From HP Lovecraft to another writer of weird fiction, Gustav Meyrink. Das Haus zur letzten Latern is a tribute to Meyrink by Silence & Strength and the package I designed late last year for Horus CyclicDaemon has just been released. I’ve mentioned before that Horus make a particular effort with all their CD productions, choosing their materials carefully, and this release is no exception. An envelope of green textured card has two of my designs embossed on either side. Inside this there’s another envelope containing the disc and an 8-page A5 booklet of dark green ink on heavy paper with a grainy texture. The music is suitably dark and atmospheric and would work very well as a soundtrack to Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920). Seeing as Wegener’s film is the most famous Meyrink adaptation I borrowed the shapes of Prague buildings from one of the original film posters. The rest of the graphics are done in a very spare, quasi-Expressionist drawing style which was a pleasure to do since it’s quite different to my usual work. The background of the booklet pages show an old map of Meyrink’s city, Prague.

When people have asked me recently what I think about the proliferation of music downloads I tell them that the best way for record labels (and book publishers for that matter) to continue to attract purchasers is to make beautiful objects which people feel compelled to own. The content is always endlessly reproducible, the packaging isn’t. As far as this argument goes, Horus CyclicDaemon has been ahead of the game for some time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for November II
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

The original Polish poster by the incredible Franciszek Starowieyski.

The shrinking pool of films still unavailable on DVD contracted by at least one title recently with the surprise appearance in the UK of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydra; 1973) from the distinctively-named Mr Bongo Films. I’ve been waiting to see this for at least twenty years so being able to walk into Fopp and buy a copy for a mere £12 strikes me as one of those small but rarely acknowledged miracles of contemporary existence.

Director Wojciech Has is more well-known for his long and weird 1965 adaptation of the equally long and weird Saragossa Manuscript, a rambling semi-fantastical novel by Jan Potocki from around 1805. David Lynch described Saragossa as “Simultaneously horrific, erotic and funny…this is one mother of a film,” and the same description could be applied to The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, as far as I’m aware the only other excursion Has made into full-on strangeness. If anything, Sanatorium outdoes his earlier work on just about every level. Readers familiar with the writings of Bruno Schulz will already have recognised the title as being a truncated variant of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the second and final collection of Schulz’s unique and very strange stories.

“Very strange” is the key here and Has’s film resists easy summary as much as Schulz’s mercurial fiction. Rather than attempt a description myself it’s easier to borrow one from the Mr Bongo site:

The film depicts its protagonist, Joseph (Jan Nowicki), traveling through a dream-like world, taking a dilapidated train to visit his dying father in a sanatorium. When he arrives at the hospital, he finds the entire facility is going to ruin and no one seems to be in charge, or even caring for the patients. Time appears to behave in unpredictable ways, reanimating the past in an elaborate artificial caprice. The many occurrences in this visually potent phantasmagoria include Joseph re-entering childhood episodes with his eccentric father (who lives with birds), being arrested by a mysterious unit of soldiers, reflecting on a girl he knew in his boyhood and bringing historic wax figures to life with names from a postage stamp album. Throughout his strange journey, an ominous blind train conductor reappears like a death figure. Has also adds a series of reflections on the Holocaust that were not present in the original novel, reading Schulz’s prose through the prism of the author’s tragic death during World War II and the demise of the world he described.

That’s an adequate description of the narrative but how and why one scene links to the next and what it all means is anybody’s guess. This isn’t a complaint; I seek out these unusual works, after all, and we’re overburdened with films whose every last plot detail is spoon-fed to lazy audiences. Schulz readers will at least recognise the territory, especially the recurrent scenes with aged Jews and garment traders, but one has to wonder how this would strike an unprepared viewer. Is Schulz’s work so familiar in Poland that there was a ready audience for this? Or was the director taking advantage of Film Polski’s funding to make something closer to poetry than narrative cinema? Whatever the answer, the film is beautifully lit and photographed and the continual procession of bizarre scenes and surprising images means that it doesn’t tax your patience even if you remain bewildered much of the time.

Hour-Glass Sanatorium is another of those oddities that seems to owe its existence almost solely to the economics of the Iron Curtain countries which (often reluctantly) provided financing for works that the more nakedly commercial “freedom” of the West would never support. This isn’t to say the Communist system was better—Andrei Tarkovsky went into exile and Sergei Paradjanov was put into prison—but its probable that without the Cold War we wouldn’t have had Stalker or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or a wealth of imaginative animation from Yuri Norstein, Jan Svankmajer, Karel Zeman, Jiri Barta and others. I’m certain we wouldn’t have had Wojciech Has’s unique fantasies. And now I really have to watch this film again.

• Franciszek Starowieyski poster galleries here and here
• The Art of Bruno Schulz
• Saragossa Manuscript film site

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Karel Zeman
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• The Stalker meme
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• The Cracow Klezmer Band, John Zorn and Bruno Schulz
• Barta’s Golem

Pages from Der Amethyst (1906).

Okay, don’t get too excited, I simply wanted to make a couple of points of order while this story is still causing a stir. I noted earlier the recent (London) Times piece about James Hawes’ new book, Excavating Kafka, described as a work which:

seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Hawes claims to have been surprised, if not shocked, by the discovery—new to him but not to Kafka scholars, it seems—of Kafka’s collection of Franz Blei publications, The Amethyst and Opals. Blei published Kafka’s short stories as well as other literary works and fits the mould of many small publishers (Leonard Smithers and Maurice Girodias come to mind) who financed poorly-selling literature with erotic titles. Kafka may well have been “paid” for his writing with these books. However:

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

Read the rest of the breathless saga here. The Times doesn’t show any of the pictures in that piece but the paper edition showed a drawing which looked like the usual erotica of the period, a slightly cruder version of the kind of thing done so well by artists like Franz von Bayros. So not photographs, then, but drawings. Sure enough, descriptions of Blei’s books list well-known names such as Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Kubin, Thomas Theodore Heine, Karl Hofer, Félicien Rops, and von Bayros. Yesterday’s Guardian examined some of the reaction to Hawes’ assertions from other Kafka scholars which is generally hostile, their counter-assertion being that he’s making a mountain out of a molehill. That piece includes another description of the depraved contents:

They include images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg.

Hmm…Beardsley, sliced-open leg? That could only be Aubrey’s illustration for Lucian’s True History. Sensitive readers may wish to avert their gaze.

Birth from the Calf of the Leg. Illustration intended for Lucian’s True History (1894). Not used, but published in An Issue of Five Drawings Illustrative of Juvenal and Lucian by Leonard Smithers, London (1906).

Shocking stuff. Allow me to veer from the point for a moment with Beardsley scholar Brian Reade’s explanation of that drawing:

This illustration (was) rejected from the 1894 and 1902 editions of Lucian’s True History. At the time when it was drawn the artist was obsessed by foetuses and irregular births; creatures derived from the foetus form occur in the Bon-Mots series, in The Kiss of Judas, in Salome and elsewhere. That he chose to illustrate this subject suggests that there may have been a latent strain of homosexuality in Beardsley. Lucian describes in his True History the way in which children are born in the kingdom of Endymion on the Moon. “They are not begotten of women, but of mankind: for they have no other marriage but of males: the name of woman is wholly unknown among them: until they accomplish the age of five and twenty years, they are given in marriage to others: from that time forwards they take others in marriage to themselves: for as soon as the infant is conceived the leg begins to swell, and afterwards when the time of birth is come, they give it a lance and take it out dead: then they lay it abroad with open mouth towards the wind, and so it takes life: and I think thereof the Grecians call it the belly of the leg, because therein they bear their children instead of a belly”. Lucian also explains that “their boys admit copulation, not like unto ours, but in their hams, a little above the calf of the leg for there they are open”.

The other drawings mentioned by the Guardian don’t sound familiar but may well be by Alfred Kubin who produced a number of curious erotic pieces, one of which is in my Art of Ejaculation post. Meanwhile Die Welt Online reproduces some of the Félicien Rops pictures in a small gallery, all of which are rather innocuous depictions of prostitutes.

