Fragment of seeking

I have returned only a moment ago from the screening of Usher  plus short films by Curtis Harrington at Anthology Film Archives.  Fragment of Seeking reminded me so much of Maya Deren - the beautiful black & white dream state photography and the fluidity of the visible and invisible worlds.  All of the films included in this program conjured Edgar Allen Poe and a surrealist morbidity. (I mention this with the highest regard.)  After the show had ended, Curtis Harrington answered questions, and I enjoyed his anecdote about an early screening with Kenneth Anger’s film, Fireworks.  An elderly philanthropist told them they were sick!  Such is the life of an experimental filmmaker . . .

These short films also paved the way for Curtis Harrington's later work in the horror genre, with features such as Night Tide, starring Dennis Hopper.   See how innocent he looks . . .

There was such a feeling of the supernatural in these films that has resonated with me even after the screening has ended.  I have just reread Poe's, Anabelle Lee, but this program also made me think of the following poem by Apollinaire:

    On Prophecies

    I’ve known a few prophetesses
    Madame Salmajour learned in Oceania to tell fortunes by cards
    It was there too she had occasion to participate
    In a tasty scene of anthropophagy
    She didn’t mention it to everyone
    Concerning the future she was never wrong

    A Ceretanian cartomanceress Marguerite something or other
            Is just as clever
    But Madame Delroy is the most inspired
            The most precise
    Everything she’s told me about the past was true and everything she
    Predicted has come true in the time she said
    I know a sciomantic but I didn’t want to interview my shadow
    I know a water diviner he’s the Norwegian painter Diriks

    Broken mirror spilt salt scattered bread
    May those faceless gods spare me always
    All the same I don’t believe but I look and listen and please note
    I read hands rather well
    For I don’t believe but I look and when it’s possible I listen

    Everybody is a prophet my dear Andre Billy
    But for so long people have been made to believe
    They have no future and are ignorant forever
            And born idiots
    That they’ve become resigned and it never even occurs to anyone
    To wonder if he knows the future or not
    There’s nothing religious in any of these matters
    In the superstitions or in the prophecies
    Or in anything that people call the occult
    There is above all a way of observing nature
    And of interpreting nature
    Which is completely legitimate

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