Parade de Satie

yamamura1.jpg

The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

In 1917, the evening of the first performance of Parade, I did astonish him.

This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

Jean Cocteau (again), writing in The Difficulty of Being about the opening night of Parade, the “ballet réaliste” he created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Erik Satie wrote the music, Léonide Massine choreographed the dance, and Pablo Picasso designed the costumes and decor, with assistance from Giacomo Balla, one of the Italian Futurists. The reception for Parade wasn’t as thoroughly hostile as that received by Le Sacre du Printemps a few years earlier but there was bait enough for the reactionaries, with ragtime quotes in the dance and the music, and an everyday setting in which a group of street performers attempt to summon a crowd to see their show. Other details were overtly avant-garde: some of Picasso’s costumes were more like wearable cardboard sculptures, while Cocteau further antagonised the audience (and the composer) by adding the sounds of a typewriter, siren, pistol and steamship whistle to the music. The most significant response came from Apollinaire when he described the ballet in the programme notes as “une sorte de surréalisme“, giving the world a new word which we still use today.

yamamura2.jpg

yamamura3.jpg

Parade de Satie by Koji Yamamura is an animated presentation of Satie’s music which sees the characters from the ballet—a Chinese magician, a small American girl, the acrobats, a pantomime horse—jumping and dancing around the screen while Satie, Picasso and Cocteau observe the proceedings. It’s a lively and witty film, probably more lively than the ballet itself when the hand-drawn performers are less encumbered by gravity or their unwieldy outfits. Yamamura has directed a single animated feature, Dozens of Norths, and many more shorts like Parade de Satie, including films based on a story by Franz Kafka (A Country Doctor) and the life of Eadweard Muybridge (Muybridge’s Strings). Being a pioneer of motion photography and inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, Muybridge is an attractive subject for animators. The naked figures from his studies of human and animal motion turn up in Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, while Gérald Frydman directed a short biographical film about Muybridge, Le Cheval de Fer, in 1984.

yamamura4.jpg

yamamura5.jpg

Previously on { feuilleton }
Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu
Orphée posters
Cocteau and Lovecraft
Cocteau drawings
Querelle de Brest
Halsman and Cocteau
La Belle et la Bête posters
The writhing on the wall
Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau’s sword
Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Enfantômastic!

fantomas01.jpg

Uncredited cover art for the first publication, 1911.

The post title is a word apparently invented by James Joyce, one whose origin I’ve yet to discover. There may be some slight disparagement in its use of “enfant”, a suggestion that the Fantômas novels (or the films derived from them) were childish pleasures. If so, those childish pleasures had many supporters among the cultural avant-garde of Paris, as we’ll see below.

fantomas02.jpg

Uncredited poster art, 1913. The blood-stained dagger on the cover of the novel was too much for Gaumont.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Fantômas, the master criminal whose exploits thrilled French readers in the years before the First World War. But I’m writing now having finally read a translation of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s first Fantômas novel, and also watched the five Louis Feuillade films which introduced Fantômas to an international audience in 1913 and 1914. The novel was worth reading even though it doesn’t rise much above the pulp fiction of the time; Allain and Souvestre were writing in haste, their books were never going to win any literary awards. Fiction doesn’t have to be finely-crafted in order to capture the popular imagination (look at James Bond…), but Fantômas is unusual for being so popular while also being essentially formless: a persistently elusive criminal mastermind with no substantiated identity that the police can discover, whose prowess with disguise enables him to infiltrate French society at all levels. Criminal masterminds are plentiful in English literature but they’re usually hiding in the background of stories with heroes as the central character, as with Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. Guy Boothby’s Doctor Nikola has Fantômas-like qualities but he’s a more ambivalent character, less of an outright villain. A closer English comparison might be Fu Manchu whose first appearance in print was in 1912, a year after the literary debut of Fantômas. The rivalry between Fu Manchu and Denis Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard matches the tireless pursuit of Fantômas by Inspector Juve of the Sûreté; yet Fu Manchu still has a personal history and, in the later novels, motivations beyond mere criminality. Nothing is known of Fantômas outside his criminal endeavours. His character is so nebulous that one of the later stories sees Inspector Juve arrested after his superiors have convinced themselves that he must be the real hand behind the Fantômas crimes.

fantomas03.jpg

Uncredited poster art, 1913. Fantômas is about to turn his unwitting victim into “The Corpse that Kills”.

On an artistic level the Feuillade adaptations are much more satisfying than their source, even though Fantômas in the films isn’t as triumphantly murderous as he is in the books. After years of only knowing the adaptations from blurred and washed-out stills it’s been a revelation to see the recent Gaumont restorations which have been mastered from the best available prints, cleaned of scratches and other flaws, and projected at the proper speed. The Feuillade serials have circulated for years in inferior copies but I’d always held off watching them in the hopes that better prints might arrive. I’m glad I waited. Cinema was still a young medium in 1913 but Feuillade was a good director, skilled at creating suspense and engineering sudden surprises. He was also working with a decent troupe of actors, especially René Navarre as the villainous leading man. The misconception that early silent acting is all grandiose gestures and exaggerated facial expressions is dispelled in films like these where the acting is generally restrained even when the subject matter is lurid and melodramatic.

fantomas04.jpg

Poster art by Achille Mauzan, 1913.

The UK release of the Feuillade films by Eureka happens to arrive just after 100th anniversary of the first Surrealist Manifesto, a coincidence, no doubt, but a fitting one. The Surrealists enjoyed the “waking dream” quality of the cinema experience, and were especially besotted with Feuillade’s Fantômas serials:

Over the next two decades, Fantômas was championed by the Parisian avant-garde, first by the young poets gathered around Guillaume Apollinaire, who, together with Max Jacob, founded a Société des Amis de Fantômas in 1913, and later by the Surrealists. In July 1914, in the literary review Mercure de France, Apollinaire declared the imaginary richness of Fantômas unparalleled. The same month, in Apollinaire’s own review, Les Soirees de Paris, Maurice Raynal proclaimed Feuillade’s Fantômas saturated with genius. Over the next two decades, poets such as Blaise Cendrars (who called the series “The Aeneid of Modern Times”), Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, and Robert Desnos, and painters such as Juan Gris, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte, incorporated Fantômas motifs into their works. Pierre Prévert’s 1928 film, Paris la Belle, featured a Fantômas book cover in the closing sequence, and the Lord of Terror was adapted to the Surrealist screen in Ernest Moerman’s 1936 film short, Mr. Fantômas, Chapitre 280,000. As the century progressed, Fantômas remained a minor source of artistic inspiration as the subject of cultural nostalgia.

Robin Walz from Serial Killings: Fantômas, Feuillade, and the Mass-Culture Genealogy of Surrealism (1996)

All of which has had me searching for examples of the above, some of which I hadn’t seen before. Fantômas was a recurrent source of inspiration for René Magritte yet “the Lord of Terror” is often reduced to a footnote in discussions of Magritte’s career. The appropriation of the name of Fantômas, along with motifs from the novels and films, is a unique moment in art history, one that points the way to the further appropriations of Pop Art and the cultural free-for-all we see in the art world today.

Continue reading “Enfantômastic!”

Study II (Hallucinations) by Peter Weiss

weiss1.jpg

If you hadn’t noticed by now, this year is the centennial anniversary of the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land. It’s also a centenary year for the Surrealist movement although the same could be said of last year and the next couple of years when Surrealism, like most art movements, doesn’t have a definite point of departure. Apollinaire first coined the term in 1917, after which it became attached by a process of accretion to some of the moves being made in the wake of Dada. André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s collection of automatic writing, The Magnetic Fields, was published in 1920 but it would be another four years before the appearance of the first Surrealist manifesto, and there were two of those produced by rival groups within a few weeks of each other as a result of the childish factionalism that plagued the movement from the outset.

weiss2.jpg

Anyway, Study II (Hallucinations) (1952) is a short film that can be regarded as Surrealist even if it wasn’t intended as such. I didn’t know playwright Peter Weiss had made any films but then I only really know him at all from his extraordinary Marat/Sade. Study II is a long way from Marat/Sade in both form and content, being an attempt to capture the fleeting impressions that enter the mind before the onset of sleep. The juxtaposition of naked figures and isolated body parts is reminiscent of many Surrealist paintings or collages, although filmed tableaux such as these are seldom as effective as still images or animated ones when there’s always the distracting awareness of watching people holding an awkward pose. But Weiss’s film would suit a screening with similar Surrealist shorts, especially Eric Duvivier’s La femme cent têtes, another display of awkward poses and hallucinatory moments.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Marat/Sade

