Salvador Dalí – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 703

Njommelsaska i Lappland (1856) by Carl Svantje Hallbeck.

• 101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen. Not another clickbait listicle of Hollywood fare that you really have seen, this is 101 films from Sight & Sound‘s annual poll of critics and directors, each of which only received a single vote. Cinema from the silent era to the present day, “from every continent but Antarctica”, all presented on a single page, and with accompanying notes from the voters. I’ve only seen four of these so it’s a list to mine for the future.

• 2024 will see the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Surrealist manifestos, so the following new books are making their presences known before the celebratory rush. At Colossal: extracts from New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting by Robert Zeller; at AnotherMag: photos by Coco Capítan of Salvador Dalí’s home at Port Lligat.

• “Cocteau was like one of those magicians who, having announced that they are going to reveal the secret of one trick, immediately perform another.” Pierre Caizergues introducing extracts from The Secrets of Beauty, a small book of aphorisms by Jean Cocteau, newly translated into English by Juliet Powys.

• More Michael Powell: “Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA”: Thelma Schoonmaker on her life and work with Michael Powell and his friend Marty.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2023. Thanks again for the link here!

• At The Daily Heller: Book covers by Iris Alba (1935–1993), art director, illustrator and graphic designer.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See the newest underwater sculptures residing on the floor of the Caribbean.

• At Wormwoodiana: Douglas A. Anderson goes looking for the fantasy fiction of Raymond Chandler.

• At Public Domain Review: Paige Hirschey on Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes.

• Entries for the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year 2023.

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Der Mann in der Photographie, 1954.

• Aurora (1971) by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band | Aurora (2005) by Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto | Aurora Liminalis (2013) by William Basinski + Richard Chartier

Covering Maldoror

This illustration by José Roy is a frontispiece created for a rare edition of Les Chants de Maldoror published by Genonceaux in 1890. Roy (1860–1924) was a French artist whose work receives little attention today but his Maldoror illustration happens to be the first of its kind, and a picture that serves the text better than some of those being produced a few years later. The detail of a flayed man stepping out of his skin prefigures Clive Barker by almost a century, a further example of the ways in which Lautréamont’s baleful masterpiece was ahead of his time.

Netherlands, 1917. Cover art by WF Gouwe.

Previous posts here have concerned illustrated editions of Maldoror but this one is all about the covers. Literary classics aren’t always very rewarding in this respect but Maldoror’s textual and imaginative wildness has prompted an assortment of illustrative choices that range from the appropriate to the bewilderingly arbitrary. The following covers are a selection of the more notable examples, avoiding those without pictures or ones that use photographs of the book’s enigmatic author, Isidore Ducasse.

Italy, 1944. Cover art by Mario De Luigi.

France, 1947. Cover and interior illustrations by Jacques Houplain.

Salvador Dalí was the first well-known artist to illustrate Maldoror but his 1934 edition was published with plain black boards. Houplain’s illustrations follow the text more closely than do those by Dalí, Magritte or Bellmer, all of whom remain preoccupied with their own obsessions.

Belgium, 1948. Cover and interior illustrations by René Magritte.

France, 1963. Cover art by Paul Jamotte.

Continue reading “Covering Maldoror”

Into the Midnight Underground

Browsing Vimeo recently I found a film by Anna Thew, Cling Film, which I remembered seeing years ago on Midnight Underground, a TV series devoted to avant-garde cinema. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) for eight weeks in 1993, with each episode being screened shortly after midnight. The presenter was the always reliable Benjamin Woolley, sitting before a backdrop resembling one of Verner Panton’s psychedelic environments from where he introduced the cinematic offerings, an eclectic blend of avant-garde and experimental films, unusual dramas plus a couple of animations. Episodes ran for around an hour, with each installment following a different theme. The films were a mix of the old and the new: “classics” (for want of a better term) of underground cinema set alongside more recent works. This was very much a television equivalent of the screenings of avant-garde cinema which Film and Video Umbrella had been touring around Britain’s arthouses since the mid-1980s; one of the founders of FVU, Michael O’Pray, is thanked in the series credits. Midnight Underground was so tailored to my interests at the time it was easy to feel like this was being screened for my benefit alone. I taped everything as it was broadcast but I never got round to digitising all the episodes, so that many of the films shown there, Cling Film included, I haven’t seen for a long time.

Benjamin Woolley.

The discovery of Anna Thew’s film set me wondering whether it would be possible to replicate the contents of Midnight Underground via links to various video sites. Since this post exists, the answer is obviously yes, or almost… Of the 44 films shown in the series only 3 are currently unavailable, with one more being limited to an extract and another as pay-to-view. This was a much better result than I expected, especially for works with such a limited appeal. The majority of the films shown in the series were being screened on British TV for the first time, also the last time for most of them. In 1993 Channel 4 was still maintaining its original brief, offering a genuine alternative to the programming on the other three terrestrial channels. As I’ve often complained here, this didn’t last; the underground remained underground. Woolley’s series was a brief taste of a televisual world where the concept of diversity could apply to form and content as well as identity. It’s a world the corporate channels will never show you, one you have to find for yourself.

* * *

1: Strange Spirits
The opening episode shows why I felt they were broadcasting this for me alone. Derek Jarman’s grainy film of a Throbbing Gristle performance is probably the first (and only?) time the group appeared on British TV. This was the first surprise. The second one was Kenneth Anger’s film being shown with its Janácek score. I’d seen this at an FVU screening a couple of years before with its ELO soundtrack, the so-called “Eldorado Edition”, which Anger later discarded. As for Daina Krumins’ weird and creepy religiose short, I expected this one to be unavailable but the director now has several of her films on YouTube. Don’t miss her even-weirder animated slime moulds, Babobilicons. The angel in Maggie Jailler’s film is artist (and Jarman/TG associate) Cerith Wyn Evans.

• TG: Psychic Rally in Heaven (Derek Jarman, 1981)
• The Divine Miracle (Daina Krumins, 1973)
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
• L’ange frénétique (Maggie Jailler, 1985)

2: Music for the Eye and Ear
Bruce Conner’s films are continually elusive on the internet, especially those made to accompany music by Devo and Eno & Byrne. The version of Mongoloid linked here differs slightly from the original but it’s essentially the same film. Versailles II is taped from the Midnight Underground broadcast, and includes Benjamin Woolley’s introduction.

• Eaux d’artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953)
• Mongoloid (Bruce Conner, 1978)
• Versailles II (Chris Garratt, 1976)
• Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (Quay Brothers, 1992)
• All My Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)

3: New Sexualities
Stephen Dwoskin’s film is the one that shows a close-up of a woman’s face during the act of masturbation. This is paralleled later in the series by Antony Balch’s masturbatory self-portrait in Towers Open Fire. Cling Film is all about safe sex, and was broadcast in a slightly amended form to avoid being too explicit. The version on Vimeo is uncensored.

• Kiss (Chris Newby, 1992) (no video)
• Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1965)
• Cling Film (Anna Thew, 1993)
• Stain (Simon Pummell, 1992)
• Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
• 6/64: Mama und Papa (Materialaktion Otto Mühl) (Kurt Kren, 1964)
• Moment (Stephen Dwoskin, 1969)

4: London Suite
Sundial and Mile End Purgatorio have both appeared here before as a result of my seeing them on Midnight Underground.

• Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (Alnoor Dewshi, 1992)
• Sundial (William Raban, 1993)
• The London Story (Sally Potter, 1987) (pay-to-view)
• Mile End Purgatorio (Guy Sherwin, 1991)
• London Suite (Vivienne Dick, 1989) (no video)

Continue reading “Into the Midnight Underground”

Eco Del Universo

Eco Del Universo, the ninth album by Mexican band Los Mundos, was released last month on Acid Test Recordings. I designed and illustrated the outer and inner sleeves for an album whose music is described on the group’s Bandcamp page as psychedelic rock. I’ve not seen a physical copy yet but the vinyl disc is available in two pressings that complement the colours of the cover.

The brief for this one was for something based on the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas, an overgrown park with accompanying hotel that Edward James spent many years and a great deal of money building in the Mexican jungle. James was a British aristocrat who fell for Surrealism in a big way in the 1930s, using his inherited wealth to support artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington, while creating Surrealist-styled homes for himself, first at Monkton House in West Sussex then at Xilitla in Mexico. James and his jungle resort have been recurrent subjects here so I didn’t need much encouragement to create something based on his constructions. In the past I’ve described Las Pozas as unfinished but this suggests a scheme with a final goal in mind. I don’t think this was ever James’s intention. His creations are more like very large concrete sculptures rather than architecture, even though some of them have a recognisable architectural form. Finished or not, the structures are a unique hybrid of the purposeless architectural folly—a popular indulgence for British landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries—and caprices like the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval.

My cover art is a fantasy on the fantasy which makes James’s improvisations look a little more planned than they are by mirroring their disposition. I also crowded together several of the constructions which at Las Pozas are in separate areas of the complex. Looking at the artwork again I’m reminded of some of Roger Dean’s views which wasn’t my intention originally. I think it’s the combination of unusual architecture, layered foliage and the treatment of light and shade. If the structures weren’t outlined and the sky was a Dean-like gradient there’d be even more of a similarity. The beautiful stellar photo is from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) whose images of the cosmos are free to use so long as you give them credit. This one was by Stéphane Guisard.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• Palais Idéal panoramas
• Las Pozas panoramas
• Return to Las Pozas
• Las Pozas and Edward James

Art on film: The Dark Corner

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films with a post that suits a week where Surrealism has been a dominant theme.

I’ve been watching a lot of film noir recently, and I do mean a lot. Since August last year I’ve watched almost 100 films that warrant the label (I’ve been keeping a written record to avoid losing track), with more of them still to come. Many of these have been first-time viewings, an experience that’s been enlightening and mostly positive. I’ll have more to say on the subject in the future but for now here’s a discovery from The Dark Corner (1946), a detective drama directed by Henry Hathaway, and one I hadn’t seen before.

A Vermeer in a dark corner.

The story concerns a New York private eye, Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens), who’s being framed by parties unknown. When Galt investigates the mystery with his secretary, Kathleen (Lucille Ball in a straight role), their researches lead them to a Fifth Avenue art gallery run by Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb playing the same waspish aesthete as he did in Laura). Many of the art details can’t help but seem amusing or bizarre today, such as when someone brings home a genuine Vincent van Gogh painting and leaves it propped in a chair. There’s also a painting that we’re told is a rare Raphael but since this has to resemble Cathcart’s wife it looks nothing like a Renaissance picture. Elsewhere, a Donatello statue is priced at a mere $40,000, while Cathcart has Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring on sale despite the real painting having been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.

As to the Surrealism, a scene inside the gallery features a blink-and-you-miss-it moment when a pair of would-be purchasers are seen peering at this Salvador Dalí painting, one of the few pieces of contemporary art on display. Before the camera pans away we see the man on the right shaking his head. I think this painting was also created for the film but unlike the alleged Raphael it looks genuine, and resembles several pictures that Dalí painted in the 1930s (eg: this one), all of which feature telephone receivers. The choice of imagery is apt. Two years earlier Dalí had created a seven-picture sequence illustrating “The Seven Lively Arts”. The Art of Cinema is represented by a figure whose head is a giant eyeball positioned between two huge ears, and with eyelashes that are cords leading to yet more telephone receivers.

Imitation or not, the painting in The Dark Corner did at least end up on the screen. In 1946 Dalí was working with Disney’s animators on the Destino project but the results of this wouldn’t be seen for another 50 years. I’ve been wondering what other Dalínean references might be hiding in American feature films from this time. (Don’t say Spellbound, everybody knows that one…)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Space is the Place
• Art on film: Providence
• Art on film: The Beast