Two films that ask: "Is this the real life or just fantasy?"
Back in May, Pratt Library launched “Film Fridays,” a weekly virtual program hosted by librarians Tom Warner (Best & Next Dept.) and Gillian Waldo (Humanities Dept.) to discuss films available for patrons to watch for free using our digital streaming services Kanopy and Hoopla. For their first film talk, the pair selected two films that, like the lyrics in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” asked the question: “Is this the real life or is this just fantasy?” It seemed a fitting double-bill for these pandemic times when, in the midst of an unprecedented social lockdown, we’ve all had to adapt to a strange new reality. Just in case you missed that live film talk, following is a print review of the two films discussed, both of which are still available to stream on Kanopy: Carnival of Souls (1962) and Yella (2007).
Both films explore the eerie mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming, offering a meditation on the popular folklore belief that the dead don’t know they are dead. And both can trace their roots to Robert Enrico’s Oscar-winning 1962 short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as well as the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Hitchhiker,” with Yella further inspired by the plot and narrative structure of Carnival of Souls.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)
Click here to view the trailer for Carnival of Souls.
Made in just 3 weeks for $30,000, Herk Harvey’s cult classic Carnival of Souls (USA, 1962) is one of the most original and unsettling independent horror films in history, with striking black-and-white cinematography by Maurice Prather and a spooky organ soundtrack by Gene Moore that became a spectral character in the film itself. George A. Romero later confessed that the look and makeup of the film’s ghouls was a direct influence on his cult film Night of the Living Dead (1968).
After a woman mysteriously survives a car wreck ( or did she?), she moves to Utah where she takes on a job as a church organist and finds herself drawn to the dilapidated carnival (Salt Lake City’s long-abandoned Saltair amusement pavilion) on the outskirts of town. There the woman, Mary Henry (played by newcomer Candace Hilligoss in her film debut), finds herself dogged by a mysterious figure known only as “the man” (played by director Herk Harvey himself) as she deals with a seemingly hostile environment and her inability to connect with people. It isn't long before she discovers the terrifying secrets her new life holds.
Carnival of Souls has been cited as a pioneering example of the “purgatorial horror” subgenre, with its disorienting spatial logic and surreal images influencing everyone from George Romero to Lucrecia Martel and David Lynch (a connection made all the more plausible by the fact that Lynch’s longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, was once a songwriting partner with Carnival of Souls screenwriter John Clifford). As Criterion Collection critic Kier-La Janisse observes, the film challenges “the objective physical definition of ‘place’ itself, posing the question of how much of our experience unfolds solely within the confines of our own imaginations.” This is the plight Mary Henry finds herself in, as she physically flees the trauma of her past by trying to forge a new life in a new town, much like Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
Although Harold “Herk” Harvey made over 400 films for Centron Films, an educational/industrial film company based in Lawrence, Kansas (where most of Carnival of Souls was shot) this was his lone feature film. The script was co-written by Harvey with Centron staffer John Clifford, and filmed in Lawrence and Salt Lake City over the course of a three-week vacation the two took from their day jobs, where they worked on such comparatively mundane fare as Pork: The Meal That Squeals and the Monsanto landscape thriller Operation Grass Killer.
After making countless educational/commercial films for other people, the pair wanted to express themselves artistically, creating something with “the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau,” to cite two of their favorite European directors, Swedish arthouse auteur Ingmar Bergman and French poetic-realism director Jean Cocteau. Shooting guerilla-style with a low-budget and a mostly non-professional cast - star Candace Hilligoss, a Method actress who trained in the same Lee Strasbourg class as Marilyn Monroe and Roy Schneider, was the only professionally trained actor - their efforts resulted in a film that has been called everything from “Orpheus meets An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to “an episode of The Twilight Zone directed by Ed Wood and Antonioni.”
But Carnival of Souls wasn’t a success at the time of its release. Plagued initially by financial and distribution problems, the film entered the public domain due to a copyright not appearing on the theatrical prints and only became a cult classic with the advent of the video boom in the 1980s. Harvey didn’t recover the copyright until 1989, the same year horror master Wes Craven produced a remake that bore little resemblance to the original. And, ironically, another cult classic greatly influenced by Carnival of Souls - George A. Romero’s Night Of the Living Dead - also failed to register its copyright and also entered the public domain!
Despite a strong performance that carries the weight of the film on her shoulders, star Candace Hilligoss only made one other feature film in her career: a minor role in 1964’s The Curse of the Living Corpse. But her acclaimed debut continues to be one for the ages, one that rewards repeated viewing.
YELLA (Germany, 2007)
In German with English subtitles
Click here to watch Yella trailer.
In Christian Petzold’s Yella (Germany, 2007), the titular young woman, Yella Fichte (Nina Hoss) plans to flee her unhinged ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann) and her economically-challenged hometown in former East Germany for a new life in the West. But as she departs, she accepts a lift from Ben and, as they drive across a bridge, he plunges their car into the Elbe. She miraculously survives (or does she?) and continues on to Hanover in West Germany, where she finds a promising job with Philipp (David Striesow), a handsome venture capitalist with whom an unlikely romance soon blossoms. But she soon finds herself haunted by buried truths that threaten to destroy her newfound happiness.
If that premise sounds familiar (especially the bridge accident), it’s because Yella is basically a retelling of Carnival of Souls, one colored by Petzold’s fascination with examining how Germans are adjusting to the "new" (post-unification) Germany, where the economically bleak post-socialist East clashes with the cut-throat capitalism of the affluent West. No doubt Petzold’s interest stems from the fact that, though he was born in the West, his parents were East German refugees, and this contrast remains a constant theme throughout his work. Through Petzold’s finely focused lens, the whole film is marked by an acute sensitivity to this concern with place and space, with recurring images of things that both connect and separate people - bridges, corridors, rivers, roads. Yella’s small, verdant hometown in the former East Germany is contrasted with the cold glass-and-steel hotels and generic office towers of the industrialized West, where she and Philipp conduct ruthless business deals rife with lies and illusions.
And viewers should note the multiple references throughout the film that question whether what we’re seeing is real or imagined, from recurring water sounds and imagery - Philippe’s laptop screensaver depicts a tidal wave; Yella drops glass of water and stares at the spill during a business meeting; countless scenes of rivers and bridges; a man drowning in a pond behind his house - to Ben (like “The Man” shadowing Mary Henry in Carnival of Souls) beckoning Yella to return to “home.”
And it is home that Yella yearns to return to when, near the end of the film, she makes a sobering discovery that brings the story full-circle. Is Yella a political ghost story? An allegory of German reunification? A young woman from the East’s dream of life in the West? In Petzold’s hands, it’s all of these and more.
While Herk Harvey and Carnival of Souls star Candace Hilligoss only worked together on one feature, Christian Petzold has called on his muse Nina Hoss a half-dozen times, most recently to critical acclaim in 2014’s Phoenix in which, once again, she played a tragic, tormented heroine. While American audiences may be familiar with Hoss for her portrayal of Astrid, a German intelligence agent on Homeland (2014-2017), Hoss has long been a leading star in German cinema. For her portrayal of Yella, Nina Hoss won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at the 2008 German Film Awards.
To see more of Hoss, check out two more films she made with Petzold that are available through Kanopy: 2012's Barbara (another study of the East-West Germany divide) and 2009’s Jerichow (a reworking of the classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice). Christian Petzold’s latest film Transit (2018), based on the novel by Anna Seghers, is also available to stream on Kanopy.
[This review originally appeared in the Enoch Pratt Free Library's PrattChat blog.]
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| Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality: Candace Hilligoss in “Carnival of Souls” and Nina Hoss in “Yella.” |
Back in May, Pratt Library launched “Film Fridays,” a weekly virtual program hosted by librarians Tom Warner (Best & Next Dept.) and Gillian Waldo (Humanities Dept.) to discuss films available for patrons to watch for free using our digital streaming services Kanopy and Hoopla. For their first film talk, the pair selected two films that, like the lyrics in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” asked the question: “Is this the real life or is this just fantasy?” It seemed a fitting double-bill for these pandemic times when, in the midst of an unprecedented social lockdown, we’ve all had to adapt to a strange new reality. Just in case you missed that live film talk, following is a print review of the two films discussed, both of which are still available to stream on Kanopy: Carnival of Souls (1962) and Yella (2007).
Both films explore the eerie mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming, offering a meditation on the popular folklore belief that the dead don’t know they are dead. And both can trace their roots to Robert Enrico’s Oscar-winning 1962 short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as well as the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Hitchhiker,” with Yella further inspired by the plot and narrative structure of Carnival of Souls.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)
Click here to view the trailer for Carnival of Souls.
 |
| Candace Hilligoss as Mary Henry |
Made in just 3 weeks for $30,000, Herk Harvey’s cult classic Carnival of Souls (USA, 1962) is one of the most original and unsettling independent horror films in history, with striking black-and-white cinematography by Maurice Prather and a spooky organ soundtrack by Gene Moore that became a spectral character in the film itself. George A. Romero later confessed that the look and makeup of the film’s ghouls was a direct influence on his cult film Night of the Living Dead (1968).
After a woman mysteriously survives a car wreck ( or did she?), she moves to Utah where she takes on a job as a church organist and finds herself drawn to the dilapidated carnival (Salt Lake City’s long-abandoned Saltair amusement pavilion) on the outskirts of town. There the woman, Mary Henry (played by newcomer Candace Hilligoss in her film debut), finds herself dogged by a mysterious figure known only as “the man” (played by director Herk Harvey himself) as she deals with a seemingly hostile environment and her inability to connect with people. It isn't long before she discovers the terrifying secrets her new life holds.
Carnival of Souls has been cited as a pioneering example of the “purgatorial horror” subgenre, with its disorienting spatial logic and surreal images influencing everyone from George Romero to Lucrecia Martel and David Lynch (a connection made all the more plausible by the fact that Lynch’s longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, was once a songwriting partner with Carnival of Souls screenwriter John Clifford). As Criterion Collection critic Kier-La Janisse observes, the film challenges “the objective physical definition of ‘place’ itself, posing the question of how much of our experience unfolds solely within the confines of our own imaginations.” This is the plight Mary Henry finds herself in, as she physically flees the trauma of her past by trying to forge a new life in a new town, much like Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
Although Harold “Herk” Harvey made over 400 films for Centron Films, an educational/industrial film company based in Lawrence, Kansas (where most of Carnival of Souls was shot) this was his lone feature film. The script was co-written by Harvey with Centron staffer John Clifford, and filmed in Lawrence and Salt Lake City over the course of a three-week vacation the two took from their day jobs, where they worked on such comparatively mundane fare as Pork: The Meal That Squeals and the Monsanto landscape thriller Operation Grass Killer.
After making countless educational/commercial films for other people, the pair wanted to express themselves artistically, creating something with “the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau,” to cite two of their favorite European directors, Swedish arthouse auteur Ingmar Bergman and French poetic-realism director Jean Cocteau. Shooting guerilla-style with a low-budget and a mostly non-professional cast - star Candace Hilligoss, a Method actress who trained in the same Lee Strasbourg class as Marilyn Monroe and Roy Schneider, was the only professionally trained actor - their efforts resulted in a film that has been called everything from “Orpheus meets An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to “an episode of The Twilight Zone directed by Ed Wood and Antonioni.”
But Carnival of Souls wasn’t a success at the time of its release. Plagued initially by financial and distribution problems, the film entered the public domain due to a copyright not appearing on the theatrical prints and only became a cult classic with the advent of the video boom in the 1980s. Harvey didn’t recover the copyright until 1989, the same year horror master Wes Craven produced a remake that bore little resemblance to the original. And, ironically, another cult classic greatly influenced by Carnival of Souls - George A. Romero’s Night Of the Living Dead - also failed to register its copyright and also entered the public domain!
Despite a strong performance that carries the weight of the film on her shoulders, star Candace Hilligoss only made one other feature film in her career: a minor role in 1964’s The Curse of the Living Corpse. But her acclaimed debut continues to be one for the ages, one that rewards repeated viewing.
YELLA (Germany, 2007)
In German with English subtitles
Click here to watch Yella trailer.
 |
| Nina Hoss as Yella Fichte |
If that premise sounds familiar (especially the bridge accident), it’s because Yella is basically a retelling of Carnival of Souls, one colored by Petzold’s fascination with examining how Germans are adjusting to the "new" (post-unification) Germany, where the economically bleak post-socialist East clashes with the cut-throat capitalism of the affluent West. No doubt Petzold’s interest stems from the fact that, though he was born in the West, his parents were East German refugees, and this contrast remains a constant theme throughout his work. Through Petzold’s finely focused lens, the whole film is marked by an acute sensitivity to this concern with place and space, with recurring images of things that both connect and separate people - bridges, corridors, rivers, roads. Yella’s small, verdant hometown in the former East Germany is contrasted with the cold glass-and-steel hotels and generic office towers of the industrialized West, where she and Philipp conduct ruthless business deals rife with lies and illusions.
And viewers should note the multiple references throughout the film that question whether what we’re seeing is real or imagined, from recurring water sounds and imagery - Philippe’s laptop screensaver depicts a tidal wave; Yella drops glass of water and stares at the spill during a business meeting; countless scenes of rivers and bridges; a man drowning in a pond behind his house - to Ben (like “The Man” shadowing Mary Henry in Carnival of Souls) beckoning Yella to return to “home.”
And it is home that Yella yearns to return to when, near the end of the film, she makes a sobering discovery that brings the story full-circle. Is Yella a political ghost story? An allegory of German reunification? A young woman from the East’s dream of life in the West? In Petzold’s hands, it’s all of these and more.
While Herk Harvey and Carnival of Souls star Candace Hilligoss only worked together on one feature, Christian Petzold has called on his muse Nina Hoss a half-dozen times, most recently to critical acclaim in 2014’s Phoenix in which, once again, she played a tragic, tormented heroine. While American audiences may be familiar with Hoss for her portrayal of Astrid, a German intelligence agent on Homeland (2014-2017), Hoss has long been a leading star in German cinema. For her portrayal of Yella, Nina Hoss won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at the 2008 German Film Awards.
To see more of Hoss, check out two more films she made with Petzold that are available through Kanopy: 2012's Barbara (another study of the East-West Germany divide) and 2009’s Jerichow (a reworking of the classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice). Christian Petzold’s latest film Transit (2018), based on the novel by Anna Seghers, is also available to stream on Kanopy.
[This review originally appeared in the Enoch Pratt Free Library's PrattChat blog.]
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