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Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse, a film by Henri Chomette

The Paris of 1925 seen through the camera of actor, director, screenwriter and brother of René Clair, Henri Chomette. Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse is one of Chomette’s earliest films, made before he graduated to features, and while it may be experimental in style it’s not at all amateurish. Many experimental films of the silent era are little more than arty home movies, filled with brief shots, abrupt edits and amateur theatrics. Chomette’s film is much more controlled, two minutes of abstraction created by mirrors and glass objects followed by a rapid journey through the Paris Métro then along the river Seine. The Métro journey features a couple of very skillful edits, like the moment when the train plunges down another tunnel to emerge in the middle of the river. Run this with a prestissimo score by Philip Glass and you’d have a French precursor to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paris Qui Dort by René Clair
• Entr’acte by René Clair

French fables by Japanese hands

The fin-de-siècle interest in Japanese art is given a twist by four small books in which a group of Japanese artists illustrate well-known fables for a French readership. The books were commissioned circa 1890 by Pierre Barboutau, an art collector who specialised in Japanese arts and crafts. Barboutau’s volumes would have been intended to broaden the interest in Japanese art which had been fuelled a few years before by Le Japon Artistique, a magazine edited by a German art dealer with a business in Paris, Siegfried Bing. Le Japon Artistique was criticised for its inaccuracies by Japanese readers but it did feature colour reproductions of prints which otherwise might only be seen as monochrome reproductions. (Bing’s Paris shop, L’Art Nouveau, is also historically significant for giving a name to the predominant mode of fin-de-siècle design.)

Barboutau’s books take the French interest in Japonisme a stage further, allowing readers to experience familiar stories through Japanese eyes. Each book was printed in a limited run on Japanese paper. Of the four, I’m only familiar with the fables of La Fontaine where the emphasis on animal characters in rural settings means there are few explicitly Japanese details. Some of the landscapes are more Japanese than French, however, especially the drawing that includes a Fuji-like mountain in the background. There’s also a drawing of a group of foxes where the background details of a shrine and torii gate seem intended more for Japanese readers. Foxes in Japan are associated with the Shinto deity, Inari, to a degree that fox statues are a common site in Shinto shrines. None of this is mentioned in the book but if you’re aware of the significance it adds an additional layer to the cultural intersections.

All these books may be seen at Gallica, a valuable site whose interface is still woefully bad, especially on mobile devices. My advice, as always, is to download the PDFs.

Choix de fables de La Fontaine, Tome 1 (1894)

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Weekend links 738

How They Met Themselves (1860) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

• At Igloo magazine: Justin Patrick Moore interviews inventor and electronic music composer Don Slepian about his life and work.

• At The Washington Post (archived link): Michael Dirda in praise of weird fiction, horror tales and stories that unsettle us.

• At The Daily Heller: Tina Touli’s explosively twirling typography. Steven Heller’s font of the month is Doublethink.

• At Colossal: Dreams and memories form and dissipate in Tomohiro Inaba’s delicate iron sculptures.

• At Unquiet Things: Jerome Podwil’s captivating cover art.

• New music: Strangeness Oscillation by 137.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Craig Baldwin’s Day.

• Brìghde Chaimbeul’s favourite albums.

• Penguin Series Design

• Double Image (1971) by Joe Zawinul | Double Flash (1999) by Leftfield | Double Rocker (2001) by Stereolab

Terra Incognita, a film by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer

I was going to mention this one a few weeks ago but it vanished from Vimeo for a while following some kind of copyright complaint. It’s good to find it returned. Terra Incognita is 20 minutes of animated fantasy that’s very reminiscent of René Laloux’s cult SF films Fantastic Planet (1973) and Gandahar (1988), also the Brizzi Brothers’ Fracture (1977). Much as I’d like to see another feature in the Laloux manner, something spun from the art styles of Métal Hurlant, short films are the most you can realistically hope for outside Japan. (There is another Caza-designed feature, The Rain Children, but like the Druillet-designed TV series, Bleu, l’enfant de la Terre, it’s a simpler story aimed at a juvenile audience.)

Terra Incognita was directed by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer, with the pair also working on the backgrounds and storyboards. The first part of the film is a creation myth which establishes the genesis of a mysterious island somewhere on the Earth whose inhabitants are four prematurely aged, immortal men. The quartet share the island with the blue giant who created them, together with a variety of unusual flora and fauna which includes luminescent psychotropic mushrooms. The accidental death of their creator leaves the islanders marooned in a world they were only beginning to learn about. The film is meticulously crafted, with an open-ended narrative that avoids melodrama when the men are faced with incursions from the outside world. And there’s a further connection to 70s’ fantasy in the soundtrack which incorporates a piece from Bo Hansson’s prog-synthesizer album, Music Inspired By Lord Of The Rings. Films like this require so much creative effort that you can’t expect more of the same any time soon, but I’m curious to see what Dexter & Kjaer may do in the future.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arzak Rhapsody
• Fracture by Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi
• The Captive, a film by René Laloux

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting presents a mixture of handwriting styles, from many corners of the world, dating from the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) to the present day. The tendency toward illegibility exists in many cultural traditions, and in this anthology we intend to offer a representative overview of the different styles, and, more specifically, the contemporary developments in asemic handwriting. We deliberately avoided the adjectives “unreadable” and “illegible” in the title of this anthology, because the question of legibility and possible transference of meaning is precisely what is at stake in these writing traditions. These writings are not completely “meaningless” or “illegible,” but challenge our common notions of reading, writing, and the meaningfulness of language. Therefore we prefer the adjective “asemic.” In the late 20th century, this word was handed down from the poet John Byrum to another poet named Jim Leftwich to one of the editors of this anthology.

All writing is “asemic” to some degree, to those who can’t read or understand a particular alphabet. Many of the one hundred examples collected here by Tim Gaze and Michael Jacobson are unorthodox writings created for artistic purposes, as the editors note later in their book’s introduction:

…visual artists from movements as far apart as Dada, Russian Futurism, Surrealism, CoBrA, Tachisme, Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Gutai, and Lettrisme have created asemic handwritten forms.

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting was compiled in 2013, with each creator being given a single page. Aside from the introduction, the collection isn’t very informative. There are no dates applied to each piece, so you won’t know from looking at a single page that Max Ernst, for example, incorporated asemic forms into his paintings as well as his prints. The book is best taken as an introduction to a field of creativity too often absorbed by general art or literary history, and a spur towards further research.

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