![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oct. 18th, 2014
Schalcken the Painter
Oct. 18th, 2014 05:04 pmI was at Shamrokon in Dublin back in August and they had made as their "Ghost of Honour" Sheridan Le Fanu, the Dublin-born writer who helped popularise the ghost story in the mid-nineteenth century, and the bicentenary of whose birth fell during the week after the convention.
I knew the name but knew little about him. Back in the mid-seventies I read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and that makes several references to Le Fanu's The House by the Churchyard. Then, when I kept on finding myself on Buffy panels fifteen years ago, I did some research on the history of the vampire in literature and discovered that Le Fanu's Carmilla is one of the seminal texts. Incidentally, at a panel at the con on film adaptations of Le Fanu it was mentioned that the Hammer Films versions of Carmilla in the seventies - The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil - play down the lesbianism that is in the original. However, one of the panellists went on to say, with the recent comedy remake, the title was Lesbian Vampire Killers. "No beating about the bush there." At which point, the audience burst into laughter and he realised what he'd said.
But also mentioned at that panel and elsewhere at the convention was a BBC film called Schalcken the Painter, shown in 1979. I remember watching this. The BBC had made a tradition of showing ghost stories late at night at Christmas, usually from short stories by M.R. James. The most famous is probably Jonathan Miller's film Whistle and I'll Come to You. Schalcken the Painter occupied that slot - shown on Dec. 23rd, apparently. I also remember it was somewhat erotic, with female nudity, and I was glad my parents had already gone to bed when I watched it at their house when I was staying there for Christmas.
So, it appears that the BFI has released it on DVD (and Blu-Ray, two discs in the same box), and I ordered it from Amazon and finally got round to watching it yesterday.
It has held up quite well. The basic plot is that Godfried Schalcken, a real Dutch painter of the mid-seventeenth century, is a student of Gerrit Dou, played by the great Maurice Denham. Schalcken is in love with Dou's ward and neice, Rose, played by Cheryl Kennedy, who was mainly known for her comedy parts in the seventies. A cadaverous individual from Rotterdam called Vanderhausen arrives and offers a wedding contract for Rose with a handsome amount of gold in payment, which Dou accepts. Schalcken, just an impoverished student, can do nothing, and Rose goes off to her marriage.
When nothing further is heard of bride and groom after the wedding, Schalcken is despatched to Rotterdam for news and finds no trace of them, no one has heard of Vanderhausen. (But Schalcken does find his way to a brothel where one of the ladies reminds him enough of Rose that he visits there often.)
As Schalcken's reputation begins to eclipse that of his master, Rose suddenly appears again in a most distressed state, fainting with hunger. But she disappears again. Schalcken himself marries and makes money painting commissions. Finally, after Dou's funeral he has one final chilling confrontation with Rose in the crypt of the church.
The story is filmed in the style of the Dutch painiting of the period which reminds me of the films of Peter Greenaway who did a film about in incident in the life of Rembrandt starring Martin Freeman recently. (Incidentally, Rembrandt appears as a minor character in Schalcken, so brief an appearance that if you blink you'll miss him, and this time of watching I must have blinked.) The accompanying booklet to the disc also mentions Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, released a few years earlier. Mind you the BBC film quality is such that I don't think watching it on Blu-Ray would improve one's viewing. I don't think there is one scene shot in daylight outside.
But it is creepy. The booklet says that the director and writer, Leslie Megahey, conceived this as an art documentary gone wrong. Megahey is known for his art documentaries and he is helped by his choice of Charles Gray as the narrator/voice of Le Fanu. (This is some years after Gray's appearance in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.) Many paintings are shown on screen and the credits thank a number of owners of these paintings, starting with the Queen. Furthermore, there is a subtext to the film that I was able to work out this time, that painting in the Netherlands at this time had become a commodity, driven by money. An extra scene interpolated by Megahey has Schalcken accepting a commission from a wealthy gentleman to paint a picture of his daughter with her favourite doll, and the whole set up is done identically to the appearance of Vanderhausen presenting his gold earlier in the story. (This gentleman is played by Anthony Sharp who if I remember rightly played both the waiter and Zarquon in the first radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
It's amusing what I'd remembered from seeing it all those years ago. An early scene I remembered, Dou arranges a couple of models for his students to draw. One is an old bearded man in a loincloth, the other a young woman dressed plainly with her shoulders bared and her skirt slightly lifted. "You are to paint the temptation of St. Anthony," he explains. He points to the old man: "St. Anthony"; the woman: "Temptation"; the floor: "Devils. You will imagine the devils."
Mind you, there is not as much nudity as I remember.
I knew the name but knew little about him. Back in the mid-seventies I read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and that makes several references to Le Fanu's The House by the Churchyard. Then, when I kept on finding myself on Buffy panels fifteen years ago, I did some research on the history of the vampire in literature and discovered that Le Fanu's Carmilla is one of the seminal texts. Incidentally, at a panel at the con on film adaptations of Le Fanu it was mentioned that the Hammer Films versions of Carmilla in the seventies - The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil - play down the lesbianism that is in the original. However, one of the panellists went on to say, with the recent comedy remake, the title was Lesbian Vampire Killers. "No beating about the bush there." At which point, the audience burst into laughter and he realised what he'd said.
But also mentioned at that panel and elsewhere at the convention was a BBC film called Schalcken the Painter, shown in 1979. I remember watching this. The BBC had made a tradition of showing ghost stories late at night at Christmas, usually from short stories by M.R. James. The most famous is probably Jonathan Miller's film Whistle and I'll Come to You. Schalcken the Painter occupied that slot - shown on Dec. 23rd, apparently. I also remember it was somewhat erotic, with female nudity, and I was glad my parents had already gone to bed when I watched it at their house when I was staying there for Christmas.
So, it appears that the BFI has released it on DVD (and Blu-Ray, two discs in the same box), and I ordered it from Amazon and finally got round to watching it yesterday.
It has held up quite well. The basic plot is that Godfried Schalcken, a real Dutch painter of the mid-seventeenth century, is a student of Gerrit Dou, played by the great Maurice Denham. Schalcken is in love with Dou's ward and neice, Rose, played by Cheryl Kennedy, who was mainly known for her comedy parts in the seventies. A cadaverous individual from Rotterdam called Vanderhausen arrives and offers a wedding contract for Rose with a handsome amount of gold in payment, which Dou accepts. Schalcken, just an impoverished student, can do nothing, and Rose goes off to her marriage.
When nothing further is heard of bride and groom after the wedding, Schalcken is despatched to Rotterdam for news and finds no trace of them, no one has heard of Vanderhausen. (But Schalcken does find his way to a brothel where one of the ladies reminds him enough of Rose that he visits there often.)
As Schalcken's reputation begins to eclipse that of his master, Rose suddenly appears again in a most distressed state, fainting with hunger. But she disappears again. Schalcken himself marries and makes money painting commissions. Finally, after Dou's funeral he has one final chilling confrontation with Rose in the crypt of the church.
The story is filmed in the style of the Dutch painiting of the period which reminds me of the films of Peter Greenaway who did a film about in incident in the life of Rembrandt starring Martin Freeman recently. (Incidentally, Rembrandt appears as a minor character in Schalcken, so brief an appearance that if you blink you'll miss him, and this time of watching I must have blinked.) The accompanying booklet to the disc also mentions Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, released a few years earlier. Mind you the BBC film quality is such that I don't think watching it on Blu-Ray would improve one's viewing. I don't think there is one scene shot in daylight outside.
But it is creepy. The booklet says that the director and writer, Leslie Megahey, conceived this as an art documentary gone wrong. Megahey is known for his art documentaries and he is helped by his choice of Charles Gray as the narrator/voice of Le Fanu. (This is some years after Gray's appearance in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.) Many paintings are shown on screen and the credits thank a number of owners of these paintings, starting with the Queen. Furthermore, there is a subtext to the film that I was able to work out this time, that painting in the Netherlands at this time had become a commodity, driven by money. An extra scene interpolated by Megahey has Schalcken accepting a commission from a wealthy gentleman to paint a picture of his daughter with her favourite doll, and the whole set up is done identically to the appearance of Vanderhausen presenting his gold earlier in the story. (This gentleman is played by Anthony Sharp who if I remember rightly played both the waiter and Zarquon in the first radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
It's amusing what I'd remembered from seeing it all those years ago. An early scene I remembered, Dou arranges a couple of models for his students to draw. One is an old bearded man in a loincloth, the other a young woman dressed plainly with her shoulders bared and her skirt slightly lifted. "You are to paint the temptation of St. Anthony," he explains. He points to the old man: "St. Anthony"; the woman: "Temptation"; the floor: "Devils. You will imagine the devils."
Mind you, there is not as much nudity as I remember.
