{ feuilleton }

One of the best—and most entertaining—films to come out of the Dada/Surrealist period, Entr’acte (1924) is also worth watching for the appearance of notable figures such as Francis Picabia (who initiated the project), Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Erik Satie. This extraordinary early film from director René Clair was originally made to fill an interval [...]

Previous posts about gay or homoerotic art or artists. A personal and idiosyncratic selection, this isn’t meant to be definitive. • Keep Your Timber Limber • The art of Naomichi Okutsu • The art of Konstantin Somov, 1869–1939 • The art of Seiji Inagaki • Claudio Bravo’s packages • Gekko Hayashi revisited • The art [...]

Monsieur Wiley in yesterday’s comments reminded me of George Franju’s seldom seen Judex, a 1963 film based on the Feuillade serials of the same name. Louis Feuillade (1873–1925), as you really ought to know by now, was the director of the original Fantômas serials (1913–14) and also Les Vampires (1915–16), obvious forerunners of Diabolik with [...]

Rose Hobart (1936) Dir: Joseph Cornell 17mins, tinted B&W The first experimental film by Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is available for viewing at Ubuweb (where they list the years of his birth and death incorrectly). Cornell’s famous boxes are highly-regarded and still influential but his films receive less attention. This is the first one [...]

Harry Smith in the middle of the Twentieth Century with some of his drawings. The first European exhibition of work by artist, writer, filmmaker, collector, Kabbalist, ethnographer…okay, polymath Harry Smith, opens today at the Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland. The exhibition runs from 2nd May–8th June 2007. In addition, there’s a companion exhibition, Harry Smith Anthology [...]

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Music: Teiji Ito. 18mins, B&W. Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which [...]

Orphée aux points by Jean Cocteau (1950). An exhibition of Cocteau drawings from the collection of Dominique Bert opens today at the Louvre des Antiquaires, Paris. Jean Cocteau (1899–1963): Collection privée de Dominique Bert 23rd March–22nd April 2007 Le Louvre des Antiquaires 2, Place du Palais Royal 75001 PARIS Previously on { feuilleton } • [...]

…Fantômas was championed by the Parisian avant-garde, first by the young poets gathered around Guillaume Apollinaire, who, together with Max Jacob, founded a Société des Amis de Fantômas in 1913, and later by the surrealists. In July 1914, in the literary review Mercure de France, Apollinaire declared the imaginary richness of Fantômas unparalleled. The same [...]

Semina, #1–9. A Return Trip to a Faraway Place Called Underground By HOLLAND COTTER New York Times, January 26, 2007 Time is forever. Love is the goal. Art is what you are, not what you do. Many young artists and poets in California in the 1950s and ’60s felt and lived this way. And a [...]

Finally…well, we’ll see. Forgive my sceptical tone, these announcements have been cropping up for years although this one seems genuine, with an Amazon page and everything. Good to know that it’s a Fantoma production since they did a great job with Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis. The enigmatic Marjorie Cameron portrays the Scarlet Woman for Inauguration [...]

In my obsession with all things Orson Welles, his 1936 production of Macbeth holds a special fascination, partly for being my favourite Shakespeare play, and partly for the curiosity of its production—an all-black cast that included genuine Haitian drummers who famously claimed to have drummed a Broadway critic to death after he gave the play [...]

A 35-minute color film by Cocteau entitled La Villa Santo Sospir. Shot in 1952, this is an “amateur film” done in 16mm, a sort of home movie in which Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend’s villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself [...]