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Italo Calvino: L’écrivain perché

The first minute of this Franco-German documentary doesn’t present a title in English but the French title, L’écrivain perché, refers to Le Baron perché, one of Italo Calvino’s earliest novels which English readers know as Baron in the Trees. The novel isn’t the first of Calvino’s flights of fancy—The Cloven Viscount preceded it—but in borrowing its title the documentary suggests that the tree-dwelling Baron’s new way of living and viewing the world was personally significant for its author, something supported by the opening interview clip.

A promising start, then, so it’s a shame that the documentary as a whole isn’t very satisfying. As with last week’s science-fiction documentary, the best parts are the extracts from interviews with Calvino himself, and I’d have preferred to see more of these than hear from random individuals (the inevitable academics, an American writer, a musician) whose comments aren’t without value but who use up time that might have been better spent describing for those unfamiliar with Calvino’s work the origin and structure of his fictions. I can tell you, for example, that the stories in Cosmicomics (1965) are the closest that Calvino came to outright science fiction; that The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) is a novel based around a series of Tarot readings, with the layout of those readings appearing beside the text in the book; that Invisible Cities (1972) is a book-length conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the Venetian explorer presents capsule descriptions of the places he’s encountered on his travels; that If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) is a masterpiece of self-reflexive writing… And so on. The documentary, unfortunately, tells you none of these things, and hardly mentions these books at all, leaving the unfamiliar viewer with no clue as to why Calvino became one of Italy’s most popular writers during his lifetime, and why he continues to be popular today. One of the worst examples of this is when his French translator talks about Calvino’s relocation to Paris in 1967, an event which brought him into the orbit of the Oulipo writers. There’s a brief explanation of the Oulipo group using formal constraints to reinvent their fiction but no mention of what this meant to Calvino or whether the formal restraints in the novels and stories he produced after 1967 were influenced by Oulipo or not.

I wouldn’t usually spend so much time writing about something which was dissatisfying but, as with the SF documentary, this felt like a missed opportunity. Arte is a public service channel that produces many similar arts documentaries. The Calvino one is well-made, subtitled in English throughout, and contains a large quantity of photographs and scarce film footage which must have taken time to assemble. Despite his continued popularity Italo Calvino has been very poorly served by Anglophone documentaries. The BBC interviewed him in 1985, the last year of his life, but the introduction to the man and his work was crammed into half an episode of Bookmark when he should have been profiled at greater length in an episode of Arena as Jorge Luis Borges was in 1982. Calvino said in the BBC film that he disliked being interviewed—he says something similar in one of the clips here—but he still spent enough time sitting in front of cameras to help support a better documentary.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Invisible Cities (and an invisible author)
• Invisible Cities: Miscellanea
• Seeing Calvino: Invisible Cities
• Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities
• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities
• Le Città In/visibili
• Mikhail Viesel’s Invisible Cities
• Bookmark: Italo Calvino
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

Henri Rivière’s lithographs

Aspects de la nature: La Baie (1897).

Henri Rivière (1864–1951) was a French painter and printmaker whose Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902) is one of my favourite picture series, a Parisian response to Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Rivière’s series is beautifully done, printed in autumnal hues, bound in boards that combine Art Nouveau design with the traditional styling of Japanese books, and with each print signed with a small red monogram. The same monogram—or a variation of it—turns up on many of his other prints, serving to remind the viewer of the artist’s debt to Japanese printmakers. Rivière’s lithographs apply the traditional Japanese arrangement of minimal outline and flat colour to French subjects, with an equivalent care taken over the choice of view and the structure of the composition. In their realistic detail and use of atmospheric effects this is a side of Rivière’s work that looks forward to the ligne claire style of European comic art.

(Note: several of these samples have artificially applied borders which I’ve left as they are.)

Aspects de la nature: La Falaise (1898).

Aspects de la nature: Le Crépuscule (1898).

Paysages parisiens: Du haut des tours de Notre-Dame (1900).

Paysages parisiens: L’île des Cygnes (1900).

Continue reading “Henri Rivière’s lithographs”

Weekend links 846

Design by Randoll Coate for the Labirinto Borges, a hedge maze at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, which was renovated earlier this year.

• “Code was probably our most overtly political record, which is interesting, touring and playing it in these very different but scary political times.” Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire talking about the experience of touring America again.

• At The Daily Heller: A look at the work of designer/illustrator George Hardie whose five-decade career is to be celebrated in a retrospective exhibition in London. There’s more George Hardie here.

• “Almost as soon as weird began circulating outside of Macbeth, its meaning broadened too, from ‘eerie’ and ‘uncanny’ to ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’.” Colin Gorrie on the weird history of the word “weird”.

• At The Quietus: Toby Manning on 40 years of Gone To Earth by David Sylvian. A minor nitpick: the album’s art and design was by Russell Mills, not Vaughan Oliver.

• New music: Burning Song by Kali Malone; Obsessive Surrealism by Parallel Worlds.

• At Door Of Perception: The radical architectural designs of Eugene Tssui.

• DJ Food’s latest accumulation of psychedelic graphics from the desktop.

• Old music: When The Music’s Over (Live, 1970) by The Doors.

• Arthur Brown‘s favourite songs.

• Weird Dream (1976) by Harmonia | It’s So Weird (1983) by Bush Tetras | Ballad Of The Weird Sisters (2013) by Blood Ceremony

Paul Woodroffe’s Tempest

Paul Vincent Woodroffe (1875–1954) was a British illustrator and stained-glass artist, a kind of British equivalent of Harry Clarke in that he seems to have spent more time creating stained glass than he did illustrating books. Woodroffe was also an exact contemporary of Aubrey Beardsley, and both artists provided illustrations in 1897 for The Parade, a heavily-illustrated gift book of stories for children. I’ve known about Woodroffe’s illustrated Tempest for some time but I’ve had to wait to find a decent collection of all the colour plates. Woodroffe was an excellent watercolourist whose nebulous effects are so delicate they might easily be spoiled by poor reproduction. I’m at a loss to say exactly how some of these effects were achieved. He evidently used washes to fill in the sky, a technique where the paint can’t be manipulated before it dries, yet he still has the translucent figures of Ariel and Prospero hovering over some of the scenes. What he seems to have done is painted the transparent figures in very diluted white tones over the backgrounds, a difficult process when you don’t want any pencil outlines showing underneath.

Where the subtance of the text is concerned, Woodroffe adds more to some of the familiar scenes than you find with other artists. For the scene where Ariel is transformed into a harpy Edmund Dulac shows the spirit as an eagle-sized bird; Woodroffe’s Ariel is a larger creature with a fearsome pair of claws. For Ariel’s Song he shows a cowled and enthroned skeletal figure sitting at the bottom of the sea, like Death waiting to make an appearance in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Woodroffe’s human figures are less interesting although still well-drawn, a parade of statuesque types with similar faces and a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite appearance. His book also features three double-page scenes, something you don’t find so often in these coloured editions.

Continue reading “Paul Woodroffe’s Tempest”

It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction!

There’s a worthwhile documentary struggling to be born in this film which is compromised by its hyperbolic title and a running time of 48 minutes, not nearly enough to contain a history of science fiction, past and present. I’m not a media historian so I can’t say whether this was the first serious examination of written science fiction made for British TV but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t have been many that preceded it. It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction! was broadcast in 1973 as part of the BBC’s Omnibus art strand; Harley Cokeliss (credited here as “Cokliss”) was the director, and also the co-writer with Michael Abrams. Two years prior to this Cokeliss had made a shorter BBC film, Crash!, which explored JG Ballard’s ongoing preoccupation with automobile accidents via the rehearsals for Crash in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard turns up again here, theorising energetically about his usual concerns (mass advertising, the media landscape, etc) from a balcony overlooking Heathrow airport.

Cokeliss opens proceedings with the inevitable collage of clips from Flash Gordon and Hollywood films of the 1950s, most of which are appalling quality. If nothing else, this is a good reminder of how terrible feature films used to look when shown on TV. More interesting for today’s viewer is the record of a handful of writers who were seldom personally visible in the mass media even while their stories were being adapted by film and television. Ballard and Brian Aldiss are the representative Brits, all the other writers are Americans: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl and Kurt Vonnegut. Also interviewed is Fritz Lang, who repeats his anecdote about Metropolis being inspired by his visit to New York in the 1920s, and Forrest J. Ackerman is filmed inside his memorabilia-filled house. The absence of women interviewees is unfortunately typical of the time. Kate Wilhelm appears on camera with husband Damon Knight but it’s Knight that does all the talking.

All of the interviews are far too brief for such a wide-ranging subject but it’s still fascinating to see Harlan Ellison at his peak, talking (and typing) at speed. It’s also surprising to find JG Ballard and Frederik Pohl in near agreement when they both describe science fiction as being a reflection of the present as much as it is it is a look into the near or distant future, “a mythology of the Space Age” as Ballard liked to describe it. Science fiction is often both these things simultaneously, predictive and reflective, something its critics don’t always seem to appreciate.

Documentaries also reflect the times in which they’re made, and this is another arts documentary that plunders the prog-rock shelves for its soundtrack music, placing a few bars of Close To The Edge by Yes over shots of New York’s teeming crowds. Harley Cokeliss really should have been given a series instead of a single film in which he flies all over America to capture nothing more than a few brief soundbites. But in 1973 the genre was lucky to get this much attention from one of the BBC’s serious arts outlets. Managerial attitudes did change later in the decade, probably as a result of the resurgence in popularity of SF cinema. In 1979 the BBC made a five-part series about science fiction, Time Out of Mind, where four of the programmes were profiles of single writers—Arthur C. Clarke, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock, and Anne McCaffrey—with other writers appearing in each film. A fifth episode concerned the SF convention that took place in Brighton that year. Ray Bradbury was given the full Omnibus treatment a year later in The Illustrated Man, a typically fine David Wheatley profile, while Philip K. Dick received a posthumous appraisal from Arena in 1994.

Here in 2026 we find ourselves in the future being grasped at in the 1970s where television has now abandoned expensive author profiles unless the author in question is massively popular or the winner of a Nobel prize. With everyone owning a pocket-sized recording device anyone can now make their own television, and so YouTube fills up with hours of amateurish video of people talking into laptops and webcams with poor visuals and dreadful sound. A good documentary is always more than a stream of raw footage; contextualisation and editorial point-of-view are essential, as well as whatever artistry the director might bring to the material. The frame is important, in other words, however compromised that frame may be.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Future Life magazine
• Science Fiction Monthly