{film} – Page 222 – { feuilleton }

The poster art of Akiko Stehrenberger

W.E. (2011).

Being someone who enjoys adopting and pastiching different art and design styles for different projects I naturally like to see other people doing the same. American illustrator and designer Akiko Stehrenberger is very adept at using this approach for her film posters. Without knowing the identity of the person responsible you wouldn’t guess that they were all the work of the same person.

The Madonna and Polanski posters are the two most overt pastiches, being based respectively on the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka, and the posters by Jan Lenica for Polanski’s Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac. Good as the poster for W.E. is, it seems the studio preferred a more cliched “romantic” treatment for their international sales. Stehrenberger’s Mac desktop design for Burn After Reading was dropped in favour of yet another Saul Bass pastiche. (As a sidenote I’d suggest a moratorium on imitating Saul Bass for the time being; it’s getting boring.) The Lost Highway design isn’t a poster but I added it here since it’s a surprising take on David Lynch’s noir piece. I like the way the dotted line can be taken either as road markings or a line signifying the division in the film between the separate storylines and the separated characters.

Akiko Stehrenberger talked to Adrian Curry earlier this year about her favourite film posters.

Burn After Reading (2008).

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008).

Lost Highway (Spanish Blu-ray cover).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• Dr Mabuse posters
• The poster art of Frank McCarthy
• Repulsion posters
• The poster art of Vic Fair
• Petulia film posters
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Wild Salomés
• Druillet’s vampires
• Bob Peak revisited
• Alice in Acidland
• Salomé posters
• Polish posters: Freedom on the Fence
• Kaleidoscope: the switched-on thriller
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Weekend links 184

Gevatter Tod (Godfather Death, 1905) by Heinrich Lefler. Via Beautiful Century.

An inevitable hangover from Halloween this week. At 50 Watts: A Modern Dance of Death (c. 1894) by Joseph Sattler, Harry Clarke Revisited, and more Ex Libris Mr Reaper | At Design Observer: Keith Eggener on When Buildings Kill: Sentient Houses in Fiction and Film | At Dangerous Minds: An interview with horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi | Clive Hicks-Jenkins on illustrating the ghost stories of MR James.

• Punk 45: The Singles Cover Art of Punk 1976–80, a book by Jon Savage & Stuart Baker with an accompanying compilation album on Soul Jazz Records. Savage & Baker selected a handful of favourite covers here.

• De humani corporis fabrica by Vesalius is back in print as a beautiful two-volume hardback edition. See sample pages here.

…the business of the writer is to find something out for yourself and to stick by it. To forge a new mythology out of materials pertinent to the moment. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of their mythology, which is a destruction of language, above everything else. This non-language, this bureaucratic-speak of the global corporate entities, is a horror in the world. So that strange language we started with – that piece of Kerouac – I think is more valuable than ever.

Iain Sinclair (yes, him again) talking to James Campbell about his new book, American Smoke.

• Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

• From 2010: The Bridget Riley Look, The Bridget Riley Sound, Bridget Riley’s Rolling Papers.

• The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board. Related: Ouija Boards at Pinterest.

• Highway 62 posted some close-ups of my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu.

• “This is not a coincidence”: Max Dax talks to Andrey A. Tarkovsky.

• Anthony Lane‘s Foreword to The Big New Yorker Book of Cats.

• At AnOther: Nicolas Roeg on Mirrors and Memory.

• Toys and Techniques: a blog.

• Death And The Lady (1970) by Shirley & Dolly Collins | Clang Of The Yankee Reaper (1975) Van Dyke Parks | All And Everyone (2011) by PJ Harvey

A mix for Halloween: Ectoplasm Forming

Ectoplasm Forming by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Presenting the eighth Halloween playlist, and this year I decided it was time to finally make a proper mix of my own. Reluctance in years past has been mainly a result of the time it takes me to put things like this together, hours spent pondering the order of the tracks, and fine-tuning transitions.

This year’s mix is rather heavy on the drones and eldritch atmospherics with little in the way of songs. There are some rhythms, however. I’ve also taken the opportunity to highlight the ongoing excellence of Emptyset, some of whose recordings I’ve been helping design recently. Their Medium album involved installing a quantity of electronic equipment in an allegedly haunted building, a process similar to that undertaken by the unfortunate doctor in The Legend of Hell House, albeit with better results.

The tracklist is on the Mixcloud page but I’m repeating it here with dates added for each recording. One likes to be thorough.

The Legend of Hell House – Dialogue (1973)
Emptyset – Demiurge: Of Blackest Grain To Missive Ruin (Paul Jebanasam Variation) (2012)
Arne Nordheim – Solitaire (1969)
David Lynch – The Air Is On Fire Pt. 7 (2007)
Ben Frost – The Carpathians (2009)
The Wyrding Module – Subtemple Session II (edit) (2013)
:Zoviet*France: – On The Edge Of A Grain Of Sand (1996)
John Zorn – Lucifer Rising (2002)
Jarboe – A Sea Of Blood And Hollow Screaming… (2009)
The Haxan Cloak – Excavation (Part 1) (2013)
Emptyset – Medium (2012)
Jon Brooks – Experiments With A Medium (2011)
Wendy Carlos – Visitors (2005)
The Advisory Circle – Eyes Which Are Swelling (2007)
Bernard Szajner – Chant Funèbre (1981)
Emptyset – Function: Vulgar Display Of Power (Roly Porter Variation) (2012)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A playlist for Halloween: Hauntology
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• A playlist for Halloween: Drones and atmospheres
• A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Another playlist for Halloween
• A playlist for Halloween

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983) is the third and best of three Gothic shorts made by Jan Švankmajer, the two earlier works being Castle of Otranto (1973–79) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1980). Švankmajer combines Poe’s famous tale of Inquistion torment with A Torture by Hope by Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and unlike Corman and co. reduces the story to a stark and wordless first-person ordeal in the face of clanking, fire-breathing engines of destruction. Poe’s story lets the narrator off the hook with a deus ex machina intervention, something Švankmajer evidently felt unable to swallow, hence the Villiers coda.

All the above works, and much more besides, can be found on the BFI’s collection of Švankmajer’s short films. Another short adaptation of the Poe story, The Pit (1962) by Edward Abraham, will appear next month as an extra on the eagerly-awaited DVD/BR debut of Schalcken the Painter.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Two sides of Liška
• The Torchbearer by Václav Švankmajer

Robin Redbreast by John Bowen

This TV play from 1970 was one of the films I watched last year at Halloween, a very poor bootleg copy from the BBC archives with a timecode running away in one corner. So it’s been a surprise to find the BFI releasing it so soon after on DVD. I never saw Robin Redbreast originally, and hadn’t even heard about it until a friend with a similar taste for the outré and neglected told me to look out for it. The main reason for the BFI picking out a rather obscure Play for Today for reissue has been its rising cult status in the sub-genre of British rural or folk horror. Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973) are the more notable examples, although in tone and presentation Robin Redbreast is closer to Nigel Kneale’s Murrain (1975), another TV play that’s currently available as a bonus on the Beasts DVD collection.

The usual plot of this kind of drama concerns the arrival of an outsider in a rural community whose presence arouses suspicion and conflict. Robin Redbreast reverses this by having its metropolitan outsider, Norah, move to the country only to find her neighbours are welcoming to the point of being interfering. In time the interference starts to become oppressive, and unfortunately this is one of those dramas where to reveal much more would be to spoil the unwinding of the story. There’s nothing supernatural here, like The Wicker Man a mystery grades in its final moments to horror. With little in the way of cinematic atmosphere it’s left to a detailed script and the performances to do the work. All the leads are excellent, especially Anna Cropper as the beleaguered Norah, and Bernard Hepton as the quietly sinister Fisher.

Bernard Hepton.

Robin Redbreast was originally filmed and broadcast in colour but the BBC had a habit of wiping many of their tapes after broadcast so what we’re left with is a telerecording on 16mm black-and-white film. This isn’t ideal but it does have the effect of giving all the scenes more consistency. Like most dramas of the period, interior shots were done in the electronic studio while exteriors were shot on film, a technique which was taken for granted at the time but which looks uneven today. The DVD is still superior to the bootleg copy that was doing the rounds. In one of the extras writer John Bowen discusses the origin of the play, explaining how a BBC editor was horrified by a plot detail concerning female contraception. This led to the script being dropped by the suspense series for which it was written, and subsequently taken up by director James MacTaggart for the new Play for Today strand. Play for Today ran for 14 years, producing many impressive dramas but mostly offering a solid diet of social realism. Robin Redbreast is one of a handful of stranger works that crept onto the screen, along with the peerless Penda’s Fen (1974), and Alan Garner’s adaptation of his novel, Red Shift (1978). Now that the BFI has exhausted the BBC’s more obvious ghost and horror fare I’m hoping that some of the less generic films may find a new audience on DVD.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Red Shift by Alan Garner
• Children of the Stones
• Penda’s Fen by David Rudkin