Max Ernst’s favourites

ernst1.jpg

The cover for the Max Ernst number of View magazine (April, 1942) that appears in Charles Henri Ford’s View: Parade of the Avant-Garde was one I didn’t recall seeing before. This was a surprise when I’d spent some time searching for back issues of the magazine. The conjunction of Ernst with Buer, one of the perennially popular demons drawn by Louis Le Breton for De Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, doubles the issue’s cult value in my eyes. I don’t know whether the demon was Ernst’s choice but I’d guess so when many of the De Plancy illustrations resemble the hybrid creatures rampaging through Ernst’s collages. Missing from the Ford book is the spread below which uses more De Plancy demons to decorate lists of the artist’s favourite poets and painters. I’d have preferred a selection of favourite novelists but Ford was a poet himself (he also co-wrote an early gay novel with Parker Tyler, The Young and Evil), and the list is still worth seeing.

ernst2.jpg

Poets: Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Hölderlin, Alfred Jarry, Edgar Allan Poe, George Crabbe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Walt Whitman, Comte de Lautréamont, Robert Browning, Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, Achim von Arnim, Victor Hugo, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Novalis, Heinrich Heine, Solomon (presumably the author of the Song of Solomon).

Painters: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Giovanni Bellini, Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, Albrecht Altdorfer, Georges Seurat, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Baldung, Vittore Carpaccio, Leonardo Da Vinci, Cosimo Tura, Carlo Crivelli, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, Francesco del Cossa, Piero di Cosimo, NM Deutsch (Niklaus Manuel), Vincent van Gogh.

I’ve filled out the names since some of the typography isn’t easy to read. Some of the choices are also uncommon, while one of them—NM Deutsch—is not only a difficult name to search for but the attribution has changed in recent years. The list of poets contains few surprises but it’s good to see that Poe made an impression on Ernst; the choice of painters is less predictable. Bruegel, Bosch and Rousseau are to be expected, and the same goes for the German artists—Grünewald, Baldung—whose work is frequently grotesque or erotic. But I wouldn’t have expected so many names from the Italian Renaissance, and Seurat is a genuine surprise. As for Ernst’s only living contemporary, Giorgio de Chirico, this isn’t a surprise at all but it reinforces de Chirico’s importance. If you removed Picasso from art history de Chirico might be the most influential painter of the 20th century; his Metaphysical works had a huge impact on the Dada generation, writers as well as artists, and also on René Magritte who was never a Dadaist but who lost interest in Futurism when he saw a reproduction of The Song of Love (1914). Picasso’s influence remains rooted in the art world while de Chirico’s disquieting dreams extend their shadows into film and literature, so it’s all the more surprising that this phase of his work was so short lived. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Viewing View
De Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal
Max Ernst album covers
Maximiliana oder die widerrechtliche Ausübung der Astronomie
Max and Dorothea
Dreams That Money Can Buy
La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier

The original Cabaret Voltaire

cv1.jpg

Cabaret Voltaire #1 (1916). Cover by Hans Arp.

Richard H. Kirk’s announcement that he’ll be performing at the Berlin Atonal festival as Cabaret Voltaire caused some raising of eyebrows recently, although if Stephen Mallinder isn’t involved I won’t be getting too excited myself. The last few releases under the Cabaret Voltaire name were credited to Kirk/Mallinder but from Plasticity (1992) on they don’t sound very different to Kirk’s solo releases from the same period. That’s not to say the music suffers but you have to wonder why the group name is being perpetuated if there’s nothing unique attached to it.

cv2.jpg

Dune, parole in libertà by Filippo Marinetti.

The group, old or new, will be the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they hear the name Cabaret Voltaire, something that might have surprised Hugo Ball who founded the original Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich almost a century ago. Cabaret Voltaire (the group) named themselves after Ball’s project, their intentions in the mid-1970s being similarly Dadaist. Early Cabs performances were more audience provocations than anything to do with entertainment; the music came later, and only after several years of very uncommercial tape experimentation, some of which can be heard on Methodology ’74–’78: Attic Tapes (2003). Thanks to Switzerland staying out of the war the original Cabaret didn’t get wrecked by bombs or destroyed by the Nazis, and is still active today. Ball also published a Cabaret Voltaire journal, two pages of which can be seen here. If this doesn’t look very dramatic to our eyes it needs to be remembered that everyone who first saw it would have been born in the 19th century so the contents would have seemed a lot more radical. A slim publication but with a formidable list of contributors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Blaise Cendrars, Wassily Kandinsky, Filippo Marinetti, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara and others.

Also at Ubuweb (where else?) there are several recordings of Hugo Ball’s Dada poetry including a recital of Karawane by (of all people) Marie Osmond. Who knew there was a connection between the Osmonds and Cabaret Voltaire?

Previously on { feuilleton }
Cabaret Voltaire on La Edad de Oro, 1983
Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire
Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
TV Wipeout
The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire