Gérald Frydman – { feuilleton }

Parade de Satie

The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

In 1917, the evening of the first performance of Parade, I did astonish him.

This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

Jean Cocteau (again), writing in The Difficulty of Being about the opening night of Parade, the “ballet réaliste” he created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Erik Satie wrote the music, Léonide Massine choreographed the dance, and Pablo Picasso designed the costumes and decor, with assistance from Giacomo Balla, one of the Italian Futurists. The reception for Parade wasn’t as thoroughly hostile as that received by Le Sacre du Printemps a few years earlier but there was bait enough for the reactionaries, with ragtime quotes in the dance and the music, and an everyday setting in which a group of street performers attempt to summon a crowd to see their show. Other details were overtly avant-garde: some of Picasso’s costumes were more like wearable cardboard sculptures, while Cocteau further antagonised the audience (and the composer) by adding the sounds of a typewriter, siren, pistol and steamship whistle to the music. The most significant response came from Apollinaire when he described the ballet in the programme notes as “une sorte de surréalisme“, giving the world a new word which we still use today.

Parade de Satie by Koji Yamamura is an animated presentation of Satie’s music which sees the characters from the ballet—a Chinese magician, a small American girl, the acrobats, a pantomime horse—jumping and dancing around the screen while Satie, Picasso and Cocteau observe the proceedings. It’s a lively and witty film, probably more lively than the ballet itself when the hand-drawn performers are less encumbered by gravity or their unwieldy outfits. Yamamura has directed a single animated feature, Dozens of Norths, and many more shorts like Parade de Satie, including films based on a story by Franz Kafka (A Country Doctor) and the life of Eadweard Muybridge (Muybridge’s Strings). Being a pioneer of motion photography and inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, Muybridge is an attractive subject for animators. The naked figures from his studies of human and animal motion turn up in Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, while Gérald Frydman directed a short biographical film about Muybridge, Le Cheval de Fer, in 1984.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu
• Orphée posters
• Cocteau and Lovecraft
• Cocteau drawings
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Providence on DVD

Providence (1977). Polish poster by Andrzej Klimowski.

After mentioning Alain Resnais’s Providence in the Sibylle Ruppert post I tried searching eBay again to see if any of the long-deleted French DVDs of the film could be found for under £100. This has been at the top of my DVD/blu-ray wants list for some time even though I’ve had an illicit DVD rip for a couple of years. I like having hard copies of favourite films, however, and this particular one has been bizarrely, stubbornly unavailable for far too long. Is it streaming somewhere? Probably. That may be fine for you but I don’t use those services.

Anyway, there were no French DVDs at all but there are now plenty of these, a new Italian DVD which is almost the same as the French one—Italian/English audio tracks rather than French/English—with the same bonus feature about the making of the film. (French or Italian, the film was shot in English with a British and American cast.) I could enthuse at length about Providence but it’s one of those films that’s probably best seen without knowing too much in advance. Last Year at Marienbad is the film for which Alain Resnais will always be remembered but Providence is very clever and more fun to watch. Jan Dawson in Time Out described it as “a haunted, haunting journey through the corridors of the unconscious mind…a Freudian ballet that is also pure cinema.” The original screenings in France were accompanied by Scarabus, a very strange animated short by Gérald Frydman.

So that’s another one to tick off the list, although I’d still prefer a blu-ray edition; the sombre photography by Ricardo Aronovich deserves as much. Meanwhile, I think another Resnais film, Je t’aime, Je t’aime, may now be at the top of the wants list. Either that or a collection of all the short films made by Anthony Balch in the 1960s, although I’m not expecting these to surface any time soon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Providence
• Marienbad hauntings
• Les Statues Meurent Aussi, a film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais
• Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais

Short films by Gérald Frydman

Scarabus.

After writing about Gérald Frydman’s animated short Scarabus (1971) last year it’s taken me all this time to get round to watching the other films on his Vimeo channel, most of which are also animations. Scarabus was of interest for its deftly-crafted Surrealism, and there’s more of the same in some of these later films, especially Agulana. As with another Belgian director, Raoul Servais, Frydman directs all his films but doesn’t always animate them himself, hence the variety of art styles.

Agulana (1976) is a kind of sequel to Scarabus with human figures being menaced and oppressed in a transforming environment. The Magritte quotient in films such as this raises the question of whether Magritte-ness (for want of a better term) is a quality unique to René Magritte or a component of the general Belgian character. Jonathan Meades insists on the latter in an excellent film of his own about Belgium.

Alepha (1980) is more Surrealism, which in this case brings to mind the animated films of Piotr Kamler. Naked figures drift over landscapes filled with ambulatory spheres, vast spikes and other structures. Where Kamler favoured electronic soundtracks by Luc Ferrari and Bernard Parmegiani, Frydman has regular collaborator Alain Pierre provide a score of electronic drones.

La Photographie (1983) is the first of two short films set in the 19th century. This one is little more than an anecdote, with a bored family forced to remain motionless while their photograph is taken, a process that lasts for the entire duration of the film. Outside the studio we see a Jules Verne wonderland of new inventions—dirigibles, rapid transport, electric light, typewriters and so on—where the frenetic activity contrasts with the inertia of the photographic process.

Le Cheval de Fer (1984) is another photographic anecdote, this time concerning the wager prompted by an argument about whether a horse’s legs left the ground when it was galloping (and if so, at what point). The argument was famously settled by Eadweard Muybridge who invented a system to photographically record animal locomotion, thus paving the way for cinema, and for film animation.

Les Effaceurs (1991) is Surrealism of a dark and disturbing kind with people urgently trying to scrub away their facial features.

Also on Frydman’s channel is La Sequence Silverstein (2000), a short science-fiction scenario which he wrote but didn’t direct. This one is live action and with dialogue in unsubtitled French. It not bad but I prefer the animations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Raoul Servais: Courts-Métrages
• Scarabus, a film by Gérald Frydman
• L’Araignéléphant
• Le labyrinthe and Coeur de secours
• Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler

Scarabus, a film by Gérald Frydman

Another tip from Philip Strick’s Science Fiction Movies (1976) (previously) that’s also another short animated film I hadn’t seen before. Gérald Frydman is a Belgian director, and Scarabus (1971) was his debut film. As with a number of the selections in Strick’s book, Scarabus tends more towards Surrealism than science fiction, although this always depends how broadly you define SF: identical men in black clothes populate a crumbling urban environment where much of the architecture is inside out and upside down, and unidentified yellow blobs clutter the place. Airships drift overhead while the men interact with each other, sometimes in a violent manner. The meaning may be elusive but it’s all very well done, and the film was later chosen to accompany the French theatrical screenings of Alain Resnais’s Providence. That’s what I call a good night out.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica