{animation} – Page 18 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 638

• After writing about Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics back in January, I left a comment expressing the hope that Arrow or Eureka might give us a Region B blu-ray of Son of the White Mare (aka Fehérlófia), Jankovics’s “psychedelic” animated feature from 1982. Fast-forward nine months to Eureka’s announcement that they’ll be doing exactly this in November. Watch the trailer. The release will include some of the director’s short films plus his first feature, Johnny Corncob (1973), a historical tale presented in the “groovy” style (previously) popularised by Yellow Submarine. If idle wishes can be granted so easily then I’ll hope again that Eureka might do the same for René Laloux’s second and third animated features, the Moebius-designed Time Masters (1982) (made in the same studio as Son of the White Mare) and the Caza-designed Gandahar (1987). Fingers crossed.

• “I don’t think anybody copies me, but Harmony Korine, Todd Solondz, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, I like those kinds of directors. They’re sometimes not funny at all. They’re very serious and eerily melodramatic. I just like movies that surprise me.” John Waters (yet again) talking to Conor Williams about films, writing and a prayer for Pasolini.

• “There is something profoundly haunting about a master artist’s last painting left unfinished upon its easel…” Kevin Dann on The Mermaid (1910) by Howard Pyle.

• At Bandcamp: Navigating the Nurse With Wound List: A Gateway to Far-Flung Sounds.

• “Juicy With Meaning”: Alex Denney chooses five essential films by David Cronenberg.

• Mix of the week: Discovering 1970s jazz fusion with Kerri Chandler.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Purgatory by Ken Hollings.

• Steven Heller’s font(s) of the month: Farandole & Lustik.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite albums.

• RIP Peter Straub.

• White Horses (1968) by Jacky | Five White Horses (1968) by Sun Dragon | Ride A White Horse (2006) by Goldfrapp

Broken Down Film by Osamu Tezuka

Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka directed a handful of short films throughout his career in which he used a reduced running time to try things that might not work so well at feature length. The shorts are often labelled “experimental”, which some of them are, although the term “playful” would be a better description for others. Broken Down Film (1985) is one of the latter, a Fleisher-like silent Western with a trio of stock characters and a stereotyped narrative that includes a gunfight (almost), and a heroine tied to a rail track. The playfulness is in the presentation which imitates all the material problems that can afflict a reel of film, from projection mishaps to various forms of damage, some of which impinge themselves on the characters. Tex Avery occasionally played with the medium in this way (I think it’s one of the Droopy cartoons where a character runs off the edge of the film) but even Avery never took things this far. The uncredited music, by the way, is Snake Rag by King Oliver’s Jazz Band.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jumping, a film by Osamu Tezuka

Weekend links 635

“A close-up image of the surface of a soap bubble. The image reveals ‘lipid islands’ of soap floating on a very thin film of water. The film on which the soap floats is so thin that it does not interfere with the light hitting it, therefore allowing the light to pass through. This creates an appearance of a black abyss. Magnification x250.”

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor Press: Everything Keeps Dissolving, Conversations with Coil edited by Nick Soulsby. I helped out a little with this one so I’m looking forward to seeing it. And since the cult fervour around the group remains undiminished, anyone interested in buying a copy is advised to do so sooner rather than later.

• There are over 90 stories in The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard (quantities vary according to edition) but few of them have been adapted into other media. The Drowned Giant is an exception, an animated short directed by Tim Miller.

• “You could spend your life exploring its dream logic without arriving at a definitive destination.” Anne Billson on the mysteries of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig.

• Meta-mix of the week: links to yearly mixes of favourite ambient releases by A Strangely Isolated Place.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Matchstick cookies keep the flame of tradition alive.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: George A. Romero Day.

• Felicia Atkinson’s favourite music.

• RIP Wolfgang Petersen.

• Das Boot: Titel (1981) by Klaus Doldinger | Martin (1983) by Soft Cell | Everything Keeps Dissolving (2000) by Coil

Three short films by Pascal Baes

Topic I (1990).

Black-and-white film, a handful of dancers, and the streets of old Prague (plus a Parisian courtyard). I linked to Topic II in a weekend post some time ago but since all three films in the series are on Vimeo I thought they deserved a post of their own.

Topic II (1990).

Pascal Baes is a French film-maker who may have created something unique here by combining the dance film with pixilation, the animation technique in which people move frame-by-frame like live action puppets. The technique is an old one that was generally used for comic effect, at least until the arrival of the music video; Baes’ innovation is to give us dance pieces that can exist only in the camera. One of the attractions for this viewer is the Prague settings, especially those in the best film of the three, Topic II, in which a pair of dancers glide up the labyrinthine streets leading to the castle that dominates the city.

46bis (1988).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Švankmajer: The Animator of Prague
• Stone Glory, a film by Jirí Lehovec
• The Face of Prague
• Josef Sudek
• The panoramic towers of Prague
• Prague panoramas
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague

Weekend links 631

Soap Bubble (1882) by Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe. Via.

• “…there is not now, has never been, and will never be a single Platonic form of the paragraph to which all others must conform.” Richard Hughes Gibson on the history of the paragraph.

• At Spoon & Tamago: imaginary covers by international illustrators for The Tokyoiter, a New Yorker-style magazine about the Japanese capital.

• New music: tick tick tick by Stephen Mallinder, and A Vibrant Touch by Aleksandra Slyz.

The Kat had a cult following among the modernists. For Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso, all of whose work fed on playful energies similar to those unleashed in the strip, he had a double appeal, in being commercially nonviable and carrying the reek of authenticity in seeming to belong to mass culture. By the thirties, strips like Blondie were appearing daily in roughly a thousand newspapers; Krazy appeared in only thirty-five. The Kat was one of those niche-but-not-really phenomena, a darling of critics and artists alike, even after it stopped appearing in newspapers.

Amber Medland on George Herriman, EE Cummings and Krazy Kat

• 35mm.online: Polish feature films, documentaries and animations, all free to view.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Georges Bataille Erotism: Death and Sensuality.

• Inside the Espai Corberó, the home/gallery of the late Xavier Corberó.

• Strange Attractor Journal Five.

• RIP Claes Oldenburg.

• Krazy Kat (1928) by Frankie Trumbauer & His Orchestra | Krazy Kat (1949) by Artie Shaw | Krazy Kat (1975) by Teddy Lasry