Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren

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Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid.
Screenplay: Maya Deren.
Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid.
Music: Teiji Ito.
18mins, B&W.

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”

Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s. (MoMA.org)

Maya Deren at Ubuweb. Includes free film downloads
Maya Deren at Senses of Cinema

Previously on { feuilleton }
Jodorowsky on DVD
Jordan Belson on DVD
Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
Lapis by James Whitney
La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood
The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

The Budweiser Ganymede

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Budweiser advertising art, 1906.

Hard to believe that the self-styled King of Beers used to advertise itself using a gay episode from Classical mythology but here’s the evidence. Zeus falls in love with the beautiful youth and, in the form of an eagle, bears him away to Mount Olympus. In some depictions this event is called The Rape of Ganymede which suggests there was some other “mounting” taking place as a result; maybe the eagle had drunk one too many beers?

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Budweiser advertising art, 1892.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The gay artists archive

New things for April

Several disparate pieces of news worth mentioning recently, so here they are gathered together.

• Some of my Lovecraft art is to be featured in a lavish limited edition volume from Centipede Press.

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Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft
Centipede Press is now accepting pre-orders.
A unique art book available in a cloth slipcase edition and leather deluxe edition.

• Cloth edition in slipcase—2,000 copies—400 pages, four color, sewn with cloth covers, enclosed in a cloth covered slipcase. Front cover image, black embossing, two ribbon markers, fold-outs, detail views.

• The first 300 orders will receive a numbered copy with a special slipcase and a hardcover folder with an extensive suite of unbound illustrations. $395 postpaid.

• Leather edition in traycase—50 copies—400 pages, four color, sewn with full leather binding, enclosed in a giant size traycase. Front cover image debossed on front, two ribbon markers, fold-outs, detail views, signed by most living contributors. $2,000 postpaid.

This huge tome features over forty artists including JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, John Coulthart, John Holmes, Harry O Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, and dozens of others.

The field has never seen an art book like this—indeed, it is an art anthology unlike anything ever published before. Many of these works have never before seen publication. Many are printed as special multi-page fold-outs, and several have detail views. The book is filled with four color artwork throughout, all of it printed full page on rich black backgrounds. A special thumbnail gallery allows you to overview the entire contents of this 400-page book at a glance, with notations on artist, work title, publication information, size, and location, when known.

HP Lovecraft fans will simply have to have this book. Because of its sheer size and scope, this book will never be reprinted and will sell out very quickly. Twenty years down the road people will be paying huge prices for this book because of its scope and the quality of reproductions. This is the HP Lovecraft fan’s dream come true. Don’t miss it!

Yes, it is indeed expensive but this is a book for serious collectors.

Bryan Talbot‘s new book, Alice in Sunderland, is finally out. Read a review of it here.

Arthur Magazine is being summoned back from Avalon, which is excellent news. To celebrate, Jay Babcock has posted Alan Moore‘s history of pornography in its entirety here.

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left to right: Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger.

One of my favourite photographs of all time shows four directors at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, all dolled up in their wildest afghan-and-ascot, hairy-hippy finery, and all of them on the cusp of what should have been majestic, transformative, transgressive careers in cinema that by and large never came to fruition. It was not to be—if only it had been.

John Patterson tell you why we need Jodorowsky as much as we ever did.

Update: And while we’re at it, Eddie Campbell also has a new book out, The Black Diamond Detective Agency. Great playbill cover design.

Behold the (naked) man

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Two Studies for the Risen Christ by Michelangelo (both 1533).

Following the predictable outrage over Cosimo Cavallaro’s My Sweet Lord, aka the Chocolate Jesus, it’s worth remembering that the depiction of Jesus sans clothing is nothing new. Aside from all the paintings of Jesus as a naked infant, a quick search turns up these two examples by Michelangelo. The drawing on the right is owned by the Head of the Church of England (ie: Queen Elizabeth II) who—so far as we know—seems to have no trouble contemplating a naked Christ. Puritan factions among Christians baulk at nudity of any sort but it was Catholics who seemed to voice the strongest objection to Cavallaro’s work despite Pope John Paul II writing in Love and Responsibility in 1981:

“Nakedness itself is not immodest… Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person, when its aim is to arouse concupiscence, as a result of which the person is put in the position of an object for enjoyment.”

The early Christian church seemed to have a different attitude to nude depictions, many scenes of Jesus’s baptism show a naked Christ. Censorship came in later, as with the painting over of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel and the painting of leaves over Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The fig leaves were added three centuries after the original fresco was painted, probably at the request of Cosimo III de’ Medici in the late 17th century, who saw nudity as disgusting. During restoration in the 1980s the fig leaves were removed along with centuries of grime to restore the fresco to its original condition.

Michelangelo’s work was assaulted again during this period when an unlikely bronze wrap was attached to his statue of Christ in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.

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Christ Carrying the Cross by Michelangelo (1521).

These censorious attitudes are a world away from TV presenter and art critic Sister Wendy Beckett (a Carmelite nun, no less) enthusing in Sister Wendy’s Odyssey about the “wonderfully fluffy” pubic hair in Stanley Spencer’s Self Portrait with Patricia Preece (1937). Not all Christians find nudity a problem but then people who regularly complain about art rarely look at it or even seem to like it. As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
The Poet and the Pope
Angels 1: The Angel of History and sensual metaphysics
Gay for God
Michelangelo revisited