OK, so since starting this series two weeks ago, I’ve had little time to take in more films on my list. Finally this weekend, trapped by howling winds without and ill health within (yup – it’s our turn to stay home with Covid – but so far, we’re more or less ok), I had the chance to sit down and have a viewing of another new-to-me Polish horror film. Ok, it might not exactly be horror, but it is Polish, it is a film, and it certainly exists in a degree of dialogue with other examples of Folk Horror. It is also quite a fascinating little flick, and possibly includes a touch of arctothropy (which I may have just made up – it’s my best guess for the bear based counterpart of lycanthropy). For the time being, it’s streaming on Shudder. Before I get to writing about it, I do want to say that the film looks fantastic but that the stills I’ve found online don’t do it justice and getting screenshots from Shudder doesn’t work well. Imagine a far more visually striking film, won’t you…
Lokis – Rękopis profesora Wittembacha (1970)
Another piece set in the 19th century, this time in what is present day Lithuania, Lokis – the Manuscript of Professor Wittembach is an interesting, little, mildly-horror-adjacent piece, written and directed by Janusz Majewski, adapted from the novel by Prosper Mérimée, the French author upon whose novel the opera Carmen is based. While it is not strictly (or, really, at all, a horror film) it does follow so many of the patterns of one model of folk horror (which is why it is included in the boxed set, All the Haunts be Ours), namely, the “civilized” protagonist venturing into a more rural – wild region and taking in its folksy charm, peculiar superstitions, comical local characters, and the foreboding sense that there is something to the old stories and that the world is a more unknowable, threatening, and simply odd place than previously imagined.
We start the journey with Professor Wittembach, a German pastor and ethnographic scholar who is journeying to the wilds of Lithuania to study local languages and customs. He begins this sojourn on a train and, set to some really striking and ominous orchestration from Wojciech Kilar (who genre fans will be most familiar with for his score to Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula), the opening credits roll to an evocatively symbolic image. The professor has taken off his glasses and left them next to the window of the train. As the vehicle moves east, all is obscured, except that which is viewed through the lenses of modernity, of reason (either that, or perhaps it refers to the limits of his perception-it could go either way, but it does look meaningful and it does look cool).
He reaches his destination, the palace of Count Szemiot, a mysterious, mercurial, and sometimes quite inscrutable figure who is first glimpsed spying on the professor from a tree. In a tower of the castle, the Count’s mother is locked up, shrieking, calling for her son to be killed for the monster he is. The Count’s doctor (when he isn’t treating the mother for madness by dunking her in water between bouts of folk songs) eventually recounts to Wittembach the local tale of how the Count’s mother was abducted and raped by a bear, and that the Count was the result of this assault. Whether or not this implausible story should be given credence, the film suggests its possibility, without ever explicitly establishing the truth.
While I don’t think it could be argued that this is really a horror film, there is an interesting balance struck between the comic specificity of the many odd characters the professor comes across (drunk, superstitious, crazy, or just plain weird), and a real sense that he has come to a dangerous place and is among unstable people (who are drunk, superstitious, crazy, and just plain weird). Additionally, there is a feeling of the uncanny, a kind of unreality, in the proceedings– at least for the professor, and, through him, the viewer; for most of the locals, the folk beliefs are taken more on face value and are generally unquestioned.
For the Count, around whom the action turns, objective truth seems beside the point as he is focused on more philosophical-poetic issues of “man’s dual nature,” of the line (if it exists at all) between civilization and animal barbarity, between the human and the bestial. In a telling moment, he explains to the professor, “I have no love for animals. They’re no better than people.” The film, I think, shares his focus, and his dim view of humanity, juxtaposing the laughable though often lovely beliefs, dances, and reactions of the common people with the cruelty of the lord of the manor and the cold detachment of the educated interlopers (the doctor and the professor).
All in all, the film features many captivating elements. The cinematography is adroit – full of gorgeously filmed landscapes, cleverly framed shots (lots of reflective surfaces here), and seventies-tastic snap zooms. Again, please take my word for it, or watch it for yourself. The pictures I’m attaching unfortunately ill serve the filmmaking. The score is rich, driving, and enigmatic and the production design feels lived in and complete – though I really can’t speak to its historical accuracy.
Most importantly, the nuance and charm of its characters mostly sustain it through its general lack of narrative drive, and it cultivates a rich atmosphere which even occasionally touches on the gothic, such as an early scene in a broken church, lit by lightning strikes and candle light, and housing a skeleton with suspiciously sharp teeth. In its specificity of character and place, it is also frequently hilarious. Again, the Count gets some of the best moments, such as when, to mark the occasion of his wedding, he “releases all of his prisoners.” This entails bringing a large cart into the courtyard of the palace and opening countless cages featuring trapped animals – hawks, cats, ferrets, foxes, and many others, before an old crazy witch woman who we had previously met in the forest climbs out and runs off jabbering wildly and cursing his name. The bit with the animals was a little odd for his many guests, but the revelation that he’d been keeping this poor, mad old lady locked up with his trophy animals was truly shocking. He simply responds to his former prisoner’s curses with a disappointed, “that’s gratitude for you.”
Additionally, the little elements of folk culture shine: a wild group dance in a local village – a strangely expressive interpretive waltz performed by aristocrats, acting out a tale of Rusalki (water nymphs that lure men into the reeds and drown them) right before the doctor mirrors this by spying on peasant girls bathing among the reeds – the degree to which the story of the bear and the Count’s mother is accepted as fact, and even relayed with some erotic charge, an odd moment when, before entering the church, the bride to be is slapped so there could later be grounds for divorce if necessary. These details bring a lot of local color.
And the film is certainly about something. The Count’s aforementioned trapping and later freeing of wild animals seems to reflect his own ambivalence towards the wildness of his own nature – restrained, denied, waiting to run free – wanting to strike out, to taste blood. Without going into details, the film ends on a bleak note, and this has less to do with a moment of final act violence than it does with a conversation between the doctor and the professor. The professor asks the doctor why, if he so well understood the many potentially dangerous problems of the Count’s family, he did so little to heal them. Basically, the physician explains that he hates them, as he does himself, as he generally does humanity writ large, and their suffering gave him some small entertainment. Then the doctor turns the same question on the professor – as a pastor, as a man of god, why did he do so little to comfort them? Wittembach has no reply. No one is actually good: man or bear, the cultured or the barbaric – he returns home having documented something of eastern folklore, but really bringing back an awareness of his own lack – of a void in his own center. There is a haunting quality to it all.
I will say, however, and I don’t want to fall into criticism, but I feel the film did miss a trick. While it all circles around a tension between the bestial and the human – reason and madness – passion (whether it be lust or rage) and sensibility, the piece as a whole is quite reserved, meditative even. There are small bursts of life, but I think it would have benefitted from giving in a bit more to the barbarity so often discussed by its inhabitants. Perhaps the idea was that, just as the Count imprisoned the animals, the potential savagery of the story was similarly restrained and restricted. While this may be symbolically and intellectually sound, I think the effect of the film would have been stronger with a bit more bloodthirstiness. Maybe I wouldn’t have this note if I weren’t writing this for a horror blog – no one can say for sure – but I think I would. As it is, it was frequently quite watchable and even enjoyable, while revolving around interesting themes, but I would have loved it to have more fully embodied them. Still – an interesting and rewarding watch.
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As an aside, I was happy to have the Rusalki referenced, and the dance scene that does so is weird and wonderful. It seemed unfortunately misleading that the subtitles simply translated it to “mermaid,” which I think really gives a false impression. The Rusalka is a really evocative folk figure – capturing the allure and the threat of local nature – that comes up in a lot of other media. I probably first encountered them in the above painting by Pruszkowski (note the one victim trampled on the ground and the next watching them through the reeds) and more recently, there’s a really fun Decemberists song about a Rusalka. Just wanted to share.