{fantasy} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Terra Incognita, a film by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer

I was going to mention this one a few weeks ago but it vanished from Vimeo for a while following some kind of copyright complaint. It’s good to find it returned. Terra Incognita is 20 minutes of animated fantasy that’s very reminiscent of René Laloux’s cult SF films Fantastic Planet (1973) and Gandahar (1988), also the Brizzi Brothers’ Fracture (1977). Much as I’d like to see another feature in the Laloux manner, something spun from the art styles of Métal Hurlant, short films are the most you can realistically hope for outside Japan. (There is another Caza-designed feature, The Rain Children, but like the Druillet-designed TV series, Bleu, l’enfant de la Terre, it’s a simpler story aimed at a juvenile audience.)

Terra Incognita was directed by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer, with the pair also working on the backgrounds and storyboards. The first part of the film is a creation myth which establishes the genesis of a mysterious island somewhere on the Earth whose inhabitants are four prematurely aged, immortal men. The quartet share the island with the blue giant who created them, together with a variety of unusual flora and fauna which includes luminescent psychotropic mushrooms. The accidental death of their creator leaves the islanders marooned in a world they were only beginning to learn about. The film is meticulously crafted, with an open-ended narrative that avoids melodrama when the men are faced with incursions from the outside world. And there’s a further connection to 70s’ fantasy in the soundtrack which incorporates a piece from Bo Hansson’s prog-synthesizer album, Music Inspired By Lord Of The Rings. Films like this require so much creative effort that you can’t expect more of the same any time soon, but I’m curious to see what Dexter & Kjaer may do in the future.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arzak Rhapsody
• Fracture by Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi
• The Captive, a film by René Laloux

Oz: The Tin Woodsman’s Dream, a film by Harry Smith

Ubuweb slipped into archival stasis earlier this year, which means that everything uploaded there will remain as it is but we won’t be seeing anything new. I don’t know when this Harry Smith short was posted there but it’s one I haven’t seen before. (There’s also a copy at Rarefilmm where I evidently missed it.) Oz, The Tin Woodsman’s Dream was made in 1967, and is one of the fragments of a much longer film that would have adapted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using a similar cutout animation technique to that deployed by Smith for Heaven and Earth Magic. The adaptation remained unfinished after Smith’s backer died but the extant pieces (including another self-contained short, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz) show him working in widescreen 35mm for the first time.

All of Smith’s films were given opus-style numbers: Heaven and Earth Magic is no. 12, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz is no. 13, and The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is no. 16. As with the films of Len Lye and other animation pioneers, Smith’s early shorts are often given a “psychedelic” label even when they predate the popular use of the term. The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is one of those where the psychedelic quotient becomes overt, comprising a few minutes of animated play with the title character and a small dog, followed by many minutes of kaleidoscoped film footage that’s more redolent of its period than Smith’s other films. I’m happy to watch the kaleidoscopics but this is the kind of thing that any number of film-makers might easily do. The Woodsman, the dog and the other characters are inhabitants of Smith’s inner landscape, as are the fly agaric mushrooms that appear here and in his other films. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them. There’s no soundtrack for this film so you can either watch the gesticulations in a Stan Brakhage silence or find 15 minutes of music to match the visuals.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Number 10: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Number 11: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Meeting Harry Smith by Drew Christie
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith
• Harry Smith revisited
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991

The art of Hannes Bok, 1914–1964

Altars of Patagonia (1946)

Like the huge cache of Virgil Finlay art that turned up at the Internet Archive a couple of years ago, the pictures here are from a two-volume collection made by an enthusiast gathering together yet more illustrations from the pulp magazines of the 1940s and 50s. Hannes Bok (real name Wayne Francis Woodard) wasn’t as prolific as Virgil Finlay, but the careers of the two men intersected in the pages of Weird Tales where they both used stipple shading to compensate for the poor reproduction of pulp paper. Bok’s work tended to be more stylised than Finlay’s, with a quirkiness that makes his art easy to spot once you’ve seen a few examples.

Boomerang (1947)

The two volumes contain a total of over 300 illustrations so any selection will only be a small sampling. Many of the drawings were new to me. The first volume is mostly work from magazines such as Weird Tales and the minor SF mags; the second includes book covers, calendar illustrations and other work. As with the Finlay collections, both volumes are available in a range of file formats which include cbz files, a format I prefer to pdf for browsing image-heavy documents. For more about cbr/cbz files, see the end of this post.

Cross of Mercrux (1942)

Daughter of Darkness (1941)

Dimensional Doors (1944)

Continue reading “The art of Hannes Bok, 1914–1964”

Weekend links 730

Cover Design for ‘The Yellow Book’ Vol.I (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley.

• “[Dorian Gray’s] version of Decadence filled the popular imagination when Decadence became an ostentatiously stylish zeitgeist—stylish being the operative word. For Decadent style encapsulated the attitude of being hellbent on thrilling experiences.” The danger of Decadence is also its value. We need more of it, says Kate Hext.

• At Swan River Press: Of Wraiths, Spooks and Spectres. Robert Lloyd Parry, in an interview with John Kenny, talks about the researches that led to the compiling of his latest ghost-story collection, Friends and Spectres.

• The latest pictorial accumulation from DJ Food is a collection of late-60s concert posters by Jim Michaelson, an artist whose designs look like Mad magazine going fully psychedelic.

• Old music: Future Travel by David Rosenboom; new music: Taking Shasta Mountain (By Strategy) by John Von Seggern & Dean DeBenedictis.

• At Public Domain Review: Hunter Dukes on Rückenfiguren, views of the human back as a subject in the history of art.

• In a week when Adobe has been in the news for pissing off its users, a list of alternatives for Adobe software.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hokusai-inspired erasers reveal Mt. Fuji the more they get used.

• At Unquiet Things: A celebration of Annie Stegg Gerard’s enchanting worlds.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2024 by Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Diamanda Galás.

• Wraith (2002) by Redshift | El Wraith (2002) by Amon Tobin | Wraith (2015) by John Carpenter

The Debutante, a film by Elizabeth Hobbs

The Debutante is an 8-minute animated adaptation of a short story by Leonora Carrington, a tale of bestial havoc wreaked by a hyena on an aristocratic dinner-dance. This wish-fulfilling fantasy, which Carrington wrote in the 1930s, is one of the author’s more popular pieces of fiction. The story has been anthologised many times, notably by Angela Carter in 1986 who included it in Wayward Girls & Wicked Women: An Anthology of Stories. Elizabeth Hobbs illustrates the piece with hand-painted rotoscoping, a technique which many people will associate with the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence in Yellow Submarine although this is by no means the earliest or only example of the form. It’s a useful process for stories which require the blending of the fantastic with the mundane.

Another hyena encountering the English aristocracy may be found in Esmé by Saki, the first story in his essential Chronicles of Clovis collection. Saki shared Leonora Carrington’s anarchic impulses when presented with ennervating upper-class rituals. Enough of his stories feature wild animals and eruptions of chaos in country houses that I wonder whether there was any Saki influence upon The Debutante. I’d guess not—Leonora Carrington possessed more than enough wayward imagination of her own—but whatever the answer, Saki remained fascinated (or appalled) by the aristocracy and their absurdities, while Leonora followed her debutante heroine to a welcome exile from their world.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist survival kit
• Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear