts power from the Devil after finding none reliably available to her on earth, not from her peasant husband, her aristocratic rapists, or her fellow villagers caught between war and famine. The voice acting is very good, especially Jeanne and the Devil. The action is narrated over a panoply of animation styles, constantly shifting registers from the pencil-sketch realistic to the cartoonish to the abstract to a scrolling panorama of still watercolor images like paintings on a church wall. The music is jazzy psych-rock with interludes of pop ballads and a genuinely spooky folk-styled refrain. The heroine's hair changes color with nearly every new art style, but only in the last third of the movie is it narratively significant. The Devil is quite cute when he only resembles a skullcapped pink dick.Here we start to hit the problem with describing Belladonna: the difficulty lies in making it sound accurately good as opposed to merely mind-bendingly weird. Rather like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), it seems to call out from critics a kind of highly colored mash-up glossolalia: "Klimt, O'Keeffe, Op Art, Ralph Steadman and the higher class of Playboy illustration," "Yellow Submarine-meets-The Devils," "like if Egon Schiele drew an edition of The Dungeon Master's Guide." I think the best praise I can give it, aside from the attestation that it is visually marvelous to watch, is that it is the only film of its kind I have ever seen where the diabolical orgy is actually blasphemous. Nobody in Belladonna wastes time doing shocking things with a cross. We are talking sex like Hieronymus Bosch drew it, where people's genitals turn into trees or giraffes or spout forth fishes and there is a whole chain of naked human figures interlocked orgasmically (and floating, like you do) and then there are some snails and scallops and some more people and a dog. It's funny and horrifying and erotically portrayed and it made the audience uncomfortable; you could tell from the quality of the laughter. Of the heroine's three sex scenes with the Devil, the consensual one is the most disturbing. It's the one where she changes shape. What gets lost in this recommendation, of course, is that the film is not just a series of narratively significant sex scenes, although there are many and Belladonna is impossible to watch without a high comfort level with sexual violence and general female nudity (male nudity is contributed primarily by the Devil's character design), it is also a great depiction of medieval European witchcraft. The artistic fluidity means the narrative can play with metaphors and the audience's understanding of them—when the Black Death comes to town, its visual representation could be germ theory or gleeful demons and just as the audience is accustoming itself to seeing human figures starred with stylized blood-black like beauty patches, the entire landscape from cathedral steps to cottaged hillside graphically collapses into an apocalyptic tide and drains literally off the edge of the world, leaving in its wake a beach-wrack of skulls and ribcages and rotten harvest and a dead man whom the witch Jeanne awakens in a paradise of flowers because she feels like it. The story ends as most witch-hunts do, but with a terrific historical stinger.
I feel like Tanith Lee should have seen this movie before writing The Book of the Damned (1989), but I can't figure out when she would have had the opportunity. It was a commercial failure and a critical bewilderment, never officially released in the U.S. prior to the extensive digital restoration now touring North America, which I encourage anyone whom this account even faintly interests to catch if it comes through your city. Rush had seen it once ten years ago at a convention, sans subtitles and apparently semi-interpreted by a very enthusiastic fan at the front of the room; it made such an impression that I was able to recognize not only scenes but specific artistic techniques from their description. I thought it was fantastic. I am only sorry it has taken so many years for the critical mass of cult appreciation to equal popular availability.
I already raved about Robert Eggers' The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) to
nineweaving, asakiyume, and handful_ofdust, but that doesn't mean I'm not still impressed. The title is truthful: in their subject matter, meticulous historical worldbuilding, and deeply alien sense of past, David Rudkin's The Ash Tree (1975) and Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013) are The Witch's closest equivalents, but this story is very definitely of New England rather than old. I think it is a combination of the landscape, the religion, and the specifics of the witchcraft that afflicts the protagonist's family that draws the distinction so clearly. The Devil in New England is a black man with a book. So he is, here.The images are not the only important thing about this movie, but they are crucial to its success; they tell perhaps even more of the story than the stark, spiritually freighted dialogue. Everything is beautifully photographed in an aspect ratio now uncommon in the U.S. (1.66:1), in natural light that looks like paintings until all of a sudden it looks like the forest turning itself inside out to swallow the characters, the camera, the audience. The soundtrack is a mix of folk themes and the kind of eerie ambient score that often accompanies contemporary horror, but it is being performed on instruments like nyckelharpa and fiddle. That low, buzzing, agitated drone that comes up over a nightmare-slow zoom into the woods is not electronic. Some scenes were shot at Plimoth Plantation, others in north Ontario, which preserves the old-growth forests that Massachusetts has mostly clear-cut since the film's early seventeenth century. There is a witch in the shape of a hare. There is the Devil in the form of a goat. (There is the Devil in the form of a man; he is barely seen, a deep voice, a spurred boot, a dark face shadowed by a hat-brim, and he is magnificent. He does more of the diabolical with his three minutes than some actors do with two hours, Al Pacino.) There is human horror and there is a decent amount of gore, though it is only part of the folklore. Anya Taylor-Joy as the protagonist is astonishing. Her eyes are so wide-set, they look a little off true, as if she herself has some animal's vision, as if she is always looking past what she is supposed to see. She is the oldest child of an English Puritan family whose patriarch has taken them into self-exile from the Plymouth Colony, a second immigration to an even less promised land. The God-given sunlit field of their first encounter fades into a fall-starved farmstead, flint corn rotting in the husk, a lightless wind shivering constantly in the pines. Drawn into the labyrinth of the wilderness, the characters encounter figures like the oldest bones of a folk story: a low tumulus of a house with stone for the door and a roof of tree, a dark young woman with a sly smile emerging in a cloak so violently scarlet, it looks like the warning coloration of a poisonous creature; it is the same color as the spilled blood of a child. A grief-maddened mother in a dream or a hallucination or a bewitchment gives suck to her lost infant; only later do we see that it is a raven perched upon her breast, tearing blood from it instead of milk. When a tormented boy chokes up the cause of his affliction, it is a small, sour apple, artificially reddened with his own tongue-bitten blood. All of this is new and strange to the family; it is presented of such a piece with chores and prayer that it is made strange to the audience. The English language is antique and organic and partly drawn from documents of the period; it is never self-important or stilted, but it can be terribly constrained. I don't know what the non-English language is.
I love especially the direction in which the film chooses to set its ambiguity. In a setting as famously self-consuming as the Puritan isolation of New England that would, about a generation after this story, give rise to the Salem witch trials, The Witch could have gotten away with the obvious horror: is the supernatural real? Is the family tormented by a witch or only turning on themselves out of the expected advantage and paranoia, Arthur Miller's The Crucible in microcosm? Instead the script favors a much scarier question: the supernatural is real, but how much of it is the family correctly perceiving? Does it matter? Within their form of Christianity, witchcraft is the answer to all manner of natural and communal calamities; they are right this time, but will the knowledge help them? Can it help them? What does it mean—personally, theologically—if it can't? At the film's height of hysteria, two parents with their hands interlinked and outstretched pray fast and terrified above the body of their afflicted child as if warding it with the desperate angles of their bodies: if the exorcism works, it saves only the soul. Their faith tells them that should be enough. With agonizing clarity, it isn't. If the love of God is no longer a consolation, what does it matter whether the Devil is abroad in your cornfields or not? But that is a modern question, and no one in this film is modern: if the Devil has come among them, the cost to their souls is beyond reckoning. A mother fears that her vanished child is in hell, being unbaptized; a son fears that he may be a damned sinner for glimpsing his sister's budding breasts. A father loves his children, but cannot assure them of their entrance into heaven, which is as real to them and inaccessible as England. Taylor-Joy's Thomasin is not sure if heaven is what she desires after all, but does that make her, automatically, the lens through which her family's damnation is bent upon it? These are not abstract issues. We have to believe in them, because they are the life or death of the world. All the day scenes in this film are by Vermeer; all the night ones are Goya.
I saw the film on its last night at the Somerville; the ticket-taker told me as I went out that he's never seen anyone ambivalent about it—either people come out smiling like me or they come out swearing it was the worst movie they ever let themselves in for. A little less than halfway through the showing, in fact, a couple sitting a few rows ahead of me got up and left, already muttering to one another as they came up the aisle, ". . . so stupid . . ." So I can't guarantee that you will not feel the same way about The Witch, but I loved it. I had read things like the world it showed me. I had never before seen them onscreen. That novelty is not the only thing the film has going for it.
I must try to sleep; I have a doctor's appointment in the morning. This double feature brought to you by my spellbinding backers at Patreon.
no subject
Damn.
All the day scenes in this film are by Vermeer; all the night ones are Goya.
Nine
no subject
I did think of you.
no subject
no subject
I'm flattered. I think.
Nine
no subject
ETA (I was thinking of the second line, about Vermeer and Goya. The first image is very arresting too, though.)
no subject
Your description of the other film made me go look for visuals: very colorful, delicately done, erotic, and distinctively of their period.
no subject
Yup. It's very much the latter, I've found, which is why horror genre nerds keep getting themselves wrapped up in that continuing ridiculous debate about whether or not not being "scary" makes something not "real horror." I mean, given how subjective AND objective fear is as a response, there's no way that everything's going to scare everybody to begin with, but the fact is, horror is a spectrum. Sometimes outright fear's not even the aim.
no subject
I've been waiting for The Witch to show up at my neighborhood theater, but I may not want to wait much longer. It does seem to be a polarizing film, but I suspect I'm going to like it very much.
no subject
It's a surprisingly good summary of the art style! It just doesn't convey that the film is actually any good, which it really, really is.
It does seem to be a polarizing film, but I suspect I'm going to like it very much.
Enjoy! I hope you do get to see it in a theater. The cinematography benefits from being studied as much as possible.
no subject
only later do we see that it is a raven perched upon her breast, tearing blood from it instead of milk
That scene is still with me and, I feel, is one of the telling moments that catalyzes your question: the supernatural is real, but how much of it is the family correctly perceiving? Does it matter? Yes, this. Just as you said.
no subject
Thank you. It is one of the most potent moments in the film for me, too.
(One of the reasons I keep thinking of A Field in England is a recurring line from that film: Open up and let the Devil in.)
no subject
I had read things like the world it showed me.
What are those things? (I want to read them.)
no subject
Greer Gilman's Moonwise (1991) and Cloud & Ashes (2009). Gemma Files' We Will All Go Down Together (2014). Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988). Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012), not as much as Belladonna does, but a little. Sarah Kennedy's A Witch's Dictionary: Poems (2008). If my library were not in boxes, I think I could tell you more.
no subject
More Here.
Nine
no subject
The link appears to be broken—it reacts when moused over, but does not go anywhere. I've found what looks like the interview here, and it is very interesting.
no subject
I don't know what the non-English language is.
IMDB's trivia page claims "mostly Enochian". Seemes appropriate to me; I've been annotating Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, which sort-of links Enochian and witchcraft in a few different ways.
I made Kes laugh out loud by reading her selections from this article about the goat.
no subject
I'm so glad you enjoyed it! It remains one of the recent movies that most impressed me last year.
IMDB's trivia page claims "mostly Enochian".
I like that.
I made Kes laugh out loud by reading her selections from this article about the goat.
"From the moment we set eyes on each other it was just kind of hate at first sight. He had two modes: chilling out and doing nothing, or attacking me."
Thank you!