Max (The Birdman) Ernst

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Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967).

Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, aka Hapshash & the Coloured Coat. Sharp’s homage to the great Max was one of a number of his designs produced on metallic foil sheets, the reflective nature of which often presents difficulties for reproduction in other media.

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Performance (1970).

I wonder how many people who admired Sharp’s poster puzzled over the meaning of the image, one of twenty-eight similar collages from the fourth chapter of Ernst’s 1934 “collage novel” Une Semaine de Bonté. Chapter four—Wednesday; Blood—concerns the criminal travails of a series of bird-headed individuals (or possibly the same individual in different guises) which end in abduction, possible rape/murder, and suicide. This picture of Ernst’s has always struck me as a very obvious rape metaphor with the woman stretched over the birdman’s lap and the knife piercing her foot. Ernst’s dark imagination—informed by Freudian concerns, as were most of his fellow Surrealists—separates the picture from the more lightweight Art Nouveau/Beardsleyesque stylings of the other London artists. Martin Sharp was producing collages of his own during this period so it’s easy to see why he was attracted to Ernst. And the popularity of his poster may explain why the birdman turns up in a painted version in Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, seen when Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) goes to pick mushrooms in the greenhouse. Ernst’s sinister birdman suits Performance very well, a token of the film’s atmosphere of weirdness and violence. (“A heavy evil film, don’t see it on acid” warned underground newspaper International Times.)

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Bob Dylan: Blowing in the Mind (1967).

And to compound the connections a little more, Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan collage portrait (another foil sheet production) also turns up in Performance as part of the collage-covered screen in one of Turner’s rooms. Unlike his fellow Hapshash artists, Sharp’s work is under-documented on the web beyond pages such as this one. The same goes for Ernst’s collage novel but then the best way to experience that is to buy the Dover book edition.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Robing of The Birds
Gandharva by Beaver & Krause
The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
The New Love Poetry
Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
Further back and faster
Quite a performance
Borges in Performance

Gandharva by Beaver & Krause

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I mentioned Wilfried Sätty’s collage work last week and this album sports one of his few cover designs. A cult object for several reasons, not least Sätty’s involvement. The title lettering was by fellow psychedelic artist David Singer who I had the good fortune to meet in California in 2005 whilst researching Sätty’s career. That chunky Seventies lettering style now looks distinctly contemporary having come back into fashion over the past couple of years.

Beaver & Krause were among the pioneers of Moog-based electronic music in the 1960s and notably provided the throbs and drones which Jack Nitzsche mixed into the soundtrack for Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. Gandharva was released in 1971 and one of the few all-electronic pieces on the album, Nine Moons in Alaska, is an outtake from those sessions. The first side is very uneven, with a blues jam and a gospel piece that don’t sit well with each other, never mind with the Moog tracks. Side two, however, is a far more successful suite of improvisations with organ, electronics, guitar, harp and saxophone (played by Gerry Mulligan) recorded live in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.

Cover photo from the Psychedelic Music Flickr pool which features many fine examples of cover design from the late Sixties on.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
Further back and faster
Quite a performance
Borges in Performance

Poe at 200

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Poe by Harry Clarke.

Happy birthday Edgar Allan Poe, born two hundred years ago today. I nearly missed this anniversary after a busy weekend. Rather than add to the mountain of praise for the writer, I thought I’d list some favourites among the numerous Poe-derived works in different media.

Illustrated books
For me the Harry Clarke edition of 1919 (later reworked with colour plates) has always been definitive. Many first-class artists have tried their hand at depicting Poe’s stories and poems, among them Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham, W. Heath Robinson and Edmund Dulac; none complements the morbid atmosphere and florid prose as well as Clarke does. And if it’s horror you need, Clarke’s depiction of The Premature Burial could scarcely be improved upon.

Honourable mention should be made of two less well-known works, Wilfried Sätty’s The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe (1976) and Visions of Poe (1988) by Simon Marsden. I wrote about Sätty’s collage engravings in Strange Attractor 2, and Sätty’s style was eminently suited to Poe’s work. Marsden’s photographs of old castles and decaying mansions are justly celebrated but in book form often seem in search of a subject beyond a general Gothic spookiness or a recounting of spectral anecdotes. His selection of Poe stories and poems is a great match for the photos, one of which, a view of Monument Valley for The Colloquy of Monos and Una, was also used on a Picador cover for Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Recordings
These are legion but among the outstanding one-off tracks I’d note two poems set to music, Dream Within a Dream from Propaganda‘s 1985 album, A Secret Wish, and The Lake by Antony & The Johnsons. The latter appeared on the landmark Golden Apples of the Sun compilation and also on Antony’s own The Lake EP.

Among the full-length works, Hal Willner’s 1997 2-CD collection Closed on Account of Rabies features lengthy readings set to music from a typically eclectic Willner line-up: Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galás, Gavin Friday, Dr John, Deborah Harry, Jeff Buckley (one of the last recordings before his untimely death) and Gabriel Byrne. Byrne’s reading of The Masque of the Red Death is tremendous and the whole package is decked out in Ralph Steadman graphics.

Antony Hegarty appears again on another double-disc set, Lou Reed’s The Raven (2003), a very eccentric approach to Poe which I suspect I’m in the minority in enjoying as much as I do. An uneven mix of songs and reading/performances, Reed updates some Poe poems while others are presented straight and to often stunning effect by (among others) Willem Defoe, Steve Buscemi, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Amanda Plummer and Elizabeth Ashley.

Films
Once again, there’s too many films but The Masque of the Red Death (1964) has always been my favourite of the Roger Corman adaptations, not least for the presence of Jane Asher, Patrick Magee and (behind the camera) Nicolas Roeg. I wrote last May about the animated version of The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA. That adaptation, with narration by James Mason, is still on YouTube so if you haven’t seen it yet you can celebrate Poe’s anniversary by watching it right now.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe
The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka

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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. The 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 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.

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Alan Bennett had already written something similar to Kafka in his 1986 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 much 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 Walt Lloyd’s moody photography, and the 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, 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