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Weekend links 790

Set design by Vladimir Pleshakov for the Ballets Russes’ The Firebird (1923).

• The latest book from Swan River Press is A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, a collection of fictions by the late B. Catling. Copies include postcards with accompanying texts by Alan Moore and Catling’s friend and regular collaborator, Iain Sinclair.

• New music: The Loneliness Of The Hollow Earth Explorer Vol. 1 by Arrowounds; The Eraserhead: Music Inspired By The Film Of David Lynch by Various Artists.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Purple Cloud by MP Shiel.

• A catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Colossal: Laser-cut steel forms radiate ornate patterns in Anila Quayyum Agha’s immersive installations.

• Photographs by Man Ray and Max Dupain showing at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 134 by Artefakt.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Anna Karina’s Day.

• Three Imposters

• Purple Haze (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Pilots Of Purple Twilight (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Purple Rain (live, 1985) by Prince & The Revolution

Vincenzo Mazzi’s caprices

More Italian theatrical design. A few years ago I put together a collection of production sketches and paintings for scenes set inside vast prisons, a popular setting in opera and theatre during the Baroque and Romantic periods. Piranesi’s etching series, Carceri d’Invenzione, is the ultimate expression of the form, where the prints exist to show architectural invention and nothing more, but Piranesi wasn’t the first or last artist to concern himself with views like these.

Caprici di Scene Teatrali (1776) is a collection of fifteen printed plates by Vincenzo Mazzi showing suggestions for theatrical settings, several of which are prison settings. All of the scenes are distinctly Piranesian, especially the title plate which has the name of the artist and his series carved on stones inside the artwork. The prints seem to be the bulk of Mazzi’s surviving designs although a few additional examples turn up when you search around. There’s also at least one Mazzi portrait of an actor which suggests that most of the artist’s output confined itself to the theatre.

Continue reading “Vincenzo Mazzi’s caprices”

Stanisław Lem, 1996

The Polish writer has been in my thoughts for the past week, now that I’ve finally got round to reading Solaris while also having watched The Congress, Ari Folman’s adaptation of Lem’s The Futurological Congress. Reading Solaris was an interesting experience when the story is so familiar from the Tarkovsky adaptation, which I’ve watched numerous times, and the Soderbergh adaptation, which has risen in my estimation in recent years. The novel was fascinating for all the detail about the mysterious planet which the films omit, while also being somewhat old-fashioned considering it was published in 1961. Lem was apparently dismissive of Anglophone science fiction but by the 1950s the treatment of futuristic technology by British and American writers was increasingly sophisticated, even if the psychology and characterisation in their stories still lagged behind literature in general. Lem’s future timeline is like something out of the 1940s, where humanity can travel to distant star systems yet the spacecraft are the cigar-shaped rockets familiar from the covers of pulp magazines. In the station orbiting Solaris the trio of scientists have endless scientific discussions, the video screens are small and monochrome, and there’s even a mention of something being powered by valves.

Solaris may be Lem’s most popular novel but it doesn’t warrant much discussion in this Polish TV documentary after Lem has mentioned his exasperated arguments with Andrei Tarkovsky when the film was being planned. Tomasz Kaminski’s profile runs through Lem’s life mostly via its subject’s reminiscences, although there is occasional comment from Lem’s friends and colleagues in the Polish literary world. The film doesn’t offer a great deal of context either but it does provide a portrait of a prickly character who I’ve never seen speaking at length before. I found it useful to rewatch the Quay Brothers’ biographical film after this one, a shorter piece which fills in a few gaps in Lem’s history while also showing the degree to which his early life was dictated by the upheavals of the Nazi occupation and the Communist era.

There are currently two versions of Kaminski’s film at YouTube, only one of which has English subtitles, and very crude ones at that. Better subtitles may be found at Opensubs but to use those you’ll have to download the video first. 4k Video Downloader Plus is my tool of choice.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Brothers Quay
• Maska: Stanisław Lem and the Brothers Quay
• Ikarie XB 1
• Golem, 2012

Weekend links 789

Niemand (1990) by Micha Ullman.

• The Diary of a Nobody (1964) by Ken Russell, John McGrath, Weedon Grossmith & George Grossmith. A recent posting at Play For Forever, an archive of hard-to-find/unreissued British TV drama.

• New music: Paul St. Hilaire With The Producers by Paul St. Hilaire; Atoms In The Void by Ivan the Tolerable & Hawksmoor; The Cosmic Tones Research Trio by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio.

• At Public Domain Review: Julie Park explores the history of the camera obscura.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Philosophy of Jazz by Daniel Martin Feige.

• At Unquiet Things: Jana Heidersdorf’s fairy tale subversions.

• At Colossal: Five decades of land art by Andy Goldsworthy.

• The Strange World of…Marissa Nadler.

• RIP Robert Wilson.

• Nobody (1968) by Larry Williams & Johnny Watson with Kaleidoscope | “There Is Nobody” (1976) by Brian Eno | Nobody (1978) by Ry Cooder

Tuning Instruments, a film by Jerzy Kucia

Back in February I posted a link to Jerzy Kucia’s first animated short, The Return. Since then I’ve been watching more Kucia films on Essential Polish Animation, a newly-released two-disc set that presents restored versions of 27 short films in high-definition. Tuning Instruments (2000) is a later addition to the Kucia oeuvre that isn’t on the Radiance collection. It’s also quite different to all the other films I’ve seen by this director, Kucia being one of those animators who tended to vary his stylistic and technical approaches from one film to the next.

The film does at least share a mood with some of Kucia’s later animations, a dream-like quality where the play of successive images is more important than any kind of structured narrative. Animation is an ideal medium for representing the shifting terrain of dreams yet the opportunity to do so remains under-explored. Quotes from Kucia in a biographical article at Culture.pl suggest that, for this director at least, the subjectivity of memory is more of a concern than the elusiveness of dreams. Tuning Instruments begins with a man doing exercises in a room. This sequence is followed by a motorcycle journey presented as a scrolling view of traffic and windows, after which the initial protagonist is forgotten in favour of a continually changing parallax landscape that leads us to a crow-filled wood in a misty countryside. I’ve no idea how Kucia and his assistants achieved many of their effects. The Culture.pl article says he mostly used drawings on paper yet the images are often overlaid or multiplied in a way that disguises their origin. Best to immerse yourself in the flow of imagery than wonder how it was achieved or what it all means

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return, a film by Jercy Kucia