{film} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 837

Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay, Leeds (1872) by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

• “In many cases, the rules of physics that apply in a real scene appear to be optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the painting’s intended effect.” An extract from The Visual World of Shadows by Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, in which the authors examine some of the rule-breaking that takes place when artists are dealing with shadows in paintings. I mentioned this aspect of artistic licence in a recent interview, making the point that meticulously accurate light and shade is a tell-tale sign of AI art.

• Orson Welles’ unfinished film of Don Quixote is back in the news again. Welles spent twenty years shooting scenes when he had the time and the money, and I seem to have spent an equivalent time reading about attempts to release the film. Any assembled footage will lack Welles’ bravura editing but I’d still like to see it.

• Read an extract from Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers And The Reinvention Of Rock, 1984–994 by Simon Reynolds.

• Mixes of the week: King Tubby – The Heaviest Dubs – A DJ Mix by Mista Savona, and Bleep Mix #319 by Yu Su.

• “What makes music psychedelic?” James McKeown on the music of Terry Riley.

• At the BFI: Gayle Sequeira selects 10 great films about dinner parties.

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

• The Strange World of…King Tubby.

• Shadows (1967) by The Leather Boy | The Never-Deserting Shadow (1991) by Jarboe | Moon Shadows (2001) by Laraaji

Stone Elegy

A new piece of work which I completed recently, this is a poster for a short film, Stone Elegy, written and directed by Shane Smith. The film is a drama set in Ireland during the Iron Age, with a narrative that encompasses lost love, armed conflict and a touch of magic. The brief from Thin Veil Pictures was for something in the style of the cover I created for Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, a window-like frame of multiple panels in which various figures and details from the story could be seen. The Moore cover is very hard-edged and brightly coloured, going deliberately for a stained-glass window effect. The director and producer liked the formal frame but wanted the look of the poster to be darker, softer and more diffuse which has led to my doing this in a much more painterly style than I’d normally use. I’m very pleased with the results (as are the film-makers), in part because achieving this look with digital tools is no longer the chore I’ve felt it to be in the past. This has been achieved by a great deal of trial and error over the past few years, fine-tuning a small range of digital brushes that now behave in the ways I’d want a regular paintbrush to behave. One thing you never want when drawing or painting is to feel that the tools are getting in your your way.

Stone Elegy was a crowd-funded project so the poster is being used in part as a reward for the backers of the film. The print version will have the credits running at the foot of the poster. There’s a teaser for the film here (actually a self-contained piece), and a proper trailer here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

Weekend links 836

Narcissus (1881) by Gyula Benczúr.

• AnOther reposts an old interview with Dennis Bell of the Bob Mizer Foundation to coincide with an exhibition of homoerotic drawings from Physique Pictorial at JW Anderson Soho, London. The drawings by the pseudonymous (and still unidentified) “Spartacus” don’t bear comparison to those by Mizer’s celebrated discovery, Tom of Finland, but they’re part of a pioneering history. There’s more “Spartacus” at Wallpaper*.

• “Ever the deviant, Bidgood initiated a style that rebelled against the dominant sensibility of his physique-magazine peers, treating his subjects with the same love that a studio-era auteur may have bestowed upon his leading ladies.” Mayukh Sen on the tawdry, opulent world of James Bidgood’s underground classic Pink Narcissus.

• “Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf.” Samuel Cox on 50 years of La Düsseldorf by La Düsseldorf.

[Adrian] Sherwood argues that Perry’s antics often mask his genius. “What upset me in later years was people marvelling at him as some kind of joke,” says Sherwood. People saw a clown, when they should have seen someone who re-engineered music. From reimagining the studio as an instrument, pushing dub reggae to the sonic limits or inventing sampling, few producers have come anywhere close to matching Perry’s impact.

Lanre Bakari on the life and musical work of Lee “Scratch” Perry

• New music: Arles 75 Drei by Can; Voyager by PJ Harvey; Fantasy by Julia Holter.

• At the BFI: Adam Nayman chooses 10 great Canadian debut features.

• At Colossal: James Turrell’s 100th Skyscape opens in Aarhus.

• At The Daily Heller: Vector art by Catalina Estrada.

• A belated RIP for writer Sandy Robertson.

• Sky – Rhythm (1972) by Dub Specialist | Skyliner (2006) by Boards Of Canada | The Sky Torn Apart (2018) by Paul Schütze

Quiet Apocalypse

More monochrome cosmic horror. Quiet Apocalypse is a short black-and-white film by “Insolitum”, a combination CGI with stock footage that nods to Cloverfield, Ishirō Honda’s monstrous menagerie, and the last few minutes of The Mist, if that particular film had continued beyond its abrupt ending. “Made using Blender, Zbrush, Substance Painter, After Effects and Davinci Resolve. Stock footage provided by Envato, Pexels and Pixabay,” says the YT note.

Most of the visuals are self-explanatory and could easily get by without the narration that enters later on. Sublime horror is seldom enhanced by excessive explanation. HP Lovecraft made the point succinctly in The Call of Cthulhu: “A mountain walked.” Sometimes that’s all you need to know.

(Another tip from Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You.)

Weekend links 835

Kites of Fukuroi and Distant View of Akiba in Totomi Province, from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (1859) by Utagawa Hiroshige II.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: International Freak: Robin Farquharson and the Dream of Psychedelic Revolt by M. Syd Rosen.

• At the Daily Heller: the Brooklyn Botanical Garden looks back at the psychedelic Sixties with Flower Power.

• At the BFI: Sophia Satchell-Baeza selects 10 great queer American underground features of the 1970s.

• At Colossal: “Surreal Figures Step from Leonora Carrington’s Paintings into Shape of Dreams”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Surreal Paperback Visions of Richard Powers.

• The Reinvention of the Guitar in 13 Albums by Simon Reynolds.

• At Public Domain Review: The Art of Kite Flying (1430–1929).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2026 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Cloud Machines by Berndt / Schmidt.

• Kites (1967) by Simon Dupree And The Big Sound | Kites I (1999) by Brian Eno | Nuclear Kites (2023) by Hawksmoor