{film} – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Oz: The Tin Woodsman’s Dream, a film by Harry Smith

Ubuweb slipped into archival stasis earlier this year, which means that everything uploaded there will remain as it is but we won’t be seeing anything new. I don’t know when this Harry Smith short was posted there but it’s one I haven’t seen before. (There’s also a copy at Rarefilmm where I evidently missed it.) Oz, The Tin Woodsman’s Dream was made in 1967, and is one of the fragments of a much longer film that would have adapted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using a similar cutout animation technique to that deployed by Smith for Heaven and Earth Magic. The adaptation remained unfinished after Smith’s backer died but the extant pieces (including another self-contained short, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz) show him working in widescreen 35mm for the first time.

All of Smith’s films were given opus-style numbers: Heaven and Earth Magic is no. 12, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz is no. 13, and The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is no. 16. As with the films of Len Lye and other animation pioneers, Smith’s early shorts are often given a “psychedelic” label even when they predate the popular use of the term. The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is one of those where the psychedelic quotient becomes overt, comprising a few minutes of animated play with the title character and a small dog, followed by many minutes of kaleidoscoped film footage that’s more redolent of its period than Smith’s other films. I’m happy to watch the kaleidoscopics but this is the kind of thing that any number of film-makers might easily do. The Woodsman, the dog and the other characters are inhabitants of Smith’s inner landscape, as are the fly agaric mushrooms that appear here and in his other films. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them. There’s no soundtrack for this film so you can either watch the gesticulations in a Stan Brakhage silence or find 15 minutes of music to match the visuals.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Number 10: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Number 11: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Meeting Harry Smith by Drew Christie
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith
• Harry Smith revisited
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991

Weekend links 731

The Electrical Experimenter, Vol. 5, no. 1. April, 1918. Electrical cover art by Vincent Lynch.

• Coming soon from Rocket 88 Books: Electricity and Ghosts, a collection of art and graphic design by John Foxx/Dennis Leigh. The book itself has been designed with a regular Foxx collaborator, Jonathan Barnbrook. Last year I put together a post collecting Dennis Leigh’s book covers.

• At Strange Flowers: Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, their Expressionist dance costumes, and their short, tempestuous lives. There’s more about the couple’s costumes and dances here.

• New music: Road to Mandalay by Laurie Anderson; Panorama (French Soundtracks & Rarities) by Various Artists; The Passage Of Time by Cosmos In Collision.

• At Public Domain Review: Raffaele Mainella’s illustrations for Nos Invisibles (1907), a Spiritualist text by Clotilde Briatte (writing as Charles d’Orinio).

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2024 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• John Cale’s favourite music. Also The Records That Made Me by Carsten Nicolai/Alva Noto.

• The mysterious mirrored monolith returns.

• RIP Donald Sutherland.

• BBC Sound Effects.

• Electricity (1967) by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band | Electricity (1980) by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Electricity (1995) by Pet Shop Boys

Mona Lisa, Enigma, Breathing

Breathing (1980).

Three short films by Toshio Matsumoto, a director best known for his debut feature Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). Matsumoto made many more short film than he did long ones, four of which were featured here a few years ago. His films of the 1970s are replete with vivid colours, rapid edits, processed visuals and electronic soundtracks. The first two films in the trio follow this form.

Mona Lisa (1973)

The world’s most famous painting provides a stage for a succession of effects created with the Scanimate video synthesizer. No credit for the electronic score.

Enigma (1978)

More Scanimate effects only this time the results are very abstract, a series of spheres and vortices. Again, no credit for the electronic score.

Breathing (1980)

At 25 minutes, the longest and most fascinating of the three films. Breathing also employs video effects but very minimally applied, being a meditation on the “breathing” of the natural world seen in three separate sections that show clouds drifting over mountains, trees moving in the wind and waves breaking against a shore. Each section also features an appearance by dancer Hiroko Horiuchi who strikes a succession of wraithlike poses. Watching this one I was continually distracted by the remarkable soundtrack. “This sounds like the music from Kwaidan,” I thought, and sure enough, the music is credited to Toru Takemitsu, composer of the score for Masaki Kobayashi’s ghost film. Is this original music or did Matsumoto simply lift sections of the soundtrack from the earlier film? I can’t say, but the music combined with the presence of the sinister dancing woman, who might be a cousin of Kobayashi’s lethal Woman of the Snow, is enough to make the whole film seem like an excised episode from the Kwaidan suite.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Phantom, a film by Toshio Matsumoto
• White Hole, a film by Toshio Matsumoto
• Atman, a film by Toshio Matsumoto
• Metastasis, a film by Toshio Matsumoto

Phaeton: The Son of the Sun

The animation collection at the Internet Archive has been improving of late, with a wider variety of uploads being added to the already copious quantities of American cartoons and Japanese anime. Last week I drew attention to Jan Lenica’s Adam 2. This week it’s the turn of Phaeton: The Son of the Sun (1972), a short Russian film written and directed by Vasiliy Livanov which is a curious combination of ancient myth and science fiction. Phaeton in Greek mythology was the son of Helios the sun god, a minor deity whose demise is related in the first part of Livanov’s film. The son takes his father’s fiery chariot for a ride across the sky after being warned about the damage the chariot’s flames may cause if it strays to close to the world below or too far from it. Phaeton’s poor horsemanship provokes a spate of natural disasters until Zeus ends the ride with a fatal thunderbolt.

This tale of cosmological destruction informs the “Phaeton hypothesis”, a 17th-century theory which sought to explain the existence of the Solar System’s asteroid belt as the remains of a destroyed planet, a body which a German linguist, Johann Gottlieb Radlof, named after the doomed god. The second part of Livanov’s film concerns a group of cosmonauts being launched into the asteroids in order to investigate the theory. The film is too short to properly explore the subject but the discussion detours briefly into ancient astronaut territory; Livanov had evidently been reading one or more of Erich von Däniken’s specious books which were topping the bestseller lists in 1972. One of the “astronaut” figures seen during the explication is the same Japanese figurine that von Däniken reproduces in Chariots of the Gods?, a book whose title echoes the theme of Livanov’s film. Short as it is, Phaeton: The Son of the Sun is nicely styled, and features the voice of Nikolay Burlyaev, an actor familiar to Tarkovsky aficionados as the boy in Ivan’s Childhood.

(Note: The Internet Archive has English subtitles for this one as a separate text file. You can get these to work by saving them in a folder along with the film file then changing the subtitle extension from txt to srt. Video applications such as VLC autoload subtitles if they’re stored in the film folder with the correct extension and a name that matches that of the film file.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Crank book covers
• The Heat of a Thousand Suns by Pierre Kast

Weekend links 728

Composition: Cones and Spirals (1929) by Edward Alexander Wadsworth.

• “Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know.” John Seamon on the vicissitudes of memory, and how actors remember their lines.

• “Mary McCarthy described it as ‘Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, and do-it-yourself novel’, among other things.” Mary Gaitskill on the pleasures and difficulties of Nabokov’s greatest novel, Pale Fire. Also a reminder that I ought to read it again.

• New music: Movement, Before All Flowers by Max Richter; A Thread, Silvered And Trembling by Drew McDowall; Unspeakable Visions by Michel Banabila.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ulysses by James Joyce.

• The latest cartographical design from Herb Lester Associates is Facts Concerning HP Lovecraft and His Environs.

• At the Daily Heller: A look back at the craze for poster stamps.

• Mix of the week: A tuning mix for The Wire by Tashi Wada.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Michael Lonsdale Day.

• Annie Hogan’s favourite music.

• Clockworks (1975) by Laurie Spiegel | Tin Toy Clockwork Train (1985) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear | Clockwork Horoscope (2008) by Belbury Poly