In a disturbing facial close-up of Helen (Dorothy McGuire) from the Robert Siodmak’s 1946 classical Hollywood film The Spiral Staircase the film’s viewer sees a serial killer’s mental projection of an erased area—a void—onto Helen’s face. In this this shot, taken from the serial killer’s point of view, the film viewer is aligned with the serial killer’s misogynist and violent view of women.
To establish and conceptualise the nature of the horror of the void that violently marks Helen’s face in Siodmak’s film this class considers a number of theories of the void and erasure, including that of the vanishing point in Renaissance art and also Gilles Deleuze’s arguments about facial effacement in his cinema books.
To identify what is happening in this close-up from a 1940s gothic woman’s film, this class also spends some time examining how close-ups operate in three other film examples: D.W. Griffith’s 1911 melodrama Enoch Arden, Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 modernist art film Persona, and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Based on this discussion, we, in this class, explore how the void—as representative of patriarchal violence—is a structuring principle of what is, and what is not, visible in The Spiral Staircase. We also learn how to identify acts of resistance to visible and invisible forms of patriarchal violence that are a source of horror for Helen and the other female characters in this film.
Hello Miskatoans,
Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have to postpone this lecture (originally scheduled for October 4th), THE HORROR OF THE VOID IN THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, to Tuesday, October 18th, 7:30pm Eastern time.
Your zoom registration will still be effective.
If you have purchased an online pass or ticket for this event and are unable to attend the live lecture on the 18th, we can offer a complimentary viewing of the VOD once it is available on our Vimeo channel. Please email us at miskatonicihs@gmail.com
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience,
The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies
Luke Robinson is a PhD candidate and a casual academic in the School of the Arts & Media, University of New South Wales, Australia. His thesis is on scenes of disappearing faces in 1940s Hollywood gothic woman’s films. He is part of the executive of the Sydney Screen Studies Network (https://facebook.com/SydneyScreenStudies/) and a video artist working with Move in Pictures (https://www.move-in-pictures.com). His research interests are in classical Hollywood film, film theory, politics and aesthetics of erasure, film fascism, and theories of film sound. He is currently co-editing a book called Sound Affects: A User’s Guide to be published by Bloomsbury (due for publication early 2023). Luke is also co-editing a book on single shots in Alfred Hitchcock’s films, forthcoming with Oxford University Press (most likely published late 2023).
