{television} – Page 14 – { feuilleton }

The Gate to the Mind’s Eye

Turn a 6 on its head and you’ll see a number 9. Do the same with the psychedelic culture of the 1960s and you get the 1990s when psychedelia emerged again, after a fashion, in a profusion of new drugs (plus the same old ones), “ambient” music (a lot of which was never very ambient at all), and, of course, computer graphics. The resemblance of the overlit, weightless world of early computer graphics to the vivid inner landscapes of psychedelic hallucination prompted people like Timothy Leary to declare computers to be their new drug of choice, while also inspiring the resurrection of the kind of visual tripping aid that would have been considered dead and buried in the very un-psychedelic 1980s. (There were a few musical exceptions in that decade—the Paisley Underground, the Dukes of Stratosphear albums, Around The World In A Day by Prince & The Revolution—but all these were counter to the dominant trends of the time.)

CD-ROMS were the hippest vehicle for far-out visuals in the mid-90s. Brian Eno was vocal in his criticism of the limitations of the point-and-click CD-ROM format but he still provided music for a thing called Headcandy in 1994, one of a series of “video kaleidoscopes” with 3-D visuals created by Chris Juul and Doug Jipson. Not so overtly druggy was a series of VHS tapes and laserdiscs released throughout the 1990s by Odyssey Productions, all of which had the words “Mind’s Eye” in their titles: The Mind’s Eye: A Computer Animation Odyssey (1990), Beyond the Mind’s Eye (1992), The Gate to the Mind’s Eye (1994) and Odyssey Into The Mind’s Eye (1996). Where Headcandy and its relations created far-out visuals using original data encoded on a CD-ROM, the Mind’s Eye laserdiscs wowed the viewer by stitching together the latest examples of CGI from a variety of sources—showreels, TV ads, music videos and so on—giving you an hour of coloured balls bouncing across crystal mountains, pulsating blobs of mercury, shiny objects zooming through corridors and vortices, together with the clumsy figure animation that’s a consistent feature of early computer graphics. Each instalment was provided with a soundtrack by a different musician, so each release is really a long music video in itself, rather like The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (Patterns & Textures) (1992), a 50-minute collage of rave footage, dolphins, spacewalking astronauts and cheap video effects soundtracked by live music from The Orb.

The Gate to the Mind’s Eye is highlighted here mainly for its having a soundtrack by Thomas Dolby that I hadn’t heard before. Other instalments feature original music by Jan Hammer (which may be okay), and Kerry Livgren from Kansas (which promises to be as unpalatable as Giorgio Moroder’s misconceived mauling of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis). The Gate to the Mind’s Eye doesn’t feature the best of Dolby’s music, it should be said, which may explain why the soundtrack CD has only been reissued once since 1994, while the visual material looks like a combination of music video and computer game. But there’s a lot of this stuff around today, especially at the Internet Archive which now has a laserdisc section containing several uploads from Odyssey Productions and its affiliate, Miramar Productions. Closer to the psychedelic ideal is a series of discs from Japan with the uninventive name of Video Drug. The Internet Archive has five discs from this series. I might have been happy to watch these in the 1990s when late-night TV in the UK was either dull or non-existent but today I’m more taken with outmoded things like Electric Light Voyage aka Ascent 1, a video release from 1979 which featured analogue video effects of a type you don’t find at all in the digital world.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Science Friction by Stan VanDerBeek

Universal Horror

A couple of Halloweens ago I worked my way through a blu-ray box of the horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and 40s. It was a fun and instructive experience: fun because I’d not watched many of the films properly for a long time; instructive for reaffirming my dislike of Tod Browning’s Dracula, a film so inert and lacking in cinematic drama it may as well be a series of still pictures. Browning’s film is further diminished when you have the opportunity to watch James Whale’s Frankenstein films immediately after it. The collection also allowed me to compare the BFI release of Universal’s silent version of The Phantom of the Opera, where Lon Chaney is an unforgettable Phantom, with the 1943 remake, a film I didn’t recall having seen before. The only positive things about the remake are the always worthwhile Claude Rains, even if he is wasted in the Phantom role, and seeing the massive Paris Opera House set from the silent version being reused.

The differences between the Universal adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein are noted in Kevin Brownlow’s 90-minute documentary which is an extra on the Frankenstein disc. Brownlow’s film, which was originally made for TV in 1998, charts the evolution of Universal’s horror films from their roots in silent cinema and German Expressionism up to the 1940s when the cycle deteriorated into sequelitis and self-mockery via Abbott and Costello. “Universal” here may be taken as referring to all of Hollywood’s early horror films. Rather than waste time on the studio’s increasingly inferior sequels, rival productions from other studios are briefly discussed: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Paramount), The Island of Lost Souls (Paramount), King Kong (RKO), and Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Brothers). In doing this Universal Horror follows the template that Brownlow established with fellow film historian David Gill in 1980 when they produced Hollywood for Thames TV, a 13-part series about the birth of American cinema which I rate as the best documentary series about film ever made. (Gill died in 1997 so Universal Horror is dedicated to his memory.) Hollywood interviewed as many people as possible connected with the production of the first silent films, following the format of the landmark The World at War (1973) series which related the events of the Second World War in 26 hour-long episodes. The World at War was narrated by Laurence Olivier; for Hollywood Brownlow & Gill had James Mason, not only an equivalent voice of authority but also a man with a great enthusiasm for silent cinema. Subsequent Brownlow & Gill documentaries had Lindsay Anderson as narrator, another silents enthusiast with a similar gravitas in his narrative delivery. The narrator of Universal Horror, Kenneth Branagh, isn’t bad as such but whatever his qualities as an actor, his voice alone is a poor match for these heavyweights. He does at least seem to have controlled the sporadic squeaks which mar his delivery in an earlier Brownlow & Gill series, Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995).

Universal Horror and Cinema Europe both fall short when compared to Hollywood by being made too late. By the 1990s most of the men connected with the early years of European cinema had died, and so had many of the actors who made the Universal films. It’s left to a handful of survivors, most of whom are women, to remember the days of their youth: Nina Foch (The Return of the Vampire), Gloria Stuart (The Invisible Man), Fay Wray (who must have spent most of her later years repeating stories about King Kong but here also discusses her role in Mystery of the Wax Museum), Lupita Tovar (the Spanish-language Dracula), Turhan Bey (The Mummy’s Tomb), Rose Hobart (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man). Additional commentary is provided by the daughters of significant figures: Sara Karloff, Carla Laemmle (who has a cameo in Dracula) and Arianne Ulmer whose father, Edgar G. Ulmer, directed The Black Cat for Universal, a much better film than the 1943 Phantom of the Opera, and one which should have been in the box set instead. Lastly, there’s some outsider commentary by Ray Bradbury (who also appeared in Brownlow’s next documentary, Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces), Gavin Lambert, James Karen, Forrest J. Ackerman, Curtis Harrington, James Curtis (author of James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters), and David J. Skal (author of Hollywood Gothic, The Monster Show, etc). Given the breadth of the subject—two decades of film history—this should have been a series like Cinema Europe, but horror on the page or on the screen remains the most abject of the genres, continually marginalised, complained about, ignored, censored, banned. Ninety minutes of documentary time is often as good as it gets, especially with Kevin Brownlow producing.

Universal Horror at the time of writing is available for viewing at the Internet Archive, waiting for Universal’s legal goons to put a stake through its heart. Someone has also uploaded the whole of Brownlow & Gill’s Hollywood series which is gratifying to see. The latter is scattered around YouTube in varying quality so it’s good to have a range of options. It’s essential viewing wherever you see it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Illustrating Dracula
• Illustrating Frankenstein
• Psychotronic Video
• Dracula and I by Christopher Lee
• Nightmare: The Birth of Horror
• Rex Ingram’s The Magician
• The Mask of Fu Manchu

Weekend links 565

The Labyrinth of Crete from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher.

• “My self appointed tutors were, in the order I discovered them, Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Nabokov, and Burgess. All of them associable in one way or another with labyrinths, all practitioners of non-linearity, all happy not to explain, all precursors of Godard’s celebrated and liberating ‘a beginning a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.’ Burgess, of course, also came from the provincial lower middle class, and gave the address at Benny Hill’s funeral.” Jonathan Meades talking to Owen Hatherley about (what else?) the tastes and opinions which were always to the fore in his long-running series of TV films about architecture, art, food, and culture in general. This time last year I rewatched Meades’ TV oeuvre thanks to downloads from MeadesShrine and YouTube. It’s no surprise to learn that he won’t be making any more of these films now that the increasingly useless BBC has decided that the arts-oriented BBC 4 will be an archive channel only. The days are long past when someone like Meades would be given a new six-part series, or an artist like Leonora Carrington 50 minutes of BBC 1 airtime.

• Food and film: “As with so much else in his life, [Alfred] Hitchcock’s accomplice in this peculiar gastronomic odyssey was Alma Reville, his wife, best friend, longest-serving creative collaborator, and, to quote Hitchcock, ‘as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen.'” Edward White on Alma Reville and the status of food in the Hitchcock household.

• Food and books: “The supply of hides for parchment was always dependent on the dietary preferences of the local population… For hundreds of years, the transmission of knowledge had depended on carnivorous appetites and good animal husbandry.” Ross King on the laborious process of bookmaking in the 15th century.

• At Wormwoodiana: Sphinxes & Obelisks, a new collection of essays “on rare books and recondite subjects” by Mark Valentine.

• New music: crystallise, a frozen eye by James Ginzburg, and Multiverse by Gadi Sassoon.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Amos Tutuola The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Step inside the miniature worlds of Tatsuya Tanaka.

• Mixes of the week: 30 years of People Like Us, and Fact Mix 803 by oxhy.

• And all that jazz: innovative album covers from the 1950s on.

• In praise of Edward Gorey, style icon.

• Labyrinthe (1995) by Zbigniew Preisner | Labyrinth (2010) by Chrome Hoof | The Seventh Labyrinth (2018) by Pye Corner Audio

Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear

Kim Evans’ 50-minute TV profile of Leonora Carrington finally turned up on YouTube in December, in a slightly truncated copy. I taped this when it was first broadcast by the BBC in November 1992, and had the foresight to digitise it before my video recorder stopped working, but I’ve never wanted a YT account so I resisted the urge to upload it myself. If I was going to do so I’d offer things to Ubuweb instead, but I haven’t managed that either.

Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear was shown a few months after Carrington’s paintings had been the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, two events that made nonsense of Tate Modern’s subsequent labelling of her as a “lost” artist. Most artists would be happy to be described as “lost” if it meant being given almost an hour of screen-time on BBC 1 together with a retrospective show at a major London gallery. Describing Carrington as “lost” was a convenient way for the Tate and any art critics playing catch-up to sidestep their having ignored her work for decades. (Joanna Moorhead embarrassed Tate Modern about this neglect in 2007.) Surrealism’s avant-garde status waned in the late 1940s, and the movement became increasingly disreputable thanks in part to Salvador Dalí’s prominence and self-promotion. There were Surrealist exhibitions in London prior to 1992—notably the expansive Dada and Surrealism show at the Hayward Gallery in 1978—but the British art and literary world has always been suspicious of an excess of imagination, the very thing that’s to the fore in Kim Evans’ film. This follows the standard BBC template of the time, combining a biographical sketch with a view of the artist’s day-to-day life which here includes a visit to a crypt full of mummified corpses, and a lesson in how to make egg tempera. Marina Warner championed Carrington’s art and writing throughout the “lost” years, and she turns up briefly to offer some comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Temptations
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• Leonora Carrington, 1917–2011

Weekend links 556

Captain Edward St. Miquel Tilden Bradshaw and his Crew Come to Grips with Bloodthirsty Foe Pirates by S. Clay Wilson, Zap Comix no. 3, 1968.

• RIP S. Clay Wilson, the wild man of American comics. The scene of mayhem above is typical in being barely coherent at a small size; click for a larger view. Patrick Rosenkranz at The Comics Journal describes Wilson as “the most influential artist of his generation…creating an extensive body of work that will defy authority and offend propriety until the end of days”. When Moebius was writing in the 1980s about the founding of Métal Hurlant he had this to say about the American undergrounds: “They were the first in the world to use comics as a means of communication, to express real emotions. Before, comics were used only to do stories, entertainment. They had some great moments but they were all very conventional. The American Underground showed us in Europe how to express true feelings, how to tell something to the reader through the comics. They blew the minds of the few professionals in Europe who saw them.” Also at TCJ, the S. Clay Wilson Interview. Wilson sent me a postcard once. I wish I knew what the hell I’d done with it.

• Michael Hoenig, synthesist for Agitation Free and (briefly) Tangerine Dream, plays one of the pieces from his debut album of electronic music, Departure From The Northern Wasteland, on a radio show in 1977. Hoenig’s album is long overdue a remastering and re-release.

• “My job, which the BBC has tasked me to do, is to provoke people and ask them, ‘Have you thought about looking at the world this way?'” Adam Curtis talks to Michael J. Brooks about his new TV series, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.

{ feuilleton } celebrates its 15th birthday today. Monsieur Chat, the mascot of this place, is happy about that but then Monsieur Chat is happy about most things.

• At Greydogtales: Opening The Book of Carnacki. A call for contributions to a collection of new stories about William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective. I’d be tempted if I didn’t already have more than enough to keep me occupied.

• “I’m being asked to talk about it a great deal at the moment, with the pandemic.” Roger Corman and Jane Asher on filming The Masque of the Red Death.

• New music: Cygnus Sutra by Mike Shannon, “a soundtrack to a fantasy/sci-fi epic not yet written”.

• A trailer for The Witch of King’s Cross, a documentary about occult artist Rosaleen Norton.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Hans Bellmer & Paul Eluard The Games of the Doll (1949).

• RIP also this week to Rowena Morrill, fantasy artist, and to Chick Corea.

• “Computers will never write good novels,” says Angus Fletcher.

• DJ Food on Zodiac posters by Funky Features, 1967.

• Mix of the week: Fact Mix 794 by Lutto Lento.

• Annie Nightingale’s favourite music.

• Zodiac (1984) by Boogie Boys | From The Zodiacal Light (2014) by Earth | Zodiac Black (2017) by Goldfrapp