{collage} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Cosmic Alchemy, a film by Lawrence Jordan

More alchemical collage animation, this time by one of the earliest practitioners of the form. Lawrence Jordan has been creating collage films since the 1950s, and is still doing so today. Cosmic Alchemy which dates from 2010, is a 24-minute piece that immediately attracted my attention for its use of cosmological charts and other maps of the heavens. The alchemy here is more astronomical (or astrological) than chemical, exploring a cosmos where the celestial spheres are populated by a variety of orbs and glittering stars, together with familiar figures from the Dover Publications Pictorial Archive. The droning soundtrack is by John Davis. There are more collaborations between Jordan and Davis at Davis’s Vimeo page.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edge of Alchemy, a film by Stacey Steers
• Still Life, a film by Connor Griffith
• Hamfat Asar, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Carabosse, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith

Edge of Alchemy, a film by Stacey Steers

Stacey Steers’ Edge of Alchemy (2017) presents a unique approach to collage animation by combining backgrounds, objects and creatures taken from engraved illustrations with characters lifted from early cinema. The latter are two of the stars of the silent screen, Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, whose roles in several films are repurposed by Steers into a wordless 20-minute exploration of weird science: Pickford becomes “The Scientist”, a part she never would have been allowed to play in the silent days, while Gaynor is “The Creature”, a plant woman born from the Scientist’s experiments whose first appearance in bandages is borrowed from The Bride of Frankenstein. Bees proliferate in this scenario, very large ones with which the Creature has a natural affinity. The cumulative effect is like seeing Wilfried Sätty’s collages brought to life, in particular those in his first two books which incorporated photographic material with the engravings. The icing on the cake is a choral score by Lech Jankowski, best known for the music he composed for several of the Quay Brothers’ films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Still Life, a film by Connor Griffith
• Hamfat Asar, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Carabosse, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith

The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine

From One Dough (1996) by Martin Stejskal, Jan Svankmajer, Eva Svankmajerová.

From A Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre (Eyre Methuen, 1974):

Exquisite corpse. The most famous of the surrealist games takes its name from the opening sentence that materialized: “Le cadavre—exquis—boira—le vin—nouveau” (1925) (The exquisite corpse—will drink—the new wine). It was produced by five players writing in turn subject, adjective, verb, object, complement, each folding over the paper so that the next player could not see what had been already written. The violent whiff of strangeness and the droll effects obtained by these verbal collages reappeared in the drawn “exquisite corpses” in which Surrealist poets and painters often combined. Despite the fact that each contribution—especially in the case of painters—is relatively identifiable, the total effect (mostly in the form of a “personage”) results from the combined elements. In this, the “exquisite corpse” can claim to have scored a victory for collective invention over individual invention and over the “signature”.

Nude (1926–27) by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray.

Exquisite Corpse (1927) by André Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, Max Morise, André Breton, Yves Tanguy.

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Ragnar von Holten’s Maldoror

More Maldoror, and more collage, this time from Swedish artist and art historian Ragnar von Holten (1934–2009). The Historical Dictionary of Surrealism describes von Holten as a Gustave Moreau enthusiast who first contacted the Paris Surrealists in 1960 when he was organising a retrospective of Moreau’s work at the Louvre. André Breton had long been a champion of Moreau, especially in the decades when the artist was out of fashion, and wrote a preface for von Holten’s L’Art Fantastique Gustave Moreau. One of the many things I like about the Surrealists is the continuity they provide with the history of fantastic and visionary art.

Von Holten’s Maldoror collages were begun in the late 1960s and completed in 1972 when they were published in a Swedish edition of the novel. I don’t know how many illustrations there were in all but you can see more at the Moderna Museet website. Not all the collages are labelled as being derived from Maldoror but many of the titles refer to the text all the same. Also there are two drawings intended as vignettes, one of which depicts in a rather literal fashion Lautréamont’s most popular metaphor.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry O. Morris’s Maldoror
• Covering Maldoror
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• Santiago Caruso’s Maldoror
• Jacques Houplain’s Maldoror
• Hans Bellmer’s Maldoror
• Les Chants de Maldoror by Shuji Terayama
• Polypodes
• Ulysses versus Maldoror
• Maldoror
• Books of blood
• Magritte’s Maldoror
• Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror
• Maldoror illustrated

Harry O. Morris’s Maldoror

Lautréamont’s delirious prose poem/novel/proto-Surrealist dream-text is sufficiently wild and free-ranging to inspire many visual interpretations. One of the peculiarities of the book is that all these interpretations are valid to some degree, although some still suit the general tone better than others. Quite a few of the well-known Surrealist artists had a crack at illustrating Les Chants de Maldoror but artists who don’t illustrate on a regular basis have a tendency to gesture vaguely at the given text while offering yet more of their own concerns.

Expert collage artist Harry O. Morris does a better job than Dalí, Magritte and co. in his depictions of Lautréamont’s mutable scenarios. Maldoror is very much a collaged text, a product of its author’s enthusiastic plagiarism, which suggests that if the book has to be illustrated at all then collage is the technique to use. Morris’s interpretation was published in 1983 as Scenes from Lautréamont’s Maldoror, a portfolio of 10 plates. A note from the artist on this page acknowledges the influence of photo-montagist JK Potter, Morris being better known for his collages of engraved illustrations and other pictorial matter.

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