A Trail of Lighthouse Movies
Robert Eggers’, Aislinn Clarke’s and Jean Grémillon’s movies seem to all share the same roots.
Lighthouses are important enough that their history can be dated back as far as ancient Egypt. And even if boats arenot the most used means of transportation nowadays, it’s a sure thing to state that these buildings still have significance in our modern world. For instance, every gamer would tell you that they are the central point of games such as Bioshock, Life is Strange or Dear Esther. That’s because they are built to show a path in a world that’s mostly devoid of logic or ideal road. There exists a very distinct qualities in the goal of lighthouses. Ain’t no surprises, filmmakers chose this precise setting for a lot of movies from Xavier Gens’ Cold Skin to oldies such as Michael Powell’s The Phantom Light. Still, it’s Robert Eggers’ latest take on those lonesome towers which interests me today.
Robert Eggers stated that his brother tried to wrote the first The Lighthouse treatment while Robert was busy securing financing for his first feature the Witch. In this optics, Eggers once shot a short named Brothers. Coming from theatre, he had people telling him he would be better showing to investors what they were betting their money on. Nowadays we know that both The Witch and The Lighthouse will be part of a trilogy centred around New England Folk Tales, the third part maybe being The Northman with a returning Willem Dafoe, on which production has halted due to Covid-19.
What we do know of The Witch is that Eggers wrote it by extracting real dialogs and sentences from witchcraft trials account. An experience he said he would never do a second time. Truth is, to write the heavy dialogs present in his second film, Eggers turned towards Sarah Orne Jewett and Herman Melville, not copying words for words but instead adapting the parley he found in their respective books.
We also know that pretty much like The Witch, The Lighthouse used to be much more fantasy-oriented, Eggers going as far as describing it as a fairy tale. Still, at some unknown point in time, the filmmaker heard of the two Thomas, Howell and Griffith, having to live together in a distant lighthouse. A sure recipe for an identity crisis, thought Eggers. This discovery may have been what turned a fantasy-filled script into a more down-to-earth kind of Wake in Fright at sea. Still those rewrites had happened with the Witch beforehand, the first draft featured the famous witch appearing to every members of the family, before Eggers finally decided on Thomasin becoming the main protagonist.
Having been disappointed to have digitally shot his first feature, Eggers, infatuated with his success, decided this time to shoot on 35mm film, which would have then to be cut down to a 1:19:1 aspect ratio. Listening closely to the audio commentary of The Witch, you can clearly hear Eggers complaining about the fact that he think he didn’t show enough of the art department’s work. An issue he seems to have resolved in his second movie. What the young filmmaker didn’t resolve though, was working with animals, according to him the ram in The Witch was a nightmare and still he didn’t want to take the seagulls out of The Lighthouse, meaning the team had to resort to shoot some extra bits in England with trained birds.
Others have noticed the link Eggers the Lighthouse seems to possess with Grand-Guignol. Mainly because its plot revolves around two protagonist, an old male and middle-aged one having to survive in lonesome lighthouse. A link which had already been exploited by Aislinn Clarke six years earlier.
Pretty much like Eggers, Aislinn Clarke comes from a background in theatre. She is an Irish director from Northern Ireland who studied cinema in both England and the United States, majoring in writing. Perfectly capable of switching mediums, Clarke readied her weapons through television, radio and theatre plays. In 2018, she released her first full-length feature entitled The Devil’s Doorway, a found footage set in the 60s and dealing with magdalene laundries, estranged convents in which the Irish Catholic Church used to imprisoned single mothers, prostitutes, lonesome women. Still, before this leap of faith Clarke put a few short films under her belt.
The Lighthouse Keepers is a thirteen minutes short which Clarke thought would be part of a trilogy exploring an unknown Irish production company. For this first foray, she adapted a play from Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin, of whom we’ll talk later. Gardiens de Phare tells the story of a duo of lighthouse keepers, father and son, with the former having to learn that the young man has previously been bitten by a rabid dog before coming up to work. No help in sight, rest for the father only to witness the demise of his sole children. Through this, we find part of the mentor-apprentice relationship which can partly be found int Egger’s the Lighthouse; we can also take note of Clarke’s direction which led her to make the movie a silent film, in a 4:3 format ratio. This, was in part due to her will to make a triptych of movie all centred around experimentations of such sort.
Her second short would be In the Dark Room, inspired by another one of the Grand Guignol’s play : Sous la Lumière Rouge de Maurice Level and Etienne Rey. It tells the tale of a young fiancé having to bury his lover in a haste because of an epidemic, only to latter discover that she wasn’t dead! Interestingly enough, Clarke chose to turn this story into a photo-roman, meaning it’s entirely comprised of stills just like Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the movie which was remade into Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. this was shot in Ballealy cottage where she would latter direct her last short Childer, read more about it here.
Cut Flowers would have been the title of the third instalment, this time recounting the tale of famous model/painter/poet Elizabeth Siddal who almost died of cold while modelling for Millais’ painting Ophelia. Clarke wanted this one to be another roman-photo but with more experimental features. Sadly, we may never know what this experimental short would have looked like.
Still, we got her take on the Gardiens de Phare play, six years before Robert Eggers’ the Lighthouse but still eighty years after Jean Gremillon’s version. Certainly, the play’s most famous adaptation.
