{film} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 833

Tony Hyde’s original artwork for the front cover of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind. The painting is being auctioned later this month.

• At the Daily Heller: Steven Heller reprints his 2012 Atlantic review of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume collection of visual adaptations of works of literature. The collection was edited by the late Russ Kick, and includes my own condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bill Hsu presents…21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations by Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña, Hugo Covarrubias, Christiane Cegavske, John Frame, Saori Shiroki, Joe Hsieh, Phil Tippett, Robert Morgan, Shengwei Zhou.

• At Colossal: In Los Angeles, 70 artists transform a vacant hospital into a sprawling art experience.

What we were doing was rooted in that specific moment, but looking back, it also seems to resonate strongly with the present—particularly in terms of how we understand media, perception, and reality itself. This is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, especially with the renewed activity around Cabaret Voltaire. It brings into focus the extent to which earlier work now reads almost as a form of prefiguration. At the time, though, much of it was intuitive. We didn’t necessarily have a fully formed theoretical framework for what we were doing—we were artists, and we were working instinctively. It’s really only in retrospect that some of those ideas begin to take on a clearer shape and meaning.

Stephen Mallinder talking to Nicolas Ballet about Cabaret Voltaire, the group’s history and working methods

• New music: The Endless Dance by Hannah Peel; Helt by Fjall; Air Signs by Anthéne.

• Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Brutal Types.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 135 by Aspetuck.

• Brute Reason (1983) by Bernard Szajner | Let’s Get Brutal (1986) by Nitro Deluxe | Brutal But Clean (1994) by Cabaret Voltaire

Huszti Horvath’s Three Dragons

Book of the Three Dragons is an unusual illustrated volume, being an American edition of a retelling of Welsh myths by a Welsh writer, Kenneth Morris, with illustrations by a Hungarian artist, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath (1891–1973). Morris was, among other things, a Theosophist who was living in California when he wrote Book of the Three Dragons which no doubt explains the American publication. There doesn’t appear to be any Theosophy in this book at least. Dragons are an important symbol for the Welsh, with a red dragon being a prominent emblem on the flag of Wales. Morris’s book opens with a guide to the pronunciation of the Welsh names and words that appear in the text.

Ferdinand Horvath, meanwhile, moved to the USA in the 1920s where he eventually found employment as an illustrator before working (without credit) for Disney. It’s at Disney-related websites that you’ll find most of the information about his life and work, where the discussion inevitably concerns his designs for animated films. A list of his other book productions would be welcome. There’s a very nice edition of The Raven that was published in the same year as Book of the Three Dragons but with art in much more of an Expressionist style.

I often wonder what Disney’s animations might have been like if the studio had given artists like Horvath and Kay Nielsen a freer rein. Disney only began to change its style in the late 1950s as a result of competition from other animation studios, and even then the results were compromised. Sleeping Beauty used the designs of Eyvind Earle to distinguish the film from the studio’s previous fairy tales but Earle was dissatisfied with the treatment his work received and he left the project before it was finished; the art direction for One Hundred and One Dalmatians was based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle but Walt Disney hated the results and refused to try anything similar again.

Continue reading “Huszti Horvath’s Three Dragons”

Weekend links 832

Dark Corridor (1990s) by Unknown Artist.

• “I greatly enjoyed this rich, allusive and strange text, which has affinities to the literary form and style of TS Eliot, David Jones and Iain Sinclair, uniting high modernism with demotic and pulp elements, as well as to the occult thrillers of Charles Williams, Mary Butts and others.” Mark Valentine reviews B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars by Andrew Duncan.

• New music: Electronic Meditation For Inner Space Travel by Studio Kosmische; Fathom Tides by Werner Dafeldecker & Lawrence English; rust/wave by Tewksbury.

• At Public Domain Review: Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: Thom Sliwowski on the history of the mysterious Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

• At Door of Perception: Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, as photographed by Neil Burnell.

• Anne Billson selects 20 of the best corridors in film.

• More corridors: Scificorridorarchive.

• Ukrainian animation.

• RIP Sonny Rollins.

• Current Rothko

• The Black Corridor (1973) by Hawkwind | Corridor (2018) by Steve Jansen | Spectral Corridor Part 4 (2021) by The House In The Woods

Weekend links 831

Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman.

• The summer catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: The Sanctity Of Rust by Hollan Holmes; Heavy Water by Magic Tuber Stringband; Sorry I Didn’t Realize by iNFO.

• In another of those foolhardy numbered lists, Alexis Petridis attempts to rank Laurie Anderson’s greatest songs.

“The best of mathematics is a way of thinking,” [Klainerman] said. Progress in the field is made through discoveries rather than inventions, by following its own version of the scientific method. In 1911, for example, Roald Amundsen and four fellow explorers were the first people to reach the South Pole. “The South Pole was there to be discovered,” Klainerman noted, “but the path you take to get there, and the equipment you bring, depends on human inventiveness.” When he and Christodoulou spent six and a half years proving that Minkowski space is stable, they too had to invent the tools to get there. But the stability itself was not their creation. It was a fact to be divined.

A long read by Steve Nadis on Sergiu Klainerman and his conviction that mathematics has an existence that precedes human thought

• At the BFI: Tony Rayns on Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), a trip into Manila’s gay underworld.

• Read an extract from In Another World: The Four Seasons Of Talk Talk by Graeme Thomson.

• At The Daily Heller: The Serene Surrealism of Guy Billout.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s a Malcolm Le Grice Weekend.

• Mathematics And Electronics (1995) by Gas | True Mathematics (2002) by Ladytron | Music Is Math (2002) by Boards Of Canada

Gilgamesh, a film by Pavel Aujezdský

The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t a natural choice for the subject of a short animated film, but that’s what we have here, the first directorial effort by Czech film-maker and TV director Pavel Aujezdský. I’ve never read the Sumerian saga so I’m in no position to judge the success of Aujezdský’s adaptation, but given the strange and confusing nature of the opening scenes I’d guess it helps to be acquainted with the story. The scenes that follow are more straightforward, depicting a journey by the hero in which various powerful beings have to be confronted and either evaded or defeated.

This is one of those animated tales where the form emulates the content to some extent, in this case presenting the deeds of Gilgamesh in the manner of the tableaux found on Sumerian stone carvings. It wasn’t the first animated short based on The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Quay Brothers made This Unnameable Little Broom in 1985, two years before Aujezdský’s film, although in the Quays’ case they only dramatised a single incident from the saga. You’ll find that one on their DVD/blu-ray collections.