She'll lose her heart in Monte Carlo? The Magician (1926), with Laurent Pigeolet, Redwood Creek Blu-ray

"…weird, fantastic, adequately suspensive, and shivery…”

Lawrence Reid, Motion Picture News

 

Of the thousands of silent films lost this is one of those that was found, having been considered "perhaps the most elusive of lost films”, by critic Carlos Clarens before being rediscovered restored and shown on TCM and released on Warner Classics DVD a decade ago. This project is based on a 16mm black and white source from a private collection and whilst it doesn’t have the DVD’s tints, it’s pretty much the same cut as far as I can tell. This is the first time that the film has been released on Blu-ray and is the result of a Kickstarter from Redwood Creek Films who conducted a 4k transfer and restoration of the materials.

 

The film is new to me although I have some familiarity with the work of Rex Ingram and The Magician is notable not just for its mystery and imagination but also its location having been filmed in France with shots featuring Monte Carlo and Paris. Carlos Clarens explains this as a means of avoiding studio interference, and given how he sums up the response on release as mostly on grounds of tastelessness, it’s easy to see why Ingram wanted time alone with his monstrous creation.

 

In addition to an international cast there’s also a British connection with young Michael Powell, often resident in the South of France, acting as an assistant director as well as an extra in one brief appearance. This cast include Ingram’s wife, Alice Terry, as well as sundry Frenchmen and the wide-eyed stylings of Herr Paul Wegener who, as one of the characters observes, looks like he’s stepped out of a melodrama. Paul gets the job done though and his magically-unreal mad Professor Haddo is a joy whether he’s hypnotising Alice, inexplicably influencing the tables at the casino or plotting ancient magic. Powell was not impressed though saying his "one expression to indicate magical powers was to open his huge eyes even wider, until he looked about as frightened as a bullfrog." Maybe you had to be there.

Michael Powell and Gladys Hamer

 

The script is based on a 1908 novel by W. Somerset Maugham, as unlikely as it seems, and is characterised by an uncanny intensity mixed with some humorous episodes that serve to both relive and build up the eventual tension. This is Todd Browning strange and proto-Universal odd, with the seemingly unstoppable Haddo plotting murder and the most gruesome recycling of human flesh… there really ought to be some kind of cinema code to restrict the horrific imaginations of these debauched show people.

 

All begins artistically enough with sculptor Margaret Dauncey (Alice Terry) moulding a huge clay statue of Pan which is of such a scale that I really doubt she’ll be able to get it out of the room. Also present is Margaret's painter friend Susie Boyd (Gladys Hamer) who provides the first moments of light relief as she changes the title of an abstract painting from sunrise to sunset over the Seine.

 

I was right about the scale of the work though for the clay suddenly cracks and the giant head falls onto Margaret threatening more than just her promising career. Her spine damaged only the state-of-the-art intervention of handsome surgeon Dr. Arthur Burdon (Iván Petrovich) saves her with an onlooking doctor praising his skill as almost magical.

 

The saving of a human life is a comparatively simple matter. On the other hand, the scientific creation of life does indeed call for the powers of a magician.

 

Paul Wegener keeps it real.

Also watching – really, really, wide-eyed – is Professor Haddo, who plans on actual magic, and more, with this most attractive of patients. The operating theatre is the strangest of places to pick up potential subjects for hypnotism and heart donation but it’s the early worm who catches the worm even though Margaret and Dr, Arthur soon begin a romance. Haddo meanwhile discovers the rare recipe for creating life in his local library – OK, a library – and makes his plans to, literally, steal Margaret’s heart.

 

After engineering a chance meeting in the park, Haddo then turns up at a visiting circus as the young couple along with Susie and her quirky pal (played by Michael Powell) watch a snake charmer. Haddo, has some words with the charmer, before picking up the snake and holding it to bite his hand, within seconds he makes the bite disappear, but the snake then bites and apparently almost kills the charmer’s assistant. He’s either a genuine magician or a master of prestidigitation.

 

If you wish to see strange things, I have the power to show them to you…

 

Haddo then makes a visit to the young woman’s apartment and proceeds to hypnotise her, using the completed head of her sculpture to present her with a vision of a pre-code Hell in which people seem to be doing exactly the kinds of things that got them sent there in the first place. He urges one especially lithely demonic, dancing faun (Hubert I. Stowitts, an American dancer at the Folies Bergere), to make his moves on Margaret who succumbs in ways that would dismay William Hays…

 

Hellzapoppin!

Margaret and her good Doctor plan to marry but on the morning of their ceremony, Arthur discovers that she has not only been whisked away by Haddo but has married him. Convinced that her will is being controlled, he begins to search Europe for them finally tracing them a year later to Monte Carlo where Haddo is using Margaret to somehow fix the odds at the gaming table presumably to fund his greater plan.

 

Arthur and his friend Dr. Porhoët (Firmin Gémier, a leading light of French Theatre who created the role of Père Ubu in the original production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi in 1896) set out to foil the Professor and the closing segment is full of classic horror tropes right down to a lightning illuminated tower and an “Igor” played by Henry Wilson. It’s high camp and schlock horror but this is one of the places were that all began. It’s a key work “Supervised by Rex Ingram” even if he didn’t direct all of it according to Henry Lachman, who directed the Sabbat section, and Powell’s memoirs.

 

The result is great fun and whilst Wegener is over the top as usual, it’s all part of the fun – he does indeed heighten the melodrama. Terry is a very effective damsel in distress and the Ingram’s supervision brings out the best in all his players. Laurent Pigeolet’s score adds a lot of flavour, inventive piano that works well with the creeping unreality of the evil professor’s emotional invasion of the couple’s real world.

Iván Petrovich and Alice Terry

 

The restoration has the flaws of the material and lacks the clarity you’d expect from a 35mm source with digital cleaning – we are so spoilt these days – but it looks like what it is, a direct copy from 16mm. The 2010 Warner Archive DVD is still to be found on eBay and other places and whilst it’s claimed as 88 minutes it’s 80 and as I say at the tope the same cut… probably!

 

Some copies of this Blu-ray are for sale on eBay, it’s not cheap but it is different.

 

Game of thrones… Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), with Costas Fotopoulos, Kennington Bioscope

 

First Bioscope of the year and it’s an epic evening for one of the cornerstones of Weimar Cinema, one in fact that I’ve been saving up for just such an occasion and, judging from a non-too scientific sampling of the audience, I’m not the only one with the DVD/Blu-ray at home on the shelf, waiting to be watched after a proper screening and the Bioscope made sure that this was indeed a special screening.

 

A 16mm print was shown tonight, slightly shorter the restoration on which our home media is  based but still very impressive, astonishing even given the scale and verve of the film making. Regular KB, MC, Michelle Facey gave her usual high-content introduction, providing the background on director and cinematic visionary Fritz Land and his script-writing partner Thea von Harbou, as well as explaining the film’s link to early 13^th Century Saxon epic poetry, Der Nibelungenlied, written in High Middle German and by unknown hands in Passau in what is now southern Bavaria.  This tale was itself based on oral traditions dating back centuries and mentioning historic events and individuals of the 5th and 6th centuries.

 

There are similar stories across German speaking Europe and up to Scandinavia and, there are some similarities with later Middle English stories such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Le Mort d’Arthur, they are all epics in which it is how the characters live as much as if they die: chivalric romances with logic and outcomes based on magical and religious certainties. The link as a noted medievalist pointed out, may well be the French writer Chrétien de Troyes, who, writing in the late 12^th  Century, told tales of Arthurian legend; setting up a style and subject matter that led to the Extended Chivalric Universe, spreading across borders and language.

Paul Richter provides some scale

Der Nibelungenlied is altogether fuller of dungeons and dragons than usually found in Arthur, it is peculiarly Germanic and this appealed especially to Lang and von Harbou who were looking to take their countrymen out of themselves by presenting a folk-fantasy many would recognise on a grand scale, something even the Americans would struggle to better. There’s no getting over the links between the story and German identity though with elements not only quoted after German reunification in the 1870s, but forming the basis for Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a celebration of the loyalties rather than the more courtly aspects. After the First World War – and Lang’s film – it’s even possible to see Siegfried as literally representing the betrayal of German interests, “the stab in the back”, seen by many at home after surrender in 1918. Politics and culture pick and choose each other in odd ways, for more on this see von Harbou’s output in Germany after 1933…

 

No doubt the primary purpose in 1924 was to deliver rousing entertainment every bit as stirring as Arthurian legends, swords and sorcery. This is something of a superhero epic with a hero who, having bathed in dragon blood, is almost invulnerable. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine two young friends, sons of recently migrated European Jews, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, both ten on this film’s release, perhaps seeing it in the USA and getting a few ideas. The Italians had their own strong man, Maciste, the German Übermensch went back a bit further.

 

The film is huge in scale and features many tropes that are now staples of the explosion in fantasy films, although Lang’s vision is decades before Tolkien or CS Lewis set their templates, let alone Game of Thrones, House of Dragons and all the rest. Like modern blockbusters, Lang’s film was also in two parts and tonight’s screening was only of the first part, still some two hours even on 16mm and well over half an hour longer on the reconstruction found on the Eureka Blu-ray.

 

Siegfried holds aloft his sword

It tells the tale of Siegfried (Paul Richter), son of King Siegmund of Xanten, who becomes an expert swordsmith, fashioning the perfect blade which the artful blacksmith, Mime (Georg John) tests by dropping a feather onto the edge and slicing it in two. Siegfried is a genetically lucky blonde, yes, an Aryan, who attains success through bravery, guile and killing the right dragon. After the sword is struck he leaves on his white charger (possibly called Tonto or Comet the Superhorse) after hearing about the kings of Burgundy who reign at a mighty castle at Worms on the Rhine, where the beauteous Princess Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) awaits just such a knight as he.

 

I shall set out for that place so that I may win Kriemhild!

 

Mime tells our hero how to find Worm but he sends him to almost certain doom as there is a dragon blocking his way. Siegfried is of course fearless and wily and outthinks the, actual fire-breathing creature, who looks a little sad as he’s blinded and then fatally stabbed by the knight’s blade. This blood has magical qualities and a little bird, literally, tells him that if he bathes in it, he will become impervious harm which leads to some  long-distance nudity as Siegfried takes the bath of invulnerability. One last twitch of the dragon’s tail though and a leaf lands on his shoulder meaning that he has one area of weak human flesh… every superhero needs their kryptonite or Achille’s Heel.

 

He also gains additional super powers and wealth after being attacked by Alberich, King of the Dwarves (Georg John, again) who wears a net of invisibility but is soon overwhelmed and forced to promise Siegfried his fortune, the treasure of the Nibelungs, if he will spare him. Naturally Alberich double-crosses but fails and as he dies curses all in his subterranean kingdom to be turned to stone. Siegfried heads off and goes from strength to strength soon conquering 12 kingdoms and presenting a suitably heroic prospect to the Burgundians. 

Margarete Schön

In her introduction, Michelle referred us to Lotte H Eisner’s Haunted Screen¹ for an analysis of the film’s incredible design and mix of the usual expressionist/UFA studio work with stunning location shots; all perfectly controlled by Lang and his team led by art director Otto Hunte. Eisner quotes early film critic Béla Balázs in saying that “the soul of a landscape or milieu did not always present itself in the same way” and so it was up to the director to “seek the eyes of the landscape…” Nature had to be “stylised” for film to become a work of art (Rudolph Kurtz²) and plain nature was not enough in itself to “make man’s destiny understood” and Stimmungsbilder, “mood pictures” had to be used.

 

Lang certainly took control of his landscape and it is very much a major character in this film, reflecting and setting the moods of the characters and the narrative. The studio constructs are huge dynamic depictions of nature; rocky outcrops, dense pine woods and treacherous pathways whilst the building of Worm are massive in scale both for the interiors and exteriors, with huge stairways dwarfing the players, who move across them, black or white, like pieces on a chess board.

 

Talking of which, Lang also micromanages the way his human resource was aligned and where exactly they where in the frame. There are so many examples of this that I was tempted just to leave 150 screen shots in place of all these words. The opening sequence is almost balletic, as Siegfried hammers out his sward and Mint recoils in horror as he sees how powerful he has become and then, when we first see the imposing King’s Castle, the guard are spaced out symmetrically as the nobles walk past, as if the audience, commoners all, are held at a distance. We quickly switch to the interiors and the almost sterile atmosphere.

 

Order in the castle

All this will change when Siegfried strikes a deal with King Gunther of Burgund (Theodor Loos) to help him gain the hand of the fearsome Queen Brunhild of Isenland (Hanna Ralph who is great value!) in exchange for allowing his new friend to give him his sister Kriemhild’s hand in marriage. They head off to Brunhild’s realm and Siegfried uses his net of invisibility to make sure that the puny King Gunther wins the three trials of strength he needs against the woman he wants to marry. Brunhild is down but not quite out and, whilst she has to accede, she suspects something is wrong.

 

All is now set for some court intrigue in Burgundy and, as with other characters who break the code of chivalry, there is always a price to pay and an uneasy peace will not last for long at the King’s castle.

