{film} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 768

The Mona Lisa as it looks run through the Random Pixelate setting in Glitch Lab.

• “We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.” Justin Patrick Moore on circuit-bending, glitch music and Surrealist composition.

• The seventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi). There’s an extract in English at Alan Moore World.

• New music: Remember The Clouds by Philippe Deschamp, and Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre by Tony Price.

• Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Polish film director Wojciech Has

• At Printmag: A new book shares the artistic odyssey of Iranian designer Farshid Mesghali.

• The Letraset Graphic Materials Handbook for the year 1987.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Cubo.

• Yet more Polish film posters.

• A cat’s eye view of Japan.

• RIP Roy Ayers.

• Glitch (1993) by Moody Boyz | Glitch (1994) by Autechre | Glitch (2011) by Brian Eno And The Words Of Rick Holland

Mazes, a film by István Orosz

Until last week I didn’t know Hungarian artist István Orosz had been making short animated films since the 1970s. I’ve known about Orosz’s Escher-like drawings for some time but missed the mention of the films in this interview with Steven Heller. Útvesztök (Mazes) from 2008 is one of the few Orosz films that you can see on YouTube, a short piece that seems to be a self-portrait going by the drawing tools littering one of the shots.

The film is divided into nine sections, each one of which opens with a view of a maze where a hand (or pencil) traces a route matching the number of the section. The sequences that follow are all of the animated type wherein familiar things (animals, people, objects) mutate in some way, the mutations eventually revealing a face which ages slightly from one sequence to the next. I was hoping we might also see some of Orosz’s architectural illusions but if he has animated any of these they must be in his other films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• False perspective

Weekend links 767

East Totem West head shop poster, from DJ Food‘s latest delve into the psychedelic poster auctions.

• The week in science-fiction illustration: Joachim Boaz on Rodger B. MacGowan’s “approachable New Wave art”; and Andrew Liptak talks to Adam Rowe about Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s.

• At The Wire: Philip Brophy sets out his intentions for the return of his long running column on film music.

• At Public Domain Review: Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Proverbs (1558).

Though the project’s genesis predated Roeg’s involvement, Cammell said that his codirector “needled” him: “He provoked me, made me focus more and more clearly on what I was trying to say.” It was Roeg’s visual sensibility, Cammell graciously admitted, that “mobilized” and “improved” his own concepts. It’s appropriate that the movie concerns two men who become fully realized only in meeting and merging with each other. Turner, said Cammell, “believes himself to be at the end of his creative life. He’s a man in despair. And then destiny brings him his mirror image, Chas, the man in whom he sees what he was and what he could be again.”

Roeg and Cammell were hardly in despair in 1968; both were novices in the foothills of their own artistry. It is not fanciful, though, to see in their collaboration something like the same lightning connection that forms between Turner and Chas. Cammell said that he set out “to make a transcendental movie.” In achieving that goal, he stretched and challenged not just himself but cinema too. Even as Performance closed the lid definitively on the sixties, it opened the door to a radical new way of making films.

Ryan Gilbey on Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance

• At A Year In The Country: Broadcast and Pathways Through Otherworldly Villages.

• “Pilot is an elegant and expressive display serif,” says Kim Tidwell.

• Winners of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards.

• New music: Forgotten Worlds by Rodrigo Passannanti.

• Janus Rose presents her Digital Packrat Manifesto.

• RIP Jamie Muir and Gene Hackman.

• Pilots Of Purple Twilight (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Pilots (2000) by Goldfrapp | I’m With The Pilots (2001) by Ladytron

The Return, a film by Jerzy Kucia

“Jerzy is the greatest among the living—the greatest Polish author of animated films that is still alive.” So says Piotr Dumala, a formidable animator in his own right, in a video discussion of Jerzy Kucia’s films. The first of these, The Return (1972), is collected on Studio Miniatur Filmowych, a YouTube channel devoted to Polish animation. My complaints about YouTube are legion but the place is still worthwhile when it allows channels like this one to exist. The same goes for the channel devoted to films from the Zagreb Studios. The only trouble with these outlets is a lack of translation for the films that feature dialogue.

This isn’t an issue with The Return, however, a wordless account of a nocturnal train journey undertaken by a shuffling man in a cloth cap. Stills don’t convey the remarkable sense of verisimilitude that Kucia creates with the patterns of light flashing over the walls and against the windows of the unlit carriage. The whole piece is meticulously observed, and a reminder to keep searching for the director’s other films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Academy Leader Variations

Hon by Yasmine Hamdan

If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, you may remember the scene near the end where the film stops for a moment in Tangier so that Yasmine Hamdan, a Lebanese singer, can perform one of her songs. I’ve got the soundtrack CD which includes Hal, the song she sings, but despite my predilection for Middle Eastern music I’ve been remiss in chasing down the albums that she’s released since. Hon is a new Yasmine Hamdan song, her first in a while if the YT comments are correct (her last album was in 2018), with an animated video credited to Khalil. The video is a wholly animated piece which is one reason why it’s featured here; as I’ve said in the past, I lost patience with the live-action video format years ago but still like those that use animation provided the technique is well-deployed.

The song itself is a political one, you might say inevitably so given the singer’s background and the state of current events. No prizes for guessing what the “tiny country with a gaping wound” refers to. Khalil’s animation uses its variety of collaged objects to spell out Arabic words. Is one of these a fleeting reference to the opening shots of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomengrates? Maybe. The link to the song came via Animation Obsessive, a favourite Substack which teaches me something new with every post. The latest instalment concerns Robert Sahakyants, an Armenian animator described as a Soviet hippy, or the closest you could get to such a thing in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. That’s another lead to go chasing after.