{film} – Page 221 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 186

One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack (2004) by Wangechi Mutu.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to call Benjamin Noys’ contribution to the recent The Weird conference at the University of London a highlight, but it was a surprise to find Lord Horror in general and the Reverbstorm book in particular being discussed alongside so many noteworthy offerings. Noys’ piece, Full Spectrum Offence: Savoy’s Neo-Weird, is now available to read online, a very perceptive examination of the tensions between the Old Weird and the New.

• Le Transperceneige is a multi-volume bande dessinée of post-apocalypse science fiction by Jacques Lob & Jean-Marc Rochette. Snowpiercer is a film adaptation by Korean director Bong Joon-ho featuring John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton. Anne Billson calls the director’s cut an “eccentric masterpiece” so it’s dismaying to learn that the film is in danger of being hacked about by the usual rabble of unsympathetic Hollywood distributors.

• This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Public Domain Review posted some of the paintings mentioned in Swann’s Way (or The Way by Swann’s as the latest translation so inelegantly has it).

• How the Paris World’s Fair brought Art Nouveau to the Masses in 1900: a huge picture post about my favourite exposition.

• Mix of the week: “Sport of Kings” Mix by Ricardo Donoso. Related: Paul Purgas on five favourite records.

• Ernst Reichl: the man who designed Ulysses. Related: Hear all of Finnegans Wake read aloud over 35 hours.

• “Why does Alain de Botton want us to kill our young?” A splendid rant by Sam Kriss.

• Love’s Secret Ascension: Peter Bebergal on Coil, Coltrane & the 70th birthday of LSD.

• Malicious Damage: Ilsa Colsell on the secret art of Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell.

• Just Say No to the Bad Sex Award, or the BS Award as Tom Pollock calls it.

• Lauren O’Neal’s ongoing PJ Harvey Tuesdays: One, Two, Three and Four.

• Neville Brody on the changing face of graphic design.

• A Brief History of the London Necropolis Railway.

• Des Hommes et des Chatons: a Tumblr.

• At Pinterest: Androgyny

• Virgin Prunes: Pagan Lovesong (vibeakimbo) (1982) | Caucasian Walk (1982) | Walls Of Jericho (live at The Haçienda, Manchester, 1983; I’m in that audience somewhere)

Tornadoes

A gust, a storme, a spoute, a loume gaile, an eddy wind, a flake of wind, a Turnado.

Captain John Smith from An Accidence, or the Pathway to Experience Necessary for all Young Seamen (1626).

In an age of storm chasers and increasingly spectacular photos, Lucille Handberg’s celebrated picture may seem undramatic, but for the moment this is still the most celebrated tornado photo to date. I knew the picture from an early age thanks to its appearance in a children’s encyclopedia. When Deep Purple’s Stormbringer album appeared in 1974 (below) that imperilled barn, and the shape of the twister, was immediately recognisable.

Lucille Handberg took her famous photo on 8th July, 1927 as the tornado passed by Jasper, Minnesota. It’s a surprise to see from the account in The Milwaukee Sentinel that there’s at least one other picture. I tried searching for a larger image of the second photo but photo libraries still control its reproduction. The copy above is from an account of the tornado here.

Continue reading “Tornadoes”

Two films by Clive Barker: The Forbidden and Salome

The Forbidden.

Clive Barker announced late last month that arrangements were being made for a remake of Hellraiser. This isn’t the first time such an announcement has been made so we’ll have to wait and see what comes of that. I think I’m in a minority of people who’ve always been well-disposed to Barker and his works (the early stories in particular) but have never really enjoyed Hellraiser. I saw it when it was first released, and was disappointed that Barker and co. hadn’t manage to successfully negotiate the pitfalls of making a British film for demanding American producers. The soundtrack that Barker commissioned from Coil was dropped (a serious error); the film’s awkward mid-Atlantic tone makes suspension of disbelief difficult, and considering Barker’s success as a storyteller the narrative is often confused and disjointed. Without all the memorable imagery it’s doubtful it would have had much of a lasting reputation, or birthed so many sequels.

The Forbidden.

Barker and his theatre colleagues made The Forbidden in 1978, a 35-minute 16mm film of entirely negative images which shows how different Hellraiser might have been if fewer capitulations had been made to the marketplace, and to the clichés of horror cinema. Both films concern an occult ritual, an occult puzzle, and the subsequent consequences of the ritual. Where Hellraiser has to connect its most striking scenes with mundane business such as Julia’s murder spree and screaming teens, The Forbidden presents its imagery as raw data, leaving it to the viewer to piece together its fragments.

Barker’s work since Hellraiser has been almost completely generic so it’s surprising to see something of his that’s this open and abstract. In tone it’s closer to the films of Derek Jarman or Kenneth Anger than anything else, especially the sequence of Barker himself dancing with an erection, something which will ensure this doesn’t get many TV screenings. (Barker has referred to Kenneth Anger when discussing the film.) The final section, featuring a man being lovingly flayed by a number of scalpel-wielding hands, offers the same spectacle as Hellraiser‘s skinless Frank but without any of the accompanying frenzy. This won’t necessarily be on YouTube for very long so watch it while you can. The uploaded version is from the Redemption DVD, music included. Since the film is silent you can watch it with a score of your choice; I’d suggest Coil’s themes for Hellraiser.

Salome.

Where The Forbidden is a successful piece of avant-garde cinema, Barker’s 17-minute dramatisation of Salome (1973) is closer to a well-made home movie. This is silent as well, and even has the quality and feel of a very old silent film. For an amateur work it still manages to convey a greater sense of dread than some of the other Salomé-related films which have been featured here, and I believe that’s the director himself playing the femme fatale.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clive Barker, Imaginer

Never Forever by Prince Rama

Lily X. Wahrman’s 18-minute video for Prince Rama (Taraka and Nimai Larson) segues songs from the group’s Top Ten Hits Of The End Of The World album into a cosmic mindblast:

One day, they sat us down and asked us, “What is every wildest fantasy you ever wanted to see fulfilled in a movie?” And we were like, “Well, ok, first off we need 12 Abercrombie models lifting marble pyramids that sweat beads of mercury, a jacuzzi of blood that resurrects the lost faces of pop star avatars, two identical motorcycles driven by two blond identical twins with ripped t-shirts that read FOR EVER, live exotic animals, a miniature model of Stonehenge made from red velvet cake and leopard printed fake nails…” (more)

The HD version at YouTube is a treat.

The Book of the Lost

A recurrent feature of the music landscape of the late 80s and early 90s was the “soundtrack for an imaginary film”, a sub-genre that proved especially popular among the electronica crowd when DJs realised they needed a description to justify their collections of downtempo instrumentals. Two of my favourite examples were produced away from the dance world: John Zorn’s Spillane (1987), and Barry Adamson’s solo debut Moss Side Story (1989), both of which took their thematic cues from crime novels and film noir. The artists on the Ghost Box label haven’t gone down the imaginary film route but many of the tracks on the Belbury Poly and Advisory Circle albums are reminiscent of TV theme tunes from the 1970s. The closest you get to an imaginary film in the Belbury sphere is the unseen giallo horror in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio with its score by Ghost Box allies Broadcast, and a title sequence by Julian House.

Given all of this, The Book of the Lost, a collaboration between Emily Jones and The Rowan Amber Mill, is a logical next step: a CD collection offering a theme from a forgotten TV series “shown on Sunday nights in the late ’70s and early ’80s” which broadcast four of the equally forgotten horror films upon which the accompanying songs are based. Between each song you hear a brief snatch of dialogue, just enough to whet the appetite without getting too involved. One of the films referred to, The Villagers, belongs to that current of British folk-horror that runs through Witchfinder General, and Blood on Satan’s Claw, to Ben Wheatley’s intoxicatingly weird A Field in England. Pastiching aside, all projects of this kind depend upon the quality of the music, and the folk-inflected songs here are very good, as is the Book of the Lost theme itself which is as spookily evocative as Jon Brooks’ Music for Thomas Carnaki.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s a special numbered edition of the CD which comes packaged in a die-cut slipcase (above) containing cards giving details of each of the films. In addition to promotional artwork there’s also a synopsis, a production history and even a cast list. Other films are mentioned in passing—The House that Cried Wolf, Ghosts on Mopeds—that imply there was a lot more happening in Wardour Street in the 1970s than we previously suspected.

The Book of the Lost isn’t officially released until January but it’s available for purchase now at the project website.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Outer Church
• The Ghost Box Study Series
• A playlist for Halloween: Hauntology
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• Ghost Box