A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Animated films
Rabbit (2007), a short animated film by Run Wrake based on drawings by Enid Blyton illustrator Geoffrey Higham. “When a boy and girl find an idol in the stomach of a rabbit, great riches follow, but for how long?” Find out at AtomFilms. The director talks about his film here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• Harpya by Raoul Servais
A Babobilicon.
Daina Krumins’ Babobilicons is a truly surrealist work in terms of both its process and product. Krumins takes time to make her films. It took her nine years to create this remarkable animated short, yet her method is in line with the surrealist affinity for chance operation. She cultivated slime molds on Quaker five-minute oats in her basement, planted hundreds of phallic stinkhorn mushrooms, and put her mother behind the camera to film them growing. The results are sexual and bizarre. She combined ordinary objects—wallsockets, candles, and peeling paint—to get unnerving, dreamlike images. Porcelain fish jump through waves; mushroom erections rise and fall. Her Babobilicons—robotlike characters that resemble coffee pots with lobster claws—move through all this with mysterious determination. Anyone who order 10,000 ladybugs from a pest control company to film them crawling over a model drawing room definite possesses a sense of the surreal. Renee Shafransky, The Village Voice
So now tell me you’re not intrigued…. I’ve seen Daina Krumins’ earlier film, The Divine Miracle (1973), a strange procession of religious imagery inspired in part by the kitsch of Christian postcard art. I haven’t seen Babobilicons (1982) unfortunately, but if the singular atmosphere conjured by the earlier work is anything to go by it should be quite something. There’s also a later Krumins’ film which seems equally surreal, Summer Light (2001), about which this NYT appraisal says “Giant milkweeds float about the landscape, babies play with fiery leaves and deer antlers jump out of water like salmon.”
Read more about the films here and here, including details of how to buy them on VHS. Surely a DVD release is overdue?
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mushrooms on the Moon
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie
Among the legions of Poe adaptations for film and television, IMDB lists 21 versions of The Tell-Tale Heart. The UPA version from 1953 is a rare moment of seriousness from a company more well-known for its Mr Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing cartoons. This has long been one of my favourite Poe adaptations, not least for James Mason’s pitch-perfect narration. (A quote from this was later sampled by Scorn on the track Night Tide from their Evanescence album.) The animation avoids being too cartoony by adopting an allusive blend of Hollywood-style Surrealism and Expressionist design of the kind more usually seen in live action dream sequences of the period. Paul Julian was the designer, Pat Matthews the animator and Ted Parmelee the director.
Animator Michael Sporn has two pages of frame grabs, including some composites which show the full extent of scenes panned over during the film.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harpya by Raoul Servais
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931
Classic animated short from 1979 which is funny and creepy in equal measure. Harpya won the Palme d’Or for best short film at Cannes that year and in its own small way could be seen as continuing the Belgian taste for Symbolism and Surrealism.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bruges-la-Morte
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
Pas de Deux (1968).
News of a theatre piece celebrating the creativity of Norman McLaren, the pioneering Scots (and gay) animator and film-maker, had me searching YouTube again for his work. His short film Neighbours (1952) is very well-known, oft-cited and imitated for its pixillated character movement. No surprise to see it there, then, along with other works such as Boogie Doodle (1941), Fiddle Dee Dee (1947), A Phantasy (1952), Blinkety Blank (1955) and several others.
Less well-known is a favourite film of mine which hadn’t been YouTubed last time I looked but which is now there in two parts, Pas de Deux (1968). This is a black and white film of a simple ballet performance transformed by its presentation to yield something that could only exist on film. Careful lighting, an atmospheric score, judicious use of slow motion and the stunning application of optical printing to multiply and mirror the figures makes one of the best ballet films I’ve ever seen; it was also one of McLaren’s personal favourites among his many films. He used slow motion again for two more dance works, Ballet Adagio (1972) and Narcissus (1983), one of his final films which impresses for its overt homoerotics but is less striking than its predecessor. The only version of the latter on YouTube is this scratch version with the visuals set to more recent music.
Narcissus (1983).
The best way to see McLaren’s incredible films is at a decent resolution, of course, and the National Film Board of Canada have made them available on a seven-DVD box set.
The theatre work mentioned above is Norman by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon which is at Macrobert, Stirling, from 17–19 April, 2008 then the Theatre Royal, Brighton from 6–10 May, 2008.
In an improbable act of theatrical alchemy, dancer/choreographer Peter Trosztmer literally inhabits McLaren’s cinematic universe. He dances, weaves, converses and interacts with the animator’s pulsing images and leaping figures, set loose in a riotous ballet of line, light and movement.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Reflections of Narcissus