Anticipating Peter Greenaway’s second feature The
Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) by three years, Leslie Megahey’s Schalcken
The Painter is a similarly superlative film about the mystery that lies
behind and within a painting. Those familiar with Greenaway’s more recent Nightwatching
(2007) will find much to delight in here especially, for the narrative
revolves around the genesis of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting.
To imagine the story behind a painting has demonstrably more
scope for cinematic treatment than that of a literary work. While Nightwatching
was named after one of Rembrandt’s paintings – and dared to imagine the darker
imperatives that led to its creation – Megahey’s production adapts from J.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s fictionalisation of the events that informed the work of
Godfried Schalcken.
Schalcken belies its origins. Megahey wrote the
script for the BBC’s Omnibus series, and it originally aired on
television just before Christmas 1979. For all other purposes, however –
highlighted by its high-definition presentation here as part of the BFI’s
ongoing Flipside series – it looks and feels like a bona fide horror film,
complete with sumptuous period details, meticulous sound design and sterling
cinematography from John Hooper. The film attains its eerie atmosphere early,
with the sound of bells over a black screen accompanied by an ominous drone,
and it sustains such qualities for its remaining 70 minutes.
“Out story begins in 1665,” so says our narrator (Charles
Gray), in Schalcken’s studio. Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde), “a man of great
ambition, foul temper and few manners” is the pupil of Gerrit Dou (Maurice
Denham). In love – “as much as a Dutchman can be” – with Dou’s niece Rose
Velderkaust (Cheryl Kennedy), Schalcken lacks the financial clout with which to
secure Rose’s hand in marriage, and when a strange figure named Vanderhausen
(John Justin) arrives in the night asking to take Dou’s niece as his bride,
Schalcken looks on helplessly. Impressed by such measures – “marriages were
matters of traffic and calculation” – Schalcken takes it upon himself to make
money, by painting commissioned works, in order to buy Rose back. In his
pursuit of wealth, he is corrupted.
The film has a slowish, bedtime-story build. Gray’s
voice-over lends an anecdotal promise: hang around, the omnipresent second
person address implies, and you’ll be amply rewarded (and indeed, its anecdotal
charms make certain ghoulish elements all the more macabre). Megahey matches Le
Fanu’s framing device by shooting through doorways and by emphasising the
geometric, staged compositions of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.
Elsewhere, the director demonstrates a keen sense of symbolic visual
arrangement, as when Schalcken warily eyes Vanderhausen at the dinner table
before looking over at Rose; the latter returns his gaze with an eye-line
match, and though the pair share the same screen space (left-of-frame), the
editing separates them so that they cannot exist in the same frame at once. Any
connection between the would-be lovers is figurative: physically (materially!),
they are kept apart.
Simon Wilson’s sound work is excellent: the harsh crack of a
paper dowry being unfolded, or of ink being scribbled onto a surface, lends a
cacophonous edge to on-screen tensions. Indeed, the clunks, chinks and scrapes
that pervade the silences here undercut Hooper’s candle-lit visual warmth: the
mastery of the Dutch painter’s flattened canvas negates the contradictions that
led to its completion. Megahey’s film enlivens the immortal, makes it flesh once
more.
