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Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958).

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1976/Salvador Dali/José Montes-Baquer/Germany)

In any list of films I’d currently most like to see but can’t due to lack of availability, this bizarre “documentary” collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer would be near the top of the list. I saw it once, probably shortly after it had been made, when the BBC screened it as part of their Omnibus arts series in the late seventies. By this time I was already very familiar with the Surrealists, Dalí, Magritte and Max Ernst especially, so it was great to see Dalí himself declaring a supposed mission to explore Upper Mongolia in a search for giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. This premise aside, I remember few other details, the whole film was as delightfully confusing as might be expected. The most distinct memory was of the painting above being shown, then the camera pulling back some distance to reveal the full extent of Hitler’s face which is only hinted at in the original. Happily, a web review now provides us with some more details:

Homage to Impressions d’Afrique (1909), is a free-associative poem written by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), even though he never visited Africa. The film is dedicated to this French author, forefather of the Surrealists, who developed a formal constraint system to generate inspiration from dislocative puns.

Dalí does the very same thing with this chimerical pseudocumentary leading us to the mysterious realm of High Mongolia where a gigantic white soft mushroom grows, many times more hallucinogenic than LSD! From his studio-museum in Cadacès (Spain), he proceeds to report on the alleged scientific expedition sent out by himself to retrieve this precious treasure, with newspaper clips and newsreel. Childhood memories (like the picture above) are the opportunity to explain more thoroughly the source of his inspiration. This bucolic landscape is in fact a close up of Hitler’s portrait (his nose and moustache) turned to the side!

Wholly Dalíesque, this film experiment pieces together astonishing combinations of superimposed images, fading in and out, switching scale with odd perspectives. Dalí invents a filmmaking process and applies his very language to cinematic purposes, bending the rules to serve his desperate need for originality. Travelling through a microscopic close up of paintings or rough surfaces, his voiceover commentary gives sense to the landscapes taking form under his eyes.

Impressions of Africa was also the title of a Dalí painting from 1938, of course:

It’s probably too much to hope that this will turn up on TV again, so for now I suppose I’ll have to look forward to it appearing on DVD at some point in the future. How about it José?

Update: Ubuweb has a copy!

The Picture of Dorian Gray II

Oscar Wilde’s novel was filmed by Albert Lewin in 1945, a great adaptation with Hurd Hatfield playing Dorian, George Sanders as the aphoristic Lord Henry and Angela Lansbury as Sybil Vane. Lewin made a number of respectably arty films during the Forties and Fifties but Dorian Gray has always seemed the best to me, even if I am biased towards the story.

The film was shot in black and white but views of the painting were shown in colour. For the final view of Dorian’s decayed portrait he commissioned the hyper-real artist Ivan Albright (1897–1983) whose shockingly grotesque picture (below) provides a memorable climax to the film. That painting now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Update: added a “before” view of the painting.

Update 2: added a link to a recent Wikipedia copy of the “after” picture that’s larger than previously available versions.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

Another favourite painting for many years and Böcklin’s most well-known work.

Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) produced several different versions of the painting. All versions depict an oarsman and a standing white-clad figure in a small boat crossing an expanse of dark water towards a rocky island. In the boat is an object usually taken to be a coffin. The white-clad figure is often taken to be Charon, and the water analogous to the Acheron. Böcklin himself provided neither public explanation as to the meaning of the painting nor the title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883. The first version of the painting, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was created in 1880 on a request by Marie Berna, whose husband had recently died.

Continue reading “Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead”

David Rudkin on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr

Vampyr, Der Traum des Allan Gray (1932) is one of the founding and defining works of psychological horror cinema, adapted from Gothic stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, a disturbing narrative of vampirism, obsession and posession of the soul. But it is also a film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the revered and legendary Danish director of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1927). Shot in France with private money and a largely nonprofessional cast and primitive sound equipment, Vampyr is to some extent a ruin. There is no definitive print and English versions are marred by poor image quality and subtitles. And yet it is unquestionably extraordinary, a vivid and haunting manifestation of Dreyer’s power to make visible on screen the inner human state, and to convey a dreamlike imagery of textures of nature amidst which transient, solitary human figures pass, some illuminated by an inner light, others threatened by a malign or demonic presence. In relation to Dreyer’s long but often frustrated career, Vampyr is often thought of as an uneven or disappointing film. But, according to David Rudkin, this is to misunderstand what it sets out to do, which is systematically to set the spectator adrift in a mysterious world. In a meticulous formal analysis of Vampyr, Rudkin expands on this contention, pinpointing the sources of the film’s uniquely disquieting effect. And yet, however strange it is, Vampyr remains a profound and troubling artwork concerned at the last to communicate human meanings—and none more so than the essence of death—in remarkable filmic imagery.

David Rudkin is a dramatist and screenwriter of forty years’standing. His theatre work is mainly associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Having collaborated with Tony Richardson, François Truffaut and Fred Zinnemann, his recent screenplays include Testimony (1987), for which he was awarded the New York Film Festival Gold Medal for Screenplay.