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Our beginning and our end. The queen to whom we must all bow at last
I made a photoset for Evangeline Walton's She Walks in Darkness (2013).
Specifically, I made a photoset for a fictitious film version of She Walks in Darkness, which could not have existed because Walton wrote the novel in the early '60's and then shelved it until her death in 1996, by which point the actor I kept mentally casting in a central role was also dead. It is completely kludged and would no doubt have been much more attractive arranged by the algorithms of a masonry grid, but I couldn't get one to work on LJ. (Thanks for not supporting JavaScript!) At the moment I am rather proud of it, but I suspect it's just because I've been wrestling with HTML for hours. Behold.
I wrote about this novel in 2013, at which time it first occurred to me to cast it as a movie because Paul di Filippo does so in his foreword and I disagreed with nearly all of his choices. It took until last night for me to care enough about the idea to frustrate myself with trying to make code I don't know very well work on platforms it wasn't designed to. It didn't and I did something else.
First row:
1. Charun and Vanth to either side of the door to the Tomb of the Anina (Tarquinia, 3rd century BCE). Surprisingly for such a chthonic novel, Walton does not mention them anywhere that I could find, but they are the psychopomps of the Etruscan underworld; it seemed appropriate to start with them.
All those dark chambers and corridors beneath the real cellar, God knows how many of them, leading God knows how far down into the bowels of the Earth! Those old Etruscan tombs that Richard was going to study. Not Christian catacombs, such as underlie old houses in the Campagna, but a veritable city of the tombs of men who died before Christ was born, before Rome became an empire. So many dead—and only one live person can be anywhere near us! But it is the living who are terrible . . .
2. Francisco Bosch as Floriano Silveri, the Gothic antihero of the novel. I cheated with him: he is a contemporary dancer, almost exactly a year younger than myself, but he played Bagoas in Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) and I have looked for him in other movies ever since. (He's been dancing. I wish I were in the right country to see him.) When he's not being a Persian eunuch, he looks like this.
His own face was as beautiful as any sculpture or painting I have seen since I came to Italy, and it was not carved or painted—it was warm, human flesh.
3. Dancers from the Tomb of the Lionesses (Tarquinia, 6th century BCE). The narrator sees something very like them in her descent through the hissing, labyrinthine shrine to Mania beneath the Villa Carenni, although filtered through Walton's perceptions of the Etruscans as an ancient unknowable race, nearly alien—decadent, beautiful, cruel.
The painted walls swarmed with myriad forms; sometimes demons glared at us, sometimes dancers rioted along beside us, men red as American Indians clasping milk-white women. One could almost see their delight in their bodies, in their leaping, spinning, amorous strength, although those bodies were only paint on stone. Crazily I wished that I could jump onto the wall too, and dance away with them, happy and safe. Then, looking a little closer at some of those fiercely joyous red faces, I knew that I couldn't have said "No" to those men as long as I had said it to Floriano. They would simply have grabbed me.
Second row:
1. Etruscan chamber tombs from the Necropolis of the Banditaccia in Cerveteri (Roman Caere, Etruscan Cisra, 9th–3rd century BCE). The novel takes place outside of Volterra, so geographically we're in completely the wrong part of the Twelve Cities, but I wanted some visible ruins in here somewhere.
We were glad when the car finally came within sight of Volterra, D'Annunzio's famous "City of Silence," that old Etruscan city whose power and splendor the Roman butcher Sulla wrecked. Its tremendous walls still stand, the walls that even Sulla could not storm; he had to starve out the city. We drove into it through the Porta all' Arco, that true Etruscan gateway deep as a small house . . . Three giant stone heads crown the cyclopean archway, midnight-black against its yellowish-white stone. Time has eaten up their faces, but they still seemed to stare down at us, full of a quiet, terrible power.
2. Samantha Eggar as the heroine and narrator, Barbara Keyes. I thought of her because of the 1972 giallo The Dead Are Alive, whose Italian title is L'etrusco uccide ancora—The Etruscan Kills Again—but then she had the right face. I took a screenshot from William Wyler's The Collector (1965) because I wanted her underground, which means that Terence Stamp is accidentally cameoing as Floriano here. He's dark-haired; it's not too out of key with Bosch. And the unease of the emotions between them is correct.
Something made me look up; I saw his eyes watching me. Assured again, gloatingly expectant . . . and I knew. He might be innocent in his way, but so is the tiger that stalks the jungle at twilight; he only wants his evening meal.
