The Door in the Wall, 1956

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The Door in the Wall is one of HG Wells’ most popular short stories, a fable-like piece which has slipped across the genre barriers into collections as diverse as Tales of the Unexpected (1924), More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales (1927), The World’s Great Mystery Stories (1943), The Dream Adventure (1963), Magazine of Horror (1965), The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1970), Tales of the Occult (1975), Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1983), Classic Science Fiction Stories (2022), and many others. The categorisations are more an attempt to fill out a contents list with quality material than a reflection of the story itself. Most readers would regard The Door in the Wall as a straightforward work of fantasy, in which a small boy discovers a door in a wall in a very ordinary London street, a portal which leads him into a paradisiacal garden. When the boy grows into man he remains haunted and eventually tormented by his memories of the enchanted world he found beyond the door.

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Given the popularity of the story and its simple narrative you’d expect there to be more film adaptations than there are. This short from 1956 (links below) was the only directorial effort by Glenn H. Alvey, and a very odd film it is. What might have been a worthy if uninspired transcription of Wells’ tale is here confounded by Alvey’s “Dynamic Frame”, a trademarked invention which involved filming the whole thing in VistaVision then masking portions of the frame with a matte that continually changes the aspect ratio of the picture to suit the action, even following the actors around the screen. Adjusting the aspect ratio while the film is running isn’t an uncommon technique but Alvey’s process is a distinctly obtrusive one, which no doubt explains why it wasn’t further developed elsewhere. As for the adaptation, the enchanted garden beyond the door turns out to be nothing more than a large and very typical English country estate, with a few parrots and a pair of caged budgerigars providing some exotic flavour. (Now that London has wild parakeets roosting in its trees even these details are no longer exotic.) Wells’ garden is a numinous and magical place, one that might have been better represented with a change from black-and-white to colour, as when Dorothy opens the door to Oz. Alvey’s adaptation is worth watching more for its views of ungentrified post-war London streets than it is for the drama. It also features an unusually restrained musical score by James Bernard, a composer better known for the thundering soundtracks he provided for many Hammer horror films. Bernard aside, HG Wells’ stories deserve better treatment than this.

The Door in the Wall: part one | part two

Previously on { feuilleton }
Claude Shepperson’s First Men in the Moon
Uncharted islands and lost souls
Doctor Moreau book covers
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Harry Willock book covers
The Time Machine
The Magic Shop by HG Wells
HG Wells in Classics Illustrated
The night that panicked America
The Door in the Wall
War of the Worlds book covers

Weekend links 751

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The Treasures of Satan (1895) by Jean Delville.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Là-Bas, the celebrated account of Satanism in fin-de-siècle France by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

• New music: Chronicle by ARC, and The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz (linked here before but that was for the pre-release).

Fabulous Animals (1975), a six-part British TV series about cryptozoology presented by David Attenborough (!).

• At Colossal: “Colour and repetition form optical rhythms in Daniel Mullen’s geometric paintings“.

• At Public Domain Review: Anton Seder’s The Animal in Decorative Art (1896) turns up again.

Unseen scenes from Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Roadhouse.

Fanzine covers selected by DJ Food.

Mark Webber’s favourite records.

Satan Side (1972) by Keith Hudson | Satan Is Boring (1986) by Sonic Youth | Sataan Is Real (1991) by Terminal Cheesecake

Weekend links 749

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Fantastic Sea Carriage (1556) by Johannes van Doetecum the Elder & Lucas van Doetecum, after Cornelis Floris the Younger.

• “Preiss and McElheny have acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), which offers a brilliant, brain-scratching disquisition on bibliotecas as conduits both of infinity and meaninglessness. I also found myself thinking of Arthur Fournier, in D. W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (2019), who spoke of ‘the psychic dreaming that paper allows.'” Sukhdev Sandhu on The Secret World, a film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny about the books collected by Christine Burgin.

• Most people know Burt Shonberg’s paintings—if they know them at all—from their appearance in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. But Shonberg had a career outside the cinema, something explored in Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light: The Visionary Art of Burt Shonberg, an exhibition currently running at the The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

Warriors (1996), an ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout directed by the Quay Brothers. Samurai warriors in an Irish pub scored to the theme from Yojimbo.

The Grand Jeu group have been neglected, at least in English-speaking history, from the general consciousness of “Surrealism” but they remain among its most interesting dissidents. The teenage Simplistes, led by [René] Daumal and [Roger] Gilbert-Lecompte, collectively experimented with consciousness and investigated wildly syncretic modes of destroying and recombining selves: diverse hermetic and occult systems, extrasensory perception, trances and somnambulism, mediumistic practice and collective dreaming.

[…]

The Grand Jeu was a project of paradox: artistic and ascetic, indulgent and severe, political, and mystical, ecstatic and negating, egoistic and selfless, graceful and violent. It sought to continually weave between collectivity and individuality, of art and life, multiplicity and unity, fed by a brew of political radicalism, inspired by Rimbaud’s germinal poetics of revolt and illumination, a utilitarian embrace of occult traditions and ideas, drug experimentation, Hindu sacred texts (Daumal would become an expert in Sanskrit) and some of Bergson’s philosophy. They were, in their own words, “serious players.” It was a mad mix, and in retrospect, clearly doomed to a short life—so, it turned out, were most its members.

Gus Mitchell on the “experimental metaphysics” of the Grand Jeu

• At Smithsonian magazine: Lanta Davis and Vince Reighard on the sculpted monsters and grotteschi that fill the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo, Italy.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella compiles a list of “spooky sounds and spooky music, things to haunt nights and dreams”.

• At Colossal: Kelli Anderson’s amazing pop-up book, Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape.

• “The play that changed my life: Jim Broadbent on Ken Campbell’s electrifying epic Illuminatus!

• DJ Food browses some of the many album covers designed by the versatile Robert Lockhart.

Winners of the 2024 Nikon Photomicrography Competition.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 873 by Andy Graham.

• The Strange World of…Lou Reed.

• The Internet Archive is back!

Warriors (1990) by Jon Hassell | Red Warrior (1990) by Ronald Shannon Jackson | Bhimpalasi Warriors (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Terra Incognita, a film by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer

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I was going to mention this one a few weeks ago but it vanished from Vimeo for a while following some kind of copyright complaint. It’s good to find it returned. Terra Incognita is 20 minutes of animated fantasy that’s very reminiscent of René Laloux’s cult SF films Fantastic Planet (1973) and Gandahar (1988), also the Brizzi Brothers’ Fracture (1977). Much as I’d like to see another feature in the Laloux manner, something spun from the art styles of Métal Hurlant, short films are the most you can realistically hope for outside Japan. (There is another Caza-designed feature, The Rain Children, but like the Druillet-designed TV series, Bleu, l’enfant de la Terre, it’s a simpler story aimed at a juvenile audience.)

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Terra Incognita was directed by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer, with the pair also working on the backgrounds and storyboards. The first part of the film is a creation myth which establishes the genesis of a mysterious island somewhere on the Earth whose inhabitants are four prematurely aged, immortal men. The quartet share the island with the blue giant who created them, together with a variety of unusual flora and fauna which includes luminescent psychotropic mushrooms. The accidental death of their creator leaves the islanders marooned in a world they were only beginning to learn about. The film is meticulously crafted, with an open-ended narrative that avoids melodrama when the men are faced with incursions from the outside world. And there’s a further connection to 70s’ fantasy in the soundtrack which incorporates a piece from Bo Hansson’s prog-synthesizer album, Music Inspired By Lord Of The Rings. Films like this require so much creative effort that you can’t expect more of the same any time soon, but I’m curious to see what Dexter & Kjaer may do in the future.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Arzak Rhapsody
Fracture by Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi
The Captive, a film by René Laloux

Oz: The Tin Woodsman’s Dream, a film by Harry Smith

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Ubuweb slipped into archival stasis earlier this year, which means that everything uploaded there will remain as it is but we won’t be seeing anything new. I don’t know when this Harry Smith short was posted there but it’s one I haven’t seen before. (There’s also a copy at Rarefilmm where I evidently missed it.) Oz, The Tin Woodsman’s Dream was made in 1967, and is one of the fragments of a much longer film that would have adapted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using a similar cutout animation technique to that deployed by Smith for Heaven and Earth Magic. The adaptation remained unfinished after Smith’s backer died but the extant pieces (including another self-contained short, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz) show him working in widescreen 35mm for the first time.

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All of Smith’s films were given opus-style numbers: Heaven and Earth Magic is no. 12, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz is no. 13, and The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is no. 16. As with the films of Len Lye and other animation pioneers, Smith’s early shorts are often given a “psychedelic” label even when they predate the popular use of the term. The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is one of those where the psychedelic quotient becomes overt, comprising a few minutes of animated play with the title character and a small dog, followed by many minutes of kaleidoscoped film footage that’s more redolent of its period than Smith’s other films. I’m happy to watch the kaleidoscopics but this is the kind of thing that any number of film-makers might easily do. The Woodsman, the dog and the other characters are inhabitants of Smith’s inner landscape, as are the fly agaric mushrooms that appear here and in his other films. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them. There’s no soundtrack for this film so you can either watch the gesticulations in a Stan Brakhage silence or find 15 minutes of music to match the visuals.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Number 10: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
Number 11: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
Meeting Harry Smith by Drew Christie
Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith
Harry Smith revisited
The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991