David Wheatley – { feuilleton }

It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction!

There’s a worthwhile documentary struggling to be born in this film which is compromised by its hyperbolic title and a running time of 48 minutes, not nearly enough to contain a history of science fiction, past and present. I’m not a media historian so I can’t say whether this was the first serious examination of written science fiction made for British TV but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t have been many that preceded it. It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction! was broadcast in 1973 as part of the BBC’s Omnibus art strand; Harley Cokeliss (credited here as “Cokliss”) was the director, and also the co-writer with Michael Abrams. Two years prior to this Cokeliss had made a shorter BBC film, Crash!, which explored JG Ballard’s ongoing preoccupation with automobile accidents via the rehearsals for Crash in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard turns up again here, theorising energetically about his usual concerns (mass advertising, the media landscape, etc) from a balcony overlooking Heathrow airport.

Cokeliss opens proceedings with the inevitable collage of clips from Flash Gordon and Hollywood films of the 1950s, most of which are appalling quality. If nothing else, this is a good reminder of how terrible feature films used to look when shown on TV. More interesting for today’s viewer is the record of a handful of writers who were seldom personally visible in the mass media even while their stories were being adapted by film and television. Ballard and Brian Aldiss are the representative Brits, all the other writers are Americans: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl and Kurt Vonnegut. Also interviewed is Fritz Lang, who repeats his anecdote about Metropolis being inspired by his visit to New York in the 1920s, and Forrest J. Ackerman is filmed inside his memorabilia-filled house. The absence of women interviewees is unfortunately typical of the time. Kate Wilhelm appears on camera with husband Damon Knight but it’s Knight that does all the talking.

All of the interviews are far too brief for such a wide-ranging subject but it’s still fascinating to see Harlan Ellison at his peak, talking (and typing) at speed. It’s also surprising to find JG Ballard and Frederik Pohl in near agreement when they both describe science fiction as being a reflection of the present as much as it is it is a look into the near or distant future, “a mythology of the Space Age” as Ballard liked to describe it. Science fiction is often both these things simultaneously, predictive and reflective, something its critics don’t always seem to appreciate.

Documentaries also reflect the times in which they’re made, and this is another arts documentary that plunders the prog-rock shelves for its soundtrack music, placing a few bars of Close To The Edge by Yes over shots of New York’s teeming crowds. Harley Cokeliss really should have been given a series instead of a single film in which he flies all over America to capture nothing more than a few brief soundbites. But in 1973 the genre was lucky to get this much attention from one of the BBC’s serious arts outlets. Managerial attitudes did change later in the decade, probably as a result of the resurgence in popularity of SF cinema. In 1979 the BBC made a five-part series about science fiction, Time Out of Mind, where four of the programmes were profiles of single writers—Arthur C. Clarke, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock, and Anne McCaffrey—with other writers appearing in each film. A fifth episode concerned the SF convention that took place in Brighton that year. Ray Bradbury was given the full Omnibus treatment a year later in The Illustrated Man, a typically fine David Wheatley profile, while Philip K. Dick received a posthumous appraisal from Arena in 1994.

Here in 2026 we find ourselves in the future being grasped at in the 1970s where television has now abandoned expensive author profiles unless the author in question is massively popular or the winner of a Nobel prize. With everyone owning a pocket-sized recording device anyone can now make their own television, and so YouTube fills up with hours of amateurish video of people talking into laptops and webcams with poor visuals and dreadful sound. A good documentary is always more than a stream of raw footage; contextualisation and editorial point-of-view are essential, as well as whatever artistry the director might bring to the material. The frame is important, in other words, however compromised that frame may be.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Future Life magazine
• Science Fiction Monthly

Magritte: The False Mirror

Another short film about René Magritte’s paintings, The False Mirror was made three years after the artist’s death in 1970, a time when his work had started to receive widespread international attention. Prior to the 1960s Magritte wasn’t exactly unknown but it wasn’t until the arrival of Pop Art that his paintings began to be reappraised. The production credits for The False Mirror are surprising for such a short piece, the film being directed by art critic David Sylvester (whose book of interviews with Francis Bacon is essential), and photographed by Bruce Beresford, later to become a well-regarded film director. Among the voices reading from the artist’s statements is ELT Mesens, another Belgian artist and friend of Magritte’s whose presence in the later incarnation of the British Surrealist Group gave that small society some authentic gravitas. (George Melly talks about Mesens and the British Surrealists in this film.) The commentary runs over familiar ground: descriptions of the artist’s childhood encounter with a painter in a cemetery (also referred to in Magritte, ou la lecon de chose), and the details of his mother’s suicide (dramatised in David Wheatley’s film). I’d been wondering recently what Magritte might have made of the increasingly excessive prices being paid for his artworks. One of the comments here provides a possible answer when he says he’d be happy if people destroyed his paintings.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Magritte, ou la lecon de chose
• René Magritte album covers
• Monsieur René Magritte, a film by Adrian Maben
• George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley

René Magritte album covers

Beck-Ola (1969) by The Jeff Beck Group. Painting: The Listening Room (second version, 1958).

An inevitable post considering the shape of the week, and also a continuation of an occasional series about paintings used as album cover art. Given Magritte’s continuing popularity I’m sure these can’t be the only examples, especially when his work had such an effect on the cover designs of the 1970s. In addition to the Magritte-like covers created by Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd and others you can find the artist’s influence in the cover by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse for The Grand Illusion (1977) by Styx, a hugely successful album whose painting is derived from Magritte’s The Blank Cheque (1965). There are many more examples.

Magritte died in 1967 so he missed out on this explosion of interest which also spread into the advertising world. When it comes to influence, Magritte has probably had more of an effect on the general culture than any of the other Surrealists, Dalí included.

See (1969) by The Rascals. Painting: The Big Family (1963).

Pipedream (1973) by Alan Hull. Painting: Philosopher’s Lamp (1936).

Vienne La Pluie (1975) by Daniel Balavoine. Painting: Hegel’s Holiday (1958).

Continue reading “René Magritte album covers”

Monsieur René Magritte, a film by Adrian Maben

Until the end of his life, [Magritte] preferred to take the tram.

Now there’s an attitude I approve of. George Melly in his BBC film about Surrealism mentions visiting Magritte at his home in Brussels, and we see Magritte’s house at the beginning of Adrian Maben’s 50-minute film about the artist’s life and work. Maben’s film was made in 1978 as an Franco-German TV production but the narration, by Maben himself, is in English. Surrealism seemed to be back in vogue in 1978: as mentioned yesterday, the Hayward Gallery in London staged an exhibition of Surrealist art that year, the BBC commissioned George Melly’s film as a result of this, while over on rival network ITV there was the marvellous documentary about Surrealist patron Edward James who modelled for one of Magritte’s most famous paintings, La reproduction interdite (1937).

Adrian Maben’s name will be familiar to Pink Floyd obsessives as the director of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972), and if you’re familiar with that film you can recognise the same shooting style in his Magritte film which deploys similar slow zooms, tracking shots and images sliding in and out of the frame. The music is credited to a surprising combination of Béla Bartók (mostly piano) and Roger Waters, although some of the pieces from the latter are actually by Pink Floyd, there’s even some of the opening of Obscured By Clouds. In style and content the film is as good as anything the BBC were producing at the time, with extracts from a TV interview with the artist, and also some of Magritte’s high-spirited home movies made with his wife and friends.

Magritte and Pink Floyd are a fitting match, some of the Floyd’s album covers could be Magritte paintings rendered photographically: two men shaking hands, one of whom is on fire; a giant pig adrift over a power station. Storm Thorgerson always acknowledged the debt that Hipgnosis owed Magritte’s example, it’s there in the title of the first Hipgnosis book, Walk Away René, and in this short Tate interview from 2011 where he mentions the Wish You Were Here album as being a very conscious Magritte homage.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley

George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist

It’s a short step from Dada to Surrealism, and George Melly provides a brief skate through the philosophies of both in this 25-minute BBC film from 1978. Melly, like JG Ballard, was struck by Surrealism at an impressionable age, and the love affair was a lasting one. Both Melly and Ballard championed Surrealism during periods when it was deeply unfashionable, an oppositional stance that Ballard seemed to relish.

Melly’s enthusiasm was so well-known that he was often called upon as a token advocate of Surrealism whenever one was required by the TV channels, hence this film whose title implies an admission of something disreputable. A major exhibition of Surrealist art was taking place in 1978 at the Hayward Gallery in London, and it’s to this exhibition that Melly journeys, explaining (and demonstrating) what it means to be a Surrealist along the way. I saw this when it was first broadcast, and the absurd phone calls to strangers inspired myself and a few school-friends to similar activities; teenage pranks seemed less frivolous with an artistic justification. There’s a slight connection to yesterday’s post in Melly’s recounting of an anecdote from the 1950s when he was spared a night-time beating by his reciting of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate to a group of belligerent youths. Elsewhere you get to see punk band The Stranglers scowling at the camera—Melly suggests that the punks might be inheritors of the Dadaist attitude—and director Alan Yentob standing at a urinal.

(Video link has been updated.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley