Weekend links 787

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Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero

Back in Doré’s jungle

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This illustration by Gustave Doré (with engraving work by Louis Sargent) is a beautiful example of how to fill a scene with detail and texture without losing a sense of depth or control of the light and shade. Piranesi’s etchings, especially his views of Roman ruins, are often as skilfully rendered, resisting the tendency of concentrated shading to turn into a depthless field of grey. Doré’s scene is from one of his illustrated editions that seldom receives a mention in lists of his works, Atala, a novella by François-René de Chateaubriand set among the Native American peoples of Mississippi and Florida. Those vaguely Mesoamerican ruins are an invention of the artist, being barely mentioned in the text. Doré’s illustrations often exaggerate details when they have to depict the real world; he even took liberties with the views of London he published following his visit to the city in 1869. This combination of ruined architecture and verdant foliage is something I’ve always enjoyed even though I’ve never worked out why the imagery is so appealing. Doré’s illustration is as close as he usually gets to Piranesi’s views of overgrown Roman ruins, only in this case the elements have been reversed, with foliage dominating the carved stonework.

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Production sketch by Mario Larrinaga from The Making of King Kong (1975).

Last week I mentioned Jean Cocteau’s enthusiasm for Doré’s illustrations, their influence being apparent in the set designs for La Belle et la Bête. Doré’s influence was even more visible in another Beauty and the Beast story filmed a decade earlier, King Kong, as described in The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George Turner:

[Willis] O’Brien’s idea of emulating Doré as a basis for cinematographic lighting and atmosphere may have originated with the pioneer cameraman and special effects expert, Louis W. Physioc, who in 1930 stated that “if there is one man’s work that can be taken as the cinematographer’s text, it is that of Doré. His stories are told in our own language of ‘black and white,’ are highly imaginative and dramatic, and should stimulate anybody’s ideas.”

The Doré influence is strikingly evident in the island scenes. Aside from the lighting effects, other elements of Doré illustrations are easily discernible. The affinity of the jungle clearings to those in Doré’s “The First Approach of the Serpent” from Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Dante in the Gloomy Wood” from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, “Approach to the Enchanted Palace” from Perrault’s Fairy Tales and “Manz” from Chateaubriand’s Atala is readily apparent. The gorge and its log bridge bear more than a slight similarity to “The Two Goats” from The Fables of La Fontaine, while the lower region of the gorge may well have been designed after the pit in the Biblical illustration of “Daniel in the Lion’s Den.” The wonderful scene in which Kong surveys his domain from the “balcony” of his mountaintop home high above the claustrophobic jungle is suggestive of two superb Doré engravings, “Satan Overlooking Paradise” from Paradise Lost and “The Hermit on the Mount from Atala.

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King Kong (1933).

I’m sceptical of Goldner and Turner’s suggestion that this illustration of the two goats inspired King Kong’s tree-bridge, the only thing the two scenes share is a piece of wood spanning a chasm. The Chateaubriand illustration is much more redolent of King Kong, as is evident from some of the films’s marvellous production sketches by Byron Crabbe and Mario Larrinaga.

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The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

The tree-bridge scene has another precedent in a very similar bridge that appears briefly in The Most Dangerous Game, a film made by King Kong’s producer and director in 1932 using the same jungle sets, and featuring many of the same actors and crew. The jungle scenes in the earlier film show a similar Doré influence, with many long or medium shots framed by silhouetted vegetation. The film even includes the animated birds that are later seen flapping around the shore of Skull Island.

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Atala’s fallen tree makes at least one more notable film appearance in Ray Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island, another film about a remote island populated by oversized fauna. Harryhausen’s island doesn’t have much of a jungle but he always mentioned King Kong and Willis O’Brien as the two greatest influences on his animation career. He also picked up on O’Brien’s use of Doré’s work, something he often mentioned in interviews. If Charles Schneer’s budgets hadn’t restricted the films to Mediterranean locations I’m sure Harryhausen would have made greater use of Doré’s jungles.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Uncharted islands and lost souls

Weekend links 785

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A 1933 poster for the second of Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films.

