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Back in Doré’s jungle

This illustration by Gustave Doré (with engraving work by Louis Sargent) is a beautiful example of how to fill a scene with detail and texture without losing a sense of depth or control of the light and shade. Piranesi’s etchings, especially his views of Roman ruins, are often as skillfully rendered, resisting the tendency of concentrated shading to turn into a depthless field of grey. Doré’s scene is from one of his illustrated editions that seldom receives a mention in lists of his works, Atala, a novella by François-René de Chateaubriand set among the Native American peoples of Mississippi and Florida. Those vaguely Mesoamerican ruins are an invention of the artist, being barely mentioned in the text. Doré’s illustrations often exaggerate details when they have to depict the real world; he even took liberties with the views of London he published following his visit to the city in 1869. This combination of ruined architecture and verdant foliage is something I’ve always enjoyed even though I’ve never worked out why the imagery is so appealing. Doré’s illustration is as close as he usually gets to Piranesi’s views of overgrown Roman ruins, only in this case the elements have been reversed, with foliage dominating the carved stonework.

Production sketch by Mario Larrinaga from The Making of King Kong (1975).

Last week I mentioned Jean Cocteau’s enthusiasm for Doré’s illustrations, their influence being apparent in the set designs for La Belle et la Bête. Doré’s influence was even more visible in another Beauty and the Beast story filmed a decade earlier, King Kong, as described in The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George Turner:

[Willis] O’Brien’s idea of emulating Doré as a basis for cinematographic lighting and atmosphere may have originated with the pioneer cameraman and special effects expert, Louis W. Physioc, who in 1930 stated that “if there is one man’s work that can be taken as the cinematographer’s text, it is that of Doré. His stories are told in our own language of ‘black and white,’ are highly imaginative and dramatic, and should stimulate anybody’s ideas.”

The Doré influence is strikingly evident in the island scenes. Aside from the lighting effects, other elements of Doré illustrations are easily discernible. The affinity of the jungle clearings to those in Doré’s “The First Approach of the Serpent” from Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Dante in the Gloomy Wood” from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, “Approach to the Enchanted Palace” from Perrault’s Fairy Tales and “Manz” from Chateaubriand’s Atala is readily apparent. The gorge and its log bridge bear more than a slight similarity to “The Two Goats” from The Fables of La Fontaine, while the lower region of the gorge may well have been designed after the pit in the Biblical illustration of “Daniel in the Lion’s Den.” The wonderful scene in which Kong surveys his domain from the “balcony” of his mountaintop home high above the claustrophobic jungle is suggestive of two superb Doré engravings, “Satan Overlooking Paradise” from Paradise Lost and “The Hermit on the Mount from Atala.

King Kong (1933).

I’m sceptical of Goldner and Turner’s suggestion that this illustration of the two goats inspired King Kong‘s tree-bridge, the only thing the two scenes share is a piece of wood spanning a chasm. The Chateaubriand illustration is much more redolent of King Kong, as is evident from some of the films’s marvellous production sketches by Byron Crabbe and Mario Larrinaga.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

The tree-bridge scene has another precedent in a very similar bridge that appears briefly in The Most Dangerous Game, a film made by King Kong‘s producer and director in 1932 using the same jungle sets, and featuring many of the same actors and crew. The jungle scenes in the earlier film show a similar Doré influence, with many long or medium shots framed by silhouetted vegetation. The film even includes the animated birds that are later seen flapping around the shore of Skull Island.

Atala‘s fallen tree makes at least one more notable film appearance in Ray Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island, another film about a remote island populated by oversized fauna. Harryhausen’s island doesn’t have much of a jungle but he always mentioned King Kong and Willis O’Brien as the two greatest influences on his animation career. He also picked up on O’Brien’s use of Doré’s work, something he often mentioned in interviews. If Charles Schneer’s budgets hadn’t restricted the films to Mediterranean locations I’m sure Harryhausen would have made greater use of Doré’s jungles.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Uncharted islands and lost souls

Weekend links 785

A 1933 poster for the second of Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films.

