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She was an excellent governess and a most respectable woman
This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.
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The Innocents is really quite the amazing film.
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It's locked to me in any case, but I appreciate the thought!
sovay, I am less convinced than you that what we are seeing are ghosts. For me, they could just as easily be projections of the nameless governess's hysterical & repressed psyche. That particular ambiguity is one of the many attractions of the film for me.
I like the film best if that ambiguity doesn't resolve: if both the ghostly and the mortal elements are true.
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Thank you! I love that you saw it first at the age of the children, not the adults (or the dead).
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I'm so glad! I saw it for the first time at the HFA with
What was also amazing was that as it began, I had a sense of déjà-vu, and gradually realized that the movie was the same movie that another friend of mine had talked about, five years ago. (She had linked to a Youtube clip of Miles's recitation, which I watched back then--whoah. As she said: as good as The Erl King.)
Britten's opera draws on that substrate, too: all things strange and bold, its Peter Quint names himself, the smooth world's double face . . . in me secrets, half-formed desires meet . . .
Her five-years-ago write-up and yours here did such a neat stereopticon in my brain as I watched the film. It was like having both of you with me.
That sounds like a great, intangibly accompanied way to watch a haunted film.