 

It’s hard to think of many films with this kind of scale in 1924, and the direction as well as cinematography are first rate with cameraman Carl Hoffmann, Günther Rittau, and Walter Ruttmann as good if not better than almost anyone in Hollywood. Paul Gerd Guderian’s costumes also match the set designs and there’s a striking mix of strong modern design with traditional folk stylings. Everything is larger than life from the hairy hobbits working in the smithery to the dwarfs and the brown back coiffeurs of Siegfried and Brunhild. There’s also a moody turn from the King of Burgundy’s general, Hagen of Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), eye patch over one eye and huge black wings attached to his armoured helmet.

Hanna Ralph is not to be messed with

It's operatic, and fantastic with an emotional sweep designed to sweep the audience away. To this end, Costas Fotopoulos’ tirelessly inventive accompaniment also played its part, never flagging during the epic mood and melded to Lang’s vision as everything else. It contributed mightily to the unfolding ultra-drama with lines and themes as intriguingly structured as the architecture and design on screen.

 

Die Nibelungen was premiered in the at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where it played for 40 performances between 29 April and 20 June 1924. A hit and an influence on film for all eternity. It was certainly a hit tonight and here’s to the second part when it can be arranged… no spoilers but it’s called: Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild's Revenge).

1.       The Haunted Screen, Lotte H Eisner, first published in 1952 and updated with translation and new material for Thames and Hudson in 1969.

2.       Rudolf Kurtz’s Expressionismus und Film, published in 1926, was one of the first, if not the first, art historical treatises to examine film as an equal of the other arts.

 

Simply red? The Red Shoes (1948), BFI, 100 Greatest Films

You have to take that film with a huge tin of salt, because there was never a ballet company anywhere which was like that. I'm sure no dancer of any generation ever had this supposedly appalling problem ending in suicide, if you please - between real life and the ballet.

Moira Shearer*

 

What is there to say about this film that hasn’t already been said? Something you could say for pretty much the rest of the Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films the BFI are showing across January and February, a once a decade opportunity to re-explore the cannon as reinvented or reinforced by some 1600 film critics (almost as many Tory Party members it takes to elect a new leader...). Powell and Pressburger have to be in there and it’s impossible to rank their films although clearly, the electorate have…

I watched the screening at the BFI and then watched it again with wife, daughter and mother-in-law who remembered her impressions on seeing it on screen in 1948 when she was just 16. Two different audiences and it was fascinating to compare over the day. I’m not sure how many of the packed audience watching on NFT 3 had previously seen the film but, after a chatty disturbed start with some early laughs at the quaintness of the dialogue we settled down in silence as the film engaged minds and sensibilities.

It's hard not to become engrossed in this film as Powell and Pressburger create such an intense atmosphere with dialogue from the latter that challenges our norms of polite discourse. Anton Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov manages to be extraordinarily rude, maniacally controlling and also strangely vulnerable. He carries natural authority and with trademark restraint manages to underplay a role that could so easily fall flat through an excess of grim single-mindedness. Boris just needs to find beauty in his art and even the prospect of being danced to in the inappropriate surroundings of an after-show party is too much for him to bear. He reminds me so much of Jose Mourinho.

Lermontov is not the only jarring character; even Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page is frank and awkwardly single minded, first in the way she talks back to Boris after he disapproves of her being asked to “audition” for him at an after show party and then as she insists on greeting him personally on stage during her first day at the ballet, she’s young but she’s strong. Walbrook may well give a star turn but in Shearer’s cinematic debut she is the centre piece, the star who is to be born and the focus not only our attention but also admiration; she is a ballerina acting the role of a ballerina and her dancing is not something you can “act”.

Powell had seen Shearer performing with the Sadlers Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) aged 20 and had pursued her for his film for something like a year. The dancer herself was less than impressed with the idea especially as she saw the story as a bit daft. She was on her way up, dancing in the shadow of Margot Fontaine and about to get her first prima roles, how could this film help her with her ambition?

Powell eventually got his woman but only after he hired a group of leading ballet dancers to form the core cast and after the Royal Ballet said that Shearer would be welcomed back after the filming. After she came back she felt the film didn’t help her in what was already a highly competitive corps de ballet but, interestingly, her stature increased as she continued to develop technically and to be offered not only the classic leading roles but also a ballet written especially for her, created by the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. She danced the title role in the premiere of his Cinderella in 1948 having already ed his seminal neoclassical ballet Symphonic Variations in 1946, along with and along with Pamela May and Fonteyn.

