A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Animated films
Animation of a more contemporary kind (do you detect a theme?), Metachaos is a frenetic 8-minute apocalypse by Alessandro Bavari whose Photoshop collages I recall being impressed by some years ago. His video uses computer rendering but with a lot more grit than the usual CGI. The soundtrack is the kind of quasi-Industrial thing you’d expect for the imagery but you can always mute the sound and play something else. Thanks to Paul at Dressing the Air for the tip!
Yet more animation. Long Drawn-Out Trip was Gerald Scarfe‘s first foray into the medium, produced in 1972 at the request of the BBC who sent the artist to Los Angeles to try out the new De Joux animation system. The process needed only six or eight drawings per second of film thus reducing the usual amount of labour. Scarfe says in the first book collection of his work, Gerald Scarfe (1982), that the 16-minute film was still very labour intensive.
The subject of Long Drawn-Out Trip is Los Angeles and America itself, the concerns being the same ones that Ralph Steadman was depicting the same year in his illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72: venality, violence, vulgarity and the omnipresent spectre of Richard Nixon, a president who had the good fortune to be drawn many times by two of Britain’s greatest living satirists although he wouldn’t have thanked them for it. In Scarfe’s film we also find Mickey Mouse being reduced to his constituent lines and colours after smoking a joint. In the 1980s Scarfe regularly drew Ronald Reagan wearing the famous mouse ears, something that nearly got him fired from his post at the Sunday Times after Rupert Murdoch saw one of the cartoons. Long Drawn-Out Trip had a more favourable effect when it was seen by Roger Waters who asked Scarfe to create some animations for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here tour. The animated sequences for The Wall have their origin in this short film. Watch it here.
Igor: The Paris Years (1982).
More animation, and scarce in the sense that some of these films were omitted from the core Quay Brothers canon released in the UK by the BFI as Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003. Quay obsessives such as myself would have been happy to pay for an extra disc featuring more of their oeuvre but we can at least turn to YouTube to fill in some gaps. This is by no means everything so I may add more discoveries at a later date. Some of the DVD-issued films can be seen on the BFI’s official Daily Motion channel.
I was eager to see the Stravinsky film again having watched it one time only in a Channel 4 screening some 25 years ago. After a fresh viewing it’s not as impressive as I remembered, in part because the Quay’s distinctive approach to animation—and filmmaking generally—developed a great deal following the unforgettable Street of Crocodiles (1986). Igor: The Paris Years concerns the composer’s relationship with Jean Cocteau and Vladimir Mayakovsky, all of whom are animated as cut-out figures in a Modernist cityscape with The Rite of Spring playing on a piano.
Leos Janácek: Intimate Excursions (1983). Part 2 is here.
In a similar vein, but more successful, is this portrait of Czech composer Leos Janácek. This uses the same cut-out character style but places the composer in Eastern European settings similar (down to the floating tram pantographs) to those seen in the very first Quay film, Nocturna Artificialia (1979). Among the other puppet characters there’s one figure singing an aria who later appears as Enkidu in This Unnameable Little Broom (1985).
Old Piano (1988).
A very short (and poor quality) ident for MTV.
I wondered how to focus on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus without the others getting in the way. This intense physical relationship developed into the focus of the film, rather than any more Harryhausenesque aspects of the Greek myths. Intimacy had not really been treated seriously with puppets…
Barry JC Purves
Several people seemed to appreciate the link a week or so ago to The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer so here’s another animated short about helmeted warriors, albeit with a very different tone. Barry JC Purves is a British animator and theatre director who produced Achilles, an 11-minute puppet animation, in 1995, back when the UK’s Channel 4 was still regularly financing animated films. Derek Jacobi narrates an exploration in the style of Ancient Greek theatre of the relationship between Achilles and his alleged lover, Patroclus. (Whether or not the pair were lovers is still a subject of dispute.) It’s rare to find any overt sexuality in the world of puppet animation unless the directors are the Brothers Quay; it’s even more rare for that sexuality to have a homoerotic aspect which is what Purves depicts. A groundbreaking piece of work, then, which can be viewed in full here. The director’s website has more about the creation of the film, and a collection of stills from the production.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer
Flannery O’Connor with one of her many peacocks.
When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.
Flannery O’Connor
Essay of the week was without a doubt Living with a Peacock by the great Flannery O’Connor, originally published in Holiday magazine in September 1961. I’d heard about Flannery’s peacocks before but had no idea she was such a pavonomane. Thanks to Jay for the tip!
• “‘He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature.’ But he was more like the very hungry caterpillar, munching his way through every musical influence he came across…” Thomas Jones reviews two new books about David Bowie for the LRB.
• In June Mute Records release The Lost Tapes by Can, a 3-CD collection. Here’s hoping this doesn’t merely repeat the outtakes that’ve been circulating for years as the Canobits bootlegs. This extract is certainly new.
• Animator Suzan Pitt, director of the remarkable Asparagus (1979), discusses her new film, Visitation, inspired, she says, by reading HP Lovecraft in a cabin while wolves howled outside.
• Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne, a biography by Robert Fraser reviewed by Iain Sinclair.
The Dangerous Desire (1936) by Richard Oelze (1900–1980) at But Does It Float.
• Making the Mari: the stuff of nightmares brought into the world by Jefferson Brassfield.
• The Background to the Moorcock Multiverse: Karin L. Kross reviews London Peculiar.
• Orson Welles’s lost Heart of Darkness screenplay performed for the first time.
• The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome: the new BFI DVD collection reviewed.
• Page designs by Alphonse Mucha for Ilsée, Princess de Tripoli (1897).
• A Slow-Books Manifesto by Maura Kelly.
• Tim Parks asks “Do we need stories?”.
• Musical table by Kyouei Design.
• Horror Asparagus Stories (1966) by The Driving Stupid | Peacock Lady (1971) by Shelagh McDonald | Peacock Tail (2005) by Boards of Canada.