A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
A rather crude 9-minute silent drama directed by Ugo Falena which claims to be based on Oscar Wilde’s play. I’m not sure Wilde would have thanked them for cramming his wordy opus into a few brief scenes of gesticulating performers. The colours are a bonus, however, as this is hand-tinted throughout.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
It’s no doubt up to the viewer to decide what constitutes anaemia in Marcel Duchamp’s 7-minute film. Anémic Cinéma was made the same year as Emak-Bakia with the assistance of Man Ray and Marc Allégret. Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs spin hypnotically alternating with punning epithets in French. The spinning artworks later appeared as Duchamp’s contribution to Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Emak-Bakia
• Un Chien Andalou
• Ballet Mécanique
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair
Posts this week will tend towards the brief since I’m spending all my time finishing Reverbstorm.
I thought I’d already posted something about Emak-Bakia, a 16-minute “cinépoème” by Man Ray from 1926, but it seems not. This is another of those short experimental films that proliferated between the wars, and a particularly inventive one with Man Ray throwing together every camera trick he could manage; he even throws the camera in the air at one point, having earlier driven over it. There’s also bits of animation, many shots of revolving sculptures and the artist’s customary emphasis on attractive women. Watch it at Vimeo or download it from Ubuweb.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Un Chien Andalou
• Ballet Mécanique
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair
What is there to say about Buñuel and Dalí’s timeless film that hasn’t already been said? It’s one of the primary Surrealist documents and something that everyone should see at least once. Cyril Connolly attended the Paris premiere in 1929:
The picture was received with shouts and boos and when a pale young man tried to make a speech, hats and sticks were flung at the screen. In one corner a woman was chanting, “Salopes, salopes, salopes!” and soon the audience began to join in. With the impression of having witnessed some infinitely ancient horror, Saturn swallowing his sons, we made our way out into the cold of February, 1929, that unique and dazzling cold…
Why does this strong impression still persist? Because Un Chien Andalou brought out the grandeur of the conflict inherent in romantic love, the truth that the heart is made to be broken, and after it has mended, to be broken again. For romantic love, the supreme intoxication of which we are capable, is more than an intensifying of life; it is a defiance of it and belongs to those evasions of reality through excessive stimulus which Spinoza called “titivations.” By the law of diminishing returns our desperate century forfeits the chance of being happy and, because it finds happiness insipid, our world is regressing to chaos.
The film comes and goes on YouTube so serious viewers are directed to the BFI DVD/Blu-ray release which comes twinned with Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair
Full metal Jacket poster (1987). Illustration by Philip Castle.
Watching Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket on Blu-ray recently I was wondering again whether anyone has noted the similarity between the film’s poster design and the cover for the UK edition of one of its source books, Michael Herr’s Dispatches. At the risk of repeating some common piece of Kubrick lore, here goes.
Airbrush artist Philip Castle painted the helmet that’s become the perennial image used to promote the film. Kubrick often reused the services of people he trusted, and had earlier employed Castle as poster artist for A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick also oversaw the design of publicity materials for his later films so we can be reasonably sure this idea was one of his.
Dispatches (1979). Illustration by Steven Singer.
Michael Herr’s collection of reports about the Vietnam war was first published in the US in 1977 with a UK edition following a year later. The cover of the US first edition is unremarkable compared to this typically excellent Picador design from 1979 (no designer is credited). That year saw the release of Apocalypse Now for which Herr wrote the narration. Kubrick was eager to turn Herr’s book into a film but neither of them could find a suitable story to provide a structure for Herr’s reportage until the director decided to weld Dispatches to the first two thirds of Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers (1979). Full Metal Jacket mixes episodes and speech/dialogue from both books: Hasford’s sniper attack on a jungle trail gets transplanted to Herr’s description of the fighting in Hue City.
The Short-Timers (1987). No illustration credit.
Hasford’s novel was first published in the UK in this shoddy tie-in version with some generic war painting badly cropped into helmet shape in order to match the film poster. Such a good book really deserved better than this hack design. Much as I like Full Metal Jacket, when you read Herr and Hasford you have to admit that the film only captured a fraction of the horror and madness in the books. Herr’s writing is justly celebrated while Hasford’s novel seems to have been forgotten again. Anyone who likes Kubrick’s film ought to search it out, it’s an indelibly memorable and disturbing read. The sniper scene is far more brutal and chilling than its cinematic equivalent, and is delivered by stark prose like this:
The snipers zero in on us. Each shot becomes a word spoken by death. Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell us a funny secret. We may not like death but death likes us. Victor Charlie is hard but he never lies. Guns tell the truth. Guns never say “I’m only kidding.” War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.
Also worth searching out is Herr’s short memoir, Kubrick, published the year after the director’s death, in which the writer describes his three-year collaboration on Full Metal Jacket‘s screenplay. It’s a generous and insightful piece of writing, worlds away from Frederic Raphael’s condescending and mean-spirited Eyes Wide Open.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kubrick shirts