• Good news for those who missed the original run (from 2002–2013), Arthur Magazine is now available for the first time as a complete set of free PDFs. I was laterally involved with the magazine from the outset, mostly as a remote supporter, but I also did several covers and interior illustrations for the early issues.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler by Norbert Jacques (translated by Lilian A. Clare); and two books by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Short Fiction, and a novella, The Room in the Dragon Volant.

• New music: Spilla by Ensemble Nist-Nah; and Sea-swallowed Wands by Jolanda Moletta and Karen Vogt.

With his compulsions for systems and architecture, his command of shadows and symbolism-imbued sets and props, Lang is never less than arresting. Yet few of the films make complete statements; Lang’s art, in this period, is seemingly as much a fugitive as are his archetypal characters. That is, until the moment that his long journey to the direct subject matter and cultural framework of the 1950s United States, addressed in the terms and by the means available to him in Hollywood, abruptly comes to superb fruition with The Big Heat.

Jonathan Lethem on Fritz Lang in Hollywood and one of the greatest noir pictures of the 1950s

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: an enthusiastic review at The Joey Zone. My thanks to Mr Shea!

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Nina Garcia; and Isolated Mix 133 by Pentagrams Of Discordia.

• At Colossal: David Romero’s digital recreations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealised buildings.

• At Smithsonian magazine: John Last investigates the history of the Tarot.

• At Planet Paul: An interview with artist Malcolm Ashman.

• At the Daily Heller: A porno gag mag with attitude.

Hodgsonia

Das Testaments Des Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda | (The Ninth Life Of…) Dr Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda | Abuse (Here) (1985) by Propaganda

Weekend links 784

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An illustration by HB Ford for The Violet Fairy Book (1906), edited by Andrew Lang.

• New music: An Aesthetic – Experiments in Tape by Hawksmoor; Leylines (2025 remaster) by Aes Dana; A Fragile Geography (10th Anniversary Reissue) by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• “Skoda Auto designers reimagine Ferat Vampire car from cult classic 1981 Czech horror film”.

• At Colossal: Chris Ware illustrates a postwoman’s day to celebrate 250 years of USPS.

Seen today, the failure of Sorcerer looks like a grim prophecy of where the film industry would be headed in the years to come. It signaled that the creative ambitions of the New Hollywood, and its indulgence of stubborn renegade auteurs, had been cast aside for a new and dispiriting blockbuster ethos. Decades later, that ethos is still with us: a Hollywood dominated by digitally smoothed, effects-encrusted moviemaking, where every backdrop looks fake (even the real ones) and action sequences carry no physical weight. It’s a wretched landscape, and Sorcerer positively towers over it. To watch the film now, from its electric opening moments through its gaspingly bleak denouement, is to encounter something more than just a magnificent ruin or an object of cultish reclamation: a thwarted masterwork that is thwarted no longer.

Justin Chang on the bleak magic of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

• At the BFI: The Red Shoes wallpaper by the film’s designer Hein Heckroth.

All This Violence by Caspar Brötzmann Massaker.

• RIP Lalo Schifrin and Rebekah del Rio.

• The Strange World of…Jon Spencer.

In Ultra-Violet (1983) by Cinema 90 | Violet Ray Gas (2009) by Violet | Violetta (2012) by Demdike Stare

Sanquirico’s theatrical settings

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Work-related research over the past couple of weeks has had me looking for pictures of theatres in the 19th century, especially backstage views. The latter proved harder to find than I expected although I did turn up a few useful reference images after scouring the picture libraries. Nuova raccolta di scene teatrali (1828) by Alessandro Sanquirico is an Italian book that surfaced during the searches, not something I wanted but it’s another collection of imaginary architectural views which I always like to see. Sanquirico was set designer for La Scala in Milan so most of these designs are for opera sets, although several are labelled “ballo“, a type of theatrical dance which evidently required dramatic settings. As to the designs, there’s more variety than you find among earlier generations of theatrical designers like the Bibienas, a family of artists who specialised in very detailed Baroque interiors. The Romantic era demanded tempestuous drama and greater spectacle, hence Sanquirico’s views of castles, caves, prisons, conflagrations and fanciful depictions of the ancient world. The selection that follows is only a small sample; the book has 242 plates in all.

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