I Walked with a Zombie

EN

“For me, this is one of the most beautiful black-and-white films ever made. A white lady in a trance walks through the sugar plantation, drawn by the sound of the drum and the sea waves. Every time I see it, I see something different: a dream of independence, a primitive science fiction, and a fear of others.

I also enjoy the film’s silent moments. Previously, they did not need to fill in all of the sound components in order to captivate the audience.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul1

“The first time I watched I Walked With a Zombie, I heard the voodoo drums for days afterwards. The carnal beats led a white lady, Jessica Holland, for a forever comatose journey. Perhaps Memoria is I Walked With a Zombie Part II, a continuation of Jessica’s walk.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul2

“Tourneur was an artist of atmospheres. For many directors, an atmosphere is something that is ‘established,’ setting the stage for the action to follow. For Tourneur it is the movie, and each of his films boasts a distinctive atmosphere, with a profound sensitivity to light and shadow, and a very unusual relationship between characters and environment – the way people move through space in Tourneur movies, the way they simply handle objects, is always special, different from other films.”

Martin Scorsese3

“One day I said to Val Lewton: ‘I have an idea. We are going to take Jane Eyre and we’re going to do a remake of it without telling anyone, simply by radically changing the setting’. And that is how I Walked with a Zombie came about. In fact, it is Jane Eyre. In order to give it a different tone, I decided to use the black singer, Sir Lancelot, as a sort of Ancient Greek Chorus commenting on the action. In my opinion, that film is more profound than Cat People, it is less childish.” 

Jacques Tourneur4

“When noctural fears have been chased away by the light of day, after mysteries have faded into prosaic explanations, or have been undermined by irony and scepticism, the fact still remains that at the time we genuinely did experience these fears and mysteries. It is precisely the effects of the memory of some dark thing which cannot be dispelled by knowledge, that trace which remains after impres­sions have been replaced by realities, which the cinema – as opposed to life – is perfectly at liberty to organise and regulate, because the cinema alone decides to what extent it will make impressions enduring, reality real. Making use of this freedom, Jacques Tourneur has exploited it in a most extraordinary manner.”

Sylvie Pierre5

“One of Tourneur’s most beautiful films, I Walked with a Zombie is a sustained exercise in uncompromising ambiguity. Perfecting the formula that Lewton and Tourneur had developed in Cat People, the film carries its predecessor’s elliptical, oblique narrative procedures to astonishing extremes. The dialogue is almost nothing but a commentary on past events, obsessively revising itself, finally giving up the struggle to explain and surrendering to a mute acceptance of the inexplicable. We watch the slow, atmospheric, lovingly detailed scenes with delight and fascination, realizing at the end that we have seen nothing but the traces of a conflict decided in advance.”

Chris Fujiwara6

• 1Apichatpong Weerasethakul, cited on the website of Film at Lincoln Center.
• 2Apichatpong Weerasethakul, cited on the website of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London.
• 3Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1998).
• 4Jacques Tourneur, cited in Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, eds., Jacques Tourneur (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975).
• 5Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, eds., Jacques Tourneur (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975), 45.
• 6Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1998).