Rops could be a lot weirder and wilder than this. (See his Octopus drawing of 1900.) I haven’t seen Hawes’ book yet, but going on this evidence it seems the Kafka scholars may have a point about his inflated claims. Much of this work was shocking at the time, of course, and open publication of some of it would have been an invitation to an obscenity prosecution. But I’ll let the Kafka scholars haggle over Franz’s reputation, quasi-saintly or not; the main point for me was that the works in question are very familiar to anyone who knows the art of the period. So in place of rancour, here’s a nice homoerotic painting by another of the artists published by Blei, Karl Hofer, in style and colour reminiscent of Picasso’s Rose Period pictures.

Drei Badende Jünglinge by Karl Hofer (1907).

Update: this volume finally turned up in the Savoy Books office so I was able to look through it. The Beardsley picture above is indeed among the very few examples of “Kafka’s porn”, used without any credit and Beardsley receives no mention in the index. There’s also a Félicien Rops drawing with a caption which says it “may be Victorian”, along with a couple of other pieces, all equally uncredited. Yes, that’s the level of the scholarship at work here; the author couldn’t even be bothered to research the art in question. Summary: worthless.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Tulips Shall Grow (1942).

Film producer George Pal’s run of fantasy and science fiction films are justly celebrated and include one particular favourite of mine, The Time Machine (1960). Prior to the 1950s, however, Pal was known for his distinctive animations using wooden puppets, a technique which acquired several names, Pal Doll, Madcap Models and Puppetoons. Europa Film Treasures has two choice examples of these, La Grande Revue Philips from 1938, a promotional work for the Dutch radio company, and Tulips Shall Grow, a striking piece of wartime propaganda from 1942. The latter is especially worth a watch, not least for the way its scenes of destruction prefigure similar scenes in Pal’s updating of War of the Worlds ten years later.

The few Puppetoons I’ve seen have a unique atmosphere, the brightly-lit wooden characters seem hyper-real, like computer graphics decades before their time, while the movement tends to be bouncy and repetitive due to the figures having a limited range of poses. The only animation I can think of with a similar quality—and which may well have been influenced by Pal’s work—is Inspiration, Karel Zeman’s animation of glass figures from 1949. Some of Pal’s later films used his Puppetoon technique, notably tom thumb (1958), a film which also featured Jessie Matthews (aka Mrs Lord Horror in David Britton’s mythos) in one of her last screen appearances.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Karel Zeman
• Barta’s Golem

From the German National Library, a postcard dated 1918 from Franz Kafka to his publisher, Kurt Wolff. These are press images so the links are to big scans.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka

Portrait of Georges Rodenbach by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1895).

Georges Rodenbach’s short, atmospheric novel is one of the key texts of Symbolism, not only for its themes but also for the art it either inspired or complemented. Bruges-la-Morte was first published in 1892 and the recent Dedalus Books edition, edited by Alan Hollinghurst and with a new translation by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone, was reprinted late last year.

Bruges-la-Morte…concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the ‘dead city’, becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugue’s obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues onto a plank walk of psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This is a poet’s novel and is therefore metaphorically dense and visionary in style. It is the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach’s lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges.

One of the Bruges-la-Morte photographs.

Bruges-la-Morte was one of the first (the first?) novels to incorporate photographs with the text and any decent edition of the book should always include these. Rodenbach’s novel is usually linked with French Symbolist artist Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer since the two men were friends and the artist produced the well-known portrait of Rodenbach shown above. Lévy-Dhurmer’s drawings and paintings of Bruges are a good match for Rodenbach’s writing, and one his Bruges pieces illustrates the cover of the Dedalus edition.

Bruges—Snow Effect by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1900).

I usually contend, however, that it was another Symbolist artist inspired by Bruges and by Rodenbach’s novel, the Belgian Fernand Khnopff, whose work manages to be even more evocative than Lévy-Dhurmer’s, and consequently more suited to the theme. His touch was lighter and he had a superb ability to convey a sense of stillness and quiet mystery. (Coincidentally but unsurprisingly, both artists produced works entitled Silence.) Khnopff’s curious Abandoned City of 1904 (below), showing the sea flooding a town square, prefigures Surrealism and the haunted vistas of fellow Belgians René Magritte and Paul Delvaux.

Bruges-la-Morte by Fernand Khnopff (1892).

Une Ville Abandonnée by Fernand Khnopff (1904).

Dedalus Books has had its existence threatened recently due to proposed Arts Council cuts which would prevent the publisher from financing new translations of decadence and imaginative fiction. I’ve already signed their petition against this and I’d encourage anyone who cares for this kind of work to do the same. And if you’re feeling generous, you could always buy one of their books, of course.

See also:
• Bruges of sighs by Alan Hollinghurst
• Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism

Le Lac d’amour, Bruges by Fernand Khnopff (1904–1905).

Souvenir de Bruges. L’entrée du Béguinage by Fernand Khnopff (1904).

A Bruges. Un Portail by Fernand Khnopff (1904).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin

• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander

• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

• Der Orchideengarten

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• Harry Clarke’s stained glass

• Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray

• Peake’s Pan

• Pite’s West End folly

• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause

• The White Peacock

• Einar Nerman

• More Arabian Nights

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

• Butterfly women

• Jugend Magazine

• The art of Maxwell Armfield, 1881–1972

• Buccaneers #1

• The art of Claude Fayette Bragdon, 1866–1946

• The art of Dugald Stewart Walker, 1883–1937

• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

• December and Vernon Hill

• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008

• Last in Line by Light Syndicate

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Peacocks

• The art of John Hurford

• La belle sans nom

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• Ronald Searle book covers

• Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein

• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

• The faces of Parsifal

• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal

• The art of Mahlon Blaine, 1894–1969

• Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours

• San Francisco angels

• Maldoror illustrated

• The monstrous tome

• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

• The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933

• The art of Ian Miller

• Dorothy Lathrop’s Three Mulla-mulgars

• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

• Meggendorfer’s Blatter

• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil

• Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927

• Dorian Gray revisited

• William Blake in Manchester

• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow

• Petrucelli’s Christmas

• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

• The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries

• The poster art of Richard Amsel

• Family Dog postcards

• Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

• The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

• The art of George Sheringham, 1884–1937

• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem

• The art of John Bauer, 1882–1918

• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer

• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

• Howard Pyle’s pirates

• Rex Whistler revisited

• The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

• The art of Patten Wilson, 1868–1928

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• The poster art of Bob Peak

• The Illustrators of Alice

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

• The Decorative Age

• The art of Erik Desmazières

• Images of Nijinsky

• The World in 2030

• Wladyslaw Benda

• The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

• The art of Rex Whistler, 1905–1944

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Inspiration (1949).

Karel Zemen (1910–1989) is a filmmaker I’m often telling people about but whose work isn’t easy to see. So it’s good to find that YouTube has gained some clips of his animations and examples of the partly-animated adventure films he made in the Fifties and Sixties. Zeman was yet another great Czech animator and the YouTube collection includes his most celebrated short, Inspiration, which gave life to glass figurines, an unyielding medium that he moves as expressively as if it was clay or plasticine.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1961).

The adventure films are predominantly based on Jules Verne and place live actors into animated settings, many of which are taken directly from (or intended to imitate) the engraved illustrations of the original novels. The animation enabled Zeman to fill his films with dirigibles, submarines and various steam contraptions which would be too expensive to create otherwise. Zeman’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen took the Gustave Doré illustrations for its visual style which is something this particular Doré fan appreciates, and the film is closer to the spirit of the Raspe novel than the Nazi adaptation of 1943 or Terry Gilliam’s later version. The results are a lot more artificial than the seamless blend of animation and live action attempted by Ray Harryhausen in his own Jules Verne film, Mysterious Island, but the artificiality gives the films a distinctive charm.

• A Deadly Invention aka The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne trailer (1958)
• Excerpts from Baron Munchausen (1961)
• The Special Effects of Karel Zeman pt. I | pt. II

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Barta’s Golem
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

Der Golem, first edition (1915) and Dover reprint (1986).
Illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag.

Before leaving Prague (for the time being), it’s worth mentioning the lithograph illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945) for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem. These atmospheric drawings always remind me of the production sketches Albin Grau created for Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens in 1922. Grau was an occultist as well as a horror aficionado and would certainly have read Meyrink’s book which was a Europe-wide bestseller when first published. The success of the novel inspired Paul Wegener’s first Golem film (now lost) which in turn helped fuel the demand for horror films that led eventually to Nosferatu.

Nosferatu poster by Albin Grau (1922).

There’s little of Steiner-Prag’s work available on the web but the Dover paperback above contains all the illustrations. The novel has been re-translated recently but I’ve yet to read one of the more recent editions to see how it compares with Dover’s 1928 Madge Pemberton version.

The Golem by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1915).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

Do you detect a theme this week? The recent Pragueness had me watching this favourite film again. I unfairly dismissed Soderbergh after his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which I found to be two hours of yuppie tedium despite its winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes. That prize did enable him to make Kafka (1991), however, so I shouldn’t complain although I didn’t get to see this until it turned up on TV years after its release. The film was a major flop and put Soderbergh in the wilderness until Out of Sight (1998), his first outing with George Clooney.

Kafka is one of a small group of works wherein well-known writers become embroiled in stories which exactly parallel their fiction. Joe Gores’ Hammett (filmed by Wim Wenders in 1982) did this with Dashiell Hammett while Mark Frost in his novel, The List of Seven, had a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle becoming involved in a Holmesian mystery. The screenplay for Kafka by Lem Dobbs has the author falling in with anarchist revolutionaries in order to solve the death of a co-worker and a bureaucratic conspiracy. This was obviously too clever for a general audience, being littered with references to Kafka’s life and work and also to German Expressionist cinema with names like “Orlac” and “Murnau” comprising key plot elements. Dobbs wrote a couple of other noteworthy screenplays after this, Dark City, a noirish fantasy that does what The Matrix did only with greater imagination, and The Limey (1999), another Soderbergh film with a great performance by Terence Stamp as a vengeful Cockney gangster on the loose in Los Angeles.

Alan Bennett had already done something similar to Kafka in his TV film for the BBC, The Insurance Man, which concerns a dye worker becoming enmeshed in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute where Kafka worked as a clerk. Daniel Day-Lewis made a marvellous Franz Kafka in Bennett’s play and was far more suited to the role than Jeremy Irons is in Soderbergh’s film. This is a shame since everything else about Kafka is excellent, from the moody black and white photography and fabulous cymbalom-inflected score by Cliff Martinez, to the cast, which includes the wonderful Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm and—in one of his last performances—Sir Alec Guinness.

Kafka is also the Prague film par excellence, making great use of the city’s Old Town and landmarks such as the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, a building which dominates the story as well as many of the outdoor scenes. In fact I find myself watching it as much for the settings than anything else. Soderbergh enjoys cinematic pastiche and Kafka owes a great deal to The Third Man (which did for post-war Vienna what Kafka does for Prague) and—inevitably—Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation, The Trial. Theresa Russell brings Vienna with her via Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, Joel Grey was in Cabaret, of course, and Alec Guinness isn’t so far removed from his role as retired spy George Smiley in the BBC’s John le Carré films. And halfway through the film there’s a great surprise which I won’t spoil here.

Kafka is available on DVD finally, although if you’re in the US you’ll have to import it. Soderbergh has talked about reworking the film in a longer version which I’d like to see if he ever gets round to it. Not an easy film to find but it’s worthy of your attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka and Kupka
• Alexander Hammid
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

Two short films by Maya Deren’s husband are now available for viewing at Ubuweb. I’ve known about Hammid’s work for years but this is the first time I’ve seen any of it so these additions are very welcome. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs, the works of the wife overshadowed those of the husband even though they collaborated on Deren’s most famous film, Meshes of the Afternoon (which is also at Ubuweb).

Of the pair of films, Na Prazskem Hrade (At Prague Castle) (1931) is the most interesting for this Prague fetishist, a disjointed study of the architecture of the city’s castle which turns the building into an expressionist collage. Two obvious associations arise while watching this; one is Franz Kafka who lived for a time in the castle’s Hradcany district at 22 Golden Lane and whose novel, The Castle (1926), is inspired by the dominating presence of the building. The other is the Nazi invasion which took place a few years after the film was made and caused its maker and his wife to flee to America. The Nazi high command controlled the country from Prague Castle so the brief glimpse of marching soldiers in one shot can be seen as an ominous presentiment of the future. The castle has featured in bigger budget productions more recently, including one of my cult films, Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991), and the underrated The Illusionist (2006) where Prague masqueraded as turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Barta’s Golem

Historia Naturae, Suita (1967).

