Art on film: Crimes of Passion

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Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks working my way through the Ken Russell filmography, rewatching familiar documentaries and feature films while acquainting myself with the portions of the Russell oeuvre that I’d missed in the past. Crimes of Passion (1984) was a film that I did see when it turned up on video in the late 1980s but I didn’t remember much about it apart from its overheated erotic atmosphere and a red/blue lighting scheme. It’s not one of Russell’s best—the script lurches uncomfortably between mundane domestic drama and lurid, sex-crazed delirium; Rick Wakeman’s synthesizer score is persistently annoying—but it does feature spirited performances by the lead actors, Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins.

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Turner is Joanna Crane, a swimwear designer who deals with the vacuity of her life by moonlighting as an in-demand prostitute named China Blue. (The polite term “sex worker” didn’t exist in the 1980s.) Russell delivers the art references early on, with unexpected cuts to erotic figures from Aubrey Beardsley’s Lysistrata (above), various Japanese shunga prints, and a flash of The Rape by René Magritte. Since the real woman behind the China Blue persona isn’t revealed until later in the film we don’t know at first that Joanna Crane’s apartment contains reproductions of some of the same pictures. She eventually admits to thinking of them during stressful moments.

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Despite this admission, there’s nothing in the script of Crimes of Passion that warrants the references, Crane’s apartment could easily have been furnished in a blandly expensive manner suited to a successful designer. The only other character who seems remotely interested in art is Anthony Perkins’ Reverend Shayne, a splenetic, sex-obsessed preacher who has a hotel room next door to China Blue. In one of several references to Psycho, Shayne watches his neighbour’s erotic encounters through a spyhole. The walls of his own room are covered in a collage of religious and pornographic imagery but little is made of this.

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The Lovers by René Magritte.

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Joanna Crane and Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) in Joanna’s apartment. Among the pictures on the walls are Romeo and Juliet by Marc Chagall, The Embrace by Gustav Klimt, and The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.

Continue reading “Art on film: Crimes of Passion”

Weekend links 775

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The Bride of the Wind (1914) by Oskar Kokoschka.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (translated by Cranstoun Metcalfe).

• This week’s Bumper Book of Magic news: the Brazilian edition of the book, titled A Lua e a Serpente: Almanaque de Magia, will be published in June. It’s available for pre-order here.

• “The basis of compilations as far as I’m concerned is, ‘I like this stuff, you may like it too.’” Jon Savage on the art of the compilation album.

• At Public Domain Review: The strange story of Oskar Kokoschka, Hermine Moos, and the Alma Mahler Doll.

• At the Daily Heller: Psychedelics, Day-Glo, Hallmark and The Peculiar Manicule.

Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a new version for sale from Important Records.

• The Strange World of…Michael Chapman.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Boris Karloff Day.

• RIP David Thomas of Pere Ubu.

Dream Machine (1968) by Les Sauterelles | Dream Machine (1980) by The Androids | Dream Machine (1981) by Phantom Band

Weekend links 774

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Fish and Octopus (Colourful Realm of Living Beings) (circa 1765) by Ito Jakuchu.

• At Aeon: “Could extraterrestrial technology be lurking in our backyard—on the Moon, Mars or in the asteroid belt? We think it’s worth a look.” Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq Misra explain.

• At Smithsonian magazine: The first confirmed footage of the Colossal Squid. Only a baby one, however, so not very colossal.

• The eighth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

Less than six months later, Lindsay signed an executive order that effectively turned the city into a movie set. The new Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting was designed to cut through existing red tape and facilitate location filming. Script approval was centralized in a single agency. A production now needed but a single permit to shoot on the streets; a specific police unit would remain with the filmmakers as they moved from location to location. Thus, Lindsay created the necessary conditions for the tough cop films, bleak social comedies, and gritty urban fables that captured the feel of New York in the late sixties and early seventies—the cinema of Fun City.

J. Hoberman explores New York City’s popularity as a film location

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by John King; and DreamScenes – April 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: Water droplets cling to fluorescent plant spines in Tom Leighton’s alluring photos.

• At the BFI: Alex Barrett on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s unmade film about Jesus.

• Anne Billson ranks 20 films starring Julie Christie.

Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (1964) by Paul Sawtell | Das Boot (1981) by Klaus Doldinger | Ambient Block (Sequenchill/Mission Control #2/Lost In The Sea) (1993) by Sequential

Weekend links 773

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The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

Four short films by Lejf Marcussen

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There’s more Surrealism inside this 34-minute collection of films by Lejf Marcussen (1936–2013), a Danish film-maker and animator whose filmography has never been easy to explore on the internet. Marcussen made an impression on a number of Britons in the late 1980s when The Public Voice was shown on TV, one of many such films broadcast during a time when British television channels still dared to screen unusual animations. I’ve written about The Public Voice before so there’s no need to repeat myself, it was a search for a better copy that led me to this compilation of four Marcussen films—The Conductor (1978), Tone Traces (1983), The Public Voice (1988), and Angeli (2002)—all of which differ so much from each other they could easily be taken for the works of four different directors.

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The Conductor is the one closest to traditional animation, being a comic portrait of an orchestral conductor’s wildy exaggerated actions and facial reactions during the performance of a piece of music. It’s music that turns out to be the dominant theme in this collection, and the sole consistent element.

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Where The Conductor is overtly comedic and grotesque, Tone Traces is completely abstract, an illustration of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5 whose unfolding is depicted by coloured lines on a black background. Marcussen’s approach differs from earlier musical illustrators like Oskar Fischinger in restricting his shapes to lines that follow the instrumentation and composition in great detail.

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This version of The Public Voice is another one taped from a TV broadcast, it’s not necessarily better than any of the others but it does at least keep Marcussen’s remarkable film circulating. The music this time is a chaotic amalgam of pieces by Luciano Berio, Henry Cow and Gustav Mahler.

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Angeli was Marcussen’s final film, another remarkable piece of work although it’s not one I like very much. Watching computerised shapes jump around in a jaunty manner isn’t how I prefer to spend my time, and the score for this one is chaos of a different kind, a collision of digital keyboard pieces with the superior music of Handel, Dvorak and Beethoven. Watch the second and third films in this set if you do nothing else.

Previously on { feuilleton }
A Picture, a film by Lejf Marcussen
The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen