{film} – Page 270 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 109

Dreams before Surrealism: a sheet music cover from 1926 by René Magritte.

• The week in music: Listen to compositions by Annea Lockwood. | At the Free Music Archive: Uncomfortable Music, a tribute to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (and, it should be said, to Alan Splet’s unique soundtrack). | Alan Licht plays a track from Trout Mask Replica then loops some Donna Summer and improvises guitar noise over it. | Music Experiments with Terror: The Spooky Isles presents Joseph Stannard‘s list of recent eldritch sounds from British musicians.

Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend, but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.

Salman Rushdie on the censorship of art

• All Diamond, No Rough” says the School Library Journal about the first volume of The Graphic Canon. Volume two should be out in August.

• Scientific American asks: Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?

• From 2010: A Dandy in Aspic – A letter from Derek Marlowe.

• Tom Phillips and A Humument: how a novel became an oracle.

• Timeline Maps at the David Rumsey Map Collection.

• Happy 50th birthday, A Clockwork Orange.

• Jim Dandy (1956) by LaVern Baker | Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, part one (1972) by King Crimson, live on Beat Club.

KraftWork

KraftWork by Seeper is another projection-mapping video where projections of 3d animations onto a building façade bring the architecture to life. Plus points for using the original Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburgh, Germany; minus points for the annoying editing which limits appreciation of the overall effect. Via Dressing the Air‘s weekly bulletin. For more projection mapping, see Apparati Effimeri.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lumiere at Durham
• Tetragram for Enlargement

Externsteine panoramas

Lucifer Rising (1973).

The first time I saw Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1983, at a film club) I recognised all the ancient monuments apart from the peculiar group of rocks where we see a line of robed and cowled torchbearers ascending a stairway at night. These shots are intercut with a caped Marianne Faithfull making the same ascent in daytime until she reaches an alcove where she’s given a vision of an Egyptian sunset. It took a few more years to discover the location was the Externsteine rock formation in northwest Germany, one of those singular outcrops which—like Glastonbury Tor—was a focus of pagan ritual before being co-opted by the Christian church.

Photo by Markus Krueger.

360cities.net has a number of panoramic views of the area, the best being the one above which shows Marianne’s alcove as well as allowing views of the surrounding countryside. Photos such as the one below are far more common. While these give some idea of the unusual nature of the site they don’t show just how isolated the rocks are. For an older view, the Library of Congress has this Photocrom print.

Photo by Wilfried Pinsdorf.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again

Lindsay Kemp’s Salomé

Fragments are all you get with this one, unfortunately, but how tantalising they are. Lindsay Kemp’s 1975 stage production of Oscar Wilde’s play was probably the queerest there’s been to date, with Kemp himself playing Herod’s doomed daughter under a heap of silks and feathers. These stills from a sequence of Super-8 shots of the performance arrive courtesy of Nendie Pinto-Duchinsky, director of the forthcoming Kemp documentary Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance, a film whose title echoes Ken Russell’s film of the Wilde play. The connections circulate wildly (so to speak) around Kemp’s production: prior to this performance Kemp had acted for Ken Russell, while two of the other actors went on to work with Derek Jarman (as did Kemp). John the Baptist (above) was played by David Haughton who appeared as Ariel in Jarman’s Jubilee; Jack Birkett’s grinning features (bottom, right) appear in many of Jarman’s films. All the more reason to wish these clips were longer.

The Kemp documentary YouTube channel has a few more items related to Kemp’s stage work, notably another tantalising sequence of stills from Flowers (1974), an adaptation of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers that also featured Haughton and Birkett.

Update: Thanks to Suzanne in the comments for pointing to her video which includes further film moments including Salomé performing with a live snake à la Salammbô.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• Saint Genet

The Telephone Box

Ah, The Telephone Box, or La Cabina, to give Antonio Mercero’s half-hour film its original Spanish title. Made in 1972, I saw what was probably the first UK TV screening sometime around 1980, and for years afterwards was asking people whether they ever saw that film about the guy stuck in a phone box. Eventually I got in on tape following another TV screening and would foist it on anyone who hadn’t seen it. Thom at Form is Void linked to a YouTube copy a while back, and Stephen Gallagher reminded me of it a few hours ago, so here it is, one of those simple but memorable dramas in which a small problem escalates into a nightmare.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Temps Morts by René Laloux