Outre Tombe / Haunted Earth 2019 (Review of Alexandre Mathis' Film Starring Pamela Stanford)

In this blog post I will tell you what’s interesting about the film Outre Tombe (Haunted Earth), what it feels like, and a funny story about what I had to go through to receive it by mail.

Let’s get down to business.

What Is Outre Tombe?

Outre tombe (French title) or Haunted Earth (English title) is an independent experimental film directed by Alexandre Mathis — a French novelist, cinema specialist, and former film critic.

Outre tombe features one of the most prominent stars of European exploitation cinema — Pamela Stanford who plays the main character.

The film was released in 2019 on DVD in both English and French. It’s about eight hours long (including the bonuses) and takes four DVD discs.

Plot summary: Catherine Lapeyre who was condemned for witchcraft and executed in 1662 in Clairac, France (a real historical figure) returns on the Earth as a ghost. The Earth seems to be abandoned by humans. The only beings she encounters are phantoms, animals, and plants. Catherine is wandering through various locations, mostly in the Southwest of France, trying to understand how she got there and how to find her way out, to eternal serenity.

Catherine Lapeyre (Pamela Stanford) looking for the way to the sacred serenity.

What's Interesting About the Film?

Here are a few highlights showing why you would probably want to watch Outre tombe:

• Pamela Stanford is in it. It’s her first full-length movie appearance since the end of the 80’s. If you don’t know who Pamela is, she’s a star of multiple films by Jess Franco, Jose Benazeraf, and other cult exploitation film directors. Learn more from my interview with Pamela Stanford.
• The film is made by Alexandre Mathis (former pseudonymes are Paul Hervé Mathis and Herbert Mathese). If you’ve read his articles and interviews in the 70’s exploitation cinema fanzines and his later novels, you will likely want to watch his film as well.
• The film gives you eight hours of relaxation inviting you for a walk in various locations of Southwest of France with Pamela Stanford. It was shot during all four seasons showing the beauty of rural France in detail.

One of the prettiest scenes in the film — a sunflower field. Pamela clearly enjoyed it a lot.

What Does It Feel Like?

Outre tombe has an unusual flavor.

Alexandre didn’t use external microphones to record the sound, so it was captured on the native built-in microphone of his digital camera. As I understand, he preferred to preserve the feeling of actual presence rather than create a traditional movie with the audio track artificially assembled of separately recorded pieces: voice, ambience sounds, music, etc.

There is almost no music in the film (except for a few classical pieces). The preference is given to the sounds of the natural ambience.

Alexandre didn’t use any professional equipment such as stabilizers or tripods. So sometimes the movements of the camera (and sometimes even his voice behind it) allow us to feel his own presence.

All these details give the film a cozy feel of rather a home video (though it was mostly filmed outside of a home) than a traditional production.

As mentioned above, it’s a relaxing movie. There is not much “action” in it. For the most part, it’s a pleasant virtual walk in various locations of the Southwest of France, notably in the region of Clairac, during different weather and seasons.

The places include various rural locations, such as a sunflower and corn fields, river banks, abandoned cinemas and other buildings with a bit of historical information about them, and more. Some of the places shown in the film as they stand today are also presented via closeups of old postcards demonstrated to compare the current look of a place to how it looked decades or even a century ago.

 

In Outre tombe, Alexandre used citations from the poetry by Edgar Poe, Dante, Théophile Gautier, and Théophile de Viau. Theophile de Viau lived in the 16th-17th century — almost a century before the real Catherine Lapeyre, in the same region — Clairac. The selected poetry pieces are presented in the context of the film's storyline.

The film was obviously shot while improvising. It often feels like children’s games we all used to play when being kids — inventing a story and imagining surrounding objects being a part of it: people accidentally trapped in the camera, voices of people behind the shot, trains, or airplanes — Pamela-Catherine Lapeyre says they are phantoms. Abandoned homes are haunted, etc. This has a cute side to it and invites you to use your own imagination together with Pamela.

Another cute detail is the abundance of animals, many of whom Pamela pets in the film — dogs, horses, sheep, goats, and even a baby hawk. 

 

Although almost all of the footage features Pamela Stanford, she is not the only actress in the film. There is another character — the Templier played by Michel Girod, a friend of Alexandre Mathis. Michel is a steel arms collector and expert.