Another very welcome DVD release from the BFI. Svankmajer’s shorts have always been my favourites of his film work. I love his Alice feature film (for me, the best screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland), and Faust (although the jabbering devils get annoying) but on the whole his longer films don’t seem to work as well as the earlier works. The short films present his Surrealist intentions in their purest expression, whether using his own jerky form of stop-motion animation or the aggressive montage seen in The Ossuary and elsewhere.

As with the Brothers Quay release from last year, there’s a great set of extras with this. If you’re curious about the films but have never seen them, searching for his name on YouTube turns up a few examples.

The most comprehensive DVD collection ever assembled of all 26 short films by the legendary Czech Surrealist filmmaker-animator Jan Svankmajer is released by the BFI on 25 June. Technically and conceptually astonishing in their own right, these films are also as remarkable for their philosophical consistency as for their frequently mind-boggling imagery.

Drawing on a tradition of Surrealism based in the capital of magic and alchemy—Prague—Svankmajer uses a range of techniques, combining live action, puppet theatre, stop-motion and drawn animation, claymation, cut-outs, re-edited archive footage and montage.

With nearly eight hours of material, compiled on three discs and packaged in a deluxe digipack with a 56-page illustrated booklet, the DVD is a truly must-have item for any Svankmajer fan. Its release follows a visit by the director to BFI Southbank on 29 May to discuss his work, after a preview of his latest film Lunacy. Lunacy opens for a two-week run on 1 June, part of a complete Jan Svankmajer retrospective season at BFI Southbank from 1–16 June, a selection of which will then go on tour.

Compiled by BFI Screenonline’s Michael Brooke, who also produced last year’s highly acclaimed release Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979–2003, the DVD collection spans almost 30 years, from The Last Trick (1964) to Food (1992). All the classics are included—Punch and Judy, The Flat, Jabberwocky, Dimensions of Dialogue, Down to the Cellar and both versions of The Ossuary (with the original banned tour-guide soundtrack and the replacement music track), alongside many British video premieres. It even contains the music video made for former Stranglers front man Hugh Cornwell (Another Kind of Love) and two ‘Art Breaks’ created for MTV.

The third disc of two-and-a-half hours of extra material includes a bonus short, Johanes Doktor Faust (1958); the original 54-minute version of The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984) with a brand new introduction by the Quay Brothers; the French documentary Les Chimères des Svankmajer (2001); interviews with Jan and Eva Svankmajer and examples of their work in other media. There’s also a chance to see some Svankmajer special effects, created for commercial Czech features when he was banned from making his own films. The 54-page booklet includes an introduction to Svankmajer by Michael O’Pray; detailed film notes by Michael Brooke, Simon Field, Michael O’Pray, Julian Petley, A.L. Rees and Philip Strick; notes on the extras and much more.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• Barta’s Golem

Les Astronautes (1959).

A nice collection of shorts by Walerian Borowczyk (1923–2006) at Ubuweb including this animated piece from 1959 which was co-directed by Chris Marker. The style is immediately reminiscent of that employed by Raoul Servais in Harpya and other films; it’s also not far removed from Terry Gilliam’s animation but it predates both. Also of note is Une Collection Particulière from 1973, a brief but fascinating look at a collection of antique pornographic toys and other adult items from the collection of Pieyre De Mandiargues. And L’Amour Monstre de tous les Temps from 1977 is a portrait of contemporary erotic Surrealist painter Ljuba Popovic at work. Borowczyk spent the Seventies making soft porn features such as Immoral Tales and The Beast, so the subject matter of the later films isn’t so surprising.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Monsieur Chat
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• Sans Soleil
• Barta’s Golem
• The art of Ljuba Popovic

La Rue du Tramway (1938) by Paul Delvaux.

Taxandria (1994) is a feature-length fantasy film by Belgian animator Raoul Servais that’s received little attention outside his native country, possibly because it failed in the marketplace and has been deemed too weird or uncommercial to export. You only have to compare the export version of Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis with his original cut to see how inventive Belgian films are treated by US distributors.

Servais had previously made the acclaimed animated short Harpya using a combination of live actors and painted backgrounds; Taxandria elaborates on this process (called Servaisgraphy by its inventor) using settings designed by one of my favourite comic artists François Schuiten, creator (with Benoît Peeters) of Les Cités Obscures. Taxandria intrigues for a third reason, the inspiration of Surrealist master Paul Delvaux whose paintings served as the origin of the project. And it also contains a remarkable detail in the screenplay credit for Alain Robbe-Grillet, a man better known for making Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, and the kind of fierce intellectual one imagines would usually run a mile from this kind of extravagant whimsy.

From the Servais website biography:

After Harpya, another project was haunting his imagination. We know he worked with Magritte and we know how he admires surrealism in general. But the painter who for a long time had fascinated him most (and who lived next door in St. Idesbald) was Paul Delvaux. His oneiric ghost-towns populated by pale naked women, absent-minded scholars and vacant men, all dressed up, the abandoned railway-stations and trains without destination—all attracted Servais’ attention. He sets off to try out some shots inspired by Delvaux’ paintings in “Servaisgraphy” and is rather pleased with the result. Servais talks it over with the eighty-year-old painter, who accepts the idea to see his universe become part of an animation film. Servais writes a first draft of the plot, which is definitely meant to become a full-length feature film rather than a short film. Supported by a writing and pre-production grant of the Flemish Community, he goes in search of a producer, because the project turns out to be long and complex—and therefore expensive. The time Servais made a Goldframe on his own account has long gone. Since 1983, a heavy story-board tells the story of a land called Taxandria (the name actually exists: it is the name of a province of Gaulish Belgium). Taxandria is, of course, an imaginary country, much like The Nebelux in Operation X-70, one of these anti-utopias that are timeless in literature.

A lighthouse guardian leads a young prince towards an imaginary world, Taxandria, where the boy learns about the power of love and the value of liberty.

A totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watches have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefore has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror.

Servais’ producer wasn’t convinced that Delvaux’s paintings could support a whole film so Schuiten was brought in to develop these and reconfigure them to suit the screen, the result being a curious hybrid of both artists’ styles with Delvaux’s vertically flat tableaux mutating into Schuiten’s lofty and fantastic architecture. The drift away from the painted world evidently left Servais unsatisfied since his next film, Nocturnal Butterflies, is another short that more fully realises Delvaux’s nocturnal realm of large-eyed, bare-breasted women in antiquated settings.

Taxandria seems to be unavailable on DVD but Servais’ short films—including Harpya and Nocturnal Butterflies—have been collected on Raoul Servais—The Complete Collection of Short Films, a Region 2 release from Boomerang Pictures (Belgium) / Doriane Films (France).

More screenshots from Taxandria, and information about the rest of his films, at Raoul Servais’ website.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• Barta’s Golem

Bridge Street, from Prague in Pictures (1940).

A shame there isn’t more of Plicka’s atmospheric photography on the web, his views of Prague present the city the way we usually imagine it from the stories of Kafka and Gustav Meyrinck. This site features a very small selection from the 220 plates that comprise his Prague in Pictures book. Taschen have published a collection of Atget’s famous photographs of Paris; the “Ansel Adams of Czechoslovakia” is overdue for a similar reappraisal.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Atget’s Paris
• Barta’s Golem

The Pied Piper.

Jiri Barta is a great Czech animator whose 1985 film, The Pied Piper, is an extraordinary, hour-long re-telling of the familiar fable. In Barta’s version, the medieval town and its inhabitants are rendered as beautifully-carved, Expressionist wood figures, and Barta twists the story in a darker direction by having the Pied Piper turn the materialistic townspeople into rats.

The Golem.

His current project is a film based on the old Prague legend of the Golem, taking Gustav Meyrinck’s classic novel as its inspiration. Since the collapse of the Communist regimes, Barta and other independent filmmakers have struggled to find financing for their more personal projects, which means that The Golem—which looks quite incredible—remains unfinished. This is especially ironic given that Prague is now a major movie-making centre for big Hollywood productions.

Kinoeye talks to Barta about The Golem and his other films, while Darkstrider has a trailer and clips from many other Czech animations.