On the Edge

Curtis Harrington was one of the few to successfully make the leap from experimental cinema into the mainstream; while I have watched quite a few of his latter efforts, this is the first among the former that I am checking out. Stylistically, it approaches the work of renowned (and contemporaneous) underground film-makers Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. The premise of the 6-minute film is a very simple one: an elderly man appears from over the hills onto the porch of a cabin surrounded by boggy terrain; there, a woman sits knitting on a rocking-chair. He forcibly removes the wool from her hands and takes off with it…but, when it runs out, he is swallowed up by the slime (with the embroidery magically slinking back to its original position inside a jar)! The film, then, is possibly a metaphor for Man's futile attempt to cheat Death; incidentally, the non-professional actors making up this two-hander are none other than the director's parents!

A poem of a movie at just 6 minutes long, but Harrington's concision allows for a singular image to emerge. The desolation of the Salton Sea in California is a perfect setting for what seems to be a reflection on transience, though the film's meaning is wonderfully ambiguous. It's pretty cool that he used his parents as the actors. It's also mind-boggling that the 23-year-old who showed such surreal creativity would be directing episodes of TV shows like Charlie's Angels three decades later.

A man walks up to a woman who is rocking and knitting next to a shack by the Salton Sea He grabs what's she's knitting and runs away to fall into a bubbling mud hole.

Experimental movies like this push the edge of the Kuleshov Effect past its limits for me. The audience infers states of mind of the performers through the power of editing: take a clip of a performer looking offscreen, and then offer an image of a steak, and people will insist he looks hungry; make it a pretty girl and he's quite obviously lustful. What one is to think of a man who steals a bit of knitting is quite beyond me.

On the Edge (1949)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This early experimental film from director Curtis Harrington casts his own parents in the two leads. An elderly man walks up on an elderly woman who is sitting in a rocking chair knitting. He soon takes some of the wool and runs off to some sort of pit. ON THE EDGE is a film that I'm sure each viewer could take something different away from. The "meaning" of the movie is certainly something people could debate but I'm not into this sort of thing so I'll just comment on the film. The movie certainly makes you feel on the edge with its good but sometime rough editing and I really thought Harrington did a fine job at showing somewhat of a countdown as the man faces what he's going up against. I'm not going to ruin the ending but it's done very nicely.