Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mental Hygiene Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 by Ken Smith

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mental Hygiene Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 by Ken Smith Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 by Ken Smith. An often effective but critically oversold low-budget shocker that’s mostly hypnotic. and frequently gimcrack goofy. The Criterion Collection has released on Blu-ray CARNIVAL OF SOULS, the 1962 indie supernatural ghost story originally released by Herts-Lion International Corp., directed by Herk Harvey, written by John Clifford, and starring Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison Stan Levitt, Tom McGinnis, Bill De Jarnette, Pamela Ballard, and uncredited Herk Harvey as “The Man.” Conceived by Centron industrial shorts producers Harvey and Clifford as exploitation horror with a hoped-for art house sheen, CARNIVAL OF SOULS was buried on a third-rate drive-in double bill in ‘62, where it promptly disappeared. However, a devoted cult following grew (due to public domain showings on late-night TV), and in 1989, it was “rediscovered”. It’s spookily evocative on the whole, and a definite must-see for fans interested in the evolution of the ghost/zombie horror subgenre. Criterion has upped the game for this Blu release with a new, scintillating 4K transfer (although an on-screen blurb in one of the tab descriptions states it’s 2K—maybe a leftover menu detail from their previous release?), a new interview with Dana Gould (fun) and a new “video essay” by David Cairns, along with all the ported-over extras from the previous Criterion edition. except for the longer director’s cut. Pretty blonde Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss, THE CURSE OF THE LIVING CORPSE) goes for a joy ride with a couple of her female friends when some punks challenge them to a drag race. Speeding across a lonely, rickety, rural Kansas bridge, the girls get bumped off, both literally and figuratively, as their car smashes through the guard rail and sinks into the muddy waters below. Three hours later, Mary miraculously appears on the bank, covered in mud (with dry hair. ), and with no knowledge of how she survived her ordeal. Deciding the time is right for a move, Mary, an organist, accepts a job playing the pipes for an Episcopal church in Salt Lake City, Utah—a secular-only decision that worries her friend, the owner (Tom McGinnis) of the organ factory where she practiced. Telling him flatly that she’ll never return, Mary embarks on her lonely drive to Utah. Speeding over the flats at night, she can’t get anything on the car radio except organ music. She also sees the ghostly apparition of “The Man,” (Herk Harvey), a pasty white, ring-eyed zombie that appears outside her passenger window and in front of her car. Mary also sees, far off near the Great Salt Lake, a massive abandoned dance hall pavilion—a desolate, eerie place that will become an obsession for Mary. Arriving at old hoot Mrs. Thomas’ (Frances Feist) boarding house, Mary can’t decide what’s more frightening: the apparition of “The Man” at the bottom of her stairs, or the introduction of fellow boarder John Linden (Sidney Berger), an oily, full-bore horndog who spots Mary as potential easy pickins. Mary’s first day with her new boss, the Very Reverend minister (Art Ellison), doesn’t go much better, when she blithely spurns that most holy of Protestant traditions: a “Welcome Wagon” pot luck with the ladies of the church. A trip out to the pavilion with the minister doesn’t assuage his trepidations about Mary’s spiritual commitment to her job (she asks him to break the rules and escort her into the fenced-off dance hall). Soon, Mary is roaming the streets of Salt Lake City, increasingly spaced-out because, apparently, she has moments where she’s invisible to everyone else. Back at the church to practice, Mary goes into another fugue state, where she has ominous, frightening visions of zombie ghouls at the pavilion —a state that translates into her hands playing ominous, sacrilegious music on the organ, a blasphemy that gets her sh*tcanned with the Episcopalians. We know Mary’s losing it completely when she’d rather hang out with Linden than chance seeing “The Man” again, but nothing can stop the onslaught of terrifying visions that either might be “real,” or merely representations of Mary’s altered state(s). I was in “film school” back in 1989 when the re-introduced CARNIVAL OF SOULS was all the rage for a couple of months. I saw it on a big screen with some friends, and while we enjoyed it for what it was—an atmospheric, often unsettling little tone poem with more than a few