Films > Laruelle's Alastor

'Jacques means the film he made out of Alastor before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub, what he could of it, and apparently struck the rest together with sequences of ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of In dunkelste Afrika, and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith ... while all the time the poet was standing on the shore, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with the Sacre du Printemps. I think I forgot the fog.' – UTV, 206.

Jacques's film, made before he went to Hollywood, seems very much "hoiked out of" the Ufa tradition of German expressionism, and in the Consuls's description is a total burlesque of some of the more exciting advances taking place in film during the 1920's.

Many of the details of Jacques's film, only slightly modified, can be recognised in Shelley's Alastor.

Left: Corinne Griffith (left) in a still from The Garden of Eden (1928), in which one particularly effective shot shows two lovers from across a pool of water, with a swan swimming across the foreground. Image: United Artists