THE GHOST THAT NEVER RETURNS (1976 review)
From Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1976. — J.R.
Prividenie, Kotoroe ne Vozvrashchaetsya
(The Ghost that Never Returns)
U.S.S.R., 1929 Director: Abram Room
In an unidentified South American country, José Real is serving
a life sentence for having led an oilfield workers’ strike ten years
earlier. After another prisoner breaks away from guards to tell him
that the prison governor has a letter from his wife, and then leaps
to his death, Real leads a revolt among the prisoners. The governor
orders that they be sprayed with hoses; the revolt subsides, and
Real is locked into a narrow cupboard. Conferring with the chief of
the secret service, the governor recalls the regulation whereby a
prisoner who has served ten years is entitled to one day’s liberty and
decides to grant this to Real, with the understanding that he will be
killed at the day’s end for trying to ‘escape’. After being shown his
wife’s letter and hearing from a newly arrived prisoner that a new
strike is planned at Hillside Well, Real agrees to go. Five days later
– after news of his imminent arrival has reached his family, their
neighbors and the oilfield workers — he sets out, warned that
no one who has taken this leave has ever made it back alive. On the
train, he converses with and is offered food by a man who later
proves to be an agent; falling asleep, he misses his stop and his
wife searches for him in vain. Waking in the morning, he leaps from
the train and the agent follows him through the desert as he enjoys
his freedom; after he falls asleep again on a boulder, the agent
wakes him to announce that he has only two hours left. With the
agent still at his heels, he rushes to his house, which he initially
finds empty. His father and his son appear, along with a friend who
brings him to Hillside Inn to help organize a strike. When the agent
and police arrive and Real declares that he won’t return, a fight
between police and workers breaks out. Real rushes home to procure
a gun from his wife and hurries out again. When sixty-five strikers
are brought to the prison, the other prisoners learn that Real is
leading the strike.
Considering the fact that it appeared in the same year as L’Argent,
Blackmail, Un Chien Andalou, Hallelujah, Lonesome, Pandora’s
Box, The River, Arsenal, The General Line, Man with a Movie
Camera and The New Babylon -- the last four in the U.S.S.R.
alone — The Ghost that Never Returns cannot be seriously regarded
as a major film of its time. Clearly this was the opinion of the
anonymous Bioscope reviewer who wrote of an allegedly re-cut
version that surfaced in England in 1931: “Dreary story of man’s
imprisonment . . . Incredibly slow development and poor continuity”.
ln 1976, one’s verdict is likely to be much less severe, and with
reason; but it must be acknowledged that the film was made during
a period when silent film language was achieving its richest palette
of possibilities, and even minor works could draw upon a common
fund of expressive options. Benefiting as well as suffering from this
opportunity, Room’s film runs through a virtual panoply of styles
as if to anthologize the work of his masters. It begins as rather
stodgy and heavy-handed propaganda: in an unnamed South
American oil republic, a modern prison is laid out to resemble a
cross between a futurist dream and a garish political cartoon, with
four tiers of cells towering over a rotating observation post like a
set left over from Metropolis. The governor is a grotesque apeJike
creature, dwarfed by his own chair and palatial office, whose
suppression of a revolt with water-hoses occasions a battery of
fancy montage effects, mechanically executed. The world outside
is a rather cockeyed blend of oilfield, wilderness, suburban
neighborhood and Wild West saloon, all set in confusing
proximity to one another. Yet once the essential ingredients
of this terrain are established, and psychological shadings
begin to emerge from the depersonalized agit-prop, the
film takes on a rather affecting life of its own. There is a
world of difference between the minuscule figures glimpsed
scurrying beneath outsized towers and vats at the beginning
and the subsequent view of José Real in extreme long shot,
as he emerges from the prison into a courtyard and breaks
into a festive dance. When images of his wife and father previously
appear in his shadowy cell — specters which he alternately
acknowledges and ignores — fluctuating intensities of light
gracefully outline the flux of his thoughts in relation to them;
and the progression of rapid cuts which follows — first between
Real’s head and details in the cell (initially static, then contained
in pans), finally between his head and his wrist, before a shot of
him running to his cell door is repeated several times in
succession — beautifully sketches the experience of his
last hours of confinement in a form of ‘notation’
anticipating Resnais. And once outside the prison, the plot itself
proceeds to bend into a more human shape, as though the
fiImmakers were offering themselves (like Real) a stretch
of ‘irresponsible’ freedom within the confines of their
commitments. The touching facts that Real falls asleep
on the train and misses his stop (an extraordinary shot
reveals his mute proflle beside the window through which
his wife can be glimpsed frantically searching for him on the
crowded platform), and that even the villainous agent is
shown gathering flowers in the desert, begin to open the film up,
allowing it to breathe more naturally. (The ambivalent treatment
of the agent recurs at Hillside Inn, where Room indulges in huge
and protracted close-ups of the back of his fat neck after he has
shown him rather sheepishly and pathetically gathering up a plateful
of leftovers from the saloon customers to fill his bourgeois belly.)
Consequently, the film’s reversion to propaganda at the end is
much more persuasive and stirring than at the beginning, if only
because the characters have been allowed some semblance of life
in between. But unfortunately, as Jay Leyda has implied, the film’s
end is needlessly ambiguous and elliptical about the struggle Real
enlists in and its consequences: the titles indicate a strike, the
acquiring of guns suggests an armed revolt, while the event
itself is kept resolutely off-screen; with generalized titles
filling in the gaps, the overall effect is awkwardly truncated
and abrupt. And elliptical passages elsewhere (when, for
instance, ReaI falls asleep in the desert, and is subsequently
wakened by the agent) leave one in much the same uncertain
position as that of the Bioscope reviewer over whether these
lapses are attributable to the print under review or to Room
himself.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
Published on 12 Apr 2013 in Notes, by jrosenbaum
