Magic Lantern: A Film about Prague

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There are many documentary films about the city of Prague but Magic Lantern is the only one written and presented by playwright Michael Frayn. Very good it is too, a personal view of the city’s political and cultural history which takes in the usual names and subjects: Rabbi Loew and his Golem, Emperor Rudolf II, Rudolf’s alchemists, artists and scholars, photographer Josef Sudek, the ubiquitous Franz Kafka, puppets, automata, and so on. While Frayn discusses the Communist and post-Communist periods there’s a brief clip of Jan Svankmajer’s The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia.

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Frayn’s film was directed by Dennis Marks, and broadcast in 1993 as part of the BBC’s long-running Omnibus strand. (There’s a further Svankmajer connection in the person of executive producer Keith Griffiths whose Koninck company produced this film at a time when they were also helping Svankmajer make his features.) Magic Lantern wasn’t the only film that Marks and Frayn made together, and not their first metropolitan essay either. Imagine a City Called Berlin (1974) is a portrait of the former capital of Germany during its Cold War isolation; there’s also The Mask of Gold: A Film about Vienna (1977), and Jerusalem: A Personal History (1984), all of which may be seen at The Dennis Marks Archive. My complaints about YouTube are copious enough to paper the walls of the Hradcany, but the site is at its best when it provides this kind of haven for television history that would be impossible to find elsewhere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Le Golem, 1967
Gustav Meyink’s Prague
Stone Glory, a film by Jirí Lehovec
The Face of Prague
Josef Sudek
Liska’s Golem
Das Haus zur letzten Latern
Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
Karel Plicka’s views of Prague

MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan’s mortised card cuts

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This one is partly intended as an aide-memoire for my future self should I need to recall where these particular illustrations are located. The Internet Archive has a good collection of specimen books created by type foundries, most of them American volumes although there are a few from Britain, France and Germany. The bulk of these books comprise typeface samples which I usually ignore, my interest being in the sections near the end which contain all manner of decorative detail: borders, ornaments and the small illustrations (“cuts”) that today would be classed as clip art. A few of these books have proved very useful when I’ve been working on a design that requires imitation of the decoration found in 19th-century print design (my cover for The Atropine Tree is a recent example) but I don’t always remember which book contains the elements I might want, hence this post.

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Another of those cannibalistic advertising animals.

If you’re looking for antique print decoration then the catalogues published by the Johnson Type Foundry of Philadelphia (later MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan) are the ones to go for. I’ve copied or adapated ornaments and decorative details from this book on many occasions over the past ten years. The Internet Archive had a more substantial MSJ catalogue in their collection but it was a bad scan, one that was poor enough to receive some rare complaining comments from other Archive users. Happily another copy of the same book, The Eleventh Book of Specimens of Printing Types (1878), arrived there recently. The Johnson/MSJ catalogues are a much better source of decorative material than those created by their competitors, with a wider variety of combination ornaments (tiny details which could be pieced together to create unique borders or other peripheral decorations) and, in the eleventh volume, a larger stock of illustrations for advertising purposes. Before discovering these scanned catalogues I’d been relying on books from Dover and Pepin Press as source material for antique design. Pepin published a book/CD-ROM collection in 1999, Graphic Frames, which reproduces a number of the advertising cuts from the eleventh MSJ catalogue, including a couple of the ones shown here. The scans are seldom ideal in their raw state, I usually end up tracing the required design as a new version which I then convert to a vector shape. But they’re valuable in being the actual print decoration from the period, not modern reconstructions (or interpretations) of “Victorian” design.

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The “Mortised Card Cuts” and “Mortised Comic Cuts” in the MSJ catalogue were comic illustrations intended for advertising purposes, although any “comic” quality is more likely to appear grotesque to our eyes. Shouting figures with very large, yawning mouths are popular in these kinds of drawings, as are dogs with singularly ugly faces. You can even see a forerunner of the “Kilroy” graffiti in the figure with a nose poking over the advert. I used a few of these faces for my Alice in Wonderland picture series in 2009: the top half of the smoking figure appears in “Advice from a Caterpillar” while other faces may be seen in the background of “Who Stole the Tarts?”.

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Sondheim enthusiasts may recognise this particular figure as the origin of the razor-wielding character on the poster for the original Broadway run of Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Designer Frank Verlizzo (aka “Fraver”) shows how easily an old illustration can be made to slip from the comic to the sinister.

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And from the comic to the plain bizarre… The past is often revealed to be a weirder place than you’d imagine once you start rummaging in its ephemera. The illustrations in most print catalogues are seldom this peculiar but until you go looking you don’t know what else might be out there.

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Weekend links 743

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Icebergs and the aurora borealis in the Arctic. From the Illustrated London News, 13 October 1849.

• The week in award-winning photographs: Winners and finalists from the Ocean Photographer of the Year Awards; and winners and finalists from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

• A new layer of mystery is added to The Voynich Manuscript with the discovery of additional writings revealed by multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis explains.

• At Swan River Press: Helen Grant talks to John Kenny about her new collection of stories, Atmospheric Disturbances, a book whose cover design I discussed here.

Some in Hollywood were taken aback by Huston’s screenwriting choice to bring Melville to the big screen. After all, to adapt a profoundly complex literary novel, he had given the nod to a man known for writing science fiction. Perhaps no one was more surprised by Huston’s choice than Bradbury himself. Huston had read the most recent book Bradbury had sent him, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and the lead story was all it took.

“The Fog Horn” is a tale about two lighthouse keepers who, late one November night, are paid a visit by a beast that has surfaced from the depths after hearing the lonely call of the lighthouse’s foghorn. Bradbury’s love of dinosaurs had led him to write the story, and it was this love that led Huston to believe he was the right man to adapt Moby-Dick. In reading “The Fog Horn,” Huston stated in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, he “saw something of Melville’s elusive quality.”

Sam Weller on how Ray Bradbury came to write the screenplay for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby-Dick

• At Public Domain Review: Kirsten Tambling on the life and art of Gottfried Mind (1768–1814), a Swiss artist known as “The Raphael of Cats”.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tentacle-inspired leather accessories handcrafted by Cokeco.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – September 2024 at AmbientBlog.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Rig Solid.

Solid State Survivor (1979) by Yellow Magic Orchestra | All That Was Solid (1996) by Paul Schütze | From A Solid To A Liquid (2006) by Biosphere

The History of Signboards

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I confess I was initially attracted to this book by the promise of copious illustrations of unusual signboards for inns and public houses but the text is so fascinating I’ll be reading the book in full. The History of Signboards: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1866) is a study of the form by Jacob Larwood and John Camden Hotten which has proved popular enough to be reprinted many times to our own present day. Larwood and Hotten divide their research into chapters exploring the main classes of signboard iconography—heraldic, historical, mythological, religious, etc—together with the many varieties of flora and fauna that the signs depict. Further chapters attempt to untangle the later stages of the designs in which basic symbols were brought together to create rebuses and visual puns based on the names of proprietors.

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The opening chapter describes the origin of inn signboards in the pre-literate tradition of using signs to indicate the trades being undertaken in a given building, a practice begun by the Romans:

Along with these very simple signs, at a later period, coats of arms, crests, and badges, would gradually make their appearance at the doors of shops and inns. The reasons which dictated the choice of such subjects were various. One of the principal was this. In the Middle Ages, the houses of the nobility, both in town and country, when the family was absent, were used as hostelries for travellers. The family arms always hung in front of the house, and the most conspicuous object in those arms gave a name to the establishment amongst travellers, who, unacquainted with the mysteries of heraldry, called a lion gules or azure by the vernacular name of the Red or Blue Lion. Such coats of arms gradually became a very popular intimation that there was—

“Good entertainment for all that passes,
Horses, mares, men, and asses;”

and innkeepers began to adopt them, hanging out red lions and green dragons as the best way to acquaint the public that they offered food and shelter.

Still, as long as civilisation was only at a low ebb, the so-called open-houses few, and competition trifling, signs were of but little use. A few objects, typical of the trade carried on, would suffice; a knife for the cutler, a stocking for the hosier, a hand for the glover, a pair of scissors for the tailor, a bunch of grapes for the vintner, fully answered public requirements. But as luxury increased, and the number of houses or shops dealing in the same article multiplied, something more was wanted. Particular trades continued to be confined to particular streets; the desideratum then was, to give to each shop a name or token by which it might be mentioned in conversation, so that it could be recommended and customers sent to it. Reading was still a scarce acquirement; consequently, to write up the owner’s name would have been of little use. Those that could, advertised their name by a rebus; thus, a hare and a bottle stood for Harebottle, and two cocks for Cox. Others, whose names no rebus could represent, adopted pictorial objects; and, as the quantity of these augmented, new subjects were continually required. The animal kingdom was ransacked, from the mighty elephant to the humble bee, from the eagle to the sparrow; the vegetable kingdom, from the palm-tree and cedar to the marigold and daisy; everything on the earth, and in the firmament above it, was put under contribution. Portraits of the great men of all ages, and views of towns, both painted with a great deal more of fancy than of truth; articles of dress, implements of trades, domestic utensils, things visible and invisible, ea que sunt tamquam ea que non sunt, everything was attempted in order to attract attention and to obtain publicity.

