{film} – Page 231 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 171

Jeune moine à la Grecque (1771) by Benigno Bossi. Via Monsieur Thombeau.

• Victoriana: The Art of Revival is an exhibition which will run throughout the autumn at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. Some of my steampunk work will be included. Related: Rick Poynor on Soft Machine’s Dysfunctional Mechanism.

• “The egg glows and hovers in the middle of a field of mesmerizing color. The spell is broken when the guard finally says, “Everybody up off the floor.'” Morgan Meis on Aten Reign by the amazing James Turrell.

• Mix of the week: a “heatwave mix” of psychedelic songs compiled by Jaime Williams. Anything that includes Vacuum Cleaner by Tintern Abbey gets my vote.

Because sex is so compartmentalized — it’s often considered separate from the rest of life and hidden away — porn performers, who have sex publicly, are in a unique position to consider and talk about integrating private and public aspects of life.

Writer and porn performer Conner Habib on the issue of nomenclature in the porn business.

• Still Hopscotching: Peter Mendelsund posts some unused cover designs for Julio Cortázar.

• A Hymn For Megatron, an hour-long drone work, and a free download, by The Black Dog.

• Vagrancy and drift: Sukhdev Sandhu on the rise of the roaming essay film.

• A Flickr set of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s musical instruments.

“Whether flower-pressing in the garden, hallucinating in the summerhouse, fainting inside stifling sites of historical interest, pirouetting along the promenade, or even sea-cruise thalassophobia complications, barely a moment will pass that isn’t made all the sweeter by obsessively listening to Down to the Silver Sea.”

• The TM Research Archive: sate yourself on Swiss graphic design.

• A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges.

• Words, sounds and robots from Sarah Angliss.

• Never Built Los Angeles

• Nautilus (2012) by Anna Meredith | Nature Of Light (2012) by Isnaj Dui | Popcorn (Ealing Feeder Mix) (2012) by SpacedogUK (Sarah Angliss)

One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin

I thought I was going to intensely dislike One Way Street (1993) owing to the deployment of that bane of documentary film and television: the actor impersonating a historical figure. But these moments are sporadic, and John Hughes’ film is a reasonable introduction to Walter Benjamin’s elusive philosophies. It probably helps if you already know something of Benjamin’s life and work; there are several allusions, for example, to the famous “angel of history” thesis, and we even get to see the Paul Klee print to which the thesis refers (and which Benjamin owned); but there isn’t a reading of the thesis itself, an omission that the BBC in its documentary heyday wouldn’t have allowed. Various writers and academics do their best to convey something of Benjamin’s thought in sound-bite form, and the film as a whole can probably evade some criticism by claiming to be Benjaminesque in its disjointed and fragmented nature (although that would also be an evasion). I think if I hadn’t read any of Benjamin’s books there’d be enough to stimulate my curiosity, in which case the film would have succeeded. Watch it here. (Via Open Culture.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage des Panoramas

42 One Dream Rush

A 45-minute omnibus film from 2009 in which Abel Ferrara, Arden Wohl, Asia Argento, Brian Butler, Carlos Reygadas, Charles Burnett, Charlyn Marshall, Chris Graham, Chris Milk, David Lynch, Dee Poon, Floria Sigismondi, Florian Habicht, Gaspar Noé, Grant Morrison, Griffin Marcus, Harmony Korine, James Franco, Joe Coleman, Jonas Mekas, Jonathan Caouette, Kenneth Anger, Larry Clark, Leos Carax, Lola Schnabel, Lou Ye, Matt Pyke, Michele Civetta, Mike Figgis, Mote Sinabel, Niki Caro, Rajan Mehta, Rinko Kikuchi, Ryan McGinley, Sean Lennon, Tadanobu Asano, Taika Waititi, Terence Koh, Yung Chang, Zachary Croitoroo and Zhang Yuang each direct a 42-second film on the subject of dreams.

A couple of these have done the rounds before but this is the first time I’ve seen the complete set. The dream theme is loosely interpreted, with entries that range from real or imagined nightmares and Lynchian weirdness (Lynch’s own piece is as strange as you’d expect), to ambitions and daydreams. Given the collection of directors it’s no surprise to find sexuality and mortality as recurrent sub-themes. Not all of it works but you only have to wait 42 seconds for something new to arrive. Watch it here.

Weekend links 170

Owl portrait by Iain Macarthur.

• “Ghost Box is a glance through a window seeing something running alongside our version of reality. Like, what if Paul McCartney had made records with the Radiophonic Workshop?” Ghost Box designer and Mr Focus Group, Julian House is interviewed.

• “…that book with the girl with the hatchet in her head…” Dave Tompkins remembers Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), a formative influence of mine, and that of many other people, it seems.

• Salvador Dalí’s 1946 illustrated edition of Macbeth. Related: From Macbeth to the Wizard of Oz: New exhibition explores the erotic side of witchcraft.

I do not want to live in a world where the government and a select few conservative feminists get to decide what we may and may not masturbate to, and use the bodies of murdered women or children as emotional pawns in that debate. It is supremely difficult to achieve radical ends by conservative means. Feminists and everyone who seeks to end sexual violence should be very cautious when their immediate goals seem to line up neatly with those of social conservatives and state censors.

Laurie Penny on the recent Tory policy of attempting to limit online pornography.

• The Facebook page for The Wicker Man has details of the pursuit for a complete print of the film. A Blu-ray edition will be released in October.

• Anne Billson visited the Hotel Thermae Palace in Ostend, the columnated location of Daughters of Darkness.

• Kenneth Anger on how he made Lucifer Rising. The ICA in London is screening his films this weekend.

Roy Krenkel illustrates Tales of Three Planets by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1964.

• The Electric Banana Blows Your Mind: The soundtrack library alter ego of The Pretty Things.

• Mix of the week: an ambient (in the 90s’ sense of the word) DJ set by Surgeon.

• Bernie Krause shares the happiest sounds he’s heard in nature.

• RIP Walter De Maria, sculptor and musician.

• Sexodrome by Asia Argento with Morgan.

• Metabolist: Identify (1980) | Curly Wall (1980) | Ymuzgo/Pigface (1981)

Weekend links 169

Cover illustration by Gray Morrow, 1967. One of the less exploitative examples from a collection of hippy book covers.

• Ten Photographs by Alain Resnais: Mise en scène of Memory, Aesthetics of Silence by Ehsan Khoshbakht. In the comments to that post someone shows an old Penguin book with cover photos by Chris Marker. This confirms that the “C. Marker” whose name I found on the back of another Penguin book was indeed Monsieur Chat.

• There’s more (there’s always more…): Cornelius Castoriadis interviewed by Chris Marker in 1989, the complete footage of an interview edited down for Marker’s TV series L’héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy). Watch the series itself at YouTube.

• “A generation of innovators want to change the way we have sex and consume porn, but Google, Apple, and Amazon won’t let them,” says Andrea Garcia-Vargas. Related: Sam Biddle on how Tumblr is pushing porn into an internet sex ghetto.

• Mix of the week: the Chop Quietus Mix, “a jagged journey all the way from Broadcast to the uneasy thrum of Suicide, kosmische flavours from Popol Vuh and Cluster, Alexander Robotnik and many more.”

• Strange Flowers looked back at The Student of Prague: “the first art film, the first horror film and the first auteur film”, and now a century old.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins talked to animator Barry Purves about the pleasures and difficulties of creating animated films for adults.

• Mazzy Star released a song, California, from their new album which arrives in September. Can’t wait.

• Suzanne Ciani, “American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari Generation” explains synthesizers, 1980.

• Christer Strömholm‘s photos of Parisian transgender communities in the 1950s.

• What are These Giant Concrete Arrows Across the American Landscape?

• How Kiyoshi Izumi built the psych ward of the future by dropping acid.

• Alan Moore: The revolution will be crowd-funded.

• Fuck Yeah Mazzy Star

• Suzanne Ciani: Lixiviation | The First Wave—Birth Of Venus (1982) | The Eighth Wave (1986)