Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 194: Sat Jul 13

Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 1962): St John on Bethnal Green, 5pm

This is especially worth catching if you're a fan of this particular cult movie as famous experimental rock band Pere Ubu will be performing their own soundtrack to the film. You can buy tickets here.

Here are the band's lead singer David Thomas's thoughts at The Quietus website:
It's not their first time playing a live score to films, having previously accompanied It Came From Outer Space and X, The May With X-Ray Eyes, with Thomas saying of the event: "I grew up addicted to Friday night sci-fi/horror flicks. The genre had an incalculable effect on the third generation of young rock giants who emerged in the 70s. Now it's time to honour that debt.
 
"The amateurish enthusiasm and naive intention, as well as lack of budget, of the B-movie encourages a kind of communal abstraction that approaches folk culture, and the frequent lack of a coherent agenda leaves lots of wiggle room for whatever personalised context or agenda an audience or band chooses to overlay. Wiggle room is good."


Time Out preview:
'The only survivor when a car plunges into a river, Mary Henry (Hilligoss) emerges on to a sandbank like a sodden sleepwalker. Shortly afterwards, en route to Utah to take up a job as a church organist, Mary is frightened by a ghostly apparition, a white-faced man whose repeated appearances seem mysteriously connected with an abandoned carnival pavilion. Other strange episodes, during which Mary seems to become invisible and inaudible to those around her, exacerbate her feeling that she has no place in this world. With its striking black-and-white compositions, disorienting dream sequences and eerie atmosphere, this has the feel of a silent German expressionist movie. Unfortunately, so does some of the acting, which suffers from exaggerated facial expressions and bizarre gesturing. But the mesmerising power of the carnival and dance-hall sequences far outweighs the corniness of the awkward intimate scenes; and as Mary, caught in limbo between this world and the next, dances to the discordant carnival music of time, the subsequent work of George Romero and David Lynch comes constantly to mind.' 
Nigel Floyd
Here is the trailer.

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