The Potted Psalm. 1946. Directed by James Broughton and Sidney Peterson.

(9/11/00)

The Potted Psalm harks back to the European avant-garde of the 1920s. It is a potpourri of "bits." They really don't hang together (as far as I can see) and the whole thing seems amateurish and maybe even corny. A lot of it was done using distorting lenses.

There are shots of graves in a cemetery. There is a headless man who pours a drink down his neck. There are closeups of mouths and hair and one fascinating shot of a male and a female foot stroking each other. Two men, seen from the back, walk side by side up a flight of stairs with identical movements and disappear into the darkness.

I did like the ending in which a woman runs, perhaps through the cemetery we had seen earlier. We first see her in slow motion, then at normal speed and then her movements are all speeded-up. It was a good scene to end the film with.