{surrealism} – Page 64 – { feuilleton }

Joseph Cornell, 1967

More Surrealism (sort of) from 1967. Joseph Cornell is a catalogue for an exhibition selected and presented by Diane Waldman at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1967. The book is one of a number of new and very welcome additions from the Guggenheim Museum to the stock of scanned books at the Internet Archive. Old art books and catalogues often feature black-and-white reproductions but that drawback doesn’t invalidate the usefulness of their textual content. The Museum’s own pages for the archived books may be browsed here.

Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet (1949–1953).

For more on the Magus of Utopia Parkway I’d suggest the BBC’s documentary film Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box (1991) but only if you can find a copy since I’ve not seen it online anywhere. That’s a shame because it’s an excellent introduction to Cornell’s life and work, with the added bonus of commentary from Susan Sontag and Cornell’s film collaborators Stan Brakhage and Rudolph Burckhardt. There’s also a surprise appearance from Tony Curtis who was friends with the artist and who reads from his diaries.

Medici Slot Machine (1942).

Elsewhere, Ubuweb has Cornell’s short films which proceed from the radical re-editing of Rose Hobart (1936) to more lyrical works such as Nymphlight (1957). And I’ve mentioned this before but it’s always worth another look: Americana Fantastica, the edition of Charles Henry Ford’s View magazine edited and illustrated by Cornell in 1943.

Medici Princess (1952).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell
• View: The Modern Magazine

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

Magritte’s Maldoror

Seen briefly in yesterday’s film about René Magritte were some of the artist’s 77 illustrations created for a 1948 edition of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror published by Éditions “La Boetie”, Brussels. The examples here are from various auction sites, and they can’t be counted among Magritte’s best work which probably explains why they’re not reproduced very often. Salvador Dalí’s set of engravings for a 1934 edition were appended last year to a new English translation by RJ Dent for Solar Books. And from French publisher La Baconniere there’s this recent edition with a set of fresh illustrations by TagliaMani (also here).

Continue reading “Magritte’s Maldoror”

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