Weekend links 712

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Above and Below (1968) by Wendy Abbott.

• “Thirty-two years after the five Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan appeared on the world map, little of the region has been portrayed in film. Countries associated with the -stan suffix are perceived as dangerous or sinister.” Komron Ergashev on Central Asia and cinema.

• Old music: Alice Coltrane’s Carnegie Hall concert from 1971 has been available for many years as a high-quality bootleg but never the complete recording. The first official release next month promises to at last present a full performance.

• RIP Damo Suzuki, vocalist for Can during the group’s peak years. The Rockpalast concert from 1970 captured the group in impressive form shortly after Suzuki joined.

• “I’ve always been drawn towards esoteric phenomena: the illogical, the inexpressible, the impossible.” Dorothea Tanning talking to Carlo McCormick in 1990.

• “This film was shot live on the surface of an 8mm² chemical reaction.” As Above by Roman Hill.

• New music: Floating On A Moment by Beth Gibbons, and All Life Long by Kali Malone.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Kiyoshi Hasegawa.

Joel Gion’s favourite music.

Esoteric Circle (1976) by Jan Garbarek | As Above, So Below (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Esoteric Red (1997) by Tao

Edward James: Builder of Dreams

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The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James) (1937) by René Magritte.

I was reading a book about Surrealism recently that I won’t shame by naming even though it was a bad piece of work: rambling, repetitive and with one section padded out by unfounded speculation. I managed to get a third of the way through before losing my patience when the author began to refer repeatedly to the wealthy British art patron “Edward Jones”. Edward James, as he’s more usually known, is a name guaranteed to turn up eventually in histories of 20th-century Surrealist art; despite not considering himself a collector James managed to amass the largest personal accumulation of Surrealist art in the world. For several years he was a patron of many artists including Dalí, Magritte and Leonora Carrington, becoming a life-long friend of the latter when they both moved to Mexico. He was also the model for some of Magritte’s paintings, including the very influential Reproduction Forbidden. The book that misnamed him was from a major British publisher, one who I usually regard as reliable which makes an error such as this especially annoying.

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Anyway…much of the history of Edward James’s involvement with the Surrealists is recounted in this hour-long documentary made in 1995 by Avery Danziger and Sarah Stein, a run through James’s charmed life, from gilded youth as an aristocrat and inheritor of vast wealth, to his old age as “Uncle Edward”, a benevolent eccentric living in the Mexican jungle at Xilitla where he spent many years constructing his own work of art, the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas. Substantial portions of the documentary are lifted from Patrick Boyle’s The Secret Life of Edward James, a TV profile made in 1978 that caught the man at a time when Surrealism in Britain was briefly trendy again thanks to a large retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. Danziger and Stein’s film is a kind of supplement to Boyle’s, showing us a more complete Las Pozas while fleshing out the impressions of James via new interviews with his friends and colleagues. Not everyone who gets thanked at the end made the final cut, so there’s no Leonor Fini unfortunately, but Leonora Carrington is present via shots from the Boyle film and extracts from a taped interview.

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One aspect of Las Pozas that seldom gets mentioned (although I think George Melly might have made the connection) is the degree to which the place fits into the tradition of folly-building by wealthy British aristocrats. Follies are a familiar architectural feature of Britain’s stately homes, and being architectural caprices they come in all shapes and sizes. Most tend to be small one-off constructions, often taking the form of towers or fake ruins. The only folly comparable in scale to Las Pozas is Portmeirion, the pastiche Mediterranean town built by Clough Williams-Ellis on the coast of north Wales. Williams-Ellis, like James, spent decades tinkering with his pet project, and both locations have ended up supporting themselves by offering hotel facilities to tourists. Portmeirion, however, lacks the strangeness of the cement anomalies at Las Pozas; the only thing that’s strange about the place is its departure from vernacular Welsh architecture. Imitation and trompe-l’oeil are common elements among British follies. The closest that Portmeirion came to Surrealism was in the 1960s when it was used as a location for The Prisoner TV series. I imagine James would have found Williams-Ellis’s architectural taste rather too neat and refined. Las Pozas is a wild place that must require continual attention to prevent it from being consumed by the surrounding jungle. One of the houses there is named after Max Ernst (Danziger and Stein interview the owner), and it’s the fantasy jungles in the paintings of Ernst and Henri Rousseau that Las Pozas takes as its model.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Eco del Universo
The Secret Life of Edward James
Palais Idéal panoramas
Las Pozas panoramas
Return to Las Pozas
Las Pozas and Edward James

Peeping Tom: A Very British Psycho

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Peeping Tom is a very tender film, a very nice one. Almost a romantic film. I was immediately fascinated by the idea: I felt very close to the hero, who is an “absolute” director, someone who approaches life like a director, who is conscious of and suffers from it. He is a technician of emotion. And I am someone who is thrilled by technique, always mentally editing the scene in front of me in the street, so I was able to share his anguish.

Michael Powell quoted in Powell, Pressburger and Others, edited by Ian Christie, 1978

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) has been released on disc several times in recent years, but Christopher Rodley’s Channel 4 TV documentary about the film and its writer, Leo Marks, has so far only been reissued on a Criterion DVD which appeared in 1999. A Very British Psycho, which was made in 1997, deserves to be paired with its subject more than most film documentaries since this is the only substantial film portrait of Leo Marks (1920–2001), a figure whose contribution to the film is often overshadowed by discussion of Michael Powell’s career. Marks was a fascinating character, the son of Benjamin Marks, owner of the famous bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, and a man obsessed with riddles and codes, a preoccupation that led to his employment at the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. The years he spent devising codes for British spies, many of whom never returned from their missions, is explored at some length in Rodley’s film. After the war Marks turned to screenwriting. Peeping Tom came about when he and Powell were planning a film on the life of Freud which was pre-empted by John Huston’s film dealing with the same subject. Peeping Tom still contains a fair amount of Freudian symbolism—staircases, keys, ladders, psychoanalysts, not to mention the phallic camera/weapon that the killer uses—but the premise is much more interesting than a Freudian biopic would have been.

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Rodley’s title—A Very British Psycho—explicitly pits Powell’s film against the more famous Hitchcock murder mystery that was released in its wake. Much as I like Hitchcock’s films, especially his own examination of the peeping tom theme, Rear Window, everything in Hitchcock is always subservient to the story. Peeping Tom has a storyline that’s satisfying enough but the script is self-conscious and cerebral in a way that Hitchcock never was. Marks and Powell undertake a psychosexual analysis of cinema itself, presented in the guise of a story about a film-obsessed killer whose impulses have been caused by the traumas induced by his psychoanalyst father. There was no precedent for this in British cinema, and there wouldn’t be much like it in cinema intended for a general audience for at least another ten years. A list of the film’s many cinematic allusions and in-jokes is beyond the remit of this post but allow me to mention: the comparison drawn between the red lights favoured by prostitutes, and the red lights of photographic darkrooms and film studios; the numerous references to vision and the lack of it, with a blind woman played by a sighted actress (Maxine Audley), and an inept film director played by a partially-sighted actor (Powell regular Esmond Knight); the jokey names: the inept director is “Arthur Baden” (a play on the founder of the Scout movement, Baden-Powell, which suggests that without a Powell this is what British cinema ends up with), while the cost-conscious studio boss, “Don Jarvis” is a reference to John Davis, the head of the Rank organisation. Powell and Marks implicate themselves in the cinematic crimes in a manner that Hitchcock never would have done, with the killer, Mark Lewis, having a name that’s a reversal of Leo Marks, while Powell himself appears in home-movie flashbacks as the traumatising father, with one of Powell’s own sons playing Lewis as a child.

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The grown-up son, Columba Powell, is one of Rodley’s interviewees, together with actors Carl Boehm, Anna Massey and Pamela Green. Also interviewed are some of the British critics who condemned the film on its release, and thus ended Powell’s career in Britian. One of these, the often splenetic Alexander Walker, suggests that Hitchcock wisely avoided showing Psycho to the British press to avoid a similar scandal, but Hitchcock’s oeuvre was filled with psycho-killers all the way back to the silent era, which suggests to me that the reaction wouldn’t have been the same at all. The problem for Powell was that nothing in his career could have led anyone to expect a film as nasty as Peeping Tom, and he had the audacity to put himself into the picture as the prime cause of all the nastiness. Critics had often accused Powell and Emeric Pressburger of lapses in taste but the pair were highly regarded in the 1940s; A Matter of Life and Death was the first film to be screened at a Royal Film Performance in 1946. Powell and Marks discomforted the British press by showing pornography being created in a room above a typical corner newsagents, with the resulting photographs being sold in the shop downstairs while young girls are buying sweets. And that’s before you get to the more insidious discomfort induced in an audience watching a film about murders that features the killer watching his own films of the killings. French critics were fascinated by all of this but their enthusiasm wasn’t enough to save Powell’s career or even do much for the film itself. The reappraisal only began in 1978 with the first BFI retrospective of Powell’s work. As for Leo Marks, nothing else he worked on was this memorable. He had another stab (so to speak) at the psycho theme in 1968 with Twisted Nerve, directed by Roy Boulting, but the only good thing about that film is the score by Bernard Herrmann.

The copy of A Very British Psycho at YouTube is complete but slightly altered by having all the film clips reduced to sequences of stills, no doubt to avoid copyright complaints. The soundtrack is still intact, however. I don’t mind this too much since I dislike those disc extras that always start off by showing you several minutes of the film you’ve just been watching.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Powell’s Bluebeard on blu-ray
The South Bank Show: Michael Powell
Powell & Pressburger: A Pretty British Affair
The Rite of Spring and The Red Shoes
Michael Powell’s Bluebeard revisited
The Tale of Giulietta

Weekend links 693

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Imaginary (no date) by Sidney Sime.

• Victor Rees was in touch this week to alert me to a one-off screening of The Gourmet (previously), a cult TV drama from 1986 written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Michael Whyte. The screening, which will take place at Swedenborg House, London, on 16th October, is one of a series of retrospective events based around an exhibition from 1974, Albion Island Vortex, by Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. The film, which is connected to Sinclair’s oeuvre by its use of one of the Hawksmoor churches, will be followed by a Q&A session with Sinclair and Michael Whyte. The screening is free but places are limited so prior booking is required.

• “Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots.” Hunter Dukes on A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860) by John Camden Hotten.

The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson’s “Dying Earth” doorstop, is republished in an abridged version as part of MIT Press’s Radium Age series, “proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935”. All the reprints come with new introductions, the one for Hodgson being by Erik Davis.

• “My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment.” Nora Claire Miller on the lure of the lava lamp. I only own a single one but I appreciate the obsessive attraction.

• Rambalac takes his roaming camera for a walk through teamLab Planets, Tokyo, a labyrinthine exhibition featuring plenty of water (and wet feet), and a moss garden filled with large silver eggs.

• At Strange Flowers: An examination of the connections between the self-mythologising Marie Corelli and her fictional counterparts in the Mapp and Lucia novels of EF Benson.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Cabarets of Death, a book about the otherworldly cabarets of Montmartre by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen.

10 essential Japanese reggae releases selected by Kay Suzuki.

• Mix of the week: A Fact Mix by Venus Ex Machina.

Modern Art in Mid-Century Comics.

• RIP Michael Gambon.

Planet Caravan (1970) by Black Sabbath | Planet Queen (1971) by T. Rex | Oszillator Planet Concert (1971) by Tangerine Dream

McCallum reads Lovecraft

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Art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

RIP David McCallum, who I prefer to remember for his role as one half of the weirdest-TV-duo-ever, Sapphire and Steel. McCallum was a minor sex symbol in the 1960s, thanks to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a celebrity that led to his conducting a series of instrumental pop albums. I’ve never heard any of these but they have their champions. They were followed in the 1970s by a number of readings for the Caedmon label which included three albums of HP Lovecraft stories. The Dunwich Horror is one I’ve referred to in the past since I used to own a knackered copy. As a reading it’s pretty good, slightly edited but with the novelty of allowing you to hear McCallum recite the famous “As a foulness shall ye know them” passage from the Necronomicon. These commissions no doubt came about simply because McCallum was available but his Lovecraft recordings gain a deeper resonance in the light of his later exploits with Joanna Lumley in the haunted corridors of Time. Some of the malign forces that Sapphire and Steel face aren’t so distant from Lovecraft’s interdimensional “Old Ones”, unfathomable entities seeking ingress to the material universe.

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Cover art uncredited.

All of the McCallum Lovecraft albums are now on YouTube so the curious may listen to the recordings without searching for rare (and expensive) vinyl:

The Rats in the Walls (1973)
The Dunwich Horror (1976)
The Haunter of the Dark (1979)

The reading of The Rats in the Walls doesn’t edit Lovecraft’s xenophobia so anyone unwilling to hear a racial epithet used as a name for a pet cat should avoid that particular recording. The first album, which included a sleeve note from August Derleth, is also the only one of the three that was reissued. I wonder whether The Dunwich Horror might have fared better if it didn’t have such appallingly amateurish cover art. A shame the Dillons weren’t able to illustrate that one as well.

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Art by Les Katz.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Haunted Corridors: The Temporal Enigmas of Sapphire and Steel