Jean Grémillon was a young man when he came to Paris to study music. Before long, the student found a job playing the piano in silent movie theatres. This occupation soon enabled him to meet personalities from the French film industry, some of whom proposed him to direct a few documentaries. Thanks to his friendship with Charles Dullin, Grémillon was soon able to direct his first full-length feature Maldone which was sadly not a financial success. This didn’t deter the young man who decided to direct Gardiens de Phare, a movie written and produced by Jacques Feyder, Marcel Carné’s mentor, and inspired by the eponymous Grand-Guignol theatre play written by Paul Cloquemin and Paul Autier.
Alas, the project fell through once, when its lead actor Gilbert Dalleu had a car accident near Saint-Brieuc, Britany, while shooting and had to have his arms amputated. This particular incident led the production to a halt but, most importantly, Dalleu’s injuries would become infected during his hospital stay, paving the way to his death two years later.
Following this drama, Grémillon, with the vigour of is youthful years, would now cast Paul Fromat as the father and re-shot the movie a second time. This is the final product which can be found on YouTube and shows, through its camerawork and framing, the talent Grémillon had gained beforehand throughout his career. In fact, the director would go on to become very successful (except for being fired from the Pathé-Nathan studio for making La Petite Lise) in talking movies.
Gardiens de Phare would become a lost movie nonetheless, as is often the case with silent films, and even more so of Grémillon’s early works. It appears the filmmaker even stated that his second silent film was “lost at sea” in a sarcastic play on words. It is during the 70s that a copy would be found in Denmark, enabling audiences to experience Grémillon’s vision of what should have been a horror tale, and certainly to compare Grémillon’s direction with Eggers’ or Clarke’s direction.
See, the Grand-Guignol was a theatre in Paris which specialized itself in horror, amoral tales and gore special effects. A live ancestor to modern day horror films. In fact, Gardiens de Phare, the original play, was written partly to make use of a new-found system at the time, which consisted of smashing nails onto windows to imitate the peckering of seagulls. More astounding is the fact that Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin would never write for the Grand-Guignol ever again. This may explain why Grémillon didn’t thought of their tales as grandguignolesque but more along the line of a social, rural drama. Strangely enough while scoutin for location, the director also heard ot the two Thomas which would later inspire Eggers. Still, to the French filmmaker Gardiens de Phare was an exploration of isolation.
For you to have a point of comparison, in the late 50s, a decade or so before the Grand-Guignol closed its gates, a certain Albert Machard wrote a play entitled Orgy at the Lighthouse, in which two brothers take two prostitutes to a lighthouse for a night of fun, shall we say. Madness ensues when through the tempest which engulfes the building one of the brothers witnesses their mother trying to reach them to prevent them from sinning. Attributing this madness to an earlier blasphemy from one of the prostitutes, they strangle her to death before dumping the body. When their mother crashes ashore and is swallowed by the sea, the two brothers decide to burn the last hooker and pray. Reading through this, one can’t help the feeling that Gardiens de Phare was definitely a safer bet for Grémillon.
It shall also be noted that the play had already been adapted by Turkish filmmaker Muhsin Ertugrul though a movie named Kiz Kulesinde bir facia which can be translated into Tragedy at the Virgin Tower, a bit ironic when you know that the lighthouse in the original play was aptly named the Cursed (le Maudit). But before Gardiens de Phare, even before the original play which was written in 1905, there was French thriller by a very famous author.
Anatole le Braz was born in 1859 in France’s region of Britany. Speaking both Breton and French, he soon began to translate famous folk songs from his native countryside at a young age. Le Braz would go on to become a teacher, much like his father, and would always thrive to make Britany’s culture more well-known. This passion for his roots would lead him onto more official missions, on both side of the Atlantic Ocean after the death of his first wife. He would eventually marry in the United States, and become Talking Heads’ Tina Waymouth’s great-grand-father. Still, in France he’s mostly famous for La Légende de la Mort, a book in which he compiled all the tales he heard on death, on how to prevent death, or how to curse to death in Britany’s folklore. Still, it’s pretty difficult to stress enough how important Le Braz was in a time when the French government decided that regional dialect should be banned, how he almost single-handedly saved a great part of France cultural past. Sadly, most regions in France would not have their own Le Braz and would see their myths and legends disappear as time passed on. Even nowadays, you can walk into Britany and feel as if every inhabitant secretly knows the vast legends their region hides in the shades of its forests.
Still, aside from his anthologies and his ethnologist work Anatole Le Braz sometimes wrote pure fiction.
In 1900, right before he moved to the USA, Le Braz published Le Gardien du Feu, which can be translated to The Guardian of the Fire, in which a lighthouse keeper recounts how he killed his wife and her lover by imprisoning them in a room of his daily job. A rural thriller according to sources, but since Le Braz was really famous at the time, it would not be a big leap to think Autier or Cloquemin might have read Le Braz’s book before coming up with their own play. 1900 was after all the time of the merveilleux scientifique movement, led by Maurice Renard, a forgotten time when weird fiction impregnated the French, I mean, the entire European cultural specter.
Like a beacon in the dead of night.
If you’re interested in old books, you may like the piece I wrote about the three dark princes of German horror, Lovecraft Country’s Making or maybe you’ll prefer to learn of the troubled past of the Snowpiercer Saga.
Next week is French Frights week, and we go old school with Jean-Pierre Mocky’s The Big Scare !!!
