{animation} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 805

A poster by Peter Strausfeld for a 1966 screening of Alphaville and La Jetée.

• At Bandcamp Daily: “Caroline True obsesses over compilations so you don’t have to,” says Erick Bradshaw. I recommend CTR’s compilations.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Music Stones: The Rediscovery Of Ringing Rock by Mike Adcock.

• At Colossal: Pastoral landscapes brim with patterns in luminous paintings by David Brian Smith.

One of the markers that sets Mamoru Oshii apart from his peers is his willingness to allow place to speak for itself. From the seasonality captured in his works, like the first two Patlabor films, to the otherworldly environments of Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (all projects in which Ogura was also involved heavily) and even the fantasy scapes of his Angel’s Egg, Oshii’s attention to place, and allowing it to be a player in the story, gives as much voice to world building, as he does to characterisation. This attentiveness and patience for place, allows us to settle deeply inside a worldview that is often simultaneously familiar but unerringly alien.

Lawrence English talks to art director Hiromasa Ogura and composer Kenji Kawai about their work on Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell

• At the BFI: Leigh Singer suggests where to begin with the films of Lucile Hadžihalilović.

• Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing: an essay by David Vichnar.

• New music: Hydrology by Loula York; Love Letters Via Echelon by Nerthus.

• There’s more Intermittent Eyeball Fodder at Unquiet Things.

• The Strange World of…Early Cabaret Voltaire.

• Winners of the Drone Photo Awards 2025.

• Lautréamont’s Apocrypha

• Drone Um Futurisma (1992) by Cusp | ABoneCroneDrone 1 (1996) by Sheila Chandra | Suspicious Drone (2009) by Demdike Stare

My thanks to the estimable Mr Shea for bringing to my attention this website devoted to the many illustrated editions of Edgar Allan Poe. Quite a few of the older illustrations have been featured here in the past but most of the later ones are new to me. The site is comprehensive enough to include my own illustrated edition from 2017, a book whose shortcomings I often find myself apologising for. (I was very pressured for time with that commission, and would welcome an opportunity to redo some of the pictures.)

A Descent into the Maelström by Alberto Martini.

I could draw attention to the later editions but I’ll single out the work of Alberto Martini (1876–1954), an Italian artist whose work I find especially attractive for the way it provides a bridge between Decadence and Surrealism. His Poe illustrations appear now and then in books or articles about horror fiction but you seldom see all of them together.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Alberto Martini.

Meanwhile, Ted Parmelee’s short but very effective animated adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) turned up recently at the Internet Archive in a copy that’s the best I’ve seen to date. Watch it here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Lawson’s House of Usher
• Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
• The Purloined Eidolon
• Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
• Mask of the Red Death, 1969
• Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
• Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
• Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
• Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke>
• Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
• Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
• Poe at 200
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Weekend links 799

A Night Alarm: The Advance! (1871) by Charles West Cope.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Meet the artist creating humorous, nihonga-style images of daily life with their rescue cat.

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

• New music: I Remember I Forget by Yasmine Hamdan; Clearwater by Maps And Diagrams.

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown—and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly”—for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities.

William T. Vollmann reviews Shadow Ticket, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon

• At Colossal: Twelve trailblazing women artists transform interior spaces in Dream Rooms.

• At Public Domain Review: Ballooning exploits in Travels in the Air (1871 edition).

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams on where to begin with the films of Satoshi Kon.

• Colm Tóibín explains why he set up a press to publish László Krasznahorkai.

• At Print Mag: Ken Carbone on a pool of perfection in Paris.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #310 by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is OTC Textura.

• Ron Mael’s favourite albums.

• Shadowplay (1979) by Joy Division | Shadow (1982) by Brian Eno | Shadows (1994) by Pram

Firebird, a film by Rein Raamat

There’s a Firebird of a different kind in this short film by an Estonian animator whose equally short Hell was featured here some time ago. Hell and Firebird are so stylistically opposed they look like the work of two different film-makers, although in the case of Hell this is a result of the film being based on the etchings of an Estonian artist, Eduard Wiiralt, Firebird (1974) is simpler fare, another example of the cultural fallout from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and a rather late one at that, not only in style but in the progress of its scenario.

Where The Beatles had Pepperland as a frozen monochrome world which has to be restored to life and colour by the Fab Four, Rein Raamat presents a monochrome city whose listless inhabitants are enlivened by the arrival in the sky of a giant coloured bird. The bird’s changing colours bring further life to the city itself; flowers and fountains burst forth, to the annoyance of a ferocious black cat who evidently preferred the earlier dispensation. As with any symbolic story made in the Soviet bloc, you can’t help but see this as a mirror for life in the world outside the cinema. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look
• Hell, a film by Rein Raamat
• Tadanori Yokoo animations

The Hand, a film by Jiří Trnka

Regular readers may have noticed that Jiří Trnka’s name has been written here with all the Czech accents intact, something that hadn’t been possible until a few days ago thanks to a database coding fault. This had long been the case with accents like those used in Czech, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, and other languages, to my endless frustration. I’ll spare you the technical details but the solution, which I resolved at the weekend, turned out to be easier than I expected, as a result of which I’ve been going back through posts adding accents to names which until now had been incomplete.

Jiří Trnka (1912–1969) came to mind while I was restoring the accents for Jiří Barta; both men are Czech animators, with Barta having been mentioned here on many occasions. Trnka was one of the founders of the Czech animation industry whose puppet films aren’t always to my taste but I thought I might have mentioned The Hand (1965) before now. This was Trnka’s final film, and one of his most celebrated for its wordless presentation of a universal theme: the freedom of the artist in the face of authoritarian demands. Many of Trnka’s previous films had been stop-motion puppet adaptations of fairy tales which lends The Hand a subversive quality when the scenario seems at first to be pitched in a similar direction. The artist character is a typical Trnka puppet with a persistently smiling face who spends his time in a single room making flowerpots with a potter’s wheel. “The hand” in this context refers both to the manual nature of the potter’s craft as well as to the huge gloved appendage that forces its way into the room demanding that the pots be abandoned in favour of hand-shaped sculptures. The resulting battle of wills shows the strengths of animation in delivering a potent visual metaphor.

Trnka’s message at the time of the film’s release was especially pertinent for the Soviet satellite nations where the promise of post-war Communism had been corrupted by decades of repressive governments, a situation that Jan Švankmajer bitterly addressed in The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Trnka isn’t as savage as Švankmajer but his message is still an ironic one, and may have been fuelled by an equivalent bitterness. Trnka’s career was bookended by films showing the struggle of assertive individuals against authoritarian oppression, but in the first of these, The Springman and the SS (1946), the contest is between a Czech chimney-sweep and the Nazi occupiers. The Hand could only be taken by Czech viewers as being aimed at their own oppressive government, and as such may be seen as Trnka’s contribution to the Czech New Wave, especially those films (Daisies, The Cremator) that the same government regarded as politically subversive or otherwise harmful. The Hand, like The Cremator, was withdrawn from distribution a few years after its release. Jiří Barta is a very different director to Trnka but Barta’s The Vanished World of Gloves (1982) features a dystopian sequence showing a fascist world of marching hands which looks like a homage to Trnka’s film. Watch The Hand here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jiří Barta: Labyrinth of Darkness
• Jiří Barta’s Pied Piper

Category: {animation}

Weekend links 805

A feast of Poe

Weekend links 799

Firebird, a film by Rein Raamat

The Hand, a film by Jiří Trnka