Linda Ganus
A little over 60 years ago, an episode produced for the legendary science fiction TV show, The Twilight Zone, aired on February 28, 1964. It’s surprisingly apt that this anniversary falls during Black History Month; here’s why.
The episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was a short French film adaption (La rivière du hibou) of Ambrose Bierce’s widely anthologized short story of the same name about a Confederate soldier facing death during the Civil War. The director, Robert Enrico, while faithfully hewing to the text of the original story published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, boldly added filmic elements that gave the naturalist narrative a modern 20th-century perspective. The film eventually won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the first television episodes to win an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1964. An uncredited performance on the film by African-American musician and jazz master, Kenny Clarke, fiercely transformed the meaning of the story by immersing the viewer in an auditory sound world imagined from enslaved Black Americans’ viewpoints. Clarke amplified their voices, left unheard in Bierce’s original.
Kenny Clarke in 1971
Drummer and vocalist Kenny “Klook” Clarke (nicknamed for the sound of the innovative bass drum “bomb” accents he dropped into long solos) was one of the giants of 1940s bebop and the later “Cool School” of mid-20th-century American jazz masters. A founding member of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Clark collaborated on iconic albums with everyone from Miles Davis to Dizzy Gillespie to Thelonius Monk (with whom he co-wrote the jazz standard “Epistrophes” in 1941). Frustrated with the pervasive racism of Jim Crow America, and wanting to explore more experimental musical forms, Clarke moved permanently to Paris in the late 1950s, where he formed his own band and collaborated with many other US ex-pat jazz musicians. He worked with Miles Davis, for instance, on the improvised jazz soundtrack to the dailies of Louis Malle’s sensational French 1958 crime thriller, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows).
This successful experience left Clarke eager to work on other creative projects in which performers would be true creative collaborators. He gladly agreed to work with fledgling director Robert Enrico and lead music director Henri Lanoë on their 1961 adaptation of the Bierce classic. Clarke ended up writing, performing, and improvising much of the startling and lyrical jazz elements of the soundtrack. He infused it with his own trenchant sonic meanings, which transformed the meaning of the tale, now reframed by 1960’s Civil Rights consciousness and activism.
Like the Bierce story, the film tells the uncanny tale of a Confederate plantation owner, Peyton Farquhar, who is about to be hanged for treason from the Owl Creek Bridge. The hanging apparently goes awry; the rope breaks, and Farquhar escapes. He frees himself from his bonds and dodges bullets from Union soldiers as he swims downstream and over a waterfall. Landing on a sandy inlet, he rejoices momentarily in still being alive until exploding cannons scare him into a frantic run through a forest back to his plantation. Upon arrival home, he is about to embrace his family when his head jerks shockingly back and the story cuts to a long shot of Farquhar hanging from the bridge; the whole escape is revealed to be an illusion in his mind seconds before his death.
All this action is faithfully brought to life by Enrico’s vision and the immediacy of the cinematography. There is almost no dialogue, and much of the soundtrack before and after the execution scenes consists of naturalistic sounds of the forest and soldiers going about their tramping, ritualistic duties, complete with military snare drum rolls and accents as the hanging ritual proceeds. What heightens the film’s strange lyricism and its savage commentary are the distorted, slowed-down sounds during Farquar’s escape and, most loomingly, Clarke’s two main solos—a delicate but pointed ballad, “Livin’ Man,” written and sung by Clarke, and a furious improvised drumset solo accompanying Farquhar’s final run home to his plantation.
Listen to Kenny Clarke performing “A Livin’ Man” here:
The comforting guitar chords of the bluesy “Livin’ Man” ballad insinuate themselves into the scene where Farquhar thinks he has finally escaped from the soldiers and starts to cautiously let his guard down. It’s an abrupt change in tone. Clarke’s voice, ecstatic and trembling with the joy of being alive, distracts us from the peril that the character is fleeing. The lyrics capture the heightened sensitivity that Farquhar, and by implication, Clarke and every viewer, should have for every short moment of life: enjoying the sight of shimmering, revolving trees in the sunlight overhead; insects and wildlife scurrying around; a spider spinning its tiny web (perhaps an implicit nod to the impending captors searching for their prey).
Clarke’s intense whispering and shifting accents emphasize certain words… “a LIVIN’ man…” “I want to be a livin’ man.” This repetition at the end of every refrain—a kind of epistrophe—reminds the viewer that this is a Black man singing and that he, too, wants and deserves to enjoy the freedom and joys of freely living like all other humans: a right that Confederates like Farquhar wanted to withhold from enslaved Black people, a right over which the entire Civil War was waged, and a right to freedom that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was still seeking to realize a whole century later.
The second, more surreal and quintessentially “Clarke” soundscape is a long, extended drum solo as Farquhar runs, exhausted and frantic, through a changing forest landscape. This follows directly on the heels of “A Livin’ Man.” The chase is set off when a bombshell lands near Farquhar and interrupts his reverie. The landscape gradually becomes more abstracted and stylized; perhaps Farquhar’s dreamlike perception of the looming understructure of the bridge pillars from which he will hang. The drum solo is a long, accented set of drum rolls, punctuated by Clarke’s signature “bomb” accents…musical signifiers of the imagined gunfire and cannon balls exploding around him as he runs. The long drumrolls could also be Clarke’s riffs on the diegetic Union drumrolls that are supposedly filtered through Farquhar’s exploding consciousness as he flashes through sensations and memories.
What makes the drum solo so gripping is the urgency and relentlessness with which Clarke drives the solo, which seems to go on forever – a few minutes during a film (-reel…or a real) chase can seem like an eternity. Farquhar runs for his life, chased by his captors in the same manner that countless enslaved people ran desperately for their lives in monumental numbers trying to escape their plantation bonds. The ferocity with which Clarke wails on the drumset is a grimly ironic commentary on the reversed roles in this story’s flight, only hinted at in Bierce’s story but given full-throated and furious volume by Clarke. Other symbolic elements overlay in this intense moment as well, including our witnessing Clarke’s ecstatic and dazzling mastery of the modern drumset, which itself only came into its present-day form with the birth and explosion of jazz in New Orleans, St. Louis, and New York City in the early 20th century.
Most importantly, both of Clarke’s brilliant solos do all of the work here capturing a Black American’s explicit expression of anguish and empathy for the enslaved millions, before and during the Civil War, hunted down and controlled relentlessly as they just tried to exist, to be “livin’” people. Clarke’s soundtrack, therefore, drastically changes the film in that his music insists on the inclusion of Black perspectives when telling and retelling our fictions and non-fictions. Without Clarke’s musical soundtrack, the enslaved Black Americans –about whose forced labor and servitude the Civil War was fought—are not visible, and the audience might not have been reminded of them as the key people whose lives were at stake in this narrative. His intensely personal and moving aural soundscape made this short film memorable as so much more than an updated retelling of a canonical American short story about white participants in the Civil War; Kenny Clarke gave a searing voice to an unheard Black American perspective–one through which a new work was created on the scaffolding of a classic, and one who continued to advocate a century later for freedom denied.
You can see and listen to Clarke’s drumset solo and watch the entire film on Tubi, here; the drum solo starts at 17:30 in the video.
Related: In the Twilight Zone: The After Hours in Severance; “A World of His Own” and the Replaceability of Women in The Twilight Zone; Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone (“Stopover in a Quiet Town”); Cyclical Abuse in The Twilight Zone; 5 Twilight Zone Episodes That Influenced Modern Horror Film; The Twilight Zone Episode That Anticipates Get Out.
Linda Ganus is a PhD student in the English Department at Lehigh University. She holds an MFA in Fine Art and Visual Culture from Vermont College of Fine Arts, her M.A. in History from Lehigh University and her Bachelor’s of Music in Flute Performance from the University of Michigan. Her teaching and research is centered around feminism and the cross-disciplinary history of literature, music and the visual arts in Western culture. She has received grants from the Getty Research Institute and the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Lehigh. Ms. Ganus also studied painting and drawing at the New York Studio School and the New York Academy of Art, and has exhibited widely across the United States. Her work has been commissioned by organizations such as the New York Philharmonic, David Sarnoff Research Center, Musical America, G. Schirmer, Inc., and the Kinhaven Music Institute, and she is a regular contributing writer to Gallery and Studio magazine. She is a member artist of Pictor Gallery in New York City and currently lives in Easton, PA.
