{film} – Page 279 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 65

From Light Beyond Sound, a new series of works by Tatiana Plakhova.

“The invasion philosophy of the Olympic Park strikes me as just like the invasion philosophy behind going into Iraq,” he says, “or anywhere else that you blast into, put up the fence, establish the Green Zone, explain everything, put it all into this lovely eco-terminology…” Iain Sinclair

• Iain Sinclair has a new book out, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project, a critique of the tendency of British governments to waste money on white elephant projects. He’s visited this territory before in Sorry Meniscus, the small book/essay about the Millennium Dome. That book grew out of a piece for the London Review of Books which can be read here. Among the current round of interviews there’s this piece in which the title of the book is explained, and a talk with John Walsh at The Independent where he describes how the site for the 2012 Olympics has destroyed his patch of London.

• A celebration of the writing and art of Mervyn Peake: “Mervyn Peake, creator of Gormenghast, is now recognised as a brilliant novelist and artist. Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, Hilary Spurling and AL Kennedy celebrate his achievements.”

• Looking like a children’s book invaded by the inhabitants of alchemical engravings, Die Geburtstagsreise (The Birthday Trip, 1976) by Monika Beisner.

• At AnOther mag this week: The ear in Blue Velvet and publisher Peter Owen on Salvador Dalí’s novel Hidden Faces.

• Four Days, Four Recordings by Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle. Related: The Hauntological Society.

• Leaving it to Chance: maverick director Nicolas Roeg on Don’t Look Now.

• Brian Eno: “This is my problem with Tracey Emin; who fucking cares?”

• Scans of Max Ernst’s masterwork Une Semaine de Bonté.

• Susie Bright: Mapping the Erotic and the Revolutionary.

• How to Become a Sensuous Witch, 1971.

• The View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | Weekend live on the OGWT (October, 1982) • Gormenghast Drift (1992) by Irmin Schmidt.

Network 21 TV

What was Network 21? It’s easiest to grab an explanation from the people responsible:

NeTWork 21 was a pirate television station which broadcast a 30mns program on Fridays from midnight throughout April to September 1986 in London. It had never been done before, and has not been done since anywhere in the UK. The broadcasts took place on channel 21 of the UHF band, slightly below ITV, using a low powered transmitter covering 8-10 miles across London. Program content was literally hand made, shot with a Sony Video 8 camera, edited on Low Band U-Matic, and broadcast on VHS. They showed slices of London’s artistic buzzing underground life as well as casual glimpses of everyday life, something which the normal television stations never showed. We would also offer slots to whoever was willing to appear on pirate TV, saying, showing or doing whatever they wanted, with no pre/post-production censorship of any kind. Because of our low tech approach, we could easily film people, situations and events with minimum disruption and maximum interaction. We were also free to choose program content and style according to our own mood, without having to worry about ratings, advertisers or good taste standards. (more)

In 1986 the UK only had four TV channels, and none of them ran through the night so theoretically there was plenty of space available for other broadcasters. In practice any unauthorised activity was always swiftly curtailed. Those of us outside London could only read about these illicit broadcasts but now it’s possible to jump back in time to the gloomy heart of Thatcherite Britain via the Network 21 YouTube channel. All the clips are fairly short and lean heavily towards the (for want of a better term) Industrial culture familiar from the early RE/Search publications, Simon Dwyer’s sorely-missed Rapid Eye, and Cabaret Voltaire’s “television magazine” TV Wipeout: William Burroughs (reading at the London Final Academy event in 1982), Brion Gysin, Psychic TV, Diamanda Galás, Derek Jarman et al. There’s also Roz Kaveney on passion, and Simon Watney with a news item related to the AIDS crisis in the US. The network website has complete listings for each broadcast.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• ICA talks archived
• The Final Academy

Weekend links 64

The Sixteenth of September (1956) by René Magritte.

To Magritte admirers, The Sixteenth of September is a deceptively realistic work painted in 1956, one of a series in which the artist plays tricks with light and time of day. It shows a crescent moon impossibly shining through the dark mass of a tree, against a dawn sky.

To [Marc] Bolan fans, the painting has an entirely different significance: 16 September 1977 was the date the singer was returning home in the small hours from a night out, in a Mini driven by his girlfriend Gloria Jones. […] Fans say the tree in the painting closely resembles the sycamore the car crashed into, and the moon was at the same phase on 16 September 1977. (more)

• New Yorkers finally got a successful vote for gay marriage making New York state the sixth and largest in the US giving full marriage rights to its gay citizens. One of America’s conservative journals, National Review, made the striking point that forty years ago New York was in the vanguard of gay liberation while Spain under Franco was a dictatorship with no gay rights at all. No one then would have bet on Spain beating New York to gay marriage rights as it did in 2005. Allow me to note that we still only have civil unions here in the UK.

• Related: Queer Beacon: LGBT spaces in New York City by Kian Goh, and at Scientific American: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors by Jeremy Yoder.

• A pair of intrepid photographers breach the midnight security at St Paul’s Cathedral to bring back photos of the building rooftop. Related (and looking like a good location for a British equivalent of Stalker), photos of the disused Thorpe Marsh Power Station, Yorkshire.

• Mixtape of the month: the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror collection by Portishead, a great blend of rock, rap and electronic odds-and-ends. Also a dash of Alan Moore & Stephen O’Malley.

• Eddie Campbell is blogging again. Welcome back to the madhouse, Eddie. His smart and witty daughter, Hayley Campbell, continues to file regular bulletins from her London bunker.

• Your Tumblrs this week: Fuck Yeah Ken Russell and Fuck Yeah Powell & Pressburger.

• Robot Flâneur: Exploring Google Street View.

• Paris Visages by Marco Gervasio.

• “Push the button, Max!”

• Written On The Forehead (2011) by PJ Harvey.

Max Reinhardt’s Dream

In which the great German theatre director goes to Hollywood to show America how to stage Shakespeare. Nearly everyone who was anyone in pre-war German cinema passed through Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin so it seemed natural that he’d gravitate eventually to film himself. The 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was directed by William Dieterle but it’s very much a Reinhardt production, especially in the fantastic opening of Act II where the fairies dance into the moonlit sky on paths of mist accompanied by Mendelssohn’s music. With its blend of music, dance and lavish production design Dieterle’s film gives us some idea of the harmonising artistry at work in Reinhardt’s stage productions.

There are other reasons to recommend this version over later adaptations, not least James Cagney’s performance as Bottom. A fifteen-year-old Mickey Rooney played Puck although he’s frequently more annoying than mischevious. Then there’s the mystery of whether that’s the young Kenneth Anger uncredited in the role of The Changeling Prince. Anger has always claimed it was him (he was a child actor for a while), Anger biographer Bill Landis agrees but plenty of other people have disputed the claim in recent years. The best viewing I had of the sequence in which the Changeling appears was on a big screen in a season of Kenneth Anger’s films in 1990. Whether Anger played the part or not, the charm of Dieterle’s film subtly invests The Magick Lantern Cycle, from the glittering surfaces in Eaux D’Artifice and the artificial forest in Rabbit’s Moon, to the appearance of Mickey Rooney’s Puck on a TV screen in Scorpio Rising. Anger’s later works were productions of Puck Films, their motto “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Ideally the magical opening of Act II would be on YouTube but it seems not. This scene, however, gives an idea of the atmosphere, while Doctor Macro has stills and more information.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Midsummer Chronophage
• Another Midsummer Night
• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

Weekend links 63

Polish poster by Andrzej Bertrandt for Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film of Solaris.

• Stanisław Lem’s Solaris receives its first ever direct English translation by Bill Johnston (only on Audible for the moment), all previous editions having been sourced from a poor French translation. An all-too-common state of affairs for non-English fiction where bad or bowdlerised translations persist for years.

• Now that Minnesota politician Michelle Bachmann is running for US president it’s a good time to examine her views when (theoretically) her actions could one day impact on us all. The Daily Beast gathered together some of her worst pronouncements, including the following about gay people: “It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan, I think, to say that this is gay.” Her husband describes his attempts to counsel (ie: cure) gay teenagers with the words “Barbarians need to be educated.” It’s no surprise that both these people find confirmation of their views in the usual narrow interpretation of Christian doctrine. Not all American Christians are this ignorant or offensive, of course. The Heartland Proclamation calls for “an end to all religious and civil discrimination against any person based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression”.

Journalist Andrew Sullivan in 2003 proposed a label for people like Bachmann: “I have a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam.” It’s a term that ought to have more widespread use.

Czech poster for Solaris. No designer credited.

• Probing the secrets of psilocybin: “Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have zeroed in on the dose levels of the ‘sacred mushroom’ chemical capable of yielding positive, life-changing experiences, while minimizing the chance of transient negative reactions in screened volunteers under supportive, carefully monitored conditions.”

• Rick Poynor relates a visit to the Frederic Marès Museum, Barcelona, home to the 50,000 objects Marès collected over his lifetime. Further details of the collection can be found at the museum website.

In her 1969 essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” [Susan] Sontag insisted that Story of O could be correctly defined as “authentic” literature. She compared the ratio of first-rate pornography to trashy books within the genre to “another somewhat shady subgenre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.” She also maintained that like science fiction, pornography was aimed at “disorientation, at psychic dislocation.”

If so, that aim is far more interesting than what most generic “mainstream” novels set out to do. No one could describe O as predictable or sentimental. Its vision was dark and unrelenting; everything about it was extreme. Sontag also compared sexual obsession (as expressed by Réage) with religious obsession: two sides of the same coin.

Carmela Ciuraru on the story of The Story of O by Pauline Réage.

• “No hay banda! There is no band. It is all an illusion.” David Lynch will be opening a Club Silencio in Paris (Montmartre, of course). Facebook pages here and here.

• Sad to say that Chateau Thombeau is now closed but Thom has begun a more personal journal here.

• Picture galleries of the Vorticists at the Tate here and here. Related: Into the Vortex.

• Illuminated Persian pages from 1604 at BibliOdyssey.

• Tape drawings by Chris Hosmer.

• Miles Davis and co. at the Isle of Wight Festival, 1970: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4