Lyrical Nitrate & The Forbidden Quest

Let's dispense with the first film on this Peter Delpeut “found-footage” double bill quickly: either you're a fan of narration-less experimental collages of silent film snippets or you're not. In the case of the 50-minute Lyrical Nitrate (1991), we're talking an establishing sequence in a Parisian theater, followed by several semi-scenes featuring a shipwreck, Christ on the cross, and Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden--all shot between 1910-1917 on nitrate film that is now in various stages of decomposition. Poetic? Perhaps. Tedious? Unquestionably. But the 71-minute The Forbidden Quest (1993), which is superficially similar to Lyrical Nitrate in its assemblage of early film footage, is different in one crucial respect: a grizzled Irish interviewee named J.C. Sullivan (Joseph O'Conor) serves as the linking device to tie these various cinematic strands into a whopper of a tale about an ill-fated arctic expedition that may or may not have stumbled on the ultimate interior passage--from the South to North Pole. Those familiar with the Ernest Shackleton story (and particularly the film South, shot by expedition cameraman Frank Hurley) will recognize the ice-locked ship, playful dog pack, and overland trek to find a navigable waterway and escape, but the weird narrative details are filmmaker Delpeut's own, inspired by the credited Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and T.S. Eliot (“April is a cruel month,” Sullivan intones at one point, paraphrasing the opening to “The Waste Land”), as well as the uncredited Herman Melville and Robert Service (in fact, The Forbidden Quest is most like “The Ballad of the Northern Lights” in structure, tone, and subject). An entertaining and often hair-raising spoof, The Forbidden Quest is, for me, the real find on this extra-less disc that features a sharp DVD transfer (especially considering the age of the source materials). Recommended. (R. Pitman)