Herald of Ruin

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New year, new book cover. Herald of Ruin is my latest for Aconyte, a sequel to Tim Pratt’s The Ravening Deep, which featured my last cover in this series of novels spun from the Arkham Horror games:

Chaos is coming to Arkham, and its herald is Randall Tillinghast. The dapper older gentleman has recently arrived in the city and his establishment of a new occult bookshop draws the ire of Carl Sanford, the head of Arkham’s secret, esoteric order, the Silver Twilight Lodge.

Sanford expects to crush the newcomer like an ant and take what he wants from the wreckage… but Randall Tillinghast isn’t quite as humble and harmless as he seems. In possession of an array of magical artifacts, Tillinghast begins to consolidate his dreams of power before turning his sights on the Lodge.

All six covers to date have followed a similar style, combining Art Deco graphics with various kinds of Lovecraftian weirdness, views of significant architecture and pictures of the main characters. With the new book being a sequel the cover was designed as an inverse companion to The Ravening Deep. The general structure is the same but with earth tones replacing the aquarian colours, and with the character shots and interlaced septagram flipped around.

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That towering edifice in the background is supposed to be the city of Sarnath which I spent some time drawing even though I knew most of it was going to be covered over. The way I work I often have to do this since I like to create all the different elements with only a vague composition in mind, after which I can shuffle things around until they assume a satisfying appearance. I also like to keep my options open in the early stages. This is something you can do more easily in Illustrator than in Photoshop, the Illustrator interface being an artboard upon which you assemble the various components of your design. Vector graphics aren’t always ideal when you’re trying to create something this complex, but the hard edges suit the Deco style and the general appearance which is more of a poster design than a picture window.

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Among the other details, the eye-in-a-triangle, a device I’ve used a lot in the past, was prompted by the source material for a change. And the woman’s face is based on a photo of Musidora, one of the stars of early silent cinema in her role as Irma Vep from Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915–16). The visual source for this character wasn’t very informative but she’s a cat burglar, and Feulliade’s serial happens to concern a group of Parisian cat burglars. I think Irma Vep may have been the first cat-burgling woman in cinema history so Musidora was a good choice with the right look for the cover.

Herald of Ruin will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Ravening Deep
Diamonds
The Devourer Below
Litany of Dreams
The Last Ritual

Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime

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Design by René Ferracci.

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films with a return to Alain Resnais. This one is less substantial than the Providence post, but 2022 happens to be the director’s centenary year, and this particular film, like Providence, is worthy of greater attention.

Last Year at Marienbad is occasionally proposed as science fiction of a very rarified sort (JG Ballard thought it was) but there’s no question about the SF credentials of Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1968), a drama that uses time travel to explore a troubled romantic relationship. Claude Ridder (Claude Rich), an unattached, suicidal man, is persuaded by scientists to assist with a potentially hazardous experiment. He agrees to a one-minute excursion into his past but the experiment doesn’t work as intended, causing him to be caught between the present—in which he can’t escape from a womb-like time machine—and his recent past, in which he relives brief moments without any awareness during the return period of their being a part of the experiment. The flashbacks that comprise most of the film’s running time show us a random sequence of the events leading to Claude’s suicide attempt, the end result of his relationship with his terminally ill partner, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot).

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The time machine.

Despite the presence of a time machine and a script by Jacques Sternberg, a Belgian science-fiction writer, Resnais was adamant that Je t’aime, Je t’aime wasn’t a science-fiction film. This is the kind of comment guaranteed to annoy the more zealous SF reader but it’s true in the sense that the film isn’t about time travel or time machines per se; the temporal experiment is a device to allow the non-linear exploration of a human drama that’s the real concern of director and writer. Previous Resnais films had dealt with remembrance of one sort or another, often using flash cuts to juxtapose different moments or scenes remembered or imagined. Je t’aime, Je t’aime pushes these techniques to an extreme, showing us every facet of the Claude/Catrine relationship, from initial meeting to tragic end. The narrative fragmentation isn’t so surprising today but it was a radical step in 1968, one that proved commercially unsuccessful.

In addition to having a Belgian writer, Je t’aime, Je t’aime is mostly set in Brussels, so the art this time is a famous Belgian painting, one of the many versions of The Empire of Light by René Magritte, which appears in the scenes in Claude’s apartment.

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In other hands this might be an incidental decoration but, as Providence demonstrates, Resnais was a director who enjoyed significant details, even if the signification isn’t always obvious. The Magritte painting serves two functions: its slow migration from one side of Claude’s apartment to the other (and the appearance of other pictures around it) shows the passage of time from one flashback to the next.

Continue reading “Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime”

Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

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Cover design by Jim Tierney; photo by Richard Corman.

When so many current biographies are recounting the lives of those about whom we’ve already heard a great deal (see the new biography of Oscar Wilde by Matthew Sturgis), a book exploring the career of a previously undocumented yet worthwhile figure is especially welcome. Such is the case with Born to Be Posthumous, Mark Dery’s life of the elusive Edward Gorey: artist, writer, illustrator, book designer, book creator, bibliophile, theatre designer, cat lover and balletomane.

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The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963).

Gorey’s small books have long been one of the more curious fixtures of American culture: many of them look like children’s books but aren’t (unless the child is Wednesday Addams); others look like comic books but they aren’t comics either. The books are sometimes (but not always) Surrealist fables; or brief accounts of irreducible mystery; or sombre inexplicabilities; or camp ripostes to the pieties of Victorian morality; infrequently spiced with black humour and with lurches into outright horror. Gorey delivered his miniature tales in an idiosyncratic drawing style that combines a cartoon-like stylisation with the density of shading found in old wood engravings, a blend that would prove influential as his popularity grew. As Dery notes in his book’s introduction, without Edward Gorey’s work there would be no Lemony Snicket, while Tim Burton would be a skeletal shadow of his present self. (Given the latter’s current output, this might do him some good. But I digress.)

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The Doubtful Guest (1957).

In Britain, however, Gorey remains a cult rather than cultural figure, still overshadowed by better-known contemporaries such as Maurice Sendak and Charles Addams. Until the publication of the Amphigorey story collections Gorey’s books were produced in small editions with such a limited availability you were more likely to encounter his art on the cover of another author’s book than within the pages of his own. I became aware of Gorey’s work by gradual osmosis. The first substantial piece I read about him was his entry in Philip Core’s Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (1984), in which Core’s mention of an art style “recollecting Victorian engravings” marked Gorey as an artist to be investigated. Two years later he received a longer entry in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural edited by Jack Sullivan. (Camp and horror: how many other artists sit so easily in both worlds?) But Gorey is absent from many books about 20th-century illustrators, and despite the sequential nature of his work you won’t find him in histories of comic art.

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Edward Gorey’s Dracula: A Toy Theatre (1979).

In a way it’s fitting that the work of a man who was adamant in his determination to avoid being pinned down should be so difficult to find. But it’s also a shame that the work of an ardent Anglophile should be hard to find in the country that fuelled his imagination. Among Gorey’s literary favourites Dery lists Jane Austen and Agatha Christie together with Ronald Firbank, Saki, and EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels. (The latter trio are all present in Core’s book on camp, which no doubt makes Gorey camp to the core. Whether he would have approved of being labelled as such is another matter.) I wasn’t surprised by the mention of Saki when so many of Saki’s story titles (The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope) sound like Gorey books, while many of the stories themselves are like Gorey scenarios in prose. Not all Gorey’s work is camp or comic, however; the 32 drawings that comprise the wordless masterpiece of The West Wing (1963) are closer to David Lynch or the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman, the latter an author that Gorey illustrated on several occasions. Dery emphasises how Gorey’s love of silent cinema contributed to The West Wing and other pieces, especially the serials of the Surrealists’ favourite filmmaker, Louis Feuillade.

Continue reading “Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey”

Weekend links 162

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Untitled drawing by Sophie Penrose.

• “…many arts producers – much more so than the artists themselves – were over-fearful of the prospect of prosecution, when in nearly all incidents there were no reasonable grounds for bringing charges.” Julia Farrington of Index on Censorship on self-censorship by artists and art institutions in the UK.

• “Tons of tones – some dissolved in beats, some beatless treatments – in a continuous mix of current ambient and electronic goodies, pouring more than a score of ambi-valent shapes and etheric waves into an occluded reverb-trail echo-veil mood-stream.” Ambivalentine, a mix by Albient.

• “I was followed by a bee, a golden bee. For three years, every day, the golden bee followed us.” Forty years ago Penthouse magazine talked to Alejandro Jodorowsky. This month Dazed magazine asked the polymath twenty questions.

• “…investigators were stupefied to find the spymaster’s quarters full of pink leather whips, cosmetics, and pornographic photographs, framed in snakeskin.” Erik Sass on Colonel Redl and a gay spy scandal in the Vienna of 1913.

• “With no one to sponsor him, Marino Auriti’s dream museum became the stuff of legends.” Stefany Anne Golberg on Marino Auriti’s Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo.

• The Crime Epics of Louis Feuillade: YouTube links and more. Related: YouTube’s Vault of Horrors.

Werner Herzog: 50 years of potent, inspiring, disturbing films.

• The doors of perception: John Gray on Arthur Machen.

• Some Sort of Alchemy: Albert Mobilio on Sun Ra.

• British Pathé’s film of ghost hunters in 1953.

• “Escape your search engine Filter Bubble

• RIP Jack Vance

Bumble Bee Bolero (1957) by Harry Breuer | The L S Bumble Bee (1967) by Peter Cook & Dudley Moore | Ant Man Bee (1969) by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band | Be A Bee (2009) by Air

Elias Romero, Judex, Vampyr on DVD

Among recent DVD releases there’s a handful worth noting here. First up is another great collection of rare cinema from the Center for Visual Music, 3 Films by Elias Romero.

romero.jpgElias Romero is considered to be the Grandfather of the Light Show. In San Francisco in 1956 he began developing a performance medium using overhead projectors. He mixed oils and inks in dishes placed on the projectors, passing light through the translucent blend which was then projected onto a screen. He performed hundreds of shows throughout California, accompanied by musicians and performers. Many of the later psychedelic light show artists were inspired by his work. In 1969 he met Richard Edlund (camera), and they began making films with Bill Spencer (music) and others. Stepping Stones (33 mins) – Abstract drama played out in light, color and sound – is made up entirely of original vintage light show projections, excerpts of which were featured in the 2005 Visual Music exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Za (24 mins) – An intense and illuminating episode of consciousness unfolding, features projections onto Diane Varsi as poet and alchemist, and costumes by Cameron. Lapis Lazuli, (29 mins) – Mystical transformation, music and poetry, with Bill Fortinberry and Susan Darby, shows them meeting simultaneously on different myth-planes. The DVD Bonus Features include: “Notes on 3 Films” – a Documentary with interviews with Elias Romero and Edlund, and a Gallery featuring other artwork by Romero. NTSC, Region 1. TRT approx 2 hours.

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Judex.

It was just over a year ago that I asked “how long do we have to wait for a Judex DVD?” and once again the DVD gods seem to have been listening. Eureka Video’s excellent Masters of Cinema series has paired Franju’s 1963 film with his other Feuillade-inspired work, Nuits rouges.

The magical, rarely seen Judex – directed by the great Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face) – was largely unappreciated at the time of its release in 1963. This lyrical and dreamlike picture, a putative “remake” of Louis Feuillade’s own 1916 Judex, is as evocative of the silent master’s own works as it is the later films of Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí. A French reviewer wrote in 1963: “The whole of Judex reminds us that film is a privileged medium for the expression of poetic magic”. Starring the magician Channing Pollock, the divine Edith Scob, and the mesmerising Francine Bergé, Judex concerns a wicked banker, his helpless daughter, and a mysterious avenger. It plays like a fairy tale – one in which Franju creates a dazzling clash between good and evil, eschewing interest in the psychological aspects of his characters for unexplained twists and turns in the action. The beautifully controlled imagery, superbly rendered by Marcel Fradetal’s black-against-white photography, animates a natural world and the spirits of animals all at war with a host of diabolical forces. Franju’s Judex and Nuits rouges both paid overt homage to the surreal, silent serial-works of Feuillade. Scripted in collaboration with Feuillade’s grandson – Jacques Champreux – these films evince the same poetic magic that made the art of that earlier master a cause célèbre not only for the Surrealist movement, but also for the world-renowned Cinémathèque Française. It was the Cinémathèque (co-founded by the legendary Henri Langlois with Franju) that helped resurrect the reputation of Feuillade decades after he’d slipped out of the public consciousness.

Nuits rouges [Red Nights] – released in the UK as Shadowman – was the second Franju-Champreux meditation upon the films of Feuillade. It aggressively escalates a pulp atmosphere steeped in shocking turns of events to an even more vertiginous level. Here, the object of pursuit is the fabled treasure of the mythical order of the Knights Templar – which the filmmakers use as the jump-off point for staging a series of fantastic set-pieces. As the Fantômas-esque arch-criminal (known only as “The Man Without a Face”, played by Jacques Champreux himself) violently pursues the treasure, the action intensifies amongst a cadre of post-’68 bohemians, the Paris police bureau, and a cult of cowled conspirators. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Georges Franju’s two most mindbending films on DVD in the UK for the first time. —Special Features— Gorgeous new transfers in their original aspect ratios—New and improved English subtitle translations—Video interviews, for both films, by Franju-collaborator Jacques Champreux—40-page booklet containing newly translated interviews with Georges Franju; newly translated writing by Jacques Rivette, and more!

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Vampyr.

Eureka’s site seems to be lacking a page for Judex (unless I missed it) but they do have a page for Carl Dreyer’s atmospheric, oneiric and weird-in-all-senses-of-the-word Vampyr (1932), which is receiving a decent UK release at last. This was one of the films I reviewed in 2006 for the André Deutsch book of horror cinema and my own DVD is a very shoddy import copy which I’ll be happy to replace.

The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match. Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a waking-dream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural.

Traveller Allan Gray (arrestingly depicted by Julian West, aka the secretive real-life Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg) arrives at a countryside inn seemingly beckoned by haunted forces. His growing acquaintance with the family who reside there soon opens up a network of uncanny associations between the dead and the living, of ghostly lore and demonology, which pull Gray ever deeper into an unsettling, and upsetting, mystery. At its core: troubled Gisèle, chaste daughter and sexual incarnation, portrayed by the great, cursed Sybille Schmitz (Diary of a Lost Girl, and inspiration for Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss.) Before the candles of Vampyr exhaust themselves, Allan Gray and the viewer alike come eye-to-eye with Fate — in the face of dear dying Sybille, in the blasphemed bodies of horrific bat-men, in the charged and mortal act of asphyxiation — eye-to-eye, then, with Death — the supreme vampire.

Deemed by Alfred Hitchcock ‘the only film worth watching… twice’, Vampyr’s influence has become, by now, incalculable. Long out of circulation in an acceptable transfer, The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Dreyer’s truly terrifying film in its restored form for the first time in the UK.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
Fantômas
Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world!
David Rudkin on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr