Category: {film}

Film

Weekend links 290

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The Royal Mint celebrates 400 years of William Shakespeare with new £2 coins. The “Tragedies” design gives Britain the Gothiest coin of all time.

• “I hate successful films that travel on an easy wave of ‘good taste’: for me, that is simply anti-culture.” Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli talks to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas about photographing Dario Argento’s masterwork, Suspiria.

• Mixes of the week: Für die Liebe II, an hour of ambient drift by Matthew Dekay, and Carwyn Ellis Mixtape No. 354 by The Voice Of Cassandre.

• Americans in Europe: Frances Mayes on the enduring mystique of the Venetian lagoon, and David Farley on the trail of Kafka in Prague.

“We’d read that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs had played around with some scientific equipment from Columbia University,” [Jim] Jarmusch recalls. It was “some kind of strobe light that they claimed, by placing eidetic pulses on the outside of your eyelids, could cause states of hallucination and trance. We found out how to check out this machine and experimented with … not fantastic results! In a way though, Luc [Sante] channels ghosts: he’s able to imagine and mentally reconstruct events and places from the past and weave them into stories. He can cross influences like Blaise Cendrars and JG Ballard with James M Cain and Raymond Roussel.”

[…]

If New York celebrates amnesia, perpetual transformation, accelerated obsolescence – and offers newcomers a blank slate, a chance to be born again – then Sante offers a mordantly heretical vision of the city. For him it’s full of layers and depths, of echoes and eerie reverberations, of occult whispers. “The tech crowd thinks that we can’t afford the past to be sitting on our shoulders. It’s a burden, a dead weight. We’ve got to innovate constantly. We have to … disrupt. But the 20th century is littered with valuable stuff – writers, ideas, daily certainties – that gets discarded and that needs to be picked up and looked at again.”

Sukhdev Sandhu profiles writer Luc Sante

• The Edge Question for 2016: What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?

• Bradley L. Garrett’s foreword for Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore and Fact (2015), a book by Antony Clayton.

• Caitlin R. Green on the monstrous landscape of medieval Lincolnshire.

• Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan by Brian Eno.

• Arche (live, 2013) by Master Musicians of Bukkake.

• A Year In The Country returns for another year.

• Kafka (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya | Manhattan (1984) by Seigen Ono | Tunnel (1997) by Biosphere

A History of the Sky, a film by Ken Murphy

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This is a year-long time-lapse study of the sky. A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

I once filled out a three-hour VHS tape with a single shot of drifting clouds using my old video camera. I was thinking at the time of Brian Eno’s studies of the skies over Manhattan but the roofs of South Manchester can’t compete with those of New York City. Ken Murphy’s film is a slowly evolving mosaic that also serves to remind us northerners how quickly the night comes to California.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mistaken Memories Of Mediaeval Manhattan

Master musicians

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This year I’m seeing out December with (among other things) several albums by the Master Musicians of Bukkake, a Seattle group led by producer Randall Dunn. MMOB’s name started as a joke (and no doubt still catches unawares anyone unfamiliar with Japanese pornography) but now positions the ensemble as indigenous performers from an imaginary country, a persona reflected in the masks and robes the musicians wear, and in their music which blends chants, non-Western instruments, synthesizers and extended wah-wah guitar drones that wouldn’t be out-of-place on a German album from the 1970s. The music alone would be enough for me but there’s the added bonus of songs based on Borges texts, Tibetan references (Dunn is a Buddhist) and outfits borrowed from Jodorowsky films. Dunn and some of the other group members have connections with Seattle groups Earth and Sunn O))), and it’s possible to detect trace elements of both those bands in the MMOB sound, especially on live recordings.

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As usual I’ll be taking my winter break over the next few days so I’ll activate the blog archive and leave you with a tremendous 75-minute performance by the Master Musicians of Bukkake at Leoncavallo, Milan, in 2013. The stage is rather cramped for the group’s theatrics, and there’s only the one camera, but the band raise a considerable cone of power performing extended variations on numbers from their recent Far West album. Far West and its follow-up, the synth-oriented Further West Quad Cult, can be listened to on their own or played together in a mix of your own choosing. MMOB aren’t the first band to do this but I don’t know of any album or (albums) that sound so different in isolation. Perfect listening for the darkest weeks of the year.

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Weekend links 289

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Fathomless Sounding (1932) by Gertrude Hermes.

• Over at Greydogtales (“weird fiction, weird art and even weirder lurchers”) I talk about art, design, the writing of this blog, and I also reveal more about my ongoing Axiom project. The latter currently stands at two novels, a couple of half-finished stories and a few pieces of artwork. I may be unveiling some of the art in the new year so watch this space.

• Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie (1983), a definitive film portrait of William Burroughs, is released at last on DVD/Blu-ray. US-only for the moment but further releases elsewhere are promised. The director’s nephew, Aaron Brookner, has a documentary about his uncle released next year.

• “…beautifully articulated bawdiness, perverse pleasures and a radical, though nondidactic, political view.” Melissa Anderson reviews Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies.

The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”

Natalie Wolchover on A Fight for the Soul of Science

• Mixes of the week: A mix by Front & Follow, and The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIV by David Colohan.

• “Psychedelics can’t be tested using conventional clinical trials,” says Nicolas Langlitz.

• At Dangerous Minds: Ralph Steadman illustrates Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

• Why does Moby-Dick (sometimes) have a hyphen? Erin Blakemore investigates.

• My thanks again to Dennis Cooper for including this blog on his year-end list.

• Cian Traynor was given 20 minutes to ask Ennio Morricone some questions.

• Lolita at 60: Ten writers reconsider Nabokov’s novel, page by page.

• At Ballardian: High-Rise: Wheatley vs Cronenberg.

• Poison Ivy: The Queen of Psychobilly Punk

• The Cinema of Hotels: a list

• Solo intimacy DIY

• Moby Dick (1970) by Led Zeppelin | William Burroughs Don’t Play Guitar (1996) by Islamic Diggers | Physical (2001) by Goldfrapp