The Erl King

Except for archivists and film restoration specialists, no one has seen Marie Louise Iribe's The Erl King for sixty years.  The 1929 French film was broadcast by Turner Classic Movies as part of its Women Make Film series.  It is not likely to be seen again.  The movie dramatizes Goethe's ballad using a post-synchronized (dubbed) soundtrack that largely consists of an orchestral and quasi-operatic version of Schubert's Lieder setting of the poem -- no one is really much interested in the source material today:  I suppose a few High School and College German classes study the Goethe poem but it has no broad audience appeal and the Schubert Lieder, although great works of art, have always been a passion limited to only an elite.  (The orchestral and operatic version of the brilliant percussive Schubert song featured in the movie is cloying and misrepresents the wild punk-rock energy of the piano and bass voice version that the composer penned.)  The movie is too long to be programmed with other pieces -- it clocks in around 45 minutes.  The primitive horror effects are laughable today and the camerawork is often amateurish -- the camera is frequently positioned too far from the action or the special effects are too tiny and murky to be successfully viewed.  As a horror film, the movie is too artistic and refined to scare anyone.  As an art film, the picture is too lurid and grim and, insufficiently, artistic to impress anyone.  The viewer has the sense of looking into the contents of long-sealed vault that is about to be sealed again.

Some of the imagery in the film is effective.  Under a sky full of towering turbulent thunderheads, a morose-looking middle-aged man rides across a barren moor.  He is cradling his small son in his arms.  His horse is limping in a eerie way and, then, suddenly trips and falls forward.  The man picks up his son, who seems to be unconscious and, by the mare's shank (walking), hikes to a fortified farmstead.  The little boy is sick and needs medical attention.  Despite warnings by the people in the lonely farm with its great stone walls, the father borrows a horse and sets off across wetlands toward the forest intervening between the ancient grange and the town.  Before leaving the farm, a maid sings to the little boy some verses from the Goethe poem, as translated into French, and the child is frightened.  On the sodden and swampy heath, a sinister frog eyes the travelers.  The frog turns into a sort of miniature goblin, a little bit like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The frog produces strange mists and the landscape becomes dark with swirling fog.  In the forest, the Erl King, a sort of giant wearing chain mail, appears is misty superimpositions over the dark woods.  He turns a beetle and spider into woodland sylphs wearing diaphanous classical gowns.  The Erl King lives in a crowded neighborhood -- there's a big burly river god (seemingly derived from Bernini's fountain in Rome), a mounted figure who plays drums on horseback to summon the lightning and thunder, and, ultimately, a skeleton riding a horse as well, pale horse pale rider.  The way through the woods, visualized as huge murky colonnades of trees, is beset by hazards -- the Erl King unleashes a flood to bar a river-crossing and, then, the figure with the timpani drums on horseback causes an avalanche, a few stray rocks rolling down a talus field--, undoubtedly, the most puny and ineffectual avalanche in film history.  The little boy points to the fairy figures, but his father can't see them.  Ultimately, the Erl King wrestles with the child and inflicts a mortal wound.  The father reaches town, another antique place that is eerily deserted.  Carrying the boy in his arms, he enters a rude Romanesque church, as gloomy as a cave, with primitive sculpted figures standing in the tympanum above the door.  In the shadowy, indistinct church, the father sets the little boy's body on the floor in front of the altar.  I assume the ending is supposed to be ambiguous -- perhaps, by the grace of God, the child will be healed.  

The film is mostly silent although with a lush, and misguided operatic-sounding score.  People's voices ring in a hollow void.  The landscapes are very atmospheric, a combination of muck and heather with dark tarns in the reeds; the forest is a nightmarish space of topless trees eccentrically lit from below.  There are baroque images such as the river god slumbering in the sedge and the flood washing over a drowned river nymph.  It's pretty but, also, tedious and doesn't add up to much.  Iribe shows some talent and a few of the shots are faintly memorable and, perhaps, she would have done great things in later films -- this movie has some of the flair and eccentricity of a student picture, a avant-garde short feature on which the director cut her teeth.  But she didn't live.  The Erl King came for her as well -- she died at age 40 in 1934.