{architecture} – Page 84

Repulsion locations

More Polanskiana. This film location site made the tracking down of locations in Repulsion (1965) an easy business. I was hoping they might have an entry for The Tenant, much of which is filmed around the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris but the only other Polanski entries are for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. No matter, one thing I like about the outdoor scenes in Repulsion is the views of South Kensington which Polanski fixed a year or so before Donovan was celebrating the area in a rather more positive manner. I have fond memories of South Kensington in the 1970s since it was the area we stayed in every February during an annual school trip. Barring a slight change of street furniture, the busy traffic island outside the Tube station looked just the same when we were there.

The exterior of Kensington Mansions in Trebovir Road, the location for Carol’s apartment. I’d always thought this was in a street near the Tube station but it’s actually some distance away in Earl’s Court.

Colin (John Fraser) and Carol (Catherine Deneuve).

The hair salon where Carol works is Thurloe’s in Thurloe Place, and the shop in question is still a hair salon. Google’s Street Views were taken in May 2012 so the flags are out for the Queen’s Jubilee.

Just down the road from Thurloe’s is the Hoop & Toy, the pub where Carol’s would-be boyfriend, Colin, goes drinking with his misogynist friends.

The traffic island outside the Tube station which in the latest Street View was still looking like a building site. The most surprising thing about the row of shops around the Tube station is that Dino’s, a restaurant visible in some of the film shots, is still there almost fifty years later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Polanski details
• Repulsion posters
• Through the Wonderwall

Geschichte der Nacht

Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan’s mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter, for the night.

Epigraph from Geschichte der Nacht; a quote from Ulysses by James Joyce

Commissioning the Third Ear Band to create the score for Roman Polanski’s Macbeth was an assuredly good move. Using their music to embellish static scenes of European cities at night is a less obvious one but not as inappropriate as it might seem. Swiss filmmaker Clemens Klopfenstein uses the group’s music sparingly in Geschichte der Nacht (1979), an hour-long record of unidentified streets in unidentified cities after dark. When there’s no music you have the location sound. There’s no narrative, not even in the common documentary sense, simply the atmosphere of neglect that falls over a city during the night and the early hours of the morning. The copy linked here is at Ubuweb where the contents aren’t always permanent. Watch it while you have the chance. Via Ghetto Raga, a Third Ear Band blog.

Athanasius Kircher’s pyramids

Athanasius Kircher’s pyramids aren’t as vast as Thomas Cole’s dream construction—for size you need Kircher’s Tower of Babel—but they’re still eccentric inasmuch as they don’t correspond to any group of Egyptian structures. One of the great things about the etchings in Kircher’s books is the way their detail gives a sense of veracity to their depictions. Go slightly further back in time and you’ll find scenes that are just as eccentric but much more crudely rendered; go forward a few years and too much was known about ancient ruins to ever depict them this way again. The illustration is the frontispiece to Kircher’s Sphinx Mystagoga (1676) which can be seen in full at the University of Heidelberg. The details in Kircher’s illustrations benefit from the high-resolution scans.

Steve in the comments to yesterday’s post mentions another painting featuring an impossible view of architecture through the ages (pyramids included), The Professor’s Dream (1848) by Charles Robert Cockerell. BLDGBLOG ran a post about Cockrell’s paintings a couple of years ago.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Athanasius Kircher’s Tower of Babel
• China Monumentis by Athanasius Kircher

The art of Thomas Cole, 1801–1848

The Titan’s Goblet (1833).

Thomas Cole’s Titan’s Goblet isn’t featured at the Google Art Project, unfortunately, but the following paintings are, and all benefit from being able to explore their details. Cole’s colossal vessel predates Surrealism by a century, and is one of many paintings which always has me mentally labelling him as the American John Martin (1789–1854). Having thought of him for years as an American artist–not least because he founded the Hudson River School–it’s a surprise to learn he was born in Bolton, a town not far from Manchester, with his parents emigrating to the US when he was 17. John Martin also grew up in the north of England so there’s another similarity, although the more important comparison concerns their use of painting to convey the spectacularly vast and unreal scenes common to the imaginative side of Romantic art. The Titan’s Goblet is unusual in not having any particular symbolic or moral significance, unlike the pictures below, it’s Magritte-like in its careful depiction of the impossible. The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, on the other hand, could be exhibited beside Francis Danby’s The Deluge (1840) for a “before and after” effect. Like Martin, Cole enjoyed painting architecture of an exaggerated scale. The Architect’s Dream features an Egyptian temple of stupendous size, while the pyramid looming in the background is closer to William Hope Hodgson’s seven-mile-high Last Redoubt than any structure on the Nile plain.

Of equal interest are Cole’s two well-known series: The Course of Empire (1833–36) and The Voyage of Life (1842), both of which I’d love to see at Art Project size.

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1828).

The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge (1829).

The Architect’s Dream (1840).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Martin’s musical afterlife
• Albert Bierstadt in Yosemite
• Danby’s Deluge
• John Martin: Heaven & Hell
• Darkness visible
• Two American paintings
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

Weekend links 136

Der Triumph des Tintenfisches from Meggendorfer-Blätter (c. 1900). Via Beautiful Century.

Much dismay this week at the news that Coilhouse—the web and print magazine founded in 2008 by Nadya Lev, Meredith Yayanos and Zoetica Ebb—was closing its doors for the foreseeable future. I always loved what they were doing, and was delighted when S. Elizabeth interviewed me for the website two years ago. Looking at the list of their featured articles is like seeing the contents of my head laid bare. Have a browse and see what you may have missed. And fingers crossed they return soon.

• “I think we are just used to seeing naked women because they are used as objects of desire in advertisements and TV. Naked men are not that common—we are not used to seeing a penis. I think that is the main problem for people.” The shock of the (male) nude.

• Michael Clarke asks “What Can Publishers Learn from Indie Rock?” Also: Michelle Dean on the value of used books.

Queers find themselves on both sides of the free speech question. Those of us who are writers want the freedom to write and say what we want. I know I do. Yet a preponderance of LGBT people have become part of the larger wave of those who would limit free speech. Because while we want to be able to say whatever we want about “them,” we do not want “them” to say whatever they want about us.

Victoria Brownworth on The Case Against Censorship

• Caspar Henderson re-reads The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges.

• One hundred classic minimalism, electronic, ambient and drone recordings.

• BLDGBLOG visits the Chand Baori stepwell in Abhaneri, India.

• Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine is launched in the UK.

• Ken Hollings visits Ludwig II’s Venus Grotto.

• A guide to Meredith Monk‘s music.

• RIP Boris Strugatsky.

• Maldorora: a Tumblr.

• Stalker: Meditation (1979) by Edward Artemiev | Undulating Terrain (1995) by Robert Rich & B. Lustmord | Stalker (2004) by Shackleton.