{film} – Page 19 – { feuilleton }

Very tasty

StudioCanal’s blu-ray of The Final Programme seems to have been out for a few months but I only spotted it this week on a visit to Fopp, a welcome upgrade for my old Anchor Bay DVD. Not everything labelled as “cult” would go on my cult list but the term is warranted for this one, still the only feature film based on any of Michael Moorcock’s novels. Moorcock has been persistently vocal about his dislike of Robert Fuest’s adaptation but his readers continue to fly the cult flag. Some films deliver a unique thrill when they present an incursion into the cinematic world of an uncommon cultural component, the less likely, the better: Frank Maxwell in The Haunted Palace intoning the names “Cthulhu” and “Yog-Sothoth”; Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh appearing as a blind piano player in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser; the credit at the beginning of The Final Programme: “starring Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius”.

Jerry Cornelius meets his maker, with what appears to be Stacia from Hawkwind gesturing in the background. StudioCanal has many more such stills, most of which I hadn’t seen before.

Cult, yes; perfect, no. If you’re familiar with the Cornelius novels the film doesn’t capture the spirit of Moorcock’s barbed ironies (although it hits the mark in places), but we live in a world where you wouldn’t expect a Jerry Cornelius feature to exist at all, especially one with such an extraordinary cast: Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffith, Patrick Magee, Sterling Hayden, Ronald Lacey, Harry Andrews, Graham Crowden, George Coulouris, etc. I always wish that Fuest had let Hawkwind perform at least one song in the arcade scene (or even let us see the group for longer than half a second), while also doing more with some of the settings. But Hawkwind in 1973 were too heavy—sonically, visually, politically—for a film intended for a general audience, and the budget was paltry by today’s standards (£222,000) which makes the existence of the thing seem even less likely. Given this, it’s amazing it looks as good as it does.

Above and below: panels by Mal Dean from the first UK edition of The Final Programme, 1969.

The main highlight for me among the disc extras is an interview with Kim Newman which I’m looking forward to seeing. I don’t usually listen to commentary tracks but I did listen to the one on the DVD where Fuest mentions that the score by Beaver & Krause was prompted by his hearing the second side of the pair’s Gandharva album. Gerry Mulligan’s lugubrious sax playing doesn’t really suit a Cornelius story but the lineage is another factor that adds to the film’s cult value.

• Watch the trailer

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Adventures: a film list
• Moorcock: Faith, Hope and Anxiety
• Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds
• Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
• The Best of Michael Moorcock

Weekend links 693

Imaginary (no date) by Sidney Sime.

• Victor Rees was in touch this week to alert me to a one-off screening of The Gourmet (previously), a cult TV drama from 1986 written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Michael Whyte. The screening, which will take place at Swedenborg House, London, on 16th October, is one of a series of retrospective events based around an exhibition from 1974, Albion Island Vortex, by Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. The film, which is connected to Sinclair’s oeuvre by its use of one of the Hawksmoor churches, will be followed by a Q&A session with Sinclair and Michael Whyte. The screening is free but places are limited so prior booking is required.

• “Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots.” Hunter Dukes on A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860) by John Camden Hotten.

• The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson’s “Dying Earth” doorstop, is republished in an abridged version as part of MIT Press’s Radium Age series, “proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935”. All the reprints come with new introductions, the one for Hodgson being by Erik Davis.

• “My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment.” Nora Claire Miller on the lure of the lava lamp. I only own a single one but I appreciate the obsessive attraction.

• Rambalac takes his roaming camera for a walk through teamLab Planets, Tokyo, a labyrinthine exhibition featuring plenty of water (and wet feet), and a moss garden filled with large silver eggs.

• At Strange Flowers: An examination of the connections between the self-mythologising Marie Corelli and her fictional counterparts in the Mapp and Lucia novels of EF Benson.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Cabarets of Death, a book about the otherworldly cabarets of Montmartre by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen.

• 10 essential Japanese reggae releases selected by Kay Suzuki.

• Mix of the week: A Fact Mix by Venus Ex Machina.

• Modern Art in Mid-Century Comics.

• RIP Michael Gambon.

• Planet Caravan (1970) by Black Sabbath | Planet Queen (1971) by T. Rex | Oszillator Planet Concert (1971) by Tangerine Dream

Weekend links 692

Illustration by Alfred Pearse for The Horror of Studley Grange by Clifford Halifax & LT Meade. Via.

• The Haunting at 60: Guy Lodge asks “Is it still one of the scariest films ever made?” I say yes but then it’s always been a favourite. Also, Robert Wise is something of a cult figure in this house, not for his big-budget directing jobs on The Sound of Music and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but for his RKO horror entries (The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher), his film noir (Born To Kill, The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow), and two smaller science-fiction films from different decades, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain. All this and he also edited Citizen Kane.

• “This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.” Jeremy Lybarger reviewing Science Fictions, the retrospective devoted to the art of Remedios Varo.

• New music: Improvisation On Four Sequences by Suzanne Ciani; Incorporeal by Hidden Horse; Atlas by Laurel Halo; Infinito (Version) by Moritz von Oswald.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present…is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Tom McCarthy: JG Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

• At Public Domain Review: Behold the Nebulous Smear: ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430).

• At Unquiet Things: Shake, Shiver, and Shriek: The Haunted Gothic Nightmares of George Ziel.

• Winners of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Strange World of…Gavin Bryars

• Watch The Stars (1968) by Pentangle | Stars (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno | Kelly Watch The Stars (1997) by Air

Works of Calder

The “Calder” being artist Alexander Calder in a 20-minute portrait by photographer Herbert Matter, with music by John Cage and narration by Burgess Meredith. A small boy (Matter’s son, Alex) wanders along a beach then into a workshop where he finds a man identified in the narration as “Sandy Calder” cutting sheets of metal into shapes for his mobile sculptures. The film aims for the poetic but also happens to show us the mundane labour involved in creating artworks which, 70 years later, you’ll only encounter in a gallery or museum. I’m not a Cage expert but I think the music is from his pieces for prepared piano.

I used to wonder what happened to Calder’s reputation in the 1980s, a question I still don’t have an answer for today. In the 1970s, when I started reading books about contemporary art, those mobiles were always mentioned somewhere. The “mobile” concept was an influential one, in the world of home decor as much as the art gallery, easily copied and exploited. When Calder died in 1976 much of the earlier interest in his work seemed to die along with him. This may only be my perception, of course; in the USA all his huge public sculptures have remained unavoidably visible if nothing else. Whatever the answer, the Calder Foundation has more films about the artist and his work at their YouTube channel. This one was brought to my attention by Ace Jet 170, a blog from the 2000s which remains active, and still posts new discoveries now and then.

(A note about the aspect ratio: the film was shot in 4:3, and should look as it does in these screen grabs. The YT copy is another one of those uploads which have been stretched to 16:9.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements
• Dreams That Money Can Buy

The art of Jordan Belson

Target (Spectrum) (c.1953).

The static art, that is. When you read about Jordan Belson’s abstract films there’s occasionally some mention of his artworks but these haven’t always been easy to see. This situation has changed recently thanks to a dedicated Belson website which includes a gallery section for drawings, pastels, paintings and his collage landscapes. Landscapes aside, most of these are also abstract pieces, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise, and very good they are too. In addition, the site has seven of Belson’s films available for viewing which may not be everything but it’s an improvement on the sole Belson DVD which only features five films. This is all very positive, here’s hoping the site stays around. (Thanks to Stephen for the tip!)

Nebula (1965).

Thoughtform (2001).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive