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Fiction Film & TV

FICTION: Scholomance, dir. Ewart Stangebye, 1927

What looks like a still from a silent film of a door knocker in the shape of a lion's head on a castle door.
A page from a film guide that opens with the tail-end of a review: "...entirely the wrong message from the film: that the life of a gangster is glamorous, and that Tony has real, enviable style. The games that De Palma so often plays around the boundaries of good taste backfired on this occasion. Scholomance, Ewart Stangebye, 1927. Only one reel of Scholomance survives, recovered by silent film scholar Kevin Brownlow from the Austrian state film archive where it had sat for 80 years in a mislabeled canister. One reel, yes – but what a reel! Thanks to the detective work of experts at the British Film Institute, with a grant from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, we know that it comes from a sequence towards the end of the first act of Stangebye’s 140-minute original and depicts the arrival of the hero Fitzgibbon (Leslie Howard) at the gates of the great demonic college. The camera follows Fitzgibbon up a winding mountain path with a steep drop on either side. The castle itself is realised through forced perspective and some fine glass matte painting. As lightning breaks around him we see half-human shapes in the darkness at the foot of the castle walls. Analysis of the film has not revealed exactly how this effect was achieved but it seems likely the figures were etched directly onto the celluloid film stock with a pin, by a talented artist. Fitzgibbon rings the bell. The castle door opens. As he enters lightning strikes again and we see further glimpses of the figures in the shadows – longer, now, and more sinuous. Certainly beyond the ability of any performer or puppeteer, though their movement feels quite organic, unlike even the best animation of the period. Inside, our hero finds an eerily abandoned ruin with high windows and a sweeping staircase. Cutaways show us rodents and, curiously, what appear at first to be blank frames. As Fitzgibbon makes his way through the castle, calling out for attention, these cuts to nothing become longer and more frequent. They are not explained by intertitles. At one point, fully 60 seconds of this fifteen-minute reel are dedicated to a single shot of complete, flat blackness. Or so I thought. I fear the restoration is at fault, with the use of digital denoising having removed subtle but..." It continues on the next page.
The following page from the same film guide: "...essential detail from these frames. During a rare screening of the original reel at the University of California I thought I saw in these frames echoes of those etched shapes from the earlier sequence. Certainly something in that minute of film disturbed me in a way the digital restoration had not. The crawl of the grain, perhaps, or some ghost created by the persistence of vision. But what I thought I saw, the sense I made of that nothingness, was the sliding of bloody skin against bloody skin, flesh falling from bone, bone piercing skin, burning and peeling, and the breaking of the barriers between one bodily form and the next. It struck me as a remarkable technical achievement of astonishing subtlety, many years ahead of its time. Speaking of persistence of vision, I find it awfully hard, now, to be in or look at darkness at all. What other medium besides film has such power? Scream, Wes Craven, 1996: One might get the impression from the breathless praise of genre..."

By Ray Newman

Editor and writer.

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