MR James – Page 8 – { feuilleton }

Schalcken the Painter

Next week the BFI releases a box set of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, a series of hour-long TV films broadcast during the 1970s, most of which were adaptations of stories by MR James. One film that isn’t among them, unfortunately, is Leslie Megahey‘s superb Schalcken the Painter, a 70-minute drama based on Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter (1839) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Megahey gets mentioned here more than any other TV director (see this earlier post), for years he was someone whose productions I looked out for with a kind of cult fervour.

Schalcken the Painter was first screened on 23rd December, 1979, and repeated two or three times over the next decade. Megahey directed several period dramas for the BBC but this is his only supernatural piece. Its story of real-life Dutch painters Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706) and Gerrit Dou (1613–1675) is beautifully produced, with great attention to period detail, lighting and photography. The BBC used 16mm film for everything at this time but lighting cameraman John Hooper does an excellent job of creating shots that resemble Schalcken’s celebrated chiaroscuro paintings, still life tableaux or scenes from Vermeer. Many of the shots appear, Barry Lyndon-like, to be illuminated with nothing but candles. The acting is equally good, with Jeremy Clyde as Schalcken, Maurice Denham as the heartless Dou, and Cheryl Kennedy as Dou’s daughter, Rose. The narrator is the splendid Charles Gray.

Self-portrait of Godfried Schalcken (1694).

Given all of this it’s surprising the BFI haven’t included the film in their DVD series, it’s a superior work compared to several of the other inclusions, not least the most recent (and terrible) Whistle and I’ll Come to You. YouTube has a couple of uploads, however, so the curious may choose from a full-length version here or the usual multi-part version here. None of these fuzzy VHS copies do John Hooper’s photography any favours at all but for now this is the only way most people will be able to see Leslie Megahey’s beautiful and chilling ghost story.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
• “Who is this who is coming?”
• The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
• Chiaroscuro

Weekend links 130

Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka.

Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have managed. Also last week he wrote about Schloss Schleißheim, a palatial estate outside Munich with connections to Last Year in Marienbad and another eccentric, pseudonymous German artist: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• The circus poster that inspired John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper song Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! has been reproduced as a limited edition letterpress print. Related: Wikipedia’s page about Pablo Fanque (1796–1871), “the first black circus proprietor in Britain”.

• The first two volumes of The Graphic Canon, both edited by Russ Kick, are reviewed at Literary Kicks. I’ve not seen either of these yet but volume 2 contains my interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Related: the second book previewed at Brain Pickings.

You only have to read [Alan Bennett’s] diaries to see that, underneath the wit and humour and sandwich-filled pottering around old churches, there is a deep resentment at what has happened to England in his lifetime and an instinctive distrust, sometimes amounting to deep loathing, of most politicians. Listening, for instance, to Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke talking on the radio about the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998, he writes: “Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of 80s Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake.”

Michael Billington on Alan Bennett: a quiet radical

• Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future: Mark Pilkington draws a Venn diagram encompassing Coil, Broadcast, the Ghost Box label, Arthur Machen, MR James, Nigel Kneale, Iain Sinclair and others.

• Hell Is a City: the making of a cult classic – in pictures. The mean streets of Manchester given the thriller treatment by Hammer Films in 1959. The film is released on DVD this month.

• The Function Room: The Kollection, Matt Leyshon’s debut volume of horror stories, has just been published. The cover painting is one of my pieces from the 1990s.

• New Worlds magazine (now apparently known as “Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds“) has been relaunched online.

A drawing from Anatomy (part 1), a series by Alex Konahin.

• The forthcoming Scott Walker album, Bish Bosch, will be released on December 3rd. 4AD has a trailer.

• Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone: Noah Gallagher Shannon on the early drafts of Blood Meridian.

• The Velvet Underground of English Letters: Simon Sellars Discusses JG Ballard.

• Michelle Dean on The Comfort of Bad Books.

• The typewriter repairers of Los Angeles

• Cats With Famous People

• Marienbad (1987) by Sonoko | Komm Nach Marienbad (2011) by Marienbad | Marienbad (2012) by Julia Holter.

(Thanks to Ian and Pedro for this week’s picture links!)

Weekend links 79

Neville Brody creates a cover design for an issue of the V&A magazine tied to the museum’s current exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990. Brody’s comment amused me for the way he smartly explained the thinking behind the design whilst also distancing himself from its theme:

For me, Post Modernism felt like a kind of facade built to cover over the cracks of a divided world, a surface of plucked effects and stylistic devices emptied of meaning, an extrusion of hollow traces and flat outlines forcing 2D into apparent depth. I was never a Post Modernist, rather a Modernist exploring humanist lines of enquiry in the collapsing world behind a wall of decoration.

• It’s a common thing today to give images from the past a queer reappraisal, finding homoerotic qualities in pictures which, when they were made, would have seemed free of any sexual subtext. This post finds such a subtext in recruitment posters for US armed forces although none of the examples are as overt as this wartime magazine ad. Over at Front Free Endpaper Callum notes that many vintage photos which people regard today as evidence of gay relationships are unlikely to be quite that. The photo he posts, however, really does appear to show a pair of men who were more than just good friends.

• A play by Ororo Productions of HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror will be staged at the London Horror Festival from October 25th. Related: Horror Made Delightful: The Strange Stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, MR James, and Robert Aickman. “Aickman never spells out his meaning,” says Greer Mansfield, “His stories end abruptly and inconclusively, and in fact the ‘meaning’ is less important than the utter mysteriousness of what happens.” Which is just what some of us enjoy.

Black Beauty, a decorated horse skull by Julia deVille.

• “Jackpot is a comedic short film about a 14-year-old gay boy in 1994 who sets off on a quest to find a stash of gay porn and get it home before anyone finds out.” Director Adam Baran is requesting completion funds at Kickstarter.

• Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu (The Complete Commercial Artist), published in Tokyo from 1927 to 1930.

• Ishac Bertran tries some analogue sampling by chopping up vinyl discs with a laser cutter.

• Steve Jobs does LSD and The Residents pay tribute to Steve Jobs.

• A rare post at Ballardian: Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition.

• It’s all fun and games until Charles Manson turns up…again.

• The Edgar Allan Poe Portfolio (1976) by Berni Wrightson.

• RIP David Bedford and Bert Jansch.

• John Waters: Roles of a Lifetime.

• Octopi Wall Street!

• Homocomix.

• Poison (1969) by Bert Jansch | Pentangle at the BBC (1970): Train Song | House Carpenter | Hunting Song | Light Flight

John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica

I swear I didn’t go hunting for this. Among the various library collections at the Internet Archive one can find The Getty Alchemy Collection, a substantial gathering of very old alchemical texts scanned in a variety of formats. John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica caught my eye during a random search, a third edition of his treatise from 1564 in which he describes his Monas Hieroglyphica, a glyph designed to combine symbols of the Sun, the Moon, the Elements and Fire in a single figure.

The glyph also intentionally resembles a human form, and Dee relates its individual parts to various astrological and chemical symbols. I’ve mentioned before that Dee scholar Derek Jarman deliberately based Prospero on John Dee in his 1979 film of The Tempest, giving the magus a scrying wand shaped to resemble the Monas Hieroglyphica.

I produced my own variations on the glyph in 2009 when working on the cover of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, Finch. The symbol recurs in Jeff’s fictional city of Ambergris and I seem to recall there being some discussion about including this doorway design somewhere in the book. In the end it was incorporated into the cover design in a rather subtle fashion. I think this is the first time the design alone has appeared in public.

The Internet Archive has a few other Dee-related items, including Lists of manuscripts formerly owned by Dr. John Dee; with preface and identifications (1921), a 500-page book by antiquarian and ghost story writer MR James.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• Alchemically Yours
• Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
• The Arms of the Art
• Splendor Solis
• Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
• The Tempest illustrated
• Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
• Digital alchemy
• Designs on Doctor Dee

“Who is this who is coming?”

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968).

He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure—how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of a sea-bird’s wing somewhere outside the dark panes.

MR James, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.

One of the alleged highlights of this year’s Christmas television from the BBC was a new adaptation of an MR James ghost story, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. The film starred John Hurt and came with the same truncated title, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, as was used for Jonathan Miller’s 1968 version, also a BBC production. The story title comes originally from a poem by Robert Burns. The new work was adapted by Neil Cross and directed by Andy de Emmony, and I describe it as an alleged highlight since I wasn’t impressed at all by the drama, the most recent attempt by the BBC to continue a generally creditable tradition of screening ghost stories at Christmas. Before I deal with my disgruntlement I’ll take the opportunity to point the way to some earlier derivations. (And if you don’t want the story spoiled, away and read it first.)

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