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• • • Being a journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.

Archive for the {film} category

 

Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”

Stalker (1979).
Among the new documentary films being shown at the Sheffield (UK) Doc/Fest is Igor Mayboroda’s Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”.  Behind the unwieldy title there lies an exploration of the troubled genesis of one of my cult artefacts, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, a personal adaptation by the director [...]

Posted in {books}, {film}, {music}, {science fiction} | 1 comment »

 


Salomé scored

Alla Nazimova as Salomé (1923).
I wrote a while ago about Alla Nazimova’s luscious silent film production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a suitably Decadent affair with an allegedly all-gay cast, and costume and stage design based on Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. The film is currently touring England and Wales with a new score for four musicians [...]

Posted in {beardsley}, {design}, {film}, {gay}, {music}, {theatre} | 3 comments »

 


Berlin Horse and Marvo Movie

Two experimental films by British filmmakers. Berlin Horse (1970) at Ubuweb is a hypnotic piece of minimalism by Malcolm Le Grice who subjects found footage of exercising horses to a series of loopings and filterings that push the degraded images to a point of textured abstraction. Of note with this film is the equally minimal [...]

Posted in {abstract cinema}, {animation}, {film}, {music} | 2 comments »

 


Clouzot’s towering inferno

Clouzot’s towering inferno | A film called Hell.

Posted in {film}, {noted} | No comments »

 


A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!

It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.
Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi [...]

Posted in {books}, {film}, {horror}, {music}, {occult} | 4 comments »

 


Orson Welles: The most glorious film failure of them all

Orson Welles: The most glorious film failure of them all | David Thomson on why Welles still fascinates.

Posted in {film}, {noted} | No comments »

 


Through the Wonderwall

It’s taken me years but the recent obsession with UK psychedelia led me to finally watch Joe Massot’s piece of cinematic fluff from 1968, Wonderwall, a film distinguished primarily for its score by George Harrison (with Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton playing pseudonymously), and its title which was swiped years later by a bunch of [...]

Posted in {art}, {fantasy}, {film}, {gay}, {music}, {psychedelia} | 5 comments »

 


Short films by Sergei Parajanov

Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967).
I’ve been enthusing for years about the unique films of Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), usually in vain since his work hasn’t always been easy to see and is (for now) poorly served by DVD. His two masterworks, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), have both been issued on [...]

Posted in {film} | 2 comments »

 


The first action heroine

The first action heroine | Ellen Ripley and Alien, 30 years on.

Posted in {film}, {horror}, {noted}, {science fiction} | No comments »

 


Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune

Fortunate Londoners can get to see a new exhibition, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was, which runs at The Drawing Room until October 25, 2009. As well as production designs from concept artists Moebius, HR Giger and Chris Foss, there’s newly commissioned work by artists Steven Claydon, [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {comics}, {design}, {film}, {illustrators}, {science fiction} | 10 comments »

 


Mirror, mirror

Mirror, mirror | Simon Callow on The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Posted in {books}, {film}, {gay}, {noted} | No comments »

 


David Lynch window displays

Two of the stunning displays created from sketches by David Lynch for the Galeries Lafayette department store, Paris. The series is entitled Machine-Abstraction-Women, and I don’t think Mr Lynch would mind too much having his description of the works translated in an extruded manner from French to English:
I was always fascinated by the spectacle of [...]

Posted in {art}, {design}, {film}, {sculpture} | 6 comments »

 


Battersea Power Station

A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, with [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {design}, {film}, {music}, {photography} | 4 comments »

 


The Thing set on survival

The Thing set on survival | Anne Billson on John Carpenter’s masterpiece.

Posted in {film}, {horror}, {noted} | 1 comment »

 


William S Burroughs: A Man Within

The Ticket that Exploded. Cover design by Thomi Wroblowski for a John Calder edition, 1985.
William S Burroughs: A Man Within is a feature-length documentary by Yony Leyser, and is, so the makers say, the first posthumous documentary about the always essential writer. Howard Brookner’s 1983 film, Burroughs, is probably definitive where the biography is [...]

Posted in {books}, {burroughs}, {film}, {gay} | 3 comments »

 


Forbidden Colours

Wilhelm von Gloeden’s version of the Flandrin pose as it appears on the cover of a 1989 Gallimard edition of Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima. I included this photograph in the very first posting which examines the recurrence of Flandrin’s Jeune Homme Assis au Bord de la Mer but this is the first time I’ve [...]

Posted in {books}, {design}, {film}, {gay} | 3 comments »

 


Dogged by rumour: The riddles of Oz

Dogged by rumour: The riddles of Oz | Andrew Johnson and David Randall sift the truth from the lies surrounding the most watched film ever.

Posted in {fantasy}, {film}, {noted} | No comments »

 


Patrick Bokanowski again

“A prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique. That its elements are not constructed in a traditional way should not be a barrier to those who wish to cross the bridge to what Jean-Luc Godard proposed as [...]

Posted in {animation}, {film} | 3 comments »

 


Dream and Delirium

Dream and Delirium | Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo diaries reviewed.

Posted in {books}, {film}, {noted} | No comments »

 


New things for July

In Spaces Between from The Great Old Ones (1999).
Some noteworthy pieces of news as the month draws to a rain-sodden and dismal conclusion.
• Frank Woodward was in touch this week to let me know that his excellent HP Lovecraft documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, will at last be appearing on DVD in October. This [...]

Posted in {books}, {electronica}, {film}, {horror}, {lovecraft}, {music}, {television}, {work} | 2 comments »

 


 





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