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Ron Hale-Evans
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As I mentioned in my Friday 5, last night we watched the film Incubus on DVD to celebrate Halloween.
Incubus is the only film ever shot entirely in Esperanto, the "second language for all" invented over 100 years ago, which now has about two million speakers (on par with Icelandic and Hebrew). The film was made in 1965 by the director of The Outer Limits and stars William Shatner in his last role before Star Trek.
Verdict: suprisingly good. It may not be to your taste, but this is a cult classic. It was thought permanently lost, but a print resurfaced in the late 1990s in a French art-film theater, where it had been shown to packed houses for 30 years. It was only released for the first time a couple of years ago, digitally restored.
The film is very beautiful, both in its cinematography and in its story. There are a couple of goofy special effects, and one fairly awkward experimental shot, but overall this is a heck of a beautiful film, visually. The story is equally beautiful; it is a Bergmanesque allegory involving the triumph of love over evil in a sort of Everyvillage, set in Everytime. Indeed, everything about the movie is archetypal. Because of its powerful Christian imagery, it can be seen as a Christian allegory, but Christ and Satan are referred to only as "La Dio de Lumo" (The God of Light) and "La Dio de Mallumo" (The God of Darkness) respectively, so all the imagery of crucifixes and churches can be seen as mere "place-holders" for more universal spiritual truths, just as the film's Esperanto can be understood as a universal place-holder for whatever mysterious language the incubus and succubi speak.
Speaking of which, the script is written in flawless Esperanto, and quite poetic too. The actors get the syntax right 99% of the time, and usually get the pronunciation right too, but there are a few howlers. In particular, Shatner is stumbling about at one point in the belief that he is damned, shouting (in Esperanto), "Malsupreen! Malsupreen!" ("Downwards! Downwards!") Now, "malsupreen" is actually pronounced "mahl-suh-PREH-ehn", but Shatner, ignoring his language coach, pronounces it "mal-soo-PREEN" (with the last syllable rhyming with "bean"). I can't tell you how hilarious this is to an Esperantist. Shatner makes a few other goofs; he makes the typical American English mistakes in Esperanto pronunciation, but throws in a few from French too: he frequently accents the last syllable instead of the second-to-last, and pronounces Esperanto words with "en" in them as if they were French; e.g. he pronounces "sen" more like English "sun" instead of rhyming it with English "men". But since Shatner is Canadian (from Montreal, IIRC) and probably knows a fair bit of French, this is to be expected.
As a bonus (sort of), before they showed Incubus at the small art gallery where we first saw it in 2001, they showed a few arty shorts and a weird 1963 horror film called The Mask (banned in Finland!), which one might consider a Lovecraftian pseudo-prequel to the Jim Carrey vehicle of the same title, if not an actual influence on it. A psychiatrist gets hold of an ancient (and ugly) Aztec mask that brings out the evil in its owner. When the psychiatrist puts on the mask, he sees fabulous and genuinely scary dream sequences that drive him mad. These are rendered in 3D, for which the theater gave us glasses. (You always know when to put on the glasses, because the 3D sequences are cued by a hollow voice intoning, "PUT ON THE MASK! PUT ON THE MASK!")
The Mask was almost like two films spliced together: a corny early-Sixties horror film with bad dialogue and bad acting, and bone-chilling 3D montages featuring the mask, skeletons throwing fireballs, boats poling through lakes of bones, etc.. The writer and director for these montages was the same guy who did a lot of Frank Capra's montages, Slavko Vorkapich.
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