Alongside the interwar feature films and newsreels that have been preserved in film archives, on occasion there are other, more unusual artefacts. One such text is the short film Prelude, made in 1927. This six-minute piece is dense with intertextual references. This blog has discussed before how interwar films often represent one expression of a story that is told in multiple formats. In the case of Prelude, the film references music, written text and other films which places the text in a wider cultural context.
Prelude is ‘conceived, produced, [and] acted by’ Castleton Knight. It is Knight’s first credited film output; in the 1930s he would become a feature film director working on, amongst others, the action film The Flying Scotsman (1930). Later in his career he specialised in more nationalist fare, including the World War Two documentary The Second Battle of London (1944) and, in 1953, a documentary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Prelude, by contrast, is an experimental horror film. Given Knight’s multiple credits on that first project, it seems safe to assume that it was a self-funded first foray into the world of film production.
Prelude explicitly draws together two other cultural sources: Rachmaninoff’s ‘Prelude in C Sharp Minor (Op. 3, No. 2)’ and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Premature Burial’. The Poe story first appeared in 1844; Rachmaninoff debuted his Prelude in 1892. The musical piece was popularly imagined to represent someone being buried alive and struggling to get out of the coffin – although the composer himself never made this connection. Poe’s story, as can be imagined from the title, deals with the same topic. The film’s opening intertitle explains to the viewer that ‘the producer’ of the film wants to imagine what inspired Rachmaninoff to his composition, and that therefore the ‘accepted theory of premature burial’ is expanded on here.
Being made in 1927, Prelude is a silent production. By taking a classical piece as the foundation of the narrative, Knight is assuming that audiences are familiar with Rachmaninoff’s work. His ‘Prelude’ was one of his best-known pieces, but it still seems likely that only educated audiences would be able to understand the connection between the music and the film. Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation had grown on both sides of the Atlantic since his premature death in 1849, although arguably viewers of Prelude do not need to be overly familiar with his work as excerpts from his story are displayed as intertitles and no further contextual knowledge is required.[1]
Prelude makes the most of a very minimal set and props; Knight, starring as the film’s character, poses as a Victorian man sitting in a chair reading Poe’s story. The story’s themes, along with a rather creepy statuette on the fireplace, and a memento mori cigarette lighter, work on the man’s imagination. As he dozes off, he imagines being buried alive. The funeral procession is conveyed solely through shots of feet and carriage wheels, and silhouettes of a coffin being loaded out of the carriage. The impression of being buried alive is achieved by superimposing an image of the man on the image of the coffin, making the man appear trapped.
Then, Prelude cuts to a close-up of the man’s eyes, and the final intertextual references take place. In the iris of the right eye, images of ‘hell’ are shown – this is actually footage from the immensely popular Swedish ‘horror documentary’ Häxen (‘The Witch’) which was released in 1922. A close-up of the other eye reveals a still image of a soul being borne aloft to Heaven. Unlike the work of Rachmaninoff and Poe, the footage from Häxen is not explicitly named, implying that the viewers are not expected to recognise its source. Instead, Knight appears to have used the footage to save having to stage and shoot a complex hellscape himself.
The man wakes up and realises that it was simply a nightmare – but the film’s enigmatic return in its final shots to the creepy statuette, representing Death, leaves the audience with a lingering sense of unease. Prelude references Victorian source materials and uses a Victorian setting to create a semi-experimental film. It can be considered as an attempt to translate Victorian (Gothic) horror to the modern medium of cinema. By making its explicit references to other cultural texts, Knight places Prelude in a longer horror tradition. Yet his use of editing, superimposition and unusual lenses means that Prelude incorporates techniques that are unique to the film medium, thus updating the Victorian horror genre and adapting it to a new means of expression.
Prelude remains an oddity – part low-budget horror short, part sophisticated reinterpretation of existing genre conventions. Its intertextual references demand that its audience have a understanding of Victorian cultural texts. It is unclear in which context Knight expected Prelude to be shown; it seems unlikely that it was meant for commercial exhibition and perhaps it primarily served as an artistic expression and his ‘calling card’ to gain a foothold in the industry. Its survival in the archives gives us an additional dimension to our understanding of the interwar British film landscape.
[1] Dudley R. Hutcherson, ‘Poe’s Reputation in England and America, 1850-1909’, American Literature, Vol. 14, no. 3 (1942), 211-233
Interwar London 