Two experimental films by British filmmakers. Berlin Horse (1970) at Ubuweb is a hypnotic piece of minimalism by Malcolm Le Grice who subjects found footage of exercising horses to a series of loopings and filterings that push the degraded images to a point of textured abstraction. Of note with this film is the equally minimal and repetitive score, a piano loop created by Brian Eno. This was before he gained prominence as a member of Roxy Music but the slight piece of experimentation points the way to his post-Roxy career and his ambient investigations. Berlin Horse is available on DVD from Lux, with a selection of Le Grice’s other shorts.

Marvo Movie (1967) at Europa Film Treasures is a typically frenetic work by Jeff Keen, four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout. Despite the year of its creation, the effect is less psychedelic and more like an amphetamine rush.

• Malcolm Le Grice at YouTube
• Jeff Keen at YouTube

Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967).

I’ve been enthusing for years about the unique films of Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), usually in vain since his work hasn’t always been easy to see and is (for now) poorly served by DVD. His two masterworks, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), have both been issued on disc but in shoddy versions with prints that are scratched and desaturated, and the latter suffers from poor subtitling. Parajanov’s films make bold use of colour and a washed-out print does him no favours at all. In an ideal world the BFI or Criterion would give these films the attention they deserve.

Grumbles aside, Ubuweb comes up trumps again by posting three of Parajanov’s shorter works, none of which I’d seen before. These give some idea of his distinctive tableaux style, and his recurrent preoccupation with decorative details and close views of objects.

• Parajanov.com

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Disasters of War

“A prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique. That its elements are not constructed in a traditional way should not be a barrier to those who wish to cross the bridge to what Jean-Luc Godard proposed as the real story of the cinema—real in the sense of being made of images and sounds rather than texts and illustrations.”—Keith Griffiths

It was only two months ago that I enthused about Patrick Bokanowski’s extraordinary 1982 film, L’Ange, after a TV screening was posted at Ubuweb, and ended by wondering whether a DVD copy was available anywhere. Last week Jayne Pilling left a comment on that post alerting me to the film’s availability via the BAA site; I immediately ordered a copy which arrived the next day. So yes, Bokanowski’s film is now available in both PAL and NTSC formats, and the disc includes a short about the making of L’Ange as well as preparatory sketches and an interview with composer Michèle Bokanowski whose score goes a long way to giving the film its unique atmosphere. I mentioned earlier how reminiscent Bokanowski’s film was of later works by the Brothers Quay so it’s no surprise seeing an approving quote from the pair on the DVD packaging:

“Magisterial images seething in the amber of transcendent soundscapes. Drink in these films through eyes and ears.”

If that wasn’t enough, there’s another DVD of the director’s short films available. Anyone who likes David Lynch’s The Grandmother or Eraserhead, or the Quays’ Street of Crocodiles, really needs to see L’Ange.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• L’Ange by Patrick Bokanowski
• The Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Babobilicons by Daina Krumins
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• The Brothers Quay on DVD

Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He never saw the low resolution, grain and scratches of Super-8 as a deficiency; on the contrary, for a painter it was a means to achieve with film stock some of the texture of painting. Michael O’Pray described the process and intent behind the film in Afterimage 12 (1985):

In 1973, Jarman shot the central sequences for his first lengthy film, and most ambitious to date, In the Shadow of the Sun, which in fact was not shown publicly until 1980, at the Berlin Film Festival. In the film he incorporated two early films, A Journey to Avebury a romantic landscape film, and The Magician (a.k.a. Tarot). The final sequences were shot on Fire Island in the following year. Fire Island survives as a separate film. In this period, Jarman had begun to express a mythology which he felt underpinned the film. He writes in Dancing Ledge of discovering “the key to the imagery that I had created quite unconsciously in the preceding months”, namely Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Seven Sermons to the Dead. He also states that these books “gave me the confidence to allow my dream-images to drift and collide at random”. The themes and ideas found in Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, The Tempest and to some extent in Imagining October are powerfully distilled in In the Shadow of the Sun. Jarman’s obsession with the sun, fire and gold (which spilled over in the paintings he exhibited at the ICA in 1984) and an ancient mythology and poetics are compressed in In the Shadow of the Sun with its rich superimposition and painterly textures achieved through the degeneration “caused by the refilming of multiple images”. Jarman describes some of the ideas behind In the Shadow of the Sun:

“This is the way the Super-8s are structured from writing: the buried word-signs emphasize the fact that they convey a language. There is the image and the word, and the image of the word. The ‘poetry of fire’ relies on a treatment of word and object as equivalent: both are signs; both are luminous and opaque. The pleasure of Super-8 is the pleasure of seeing language put through the magic lantern.” Dancing Ledge p.129

Ubuweb also has some of the short films which were used as raw material for the longer work: Journey to Avebury (1971) (with an uncredited soundtrack by Coil), the Kenneth Anger-esque Garden of Luxor (1972), and Ashden’s Walk on Møn (1973).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

The good people at Ubuweb have excelled themselves by turning up this 70-minute avant garde work by a director who’d managed to stay resolutely off my radar despite years spent delving for cinematic weirdness. L’Ange (1982) is a film which stands comparison with the more abstracted moments of David Lynch and the Brothers Quay. In fact some scenes (and the music) are so reminiscent of parts of the Quay canon I’d suspect an influence if I didn’t consider that an unfair diminishing of the Brothers’ own considerable talents. So what is L’Ange? Trying to describe this film isn’t exactly easy so it’s simpler to hijack Ubuweb’s own précis:

During the seventy minutes of The Angel, viewers see a series of distinct sequences arranged upward along a staircase that seems more mythic than literal. Each of the sequences has its own mood and type of action. Early in the film, a fencer thrusts, over and over, at a doll hanging from the ceiling of a bare room. At first, he is seen in the room at the end of a narrow hallway off the staircase, and later from within the room. He fences, sits in a chair, fences – his movements filmed with a technique that lies somewhere between live action and still photographs. At times, Bokanowski’s imagery is reminiscent of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs. Further up the stairs, we find ourselves in a room where a maid brings a jug of milk to a man without hands, over and over. Still later, we are in a room where there seems to be a movie projector pointing at us. Then, in a sequence reminiscent of Méliès and early Chaplin, a man frolics in a bathtub, and in a subsequent sequence gets up, dresses in reverse motion, and leaves for work. The film’s most elaborate sequence takes place in a library in which nine identical librarians work busily in choreographed, slightly fast motion. When the librarians leave work, they are seen in extreme long shot, running in what appears to be a two-dimensional space, ultimately toward a naked woman trapped in a box, which they enter with a battering ram. Then, back in the room with the projector, we are presented with an artist and model in a composition that, at first, declares itself two-dimensional until the artist and model move, revealing that this “obviously” flat space is fact three-dimensional. Finally, a visually stunning passage of projected light reflecting off a series of mirrors introduces The Angel’s final sequence, of beings on a huge staircase filmed from below; the beings seem to be ascending toward some higher realm. Bokanowski’s consistently distinctive visuals are accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Michèle Bokanowski, Patrick Bokanowski’s wife and collaborator. Like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Bokanowski’s The Angel creates a world that is visually quite distinct from what we consider “reality,” while providing a wide range of implicit references to it and to the history of representing those levels of reality that lie beneath and beyond the conventional surfaces of things.

Asking what it all means is pointless, we’re in the world of dreams here and once again we see how film is able to capture the ambience of dream states in a way no other artform can manage. For an obviously low-budget production there’s real craft and control at work throughout L’Ange, not least in the excellent score—a blend of strings and electronics—which could easily stand alone. Many experimental films of this type quickly outstay their welcome via prolonged repetition or a failure to exploit the imaginative potential of their techniques. Like Lynch and the Quays, Bokanowski successfully balances on the dividing line between narrative and abstraction, finding images unlike any we’ve seen elsewhere. Yes, I enjoyed this a lot, and now I want to watch it again on DVD (if such a thing exists). Fans of The Grandmother and Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies are advised to set aside seventy minutes of their time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Babobilicons by Daina Krumins
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• The Brothers Quay on DVD

A largely-wordless tour of Gaudí’s architecture by the director of Woman in the Dunes (1964). Like that earlier film this also features a score by the composer Toru Takemitsu. I hadn’t realised before that the famous dragon gate (above) at the entrance to the Parc Güell, Barcelona, was as large as it is.

Teshigahara’s documentary is another film available at Ubuweb.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atelier Elvira

An automated performance of György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes at Ubuweb.

Since its world premiere in the Netherlands in 1963, Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes has been very rarely performed in public. The complicated scenographic staging, the detailed preparation by hand, the need for around ten technicians to activate more or less simultaneously the 100 metronomes, makes the demand for performances limited. Thirty-two years after the premiere, the sculptor and installation artist Gilles Lacombe heard a recording of the work. Impressed, he decided to invent a machine able to perform the piece automatically. After six months, he set up this ingenious device. Ever since, Poème symphonique can be performed accurately, at any time, and in public. Please understand that at its world premiere in 1963, the concert was filmed by Dutch television. On that night, after the final tick-tock of the metronome, there was a heavy silence, followed by booing, screaming, and threats. The concert was never broadcast.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget Man Ray’s Object to be Destroyed (1923) (aka Indestructible Object). Richard Cork looked at its origin and meaning for the Tate magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Avant Garde Project

Cover painting by Tom Phillips, design by Russell Mills.

A post for a Thursday.

Brian Eno’s ambient music receives a lot of playing time here, especially Music for Airports, On Land, The Shutov Assembly and, when something really minimal is required, Neroli. But it’s Thursday Afternoon which receives the most attention. Recorded at the request of Sony Japan in 1984, Thursday Afternoon is a single piece which originally accompanied seven of Eno’s “video paintings”, each of them showing Christine Alicino warped and blurred by ultra-slow motion and video noise. Like his earlier static views of the New York skyline, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, filming vertically means that proper viewing can only be achieved by turning the TV on its side. The soundtrack is a beautifully rendered composition which uses Eno’s customary process of letting a number of looped phrases form a shifting musical moiré.

Compositionally, Thursday Afternoon belongs to the family of works which also includes Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised this style of composition as “holographic”, by which he means that any brief section of the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. (From the album notes.)

Daniel Lanois, Roger Eno and Michael Brook were all involved in the creation and production of Thursday Afternoon and the piece works as well played very quietly as it does at louder volume. When played louder more of the background detail becomes apparent, including some very faint birdsong which is most discernible at the end when much of the music has faded away. Perfect for colouring the atmosphere of a room whilst reading, working or talking with friends. It’s also a favourite of mine for playing in the bedroom with someone special.

Thursday Afternoon was released on video cassette then appeared on CD in 1985. As a single track of 61 minutes, this was one of the first original recordings which made specific use of the extended running time of the CD format. The cover painting was by {feuilleton} favourite, artist Tom Phillips, with design by artist and designer Russell Mills. Ten years earlier, Eno had used a detail of Phillips’ painting After Raphael on the cover of Another Green World.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you can now see the original sound and vision version of Thursday Afternoon at Ubuweb. Not ideal by any means but it gives you an idea of the complete work rather than the trunctated versions on YouTube. Eno’s video paintings, Thursday Afternoon included, are now available on DVD should you require them in higher quality. Just be prepared to turn your TV on its side.

Update: Eno’s ambient processes have now reached the iPhone with the Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers app, Bloom.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• Generative culture
• Exposure by Robert Fripp
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

A curious short film over at Ubuweb by Chris Marker, John Chapman and Frank Simeone, depicting driftwood sculptures at the shore of San Francisco Bay which resemble the remnants of some Ballardian cargo cult. The film was made in 1981 and the sculptures look weathered and dated enough (rainbow stripes; what appears to be a lunar lander) to be products of the early 1970s. The atmospheric soundtrack is reminiscent of Max Eastley’s recordings, some of which use the force of sea-borne winds to generate their sounds.

And while we’re on the subject of Mr Marker, I hadn’t noticed this Marker-related blog before.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Max Eastley’s musical sculptures
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• Monsieur Chat
• Sans Soleil

Yukio Mishima’s extraordinary, little-seen 28-minute film Yûkoku aka Patriotism aka Rite of Love & Death (1966) was released on DVD earlier this year via Criterion. You can also see it now on Ubuweb.

Playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima foreshadowed his own violent suicide with this ravishing short feature, his only foray into filmmaking, yet made with the expressiveness and confidence of a true cinema artist. All prints of Patriotism (Yûkoku), which depicts the seppuku of a army officer, were destroyed after Mishima’s death in 1970, though the negative was saved, and the film resurfaced thirty-five years later. New viewers will be stunned at the depth and clarity of Mishima’s vision, as well as his graphic depictions of sex and death.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Secret Lives of the Samurai
• Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian
• The art of Takato Yamamoto

This early piece of abstract cinema from 1924 is available for viewing in several locations—YouTube and Ubuweb have copies—but the best version can be seen at Europa Film Treasures. The film was originally silent so don’t feel too bad about watching with the sound off or with your own score to replace those which were added later.

Born in Sweden to a family of German origin, Viking Eggeling emigrated to Germany at the age of 17, where he became a bookkeeper, and studied art history as well as painting. From 1911 to 1915 he lived in Paris, then moved to Switzerland at the outbreak of World War I. In Zurich he became a associated with the Dada movement, became a friend of Hans Richter, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Marcel Janco. With the end of the Great War he moved to Germany with Richter where both explored the depiction of movement, first in scroll drawings and then on film. In 1922 Eggeling bought a motion picture camera, and working without Richter, sought to create a new kind of cinema. Axel Olson, a young Swedish painter, wrote to his parents in 1922 that Eggeling was working to “evolve a musical-cubistic style of film—completely divorced from the naturalistic style.” In 1923 he showed a now lost, 10 minute film based on an earlier scroll titled Horizontal-vertical Orchestra. In the summer of 1923 he began work on Symphonie Diagonale. Paper cut-outs and then tin foil figures were photographed a frame at a time. Completed in 1924, the film was shown for the first time (privately) on November 5. On May 3, 1925 it was presented to the public in Germany; sixteen days later Eggeling died in Berlin. For more on Eggeling see the book Viking Eggeling 1880–1925 by Louise O’Konor.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mary Ellen Bute: Films 1934–1957
• Norman McLaren
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Moonlight in Glory
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood

More cult stuff from Ubuweb, you lucky people. Being a big Tom Phillips enthusiast I’ve been watching A TV Dante (1989) for years, having taped the one and only broadcast of the series. I also bought the accompanying booklet (below).

This ambitious program, produced by the award-winning film director Peter Greenaway and internationally-known artist Tom Phillips, brings to life the first eight cantos of Dante’s Inferno. Featuring a cast that includes Sir John Gielgud as Virgil, the cantos are not conventionally dramatized. Instead, the feeling of Dante’s poem is conveyed through juxtaposed imagery that conjures up a contemporary vision of hell, and its meaning is deciphered by eminent scholars in visual sidebars who interpret Dante’s metaphors and symbolism. This program makes Dante accessible to the MTV generation. Caution to viewers: program contains nudity. (8 segments, 11 minutes each)

Given the nature of the collaboration, this can’t be compared to many other TV productions. Greenaway wasn’t staging a drama, he was using the TV screen as a flat space like a moving painting, or a series of diagrams and connected symbol systems. The division of the screen has a parallel in some of Phillips’s paintings (and his artist’s book of the Inferno) and makes use of Phillips’s familiar stencil lettering. There are actors: as mentioned above, Sir John Gielgud took the role of Virgil, with Bob Peck as Dante and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as Beatrice. And there are recurrent motifs: triangle, concentric circles, cardiograph displays, Muybridge animations and so on. “Footnotes” were provided by a company of experts who appear in small inset panels to comment on the text while it’s being read. Phillips himself is one of the principal commentators since it was his translation being used.

Peter Greenaway’s feature films have never interested me very much, I prefer him when he’s doing things like this which probably explains why I like Prospero’s Books, his version of The Tempest; much of that film’s approach seems to have been developed from A TV Dante. It’s a shame that only eight of the Cantos were filmed in this way. There were plans to film all thirty four using other directors (with Greenaway to return at the end) but this endeavour took place at the end of the period when Channel 4 was still a haven for unusual arts projects. Regime change subsequently charted a course for the lowest common denominator. And with the two leading actors now dead it wouldn’t be possible to resume the project. In the end this doesn’t matter too much. What remains is an introduction to a perennially fascinating book and an example of how television could—if someone had the courage—ditch the clichés of drama documentary and try something genuinely new.

• The official Tom Phillips website
• The Tom Phillips blog

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• 20 Sites n Years revisited
• The last circle of the Inferno
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

Mary Ellen Bute.

Last week I noted the appearance at Ubuweb of Mary Ellen Bute’s little-seen Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. News comes this week of an exhibition of her abstract films at sketch, London.

sketch presents the first gallery survey exhibition of abstract film by Mary Ellen Bute (b. Houston, Texas 1906, d. 1983).

From 1934–1957 Mary Ellen Bute made fourteen short films pioneering techniques with light, sound and the moving image. Her work involved collaborating with artists, musicians, inventors and others who adopted a scientific experimental approach to creating sound and optical effects. In addition to sampling hand processes such as drawing and painting directly on film the work features imagery created automatically by a custom-built, cathode-ray oscilloscope. She can one of the first woman artists to experiment with the medium but unlike contemporaries Hans Richter (b. 1888), Len Lye (b. 1901) and Oskar Fischinger (b. 1900) her work remains largely unknown. This exhibition brings together a complete chronology of her abstract films, most of which have never been shown in Britain and for the first time will present her work as a multi-screen installation using sketch’s twelve projectors. This exhibition has been curated by Michelle Cotton who has included Bute’s work in survey of artist film distributed by the Independent Cinema Office. Essentials: Modernity will be released nationwide later this year.

A publication featuring essays and previously unpublished material will be published by ALMANAC to be launched in September 2008. ALMANAC is curatorial studio and independent imprint run by Andres Bonacina, Victoria Brooks, James Lambert & Anne Low.

The exhibition runs from 26 July to 13 September, 2008.

Synchromy No. 4: Escape.

For those of us not in London, there’s always YouTube which has a small selection of Ms Bute’s work and in decent quality for once. The two later colour films are especially worth watching; Tarantella was a collaboration with Norman McLaren while Synchromy No. 4 used Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor two years before Disney’s similar sequence in Fantasia.

Mary Ellen Bute on YouTube:
• Rhythm in Light (1934)
• Dada (1936)
• Synchromy No. 4: Escape (1938)
• Tarantella (1940)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Norman McLaren
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Moonlight in Glory
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood

Ubuweb continues to come up with the very obscure goods. Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the kind of thing you would have been lucky to see on television even in the days when non-Hollywood fare was screened regularly. Joyce is almost the definitive example of the unfilmable author although that didn’t prevent Joseph Strick from having a go at Ulysses in 1967 and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ten years later. Ulysses if it was filmed at all should probably be done as eighteen hour-long films rather than Strick’s truncated skate through the novel. Some passages work better than others but I’ve never been able to accept Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom. Bosco Hogan on the other hand is permanently fixed in my head as Stephen Dedalus having seen Portrait before reading the book.

As to the success of Mary Ellen Bute’s opus, I still haven’t watched it properly so you’ll have to go and look for yourself. It’s little more than an illustrated reading but that’s not necessarily as misguided as it seems. Finnegans Wake for many people is one of English literature’s impregnable fortresses; anything that helps break down the doors is surely worthwhile.

Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot Kaplan

Cast (in alphabetical order)
Ray Flanagan . . .Young Shem
Peter Haskell . . . Shem
Page Johnson . . . Shaun
Martin J. Kelley . . . Finnegan
Jane Reilly . . . Anna Livia

There are currently no copies of this film availabe on VHS or DVD; but a 16 mm print is available for museums, universities, and Joycean institutions. Contact Mrs. Cecile Starr at (802) 863-6904; rental is $180.

A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.

With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wyndham Lewis: Portraits
• Picasso-esque
• Books for Bloomsday
• Finnegan begin again

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 between two acts of Francis Picabia’s new ballet, Relâche, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in 1924. Picabia famously wrote a synopsis for the film on one sheet of note paper, headed Maxim’s (the famous Parisian restaurant), which he sent to René Clair. This formed the basis for what ultimately appeared on screen, with some additional improvisations. Music for the film was composed by the famous avant-garde composer Erik Satie, who appears in the film, along side its originator, Francis Picabia. The surrealist photographer Man Ray also puts in an appearance, in a film which curiously resembles his own experimental films of this era.

Entr’acte is a surrealistic concoction of unrelated images, reflecting Clair’s interest in Dada, a fashionable radical approach to visual art which relied on experimentation and surreal expressionism. Clair’s imagery is both captivating and disturbing, giving life to inanimate objects (most notably the rifle range dummies), whilst attacking conventions, even the sobriety of a funeral march.

Entr’acte can be watched and downloaded at Ubuweb. Tate Modern is running a major exhibition of the works of three of the participants, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, until 26 May, 2008.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexander Hammid
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• The South Bank Show: Francis Bacon
• Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell
• Some YoYo Stuff
• Beckett directs Beckett
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• Not I by Samuel Beckett
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• Un Chant D’Amour by Jean Genet
• Borges documentary
• Film by Samuel Beckett
• Towers Open Fire

Two short films by Maya Deren’s husband are now available for viewing at Ubuweb. I’ve known about Hammid’s work for years but this is the first time I’ve seen any of it so these additions are very welcome. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs, the works of the wife overshadowed those of the husband even though they collaborated on Deren’s most famous film, Meshes of the Afternoon (which is also at Ubuweb).

Of the pair of films, Na Prazskem Hrade (At Prague Castle) (1931) is the most interesting for this Prague fetishist, a disjointed study of the architecture of the city’s castle which turns the building into an expressionist collage. Two obvious associations arise while watching this; one is Franz Kafka who lived for a time in the castle’s Hradcany district at 22 Golden Lane and whose novel, The Castle (1926), is inspired by the dominating presence of the building. The other is the Nazi invasion which took place a few years after the film was made and caused its maker and his wife to flee to America. The Nazi high command controlled the country from Prague Castle so the brief glimpse of marching soldiers in one shot can be seen as an ominous presentiment of the future. The castle has featured in bigger budget productions more recently, including one of my cult films, Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991), and the underrated The Illusionist (2006) where Prague masqueraded as turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Barta’s Golem

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage á Raymond Roussel (1974-75).

When I wrote a short reminiscence about Impressions de la Haute Mongolie last March I really didn’t expect I’d be watching it again just over a year later having waited thirty years for the opportunity. But now we can all see José Montes-Baquer’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí, thanks to the indispensable Ubuweb. The copy there doesn’t have English subtitles, unfortunately, but the visuals are still beguiling and not too difficult to follow if you can understand some French and Spanish. It was a curious experience seeing this again, some parts I remembered very well, others I’d completely forgotten about. Most surprising was the soundtrack of electronic music, much of it taken from recordings by Wendy Carlos, including a part of her ambient Sonic Seasonings suite and portions of her complete score for A Clockwork Orange. There’s more about this deeply strange film in Tate Etc.

And speaking of surreal landscapes, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve spent the past few weeks working on a new piece of Lovecraft-themed artwork for an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs, the Museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The exhibition of newly-commissioned work based on themes from HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book will be launched in October 2007. More details about the event, and my contribution, closer to that date. In the meantime, the European edition of TIME magazine has a short feature about the gallery and its ethos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí and Film
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Les Astronautes (1959).

A nice collection of shorts by Walerian Borowczyk (1923–2006) at Ubuweb including this animated piece from 1959 which was co-directed by Chris Marker. The style is immediately reminiscent of that employed by Raoul Servais in Harpya and other films; it’s also not far removed from Terry Gilliam’s animation but it predates both. Also of note is Une Collection Particulière from 1973, a brief but fascinating look at a collection of antique pornographic toys and other adult items from the collection of Pieyre De Mandiargues. And L’Amour Monstre de tous les Temps from 1977 is a portrait of contemporary erotic Surrealist painter Ljuba Popovic at work. Borowczyk spent the Seventies making soft porn features such as Immoral Tales and The Beast, so the subject matter of the later films isn’t so surprising.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Monsieur Chat
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• Sans Soleil
• Barta’s Golem
• The art of Ljuba Popovic

Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis Bacon in fine form, both as combative critic and sozzled pisshead when he and presenter Melvyn Bragg drink too much wine in a restaurant. Highlights include his funny dismissal of Mark Rothko whilst viewing paintings at the Tate, their tour of his cramped studio, and his drunken pronunciation of the word “voluptuous” when describing Michelangelo’s male figures.

I taped this programme when it was repeated after Bacon’s death in 1992 but you lucky people can now see and download it from Ubuweb. (Their note says the SBS is a BBC production but this is incorrect.)

Part of The South Bank Show series, David Hinton directs this documentary about British painter Francis Bacon, known for his horrifying portraits of humanity. The program consists of a series of conversations between Bacon and interviewer Melvyn Bragg, starting with commentary during a side-show presentation at the Tate Gallery in London. Later in the evening, Bacon is followed through various bars hanging out, drinking, and gambling. In another segment, Bacon provides a tour of his painting studio and a glimpse at his reference photographs of distorted humans. The artist discusses his theories, influences, and obsessions. This title won an International Emmy Award in 1985.

This isn’t necessarily the best Bacon interview, that accolade would probably have to go to the 1984 Arena documentary (which was a BBC production) Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact where FB is interviewed by art critic and long-time supporter David Sylvester. Sylvester interviewed Bacon many times over twenty years or so and Thames & Hudson printed the Arena interview along with several of their other talks in Sylvester’s book of the same name. Essential reading for anyone interested in the artist’s work.

Bacon’s work has affected my own on a number of occasions. The cover to Reverbstorm #4 borrowed the carcass from his Painting (1946); some of the paintings I was doing in 1997 (like this one and this one) are distinctly Bacon-esque and we used two of his paintings on the cover design for Savoy’s edition of The Killer (Dave Britton’s idea on that occasion).

His work remains popular for the over-inflated art market. Sketches and unfinished paintings that he was throwing out, and detritus like discarded cheque books, sold for nearly a million pounds last month. And earlier this week his Study from Innocent X (1960) went for $52.6m in a New York auction. Bacon once said that “some artists leave remarkable things which, a hundred years later, don’t work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar—you never know.” I think we can assume this won’t be happening for a while yet.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

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 of them I’ve seen.

Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn’t feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.

While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of ‘Forte Allegre’ and ‘Belem Bayonne’ from Nestor Amaral’s Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.

• View magazine, 2nd series no 4: Americana Fantastica, January 1943
(Cover and many pages by Joseph Cornell)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Design
• The Surrealist Revolution
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• View: The Modern Magazine

Some YoYo Stuff: An observation of the observations
of Don Van Vliet by Anton Corbijn (1993).

Anton Corbijn’s sad and touching short about Captain Beefheart is at Ubuweb.
Includes a brief appearance by David Lynch.

Don van Vliet, alias “Captain Beefheart”, is one of the most influential, misunderstood, talked about, admired, copied, treasured, loved and quoted musicians and yet he is still an obscure and mysterious artist. His quite abrupt artistic transformation from working with a microphone to a paintbrush in 1982 and his consequent move from the desert to the ocean meant even less direct contact with the outside world than before. Subsequently there is very little information about Don from this time onwards and this short black-and-white film made in 1993 is an unique opportunity to see and hear this unique man. The film is approximately 13 minutes long, directed and photographed in black and white.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The genius of Captain Beefheart

Beckett Directs Beckett
In 1985 Samuel Beckett directed “Waiting for Godot”, “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “Endgame” as stage pieces with the San Quentin Players. All three productions were grouped together under the overall title “Beckett Directs Beckett.” As such they toured throughout Europe and in some parts of Asia to wide acclaim. Furthermore, each time a new tour was organized for these productions, after sometimes lengthy lacunae, Beckett has, with the assistance of Walter Asmus, and/or Alan Mandell, brought them back to performance level.

Though the initial productions as staged in 1985 already brought forth substantial changes in the published acting texts of the plays, each time a re-mounting of the productions occurred additional changes were made. The same was true during the production period for these television versions, with Beckett sometimes making textual changes on the telephone even as a given scene was being taped. For these productions, it was our intention and design to open them out beyond the confines of the stage in order to accommodate them to the television medium. Walter Asmus and Alan Mandell, both of whom enjoyed the author’s complete confidence, were responsible for this part of the endeavor.

The producers have a contractual obligation to Mr. Beckett that no changes be made in the original Beckett productions. However, as someone who has done a good deal of work on television (unfortunately not well known in the US), Beckett realizes the constraints and demands of that medium, and the many significant differences between television and the stage. In mounting the television versions of these productions, therefore, we worked intimately with Beckett on these questions as they arose.

Furthermore, Beckett asked that the taping take place in Paris so that, as he said, he could keep an eye on things. In short, Beckett’s was the creative vision which moved the whole enterprise. Walter Asmus and Alan Mandell, the nominal television directors for the series, were perfectly content to act as the guarantors for Beckett’s directorial vision.

Nothing here should be taken to suggest that we lay claim to the only possible interpretations of these plays, that Beckett’s is the last word on the subject. On the contrary: we sought, and believe we have succeeded, in establishing not only the last versions of the texts which Beckett revised prior to his death, but also provided bench-marks, points of departure from which present and future theater and television and film artists can explore other interpretations. The programs were aired by PBS in the US and have been seen in many other countries throughout the world.

More from the indispensable Ubuweb. Would have been nice for these productions to have been some of those mentioned by Colm Tóibín in his piece for the LRB on Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee but these are still worth seeing for being directed by the writer. As Tóibín notes with regard to Beckett’s direction:

The journalist Clancy Segal wrote about Beckett’s style of directing as he observed him work with the two Irish actors: “His interventions are almost always not on the side of subtlety but of simplicity . . . The actors tend to want to make the play ‘abstract and existential’; gently and firmly Beckett guides them to concrete, exact and simple actions.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Colm Tóibín on Beckett’s Irish Actors
• Not I by Samuel Beckett
• Film by Samuel Beckett

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 a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”

Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s. (MoMA.org)

• Maya Deren at Ubuweb. Includes free film downloads
• Maya Deren at Senses of Cinema

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jodorowsky on DVD
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

Not I (1973)
149.6 mb (avi), 15′06″
Starring and Introduced by Billie Whitelaw

Not I takes place in a pitch black space illuminated only by a single beam of light. This light illuminates an actress’s mouth. The mouth utters a monologue of fragmented, jumbled sentences which gradually coelesces into a narrative about a woman who has suffered an unpleasant experience. The title comes from the character’s repeated insistence that the events she describes did not happen to her.

The stage directions also call for a character called ‘the Auditor’ who wears a black robe and can be dimly seen at the back of the stage, occasionally raising its hands in a gesture of impatience. When Beckett came to be involved in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and consequently allowed the character to be omitted from those productions. However, he did not decide to cut the character from the published script, and whether or not the character is used in production seems to be at the discretion of individual producers. As he wrote to two American directors in 1986: “He is very difficult to stage (light–position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Film by Samuel Beckett

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 is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche. This informal little project once again shows the joy Cocteau takes in creating art, in addition to showing a side of his work (his paintings and drawings) that his films often overshadow.

La Villa Santo Sospir, 1952, 250 mb, (AVI)

The film is in French but Ubuweb provide a subtitle file if you know how to use those. This isn’t really essential however (despite the copious narration), the film is more concerned with giving the viewer a guided tour of the villa and its decorations. Fascinating seeing Cocteau working with colour even though many of the drawings and murals on display are his characteristic black lines on a white field. Nice also to see again his habitual delight with cinematic trickery in the reverse-motion sequences, wiping a blank canvas with a cloth so that a drawing appears, or piecing together living flowers from fragments of stalk and petal.

Photo of JLB by Pepe (José María) Fernández.

At the ever fabulous Ubuweb.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man (2000)
260MB (AVI)
Directed by Philippe Molins
Written by Alberto Manguel
Runtime: 47mins
Language: English

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Borges in Performance

Genet’s gay classic at Ubuweb.

Un Chant D’Amour, 1950, 269 mb (AVI)

Packed with shots of full frontal hard ons, masturbation, and extreme close ups of sweaty feet, armpits and thighs, Jean Genet’s only film is confrontingly explicit. Though no sex takes place, the erotic factor of Un Chant D’Amour is off the scale, and makes for a sensational viewing experience that feels like watching porn. As well, as a twenty-five minute black and white avant garde short, it’s everything but commercial, and it was even abandoned by its director who, à la George Michael, disowned it in the mid seventies on the grounds that he had reached a far more sophisticated plateau of artistic expression, and was embarrassed by this crude early work. No wonder then, that Un Chant D’Amour has been banned, censored and blacklisted ever since its 1950 release.

This is quite a shame, for apart from being an excellent and extremely horny short film, Un Chant D’Amour is quite the hidden treasure, an underviewed and lushly romantic avant-garde tribute to yearning and desire, and and a frustrating glimpse of what might have been if Genet had kept making films.

Stuck in airless and solitary prison cells (somewhere in Algeria, presumably), sexy inmates drive themselves to the edge with obsessive erotic longing for each other. Almost mad from solitude and longing, they blow cigarette smoke through mini glory holes, and writhe against thick concrete walls, knowing their man is on the other side. A sexually suspect guard spies on them, one by one, peep show style, and they sometimes notice, and perform for him. He gets so worked up he breaks into a cell, whips the inmate, and gets him to fellate his gun. Symbolism and dream sequences abound, but are hard to distinguish from the narrative proper as Genet’s use of repetition, ritual, and stylised movement is unrelentlingly hypnotic.

Un Chant D’Amour’s resonance is mostly due to images that would never make the cut of modern pop culture, certainly not a modern commercial film. Saying that most gay-interest films pale in comparison, then, is unfair. However, Genet’s sensuous presentation makes his two central characters’ almost insane cravings tangible and heartfelt. No amount of dialogue compensates, and furrow-browed pleas for tolerance and happiness drag things in the opposite direction fast. The fantasies of Un Chant D’Amour involve smoke, flowers, dance and forests as well as hair, sweat and muscle. This rocking back and forth between lush romance and salty carnality is a little dizzying, but masterfully (unknowingly?) evocative. By comparison, most other gay films look like tupperware parties, gatherings of politically activated animatronic eunuchs.

Like The Deep End, Un Chant D’Amour taps into elemental energies and ignores politics and socialisation, and as a result comes closest to capturing (pre-rainbow flag) “gay” on screen.

Review by Mark Adnum
www.outrate.net

Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field by Pavel Tchelitchew (1933).

View magazine was an American periodical of art and literature, published quarterly from 1940 to 1947 with heavy emphasis on the Surrealist art of the period. The jaw-dropping list of contributors included: Pavel Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Paul Klee, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, René Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, and Edouard Roditi.

The editor was Charles Henri Ford, one of those mercurial polymaths who seemed to know everybody of significance in the world of arts and letters which explains how he could summon such an extraordinary roster of contributors. Ford made a splash initially in 1933 when he co-wrote what’s generally regarded as the first gay novel, The Young and Evil, with Parker Tyler. This received guarded praise from Gertrude Stein (Ford’s writing was influenced by Stein and Joyce) who later said it was “the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation”, and the book was sufficiently frank about the lives of its Greenwich Village characters to be banned in the US until the 1960s.

The tragedy of all magazines is that they flourish for a period then are quickly forgotten, no matter how much impact they may have made in the general culture. View was published in limited runs which means individual copies now command high prices. At a time when other forms of media are being continually resurrected, magazines fall by the wayside; museums and libraries collect them but they remain out of view of the world at large. The web has been slowly alleviating this problem: editions of Oz are now available for online browsing and there’s a complete copy of the “Americana Fantastica” issue of View here. You can also see the incredible Aspen magazine over at the wonderful Ubuweb. Fingers crossed that somebody eventually gives us the rest of View.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – JANUARY 1943 (SERIES II, NO.4)
Cover by Joseph Cornell.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.3)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.4)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY / SUMMER 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.2)
Cover by Georgia O’Keeffe.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.3)
Cover by Fernand Leger.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, No.4)
Cover by Esteban Frances.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1945 (SERIES V, NO.1)
Cover by Marcel Duchamp.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY 1945 (SERIES V, NO.2)
Cover by Wilfredo Lam.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.3)
Cover by Morris Hirshfield.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.4)
Cover by Leon Kelly.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.5)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 1)
Cover: Brancussi’s studio.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 2)
Cover by Rene Magritte.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH / SPRING 1947 (SERIES VI, NO.3)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958).

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1976/Salvador Dali/José Montes-Baquer/Germany)

In any list of films I’d currently most like to see but can’t due to lack of availability, this bizarre “documentary” collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer would be near the top of the list. I saw it once, probably shortly after it had been made, when the BBC screened it as part of their Omnibus arts series in the late seventies. By this time I was already very familiar with the Surrealists, Dalí, Magritte and Max Ernst especially, so it was great to see Dalí himself declaring a supposed mission to explore Upper Mongolia in a search for giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. This premise aside, I remember few other details, the whole film was as delightfully confusing as might be expected. The most distinct memory was of the painting above being shown, then the camera pulling back some distance to reveal the full extent of Hitler’s face which is only hinted at in the original. Happily, a web review now provides us with some more details:

Homage to Impressions d’Afrique (1909), is a free-associative poem written by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), even though he never visited Africa. The film is dedicated to this French author, forefather of the Surrealists, who developed a formal constraint system to generate inspiration from dislocative puns.

Dalí does the very same thing with this chimerical pseudocumentary leading us to the mysterious realm of High Mongolia where a gigantic white soft mushroom grows, many times more hallucinogenic than LSD! From his studio-museum in Cadacès (Spain), he proceeds to report on the alleged scientific expedition sent out by himself to retrieve this precious treasure, with newspaper clips and newsreel. Childhood memories (like the picture above) are the opportunity to explain more thoroughly the source of his inspiration. This bucolic landscape is in fact a close up of Hitler’s portrait (his nose and moustache) turned to the side!

Wholly Dalíesque, this film experiment pieces together astonishing combinations of superimposed images, fading in and out, switching scale with odd perspectives. Dalí invents a filmmaking process and applies his very language to cinematic purposes, bending the rules to serve his desperate need for originality. Travelling through a microscopic close up of paintings or rough surfaces, his voiceover commentary gives sense to the landscapes taking form under his eyes.

Impressions of Africa was also the title of a Dalí painting from 1938, of course:

It’s probably too much to hope that this will turn up on TV again, so for now I suppose I’ll have to look forward to it appearing on DVD at some point in the future. How about it José?

Update: Ubuweb has a copy!