hinky moments—we sure didn’t think it was some kind of unjustly neglected masterpiece, a Rosetta Stone talisman that set into motion the modern horror/zombie movie. And to writer John Clifford’s and director Herk Harvey’s great credit. they didn’t think so, either, even when critics and rabid fans were shining them on like they wrangled Albert Camus’ Second Coming with their chintzy little production. In Harvey’s and Clifford’s scene-select commentary track for this disc, Clifford suddenly blurts out to Harvey, “Do you ever get tired of trying to explain all these things in CARNIVAL OF SOULS?” after laying out that a lot of the movie’s choices were done quickly on the fly (Clifford flatly refuses to explain his work, before admitting he has no idea what he was thinking about when writing the movie all those years ago). Later, Harvey is even more specific, stating once and for all: “The film critics added dimensions to the film that John and I didn’t intend.” Case closed, over-zealous tea leaves readers. Post-modernist “film criticism” gets around this kind of plain-spoken honesty by slyly stating an artist’s planned intent isn’t required for her or him to produce a work of art—it’s up to the critic to discover what’s really been achieved. Of course this is narcissistic sophistry; it’s just a way for a critic, who produces nothing of any real value next to the actual object being described, to take possession of a work of art for themselves: art to them only becomes art when they define it as such. That shouldn’t lead you to dismiss CARNIVAL OF SOULS out of hand (after all, I’m one of those critics: what do I know?). CARNIVAL OF SOULS works best when you don’t look for meaning in every corner of its mise-en-scene , and when you shut off those annoying squawks of "the School of Resentment" criticisms that seem to have multiplied and mutated over the years and decades, such as seeing eons of complex male oppression in CARNIVAL OF SOULS’s campy, clichéd 1960s sexual banter (if scripter Clifford was deliberately trying to comment on Mary’s journey through a world of predatory or paternalistic men, which I doubt since he denied doing so—judgmental labeling I question, anyway, when discussing the organ factory owner and the minister—he only succeeded in showing us that letch Linden probably read one too many issues of Argosy ). Watching CARNIVAL OF SOULS the way you’d read or listen to a poem—with an emphasis on experiencing, visually and aurally, the tone and emotion and sensation, and less as an intellectual or linear experience—frankly yields more satisfying results. since so much of its grounding dramatics are shaky. When CARNIVAL OF SOULS opens with that verkakte drag race straight out of the Highway Safety Films catalogue, you wouldn’t be chastised for thinking the movie was more in the “Goofus” than the “Gallant” column. However, when Harvey cuts to this remarkably inscrutable shot of Mary staring at her companion driver (is it fear? Incredulity? An acknowledgement of fate?), you’re brought up short. That’s not a narrative shot. That’s pure poesy. Later, a decidedly unsettling overhead shot of Mary climbing out onto a mudbar gives us more to think about and feel than any verbal explanation Clifford could have possibly summoned up for the character. CARNIVAL OF SOULS’ straight exposition scenes, such as the concerned organ owner cautioning Mary, or the minister wondering why she’s so distant, or Mrs. Thomas’ fluttering ministrations, or greasy Linden’s hilariously inept seductions, are all rather hokey and square—they’d be right at home in one of Clifford’s or Harvey’s Centron industrial/social engineering shorts. You don’t have to have read Bierce to know what the big final twist is here (they’re not exactly subtle or sly about telegraphing what ultimate plane she occupies), while the horror stuff comes off as unintentionally comical, not terrifying. And no, that assessment isn’t out of context. Compare that stand-out shot everyone loves of Harvey’s silly face staring at Mary through her car window (that effect wouldn’t have held water in a fourth-rate Bowery Boys spookums), with Hitchcock’s iconic shot of Norman Bates in drag silhouette, with a raised knife and only his eyes barely lit as he rips open a shower curtain, to see the difference between true horror and truly “nice try” (every time “The Man” showed up, I worried more about the corn starch getting on his collar and black suit, rather than for Mary). CARNIVAL OF SOULS’s real unease comes whenever the startlingly strange Candace Hilligoss—part gorgeous, neurasthenic Hitchcock blonde, part gangly Vanessa Redgrave-as-Creepella Gruesome—is on the screen.

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