Weekend links 683

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She Did Not Turn (1974) by David Inshaw.

• “Pauline Kael compared Bruce Lee to Fred Astaire; I think the comparison works better with Rudolf Nureyev. Astaire had a besuited, playful grace, while Nureyev was shirtless, dramatic, and muscular. Astaire moved with athletic modesty, while Lee’s bravura dominated the screen.” Micah Nathan on 50 years of Enter the Dragon.

• New music: This Stolen Country Of Mine by Alva Noto, and Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Japanese Electronic Music) Vol.1 by Cosmocities Records.

• At Cartoon Brew: A profile of Sally Cruikshank. The spooky psychedelia of Face Like a Frog has long been a favourite round here.

• “My Life in a Hop, Skip and a Jump!” Clive Hicks-Jenkins answers a few questions about his art.

• At Public Domain Review: Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836).

• More martial arts: Tom Wilmot on Bruce Lee’s greatest fight scenes at Golden Harvest.

• Submissions to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lucrecia Martel Day.

• RIP Jane Birkin.

Enter The Dragon (1974) by The Upsetters | Dragon Power (A Tribute To Bruce Lee) (1978) by JKD Band | Edit The Dragon (1985) by Colourbox

The car in the snow

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Dekalog DVD.

Screen-shots from Kieslowski’s Dekalog 3, courtesy of my old Artificial Eye DVDs and the Arrow blu-ray set which arrived this morning. Watching the first couple of episodes on DVD earlier this week I was surprised to find that the picture quality was worse than I remembered—scratches and cue marks all over the place—and especially lacking after watching eight of Kieslowski’s other films in high-definition. I ought to have bought the Arrow collection when it was first released but it didn’t seem really necessary at the time. The picture quality of these restored films is so good I’m tempted to start again from the beginning when I’ve reached the end of the cycle, although going through the horrors of Dekalog 5 twice in one week would be a bit much.

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Dekalog blu-ray.

Anyway, I recommend this set. (It’s also in the Criterion catalogue if you prefer their overpriced discs.) There’s been a spate of news and opinion pieces recently complaining about the current state of cinema, by which people mean American cinema since this is the only variety anyone is supposed to care about. With each fresh complaint all I can hear is John Lydon singing “Burn, Hollywood, burn”. It’s a big cinematic world out there, and “world cinema” is more than just a few shelves in an entertainment store.

• Further reading: “And So On”: Kieslowski’s Dekalog and the Metaphysics of the Everyday by Paul Coates.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Dekalog posters by Ewa Bajek-Wein

The art of Henri van der Stok, 1870–1946

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Mercurius.

Work-related research this week turned up these mask and astrological prints by Henri van der Stok, a Dutch artist who specialised in woodcuts and stained glass. The masks represent planetary spirits, reminding me of the designs that Barney Bubbles created in 1973 for concert-going Hawkwind fans. Artvee has more by van der Stok but nowhere displaying his work seems to have a Taurus print to fill out the Zodiac set.

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Venus.

Any time I see something by one of Aubrey Beardsley’s contemporaries (van der Stok was two years older) I wonder how Beardsley’s work might have developed if he’d managed to live past the age of 25. We can only guess, of course, and even then any speculation will be hazardous when everyone who established themselves in the 1890s had to face the challenges of Modernism, either by ignoring it or embracing the possibilities it offered. Van Der Stok’s early years were spent as a naval officer so he didn’t really have to worry about changing with the times. His designs sit easily among the stylisations of the Deco (or Moderne) period.

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De Aarde.

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Mars.

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Jupiter.

Continue reading “The art of Henri van der Stok, 1870–1946”

Dekalog posters by Ewa Bajek-Wein

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One of the pleasures of our age of cultural plenitude is the opportunity to immerse yourself in entire filmographies. I did this recently with almost all of Wes Anderson’s films (I skipped Bottle Rocket, and I still haven’t seen Asteroid City); last week it was the turn of Krzysztof Kieslowski, with a run through four of his Polish films—The Scar, Camera Buff, Blind Chance and No End—followed by the final quartet of The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colours Trilogy. This week I’ll be working my way through Kieslowski’s Dekalog, a cycle of ten hour-long films that I’ve had on disc for years but not watched all the way through for some time.

