Enfantômastic!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!”

Weekend links 741

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The Empty Mask (1928) by René Magritte.

A Walk Across Northampton: Iain Sinclair and John Rogers wander the streets in search of significant historical locations before ending up at the home of the local magus, Alan Moore. I recently illustrated a new piece of writing by Iain Sinclair but can’t talk about that just now. Later.

• New music: The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz, and Through Other Reflections by The Soundcarriers.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger: the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world.

• At Colossal: Across rural Europe, Ashley Suszczynski photographs remarkable and ancient masked traditions.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Poetry by WB Yeats.

• At Unquiet Things: Maggie Vandewalle’s enchanted autumns.

Richard Norris’s favourite albums.

Tapedeck.org

Preludes For Magnetic Tape (1966–76) by Ihlan Mimaroglu | Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy (1995) by Stars Of The Lid | Those Tapes Are Dangerous (1997) by The Bug

Ballard’s sextet

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Cover artist unknown.

A selection by JG Ballard of six favourite Surrealist paintings, or five Surrealist ones and a Metaphysical picture if you want to be strict about the definitions. These were described but not shown in an essay, “The Coming of the Unconscious”, that Ballard wrote for issue 164 of New Worlds magazine in 1966, something I was re-reading yesterday. I have quite a few of the Moorcock-edited Compact editions of New Worlds, being paperback-sized they used to be a common sight in secondhand bookshops. Issue 164 also includes a guest editorial from Ballard which he fills with a report from his recent viewing of La Jetée, the influential time-travel short by Chris Marker which was receiving its first London screenings.

Ballard’s essay is ostensibly a review of two books about Surrealist art but he doesn’t really bother with these, being more concerned with exploring his own thoughts about the paintings which inform so much of his early fiction. It’s a very good piece, especially for the way it interleaves Surrealist theory with the Ballardian concerns found in the “condensed novels” that were eventually published together (with Dalí cover art) as The Atrocity Exhibition in 1970. The following list comes near the end of the piece, and shouldn’t be taken as a definitive selection on Ballard’s part. There’s no Yves Tanguy, for example, even though Tanguy’s art is referred to in The Drought. And no Paul Delvaux either, an artist who Ballard liked enough to commission Brigid Marlin to recreate the two Delvaux paintings that were destroyed in the Second World War. A still-extant Delvaux painting, The Echo, is mentioned in The Day of Forever, a story that Ballard was probably writing around this time and which was published in New Worlds 170.

“The Coming of the Unconscious” was reprinted several times after this: in a story collection, The Overloaded Man (1967), in the first RE/Search Ballard book in 1984, and in the essay and reviews collection A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996).


The Disquieting Muses (1916–1918) by Giorgio de Chirico

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“These mannequins are human beings from whom all transitional time has been eroded, they have been reduced to the essence of their own geometries.”

I’m guessing that this is the original painting. De Chirico was perpetually frustrated that everyone preferred his “Metaphysical” paintings of the 1910s to the endless self-portraits and other dull works he insisted on producing in his later years. In order to keep the income flowing he painted many copies of his older pictures, at least 18 of which are versions of this one, with several backdated to the time of the original. As Robert Hughes put it: “Italian art dealers used to say the Maestro’s bed was six feet off the ground, to hold all the ‘early work’ he kept ‘discovering’ beneath it.”


The Elephant Celebes (1921) by Max Ernst

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“Ernst’s wise machine, hot cauldron of time and myth, is the tutelary deity of inner space, the benign minotaur of the labyrinth.”


The Annunciation (1930) by René Magritte

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“This terrifying structure is a neuronic totem, its rounded and connected forms are a fragment of our own nervous systems, perhaps an insoluble code that contains the operating formulae for our own passage through time and space.”

An interesting choice mainly because Ballard didn’t usually mention Magritte; Dalí, Delvaux and Ernst were the painters he returned to the most. It’s typical, however, for him to choose a landscape.


The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí

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“The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation, of a final stasis of the soul.”

The one painting that even Dalí’s many detractors tend to like. Ballard, like Dawn Ades and a handful of others, developed his own opinions about Dalí’s oeuvre instead of following the consensus opinion (which often seems more like an unexamined prejudice) that everything the artist did after the 1930s was of little value.


Decalcomania by Óscar Domínguez

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“These coded terrains are models of the organic landscapes enshrined in our nervous systems.”

Decalcomania is a process, not a picture, an addition by Domínguez to the many techniques of pictorial automatism (frottage, grattage, fumage, etc) developed by the Surrealists. With this entry you can make your own selection from the Domínguez paintings that use the technique. I chose Untitled (1936).


The Eye of Silence (1943–44) by Max Ernst

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“The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are—the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.”

My favourite Max Ernst painting, and also a definite Ballard favourite. The Crystal World had just been published when this essay appeared, and both the UK and US editions used this painting on their dustjackets. Panther books followed suit when the UK paperback appeared two years later.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Echoes of de Chirico
Max Ernst’s favourites
Ballard and the painters

Man with a Newspaper

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René Magritte with a newspaper.


La Nouvelle Médication Naturelle Traduit de l’Allemand – Vol. 2 (1899) by FE Bilz

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Man with a Newspaper (1928) by René Magritte

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Fuzz Against Junk (1959) by Akbar Del Piombo

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The Oxford Book of Short Poems (1986) edited by PJ Kavanagh and James Michie

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Mensonge (1987) by Malcolm Bradbury

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2015), illustrated by Anthony Browne

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Fuzz Against Junk & The Hero Maker

Forbidden reproductions

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La Reproduction Interdite (1937) by René Magritte.

English translations of the title of Magritte’s painting vary, with Not to be Reproduced and Reproduction Prohibited being two of the most popular. I prefer Reproduction Forbidden, a title that sounds more serious, and with a use reinforced by Forbidden Games, the English title of a René Clement feature film, Jeux Interdits. Whatever the translation, this is one of Magritte’s most popular inventions, one that people like recreating.


The Flat (1968).

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Jan Svankmajer’s short has more justification for copying the painting than some of the examples which follow. Svankmajer and Eva Svankmajerová were members of the long-running Prague Surrealist group, and The Flat is very much a Surrealist piece, with a man trapped inside a room where none of the mundane objects behave as he expects. In addition to the overt Magritte quote there’s an appearance by Svankmajer’s film-directing friend, Juraj Herz, as a bowler-hatted man carrying a chicken.


Sabotage (1975) by Black Sabbath.

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The front cover is the Magritte idea but with them all facing away from the mirror.


One Of The Boys (1977) by Roger Daltrey.

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One of the things that makes Magritte’s original work so well is the blank space in the mirror which directs attention to the impossible reflection. I suspect that if design group Hipgnosis had been asked to imitate the painting they would have done something similar, avoiding the lacklustre effect achieved here by photographer Graham Hughes. Hipgnosis acknowledged their own debt to Magritte in the title of their first book, Walk Away René in 1978, and often constructed whole sets for photo shoots. Hughes tried another Magritte-like effect for the back cover of the Daltrey album but with diminished success.


Dolores Claiborne (1995).

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The following images are from films (and a TV series), two of which are coincidentally based on Stephen King stories. To date I’ve only seen Secret Window which isn’t one I’d recommend. Are there any more forbidden reproductions out there?


Secret Window (2004).

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The Double (2013).

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Us (2019).

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Euphoria (2019).

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Update: Added Sabotage and Euphoria.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
René Magritte, Cinéaste
Magritte: The False Mirror
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