{film} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 825

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric.

• Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having been silent for the past thirteen years there’s been an understandable flood of wild speculation on the BOC Reddit page, the supposition being that the tapes (and now an equally cryptic set of posters) mean that a new record release is on the way. We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, here’s DJ Food’s O Is For Orange 2025 (version 3), a Boards Of Canada-themed mix that I neglected to link to last year.

• “There is no artistic process that isn’t magical in that it’s an attempt to magically conjure an idea, something that is invisible and intangible, into material form…” Alan Moore (again) talking to Dominique Musorrafiti about art and magic. Also the comics business, which people really ought to stop asking him about when his reluctance to discuss his old work is so evident.

• “I’m not a commercial director—I’m not even a professional film-maker.” Jim Jarmusch talking to Amy Raphael about his career and his latest film, Father Mother Sister Brother. At Little White Lies, Claire Biddle examines the music in Jarmusch’s films and his collaborative albums.

• “Painting and sculpture influenced me greatly. You start to see the world, the outside, everything around you, the tone, with the eyes of seeing a picture that’s framed.” Irmin Schmidt talking to Adelle Stripe about his early life and Requiem, his new album.

• New music: All Clouds Bring Not Rain by Memorials; Afterlife Requiem by Those Who Walk Away; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• At Colossal: Daniel Sackheim traverses Los Angeles’ noir side in The City Unseen.

• At Bandcamp Daily: Jim Allen on the sound of the ’70s French Underground.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Australian debut features.

• NASA Johnson

• Hexagon (1990) by Ruins | Octagon (1994) by Basic Channel | Triangles And Rhombuses (1998) by Boards Of Canada

Visa de censure numéro X

Synopsis: This flamboyantly poetic film includes two works of art: Livret De Famille and Carte De Vœux. A hallucinogenic voyage, psychedelic images float across the screen, of family and friends (Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Yves Beneyton, Valérie Lagrange…) as they share their adventures.

A slight return to Cyrille Verdeaux via actor Pierre Clémenti. If you watch enough European art cinema from the 1960s and 70s you’ll eventually run across Clémenti in films by Visconti, Pasolini, Buñuel, Bertolucci and others. His roles were often minor ones but his fashion-model looks made him stand out wherever he appeared. Clémenti also had a side career as a director, producing a number of mostly short films from the late 60s on. Visa de censure numéro X appears to be a product of his earliest experiments with a camera, being a collage of silent home-movie fragments which have been chopped up, filtered and overlaid to create a French hippy equivalent of Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother; or maybe Derek Jarman’s early Super-8 films, although Jarman’s painterly approach to cinema tends to be more sedate.

Where Anger had his film soundtracked with an irritating Moog score from Mick Jagger, Clémenti had the good sense to ask Cyrille Verdeaux and Ivan Coaquett to write some original music when the film was being prepared for release in 1975. Visa de censure numéro X runs for 42 minutes which is longer than most people want to spend watching a group of hippies partying, running around naked or cavorting in the woods. But this does give us a whole album of music in which Verdeaux and company—Christian Boulé and Tim Blake among them—go all-out for psychedelic rock; Boulé is credited with “cosmic guitar”. The improvisations were released under the name Delired Cameleon Family, an ensemble whose sole release sounds like Clearlight if they’d been liberated from the necessity of following Verdeaux’s compositions. As Clémenti’s film demonstrates, France had embraced the psychedelia of the 1960s as much as other European countries but French psychedelic rock wasn’t so common. The Delired Cameleon Family album is a notable exception, albeit one that arrived several years too late.

Cover art by Jean-Claude Michel.

All the online copies of Visa de censure numéro X that I’ve seen are horizontally stretched: the film should be viewed in 4:3, not 16:9. This copy at the Internet Archive may be downloaded then viewed in any application that allows you to change aspect ratios.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clearlight: Symphonies
• Into the Midnight Underground
• Us Down By The Riverside, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a film by Jud Yalkut

Weekend links 824

“A view of Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows after completing the translunar injection burn on April 2, 2026. The image features two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.”

• I was surprised this week to find myself quoted by David Hudson at Criterion Current in an overview of the schedule for Cold War Visions: Nuclear Anxiety in Eastern Bloc Cinema, a short season of films that will be showing at the Barbican throughout this month. One of those films is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a cult film round here, which a handful of lucky Londoners will be able to see on a big screen.

• 邪神三十六景 (Thirty-six Views of the Evil Gods) is collection of drawings by Takeki Yamada that combine Hokusai’s celebrated views of Mount Fuji with beings from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I’m a little underwhelmed by the results but the book is out there for those who want it.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. (Previously)

• Coming soon at Unquiet Things: The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny, and Unexplained by S. Elizabeth.

• At Public Domain Review: Elizabeth I’s manuscript copy of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses (1559).

• New music: Enter the Nuummite Cosmos by Brotherhood Of Sleep.

• At the BFI: Where to begin with Peter Weir.

• A Brief History of the Dust Jacket.

• Out Of The Unknown (1984) by Died Pretty | Brian’s Nightmare / The Unknown, Part One (2005) by Robin Guthrie / Harold Budd | A Gift Of Unknown Things (2017) by Teleplasmiste

Visions of Light

Good to see this again even if it is an unofficial “remastering” of the original. Visions of Light is a feature-length documentary about the art of cinematography as practiced in (mostly) American cinema. The film was made by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels for the American Film Institute in 1992, and is unique in being related solely through the words of cinematographers; there are no actor-narrators, actors, directors, academics or celebrities blathering about “iconic” moments. The format is very simple and direct: short clips from feature films showing the evolution of photographic styles and techniques from the silent era to the present, with each clip being commented on and contextualised by the cinematographers. Each clip includes an on-screen caption listing the title of the film, the director and the cinematographer. Most of the interviewees are Americans but there are a few notable Europeans such as Néstor Almendros, Sven Nykvist and Vittorio Storario.

The version of the film archived here is an unofficial “remastering” which has upgraded the original to high definition. I haven’t seen Visions of Light since it was broadcast on TV in the 1990s so my memory may be faulty but I think the incorporation of some of the interviews as picture-in-picture overlays may be a new addition. While it’s good to see high-quality extracts the real attraction for me is the interviews. The people who photograph feature films are essential to the film-making process yet they’re seldom given the opportunity to talk about their work outside extras on hard-format releases. And now that the masses have stopped buying films on disc the opportunities for this kind of discussion are limited once again. The interview with Conrad Hall was one I found especially revelatory for his discussion of breaking the studio rules when filming Cool Hand Luke in 1967. This was the first major Hollywood film to show sunlight flaring into the camera lens, an effect that would have had the shot rejected in the days when studios policed each production with great rigour. Once Hall had got away with this everyone started doing it, with the result that American film and TV after 1967 is filled with lens flares. Cinematography, in other words, creates and follows trends as much as other film-making techniques.

Ninety minutes is too short a time to cover a hundred years of cinematic history in any depth. It would have been better for the AFI to produce a multi-part TV series but I doubt there would have been the audience for such a thing. Aside from actors and the occasional high-profile director most film-viewers are happy to remain ignorant about the identities of the people who make the films they watch. Visions of Light was obviously edited down from a great deal of interview footage which makes me wonder now what happened to the material that didn’t make the final cut. Will we ever get to see it?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vilmos Zsigmond, 1930–2016

Weekend links 823

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“

• Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from the CD release. (Thanks to Francis for the tip!)

• The spring catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: State Of Matter by Dobrawa Czocher; Plague Dogs by The Heartwood Institute.

• “Why we made a film about Mark Fisher called We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher.”

• At Colossal: “Ambiguity reigns in Olaf Hajek’s mysterious illustrations”.

• At Public Domain Review: Monet’s early caricatures (ca. late 1850s).

• At the BFI: George Orwell, film critic.

• The Strange World of…Ladytron.

• The Plague (1967) by Scott Walker | A Plague Of Angels (2007) by Earth | The Plague (2014) by Cosmic Ground