Kenneth Anger – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

The Salivation Army, a film by Scott Treleaven

I think of the area of magic as a metaphor for the homosexual situation. You know, magic which is banned and dangerous, difficult and mysterious. I can see that use of magic in the Cocteau films, in Kenneth Anger and very much in Eisenstein. Maybe it is an uncomfortable, banned area which is disruptive, and maybe it is a metaphor for the gay situation.

Derek Jarman, in conversation with Simon Field and Michael O’Pray, 1985

Derek Jarman’s face appears briefly in The Salivation Army (2002), a short history/memoir by Canadian artist Scott Treleaven concerning This Is The Salivation Army, a zine Treleaven produced with a small group of friends from 1996 to 1999. The film itself is credited as the ninth issue, and makes me sorry to have missed the zine in its original incarnation.

The season of Jarman films which is currently running in London is entitled Queer Pagan Punk, and will include a screening of Treleaven’s film next month, along with Glitterbug (1994). The phrase “Queer Pagan Punk” encapsulates the ethos of This Is The Salivation Army, and Treleaven’s narration describes the origin of his zine in a familiar sense of unfocused rage, and also the alienation he and his friends felt towards the vapidities and conformity of contemporary gay culture. Being someone who’s always loathed clubbing, and the consumerist drivel that fills so many gay magazines, this is music to my ears; I just wish the zine been around in the 1980s. The shadow of the Temple of Psychic Youth—which was around in the 1980s—hangs heavily over this project; Derek Jarman had his own connections with PTV/TOPY, of course, being an ally of Throbbing Gristle, and later of Coil. The fanzine may have run its course but Treleaven continues to explore queer paganism in his artwork. The Salivation Army can be seen at Vimeo.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
• Abrahadabra
• The art of Scott Treleaven

Weekend links 194

Untitled glass sculpture by Richard Roberts.

• Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, my collaboration with David Britton, makes The Quietus list of Literary Highlights of 2013. At the same site there’s Russell Cuzner talking to English Heretic. “His methodology takes in magick, psychogeography and horror film geekdom, along with firm roots in Britain’s industrial music culture of the early 1980s, to form potent, novel topographies of an otherwise unconnected world of occultists and psychopaths.”

• A slew of London links this week: Geoff Manaugh on how the capital was redesigned to survive wartime blackouts, a piece which inadvertently explains why you see so much black-and-white street furniture in post-war films | Bob Mazzer’s photos of the London Underground in the 1970s and 1980s | Philipp Ebeling’s photos of the capital and its inhabitants today.

• “Science has become an international bully. Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.” David Gelernter on “The Closing of the Scientific Mind”. Related: “When Science Becomes Scientism” by Stanislav Grof.

• My favourite book about Orson Welles is This is Orson Welles (1992), a collection of Peter Bogdanovich’s interviews with Welles edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Bogdanovich’s interview tapes can now be heard at the Internet Archive.

• Brian Dillon on Dada collagist Hannah Höch who he calls “art’s original punk”, and Sean O’Hagan talking to another collage artist, Linder Sterling, who says “Lady Gaga didn’t acknowledge I wore a meat dress first”.

• One Hundred Years Of Weird Fear: Daniel José Older on HP Lovecraft’s literature of genealogical terror. More fear (and Lovecraft): Will Wiles on the growth of Creepypasta.

• The Last Alan Moore Interview? A lengthy discussion with Pádraig Ó Méalóid. Shunning interviews hasn’t done Cormac McCarthy any harm so if I was Alan I wouldn’t worry.

• And speaking of Cormac McCarthy, the headline of the week: “Cormac McCarthy’s ex-wife busted after pulling gun from vagina during alien argument“.

• Where the bodies are buried: Mick Brown presents a potted biography of Kenneth Anger who offers a few reluctant quotes.

• A short animation for gore-obsessed kids: Pingu’s The Thing by Lee Hardcastle.

• Helen Yentus designs a 3D-printed slipcase for a novel by Chang-rae Lee.

• Ralph Steadman‘s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 103 by Lustmord.

• Collage art at Pinterest.

• No Escape (1966) by The Seeds | Pushin’ Too Hard (1966) by The Seeds | No Escape (1979) by Cabaret Voltaire | Pushin’ Too Hard (1982) by Paul Parker

Two films by Clive Barker: The Forbidden and Salome

The Forbidden.

Clive Barker announced late last month that arrangements were being made for a remake of Hellraiser. This isn’t the first time such an announcement has been made so we’ll have to wait and see what comes of that. I think I’m in a minority of people who’ve always been well-disposed to Barker and his works (the early stories in particular) but have never really enjoyed Hellraiser. I saw it when it was first released, and was disappointed that Barker and co. hadn’t manage to successfully negotiate the pitfalls of making a British film for demanding American producers. The soundtrack that Barker commissioned from Coil was dropped (a serious error); the film’s awkward mid-Atlantic tone makes suspension of disbelief difficult, and considering Barker’s success as a storyteller the narrative is often confused and disjointed. Without all the memorable imagery it’s doubtful it would have had much of a lasting reputation, or birthed so many sequels.

