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Genesia (2011) by Bette Burgoyne. • “…so I started buying these old gay porn novels, just for the covers and kept on collecting them.” Maitland McDonagh on the underexamined world of gay pulp. McDonagh’s 120 Days Books is reprinting some of these scarce titles. More gay erotica: Plans are afoot to republish Des Grieux, the […]

“I was a big fan of Kraftwerk, Cluster and Harmonia, and I thought the first Neu! album, in particular, was just gigantically wonderful,” admits Bowie. “Looking at that against punk, I had absolutely no doubts where the future of music was going, and for me it was coming out of Germany at that time. I […]

An inevitable follow-up to yesterday’s film, Ira Cohen’s fantasia from 1968 is one of the classics of psychedelic cinema, a Kenneth Anger-like delirium that makes great use of Cohen’s obsession with Mylar distortions. Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is the model here, with a cast of revellers adopting various guises; Cohen himself appears as […]

In Heaven and Hell (1956) Aldous Huxley considers various forms of art that might be said to imitate or resemble the intense visuals generated by psychedelic agents. In past centuries this would include firework displays and the vivid hues of stained glass windows; when discussing the present, mention is made of NY, NY, a short […]

Ghost in the Machine (2012) by Hope Kroll. • Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, an album of William Burroughs’ personal tapes originally released by Industrial Records is reissued on vinyl this month. Andrew Spragg reviews it here. Burroughs’ readings fill several collections but this one was the first I owned, and it’s always been […]

A brief journey into a psychedelic afterlife that attempts in 5 minutes what Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void spends over two hours doing. Endtrip is the work of Koen de Mol, Olivier Ballast and Rick Franssen. Watch it here. Previously on { feuilleton } • Cosmic Flower Unfolding, a film by Ben Ridgway • The […]

Science-fiction cinema has always suffered in comparison to its written counterparts; sets and special effects have to work hard to create believable worlds or futures, while the need to recoup enormous costs has often meant that film scenarios aren’t much better than those being written in the early days of the pulp magazines. Simplistic adventure […]

A drawing by Lucille Clerc. • The usual imbalance of heat versus light this week but Kenan Malik and Teju Cole had some worthwhile things to say. Related: Atlantic illustrators respond to the events of Wednesday. And some history: covers of Charlie Hebdo‘s parent magazine, Hara-Kiri, whose legacy of bad taste and confrontation was overlooked […]

A very short collage animation from 1956 that Smith later expanded into a version running 12 minutes. The artwork crams a great deal of occult and religious symbolism into its 3-minute running time—alchemy, the Kabbalah, Buddhism, Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet, and so on—while Misterioso by Thelonious Monk is playing. Watching this makes me realise that there […]

Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet of the 1920s is one of the more famous products of the Bauhaus movement, a radical reinvention of the medium which encased the dancers in cumbersome costumes. The outfits and stage designs are familiar from Bauhaus histories but you’re less likely to see an actual performance, something that’s possible with this […]

This is an odd one-off TV drama whose title I’ve known for years but which I hadn’t seen until this week. The Incredible Robert Baldick was broadcast in 1972 in a slot used by the BBC to test dramas that might later become series. The writer was Terry Nation, creator of Doctor Who and the […]

The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal, 1904) by Gertrude Käsebier. Once again the annual review of artists/designers/photographers featured in the weekend posts arrives at the beginning of the new year rather than the end of the old. Scroll down to see what caught my attention over the past twelve months. We Are The Water […]

Picking up where we left off, I was thrilled to find that Micheál MacLiammóir’s one-man dramatised biography of Oscar Wilde had finally made it to YouTube. The Importance of Being Oscar was MacLiammóir’s 100-minute magnum opus, an acclaimed condensation of Wilde’s life and work first performed at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1960. Hilton Edwards […]

Another return, and another short ghost story. Return to Glennascaul (1951) has been presented at times as Orson Welles’ Ghost Story even though it was written and directed by Welles’ friend, Hilton Edwards. Welles is the narrator, and plays himself in the framing section. The story is a version of the old “Vanishing Hitchhiker” urban […]

Another obscure film, The Return (1973) isn’t a television drama, more a miniature for the cinema, and as such may have been produced as a double-feature short. Director and co-writer Sture Rydman only has one other film to his credit but the music for The Return is by film composer Marc Wilkinson while the photography […]

This is a very curious short film I’d not come across before, the final entry in Leap in the Dark, a series of half-hour supernatural dramas and documentaries broadcast by the BBC from 1973 to 1980. To Kill A King could be viewed as a supernatural piece although it’s more of a psychodrama with writer […]

The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal, 1904) by Gertrude Käsebier. • “I had to resort to extreme violence”: how Hipgnosis revolutionised the album sleeve. Aubrey Powell, last surviving member of the design team, talks to Joe Muggs. • Mixes of the week: Radio Belbury: Programme 14; The Conjurer’s Hexmas by SeraphicManta; Secret Mix 139 […]

Collage animators may not be as plentiful as collage artists but this branch of filmmaking has attracted a number of heavyweight talents including Harry Smith, Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk and Terry Gilliam. Lawrence Jordan worked for a time as an assistant to Joseph Cornell but he’s been making short films since the 1950s, many of […]

Another resurrected article. Cinema Rising was a short-lived newsprint film magazine that ran for three issues in the UK in 1972. I have a few pages from the rare first issue that was part of a batch of old underground newspapers I was given a few years ago. (The Frendz Hawkwind strip is from the […]

Histories of abstract cinema often begin with Oskar Fischinger, a filmmaker and animator who was certainly a pioneer of the form. But these four silent shorts by Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941), Lichtspiel: Opus I, II, III & IV (1921–25) predate Fischinger’s work, and also prefigure Fischinger’s own animations of swooping shapes, blooming circles and stabbing triangles. […]