Cosmic Zoom

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Cosmic Zoom (1968) is a short, semi-animated film by Eva Szasz, one of the many great shorts financed by the National Film Board of Canada. When I wrote about this in 2006 there was only a low-res version available for viewing on the NFB site while Powers of Ten (1977), a very similar film by Charles and Ray Eames, could be seen on YouTube. Three years on and Powers of Ten has disappeared behind a registration wall but Cosmic Zoom can now be seen in higher quality on the newly relaunched NFB site. A shame about the annoyingly obtrusive onscreen logo but it’s worth browsing the site for more of their excellent animations, not least the work of Norman McLaren. The time when these shorts would regularly turn up on UK TV are long gone so it’s good to know that they’re now available for viewing any time we wish.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Norman McLaren
• Cosmic Zooms

Ma Petite Ville

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A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying Lorrain was “truly, at the fin de siècle, Sodom’s ambassador to Paris”. Jullian, as I never tire of repeating, wrote the best book on the Symbolist period, Dreamers of Decadence (1971), and that quote reminds me that I ought to track down a copy of his Lorrain biography.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Macho men

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An ad campaign which can’t possibly be ignored given the present train of obsessions. Andrés Ramírez photographs a collection of tight packages for underwear manufacturer, Macho. I’m not sure what a group of Roman gladiators would be doing sparring in what appears to be a Bollywood boudoir like the one in Moulin Rouge! but, ya know…underwear and swords… Consistency is the hobgoblin of fevered imaginations.

Via Queerty.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

The art of Maxwell Armfield, 1881–1972

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De Profundis.

I’ve known Maxwell Armfield’s work in the past mainly for the appearance of his paintings in books of late Victorian or even Pre-Raphaelite art. His depiction of Faustine (1904), which illustrates a Swinburne poem, is probably the most popular of these, with a subject resembling Rossetti’s portraits of Jane Morris. So it’s a surprise to find his illustration work using a very different, more open style based on Ancient Greek art and (possibly) Classical enthusiasts such as John Flaxman. Among the online examples, the redoubtable Internet Archive has a few book downloads available including a volume of Armfield’s rather tepid poetry, The Hanging Garden, and other verse (1914), which nonetheless includes the fine illustrations shown here. In addition there’s a curious fable by Vernon Lee, The Ballet of the Nations; a Present-day Morality (1915) in which Death stages a ballet (aka another war) to decimate humanity, and a short book Rhythmic Shape; A Text-book of Design (1920), Armfield’s guide to art and design theory.

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“Out of the East he came.”

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive