{"id":14461,"date":"2013-10-29T01:51:42","date_gmt":"2013-10-29T01:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=14461"},"modified":"2025-09-20T19:17:33","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T18:17:33","slug":"the-pendulum-the-pit-and-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/10\/29\/the-pendulum-the-pit-and-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s8if_9OSY7I\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/pendulum1.jpg\" alt=\"pendulum1.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s8if_9OSY7I\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope<\/em><\/a> (1983) is the third and best of three Gothic shorts made by Jan \u0160vankmajer, the two earlier works being <em>Castle of Otranto<\/em> (1973\u201379) and <em>The Fall of the House of Usher<\/em> (1980). \u0160vankmajer combines Poe&#8217;s famous tale of Inquistion torment with <em>A Torture by Hope<\/em> by Auguste Villiers de L&#8217;Isle-Adam, and\u00a0 unlike Corman and co. reduces the story to a stark and wordless first-person ordeal in the face of clanking, fire-breathing engines of destruction. Poe&#8217;s story lets the narrator off the hook with a <em>deus ex machina<\/em> intervention, something \u0160vankmajer evidently felt unable to swallow, hence the Villiers coda.<\/p>\n<p>All the above works, and much more besides, can be found on the <a href=\"http:\/\/filmstore.bfi.org.uk\/acatalog\/info_4543.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">BFI&#8217;s collection of \u0160vankmajer&#8217;s short films<\/a>. Another short adaptation of the Poe story, <em>The Pit<\/em> (1962) by Edward Abraham, will appear next month as an extra on the eagerly-awaited DVD\/BR debut of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.moviemail.com\/film\/dvd+blu-ray\/Schalcken-the-Painter\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Schalcken the Painter<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s8if_9OSY7I\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/pendulum2.jpg\" alt=\"pendulum2.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Previously on { feuilleton }<br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/08\/22\/two-sides-of-liska\/\">Two sides of Li\u0161ka<\/a><br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2012\/03\/24\/the-torchbearer-by-vaclav-svankmajer\/\">The Torchbearer by V\u00e1clav \u0160vankmajer<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983) is the third and best of three Gothic shorts made by Jan \u0160vankmajer, the two earlier works being Castle of Otranto (1973\u201379) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1980). \u0160vankmajer combines Poe&#8217;s famous tale of Inquistion torment with A Torture by Hope by Auguste Villiers de &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/10\/29\/the-pendulum-the-pit-and-hope\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[5333,93,5334,375,3527],"class_list":["post-14461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-horror","tag-auguste-villiers-de-lisle-adam","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-edward-abraham","tag-jan-svankmajer","tag-vaclav-svankmajer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3Lf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}