{film} – Page 49 – { feuilleton }

The Desert of the Tartars

The Desert of the Tartars (1976), an Italian film directed by Valerio Zurlini, is another of those cinematic works whose description in books would leave me tantalised and frustrated. A brief entry would tell you that the film existed but when would you ever get to see it? Last week I finally got to see this one thanks to a recent restoration via a French blu-ray disc which, for once, had English subtitles.

Zurlini’s film is an adaptation of The Tartar Steppe, the most popular of Dino Buzzati’s novels, and for a long time the only book of his that you could easily find in English. I often feel a little hypocritical when it comes to Buzzati. I’ve been telling people for years to look out for his strange stories—the phrase was used as a subtitle for a Calder & Boyars edition of Catastrophe—even though the translated collections were all out of print. The Tartar Steppe has been reprinted more than most yet I still haven’t read it. I’ll be correcting this now I’ve seen the film. Buzzati’s story concerns a young soldier, Lieutenant Drogo, being posted to a distant border fortress where a small company of soldiers awaits a barbarian invasion which they believe will come from the surrounding desert. All the soldiers are eager to experience the thrill of battle yet the invasion has so far refused to arrive. Matters are complicated when officers who were determined to stay are sent back home while Drogo, who says he was posted there by mistake, finds the place impossible to leave. A Cavafy poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, is credited as an inspiration for this, but the spectre of Franz Kafka haunts any story with a deferred or inaccessible resolution, and in that respect Buzzati’s novel, which was published in 1940, may be one of the first to learn from the example set by The Castle.

Jean-Louis Bertucelli and André G. Brunelin wrote the screenplay which was apparently criticised for not doing justice to Buzzati’s story. I can’t comment, obviously, but it wouldn’t be the first time the subtleties of a novel have been lost in the translation to the screen. Faithful or not, I was happy to be watching the thing at all, and besides which, familiarity with the source material can sometimes blind you to the other qualities of an adaptation. The film has a minimal score by Ennio Morricone, and an impressive cast that includes Philippe Noiret, Fernando Rey, Jean-Louis Trintignant and a dubbed Max von Sydow.

It also looks fantastic, with photography by Luciano Tovoli and spectacular locations in the Iranian desert. The ancient Bam citadel at Arg-e Bam in southern Iran provided the location for the Bastiani fortress, a massive and exceptionally photogenic ruin. A note at the end of the restored print tells us that the citadel and surrounding area was devastated in 2003 by an earthquake that claimed 26,000 lives and levelled the place. The citadel has since been rebuilt, so the film also serves now as a record of its former appearance.

As for Buzzati, it’s still a mystery why his books haven’t been made more widely available in English but matters improved recently with the republication of Catastrophe and Other Stories. He was also an accomplished artist whose illustrations are deserving of more attention. Some of these were featured at 50 Watts a few years ago, together with samples from his book-length graphic adaptation of the Orpheus myth, Poem Strip, from 1969.

Animating the pinscreen

Before the Law (1962).

The animated films of Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker have been featured here on several occasions even though they remain hard to find. I linked to a YouTube collection a few years ago but—typically for YT rarities—it’s no longer available. One example that many people will have seen is Before the Law, the short prologue and film-within-the-film that appears in Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. Before the Law, like all the Alexeieff and Parker films, was produced with the pinscreen, a unique piece of animation technology invented by the couple. The pinscreen’s white board contains thousands of tiny pins whose angled shadows can be manipulated by pushing the pins in or out to create sharp lines or subtle monochrome shades.

The pinscreen technique is almost always mentioned when Alexeieff and Parker’s work is being discussed but the structure and operation of the board hasn’t always been very clear. For a long time I thought that “pinscreen” was merely a useful name, and that the pins must be more like nails, rather like those desktop toys that mould your face or hand. This film from 1972, The Alexeieff-Parker Pin Screen [sic], opens with a detailed description of the device, immediately confirming that, yes, those really are thousands of tiny black pins set into a board. The documentary was made for the National Film Board of Canada by another great animator, Norman McLaren, who can be seen hovering in the background from time to time. McLaren and the NFB wanted to record Alexeieff and Parker discussing the pinscreen and its operation so a tutorial might be preserved for future animators.

The pair are seen introducing a smaller version of their original pinscreen to a group of would-be users, a board containing 240,000 pins; the screen used to create Before the Law was four times the size with over a million pins. The operation of the device seems slow and cumbersome at first, especially when great care has to be taken to draw lines or shapes by raising or lowering the pins without damaging them at all. But having a surface that was both static yet manipulable must have offered advantages over more traditional animation methods using paint or charcoal. The most surprising detail for me was seeing Alexeieff and Parker working on both sides of the screen, with Alexeieff pushing in the pins to create light areas and Parker pushing them out again to return the area to its original black. The documentary ends with a short sequence showing animation experiments made by the students.

I said earlier that Alexeieff and Parker’s films can be hard to find but there was a DVD collection released a few years ago which I recall trying to order from some French website that wouldn’t co-operate. I thought it might be thoroughly unavailable by now but copies are still on sale at the very reliable Re:voir so I’ve just ordered one. For a taste of Alexeieff and Parker’s prowess with this kind of animation there’s En Passant (1944), two miraculous minutes illustrating a French-Canadian folk song.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The pinscreen works of Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
• The Nose, a film by Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker

Weekend links 612

Cabinet of Curiosities (c. 1690s) by Domenico Remps.

• “…the human voice is an astonishing landscape”. Jeremy Allen on Desert Equations: Azax Attra (1986) by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz, an album which is being reissued by Crammed Discs with bonus tracks and an inexplicably rearranged track list. Good as it is, their follow-up release from 1996, Majoun, is even better, and might be better known if it hadn’t been so thoroughly abandoned by Sony Classical.

• “On view through May 29, By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500–1800 showcases masterpieces done by 17 Italian women to make the case for a broader view of women’s participation in the Italian Renaissance.” Nora McGreevy reports.

• “We had a far more profound effect on society than we really understood, and some of us paid for that”: Jane Lapiner and David Simpson of the San Francisco Diggers talking to Jay Babcock in another installment of Jay’s verbal history of the hippie anarchists.

• “Close your eyes and you could almost imagine it’s the muffled screams of a ghost trapped in a bottle.” Daryl Worthington on 25 years of The Ballasted Orchestra by Stars Of The Lid.

• More Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Mike Stax talks with Michael Moorcock about music, science fiction, politics, and their intersections in the 1960s.

• “Cormac McCarthy to publish two new novels.” Oboy oboy.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Larry Gottheim Day.

• Metal Machine Music For Airports

• Marginalia Search

• Music For Meditation I (1973) by Eberhard Schoener | Music For Evenings (1980) by Young Marble Giants | Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30 (Part I) (1996) by Stars Of The Lid

Study II (Hallucinations) by Peter Weiss

If you hadn’t noticed by now, this year is the centennial anniversary of the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land. It’s also a centenary year for the Surrealist movement although the same could be said of last year and the next couple of years when Surrealism, like most art movements, doesn’t have a definite point of departure. Apollinaire first coined the term in 1917, after which it became attached by a process of accretion to some of the moves being made in the wake of Dada. André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s collection of automatic writing, The Magnetic Fields, was published in 1920 but it would be another four years before the appearance of the first Surrealist manifesto, and there were two of those produced by rival groups within a few weeks of each other as a result of the childish factionalism that plagued the movement from the outset.

Anyway, Study II (Hallucinations) (1952) is a short film that can be regarded as Surrealist even if it wasn’t intended as such. I didn’t know playwright Peter Weiss had made any films but then I only really know him at all from his extraordinary Marat/Sade. Study II is a long way from Marat/Sade in both form and content, being an attempt to capture the fleeting impressions that enter the mind before the onset of sleep. The juxtaposition of naked figures and isolated body parts is reminiscent of many Surrealist paintings or collages, although filmed tableaux such as these are seldom as effective as still images or animated ones when there’s always the distracting awareness of watching people holding an awkward pose. But Weiss’s film would suit a screening with similar Surrealist shorts, especially Eric Duvivier’s La femme cent têtes, another display of awkward poses and hallucinatory moments.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Marat/Sade

Quay Brothers posters

This Sweet Sickness (1977).

Looking around for Quay Brothers designs turned up an item I hadn’t seen before, a poster for the UK release of a French film by Claude Miller, This Sweet Sickness, starring Gérard Depardieu. I’ve not seen the film either, nor have I read the Patricia Highsmith novel on which it was based although a copy of the book has been sitting on my shelves for some time, together with a couple of other unread Highsmiths. The poster dates from just before the Quays started to get serious about their own film-making.

Nocturna Artificiala: Those Who Desire Without End (1979). The organ pipes, which don’t appear in the film, are an allusion to the improvised organ score by Stefan Cichonski.

Being graphic designers as well as film-makers puts the Quay Brothers in a very rare class, one where they not only make the films but also design the posters used to promote their films. Offhand, I can only think of the late Eva Svankmajerová as being in the same company so it’s perhaps fitting that her husband and artistic collaborator, Jan Svankmajer, was the subject of an early film by the Quays.

Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Stille Nacht: Dramolet (1988). An early use of Heinrich Holzmüller’s typographic designs.

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