Third row:
1. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses (Caere, 6th century BCE). I have loved this sculpture—sarcophagus, cinerary urn—ever since I read Rika Lesser's "Degli Sposi" in her first collection Etruscan Things (1983). Walton gives a more ambiguous vision to Roger Carstairs, the English archaeologist and escaped POW who stumbled into the cellars of the Villa Carenni in 1945.
Funeral urns lined the walls and, by turning his head, he could see the sarcophagus built against the massive central pillar, beneath the glaring Gorgon's head. Here the master and mistress of some ancient household slept, their dependants around them. Their painted, life-sized effigies half-sat, half-reclined upon the sarcophagus, side by side. In the dim light, the two looked startlingly, almost threateningly alive, capable of rising to chastise an intruder.
2. The goddess Thesan with the youth Kephalos in her arms (Val di Chiana, Archaic period). She is the dawn, often syncretized as such with the Greek Eos; she is also the goddess of divination. (Illumination, revelation. Dawn breaks over Marblehead. I named an alt-historical diviner after her.) She is frequently depicted on the backs of mirrors. Sometimes she is grieving for her son Memnun, slain in the Trojan War; sometimes she is abducting Kephalos or Tithonos (Tinthun) to be her lover. Barbara sees a statue of the latter story in the gardens of the Villa Carenni, her first afternoon on Etruscan land.
Statues gleamed ghost-pale among a glowing riot of roses and jasmine. One was a gigantic, white-winged woman carrying in her arms a life-sized youth of red terra cotta . . . This was not Homer's rosy-fingered Eos; I remembered the story now. All the tender radiance of the Greek dawn-goddess was gone. This giantess's mouth, bent to her unwilling prey's, seemed more likely to bite than to kiss. One felt immense appetite, savage strength, but no tenderness. Her very whiteness made her seem like death, seizing upon warm human life.
3. Funeral games on the walls of the Tomb of the Augurs (Tarquinia, 6th century BCE). Because blood is shed in these games; there is sacrifice taking place on the nearer wall, the unequal contest of a blindfolded, rope-bound man and a maddened dog at the end of a masked figure's leash. Walton's Etruscans—and their descendants—are refined in their cruelties.
. . . damned ugly sight . . . Wish I had stayed in my room today . . . A good old Etruscan punishment, of course; Virgil mentions it; and all of them must have been proud of their Etruscan blood, even if they weren't obsessed by it, like Prince Mino. God knows what obsessed or possessed a man who could do a thing like that . . . heard the yarn years ago: How whenever an heir of the Carenni comes of age, his father brings him down to see those two skeletons . . . lesson against treachery. And Prince Mino calls other people barbarians . . .
Fourth row:
1. Peter Cushing as Prince Mino Carenni. Because I can't imagine who else he could be.
He set it down and I had my first good look at him. At a tall lean man with white hair and piercing black eyes. His profile, stern and finely chiseled, might have been cut out of an ancient frieze; it had none of the softness of living flesh . . . The face of that last high priest who buried himself with his threatened temple and its treasures never can have looked more dedicated, more terrible, in its all-sacrificing exaltation.
2. The Inghirami tomb from Volterra, once Velathri. It is named after the two brothers who discovered and excavated it in the mid-nineteenth century: they found it filled with alabaster funerary urns from five or six generations of the same family. It was moved to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence in 1901, where it is currently accessible to the public. I have never seen it. I have no idea about Walton, but it is of the same construction as the tomb that forms the entrance to the Villa Carenni's maze.
The vast cavern was gone forever, and so was the snake-like hissing of that steam-crowned abyss. We were out of that suffocating passage, back in the Tomb of the Priests. My lantern still stood there, lighting the great round chamber, even lessening the darkness of some of those niches that for ages had been beds of the dead.
And everything else is a function of finding an aesthetic way to stick the images together.
Questions, comments, criticisms welcome; I've never done this before.
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It works as itself--I don't think there's a firm standard of what a photoset must look like, or a bar to clear.
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Thank you! That was something I worked at, so it is especially good to hear it paid off.
It works as itself--I don't think there's a firm standard of what a photoset must look like, or a bar to clear.
Cool.
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Nine
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Thank you. There were some objects I was sorry I couldn't include—pages from the Liber Linteus, the demon Tuchulcha, anthropomorphic cinerary urns—because they figured prominently in the novel, but I like how it came out. It seems balanced. And I am very pleased with the apparent join between the two images in the final row.
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Thank you! I actually worked on that!
and them green tombs are especially nice. Want to see those.
We should start keeping a list. At least we should have an idea of how much driving we'll have to do when we get to Italy.
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Thank you! It went very suddenly from being something I had thought about last fall to a brain-overriding imperative. And sort of proved my point about Tumblr, since it took me a full twenty-four hours to generate (allowing for technological silliness and the rest of my life needing to happen), which is obviously not sustainable if I ever want to do anything else, but I am not sorry.
I love the juxtaposition of real archaeology and book quotes with fake film "stills", and heartily approve of your casting (of course).
I am very glad. I knew exactly the age at which I needed Cushing, too, and then I needed a picture in which he was (a) in color (b) not wearing Gustav Weil's hat.
God, I'd love to see this IRL; I wonder if it could translate to an animated film done (perhaps) with a rotoscoping base, where you could sort of "draw" Cushing's features on somebody else and voice-cast someone with the same timbre?
Well, if we wait another twenty-five years, we can cast Tom Hiddleston . . . ?
(Seriously, who else has those cheekbones? Peter Capaldi has some of the same high, sharp bone structure, but I wouldn't say you could open letters with his cheekbones. Maybe shank people with them.)
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Off-topic, but imagine his Van Helsing...
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Huh. You know, I could see it. Now who could write a contemporary Dracula that isn't stupid?
(There's already a Van Helsing on Penny Dreadful, isn't there.)
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I like your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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LOL
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Thank you! The book is an unusual combination of a Gothic novel and a New Age fantasy and I highly recommend it. It's not flawless—I can't blame an author for not being alive to edit her work, but it could have used a round of fact-checking or even another draft, for structure—but it is compelling and strange and it would have made an equally cult, great movie. Paul di Filippo in his foreword insists on seeing it as a Roger Corman: "In fact, at times this book reads like the best Roger Corman film never realized, with all these named actors used in their primes: Vincent Price as Count Carenni, Jack Nicholson as Floriano, John Agar as Richard Keyes, and Barbara Steele as Barbara." I couldn't tell at first if he was being serious, and then I just disagreed. I understand where he got Barbara Steele, because I also went for a giallo heroine when I was thinking of Barbara, but Vincent Price? A greatly talented man, but not as cold and chiseled as Prince Mino is written. Cushing's voice, too:
The cold, cultured voice was not loud, but it rang through the dark hall like a bell. It had the smooth hardness of a bell.
Jack Nicholson as Floriano also does not work for me; I never found him beautiful.
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Also also, I have totally added the book to my wishlist now.
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I had never heard that phrase. Thank you!
Not to mention that he is quite relentlessly American.
That is one of the other reasons, yes. I am handwaving Cushing because I imagine this movie as an English-language production, but I'd still rather keep the casting on the other side of the Atlantic.
Prince Mino sounds more like the monster in human shape, and Peter Cushing is much better for that.
You need someone icy and inhuman and obsessive and remote and none of those are adjectives I associate with Vincent Price. Point me at Cushing's Frankenstein and I'm all for them.
Also also, I have totally added the book to my wishlist now.
I hope you enjoy it! I linked my last year's more detailed review in the body of the post.
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First I went back and reread your post about the book, which I recalled, but this time I really got the sense of the characters, especially the Peter Cushing prince, and the sense of the Walton-style Etruscans.
*Then* I came back and looked at your efforts here. Just marvelous! Peter Cushing in this picture looks **just** like the quotations you pick, both the one here and the one in the 2013 entry. I'm glad you found such a good-looking (and Italian) guy for Floriano Silveri (what a romantic name!) And the art! I especially like the couple on the sarcophagus, whom you've linked to before, and Charun and Vanth. But the atmospheric scene-setting photos are great too--seriously, this is awesome.
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Thank you!
Peter Cushing in this picture looks **just** like the quotations you pick, both the one here and the one in the 2013 entry.
Yay! See above to
I'm glad you found such a good-looking (and Italian) guy for Floriano Silveri (what a romantic name!)
I am afraid he is Spanish, but it's going to be an international production anyway . . .
(I truly wish Alexander had not starred Colin Farrell. It took me years after that to realize he could actually act.)
And the art! I especially like the couple on the sarcophagus, whom you've linked to before, and Charun and Vanth. But the atmospheric scene-setting photos are great too--seriously, this is awesome.
I am so very glad! This was an unfamiliar art form for me and I wanted to do it well.
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Thank you! It is not customarily one of the ways in which I think about books, either, which is part of the reason I wanted to do it. I am so glad it works outside my head.
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Thank you!
I would say you can reblog it, but I'm pretty sure it won't transfer across platforms except as a link. I'm still really happy with it, though. The point was seeing if it worked.
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Thank you!
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Awesome!
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More grist, since it's probably not exactly what you're looking for. (Such aids rarely are exactly right.)