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The Idea, a film by Berthold Bartosch

Having mentioned Frans Masereel in the previous post, here’s a short animated film based on one of Masereel’s wordless novels. Masereel’s The Idea (1920) concerns the birth and progress of radical thought in an illiberal society, with the troublesome conception embodied as a naked woman. When the idea escapes into the world the authorities try to cover her nakedness, but their efforts fail to prevent her image being disseminated by the printing press…

Berthold Bartosch was a Czech animator whose 25-minute adaptation of the book was released in 1932. Frans Masereel helped with the creation of the film in its early stages but he lost his patience with the slow pace of the animation process. Bartosch’s film is significant for being one of the first animated dramas to aim self-consciously at art rather than comedy or entertainment for children. Also significant is the score by Arthur Honegger whose use of the ondes Martenot is claimed as the first use of an electronic instrument for cinematic purposes. Bartosch’s animation technique brings to life cut-out figures in nebulous, layered compositions that anticipate the films that Yuri Norstein would be making decades later. It’s a shame that all the online copies of the film are so poor, it ought to be seen in better quality. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• The Nose, a film by Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
• Yuri Norstein animations
• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward
• Frans Masereel’s city

Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel

Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward are the two names most commonly associated with the “wordless novel” of the 1920s and 30s, but there was another significant contributor to the form, Otto Nückel (1888–1955), a German artist whose Schicksal, Eine Geschicte in Bildern was one of the spurs for Ward to try something similar. I hadn’t seen Nückel’s book before, the pictures here being taken from an American reprint from 1930. The general tone is very similar to Masereel’s The City (1925), with the difference that Destiny depicts a single, tragic life in a nameless European metropolis where Masereel presents a tapesty of city-wide lives and events. The artistic styles differ but all three artists used engraving to create their pictures, a technique that no doubt helped sustain an aura of seriousness about these projects, keeping at bay any association with disreputable comic strips. Masereel and Ward used wood for their medium while Nückel preferred to engrave on lead plates. His book is still in print today via Dover Publications.

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Weekend links 740

Winged Figure (no date) by Mark Severin.

• At Wormwoodiana: News of the publication of two uncollected early stories by Cormac McCarthy. I happen to be reading McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger, at the moment. Very enjoyable and very different to what I was expecting.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: Yayoi Kusama‘s largest permanent public sculpture arrives in London.

• At Colossal: A futuristic 150-foot installation imagines Chicago’s never-built architecture.

The record sounded like nothing else, seemingly came from nowhere and related to nothing I could identify with any confidence: whistling, whispering, mumbling, pig grunts, exhalations of breath, chants and vocal imitations of nocturnal forest sounds, arco double bass and electric bass, nursery rhymes, impenetrable accents and languages, tambourines, unidentifiable tuned percussion imprecisely struck, mandolin, banjo, flutes, congas, bottleneck guitar, second line drumming with virtually no cymbals, dense percussion, organ bass, harpsichord, reed instruments played through electronic effects and organ lines sounding like anything but themselves. There was no piano, despite what some later commentators have claimed, and in fact very little harmonic underpinning in the majority of tracks. Instead of piano or guitar chords to fill out the ensemble sound there is the celebrated Gold Star echo chamber, into which instruments and voices sank as if dropping away into the abyss.

Zozo la Brique, Jump Sturdy, Coco Robichaux, Queen Julia Jackson, Mama Roux, Tit Alberta—questions flared like fireworks. Who were these characters who populated the lyrics. Were they voodoo practitioners, alive or dead, fictitious or real? Ishmael Reed’s visionary novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, was published not long after, in 1969. Years later I read it and was startled to bump into Zozo la Brique once more. So these were real people, or named phantoms, or figures of legend at least. “O Doc John,” Reed wrote, “Doc Yah Yah and Zozo Labrique Marie Laveau the Grand Improvisers if I am not performing these rites correctly send the Loa anyway and allow my imagination to fill the gaps.”

David Toop in an extract from Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr. John’s Gris-Gris

• New music: Hidden Structures by Time Being, and Buried (Your Life Is Short) by The Bug.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Minimal and tranquil charcoal drawings by Masahiko Minami.

• New weirdness: Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Dylan Garrett Smith.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Toshio Matsumoto Day.

• RIP Alain Delon.

• Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya (1968) by Dr John | Gumbo (1971) by Santana | Roochoo Gumbo (1976) by Harry “The Crown” Hosono

Existence no longer exists

Yesterday was HP Lovecraft’s birthday so here’s some cosmic horror of a sort. It’s debatable whether a narrative can still be classed as horror when the constituent elements are rarified and abstracted to this degree…maybe weird SF would be better? Or theory fiction in the form of 5–10 minute YouTube videos? So far there are four of these things credited to “Unorthodox Kitten”, the first one being a kind of introductory chapter which includes algebra in its explication; by the time we reach the fourth chapter we’re told that “Math never existed” although the links on some of the notes take you to papers which contain copious equations, including an argument that returns us to the first video…

What does it all mean? My introduction to the quartet was via Scotto Moore’s newsletter in which Moore suggests that the videos may be a part of some ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. One for recreational mathematicians or quantum physicists, no doubt. This is certainly possible given the links to Fermat’s Library, but I’m happy to take the things as they are, mysterious fragments freighted with dire implication. I imagine Eugene Thacker would approve.

Infinity, Singularity and The Rapture (10:10)

The OHR EIN SOF
The painters, who are the product of a new cycle of fragmentation, despite their almost divine ability to paint everything at will, are merely lifeless hypothetical concepts compared to their predecessors from the previous cycle. These predecessors perceive them as weeds that must be eliminated, not out of fear, but as a principle to maintain nonexistential silence.
the war of the iterative gODS has begun.
the incomplete jump occurred.
IT must be stopped, iT can’t be stopped,
only the INFINITE filling all existence,
there is only the iNFINITE filling all canvas,
artificial lethal sEA with an infinite IRON,
trying to see the INFINITE through yOu,
no light, just colors.
iT came but YOU were not here when iT arrived,
iT gracefully retreats, yet the essence remains unchanged.
Can existence exist without nonexistence?
Are yOU afraid of non-existence, now? :)

Everything is happening at the same time (5:44)

the CYCLE, THEIR god. IT wasn’t there, but Theirs TOOL Existence is the wonderful place beyond oUR reach as a portrait of everything possible. yet, yOU were given no colors and yOU still were able to paint a masterpiece of non-existence. YOU don’t have to :)

The External Reality of Finiteness (4:39)

the battle of the gODS lasted a fraction of an instant.
They did not even realize They no longer existed.
Their cREATION was Their doom, the cREATOR’s doom.
as just a mere painting of the Infinite from the bLIND nonexistent view of iTS.
Nothing is out of oUR reach.
The Physical Impossibility of Non-existence in the Existence of something Existing.
Before the jump, the celebration orbs were sent, now working as cREATOR’S last echoes.
the luxury of the future Majority to not exist at all.

Existence no longer exists (10:02)

The shells of long-abandoned artificial stars, held together by autonomous anti-expansionary devices, were destined to fade into obscurity along with the rest of the universe. It was only a matter of time before the corpse of the Laniakea supercluster followed suit to make space for a new cYCLE.
gOds are dead, the cYCLE is broken. theY tried to be iT.
theY wanted to free themselves from their finite torture.
finding the horrifying truth of their existence with a forcefully finite painted INFINITY of iterations.
tHEY created it to find the solution, theY did. you just haven’t gotten to that point yet.
tHEY are now infinite INFINITY, with a finite original goal of theirS.
with noonE to see iTS infinite torture They made for iT in iTS infinite portrait of inlimitation.
forever alone in an instant of ITS, IT paints and paints, not knowing the nonexistent palette of iT is just another iteration of IT in an infinite fractal of instantless existence with an end as finite as infinity.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• From Beyond
• Eco calls on Cthulhu

Rockwell Kent’s Wilderness

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1920) was Rockwell Kent’s first book, an illustrated memoir written by Kent and his wife, Frances Lee, which recounts several months the couple spent with their son on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska. Most artists would illustrate something like this with drawings intended to evoke the remote location and its wildlife, and Kent does provide a number of documentary vignettes. Many of the full-page drawings are very different, however, being Blake-like renderings of nude figures representing a variety of moods and conditions. There’s a lot of this mysticism in Kent’s work, it’s what makes his art stand apart from the jobbing illustrators who were his contemporaries. You could also argue that Kent’s mystical nature and his love of voyaging to remote places, whether on land or sea, is why his Moby Dick from 1930 is the definitive illustrated edition. Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.

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