{film} – Page 240 – { feuilleton }

Caresses by Fernand Khnopff

Details from Caresses aka The Caress (1896), the most famous painting by Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff which can now be explored in detail at the Google Art Project. Caresses was one of Khnopff’s more enigmatic works although the term is a relative one when it comes to an oeuvre in which enigma is the default position. The combination of a young male, a feline female and the trappings of antiquity suggests Oedipus and the Sphinx although the Sphinx of mythology is a far more threatening presence. Adding to the enigma is the fact that Khnopff’s sister, Marguerite, was his model in most of his paintings which means we can recognise her heavily-jawed features in the male figure as well as the female. The essence of Symbolism for me has always been an atmosphere of unresolved pictorial mystery, a quality which this painting exemplifies.

Malcolm McDowell and Ruth Brigitte Tocki in a deleted scene from Cat People (1982).

The mystery would have been carried over to the cinematic world in 1982 if the producers of Cat People had kept their nerve. The “Leopard Tree” dream sequence was to have featured a moment when Irena (Nastassia Kinski) meets her dead brother and mother in a pose which recapitulates Khnopff’s painting. The painting itself also appeared earlier in the film although it’s so long since I watched it I forget now whether that moment was also excised. The dream sequence may have been stretching audience credulity too far but the symbolism is fitting not least for the incestuous nature of the story. Here’s the scene in the final cut set to Giorgio Moroder’s fantastic score.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer.

The painting definitely did appear on-screen in 1993 where it overshadows a crucial conversation in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence. Given that the setting is New York in the 1870s the usage is slightly anachronistic but once again the symbolism works for a scene which concerns unacceptable and unrequited passions.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Symbolist cinema
• Bruges-la-Morte

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

Yesterday’s film was no doubt approved by Ry Cooder in part because of this early Les Blank documentary, a 30-minute portrait of blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins and his friends and neighbours in Centerville, Texas. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins is dated 1968, and captures a group of aging blues musicians and a community for whom blues music was still part of the texture of everyday life. Earlier films about blues artists tended to be a lot more formal, usually based around a performance staged specially for the cameras. Blank’s snapshot has a looseness that suits its subject and is all the better for it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have A Ball

Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have A Ball

Someone told me once they didn’t like Ry Cooder, a sentiment I’d place in the same category as saying you don’t like, say, chocolate: as an attitude it’s within the bounds of possibility but it requires a considerable effort of sympathetic imagination to appreciate. Let’s Have A Ball is a 90-minute Ry Cooder concert film by the great documentary filmmaker Les Blank, better known for Burden of Dreams (1982), his chronicle of the trials of Werner Herzog and company during the making of Fitzcarraldo. Burden of Dreams is that rare thing among “making of” films, a documentary that’s as fascinating as the film whose production it depicts.

Let’s Have A Ball catches Ry Cooder and his band playing at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, on March 25th, 1987 during their Get Rhythm tour. I’d seen this when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1988 but don’t have it on tape so thanks go to the Metafilter people for drawing attention to the entire concert at YouTube. The film was screened in Europe and elsewhere but not in the US, and for now remains unavailable in any official capacity for unspecified reasons; Les Blank’s site says Cooder doesn’t want it released. This is surprising since it’s a fantastic concert film, the sound quality and performances are easily as good as anything on his live albums. In addition to great renditions of Cooder’s back catalogue you get to see several of his regular collaborators in action, not least Van Dyke Parks playing some typically idiosyncratic piano. The high spot is a 16-minute version of Down In Hollywood where everyone, singers included, gets to show off their solo prowess.

The band:
Ry Cooder: guitar, vocals
Jim Keltner: drums
Van Dyke Parks: keyboards
Jorge Calderon: bass
Flaco Jiménez: accordion
Miguel Cruiz: percussion
Steve Douglas: sax
George Bohannon: trombone
Singers: Bobby King, tenor; Terry Evans, baritone; Arnold McCuller, tenor; Willie Green Jr, bass

The songs:
Let’s Have A Ball
Jesus On The Mainline
How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?
Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb
Down In Mississippi
Maria Elena
Just A Little Bit
The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor)
Crazy About An Automobile
Chain Gang
Down In Hollywood
Good Night Irene

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My Name Is Buddy by Ry Cooder

Weekend links 138

Heartsick (2011) by Kelly Durette.

• Now that Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch album is out and causing the usual consternation, the spotlight-shy singer/composer has been doing a surprising amount of promotional interviews. Simon Hattenstone talked to him for the Guardian at the end of last month; this week it was John Doran’s turn at The Quietus. One quote from the latter piece stood out in the light of this week’s posts: “…the music we’re making is meant to be an aural version of the HR Giger drawings for Alien. It always sounds to me like those look.”

• Satanica is a limited-edition publication curated by Gio Black Peter & Christopher Stoddard “for anyone who rejects societal norms, for those dedicated to a life of pleasure, excess and self-reflection”.

• Sci-Fi-O-Rama has put five years’ worth of blog pictures onto Pinterest. I don’t really need to do that, there’s already a diverse crowd of Pinterest users compiling their own selection of things posted here.

As Susan Sontag once observed, pornography is practical. It was designed as a marital aid, and its vocabulary should follow natural biological rhythms and stick with hot-button words in order to produce a predictable climax. It is not about sex but is sex. Whereas the great sex writers (Harold Brodkey, DH Lawrence, Robert Gluck, David Plante, the Australian Frank Moorhouse) have a quirky, phenomenological, realistic approach to sex. They are doing what the Russian formalists said was the secret of all good fiction – making the familiar strange, writing from the Martian’s point of view.

Edmund White on writing about sex in fiction

• When pirate DVDs of films by Cocteau, Bresson and Pasolini are on sale in a Mexican market, life in the 21st century increasingly resembles a William Gibson novel. Joanne McNeil investigates.

• Copies of City Fun, Manchester’s premier music fanzine/alt culture mag (founded 1978), can now be read online at the Manchester District Music Archive.

• Linked everywhere during the past few days, the astonishing map of bomb hits on London during the Blitz (October 1940 to June 1941).

• At 50 Watts: 30 Vintage Magazine Covers from Japan and Alfred Kubin’s illustrations for Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel (1913) by Paul Scheerbart.

• Earlier this year for Frieze Magazine Geeta Dayal talked to musical collaborators of the great German producer Conny Plank.

• Invisible Ink by Christopher Fowler, “the extraordinary stories of over one hundred forgotten authors”.

• Cynthia Carr talks about Fire in the Belly, her biography of American artist David Wojnarowicz.

• “Blasphemy, Filth, And Nonsense” More Aleister Crowley ephemera at Front Free Endpaper.

• At Strange Flowers: Surrealist art by Jindrich Heisler (1914–1953).

• Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Alfred Hitchcock in 1964.

• Scott Walker’s four tracks from the Nite Flights album (1978): Shutout | Fat Mama Kick | Nite Flights | The Electrician.

Twentieth Century Meets the Fifteenth

Something spotted whilst browsing issues of Photoplay magazine at the Internet Archive, a photo showing the US dirigible ZR1 drifting over the Cosmopolitan Studios in 1923 during the filming of Yolanda. I don’t doubt that the ZR1 really did fly over Hollywood although it looks here to be at an odd perspective (it’s also being completely ignored by the crowd of extras). This makes me think the magazine may have comped two separate photos for convenience, as famously occurred with the cover photo of Pink Floyd’s Animals album.

Searching around for details about the ZR1 turned up this 1931 poster by Georgii Kibardin exhorting Soviet citizens to build a fleet of airships in Lenin’s name. The Hindenberg disaster six years later put an end to this kind of enthusiasm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelinology
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls