Brothers Quay – Page 8 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 192

“Chloromgonfus detectis, a dragonfly that can detect volatile pollutants.” A speculative insect by artist Vincent Fournier.

• “…a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine with the purpose of exploring the Cenozoic era…” Butterflies tied together Vladimir Nabokov’s home, science, and writing, says Mary Ellen Hannibal.

• More ghosts: Kira Cochrane on the Victorian tradition of the Christmas ghost story, and Michael Newton on why Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) remains one of the very best ghost films. No argument there.

• Should you require further persuasion, Daniel Barrow reviews I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990, an album still receiving heavy rotation in these quarters.

Swords, daggers—weapons with a blade—retained a mysterious, talismanic significance for Borges, imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honor. The short dagger had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death close, in a final embrace. As a young man, in the 1920s, Borges prowled the obscure barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he wished to know and absorb.

The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges by Michael Greenberg

• The Junky’s Christmas (1993): a seasonal tale from William Burroughs turned into a short animated film by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 101 by Jan Jelinek, and The Conjuror’s Hexmas by Seraphic Manta.

• Meet the 92-year-old Egyptian [Halim El-Dabh] who invented electronic music.

• The Mysterious Lawn Home of Frohnleiten, Austria.

• The Peacock Room at Sammezzano Castle in Italy.

• The Quay Brothers’ Universum.

• Alan Bennett‘s diary for 2013.

• Butterfly (1968) by Can | Butterfly (1974) by Herbie Hancock | Butterfly (1998) by Talvin Singh

Two sides of Liska

Et Cetera (1966).

A little more on the music of Czech soundtrack composer Zdenek Liska (1922–1983). Liska seems to stand in relation to Czech cinema as Ennio Morricone does to that of the cinema of Italy, being similarly prolific, highly regarded, and idiosyncratic to a degree that makes his work immediately recognisable. Both men could also draw on their experience outside the film world to fuel their scores: Morricone for many years was a performer with Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a group of Italian free improvisers, while Liska’s work with electro-acoustic composition and early electronic music explains the frequent eruptions in his lush orchestrations of tape effects, exaggerated echoes and other forms of artificial processing. This kind of cross-pollination doesn’t seem so surprising today but it’s striking and surprising in soundtracks from the 1960s.

Good examples of the opposite poles of Liska can be found in two of Jan Svankmajer’s early shorts. Et Cetera (1966) is one of the director’s most formal exercises, a series of crude drawings (or cut-outs) coming to life to perform a repetitive routine before being interrupted by the words “ET CETERA”. The film plays with the audience by beginning with a title card that states “The End”, and the piece as a whole could easily be screened as an endless loop. Liska’s score is a combination of fairly minimal orchestration with a variety of electro-acoustic effects which are closer to Pierre Henry or Ilhan Mimaroglu than other Eastern European composers.

Shade of Magritte: The Flat (1968).

At the opposite end of the scale there’s the score for The Flat (1968), a typical piece of Svankmajer Surrealism with an unfortunate individual locked in a room where everything, from walls to furniture, contradicts his expectations. René Magritte casts a long shadow over this one, with director Juraj Herz making a brief appearance as a bowler-hatted man carrying a chicken. Liska’s score has a driving and reverberent choral rhythm that always makes me think of Krzysztof Komeda’s similar music for Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967). For such a short film it’s a remarkable piece of orchestration. The Brothers Quay are great Liska enthusiasts, and used some of the score from The Flat (and two other Liska pieces) for their 1984 film The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, an animated portrait of the director.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Liska’s Golem
• The Cremator by Juraj Herz

The Cremator by Juraj Herz

The Cremator, a film directed by Juraj Herz, missed out on the attention given to other Czech films in the late 1960s, something the Brothers Quay note in their enthusiastic introduction to the Second Run DVD. Unlike other films made during the Czech New Wave, Herz’s film premiered in 1969 then was promptly banned, and didn’t receive a wider distribution until 1989.

It’s easy to see why the Communist authorities would have a problem with a film about a Prague crematorium director in the 1930s, a man who not only delights in his ability to efficiently turn human beings into ash in 75 minutes, but also has no problem siding with the invading Nazi regime when it becomes apparent that this will further his obsession with incineration. Rudolf Hrusínský dominates the proceedings as cremator Kopfrkingl, a stout and ebullient presence who Herz directs without resorting to any clichés of macabre or morbid characterisation. We’re with Kopfrkingl in every scene, and for the most part he remains cheerful and reasonable, whether showing new workers around the crematorium, dealing with his family (or the prostitutes he visits), or happily shopping all the Jews he knows to his collaborationist associates. A Holocaust subtext becomes overt when Kopfrkingl is asked to lend his incineration skills to a “secret project” the new authorities have in mind, an offer which sends the cremator into a fantasising rant (filmed against Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of Hell) in which he realises he might be allowed to turn many thousands of bodies into ash.

Described like this the film is a blackly comic satire at the expense of all those Czechs who collaborated with the Nazis during the war. What attracts the praise of viewers such as the Brothers Quay, and puts the film in the essential category, is the additional details of Herz’s direction. Anyone familiar with the early films of Jan Svankmajer will feel quite at home with the sequences of rapid editing, with the scenes introduced by unexpected close-ups, and with the grotesquery of a visit to a chamber of horrors which includes a special area showing bottled foetuses and the consequences of disease. The Svankmajer atmosphere is reinforced by a marvellous score from Zdenek Liska whose music can be heard in many of Svankmajer’s early films. One of these, The Flat (1968), features Juraj Herz in an acting role, while The Ossuary (1970) would be ideal for a screening with The Cremator even if Kopfrkingl would disapprove of all those unburnt bones. Liska’s score is as idiosyncratic as in the Svankmajer films, and helps augment a sense of disquiet that shades to outright horror.

There’s more: the skilful way that Herz and screenwriter Ladislav Fuks (whose novel provides the basis of the story) link otherwise disconnected scenes; Kopfrkingl’s obsession with Tibet which gradually descends into mania; and the mysterious and silent dark-haired woman whose presence in so many scenes is never explained. Given all this, and the successful way that Herz blends his outré material, I’m surprised this film isn’t better known. Herz’s later Morgiana (1972) has more of an audience, and is also worth seeking out. It’s also very different to The Cremator, to such a degree that it might be the work of a different director altogether. Both films can be found on Region 2 DVD at Second Run.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sedlec Ossuary panoramas
• The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films

Stille Nacht V: Dog Door

A short animation by the Brothers Quay which I evidently missed last year when I was searching for their uncollected works. As far as I’m aware this is the most recent addition to the Stille Nacht series, all of which were made to serve some function external to the films themselves: so Stille Nacht I was an MTV ident, II was a music video for His Name Is Alive, III was an extended trailer/preview for Institute Benjamenta, and IV was another music video for His Name Is Alive.

Number V in the series is another music video, this time for Sparklehorse’s Dog Door, a song from the group’s 2001 album It’s A Wonderful Life. Tom Waits is the guest vocalist providing his usual enigmatic wailing. The video was one of several commissioned to illustrate the album’s songs but the Quays still manage to make something that’s very much their own. As with the His Name Is Alive films there’s an atmosphere of polymorphous perversity via the two characters of a masturbating dog (or is it a fox?) and a recumbent doll, also masturbating. A slogan at the end states in French “You’re never too young for debauchery”. (In the earlier videos there was another doll and a toy rabbit.) Copies on YouTube are rough but for the moment it’s the only way you’ll see this one.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

La femme qui se poudre

The DVD collection of films by Piotr Kamler turned up last week so I’ve been alternating viewing of that with shorts by Patrick Bokanowski. The latter is less an animator than a filmmaker who uses animation or film effects to achieve his aims, together with masks and very stylised performances. Bokanowski’s early film La femme qui se poudre (The Woman Who Powders Herself, 1972) runs for 15 minutes, and is as remarkable in its own way as his feature-length L’Ange (1982). La femme qui se poudre has the same masked figures engaged in activities which often lack easy interpretation; in both films the atmosphere can shift from absurdity to the edge of horror and back again. For me what’s most remarkable about this particular short is the way it anticipates both Eraserhead and the early films of the Brothers Quay yet still seems little known. The Quays are on record as admiring L’Ange but I’ve yet to see any sign that David Lynch knew of this film in the 1970s. I’d be wary of assuming that Lynch was imitating Bokanowski, artists are quite capable of finding themselves working in similar areas independently.

Films of this nature always benefit from well-matched soundtracks: Piotr Kamler uses recordings by different electronic composers; Eraserhead had Fats Waller and the rumblings and hissings of Alan Splet; the Quays have unique compositions by Lech Jankowski. La femme qui se poudre and L’Ange have outstanding soundtracks by Michèle Bokanowski, the director’s wife and an accomplished avant-garde composer. Her work is as deserving of further attention as that of her husband. DVDs of L’Ange and a collection of Patrick Bokanowski’s short films may be purchased here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le labyrinthe and Coeur de secours
• Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler
• Brothers Quay scarcities
• Patrick Bokanowski again
• L’Ange by Patrick Bokanowski