{film} – Page 55 – { feuilleton }

Mask of the Red Death, 1969

More animation, and more Edgar Allan Poe, although the story is reduced to a minimal trace in this 1969 short from the Zagreb animation studios. I’ve no idea whether the title is a misreading (or mistranslation) of Poe’s or a deliberate play on the masks used in the masque but I’ve gone with the most common labelling. Directors Branko Ranitovic and Pavao Stalter use a paint technique to sketch the stages of a tale that continues to resonate today. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA

The Hangman by Paul Julian and Les Goldman

After mentioning Paul Julian in the previous post I went looking for examples of his work. The production design and background paintings that Julian created for the animated adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) are perennially celebrated, especially around Halloween, but director Ted Parmalee tends to receive all the credit. The Tell-Tale Heart was a production for UPA but Julian had a long career in animation, especially for Warner Bros., and his voice (if not his name) are universally familiar from the sounds the Road Runner makes in the Wile. E Coyote cartoons. Until this week if I’d thought about this at all I would have assumed that the “hmeep-hmeep” sound (as Julian described it) was created by Mel Blanc, not one of the cartoon’s background artists.

The Hangman (1964) is an 11-minute animation that, like The Tell-Tale Heart, is a long way from Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Herschel Bernardi reads a poem by Maurice Ogden that describes a hangman who arrives in a small town and begins executing the citizens one after the other. No-one is spared, even those who support the actions of the hangman when his first victims are Jewish, Black, an unspecified “alien” and a man who openly questions the executions. The poem was written during the McCarthy era but is the kind of moral fable whose sentiments can be applied to any time, even if the design makes the context a specifically American one. Paul Julian painted the backgrounds and co-directed with Les Goldman, while Julian’s wife, Margaret, provided the minimal animation. The jazzy score—which doesn’t really suit the theme—was the work of Serge Hovey. Julian’s townscapes start out as Edward Hopper-like scenes of tall houses, old storefronts and wide roads striped with sunset shadows. In the second half of the film a Surrealist quality takes over. The gallows pole slowly consumes the town as well as its people, dismantling the buildings in order to grow into a towering edifice. The characterisations and the scene transitions make it plain how much of The Tell-Tale Heart was Julian’s work, while the film as a whole reminds me of one of Ray Bradbury’s morality tales. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA

Weekend links 591

Ghost Box 39. Design, as always, is by Julian House.

• Entangled Routes by Pye Corner Audio will be the next album on the Ghost Box label, due for release on 26th November. This will be Pye Corner Audio’s fourth album for Ghost Box, and one which forms the final part of a trilogy of imaginary soundtracks for science-fiction scenarios, “the latest installment of which plays with the idea of mycorrhizal networks and attempts by humans to listen in and communicate”.

• “…for every ten projects I start, nine will probably fall by the way side—they just don’t get made. Nothing happens, you can’t find the tapes, you can’t find the rights holders, the tapes were destroyed, no one’s interested.” Jonny Trunk interviewed at Aquarium Drunkard.

• At Unquiet Things: S. Elizabeth is celebrating the first anniversary of The Art Of The Occult (previously) by giving away a signed copy of her book to one of the commenters on this post.

• “Sand is not only temporary, it is also the most temporised form of matter.” Steven Connor on the dust that measures all our time.

• Mixes of the week: Autumn Hymnal: A Mixtape by Aquarium Drunkard, and In Estonia with Bart de Paepe by David Colohan.

• “Touched by the hand of Ithell: my fascination with a forgotten surrealist.” Stewart Lee on Ithell Colquhoun.

• Skin trade: a playlist of percussion at the outer limits; Valentina Magaletti surveys alternatives to the conventional kit.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews The Devil At Saxon Wall by Gladys Mitchell.

• “The Show: Alan Moore brings vaudevillian dazzle to Northampton noir,” says Phil Hoad.

• At Bandcamp: A Guide to the Eclectic Funk Music of Bernie Worrell by John Morrison.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Octave Mirbeau The Torture Garden (1899).

• At Spine: Vera Drmanovski on redesigning the novels of Hermann Hesse.

• New music: Music For Psychedelic Therapy by Jon Hopkins.

• South To The Dust (1990) by Ginger Baker | Into Dust (1993) by Mazzy Star | Photon Dust (2020) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 590

Understanding Mu (1970) by Hans Stefan Santesson. Cover art by Ron Walotsky. Via.

• “I have never believed Chariots of the Gods?—it takes faith, so what I mean is that I’ve never believed in it—but it has still held my affection for decades.” Patrick Allington on ancient aliens, unidentified aerial phenomena, and the unhinged pleasures of speculative nonfiction. I still have a stash of paperbacks in what I call “The Crank Box”, a collection of the more far-out titles that proliferated in the 1970s in the wake of the bestselling (and very egregious) Erich von Däniken. There aren’t many books about ancient astronauts or flying saucers in the box because they were so plentiful, I was always on the lookout for more outlandish volumes: lost continents, yes, but not the all-too-common Atlantis; Lemuria or Mu were more like it. So too with Hollow Earths and mysterious realms as detailed in Shambhala: Oasis of Light by Andrew Tomas, or The Lost World of Agharti: The Mystery of Vril Power by Alec MacLellan. The attraction wasn’t that any of this speculation might be true, more that these books operate as bargain-basement equivalents of the Borges conceit in which metaphysics is regarded as a branch of fantastic literature. Weird fiction by other means.

Collecting these books was a fun thing to do in the 1980s when the crank publications of the previous decade had washed up on the shelves of secondhand bookshops. The shine began to wear off in the 1990s when the emergence of the internet empowered a new breed of hucksters (and worse) pushing all of this stuff as though it was “hidden knowledge”. It’s hard to get excited about a battered paperback brimming with pseudo-science and pseudo-archaeology when similar ideas proliferate on YouTube channels catering to credulous hordes.

• Absolutely elsewhere (and linked here on a regular basis): An archive of the endlessly fascinating Absolute Elsewhere, a website created by the late RT Gault in order to present “a bibliography of visionary, occult, new age, fringe science, strange and even crackpot works published between 1945 and 1988”. The listings are accompanied by an informed, sceptical and often enlightening commentary, and also include a fair amount of weird fiction. Mr Gault had the right attitude.

• New music: Raum by Tangerine Dream, a preview of the new album, Probe 6–8, which will be released next year; new/old music: a reissue of Marine Flowers (Science Fantasy) by Akira Ito.

• “He had been honest about himself, and shockingly honest about his parents, but about his work he had spun me a tale.” Carole Angier on the elusive WG Sebald.

• At The New Criterion: Two stray notes on Moby-Dick by William Logan; on contemporary reviews of Moby-Dick and Melville’s journey on the Acushnet.

• “Perhaps what’s most extraordinary about Kollaps is that it was made at all.” Jeremy Allen on Einstürzende Neubauten’s thrilling debut album.

• At Culture.pl: a podcast about Czech film director Vera Chytilová and her masterpiece of Surrealist anarchy, Daisies.

• At Perfect Sound Forever: Part 2 of a Jon Hassell tribute which talks to friends and musical collaborators.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded (1962).

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine unearths a medieval recipe for gingerbread.

• Mix of the week: Death’s Other Dominion by The Ephemeral Man.

• MU-UR (2000) by Coil | Mu (2005) by Jah Wobble | Mu 1 (2015) by Acronym

Philippe Caza record covers

Bad Taste (2014) by The Datsuns.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. Druillet and Moebius have already featured in this series so here’s another French comic artist whose work was popularised in the Anglophone world by Heavy Metal magazine. In addition to comics, Caza has been a prolific cover artist for French fantasy, horror and SF novels, some examples of which are reused here. As with Druillet, many of his record sleeves are reprintings of comics panels, but he’s also created a few pieces specially for vinyl and CD.

Aber Du (1985) by Haindling.

Mémoire Des Ecumes (1985) by Torgue.

A soundtrack album (?) for the comic book of the same name by Caza and writer Christian Lejalé.

Musique Originale Du Film Les Enfants De La Pluie (2003) by Didier Lockwood.

The soundtrack album for an animated feature film co-written and designed by Caza. This follows earlier Caza-derived animations by René Laloux including the feature-length Gandahar (1988).

Sweat All Night (2013) by Nico’ZZ Band.

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