Anton encourages

She soon found that filming ballet is quite different from performing on stage, and this was not all to her taste. Firstly there were the stages which had concrete floors, “… death to the calf muscles!”, then there was the disjointed nature of filming and “…the long waiting while cameras, lights, playbacks, etc, were organised. Eventually they would be ready and expect us to leap instantly into the air, but we were now cold and had to limber up yet again. No - filming ballet is not easy.” Quoting a lecture she gave in 1949, The Daily Express had her complaining The chopped-up sequences allowing perhaps only half a minute's dancing at a time made it very difficult and a very miserable experience. You can see how the film-making experience would have been completely counter to her ingrained discipline and practice. And yet, she made it.

Another deciding factor in her decision to do so was the casting of Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, three ballet dancers with impressive pedigrees. Shearer had worked with Helpmann and Massine a number of times and also with several of the corps de ballet dancers and this familiarity shows in certain moments when they practice, rehearse and put in the hours with professional commitment. All of this makes the film stronger and the reality of the dance sustains the fantasy all around.

I had been a more rounded performer at the time I made it or that I would have done it two or three years later, when I think I would have done justice to it. Still, I've seen 'The Red Shoes' a couple of times in the past 10 years, and I must say that for all the creakiness of the dialogue and situations, it has a certain period charm… Moira Shearer, The New York Times, 1988

Powell had cast a young ballerina on the way up as, a young ballerina on the way up… he also cast the most extraordinary cinematic hair… Jack Cardiff’s cinematography is stratospherically good as usual but he achieves so much in being able to capture the natural tone of the actor’s golden strands as well as her Scottish freckles and powerful pale skin. These observations are made after a comparison of said tones with those of my wife Catherine, a Grade 6 ballerina in her day and no less fierce than Ms Shearer in her opinion and drive!

Powell may well have been cold, but Pressburger was not and the cast and crew created something far greater than the sum of the parts… despite himself, in Moira’s view he was cold, lacking warmth and humanity, and yet the director led in this wonderful cinematic creation with his crew excelling from painter Hein Heckroth, completely out of his comfort zone and yet providing astonishing production design along with costumes, and Arthur Lewis art direction. As with the gaggle of real dancers on set, the real filmmakers gelled and teamworked a gem.

It's tempting to draw a line from the film to Shearer’s eventual career choices but she really does sound like a no nonsense lass from Dumfries … the offers continued for years, including unlikely ones like El Cid with Charlton Heston. But I've always found my marriage and my children infinitely more important than any career, so no great decision had to be made…

Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer

No red shoes were to compel Moira away from the path she had chosen. That’s the reality but there is still so much to unpick from the fantasy. Red Shoes remains one of the greatest cult films of all time and part of that, a big part, is because of the sheer skill and humanity that Shearer bought to the film. She was to dance for Powell twice more, once in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and with a light-hearted cameo in the otherwise sinister Peeping Tom (1960) but she had four children by then and had found a different life.

Red Shoes is such an enduring fable, dramatizing the choices we make in life and its darker corners are mysterious enough to reward repeated viewing. Although, each time, I’m not the one who has to watch myself dance, but, in many ways, that is the heart of the film’s meaning even if, from the start, the star herself had such mixed feelings.

Let’s leave it to The Daily Express to add some of it’s now famed balance to Moira’s view of her film  with Emeric Pressburger responding to comments she made in 1949, I will make no comment. Miss Shearer has the right to criticise like everyone else. I don't know why she is doing it. But she must have a reason.

So much to unpick and I look forward to Pamela Hutchinson’s book on The Red Shoes being published later this years. There’s so much more to learn for a film that never grows old and wins over every new generation.

You can pre-order the book now direct from Bloomsbury, there will be more opportunities to see and discuss this film as the year unfolds.

*From a 1994 interview reproduced in An Autobiography of British Cinema, Brian McFarlane (1997), Methuen/BFI (pp 532-5)

**Quotes sourced from the excellent Powell and PressburgerPages site. 

Léonide Massine offers you a choice...

Echoes… The Stone Tape (1972), BFI, The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men

 

The Stone Tape is a made for TV play broadcast as a Christmas ghost story in 1972 but on the Southbank early in the New Year half a century later it is still viscerally unsettling. Screening as part of Mark Jenkin’s season showing The Cinematic DNA of his new film, Enys Men, it shows men pitting technology against ancient forces, attempting to control and to commercialise that which they barely comprehend, in complete denial about the possibilities that they may have found one of those things undreamt of in their philosophy.

Written by Nigel Kneale who specialised in macabre tales mixing the supernatural with the scientific most famously in the Quatermass series and who also adapted many literary works for cinema including John Osborne's plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer for director Tony Richardson, both a far cry from sci-fi horror mash ups and yet which explain his grasp of character which adds so much to The Stone Tape. The human interactions and corporate politics mask the unfolding mystery so that when at last it is truly revealed, we’re all wrong-footed.

Filmed largely in studio and directed with superb timing and economy by Peter Sasdy, it featured some of the leading British actors of the time all of whom act their collective socks off in service to Kneale’s script… you really wouldn’t expect a studio play to be so affecting, you can see the “joins”, the studio floor, the artificiality of the lighting but it magnifies the tension, as you suspend that disbelief, born away by the players and the uncanny expectation.

Jane Asher stands alone

There’s one exception to the masculine rationality and that’s ace computer analyst, Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) who arrives at Ryan Electronics' new research facility “Taskerlands”, an old Victorian property about to be transformed into a research hot-house to help the electronics firm keep pace with the Japanese competition. As she pulls up two Ryan lorries apparently start reversing into Jill’s car… she reverses away in panic into a pile of sand: it’s a foretaste of the ordeal to come.

Shouting down Jill’s intuitions is Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), the head of a research team and a natural leader, if natural leaders are required to be obnoxious, bullying and aggressive,  as well as decisive and competitive, always with an eye for the main chance. He’s married with children (and a horse) but has been having an affair with his computer prodigy… he must have hidden charms.

There’s something very strange about their new base and foreman Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson, who always so good at expressing doubts when following orders), reveals that the builders have refused to work on one room saying that it’s haunted. Naturally Brock dismisses this but Jill is shaken to the core as she sees an apparition of a woman in Victorian dress, screaming in terror… The sightings continue until even Brock is convinced there’s something awry… boldly he decides that this is something worth investigating: “… a mass of data... waiting for a correct interpretation.” He marshals his team and they move their kit and computers into the room to analyse and nail the phenomenon.

Iain Cuthbertson and Michael Bryant

They’re a mix of sceptics covering the full gamut of 70’s TV scientists from rough and ready (Peter Angelis) to bearded and contemplative (Michael Bates).  But, not only do they not believe some, literally, cannot see or hear the apparition… there are other sensitives like Jill who perceive the sound and vision and others who cannot feel anything at all, a mystery with lots of nuance, all designed to suspend our belief as well as motivate the denial on screen.

 

The story is well structured with rationality and investigation boldly pursued by the scientists, the kind of forensic approach that usually explains everything. Then, even after evidence from some locals and some palpable if not recordable, evidence felt by most, Brock decides to pound the issue with pure sound, before deciding that the very stones are a recording mechanism which, naturally could make his company very rich and make him the hero, commercially speaking.

As with any good such tale of this time, authority is generally stupid and brave scientists are often ignored even when, in this case, some should be ignored. Such tropes seem to be commonplace in an era when science was more trusted and supernatural fear was unsettling rather than graphic; a general paranoia and society ill at ease with the chaos of nuclear uncertainty only a couple of decades after such weapons were deployed, not once but twice to conclude the war after the war to end all wars.

Jane Asher is virtually the only woman and carries the mystery with her for long portions of the story, the sensitive human anchor amongst all the testosterone. scientific posturing and macho denial. The men want to control, to follow orders not instinct but she wants to genuinely understand and Brock’s casual in-bred exasperation - “bloody women!” - rebounds emphatically on him in the end.

Encapsulating the creeping disruption throughout is the sizzling static of a score which seems to have been sucked directly from the stones by Desmond Briscoe and The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The Workshop sound evokes the science mysteries of my youth and their influence of their experimental early synthesisers is long-lasting, informing the sounds of labels such as Ghost Box, Castle in Space, Woodford Halse and many more. These labels feature many an album of imagined scores for films that could have been made around the time of The Stone Tapes… the ghosts of electronica past inhabit the very vinyl of my study… the cardboard and plastic containers and even electrostatic patterns on newly-minted cassettes… we’re living in Brock’s world of endless-storage, nothing is forgotten, all is recorded. Still, we struggle to make sense of it.

All of which leads onto Enys Men and Mark Jenkins’ own score, which resonates with these same mysteries of sound and stone. Which is where we came in.

Details of The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men can be found on the BFI website along with screening information for the film itself. Nigel Keane will be there, spirit infused in the huge concrete walls of the Southbank.

There's a highly-collectable slice of vinyl too...