 

The cool and mysterious Templier — Michel Girod.

Finally, the bonus includes “making of” and a few cinematographic portraits of Pamela Stanford. A cinematographic portrait is when she is simply being filmed for a few minutes looking in the camera, smiling, making faces, and making you smile as well.

Where to Watch Outre Tombe

Outre tombe is only available on DVD. You can buy it directly from Alexandre Mathis here.

It includes 4 DVDs in a plastic box and a 52-page illustrated booklet. The edition is very beautiful, just like the film itself.

 

For the fans of Pamela Stanford, I also made this print T-shirt design. Shirts (as well as hoodies, tank tops, and other clothing) with this design on them are available at my online store.

A Funny Story About Me Receiving the Film by Mail

I learned about Alexandre Mathis when doing research about Pamela Stanford to come up with questions for my interview with her. We became friends and he sent me Outre tombe together with his novel LSD 67 (in separate packages but sent together, on the same day). Alexandre sent them at the end of March 2020 — the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that made the postal service unstable. It wasn’t easy either for him to send these items to me or for me to receive them.

First of all, Alexandre’s local post office didn’t work. He asked his friend to take him by car to another town to send the parcels from there. But the post office employee said they weren’t accepting mail (which is the main purpose of a post office, isn’t it?). He had to wait for a couple of weeks and send the packages from his own town, nevertheless.

Apart from Outre tombe and LSD 67, Alexandre asked his friend — Jacques Spohr — to send me l'Instable —  a magazine about sexploitation cinema (fanzine released by Jacques himself). So I was waiting for three packages from France, which was pretty exciting.

Once the mail was sent, the other problem was to receive it. Alexandre gave me tracking numbers. According to the website of the French postal service, the packages left France with an interval of a couple of weeks, even though Alexandre had submitted both on the same day. And after the first package had left France, it wasn’t trackable anymore — Alexandre found out from his post office clerk that tracking of French packages throughout the Ukrainian territory was impossible, probably, due to the pandemic.

When I came to the post office to check if they had anything for me, I was told by the post office employee that they didn’t, and that they would not deliver a notification to my mailbox when the packages would come — I had to come to the post office once in a while to check for myself. So I started to go there every Friday since then.

First, I received Alexandre’s book — LSD 67 — in about a month after it had been sent. But the film and the magazine seemed to have been lost. I contacted the Ukrainian post customer support to ask them to locate the package. They refused to help because the tracking number wasn’t of the international standard (as mentioned above, Alexandre hadn’t been able to obtain an international one). I also sent an email to the French post customer support, with no response.

Alexandre decided that the film was lost. But he didn’t give up. He sent me another copy instead of it!

At the end of July, on Friday, as usual, I went out to go to the post office again. On my way there, I looked in my mailbox and found a notification about two packages waiting for me. A notification that, according to the post office employee, the postwoman wasn't supposed to deliver. On that day, I finally received Outre tombe and l'Instable, after about three months of waiting.

But now I had to receive the second copy of Outre tombe sent to me instead of the first one that we had thought was lost. Fortunately, it took only a couple more weeks. I came to the post office, got it, and sent it back to Alexandre right away.

On my way back, I looked in my mailbox and saw a letter from France addressed to me! It was a letter from the French postal service customer support. It was saying something like “we are very sorry, but we can’t locate the package in this situation: we advise you to ask the sender to reach out to us, as the mail is his responsibility until it’s received by the recipient”. It was their response to my request sent a month before to locate the first Outre tombe package and Instable.

Instead of simply responding to my email, they wrote me a paper letter that I had to wait for a month to learn what next step to take to resolve my problem. As a customer support service, they indeed chose the quickest and most efficient way possible to help their client resolve their problem.

What’s also funny is how the letter was written — an extremely suave, empathetic letter full of compassion and understanding of my frustration. I was very touched.

Additional Resources

Outre tombe on Alexandre Mathis' blog (French)
An article about the film on Psychovision (French)
Interview with Alexandre Mathis on Psychovision (French)
Wiki article about the film on everybodywiki.com (French)
An article on lesinfluences.fr (French)
An article on culturopoing.com (French) 

 

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