Forbidden reproductions

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La Reproduction Interdite (1937) by René Magritte.

English translations of the title of Magritte’s painting vary, with Not to be Reproduced and Reproduction Prohibited being two of the most popular. I prefer Reproduction Forbidden, a title that sounds more serious, and with a use reinforced by Forbidden Games, the English title of a René Clement feature film, Jeux Interdits. Whatever the translation, this is one of Magritte’s most popular inventions, one that people like recreating.


The Flat (1968).

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Jan Svankmajer’s short has more justification for copying the painting than some of the examples which follow. Svankmajer and Eva Svankmajerová were members of the long-running Prague Surrealist group, and The Flat is very much a Surrealist piece, with a man trapped inside a room where none of the mundane objects behave as he expects. In addition to the overt Magritte quote there’s an appearance by Svankmajer’s film-directing friend, Juraj Herz, as a bowler-hatted man carrying a chicken.


Sabotage (1975) by Black Sabbath.

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The front cover is the Magritte idea but with them all facing away from the mirror.


One Of The Boys (1977) by Roger Daltrey.

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One of the things that makes Magritte’s original work so well is the blank space in the mirror which directs attention to the impossible reflection. I suspect that if design group Hipgnosis had been asked to imitate the painting they would have done something similar, avoiding the lacklustre effect achieved here by photographer Graham Hughes. Hipgnosis acknowledged their own debt to Magritte in the title of their first book, Walk Away René in 1978, and often constructed whole sets for photo shoots. Hughes tried another Magritte-like effect for the back cover of the Daltrey album but with diminished success.


Dolores Claiborne (1995).

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The following images are from films (and a TV series), two of which are coincidentally based on Stephen King stories. To date I’ve only seen Secret Window which isn’t one I’d recommend. Are there any more forbidden reproductions out there?


Secret Window (2004).

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The Double (2013).

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Us (2019).

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Euphoria (2019).

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Update: Added Sabotage and Euphoria.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
René Magritte, Cinéaste
Magritte: The False Mirror
Magritte, ou la lecon de chose
René Magritte album covers
Monsieur René Magritte, a film by Adrian Maben
George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist
The Secret Life of Edward James
René Magritte by David Wheatley

X-ray visions

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Cover art by George Wilson.

Cosmic weirdness isn’t something you expect to find in the tie-in comics published by Gold Key in the 1960s, but this adaptation of Roger Corman’s film contains a few such traces, as does the film itself. Having watched X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes again recently I was curious to know how artist Frank Thorne would manage with the scenes where Dr Xavier’s vision is showing him more of the world than he wants to see. Despite the general sketchiness of the drawing, in some of the panels these visions are more fully realised than they are in the film, it being easier to draw an unusual effect than capture it on celluloid. Roger Corman had a great idea, a talented co-writer in Ray Russell, and an authentically tormented performance from Ray Milland, but the film is hampered by the limitations of AIP’s budgets. When Xavier complains about the oppressive sight of people above him on the floors of his tenement building only the comic shows us what he sees.

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So too with the later scenes, by which time all of Corman’s point-of-view shots are the same combination of a diffracted lens (Spectarama!) and Les Baxter’s wailing theremin. Xavier’s description of a great watching eye “at the centre of the Universe” isn’t conjured so well by Corman’s visuals. The comic gives us an all-too-human eyeball floating in space, but before this there’s a panel of ragged shapes flapping through the interstellar void, as well as something never seen in the film when Xavier looks down into the Earth’s core.

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The comic was written by Paul Newman (not that one), and was evidently adapted from a script rather than a print of the film. None of the characters or scenes resemble their cinematic equivalents, while Xavier’s eyes in the comic hardly change appearance. But the additions to the finale make me wonder whether there was a little more in the script than ended up in the film.

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Corman made The Man with the X-ray Eyes in 1963, immediately after The Haunted Palace—the first film to adapt HP Lovecraft—and a few years before The Trip—the first feature film devoted solely to the psychedelic experience. Xavier’s journey into nightmare is a curious hybrid of Lovecraft and psychedelia: the titles are set against a swirling violet spiral, while the doctor’s Spectarama visions are precursors of the delirium experienced by Peter Fonda’s Paul in The Trip. (Corman’s initial idea for The Man with the X-ray Eyes had a jazz musician taking too many drugs.) At one stage in his LSD trip Paul looks in a mirror and announces that he can see inside his own brain, but in the earlier film we get to see inside Xavier’s brain for ourselves when he takes his eye drops for the first time, after which the camera passes through the back of the doctor’s head until we’re looking out of his eyes. This is so close to a moment in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void that I’ve been wondering whether Corman’s film is another of Noé’s cult titles like those you see named at the beginning of Climax.

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As for the Lovecraftian quality, The Man with the X-ray Eyes misses an opportunity to do more with the scope of its central concept. Stephen King famously reported a rumour that the film had a suppressed line of dialogue from the very end, when Xavier tears out his eyes then screams “I can still see!” Corman denied that this was the case but admitted it was a good idea. King mentions this in Danse Macabre, in a description of the film which also interprets the story as being far more Lovecraftian—he uses that word—than it actually is. His suggestion (or mis-remembering) is that all the Spectarama effects are Xavier’s growing perception of the Eye at the centre of the Universe, even though Xavier only mentions this presence in the last few minutes.

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The implications of this remain unexplored but Xavier’s final vision of cosmic horror is still truer to Lovecraft’s Mythos philosophy—a warning that the human race peers into the void at its peril—than almost anything else in cinema, and the revelation is made all the more disturbing by the appearance of Xavier’s eyes which by this point are solid black orbs. As King suggests, there’s another film altogether lurking under the surface of this one, a horror film with a cosmic reach. Hollywood still struggles to do anything substantial with Lovecraft’s fiction, but you know the way things are today we’ll be lucky to get anything weirder than more CGI monsters and lumbering kaiju. I wouldn’t want to suggest that Gaspar Noé remake The Man with the X-ray Eyes but if he ever wanted to create a psychedelic horror story then the cosmic route is the way to go.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Undead visions
Trip texts revisited
More trip texts
Enter the Void

The Needful Thing

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Very fitting this one turning up today of all days, especially when the story takes place in the month of October. This time last year I was still working on the interior illustrations. It’s a heavyweight volume, bulked out to 730 pages by Richard Christian Matheson’s afterword and the sturdy slipcase; I designed the cover lettering but the rest of the book design is by Michael Smith. I also signed the main run of 1000 copies, with a smaller run (40 copies, I think) being signed by author and artist. Demand from collectors sold out the book very quickly but if you’re really needful you can find them on Abebooks and eBay for the inevitable high prices.

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Still to come is a post about the illustrations but before I can do that I need to create a new page for the main website. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Mr Gaunt making Polly Chalmers an offer she can’t refuse.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
All the Things
Needful Things

All the Things

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Over the weekend I braved repetitive strain injury and solvent delirium from the fumes emitted by metallic markers while autographing this stack of signing sheets. The weighty pile is now on its way back to PS Publishing which means that the forthcoming illustrated edition of Needful Things is closer to being with its needful purchasers.

Needful Things

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This is the first time I’ve mentioned this doorstop volume but it won’t be the last. I’ll be writing at greater length about last year’s heavy-duty illustration project once the book is in print. Needful Things is the latest in an ongoing series of reprints of Stephen King books from PS Publishing, each volume being limited to 1000 cased, hardback copies. Each book showcases the work of a different illustrator who also signs a tipped-in bookplate. There’s a thriving international market for deluxe reprints of King’s books so these things always sell out fast. This post serves as an alert to let interested purchasers know that the pre-ordering queue will open on the publisher’s website this Friday.

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It was just over a year ago when PS asked if I’d like to illustrate Needful Things. I agreed with some trepidation, having already started work on another major illustration/design project (still in progress). The request from PS was for a cover design and 30 full-page interior illustrations; that’s only a little more than the amount of work I had to do when illustrating Dracula a couple of years ago, but those illustrations were mostly digital collages which took two or three days each to complete. A full-page drawing with this level of accuracy and detail takes me the best part of a week so I could see nine months of frantic plate-spinning ahead. Everything worked out, anyway, and I’m very pleased with the end results. So is Stephen King, which is good to know.

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I’m afraid I don’t have price details for this one but the PS edition of Cujo was priced at £90. Anyone wanting to join the pre-order stampede is advised to first join the publisher’s mailing list. The most recent PS mail has some additional information about the ordering process. I’ll write a little more about the illustrations once the dust has settled.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg
Berni Wrightson in The Mist