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Three short films by Piotr Kamler

The DVD of Piotr Kamler’s animations released by aaa a few years ago contained almost all of the director’s works, comprising a handful of short films together with the 50-minute Chronopolis. The most recent film in the collection was Une mission éphémère, made in 1993, but this wasn’t the last of Kamler’s films. He was still active in the 2000s, and exploring new animation methods using computer graphics. Four shorts resulted from this period: Telemann (2006), Continu-discontinu 2010 (a reworking of one of his earliest films), Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer (2013), and Perpetuum Mobile (2015). Continu-discontinu 2010 turned up on Vimeo a few years ago, and still seems to be there although you now have to be logged in to see it. The other three films were uploaded recently to the Internet Archive, and together form a distinct quartet in the Kamler filmography.

Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer.

All four films are exercises in abstract animation, where shapes and colours evolve and change in time to a musical accompaniment. This is a very old cinematic form yet one that still seems fresh because of its scarcity. Telemann, which harks back to the “visual music” of Oskar Fischinger, pairs a dancing group of vertical lines with a piece by Baroque composer Georg Telemann. The animation isn’t as strictly choreographed as Fischinger’s films or Lejf Marcussen’s Tone Traces but it functions well enough as another abstract rendering of musical transcription. The other two films are closer to Kamler’s earlier shorts in the restless motion of their separate elements, with music by Beatriz Ferreyra and Polish group Kwadrofonik.

Perpetuum Mobile.

I thought for a while that the Kamler DVD was out of print but the aaa website still has a page with an active purchase link. A high-definition collection of all of Kamler’s films would be the ideal but for now the DVD is the best you can get.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Continu-discontinu 2010, a film by Piotr Kamler
• L’Araignéléphant
• Le labyrinthe and Coeur de secours
• Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler

Kay Nielsen’s Arabian Nights

Prologue.

Last week a Kay Nielsen illustration passed through my RSS feed, a picture I thought for a moment I hadn’t seen before. A quick search revealed that the illustration is in fact present in a book on my shelves, The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977), one of the series of art books co-published by Pan and Ballantine in the 1970s. A selection of Nielsen’s illustrations had appeared in the series two years earlier in a book simply titled Kay Nielsen; the arrival of a follow-up made the Dane the only featured artist aside from Frank Frazetta to be the subject of multiple volumes.

Prologue.

Nielsen’s illustrations in the second book were labelled “unknown” because they hadn’t been printed before, despite being commissioned for a new Danish translation of The Thousand and One Nights by Arthur Christensen. Hildegarde Flanner, a friend of the Nielsens when they were living in Los Angeles in the 1940s, writes in an introductory “elegy” that Nielsen worked on the illustrations from 1918 to 1922, but publication of the book was abandoned as a result of the economic climate in post-war Denmark. There were further difficulties later on. When Nielsen died in 1957 the illustrations still hadn’t been published. Nielsen’s widow, Ulla, passed them on to Hildegarde Flanner and Frederick Monhoff who subsequently tried to place them with museums in the USA and Denmark. None of the institutions they contacted were interested, an unthinkable situation today.

Prologue.

There’s more of an adult tone to Nielsen’s Arabian Nights than there is in his earlier works, a quality which suits the material but which may explain why they had to wait until the 1970s to see print. Simplified versions of the tales of Aladdin and Sin(d)bad have seen The Thousand and One Nights continually miscast as children’s fiction when the original stories were intended for adults; Scheherazade invents a new story each night to save herself from execution in the morning. Nielsen’s illustrations bring the stories closer to their origin while also maintaining the influence of Persian art on the style of his drawings.

The Tale of the Little Hunchback.

The copies you see here show the colour plates alone but Nielsen also created a number of monochrome vignettes and other pieces to be used as decoration elsewhere in the book. The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen doesn’t reprint the stories so has to pad out its pages by combining details from the colour plates with the ink borders. More recently the illustrations were reprinted in one of Taschen’s expensive editions which is closer to Nielsen’s original plan for the book.

The Tailor’s Tale of the Lame Young Man.

Continue reading “Kay Nielsen’s Arabian Nights”

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

Clearlight: Symphonies

The Clearlight that concerns us here is a French musical ensemble with a shifting line-up, formed by and oriented around the activities of its keyboard-playing composer Cyrille Verdeaux. Clearlight, in other words, shouldn’t be confused with the short-lived American psychedelic band known as Clear Light. Cherry Red have just released five Clearlight albums in one of their well-produced CD boxes: Clear Light Symphony (1975), Forever Blowing Bubbles (1975), Les Contes Du Singe Fou (1977), Visions (1978), and Impressionist Symphony (2014). The box bears the subtitle “The Collected Recordings” but these albums comprise only one half of the Clearlight discography. I doubt there’s much demand for anything more substantial than this, at least in Britain where the group have been chiefly known for their first album, Clear Light Symphony. Cyrille Verdeaux’s booklet notes describe how he secured a deal with Virgin Records thanks to the success of Mike Oldfield’s early albums. Verdeaux’s demo tape was aiming for a similar blend of rock music with classical structures, with one long “symphony” divided into two parts. When the album was being recorded Virgin persuaded him to flesh out his composition with three musicians who were signed to the label via Gong—Steve Hillage, Tim Blake and Didier Malherbe—all of whom play on the second part. Or what should have been the second part… Virgin switched the two playing sides of the recording around in order to give the Gong artists greater prominence. The switch has been reversed for this latest release.

Cover art by Jean-Claude Michel.

I’ve not heard everything in Cyrille Verdeaux’s discography but the Clearlight albums that follow the debut are further excursions into quasi-classical prog-rock composition. There was a lot of this around in the 1970s, especially from keyboard players like Rick Wakeman, Vangelis, Bo Hansson and others. Verdeaux isn’t as much of a Liberace show-off as Wakeman, and he’s not as original as Vangelis, but in Clearlight his piano and keyboard flourishes benefit from the other musicians assembled on each release. Tim Blake had settled in France in the late 1970s, and turns up on several of the albums that follow Clear Light Symphony. The presence of Blake’s burbling synthesizers and Christian Boulé’s Hillage-like guitar lead the music out of the concert hall and into the cosmos. I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by this collection of albums. I bought the set mainly to restore Clear Light Symphony to my record collection, an album I used to own on vinyl then sold following a shelf purge in the early 2000s. (One thing you’ll never get on a CD reissue is the locked groove that ends side two of the vinyl release.) My worries about the other albums being severely unpalatable haven’t been realised.

Cover art by Jean-Claude Michel.

Forever Blowing Bubbles was another Virgin release, this time with shorter pieces separated by electronic bubbling noises that posit each composition as one of a number of musical “bubbles” that we’re visiting in turn. A couple of these are songs which I was less keen on but the music is just as good as on the debut album. This is also the first album in the box featuring bonus tracks, a common feature of album reissues which often prove to be superfluous. Not so here, where the additions sound like a continuation of the album as a whole. King Crimson enthusiasts may like to know that David Cross plays violin on this album.

Cover art by Jean Solé.

Les Contes Du Singe Fou continues the formula, with more short compositions and a couple more songs, one of which is so close to the beginning of Supper’s Ready by Genesis as to be almost plagiaristic. In place of David Cross on violin there’s a recent exile from Magma, Didier Lockwood, whose fiery contributions are especially welcome. I didn’t expect there to be a tangible link with the Zeuhl artists when Verdeaux’s compositions are generally more palatable than Magma and co. Christian Boulé was touring in Steve Hillage’s band in 1977 so Yves Chouard takes over on the guitar. I ought to note that this album and the one that follow have been mastered from vinyl sources.

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