Au royaume des ombres : Daughter of Darkness (Lance Comfort, 1948) et The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson, 1949)

Abstract

Gothic cinema has always relied on the contrast of light and darkness. The shadows that people it have never ceased to appear in various guises — as shadows cast by bodies, as ghosts, spirits or doppelgängers. British cinema in the 1940s appeals to darkness to challenge the codes of realism according to the conventions of several major genres — the woman’s film, the thriller and the Fantastic. A whole series of gothic films in particular pushes this tension to a limit by inscribing the use of shadows within a double tradition which goes back to the legacy of German Expressionism on the one hand, and to the films of Jacques Tourneur on the other. The present article intends to reassess this neglected phase of British gothic cinema, through the study of two major films which are typical of postwar aesthetics, at odds with consensus values: Daughter of Darkness (Lance Comfort, 1948) and The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson, 1949). We will see how shadows are not just the threat the aesthetic status of the films prescribes them to be: through the creation of ambiguous figures, the filmmakers seem to join the dark forces which are a condition of the cinematic illusion itself.

Keywords

• expressionism
• British cinema
• gothic