The Forbidden.

Barker and his theatre colleagues made The Forbidden in 1978, a 35-minute 16mm film of entirely negative images which shows how different Hellraiser might have been if fewer capitulations had been made to the marketplace, and to the clichés of horror cinema. Both films concern an occult ritual, an occult puzzle, and the subsequent consequences of the ritual. Where Hellraiser has to connect its most striking scenes with mundane business such as Julia’s murder spree and screaming teens, The Forbidden presents its imagery as raw data, leaving it to the viewer to piece together its fragments.

Barker’s work since Hellraiser has been almost completely generic so it’s surprising to see something of his that’s this open and abstract. In tone it’s closer to the films of Derek Jarman or Kenneth Anger than anything else, especially the sequence of Barker himself dancing with an erection, something which will ensure this doesn’t get many TV screenings. (Barker has referred to Kenneth Anger when discussing the film.) The final section, featuring a man being lovingly flayed by a number of scalpel-wielding hands, offers the same spectacle as Hellraiser‘s skinless Frank but without any of the accompanying frenzy. This won’t necessarily be on YouTube for very long so watch it while you can. The uploaded version is from the Redemption DVD, music included. Since the film is silent you can watch it with a score of your choice; I’d suggest Coil’s themes for Hellraiser.

Salome.

Where The Forbidden is a successful piece of avant-garde cinema, Barker’s 17-minute dramatisation of Salome (1973) is closer to a well-made home movie. This is silent as well, and even has the quality and feel of a very old silent film. For an amateur work it still manages to convey a greater sense of dread than some of the other Salomé-related films which have been featured here, and I believe that’s the director himself playing the femme fatale.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clive Barker, Imaginer

Weekend links 182

Mirror of Water (1981) by Reika Iwami.

• The week in comics: Paul Gravett interviews Enki Bilal. | Paul Kirchner’s wordless and inventively surreal strip, The Bus, was republished in France last year but it’s been out-of-print for years everywhere else. Read it online here. | Bill Watterson has made the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes available for free.

• “…seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” Leland de la Durantaye reviews Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985.

• Artist Charles Ross says “My interest in science is related to how mysterious it is.” Ross Andersen visited Ross’s Star Axis, “a masterpiece forty years in the making”.

There is a satirical intent at work here, as well as mordant humour, a potent mix that reminds one more of the absurdist fictions of the French jazz musician Boris Vian than of anything in the SF canon. Science fiction is not central in Harrison’s work – not even as a target of his sharp wit – and it is a mistake to regard him as being chiefly interested in demolishing a genre that is only one of several he has mastered.

John Gray on M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. This week Harrison posted a new piece of fiction on his blog.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 091 by Sugai Ken, and Bride of the Abominable Marshman, an early Halloween mix by Hackneymarshman.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Schandmasken (masks of shame), and the clay visage of Paul Wegener’s Golem.

• A version of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express by Chicago band Disappears.

• Postcards to the Curious: MR James-themed artwork by Alisdair Wood.

• Clive Barker: Why I Once Gave Up Horror Movies Entirely.

• Artist Melinda Gebbie at Phantasmaphile.

• Fragment, a new video from Emptyset.

• 38 photos of airships through the ages.

• This Much I Know: Kenneth Anger.

• Trans Europe Express (2000) by Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto | Trans Europe Express (2007) by Receptors | Trans Europe Express (2012) by Daniel Mantey

8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements

Continuing the Cocteau theme, this fascinating film remains (for the time being) unavailable in a better copy despite its artistic all-star cast. 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) can be regarded as a follow-up to Hans Richter’s Surrealist anthology Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), the directorial credit this time being shared between Richter, Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. The latter famously quit the art world to devote more time to chess-playing so his involvement with a chess-based fantasy (self-described as “a fairytale for grownups”) isn’t so surprising:

It explores the realm behind the magic mirror which served Lewis Carroll 100 years ago to stimulate our imagination.

The cast comprises famous friends including Cocteau himself, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Paul Bowles, Fernand Leger, Alexander Calder, Duchamp, and, in the Venetian episode, Peggy Guggenheim in her favourite sunglasses. In places it’s closer to Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) than Dreams That Money Can Buy, especially since Anger’s film was another assemblage of unique personalities. One detail I’ve not seen remarked upon elsewhere is the presence behind the camera of Louis & Bebe Barron who assisted with the sound. The Barrons are better known today for their still astonishing all-electronic score for Forbidden Planet (1956). Watch 8 x 8 at Ubuweb or YouTube.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreams That Money Can Buy