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Reverbstorm: 1994–2012. Art, intellectual pursuits, the development of the natural sciences, many branches of scholarship flourished in close spacial, temporal proximity to massacre and the death camps. It is the structure and meaning of that proximity that must be looked at. […] But there is a [...] danger. Not only is the relevant material vast […]

Gold Head 2 (2011) by Kouji Oshiro. • Josef Hartwig’s 1922 Bauhaus chess set. Contemporary copies can be bought from Naef Spiele but they’re not cheap. Related: Bauhaus: Art as Life, a major exhibition at the Barbican, London. Related, related: Art as life by Fiona MacCarthy. • Rattera is a new font by Barnbrook Design […]

One last film post for a very busy week. Ubu is a highly-stylised animated adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. This was a British production directed in 1978 by Geoff Dunbar who employs an ink-spattered style reminiscent of Ralph Steadman’s drawings; in place of vocal dramatisation Pa and Ma Ubu shriek horribly and occasionally spit […]

A rather crude 9-minute silent drama directed by Ugo Falena which claims to be based on Oscar Wilde’s play. I’m not sure Wilde would have thanked them for cramming his wordy opus into a few brief scenes of gesticulating performers. The colours are a bonus, however, as this is hand-tinted throughout. Elsewhere on { feuilleton […]

It’s no doubt up to the viewer to decide what constitutes anaemia in Marcel Duchamp’s 7-minute film. Anémic Cinéma was made the same year as Emak-Bakia with the assistance of Man Ray and Marc Allégret. Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs spin hypnotically alternating with punning epithets in French. The spinning artworks later appeared as Duchamp’s contribution to Hans […]

Posts this week will tend towards the brief since I’m spending all my time finishing Reverbstorm. I thought I’d already posted something about Emak-Bakia, a 16-minute “cinépoème” by Man Ray from 1926, but it seems not. This is another of those short experimental films that proliferated between the wars, and a particularly inventive one with […]

What is there to say about Buñuel and Dalí’s timeless film that hasn’t already been said? It’s one of the primary Surrealist documents and something that everyone should see at least once. Cyril Connolly attended the Paris premiere in 1929: The picture was received with shouts and boos and when a pale young man tried to […]

Full metal Jacket poster (1987). Illustration by Philip Castle. Watching Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket on Blu-ray recently I was wondering again whether anyone has noted the similarity between the film’s poster design and the cover for the UK edition of one of its source books, Michael Herr’s Dispatches. At the risk of repeating some […]

A suspended fluid photograph from Demersal, a series by Luka Klikovac. • “Soon, Mr. Lachman was writing occult music. His song “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” which appeared on Blondie’s 1977 album Plastic Letters, was an example.” Gary Lachman: from Blondie to Swedenborg. • Neil Krug’s cover art for the new Scissor Sisters […]

A post for Record Store Day. “Psychedelic” is stretching things here but it’s a word that always grabs the attention. Let’s Pretend was a series of fairy tale recordings released in the US in 1970 on the Stereo Dimension Records label. Each of the 25 recordings employs a radio show format, possibly because these were […]

The films shot by the Edison company at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 were featured here a couple of years ago. These screen grabs are from better quality footage made by Edison’s French rivals, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who had the advantage over the Americans in also having their films screened as one of […]

The Martyrdom of St Denis (1885). Léon Bonnat’s depiction of St Denis reaching for his detached head might be included with St Lucy (always shown with her dish of eyeballs) and St Peter of Verona (seldom without an axe stuck in his skull) in a facetious list of Saints Do The Funniest Things. Bonnat’s gory […]

Thanks are due to Ty Reutel for alerting my attention to this one. I’d no idea that the great Virgil Finlay had illustrated Tarzan but here’s the proof, one half of an interior drawing for The Quest of Tarzan in Argosy Weekly for 1941. That’s the first surprise, the second, of course, was that Finlay […]

A selection of colour plates from Faery Tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1910) illustrated by British artist Maxwell Armfield. I hadn’t seen this collection before which turned up whilst searching for Tinderbox illustrations. Armfield does illustrate that particular story (here titled The Tinder Box—the title varies) but we don’t get to see the monstrous hounds. I […]

HJ Ford (1894). “Do you see that great tree!” quoth the witch; and she pointed to a tree which stood beside them. “It’s quite hollow inside. You must climb to the top, and then you’ll see a hole, through which you can let yourself down and get deep into the tree. I’ll tie a rope […]

Prettiest Star (2004) by Timothy Cummings. • I Want Your Love, a feature film directed by Travis Mathews catches my attention for having been described as “the gay Shortbus” even though (as the director notes) Shortbus was pretty gay to begin with. • I’ve always found Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Tinderbox—a tale of […]

After subjecting Frederic Leighton to undignified speculation yesterday, his work is now ushered into the homoerotic environs of the Recurrent Pose Archive. These engravings are from a Leighton-themed edition of The Art Annual which is undated but which refers to The Sluggard as being a work in progress so that would date it to 1894 […]

An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). The python wrestler by Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) has appeared here before, and it’s one sculpture that always catches my eye for having appeared in my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988. It’s now one of the Leighton works available for close viewing at the Google Art […]

The illustrations of Belgian artist Jean de Bosschère (1878–1953) aren’t as easy to find as those of his British and American contemporaries so it’s a shame there isn’t more of his idiosyncratic work at the Internet Archive. Folk Tales of Flanders is there, however, an edition from 1918 featuring a number of colour plates and […]

The Chelsea Drug Store, 49 King’s Road, London, circa 1970. How quickly things change. It was almost six years to the day that I posted an unapologetically sedulous analysis of the record shop scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, something that’s still one of the most regularly visited of all the entries here. That […]

Hedgehog in the Fog (1975). One more animation post before I move onto other things. Since the 1970s Russian animator Yuri Norstein has been regarded as one of the greatest living practitioners of the medium despite having only made a handful of films. Hedgehog in the Fog is a 10-minute piece with a self-explanatory title: […]

Animation of a more contemporary kind (do you detect a theme?), Metachaos is a frenetic 8-minute apocalypse by Alessandro Bavari whose Photoshop collages I recall being impressed by some years ago. His video uses computer rendering but with a lot more grit than the usual CGI. The soundtrack is the kind of quasi-Industrial thing you’d […]

Robert Fripp photographed by Chris Stein. Video posterization by Michael Schiess. Scans of Synapse, “The electronic music magazine”, are posted here. Issues range from 1976 to 1979, and include interviews with the more notable synthesists of the period, Kraftwerk included. Brian Eno was regularly interviewed by synth mags despite always being reluctant to talk about […]

Yet more animation. Long Drawn-Out Trip was Gerald Scarfe‘s first foray into the medium, produced in 1972 at the request of the BBC who sent the artist to Los Angeles to try out the new De Joux animation system. The process needed only six or eight drawings per second of film thus reducing the usual amount […]

Stravinsky – The Paris Years (1983). More animation, and scarce in the sense that some of these films were omitted from the core Quay Brothers canon released in the UK by the BFI as Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003. Quay obsessives such as myself would have been happy to pay for an extra disc […]

I wondered how to focus on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus without the others getting in the way. This intense physical relationship developed into the focus of the film, rather than any more Harryhausenesque aspects of the Greek myths. Intimacy had not really been treated seriously with puppets… Barry JC Purves Several people seemed […]

The Deluge (1834) by John Martin. One of John Martin’s Biblical cataclysms succumbs to a Turner-like nebulosity at the Yale Center for British Art, something that can now be viewed in detail thanks to Google’s expansion of its Art Project. 151 additional galleries have been added, and the collections of those already present expanded, which […]

Invariancia. The workload has increased recently so posting here may tend to laziness for a while. I think I first saw the hyper-detailed digital collages of Luis Toledo aka Laprisamata at Form is Void where Thom has a knack for spotting the good stuff. I was reminded of them again last week thanks to Dressing […]

Unidentified model from Otoko (1972). Two photos by Tamotsu Yato (c. 1928–1973), a pioneer of homoerotic photography in Japan who published his work in three collections: Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan (1967), Naked festival: A Photo-Essay (1969), and Otoko: Photo-Studies of the Young Japanese Male (1972). Yukio Mishima introduced the first two volumes, and also […]

Flannery O’Connor with one of her many peacocks. When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until […]