Lightning & Kinglyface’s paper forest; photo by Jeff Moore.

Tunnel 228 is a collaboration between Kevin Spacey in his position as artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre, and experimental theatre company Punchdrunk staging an art installation/performance work in tunnels beneath Waterloo, London. Mention of the magic word “Metropolis” (in its Fritz Lang context) caught my attention, the network of tunnels being filled in part by the sounds of clanking machinery. Visitors get to explore the paper forest shown above and may also see:

…tiny models of people in hidden nooks…a gilded statue of two fighting angels…spooky dummies of masked workers by artist Mark Jenkins, and bizarre still scenes, including a woman slumped over a melting table, by Polly Morgan.

The show runs from May 8th for fifteen days and is free but already seems to be fully booked going by the frustrated comments on this page. The rest of us will have to be intrigued by photos and hope that events such as this inspire artists and theatre groups elsewhere.

• Tunnel vision of underground art | Guardian feature.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Polly Morgan, fine art taxidermist
• Metropolis posters

In honour of the great news that a print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been discovered containing scenes long-believed to have been lost, here’s a link to my favourite Guy Maddin film, The Heart of the World. Maddin’s short is six minutes of frenetic genius which references Metropolis in passing although it owes far more to Expressionist cinema and the avant garde propaganda works of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and others. I like Maddin’s films a lot, especially the luxuriantly camp Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, but sometimes his eccentricities can be overbearing at feature length. Heart of the World by contrast is just perfect.

YouTube has a few other Maddin shorts including his BBC-commissioned The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (1995), based on a picture by Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. Also the long version of Sissy Boy Slap Party from the same year, which comes across as a crazy blend of South Pacific outtakes, Fassinbinder’s Querelle and Martin Denny exotica, in a style as frenetic as Heart of the World. Hilarious and homoerotic in equal measure.

• I cast Ann Savage as my mother | Guy Maddin on his new film, My Winnepeg

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exotica!
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Metropolis posters

The cover of The Evanescent City shows a night view of Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few remaining structures from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that was held in San Francisco in 1915. After earlier posts about ephemeral architecture and the futuristic visions of Hugh Ferriss, I stumbled across the Books about California site which features a wealth of scanned volumes, including a number of books and pamphlets devoted to the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Expositions and World’s Fairs hold a particular attraction for enthusiasts of architectural invention, not least for the way they allow architects the opportunity to create structures that would otherwise never be built.

Palace of Horticulture—Dome and Spires by Night from The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition.

At night, when the powerful searchlights within the dome are played upon the translucent glass, the effect is magical, the reflections weirdly changing in color and shape. The rich details of the decorations are softened in the night light.

The Panama-Pacific Exposition and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago fascinate owing to the insight they give into the 19th- and early-20th century architectural imagination. This invariably meant huge towers, enormous domes and everything ladled with elaborate decoration, the Panama-Pacific Exposition being especially decadent in this respect, numbering a jewel-spangled tower among its attractions. With the Bauhaus innovations a few years away this was the last time the world would be offered a reflection of itself that was so excessively indebted to the past. If Hugh Ferriss shows us a vision of the world like that in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the Panama-Pacific architects invite us to imagine a world like the Slumberland that Winsor McCay created for Little Nemo.

Archive.org has a number of short films showing views of the exposition. Most interesting, if rather crudely made, is The Story of the Jewel City, a brief fantasy about two children exploring the exposition grounds.

The following pictures are a small sample of the amount of material at Books about California. The snake-entwined figure of Helios would have made a good addition to the Men with snakes post while it’s difficult not to smile at the suggestion that the figure of a naked man should be preserved for America’s future gay capital.

Tower of Jewels—the Illumination by Night from The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition.

The Tower takes its name from the thousands of many-colored jewels so cut, polished and suspended that they reflect the sunshine with dazzling brilliancy by day and at night, under the white radiance of the searchlights, clothe the whole structure with shimmering splendor.

The Fountain of Earth from The Court of Ages by Beatrice Wright.

Part of Education Building and Court of Palms looking towards Horticultural Building from Panama-Pacific International Exposition—Popular Information.

Tower and Cascade in Court of Abundance from the Official View Book of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Dedicated to Music and Pageantry. Water in the cascade flows over a scheme of brilliant illumination. Designed by Louis Christian Mullgardt.

Palace of Horticulture—The Dome and East Entrance from The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition.

Helios by Robert I Aitken from The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition.

The Rising Sun by Adolph Alexander Weinman from Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts by Juliet Helena Lumbard James.

This fresh, strong young Sun is about to start on his journey – dawn is soon to break upon the world. With muscles stretched, the wind blowing through his hair, the heavenly joy of the first move expressed upon his face, the vigor of young life pulsating through his body, he will start the chest forward and move those outstretched wings. Let us preserve this glorious figure for our western city. It would so admirably suggest the new light that has been shed upon San Francisco by the Exposition of nineteen hundred and fifteen, as well as the new light occasioned by the opening of the Panama Canal.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ephemeral architecture
• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs
• The World in 2030
• Metropolis posters
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s future city

Philosophy from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929).

I’ve procrastinated for an entire year over the idea of writing something about Hugh Ferriss and now this marvellous Flickr set has forced my hand. Ferriss (1889–1962) was a highly-regarded architectural renderer in the Twenties and Thirties, chiefly employed creating large drawings to show the clients of architects how their buildings would look when completed. But he was also an architectural theorist and his 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, which lays out his ideas for cities of the future, was a major influence on the work I produced for the Lord Horror comics during the 1990s. Ferriss’s book appeared two years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but bears little resemblance to Lang’s simplistic tale, despite superficial similarities. Rather than a science fiction warning, The Metropolis of Tomorrow was a serious proposal for the creation of Art Deco-styled megacities.

Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror #5 (1990).

The Flickr collection is a mixture of Ferriss’s visionary views and more mundane renderings of American skyscrapers. His idea of the city of the future frequently involved rows of towering skyscrapers separated by multi-lane superhighways, a discredited concept now but this doesn’t remove the compelling “what if?” quality from the drawings. The brooding, silhouetted aspect of his work is one of the things which made it attractive to me. Unlike his contemporaries in the rendering field, he often eschewed detail in favour of mass and presence, powerfully evoking the sense of a building as a solid form rather than a mere façade. It’s easy to push that approach further to create buildings that loom and threaten, which is exactly what I did in the Reverbstorm comics, borrowing his technique of applying a mass of shadow to the tops of buildings.

(No title).

The Metropolis of Tomorrow used to be available only as an expensive facsimile edition from The Architectural Press. Happily Dover Publications have now produced their own version although the Amazon reviews criticise its reproductions. I haven’t seen the Dover book but I doubt it includes the long Ferriss essay from the facsimile edition. That essay features many further examples of his speculative drawings including those shown below.

Update: There’s some page scans from Metropolis of Tomorrow at The Nonist.

New York in 1942 (1922).

A City of Needles (1924).

Forecast of the city of the future (1928).

Aerial view of an imaginary city (1930).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer
• The World in 2030
• Metropolis posters
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s future city

Alla Nazimova was another of these exotic creatures, and rather more exotic than most since she was at least a genuine Russian, even if she also had to amend her given name (Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon) to exaggerate the effect. Like an opera diva or a great ballerina she dropped her forename as her career progressed, and is billed as Nazimova only in her 1923 screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé. Nazimova inaugurated the project, produced it and even part-financed it since the studios, increasingly worried by pressure from moral campaigners, regarded it as a dangerously decadent work. Nazimova had a rather colourful off-screen life and the stories of orgiastic revels at her mansion, the Garden of Allah, probably didn’t help matters.

Salomé lobby card (1923).

Salomé: The Peacock Skirt by Aubrey Beardsley (1893).

It may seem bizarre to make a silent film of a stage play but silent adaptations of Shakespeare had been around since film’s earliest days. The task of adapting Wilde was given to Natacha Rambova, wife of Rudolph Valentino. If you’re going to cut down the available dialogue, however, it helps if the audience is familiar with the story. Nazimova’s audience in 1923 would have known of Salomé from their Bibles but Wilde’s play has rarely been considered a stage masterwork and remains largely unknown even today. The film’s intertitles were deemed too wordy and the production flopped as a result. This is a shame since the film is a curiosity, not least for the decision to base the production design on the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations that have accompanied (overshadowed, even) the printed edition of the play since its first publication.

Salomé: The Climax by Aubrey Beardsley (1893).

The film remains intriguing also for its distinctly gay aura. Nazimova was a lesbian and, in one of those rumours that persists around certain productions, was said to have demanded that most, if not all, the cast be gay or bisexual. The director certainly was. Charles Bryant (also an actor) lived with Nazimova in what was known at the time as a “lavender marriage”, a partnership between a gay man and a lesbian that enabled both to masquerade in a manner acceptable to contemporary mores. I haven’t read Gavin Lambert’s biography of Nazimova so details about the rest of the cast are sketchy but we know there was at least one other gay actor involved. Arthur Jasmine who played the page of Herodias was known in later life as Sampson (also Samson) de Brier and his house and person feature prominently in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

Nazimova and Arthur Jasmine in a shot modelled on Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt.

Salomé is available in the US on DVD accompanied by another curious Biblical work with prurient interest, Lot in Sodom (1933).

On a final note, the associations between Salomé and silent cinema carry over to my own Salomé picture from 2002. This was a Photoshop collage which began life as a rather chaste still of silent star Norma Talmadge. I gave Norma a pair of bare breasts, a beaded necklace, bangles and a severed head to hold. I hope she forgives me.

Salomé by Coulthart (2002).

• Salomé movie photo gallery
• A review from Motion Picture magazine, October 1922
• The complete text of Wilde’s play in French (as originally written) and English
• A complete set of Beardsley’s Salomé illustrations

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky
• Metropolis posters
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Designer: Heinz Schulz-Neudamm.
As of 2005, the world’s most expensive film poster, selling for $690,000.

Is the picture on the left the original jacket of Thea von Harbou’s novel? Information is scarce although the poster next to it is by Werner Graul who may have produced both designs.

Designer: Josef Bottlik

Designer: Boris Bilinsky.

Designer: Boris Bilinsky.

Designer: Boris Bilinsky.

Designer: Boris Bilinsky.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Film noir posters