{"id":19687,"date":"2020-06-04T14:21:40","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T13:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=19687"},"modified":"2025-09-20T18:59:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T17:59:09","slug":"the-marvellous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2020\/06\/04\/the-marvellous\/","title":{"rendered":"The Marvellous"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/melly.jpg\" alt=\"melly.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The marvellous is always beautiful. Anything marvellous is beautiful. In fact only the marvellous is beautiful.<\/p>\n<p><em>George Melly (above) quoting Andr\u00e9 Breton&#8217;s declaration from the first Surrealist Manifesto, 1924<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Two posts in one week\u2014<em>quelle surprise<\/em>. This is partly because I&#8217;m trying to get WordPress to post updates to Twitter, something that hasn&#8217;t been possible for many years without going through the long-winded process of signing up as a Twitter developer. Anything that limits my involvement with Twitter&#8217;s burning caf\u00e9 feels like a positive thing at the moment, so thoughts that I previously cast into the flames may find their expression here instead.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/svankmajer.jpg\" alt=\"svankmajer.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The two screengrabs are from recent re-viewings. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2014\/07\/10\/george-mellys-memoirs-of-a-self-confessed-surrealist\/\">George Melly&#8217;s short guide to Surrealism for the BBC&#8217;s <em>Arena<\/em><\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2019\/06\/21\/jan-svankmajer-the-animator-of-prague\/\">Jan \u0160vankmajer&#8217;s equally short BBC profile <\/a>have both been featured here in the past, but my recent purchase of a box of blu-rays from <a href=\"https:\/\/svankmajerjan.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u0160vankmajer&#8217;s shop<\/a> has prompted a journey back into the Surrealist praxis via whatever books and videos I have to hand. It&#8217;s been interesting looking again at Ren\u00e9 Passeron&#8217;s <em>Encyclopedia of Surrealism<\/em> (1975), a book which for many years was more interesting for the 24-page section devoted to the precursors of Surrealism, all the artist-eccentrics, architects, illustrators, Mannerists, and (especially) the Symbolists whose works I spent most of the 1980s pursuing. Today there are more threads to be followed in the Surrealist section of Passeron&#8217;s study so I&#8217;m looking forward to seeing where they lead. As for The Marvellous, the \u0160vankmajer discs are this with and without the capital &#8220;M&#8221;. I recommend them.<\/p>\n<p>Update: And the post didn&#8217;t announce itself at Twitter which isn&#8217;t so surprising; I&#8217;ll keep working at this behind the scenes. Social media is the anti-Marvellous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The marvellous is always beautiful. Anything marvellous is beautiful. In fact only the marvellous is beautiful. George Melly (above) quoting Andr\u00e9 Breton&#8217;s declaration from the first Surrealist Manifesto, 1924 Two posts in one week\u2014quelle surprise. This is partly because I&#8217;m trying to get WordPress to post updates to Twitter, something that hasn&#8217;t been possible for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2020\/06\/04\/the-marvellous\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Marvellous&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,2,42,7,18,19,37],"tags":[350,1263,375,10647],"class_list":["post-19687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animation","category-art","category-books","category-film","category-surrealism","category-television","category-wordpress","tag-andre-breton","tag-george-melly","tag-jan-svankmajer","tag-rene-passeron"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-57x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}