The chapter goes on to explain the evolution of some of the stranger signs—The Hog in Armour, The Goat in Boots—which can be so unpredictable they appear at first to be the products of a kind of folk surrealism. Larwood and Hotten theorise that some of the more peculiar signs were the result of misreadings by the hostelry users, errors which were then passed on once the incorrect name had stuck and a new sign was required. Others might be mistranslations of foreign (usually French) names or phrases. After this you have familiarity leading to deliberate misreading or misnaming:

Along with this practice, there is a tendency to translate a sign into a sort of jocular slang phrase; thus, in the seventeenth century, the Blackmoorshead and Woolpack, in Pimlico, was called the Devil and Bag of Nails by those that frequented that tavern, and by the last part of that name the house is still called at the present day. Thus the Elephant and Castle is vulgarly rendered as the Pig and Tinderbox; the Bear and Ragged Staff, the Angel and Flute; the Eagle and Child, the Bird and Bantling; the Hog in Armour, the Pig in Misery; the Pig in the Pound, the Gentleman in Trouble, &c.

On the subject of vulgar renderings, I’m reminded that a local pub known as The King’s Arms was commonly referred to by friends of mine as The Queen’s Legs, as in “I’ll see you tonight in The Queen’s Legs.” You can’t stop the street from finding its own use for things.

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Ritual by Jon Hopkins

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My music listening for the past week has comprised alternations between various Hawkwind albums and this, the latest release from Jon Hopkins. Ritual is so good I’ve been trying not to overplay it, a 40-minute composition divided into eight connected parts which is sufficiently beatless to be described as ambient, although the ambient tag usually refers to music that drifts quietly in the background. Ritual may work at low volumes but it generates an intensity that warrants immersion in its field of sound, especially on The Veil/Evocation where a slow and increasingly powerful detonation emerges from the boundless spaces. The album has been promoted with a pair of videos, a typical constituent of any high-profile release but one which in this case spoils the flow of the album where the music only fades to silence at the very end. The second video by UON Visuals does at least communicate something of Hopkins’ transcendent reach, an extension of the cover art into a glittering psychedelic vortex.

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Ritual, Part II: Palace by UON Visuals.

It took me a while to get round to Hopkins’ brand of electronic music, mainly because his early releases don’t distinguish themselves very much from similar explorations of the post-techno landscape. Opalescent was his first album in 2001, a release that I now own but might not have bothered with if his work hadn’t improved a great deal over the past two decades. The discography gets really interesting with Singularity in 2018, an album whose thumping four-four rhythms continued the trend of previous releases but now with a distinct flavour of their own. The same goes for Hopkins’ use of the piano which, being classically trained, he plays with considerable skill. Music for Psychedelic Therapy followed Singularity, an unexpected swerve into ambient territory which abandoned any relation to the dancefloor for a kind of throwback to the better class of New Age albums being released in the 1980s, with natural sounds—wind, rain, bird and animal calls—mixed into the music. The New Age connection was reinforced by the final track which features a platitudinous monologue from the late Ram Dass, the American mystic formerly known as Richard Alpert who was one of the early promoters of psychedelic therapy in the 1960s along with his erstwhile colleague, Timothy Leary. I’d consider the album a perfect one if it wasn’t for this coda. With a few exceptions (William Burroughs, for one), I’ve never liked lengthy spoken-word pieces on otherwise instrumental albums, and Ram Dass seems especially out of place when he spent the latter part of his life proclaiming the virtues of meditation and Hindu-derived mysticism over psychedelic voyaging. The latest album applies the power of Singularity to the ambient spaces of Music for Psychedelic Therapy. It’s the best thing Hopkins has done to date. I can’t wait to hear what he does next.