A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Animated films
Relativity (1953) by MC Escher.
Escher’s famous lithograph has a less familiar companion piece in the woodcut below.
Delirius (1972) by Philippe Druillet.
Lone Sloane’s adventure on the pleasure planet of Delirius was written by Jacques Lob, and features this diversion in the Palais d’Escher. Possibly the first fictional use of one of Escher’s prints.
I’ve been reading Thomas Ligotti for the past week so here’s something Ligottian: a short film performed by life-size wooden puppets. Švankmajer’s production from 1969 conveys the Don Juan legend with actors masquerading as traditional Czech marionettes, the proceedings being scored by music from the great Zdeněk Liška. No English subtitles on this one so if you don’t speak Czech or Russian you can either relish the mystery or take it as a prompt to buy a DVD. While we’re on the subject of Ligotti, the new Penguin edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe is published next week. I recommend it.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Two sides of Liška
• The Torchbearer by Václav Švankmajer
A recent interview with the Brothers Quay mentioned The Mascot (1933), a Starewicz animation I’d not seen, so here it is. IMDB has a summary:
A toy stuffed dog has just been sewn together when it hears a young child ask for an orange. The child’s mother explains that they have no money, and so she cannot buy any oranges. The dog is then packed up along with a box full of other toys to be sold, but it soon winds up in the street. The dog picks up an orange from a curbside stand, and hopes to take it home to the child. But that night, before the dog can get back to the child’s home, it must face a series of strange and frightening adventures.
A toy’s separation from its owner followed by a fraught journey home is essentially the plot of all the Toy Story films, but Starewicz’s short is rather more grotesque than anything you’ll get from Pixar, especially in the carnivalesque second half. There’s a choice of viewing (and quality) at YouTube, Ubuweb or the Internet Archive.
Byronic I by Boris Pelcer. Via Full Fathom Five.
• “Music determines everything in terms of our narrative. Music demands, music suggests. Whereas traditional Hollywood animation is all based on character development—you know, there’s Toy Story and it’s Tom Hanks’s voice pushing the thrust of the action. For us, décor is all part of it. It’s the objects, a sense of atmosphere, the stimmung (mood) of what’s happening in this landscape where the puppet is just, invariably, a tiny element.” The Brothers Quay talking to JW McCormack about their films, and about Quay, a short documentary by Christopher Nolan.
• Croissants with Cthulhu: Stephanie Gorton Murphy reports on the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast at last week’s NecronomiCon. I didn’t attend this: abject silliness is the last thing I want at 8 o’clock in the morning.
• “…a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming.” Italo Calvino on his cinema-going youth.
Only in that brief moment of absolute uncertainty – when both options seem equally plausible and implausible, when neither thought can be accepted or rejected, when everything can be explained and nothing can be explained – only in that moment do we really have this horror of philosophy, this questioning of the principle of sufficient reason. It is for this reason that Todorov qualifies his definition by stating that the “fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.”
Eugene Thacker in an extract from Tentacles Longer Than Night (Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3), Zero Books, 2015
• It’s always good to hear some new rumblings by Emptyset. The Guardian has a stream of side 1 of the latest release, Signal.
• David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives a film screening at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, on Saturday, 5th September.
• Sea Calls Me Home, another song from the forthcoming Julia Holter album.
• Digital visualizations of imagined future landscapes by Mike Winkelmann.
• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. IX by David Colohan.
• Cherchez la femme: Women and Surrealism at Sotheby’s, NYC.
• At It’s Nice That: 50 years of A Humument by Tom Phillips.
• April 16, 1963: Housewife on LSD
• Signal (1981) by Phew | Signals (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno | Signals (2010) by The Soundcarriers
A busy week here (for a change) so this is a bit of a lazy choice but there is a Wunderkammer present. The Quays made this in 1984 for a Švankmajer documentary, and it’s still one of my favourites: Švankmajer as subject, lots of Prague references, and wonderful music (borrowed from Švankmajer’s own films) by Zdeněk Liška. This is also one of the few films you’ll see with animated characters demonstrating some film animation of their own. Watch it here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive