Edgar Allan Poe – Page 10

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983) is the third and best of three Gothic shorts made by Jan Svankmajer, the two earlier works being Castle of Otranto (1973–79) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1980). Svankmajer combines Poe’s famous tale of Inquistion torment with A Torture by Hope by Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and unlike Corman and co. reduces the story to a stark and wordless first-person ordeal in the face of clanking, fire-breathing engines of destruction. Poe’s story lets the narrator off the hook with a deus ex machina intervention, something Svankmajer evidently felt unable to swallow, hence the Villiers coda.

All the above works, and much more besides, can be found on the BFI’s collection of Svankmajer’s short films. Another short adaptation of the Poe story, The Pit (1962) by Edward Abraham, will appear next month as an extra on the eagerly-awaited DVD/BR debut of Schalcken the Painter.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Two sides of Liska
• The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer

Weekend links 183

La table qui tourne (1943) by Robert Doisneau.

In [Gödel, Escher, Bach], Hofstadter was calling for an approach to AI concerned less with solving human problems intelligently than with understanding human intelligence—at precisely the moment that such an approach, having borne so little fruit, was being abandoned. His star faded quickly. He would increasingly find himself out of a mainstream that had embraced a new imperative: to make machines perform in any way possible, with little regard for psychological plausibility.

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think by James Somers.

Whenever the latest pronouncements about the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence are being trotted out I wonder what Douglas Hofstadter would have to say on the matter. You don’t hear much about Hofstadter despite his having been involved for decades in artificial intelligence research. One reason is that he’s always been concerned with the deep and difficult problems posed by intelligence and consciousness, subjects which don’t make for sensational, Kurzweilian headlines. Hofstadter’s essays on AI (and many other topics) in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985) are essential reading. James Somers’ lengthy profile for The Atlantic is a welcome reappraisal.

• The end of October brings the spooky links: When Edward Gorey illustrated Dracula | Paula Marantz Cohen on Edgar Allan Poe | Yasmeen Khan revisits Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu | Roger Luckhurst on horror from the Gothics to the present day, and Michael Newton on Gothic cinema.

• Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore is a biography of the Northampton magus by Lance Parkin. The author talks about his book here, and also here where if you look carefully you can see my Lovecraft book on his shelf.

• A crop of Halloween mixes: Boo, Forever by Jescie | Samhain Seance 2: Hex with a Daemon by The Ephemeral Man | Wizards Tell Lies & The Temple of Doom by The Curiosity Pipe | Radio Belbury’s Programme 11.

• The Book of the Lost is an album by Emily Jones & The Rowan Amber Mill presenting music from imaginary British horror films. Release is set for Halloween. More details here.

• Laura Allsop on Derek Jarman’s sketchbooks. Jarman’s Black Paintings are currently showing at the Wilkinson Gallery, London.

• Magick is Freedom! Existence Is Unhappiness: Barney Bubbles vs. Graham Wood.

• Soho Dives, Soho Divas: Rian Hughes on sketching London’s burlesque artists.

• Jenny Diski on the perennial problem of owning too many books.

• Equus through the years by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

• Virgin Records: 40 Years of Disruptions

• At BibliOdyssey: Chromatic Wood Type

• Witches at Pinterest

• The Witch (1964) by The Sonics | My Girlfriend Is A Witch (1968) by October Country | You Must Be A Witch (1968) by The Lollipop Shoppe

Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe

Halloween approaches. Edgar Allan Poe illustrators are legion—some of the better ones appeared here a couple of years ago (see the links below)—but I’d not seen these lithographs by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945) before. Steiner-Prag was an ideal illustrator for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem so it’s a pleasure to see him addressing Poe’s poems. All the prints are from a collection at the Google Art Project which includes one of the Golem illustrations plus a set for The Tales of Hoffmann.

Spirits of the Dead.

The Sleeper.

To Zante.

The Raven.

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Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings

House of Usher (1960): Vincent Price and Mark Damon.

This post ought to have followed the one in January about the sinister portraits glimpsed in Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. I still don’t know who was responsible for those paintings but the artist who created the equally outré family portraits in Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960) was credited for his work. Burt Shonberg (1933–1977) was a friend of Corman’s who had to produce the six portraits at speed (the entire film was shot in fifteen days) so the results are sketchier than they might have been in a production with a bigger budget. I always liked the anachronism of these pictures, the way they look very much of their time; the effect is a jarring one that adds a note of much-needed strangeness to Corman’s otherwise sparse interiors.

Shonberg was a curious artist, the gallery page on his website shows a progression from Picasso-style early works in the 1950s to his own brand of mystical psychedelia. Some of his paintings from around the time of House of Usher have that stained-glass fragmentation one finds in the work of Leo & Diane Dillon from the same period. Shonberg’s biography says Corman used more paintings in The Premature Burial (1962) but I don’t have a copy of that to hand and haven’t found any examples. There’s also the detail that Shonberg was involved for a while with Marjorie Cameron, herself an artist who appeared as the mysterious “Water Witch” in another AIP production, Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, a year after House of Usher.

Continue reading “Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings”

Whirlpools

This was a surprise. My first thought on seeing the cover for Ethel Archer’s “book of verse”, The Whirlpool, was that its swirling waters were borrowed from Harry Clarke’s typically astonishing illustration for A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe. The problem there is that the Ethel Archer book was published in 1911 while Clarke’s first collection of Poe illustrations didn’t appear until 1919. The cover for the Archer book was by Ethel’s husband, Eugene Wieland, the publisher of Aleister Crowley’s Equinox periodical/occult treatise, and also the publisher of this volume. Crowley provided an introduction to the book. Given these occult associations it’s possible that Harry Clarke might have seen a copy of this. Clarke’s work appeared in Austin Spare’s own occult periodical, The Golden Hind, and he wasn’t averse to producing occult art of his own. This isn’t to say that Clarke necessarily took anything from the Archer book—sometimes a whirlpool is just a whirlpool—but it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.

There’s a copy of Ethel Archer’s book currently on sale at eBay, together with some original drawings by Eugene Wieland. The cover above came via John Eggeling’s Flickr page of rare book covers. The Poe illustration is via 50 Watts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism