{film} – Page 269 – { feuilleton }

Dreams That Money Can Buy

Max Ernst.

The posts this week have all followed a Surrealist theme so I feel compelled to draw attention to the DVD-quality copy of Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) at the Internet Archive. As mentioned before, Richter’s film is one of the key works of Surrealist cinema, made at the time when the art movement had been overwhelmed by the war in Europe but was finding a brief resurgence of interest in the United States. Hitchcock had drafted Salvador Dalí to design the dream sequences in Spellbound two years earlier which may have helped Richter to raise the funds for a colour feature film. The budget was low but the production values are a lot higher than other experimental films of the time, and Richter was able to find in New York a roster of world-class collaborators including Max Ernst, Paul Bowles, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Alexander Calder.

The seven artists provide (and in Ernst’s case, perform in) the dreams that lead character Joe is selling to cover his rent. Fernand Léger’s contribution is a song sequence, The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, about love among the showroom dummies, while Marcel Duchamp’s spinning discs are given another outing accompanied by music from John Cage. Dreams That Money Can Buy is a fascinating film that’s essential viewing for anyone interested in the art of this period. It’s also a film to which Kenneth Anger owes a small debt: the sleeping woman in Ernst’s Desire sequence is seen at one point swallowing a golden ball that hovers above her mouth, a trick that Anger later borrowed for Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

Also at the Internet Archive are three further Richter films: two short works, Rhythmus 21 (1921) and Filmstudie (1925), and also Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927), an inventive experimental piece using cut-up imagery, simple animation and trick photography.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair

René Magritte by David Wheatley

René Magritte as portrayed by Patrick McDonnell.

René Magritte died in 1967, the year Eric Duvivier’s La femme 100 têtes appeared in French cinemas. Magritte is even less visible cinematically than Max Ernst, IMDB lists a couple of documentaries and nothing else. There are trace elements elsewhere, notably the Magritte and de Chirico influence in Bertolucci’s Borges’ adaptation The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), but the artist’s arresting visual imagination has always found more of a welcome on book covers than cinema screens.

One exception is David Wheatley’s drama documentary René Magritte (1976), yet another work you won’t find listed at IMDB. This was Wheatley’s graduation film which the BBC screened in a 30-minute version (shorn of some apparently clunky dialogue scenes) in 1979, and which secured for Wheatley a place as a regular director for the BBC’s Omnibus and Arena arts programmes. I saw the 1979 broadcast, and caught it again a decade later when one of the channels was having a season of Magritte-related programming, something that’s impossible to imagine in today’s debased television landscape.

For a student film it’s a stunning piece of work, taking a similar approach to Eric Duvivier in bringing to life many of the artist’s more famous pictures: a window shatters to reveal the scene behind it painted on its panes, a mountain hovers ponderously over the sea, a dove made of clouds flies across a stormy sky. Between the artworks there are short biographical scenes. There’s a sole version of the film on YouTube that remains watchable despite being a low-quality recording from video tape that’s also hacked into three parts and subtitled in Danish.

Looking for more information about David Wheatley it was dismaying to find he’d died in 2009, aged 59. Leslie Megahey—a cult TV director of mine—wrote an obituary for the Guardian where he describes some of Wheatley’s other productions including the Arena film Borges and I (1983)—as far as I’m aware the only British TV documentary about Jorge Luis Borges—and Wheatley’s first feature film, an adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1987). I recall enjoying the latter, produced at a time when the success of The Company of Wolves (1984) made it seem there might also be a place in the cinema for Angela Carter’s imagination; we know how that worked out. The Magic Toyshop doesn’t seem to have had a DVD release so good luck to anyone searching for it. As for René Magritte, if anyone runs across a better online copy be sure to leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen

La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier

La femme 100 têtes: L’immaculée conception (1929).

Salvador Dalí never lacked for attention from filmmakers, as has been noted here on several occasions. Max Ernst, on the other hand, received far less attention despite being an actor and collaborator in two of the most significant Surrealist films, L’Age D’Or (1930) and Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947).

La femme 100 têtes: Alors je vous présenterai l’oncle (1929).

One of the key works in the Ernst filmography is La femme 100 têtes, a 19-minute film from 1967 based on the series of collages Ernst created under that title in 1929, precursors to his collage masterwork Une semaine de bonté (1934). Eric Duvivier was the director, nephew of the celebrated French director Julien Duvivier, and a director of many educational films, none of which seem to be listed on IMDB. Duvivier’s film may be short but he had the resources to go to some extraordinary lengths in replicating cinematically so many of Ernst’s collages. Some of the scenes merely require a room or a street, in others bizarre or elaborate sets have had to be built then populated with actors for shots that last less than half a minute.

La femme 100 têtes (1967).

Why go to all this effort in 1967? The clue is in the name and logo of the producer—Sandoz—the pharmaceutical company that invented and manufactured LSD. Sandoz had a film division which they used to create promotional films for their products. Among the ones related to LSD are Images du monde visionnaire (1964), directed by Henri Michaux and Eric Duvivier, and (possibly) La femme 100 têtes. I say “possibly” only because I haven’t seen this confirmed but why else would a pharmaceutical company that just happened to make the world’s most famous hallucinogenic drug make a Surrealist film? Whatever the reason it’s a remarkable piece of work. See it on YouTube here.

La femme 100 têtes (1967).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Scenes from a carriage
• Surrealist echoes
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• The Robing of the Birds

Weekend links 91

Untitled (1978) by GR Santosh at 50 Watts.

• Evertype Publishing produces a range of Lewis Carroll special editions including Ailice’s Àventurs in Wunnerland (a translation in Scots), Alicia in Terra Mirabili (a Latin version), and an edition printed in the Nyctographic Square Alphabet devised by Carroll.

• This week’s bookshop animations: Type Books, Toronto presents The Joy of Books while at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Spike Jonze and Simon Cahn explore the erotic life of book covers in Mourir Auprès de Toi.

• Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies, a 1982 article on sexism in (US superhero) comics by Alan Moore. Thirty years on, things haven’t improved much at all.

I reread it now, 35 years later, and I am struck by its capacity to change like a magic mirror. Where I had originally seen it as a book about writing, about becoming a writer, I now see it as a book about reading, about taking one’s place in the chain. Where I once assumed it was a book about eternal youth, I now see it as a book about growing up, about learning to live.

Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

• Dark Water, Lovecraftian carpet designs (yes, carpets) by Kirill Rozhkov. Danish carpet manufacturer Ege has a catalogue showing the finished products.

• Neil Gaiman ventures into the treacherous labyrinth of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium.

• Nicholas Lezard reviews The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen.

The Dream (1910) by Henri Rousseau at the Google Art Project.

• Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration by Pat Kirkham.

• Getting There Too Quickly: Peter Bebergal on Aldous Huxley and Mescaline.

• Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro-American Male Couples.

• Filles En Aiguilles, a new musical work by Schütze+Hopkins.

• RubiCANE’s Erotic Illustrations.

• Laurie Anderson has a Godplex.

• Alan Bennett on Smut.

• The Jungle Line (1975) by Joni Mitchell | The Jungle Line (1981) by Low Noise (Kevin Armstrong, Thomas Dolby, JJ Johnson & Matthew Seligman) | The Jungle Line (2007) by Herbie Hancock with Leonard Cohen.

Carel Struycken’s panoramas

The Bradbury Building by Carel Struycken.

An idle search for a panorama view of the interior of the Bradbury Building in Downtown Los Angeles fetched me up at my favourite panorama site 360Cities and this photo by Carel Struycken. Mr Struycken is better known as an actor whose great height has seen him cast as The Giant in the Twin Peaks TV series, and Lurch in the Addams Family films. 360Cities has a page of his panorama views most of which are taken in and around Los Angeles. The strangely ossified landscape around California’s Monolake is more familiar from this photo by Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album.

Urban Light by Carel Struycken.

Monolake in Winter by Carel Struycken.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through the darkness of future pasts
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future