Art for the Apocalypse: Sculpture by Frink in Losey’s The Damned

• Main Author: Susan Felleman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Associação de Investigadores da Imagem em Movimento 2014-07-01
• Series: Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento
• Subjects: Joseph Losey; Elisabeth Frink; The Damned; These Are the Damned; escultura no cinema
• Online Access: http://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/article/view/82

<p>Blacklisted and exiled, American director Joseph Losey finished <em>The Damned</em> in England in 1961 but Hammer Films did not release it until 1963 (then with severe cuts) and it wasn’t seen until 1965 in the U.S., further changed and retitled <em>These Are the Damned</em>. Adapted by Evan Jones from <em>The Children of Light,</em> a novel by H.L. Lawrence, <em>The Damned</em> is a strange hybrid of science fiction, horror and social commentary that in some ways anticipates by a decade Kubrick’s <em>A Clockwork Orange</em>. Beautifully photographed in black-and-white on location in Weymouth, it brings a mysterious American stranger (Macdonald Carey)—perhaps a fugitive—into a violent confrontation with a gang of Teddy Boys and ultimately into a deadly, dystopic government experiment with radioactive children.</p> Among the film’s considerable changes to Lawrence’s narrative was the addition of a major character: a sculptor, whose cliff-top studio is a vivid and key location and whose works function as visual omens of a social and technological apocalypse to come. Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors) was conceived expressly to employ the work of sculptor Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993), whose scarred, distressed figural works of the period included anthropomorphic birds, winged men, fallen men, horse heads and other morbid ciphers of existential dread. In the film these works of plaster and bronze embody the age of anxiety even as they represent art as a redemptive alternative to the cold-bloodedness of both lowbrow Teddy Boy (Oliver Reed) and highbrow Government scientist (Alexander Knox). Associated with the postwar structure of feeling that Herbert Read characterized as “the geometry of fear,” Frink’s work performs a major role in <em>The Damned</em>, giving form to psychosocial ills and fears of the postwar generation.<p> </p>