{sculpture} – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 669

Love (1973), a poster by Nicole Claveloux.

• “Warner Brothers had been keen on a Rolling Stones movie. Jagger was keen on being a movie star. But Donald Cammell’s script was no Beatles’ jolly japes musical comedy…” Des Barry examines the ninth minute of Cammell & Roeg’s Performance.

• “…part of what made his 1970s work so original was the degree to which his band cross-pollinated guitar with synthesizer.” Aquarium Drunkard explores the esoteric jazz-rock of Steve Hillage.

• Magma, the cosmic jazz-rock group from France, have been around for 50 years without making a music video. Hakëhn Deïs is their first.

There was half-Tarkovsky embedded in async, “Solari” and “Stakra” and “Walker”, a hand outstretched to those great poems of living and light that we call films. “I had a strange dream last night,” Andrey Tarkovsky wrote in one of the diary entries collected in Instant Light, “I was looking up at the sky and it was very, very light and soft; and high, high above me it seemed to be slowly boiling, like light that had materialised like the fibres of a sunlit fabric, like silken living stitches in a piece of Japanese embroidery.”

David Toop remembers Ryuichi Sakamoto

• “Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station…”

• The Electrifying Dreamworld of The Green Hand: Dan Clowes on the comic-art of Nicole Claveloux.

• At Bandcamp: Andy Thomas on the post-punk pop subversion of David Cunningham.

• At Unquiet Things: An enigmatic baroness and her collection of skulls.

• New music: River Of Dreams by Romance & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ray Gun.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – April 2023.

• RIP Al Jaffee.

• Skulls Of Broken Hill (1996) by Bill Laswell | The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2008) by Earth | Black Skulls (2018) by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Art on film: The Dark Corner

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films with a post that suits a week where Surrealism has been a dominant theme.

I’ve been watching a lot of film noir recently, and I do mean a lot. Since August last year I’ve watched almost 100 films that warrant the label (I’ve been keeping a written record to avoid losing track), with more of them still to come. Many of these have been first-time viewings, an experience that’s been enlightening and mostly positive. I’ll have more to say on the subject in the future but for now here’s a discovery from The Dark Corner (1946), a detective drama directed by Henry Hathaway, and one I hadn’t seen before.

A Vermeer in a dark corner.

The story concerns a New York private eye, Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens), who’s being framed by parties unknown. When Galt investigates the mystery with his secretary, Kathleen (Lucille Ball in a straight role), their researches lead them to a Fifth Avenue art gallery run by Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb playing the same waspish aesthete as he did in Laura). Many of the art details can’t help but seem amusing or bizarre today, such as when someone brings home a genuine Vincent van Gogh painting and leaves it propped in a chair. There’s also a painting that we’re told is a rare Raphael but since this has to resemble Cathcart’s wife it looks nothing like a Renaissance picture. Elsewhere, a Donatello statue is priced at a mere $40,000, while Cathcart has Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring on sale despite the real painting having been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.

As to the Surrealism, a scene inside the gallery features a blink-and-you-miss-it moment when a pair of would-be purchasers are seen peering at this Salvador Dalí painting, one of the few pieces of contemporary art on display. Before the camera pans away we see the man on the right shaking his head. I think this painting was also created for the film but unlike the alleged Raphael it looks genuine, and resembles several pictures that Dalí painted in the 1930s (eg: this one), all of which feature telephone receivers. The choice of imagery is apt. Two years earlier Dalí had created a seven-picture sequence illustrating “The Seven Lively Arts”. The Art of Cinema is represented by a figure whose head is a giant eyeball positioned between two huge ears, and with eyelashes that are cords leading to yet more telephone receivers.

Imitation or not, the painting in The Dark Corner did at least end up on the screen. In 1946 Dalí was working with Disney’s animators on the Destino project but the results of this wouldn’t be seen for another 50 years. I’ve been wondering what other Dalínean references might be hiding in American feature films from this time. (Don’t say Spellbound, everybody knows that one…)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Space is the Place
• Art on film: Providence
• Art on film: The Beast

Weekend links 666

Muy Mago (Portrait of Aleister Crowley) (1961) by Xul Solar.

• “…snails amaze with their capacity to move so far, to spread so widely, while doing so little. This, it seems to me, is one of the real marvels of snail biogeography. Individuals do not need to exert great effort because natural selection has acted for them, acted on them, acted with them, to produce these beings that are so unexpectedly but uniquely suited to a particular form of deep time travel, drifting. From such a perspective, rather than being any kind of deficiency, the highly successful passivity of snails might be seen as a remarkable evolutionary achievement.” Thom van Dooren on how snails cross vast oceans.

• “Slow art has layers. And this is why it requires time and effort. We should see this as a good and necessary thing. If this is a kind of obstacle in the way of easy assimilation then it is an obstacle that is integral to the value of the thing itself. The mind is calmed, or disturbed, or made exultant by the art that rewards us for our goodwill and our capacity to take our time.” In Praise of Slow Art by Chris Horner.

• “I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance…” Paul Broks explores the roots of coincidence.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hector Garrido, an illustrator who specialised in the Gothic staple of women in gowns fleeing at night from sinister mansions.

• “The writer Jorge Luis Borges once referred to his friend the artist Xul Solar as ‘one of the most singular events of our era’,” writes Miriam Basilio.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese craftsmanship meets Pokemon at Kanazawa’s National Crafts Museum.

• At Public Domain Review: Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63).

• New music: Rest Of Life by Steve Roach.

• The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Supper’s Ready (1972) by Genesis | Six Six Sixties (1979) by Throbbing Gristle

The Magic Art of Jan Svankmajer

Three years ago I binged on all the Jan Svankmajer feature films after buying the box of blu-rays released by the director’s Athanor company. Once I’d worked my way through that lot, and rewatched the BFI collection of Svankmajer’s short films, I went through all the documentaries I’ve managed to accumulate, including this two-part BBC study which I taped when it was first broadcast in 1992. It’s likely that Svankmajer’s approach to film and to Surrealism no longer requires the kind of introduction that seemed necessary in the 1990s, but for those who do need such a thing this is a good place to start.

Ben Fox’s documentary was made to coincide with an exhibition of Svankmajer’s films and artworks being shown at an animation festival in Cardiff. The two installments examine a different aspect of Svankmajer’s cinematic works: “Memories of Mysterious Beings” concerns the films that deal with childhood dreams and fears, while “The Naming of Demons” concentrates on his use of Surrealism as a tool for satire or social critique. In between lengthy extracts from the films the camera prowls around some of the director’s artworks while an actor reads statements Svankmajer has made about his interests and intentions. This last feature isn’t something I enjoy very much, not when the actor’s nasal delivery is so different from Svankmajer’s own voice. It’s a common ploy in documentaries, having someone impersonate an interviewee to avoid using subtitles, but it’s one I find distracting when done like this.

Eva liked statues.

At this point I would have directed your attention once again to Jan Svankmajer, Director, a documentary about Czech cinema which featured the man himself talking at length about his activities in the 1960s, but this has now been removed from YouTube. In its place, however, there’s a more recent upload, Les Chimères des Svankmajer, an 80-minute documentary for French TV by Bertrand Schmitt and Michel Leclerc which is included among the extras on the BFI’s collection of Svankmajer’s short films. The only trouble here is that the YT copy has no subtitles, you’ll need to be a French speaker to understand the voice-overs which run throughout. This is one of the best of all the Svankmajer documentaries since it shows the range of activities conducted by Svankmajer and his late wife, Eva Svankmajerová, as artists and foremost members of the Prague Surrealist Group; film-making, as Svankmajer has often stressed in interviews, was only one outlet for his creativity. (It was also one he was forbidden to practice for several years when the Communist authorities took exception to his work.) In addition to seeing the Svankmajers preparing an exhibition of their creations, Schmidt and Leclerc show us something of their home outside Prague, an artwork in itself that combines the sculpture park and Wunderkammer. Eva Svankmajerová was the creator of many of those sculptures, a celebrated artist in her own right whose contribution to her husband’s films has often been overlooked.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Svankmajer’s cats
• Jan Svankmajer: The Animator of Prague
• Jan Svankmajer, Director
• Don Juan, a film by Jan Svankmajer
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Two sides of Liska

Weekend links 656

Mobius Strip II (1963) by MC Escher.

• Old music: Warp Records is reissuing two recent Jon Hassell discs later this year: The Living City (Hassell’s ensemble playing live in NYC, 1989) and Psychogeography (Zones Of Feeling) (remixes from City: Works Of Fiction), which will be available as standalone releases or bundled together as Further Fictions together with Hassell’s Atmospherics book.

• “His library is an immense and enviable wellspring, a demimonde of objects by murky creators who for decades have gnawed away at the inner organs of polite society.” Steven Heller talks to Glenn Bray about Library, an 800-page collection of scans from Bray’s trove of books, comics and print ephemera.

• New music: Tsathoggua, the latest in the Lovecraftian series of Cryo Chamber Collaborations which reminds me that I’m still missing the more recent entries. Also the non-Lovecraftian Coil by Ian Boddy.

• “Music is a way to express yourself beyond words,” says Hildur Gudnadóttir.

• See this year’s winners of the annual Close-up Photographer of the Year competition.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ishmael Reed The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974).

• A few new photos of Michael Heizer’s City in the Nevada desert.

• City Of Night (1994) by David Toop & Max Eastley | City As Memory (1995) by John Foxx | City Appearing (2013) by Julia Holter