A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Mid-Sagital Skull Bisection (2007).
Hand casted acrylic resin with vintage watch parts.
Articulated Singer Insect (2005).
Antique mechanical parts and vintage Singer sewing attachment.
Lots of other great creations at the artist’s site. Via Boing Boing.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture
• Insect Lab
• The art of Jessica Joslin
No, not Pirates of the Caribbean III although that film will be with us soon and is certain to contain at least one of the above ingredients. The dubious delights of exploitation cinema have been put back on the map recently by Grindhouse, the double feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, but garish melodrama is nothing new in the film world. Silent films had more than their share of sex, violence, monsters and maniacs, and many featured a degree of nudity that wouldn’t be seen again until the late Sixties, thanks to the Hays Code. “Everything in life is exploitation,” Barbara Stanwyck was told in Baby Face (1933) and she went on to prove it by sleeping her way to the top in a film considered by moral guardians of the time to be so scurrilous that its uncensored print remained buried until 2005.
These wonderful hand-tinted plates from the George Eastman archive are lantern slides used to display information about coming attractions, and would have been screened between features as a kind of motionless trailer. The movie trailer as we know it today had been around since about 1910 but it wasn’t until the late Twenties that the regular production and screening of trailers took off. Lantern slides were a cheap way of keeping audiences attentive while the next feature was being prepared.
Cannibals of the South Seas was a 1912 documentary by Osa and Martin E. Johnson and it’s a good bet it was a lot more prosaic than this slide implies. The Isle of Lost Ships seems from the picture to be a sea-faring horror tale but turns out to be a 1923 adventure story based on a novel by one Crittenden Marriott and directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of the great horror and noir director, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People [1942], Out of the Past [1947], Night of the Demon [1957]). This first film is now as lost as the becalmed ships of its title but it was remade as an early talkie in 1929 and that film still exists somewhere. Film remakes are also nothing new. The tentacles and Sargasso setting made me suspect Mr Marriott had purloined an idea or two from William Hope Hodgson, writer of a series of excellent horror stories concerning the Sargasso Sea and (in his fiction) its population of tentacled abominations; Dennis Wheatley certainly stole from Hodgson, as I’ve mentioned before. But Marriott’s novel, The Isle of Dead Ships, and the films based upon it, prove to be less interesting than the slide promises. And so we learn a primary rule of exploitation cinema that was well-established even then: promise much but don’t always deliver.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Seamen in great distress eat one another
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones
Arthur II: The Resurrection
The Once and Future Magazine.
Gary Oldman as Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987).
Ken: At least you can say you’ve sat in the same chair as TS Eliot.
Joe: Yes, I’m never going to wipe my bum again.
Gay playwright Joe Orton receives a welcome renewal of attention this month with a showing of films at the ICA in London and the 20th anniversary re-release of Prick Up Your Ears, the great Orton biopic by Alan Bennett and Stephen Frears. Gary Oldman is marvellously sexy (and funny) as Orton in Frears’ film, Alfred Molina is equally good as his increasingly neurotic lover, Kenneth Halliwell (who eventually murdered Orton before killing himself), and there’s decent casting throughout, with Vanessa Redgrave playing Peggy Ramsay and Julie Walters hilarious as Orton’s mother.
Prick Up Your Ears was originally Halliwell’s title for a script Orton was writing for the Beatles (“…much too good a title to waste on a film,” said Orton.) That film idea, variously titled Up Against It and 8 Arms To Hold You, was deemed “too gay” by McCartney and co., not least because Orton had all four Beatles sleeping in the same bed. He also wrote that “…the boys, in my script, have been caught in flagrante, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison and committed adultery. And the script isn’t finished yet.” Now you know why the third Beatles film was an animated one.
A feature in The Guardian examining Orton’s legacy, as well as the film, has this to say of Prick Up Your Ears:
it was the first mainstream British film to depict the gay underworld of West End toilets and sign language that existed in an age when homosexuality was still illegal.
And much of it was filmed on location in Orton’s haunts. Every time I’ve been through Islington tube station I think of the scene where Gary Oldman picks up a guy he’s been eying in the lift.
Orton had the misfortune to die in 1967, the year homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain. Well… decriminalised so long as you were both 21, not members of the Armed Forces and there was no one else in the room with you; Orton could have made a play out of such farcical restrictions. But the film makes it clear that the existence of a stupid law—which caused the downfall of another playwright, Oscar Wilde—did nothing to prevent him enjoying himself. The Guardian has another quote from him:
[The police] interfere far too much with private morals—whether people are having it off in the backs of cars or smoking marijuana, or doing the interesting little things one does.
They still do, Joe.
The web doesn’t serve Orton’s memory very well; the links below are some of the more interesting finds.
• An interview from June, 1967
• Joe Orton at the BBC Sound Archive
• Joe Orton at GLBTQ
• The Disappearing Gentlemens’ Lavatories of Old London
(A hymn to the public convenience by Dudley Sutton, dedicated to Joe Orton.)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passion play
• The Poet and the Pope
• Please Mr. Postman
• All you need is…
• Queer Noises
top: Apocalypse Now (1979), Camelot (1967).
bottom: The Comfort of Strangers (1990), The Black Stallion (1979).
Bob Peak was one of the top Hollywood poster artists of the Sixties and Seventies. His site has a fairly extensive gallery which includes sketches and unused artwork. Movie poster art now is invariably the product of anonymous Photoshop artists and all the poorer for losing this kind of individual touch.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton}
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters