{pulp} – Page 13 – { feuilleton }

Weird Tales: The Strange Life of HP Lovecraft

BBC Radio 3 gets hip to the squamous nightmares of HPL.
Available to listen to online until next Sunday.

Geoff Ward examines the strange life and terrifying world of the man hailed as America’s greatest horror writer since Poe.

During his life Lovecraft’s work was confined to lurid pulp magazines and he died in penury in 1937. Today, however, his writings are considered modern classics and published in prestigious editions.

Among the writers considering his legacy are Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville.

Film noir posters

Two pages of them, and BIG scans as well, which makes a nice change for a web gallery. Strictly speaking, many of these films aren’t what’s usually classed as film noir (a debatable term at the best of times) but we shouldn’t quibble, painted posters are now a lost art.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alida Valli, 1921–2006

The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

Mrs Amworth.

Another great artist of the macabre and supernatural, Virgil Finlay was the one of the most talented and imaginative illustrators of his generation. Unlike older contemporaries such as Joseph Leyendecker, who became wealthy producing elegant yet often bland advertising art, much of Finlay’s best work was for pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories which paid a pittance and printed his finely-hatched scratchboard drawings on the cheapest paper. The advantages to this work, such as they were, came in the access to a huge and appreciative audience, and the chance to provide the first illustrations for what would turn out to be classic genre stories. Finlay illustrated a number of HP Lovecraft’s tales and received the highest praise from the author in doing so. His illustration for Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep (below) contains a slight nod to Harry Clarke’s Valdemar picture (see previous post) with its distant, highlighted doorway, a detail that Clarke himself borrowed from the celebrated Las Meninas by Velázquez.

Therionweb has five galleries of Finlay’s pictures and Bud Plant again has a brief biography.

Abercrombie Station.

The Thing on the Doorstep.

Six and Ten.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world

The (low-res) digitisation of the past continues apace on this site which is accumulating cover scans from a host of American sf and fantasy magazines. Oddly enough, I’d been looking for a place with pictures of the early Omni covers just recently, but this site didn’t come up on Google, or if it did, I missed it. I bought most of the first year’s run of Omni so it’s interesting seeing which covers I remember and which I’d forgotten about. Now, where is there a site with a complete run of New Worlds covers? Link via Strange Attractor.

And an item of contemporary magazine news:
Jonathan Barnbrook designs the latest issue of Adbusters.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A few thousand science fiction covers
• Vintage magazine art II
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• View: The Modern Magazine
• Vintage magazine art
• Oz magazine, 1967–73

Cockfighter

Cockfighter is a film by Monte Hellman from American cinema’s great decade (the Seventies) that we’re not allowed to see in this country because it contains cruelty to chickens. This week the Edinburgh International Film Festival halted a planned screening after being informed it contravened a 1937 law:

Change to Programmed Performance: Cockfighter

Mon 21 Aug 2006

Due to interesting circumstances we are unable to screen COCKFIGHTER (70’s retrospective) on TUESDAY 22 August.

This will be replaced by Monte Hellman’s TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971) in a spanking new preservation print. Huge thanks to Universal for giving us this and to the BFI for help in sourcing it.

COCKFIGHTER contains scenes which contravene the CINEMATOGRAPHIC FILMS(Animals) ACT 1937 whereby it is a criminal offence to screen the film to the public (whether they pay or not).

We apologise for the disappointment this may cause. The film was never certificated in the UK because it was impossible to deliver a cut that would not contravene the Act.

We were unaware of this combination of circumstances when we programmed the film.

We’re not chicken; it’s the cinema license holder who would prosecuted and as that isn’t me, I’d prefer to take the prudent route.

Ginnie Atkinson, Managing Director, EIFF

Monte Hellman is a serious director and the film has been lauded by other directors and critics such as Alex Cox who praise Hellman’s direction and Warren Oates’ performance. The screenplay was by Charles Willeford based on his novel and the film also features Harry Dean Stanton who was in Hellman’s earlier Two Lane Blacktop.

While I’m not desperate to see chickens pecking and clawing themselves to death, I’d prefer to be allowed a choice of whether I can or not. For some reason odd films like this get singled out yet other films of the period that contain images of violence to animals get by. Offhand I can think of the shooting and slaughter of a buffalo in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, chickens having their heads shot off in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and the slow-motion slaughter of a caribou in Apocalypse Now. The Guardian says:

A BBFC spokesman said that The [Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937] made it illegal to show any scene which was organised or directed for the purpose of the film involving cruelty to animals. The Act was originally introduced following complaints that horses were deliberately made to fall in Hollywood westerns.

This seems inconsistent given that the Peckinpah film certainly had chickens killed for the purposes of that scene. Maybe it’s not counted as cruelty if you blow off their heads rather than let them attack each other? I wonder how many of the people who’ve enforced this rule over the years have been chicken eaters? Anyway, this nonsense aside, Anchor Bay has had the film available on DVD for a while and Willeford’s novel is also in print.