• Good news for those who missed the original run (from 2002–2013), Arthur Magazine is now available for the first time as a complete set of free PDFs. I was laterally involved with the magazine from the outset, mostly as a remote supporter, but I also did several covers and interior illustrations for the early issues.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler by Norbert Jacques (translated by Lilian A. Clare); and two books by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Short Fiction, and a novella, The Room in the Dragon Volant.

• New music: Spilla by Ensemble Nist-Nah; and Sea-swallowed Wands by Jolanda Moletta and Karen Vogt.

With his compulsions for systems and architecture, his command of shadows and symbolism-imbued sets and props, Lang is never less than arresting. Yet few of the films make complete statements; Lang’s art, in this period, is seemingly as much a fugitive as are his archetypal characters. That is, until the moment that his long journey to the direct subject matter and cultural framework of the 1950s United States, addressed in the terms and by the means available to him in Hollywood, abruptly comes to superb fruition with The Big Heat.

Jonathan Lethem on Fritz Lang in Hollywood and one of the greatest noir pictures of the 1950s

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: an enthusiastic review at The Joey Zone. My thanks to Mr Shea!

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Nina Garcia; and Isolated Mix 133 by Pentagrams Of Discordia.

• At Colossal: David Romero’s digital recreations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealised buildings.

• At Smithsonian magazine: John Last investigates the history of the Tarot.

• At Planet Paul: An interview with artist Malcolm Ashman.

• At the Daily Heller: A porno gag mag with attitude.

• Hodgsonia

• Das Testaments Des Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda | (The Ninth Life Of…) Dr Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda | Abuse (Here) (1985) by Propaganda

Chronicle: The Vase

The sound on this old VHS recording is terrible, as the uploader admits, but I’ll write about the programme as a placeholder in the hopes that a better copy turns up one day. The vase in question is the Portland Vase, a vessel believed to have been made in Rome during the reign of Augustus, which has been housed in the British Museum since 1810. The vase is notable for being an exceptional example of cameo glasswork, a type of decorated glass in which an object is fashioned in one colour then dipped into a pool of glass of a second colour to create an extra coating. Once the glass has hardened, portions of the outer coat are carefully carved away, leaving a surface of relief decoration. The carving process can take years to complete. Josiah Wedgewood’s famous jasperware was a ceramic imitation of cameo glass; Wedgewood even borrowed the vase for a while to make a copy.

The Portland Vase fragments (1845) by Thomas H. Shepherd.

The other notable fact about the Portland Vase is that it was smashed to pieces in 1845 by a drunken student, and has since been pieced together on three separate occasions, the first time shortly after its destruction, the second time in 1948 when the vase was dismantled and reassembled using shellac to fill some of the gaps between the larger pieces. The most recent reconstruction in 1989 was filmed by the BBC for this episode of Chronicle, a process which once again required the careful dismantling of the vase then its rebuilding using more durable glues and filling materials. Reading about these reconstructions had me wondering about the logistics of dismantling a 2000-year-old antique, especially one fashioned from such a fragile material. Conservators Nigel Williams and Sandra Smith spent nine months working with 230 fragments. If you share my curiosity about their work, this damaged recording is worth persevering with, the film provides a rare opportunity to see in detail the restoration of one of the world’s great art treasures. It’s also a reminder to myself to go and see the vase the next time I’m near the British Museum, which I often am when I visit London. Despite having visited the museum many times, the vase is one exhibit I’ve yet to see.

Cocteau’s effects

Chez Cocteau.

“Effects” in the sense of possessions rather than aesthetic or creative effects. I’ve been reading Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being, an essay collection in which the author muses on a variety of subjects, from his own life, his work, and people he knew, to more general considerations of the human condition. In one of the chapters Cocteau describes his rooms at 36 rue de Montpensier, Paris, where he lived from 1940 to 1947, offering a list of the objects that occupied the shelves or decorated the walls of his apartment. I always enjoy accounts of this sort; the pictures (or objects) that people choose to hang on their walls tell you things about a person’s tastes and character which might not be so obvious otherwise. The same can’t always be said for published lists of favourite books or other artworks when these may be constructed with an eye to the approval of one’s peers. The pictures decorating your living space are more private and generally more honest as aesthetic choices.

I already knew what a couple of these items looked like: the Radiguet bust, for example, may be seen in documentary footage. This post is an attempt to find some of the others. If you know the identity of any of the unidentified pieces then please leave a comment.

The most engaging bits of such wreckage, thrown up on this little red beach, is without doubt the Gustave Doré group of which the Charles de Noailles gave me a plaster cast from which I had a bronze made. In it Perseus is to be seen mounted on the hippogryph, held in the air by means of a long spear planted in the gullet of the dragon, which dragon is winding its death throes round Andromeda.

“the Charles de Noailles” refers to Charles and his wife, Marie-Laure, a pair of wealthy art patrons who helped finance Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or and Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète. Doré’s illustration (showing Ruggerio from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso reenacting the heroic rescue) is very familiar to me but I was unable to find any sculptural copies of the work. In addition to decorating Cocteau’s room some of Doré’s illustrations also served as inspiration for the sets in La Belle et la Bête.

This group is on a column standing between the so-called castor window and a tall piece of slate that can be moved aside and that conceals a small room which is too cold to be used in winter. It was there that I wrote Renaud et Armide, away from everything, set free from telephone and door bells, in the summer of 1941, on an architect’s table above which one sees, saved from my room in the rue Vignon where it adorned the wall-paper, Christian Bérard’s large drawing in charcoal and red chalk representing the meeting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

Bérard’s drawing is large indeed (see the photo at the top of this post). The artist was a theatrical designer, also the designer of La Belle et la Bête, and one of several of Cocteau’s friends who died young.

On the right of my bed are two heads, one Roman, in marble, of a faun (this belonged to my Lecomte grandfather), the other of Antinoüs, under a glass dome, a painted terracotta, so fragile that only the steadiness of its enamel eyes can have led it here from the depths of centuries like a blind man’s white stick.

A third head adorns that of my bed: the terracotta of Raymond Radiguet, done by Lipschitz, in the year of his death.

And speaking of premature deaths… Antinous was the celebrated youth beloved of the emperor Hadrian whose death by drowning in the Nile caused Hadrian to establish a cult of Antinous that spread across the Roman Empire. Many busts and full-figure statues survive as a result, but I was unable to find a photo of the one owned by Cocteau. Raymond Radiguet, meanwhile, died of typhoid fever at the age of 20. Radiguet was a precocious talent who managed to write two novels before he died, including Le Diable au corps at the age of 16.

Continue reading “Cocteau’s effects”

Weekend links 784

An illustration by HB Ford for The Violet Fairy Book (1906), edited by Andrew Lang.

• New music: An Aesthetic – Experiments in Tape by Hawksmoor; Leylines (2025 remaster) by Aes Dana; A Fragile Geography (10th Anniversary Reissue) by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• “Skoda Auto designers reimagine Ferat Vampire car from cult classic 1981 Czech horror film”.

• At Colossal: Chris Ware illustrates a postwoman’s day to celebrate 250 years of USPS.

Seen today, the failure of Sorcerer looks like a grim prophecy of where the film industry would be headed in the years to come. It signaled that the creative ambitions of the New Hollywood, and its indulgence of stubborn renegade auteurs, had been cast aside for a new and dispiriting blockbuster ethos. Decades later, that ethos is still with us: a Hollywood dominated by digitally smoothed, effects-encrusted moviemaking, where every backdrop looks fake (even the real ones) and action sequences carry no physical weight. It’s a wretched landscape, and Sorcerer positively towers over it. To watch the film now, from its electric opening moments through its gaspingly bleak denouement, is to encounter something more than just a magnificent ruin or an object of cultish reclamation: a thwarted masterwork that is thwarted no longer.

Justin Chang on the bleak magic of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

• At the BFI: The Red Shoes wallpaper by the film’s designer Hein Heckroth.

• All This Violence by Caspar Brötzmann Massaker.

• RIP Lalo Schifrin and Rebekah del Rio.

• The Strange World of…Jon Spencer.

• In Ultra-Violet (1983) by Cinema 90 | Violet Ray Gas (2009) by Violet | Violetta (2012) by Demdike Stare