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Balloons in the Grand Palais

Autochrome by Léon Gimpel.

The Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris is one of the few sites remaining from the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (see yesterday’s post), and is still in use today as a venue for art exhibits, fashion shows and the like. The huge and graceful canopy ceiling makes it a far better venue for art events than the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, London, which suffers from being narrow, lightless and bisected by a concrete walkway.

Nine years after the Exposition the first Paris Air Show was held at the Grand Palais giving us these photos of the place filled with a variety of balloons and a blimp. I’m wondering now whether you could fit an entire Zeppelin inside the nave (probably not), although even if it fit there’d be no way to get it inside without demolishing a wall.

The current Grand Palais site has a section devoted to the history of the building which includes this surprising photo from 1937 showing the Beaux Arts structure covered in a Deco-style disguise.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paris III: Le Grande Répertoire–Machines de Spectacle

Exposition Universelle photochroms

Grand entrance.

Every time I think I’ve said enough on this subject something else turns up. I’ve linked before to the Brooklyn Museum’s tinted photographs of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 but these photochom prints at the Library of Congress are so sharp, detailed and subtly hued they make all other views seem crude in comparison. If you’ve seen earlier views of the exposition buildings then everything here is very familiar, albeit more lifelike than anything you’ll find elsewhere. In addition to the greater veracity, the Library of Congress also makes many of its pictures available as high-quality files. These prints and the few minutes of film footage is the closest you’ll get to this event without a time machine.

Champs de Mars.

Le Chateau d’eau and plaza.

The Palais Lumineux.

Continue reading “Exposition Universelle photochroms”

Golem, 2012

“There are always more golems,” I wrote back in August, and here’s another. The artificial entity this time is a military computer that’s the subject of Golem XIV (1973), a science fiction story by Stanisław Lem that was later expanded into a novel:

The book is written from the perspective of a military AI computer who obtains consciousness and starts to increase his own intelligence, moving towards personal technological singularity. It pauses its own development for a while in order to be able to communicate with humans before ascending too far and losing any ability for intellectual contact with them. During this period, Golem XIV gives several lectures and indeed serves as a mouthpiece for Lem’s own research claims. The lectures focus on mankind’s place in the process of evolution and the possible biological and intellectual future of humanity. (more)

Golem (2012) is a seven-minute film by Patrick Mccue & Tobias Wiesner which uses elaborate and detailed CGI to illustrate Lem’s story. The music is an original piece by Cliff Martinez that in its final moments echoes his score for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002). Watch it here. (Via Coudal.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Golems
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Barta’s Golem

Borobudur panoramas

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda.

Panoramas of Borobudur, the Buddhist monument in Magelang, Central Java, which lay undisturbed and overgrown for centuries until restoration began following the British occupation of the island in the 19th century. The bell-like structures are stupas, many of which contain statues of the Buddha in different symbolic postures. The entire monument is a complex three-dimensional map of the Buddhist cosmology: pilgrims ascend from the lowest level reading the bas-reliefs and visiting each Buddha in turn. Wikipedia has a detailed account of both the history of the monument and its meaning as a piece of religious architecture.

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda.

Photo by Lanang Lintang.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg

I used to have this documentary on tape but it vanished years ago so it’s good to find it again on YouTube. Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg was directed by Laurens C. Postma and broadcast on British television in 1987 as a tie-in with the UK release of Cronenberg’s The Fly. The writer was Chris Rodley who subsequently directed some equally good documentaries of his own including the South Bank Show feature about the making of Naked Lunch (now present as an extra on the Naked Lunch DVD), A Very British Psycho about Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (clips of which can be found in this film), and Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance.

Postma’s film captures Cronenberg when he was starting to gain visibility outside the science fiction and horror genres he’d mostly been working in up to this point. Among the interviewees are Martin Scorsese, an early champion, and Stephen King, whose The Dead Zone Cronenberg adapted in 1983. In the critical corner there’s the late film critic Robin Wood who the producers possibly chose on account of his being the voice of dissent in Piers Handling’s 1983 study of Cronenberg’s films The Shape of Rage. Wood isn’t as tiresomely ideological here as he is in Handling’s book (where you can play a drinking game if you count the times he uses the phrase “bourgeois patriarchal capitalism”) but he still seemed to find something reactionary and “unprogressive” (in a political sense) about Cronenberg’s work. Elsewhere there are clips of the films from Shivers on, and I’d forgotten about the comparisons Rodley and Postma make between Cronenberg’s work and Michael Powell’s still astonishing Peeping Tom.

Long Live the New Flesh is 67 minutes long and unfortunately chopped into chunks on the YouTube copy. Watch it here: