{architecture} – Page 128

Les lieux imaginaires d’Erik Desmazières

Labyrinthe II (2003).

This is very late notice but I only just discovered that there’s been a major exhibition of etchings by Erik Desmazières running at the Jenisch Gallery in Vevey, Switzerland. The exhibition, which ends on September 9th, includes these more recent works among over 100 other pieces covering the extent of the artist’s career. Sounds like the catalogue for this would certainly be worth ordering. There’s also a 40-minute documentary film being shown there, Le Paris d’Erik by Bertrand Renaudineau and Gérard Emmanuel da Silva.

Théâtre de géographie (2007).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Erik Desmazières

Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, designed by the internationally acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson and the award-winning Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, of the architectural practice Snøhetta, is now open to the public and will remain on site until November 2007.

The Pavilion acts as a “laboratory” every Friday night with artists, architects, academics and scientists leading a series of public experiments. The programme, conceived by Eliasson and Thorsen with the Serpentine, will begin in September and culminate in an extraordinary, two-part, 48-hour marathon laboratory event exploring the architecture of the senses.

The Serpentine Pavilion 2007 is a spectacular and dynamic building. The timber-clad structure resembles a spinning top and brings a dramatic vertical dimension to the more usual single level Pavilion. A wide spiralling ramp makes two complete turns, ascending from the Gallery’s lawn to the seating area and continues upwards, culminating at the highest point in a view across Kensington Gardens and down into the chamber below.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is based in Berlin where he established Studio Olafur Eliasson, a laboratory for spatial research. His work explores the relationship between individuals and their surroundings, as experienced in his awe-inspiring large-scale installation The weather project, 2003, at Tate Modern. Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre in Reykjavik (design of the building envelope).

He is collaborating with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., on a project that reconsiders the Museum’s communicative potential, and he recently won the competition for a large rooftop extension at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

Kjetil Thorsen is co-founder of Snøhetta, one of Scandinavia’s leading architectural practices, with offices in Oslo and New York. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, 1995–2001, is the commission that brought Snøhetta to international acclaim. Thorsen is responsible for the design of award-winning public buildings globally, and has collaborated with Eliasson several times, including The Opera House, Olso, currently under construction. He is a founder of Galleri Rom, Oslo, which focuses on the intersection of architecture and art, and is a member of the Norwegian Architectural Association (NAL) and the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He is also Professor at the Institute for Experimental Studies in Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The London Oasis
• New Olafur Eliasson

Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka

Do you detect a theme this week? The recent Pragueness had me watching this favourite film again. I unfairly dismissed Soderbergh after his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which I found to be two hours of yuppie tedium despite its winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes. The prize did enable him to make Kafka (1991), however, so I shouldn’t complain although I didn’t get to see this until it turned up on TV years after its release. The film was a major flop and put Soderbergh in the wilderness until Out of Sight (1998), his first outing with George Clooney.

Kafka is one of a small group of works wherein well-known writers become embroiled in stories which parallel their fiction. Joe Gores’ Hammett (filmed by Wim Wenders in 1982) did this with Dashiell Hammett while Mark Frost in his novel, The List of Seven, had a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle becoming involved in a Holmesian mystery. The screenplay for Kafka by Lem Dobbs has the author falling in with anarchist revolutionaries in order to solve the death of a co-worker and a bureaucratic conspiracy. This was obviously too clever for a general audience, being littered with references to Kafka’s life and work and also to German Expressionist cinema with names like “Orlac” and “Murnau” comprising key plot elements. Dobbs wrote a couple of other noteworthy screenplays after this, Dark City, a noirish fantasy that does what The Matrix did only with greater imagination, and The Limey (1999), another Soderbergh film with a great performance by Terence Stamp as a vengeful Cockney gangster on the loose in Los Angeles.

Alan Bennett had already written something similar to Kafka in his 1986 TV film for the BBC, The Insurance Man, which concerns a dye worker becoming enmeshed in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute where Kafka worked as a clerk. Daniel Day-Lewis made a marvellous Franz Kafka in Bennett’s play, and was much more suited to the role than Jeremy Irons is in Soderbergh’s film. This is a shame since everything else about Kafka is excellent, from Walt Lloyd’s moody photography, and the fabulous cymbalom-inflected score by Cliff Martinez, to the cast which includes the wonderful Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm and, in one of his last performances, Alec Guinness.

Kafka is also the Prague film par excellence, making great use of the city’s Old Town and landmarks such as the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, a building which dominates the story as well as many of the outdoor scenes. In fact I find myself watching it as much for the settings than anything else. Soderbergh enjoys cinematic pastiche and Kafka owes a great deal to The Third Man (which did for post-war Vienna what Kafka does for Prague) and—inevitably—Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation, The Trial. Theresa Russell brings Vienna with her via Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, Joel Grey was in Cabaret, of course, and Alec Guinness isn’t so far removed from his role as retired spy George Smiley in the BBC’s John le Carré films. And halfway through the film there’s a great surprise which I won’t spoil here.

Kafka is available on DVD finally, although if you’re in the US you’ll have to import it. Soderbergh has talked about reworking the film in a longer version which I’d like to see if he ever gets round to it. Not an easy film to find but it’s worthy of your attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka and Kupka
• Alexander Hammid
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

Alexander Hammid

Two short films by Maya Deren’s husband are now available for viewing at Ubuweb. I’ve known about Hammid’s work for years but this is the first time I’ve seen any of it so these additions are very welcome. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs, the works of the wife overshadowed those of the husband even though they collaborated on Deren’s most famous film, Meshes of the Afternoon (which is also at Ubuweb).

Of the pair of films, Na Prazskem Hrade (At Prague Castle) (1931) is the most interesting for this Prague fetishist, a disjointed study of the architecture of the city’s castle which turns the building into an expressionist collage. Two obvious associations arise while watching this; one is Franz Kafka who lived for a time in the castle’s Hradcany district at 22 Golden Lane and whose novel, The Castle (1926), is inspired by the dominating presence of the building. The other is the Nazi invasion which took place a few years after the film was made and caused its maker and his wife to flee to America. The Nazi high command controlled the country from Prague Castle so the brief glimpse of marching soldiers in one shot can be seen as an ominous presentiment of the future. The castle has featured in bigger budget productions more recently, including one of my cult films, Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991), and the underrated The Illusionist (2006) where Prague masqueraded as turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Barta’s Golem

Danger Diabolik

More pulp madness as Mario Bava’s 1968 crime caper finally appears on DVD in the UK this week; a camp confection from an already very camp decade, although it pales beside the lurid excesses of Barbarella which was released in the same year. Both films were based on popular European comic strips, and both are connected by the presence of John Phillip Law, the sexiest (male) screen angel in Barbarella, and the star of Danger Diabolik. Barbarella’s adventures on page and screen managed to be equally frivolous whereas master thief Diabolik in the original fumetti (which is still running) was rather more serious, at least in serial adventure terms. Bava forgoes any attempt to treat his subject with a straight face, opting instead for the knowing action-comedy style that was popular during the Sixties, whether in post-Bond fare such as Our Man Flint or superior TV series like The Avengers.

Diabolik stands apart from his contemporaries, and from other campy comic spin-offs such as Adam West’s Batman, by being an anti-hero in a field over-stuffed with costumed vigilantes and sexist super-spies. Most characters of this type are descendants of deathless arch-criminal Fantômas, and Diabolik can perhaps be seen as a trendy updating of the Fantômas type, with his black leather bondage outfit and ultra-cool E-type Jaguar, probably the only car ever made in Britain that would impress style-conscious Italians. The comic strip was created in 1962 by two sisters, Angela and Luciana Giussani, a feat one imagines would be impossible in the male-dominated world of American comics at that time.

The fumetti Diabolik shuns firearms in favour of knife-throwing expertise, something that Bava ignores by giving him a mundane machine-gun. Bava had directed a very silly James Bond spoof, Doctor Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, two years earlier, and always had a great eye for aesthetics even when lacking an adequate budget. His horror films frequently outdid Hammer for Gothic atmosphere, and his strange science fiction/horror, Planet of the Vampires (1965), features a cast similarly sheathed in shiny black spacesuits. The clouds of coloured fog those astronauts encounter reappear as the coloured smoke Diabolik uses to evade his pursuers, while his underground super-pad is one of the more spectacular villainous residences, like something Norman Foster might design for Dr. No. It certainly makes the Batcave look shabby, although, as with all these underground complexes, you can’t help wondering who the hell built them and how they managed to escape detection while doing so. The plot of the film, such as it is, is some forgettable nonsense concerning Diabolik’s cat-and-mouse game with his chief adversary, Inspector Ginko. Michel Piccoli plays the inspector, and it’s surprising seeing the splendid Terry-Thomas as a government official who Diabolik embarrasses with “exhilarating gas” at a press conference. The film is embellished with a tremendously groovy score by Ennio Morricone.

One of my favourite comic strip heroes when I was a kid was Billy the Cat in the Beano, the adventures of a super-agile boy in a black leather catsuit (no eyebrow-raising, please). I always had a fondness for these kind of characters, and I’m sure I would have loved Danger Diabolik for the cat burglary and the Sixties’ zaniness had I seen it on TV. My only gripe now is I can’t quite believe that Diabolik is all that interested in his female companion, Eva, despite the scene where they have sex on a revolving bed covered in dollar bills. If he’d rescued Alain Delon’s taciturn assassin from death at the end of Le Samouraï he could find Eva a nice young man in Monte Carlo, after which Jef Costello (as Delon is named in Melville’s film) could whack the pesky Inspector Ginko, and the pair could live together in subterranean peace, at least until the next heist. We can but dream.

A tip of the hat to Mark Pilkington for alerting me to this one. Bava’s Diabolikal influence lives on via Roman Coppola’s 2001 homage to Sixties’ camp, CQ, and the Beastie Boys’ video for Body Movin’.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantômas
• The persistence of memory