A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Animated films
Gahan Wilson’s macabre humour has provided stories for film and television on a number of occasions but this very short entry is the only one I’ve seen so far. Gahan Wilson’s Diner seems closest to Wilson’s work as a cartoonist, being an attempt to faithfully translate the style of his drawings and their grotesque predicaments to the world of animation. Wilson wrote and designed the film, the direction is credited to Graham Morris and Karen Peterson. Watch it here.
Illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister for a Czech edition of The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.
• It’s good to hear that Czech animator Jiří Barta is back at work on his long-gestating feature film based on the Golem legend. The new iteration looks like a reimagining of the entire project.
• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.
• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey breaks down more of his Great Enchanters pages.
• At Colossal: Charles Brooks photographs the interiors of musical and scientific instruments.
• At Igloomag: Philippe Blache on neo-noir, doom jazz and related atmospheric music.
• At The Daily Heller: The book-brick that is the 1,264-page Emigre Specimen Encyclopedia.
• New music: Changing States by Matmos, and Of Shadow Landscapes by Skotógen.
• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams selects 10 great Japanese time-travel films.
• Lawrence English remembers the sound-art pioneer Alan Lamb.
• Tunde Adebimpe’s favourite albums.
• Time Machine (1967) by Satori | Time Machine (1968) by Lemon Tree | Turn Back Time (1971) by Time Machine
The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.
• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”
• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.
• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.
• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.
• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.
• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”
• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.
• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.
• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.
• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.
• New music: Sabi by Odalie.
• RIP Max Romeo.
• Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact
There’s more Surrealism inside this 34-minute collection of films by Lejf Marcussen (1936–2013), a Danish film-maker and animator whose filmography has never been easy to explore on the internet. Marcussen made an impression on a number of Britons in the late 1980s when The Public Voice was shown on TV, one of many such films broadcast during a time when British television channels still dared to screen unusual animations. I’ve written about The Public Voice before so there’s no need to repeat myself, it was a search for a better copy that led me to this compilation of four Marcussen films—The Conductor (1978), Tone Traces (1983), The Public Voice (1988), and Angeli (2002)—all of which differ so much from each other they could easily be taken for the works of four different directors.
The Conductor is the one closest to traditional animation, being a comic portrait of an orchestral conductor’s wildy exaggerated actions and facial reactions during the performance of a piece of music. It’s music that turns out to be the dominant theme in this collection, and the sole consistent element.
Where The Conductor is overtly comedic and grotesque, Tone Traces is completely abstract, an illustration of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5 whose unfolding is depicted by coloured lines on a black background. Marcussen’s approach differs from earlier musical illustrators like Oskar Fischinger in restricting his shapes to lines that follow the instrumentation and composition in great detail.
This version of The Public Voice is another one taped from a TV broadcast, it’s not necessarily better than any of the others but it does at least keep Marcussen’s remarkable film circulating. The music this time is a chaotic amalgam of pieces by Luciano Berio, Henry Cow and Gustav Mahler.
Angeli was Marcussen’s final film, another remarkable piece of work although it’s not one I like very much. Watching computerised shapes jump around in a jaunty manner isn’t how I prefer to spend my time, and the score for this one is chaos of a different kind, a collision of digital keyboard pieces with the superior music of Handel, Dvorak and Beethoven. Watch the second and third films in this set if you do nothing else.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Picture, a film by Lejf Marcussen
• The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen
This short animated film differs from many other dinosaur films in using outmoded representations of the creatures for its source rather than the more accurate depictions we have today. The first modellings of dinosaurs were crude and often very inaccurate, to a degree that the earliest renderings now have a naive charm of their own, like the hearsay depictions of African animals or Egyptian monuments.
Antediluvian has an additional attraction in its unintended resemblance to Roland Topor’s designs for René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet. Topor’s snapping, shrieking fauna are just as vicious as the outmoded saurians while being rendered in an equally naive style. All that Antediluvian requires is some suitably alien flora to push it into Topor-land, or at least the planet next door.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Temps Morts by René Laloux