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Dekalog (or The Decalogue) is a series that Kieslowski made for Polish TV in 1988, although subsequent acclaim for the cycle (famously from Stanley Kubrick) has seen it treated as a work of cinema in its own right, albeit one that few people are likely to watch in a single sitting. Two of the films were also expanded to feature length and released individually as A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing. Each film concerns different inhabitants of the same housing estate, with the problems they face (or that they create) being related to one of the Ten Commandments. None of the Commandments are named as such, we’re left to guess from the numbers which is which. I imagine this would have been more obvious to an audience in Poland where Catholicism remained a dominant presence despite the disapproval of the Communist authorities. I was dragged through the Catholic church as a child but I still couldn’t list all the Ten Commandments today without cheating. Kieslowski’s films aren’t as dourly moralistic as this structure might suggest. Ironic circumstance was one of his persistent themes, his characters usually find their desires thwarted or fulfilled in ways they didn’t anticipate at all. Fate, rather than the hand of God also plays a part, dramatically so in Blind Chance where we see three different futures for a young student running to catch a train.

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Ewa Bajek-Wein’s posters turned up when I was searching for designs by Andrzej Pagowski, an artist responsible for many of the Polish posters for Kieslowski’s films, including the two Dekalog features. Bajek-Wein’s designs, created for a 2009 reissue of the cycle, continue the Polish tradition of original and unorthodox approaches to the cinema poster which extends in this case to the graphics as well as the artwork. Titles and other credits on 20th-century Polish posters were often casually hand-lettered, with the details pushed to the margins. The artwork here maintains the elusiveness of the theme; if you don’t know which number relates to which Commandment you’re left to guess from the picture. Films five and six are easy enough to decipher but I’ll be looking up the titles of the rest before I watch them again.

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Continue reading “Dekalog posters by Ewa Bajek-Wein”

Weekend links 682

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La Voie Lactée (1921) by George Barbier.

• Fun news of the week: “The Taylor Swift vinyl haunted by Britain’s weirdest musicians.” The “weirdness” is tracks from Happy Land: A Compendium of Electronic Music from the British Isles 1992–1996 which have been mispressed onto Swift’s latest, the re-recorded Speak Now. One of the offending pieces is Soul Vine (70 Billion People) by Cabaret Voltaire, a relatively understated instrumental from the Plasticity album which features samples from the Demon with a Glass Hand episode of The Outer Limits. “It’s possibly the most subversive thing we’ve ever done,” says Stephen Mallinder. Adventurous Swifties looking to broaden their horizons are advised to try The Crackdown next.

• “For McCarthy, violence is the signature of God: God, who cannot be seen, who is only indicated by an absence, who no amount of experimenting or observing will reveal, but whose existence is in evidence all around us, every day, through the apocalyptic and apophatic violence that makes up the very stuff of the world.” JC Scharl on the violent faith of Cormac McCarthy.

• Strange news of the week: Reclusive guitarist Master Wilburn Burchette (age 84) was found dead in a house with the body of his younger brother (age 76) after decades spent avoiding anyone showing an interest in his music. Numero Group, the label behind the recent reissues of Burchette’s albums, posted an interview from 2018.

Takrar by Waref Abu Quba is “an experimental film that celebrates the timeless and intricate beauty of ancient craftsmanship. Filmed in Istanbul, the film takes us on a mesmerizing journey into the past, paying homage to Islamic, Ottoman, Greek, and Byzantine art forms.”

• “Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?” Probably not, but if it was in the deep past how would we know? Joel Froelich investigates.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Visual evidence from almost every museum devoted to prestidigitation in the world (for Derek McCormack).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Osaka celebrates Star Festival with river of 40,000 LED lights evoking the Milky Way.

• At Unquiet Things: Even more sneak peeks from The Art of Fantasy.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – July 2023 at Ambientblog.

• At The Daily Heller: Sign writing and glass engraving.

Out Of Limits (1963) by The Marketts | Trip Through The Milky Way–An Electronic Panorama (1969) by Raymond Moore | Milky Way (1971) by Weather Report