{film} – Page 348 – { feuilleton }

Davy Jones

No, not the dreadful singer from The Monkees but he of the undersea locker and also the new villain in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Bill Nighy plays this splendidly-designed character, with the assistance of some CGI to get those tentacles working. I’ve still not seen the first film but the look of this makes me more interested in the series as a whole.

Aside from William Hope Hodgson‘s sea tales, the pirates plus voodoo/Sargasso Sea angle has rarely been exploited properly in fiction. Tim Powers had a go in On Stranger Tides but the results fell rather flat. In film there’s been hardly anything apart from the Hammer oddity The Lost Continent (1968), based on Uncharted Seas, a Dennis Wheatley potboiler that plundered Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories. The new Pirates film may be about to amend this situation; Davy Jones looks like something dreamed up after a heavy diet of Hodgson and HP Lovecraft.

Early Kubrick

Before Stanley Kubrick’s first self-financed feature, Fear and Desire, there came two documentary shorts: Flying Padre and Day of the Fight. The latter is probably the best, not least for the way it connects to the noir ambience of the period (boxing dramas such as Body and Soul and The Set-Up) and points towards Kubrick’s own noir excursions, Killer’s Kiss (featuring a boxer as the lead character) and The Killing. Thanks to the miracle of the interweb you can now see this early Stanley gem for yourself in a reasonable copy, not crappy YouTube grain-o-vision. Grab it while you can.

a dvd-r recently arrived from an anonymous source. upon hitting ‘play’ i found it was none other than stanley kubrick’s 1951 debut ‘day of the fight’.

i initially considered taking it viral, but decided against that because i thought such anonymity would be an insult, modern american independent filmmaking began here. kubrick didn’t have dvds to study or final cut pro. at the age of 22, he taught himself and did it. and invented the trajectory of the kid who scraps it together and rises to greatness.

Day of the Fight (116MB mov)

Dunwich

Christian Matzke writes to inform me that his short film, Dunwich, based on two HP Lovecraft stories, The Dunwich Horror and The Terrible Old Man, is in production, and that he and co-director Sarah Tarling used my Dunwich Horror adaptation as inspiration. I’m very pleased to hear this, of course, and look forward to seeing how their prequel to the events in Lovecraft’s story turn out. The film’s website has more information.

Hollywood goes lubki

The Terminator

The lubki (sing. lubok), simple printed pictures coloured by hand and often called broadsides, popular prints, folk prints, folk etchings, or folk engravings, are a vivid and fascinating page in the history of Russian culture. Folk prints were known in many other countries (in the Far East as early as the eighth century and in Western Europe from the fifteenth); in Russia they appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century and survived until the beginning of the twentieth.

The Matrix

Impossible to trace the provenance of these things since the page they’re from is in Russian but they’re hilarious. I still haven’t worked out all the movies they’re supposed to be depicting but that’s part of the fun. Would be nice to have a translation of the inscriptions also.

Via BibliOdyssey.

Quite a performance

As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles.

Quite a performance
review by Barry Miles

DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp

THERE IS A PERSISTENT rumour that after shooting himself in the head the filmmaker Donald Cammell lived on in a delirious, euphoric state for 45 minutes. The story is that he asked his wife China to place a mirror so that he could watch himself die and said: “Do you see the picture of Borges”? This is a reference to the death scene in Performance, his best known film, when the gangster Chas (played by James Fox) shoots the rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger).

In a profoundly shocking sequence, the camera follows the bullet into his brain, only to find there a photograph of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges who is much quoted in the film. This is but one of the many myths surrounding Cammell that these authors debunk — he died the instant the .38 bullet entered his skull.

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