Gustav Meyrink – { feuilleton }

Gustav Meyrink’s Orchids

The orchids that concern us here are the “sonderbare geschichten”, or strange stories, which comprise Gustav Meyrink’s first story collection from 1905. I’ve not read any of these so can’t vouch for the strangeness quotient but they inspired their illustrator to provide an accompanying collection of head and tail pieces throughout the book, many of which would have been grotesque enough to find a place in Der Orchideengarten magazine a decade later. ~~The illustrator is unfortunately uncredited so if anyone can identify the individual from the monogram (“JT”…?) please leave a comment.~~ The illustrator is Ignatius Taschner. Thanks to Lutz for the identification!

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Le Golem, 1967

There are always more Golems…

Le Golem is a 110-minute film based on Gustav Meyrink’s novel which hasn’t received as much attention as you’d expect considering the dearth of Meyrink adaptations. The production was for French TV so its obscurity may be a result of unavailability as much as anything else, television being a medium notorious for burying its own history. The DVD I was watching is an official release from INA with no subtitles (merci!), but English subs may be found online.

Meyrink’s novel isn’t an obvious choice for film or television adaptation despite the popularity of the Golem theme. His story is an uneven blend of mysticism and melodrama related via many digressions and rambling conversations. The title and the Prague setting suggest Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920), with the ghetto monster dominating the proceedings, but Meyrink’s Golem remains in the shadows (if it exists at all), being more of a symbol for the mystical and psychological challenges that beset Athanasius Pernath, the novel’s protagonist. Given all this I’m curious to know who decided to adapt the story when there’s so much about the film that would confuse an audience who hadn’t read the novel. The opening scenes move rapidly from a stylised city of the 1960s to the Prague ghetto of the past while omitting the attempts of Meyrink’s narrator to make sense of his situation. A note on the DVD states that the film was broadcast at 8:30pm on the national channel, ORTF, which makes its peculiarities even more surprising.

The director, Jean Kerchbron, spent much of his career filming adaptations of classic plays and stories for French television, ranging from adventure serials to Molière and Shakespeare. Writer Louis Pauwels was co-editor with Jacques Bergier of the popular Planète magazine, a journal of fantasy, science fiction and scientific speculation, but had little experience in the film world; Le Golem was his first feature for which he supplied the dialogue and adapted the story with Kerchbron. Pauwels and Bergier are names familiar to Anglophone readers of Fortean literature for The Morning of the Magicians (1960), their discursive treatise on “Fantastic Realism” whose success launched Planète and later gave David Bowie some ideas for lyrics. The pair refer to Meyrink in their book as a “neglected genius” prior to running an extract from one of the author’s later novels, The Green Face. Pauwels and Kerchbron manage to condense the work of the neglected genius without doing too much harm to his story, compressing some sections (a request for an explanation in a later scene is wisely rejected as “too complicated”) while omitting the overly mystical episodes that might have posed problems for a limited budget. Pauwels moves what’s left of the mysticism to Pernath’s philosophical voiceovers. Kerchbron’s direction is lively and much more elliptical than is usual for the plodding television medium. Novel and film only depart near the end when various plot threads are hastily tied together.

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Gustav Meyrink’s Prague

The Prague Ghetto, 1902, by A. Kaspara.

I looked away from him, and gazed instead at the discoloured buildings, standing there side by side in the rain like a herd of derelict, dripping animals. How uncanny and depraved they all seemed. Risen out of the ground, from the look of them, as fortuitously as so many weeds. Two of them were huddled up together against an old yellow stone wall, the last remaining vestige of an earlier building of considerable size. There they had stood for two centuries now, or it might be three, detached from the buildings around them; one of them slanting obliquely, with a roof like a retreating forehead; the one next to it jutting out like an eye-tooth.

Beneath this dreary sky they seemed to be standing in their sleep, without a trace revealed of that something hostile, something malicious, that at times seemed to permeate the very bricks of which they were composed, when the street was fllled with mists of autumn evenings that laid a veil upon their features.

In this age I now inhabit, a persistent feeling clings to me, as though at certain hours of the night and early morning grey these houses took mysterious counsel together, one with another. The walls would be subject to faint, inexplicable tremors; strange sounds would creep along the roofs and down the gutters—sounds that our human ears might register, maybe, but whose origin remained beyond our power to fathom, even had we cared to try.

(Translation by Mike Mitchell)

Watching Jiri Barta’s films again, and thinking about his unfinished adaptation of The Golem, prompted me to return to the source.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Stone Glory, a film by Jirí Lehovec
• The Face of Prague
• Josef Sudek
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Barta’s Golem

Weekend links 482

Hades II (2004) by Ana Maria Pacheco.

• I’ve been reading a lot of Angela Carter over the past few weeks so the news of her house in Clapham being awarded a blue plaque was coincidental but also timely. Related: Angela Carter Online, and The Holy Family Album (1991), “a sacrilegious take on the history of Christian painting and iconography” written and narrated by Carter. Also, we’re still some distance from Halloween but take this as a precursor: Vampirella (1976), Angela Carter’s first radio play for the BBC, starring Anna Massey as a vampire countess.

• In May this year the Dark Entries record label announced the discovery of more tapes from Patrick Cowley’s pre-disco years in the 1970s. A selection from the archive, Mechanical Fantasy Box, will be released next month, together with a book of the same name reprinting Cowley’s homoerotic journal from the period.

• More Magma (there’s always more Magma): Warren Hatter on 7 essential albums from their sprawling discography. Related: Magma on film in 1972, appearing in Moi y’en a vouloir des sous, a short but typically intense performance.

• Out in November: Paul Wegener’s adaptation of Gustav Meyrink, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920), receives a substantial blu-ray release from Eureka.

• Joe Banks’ forthcoming space-rock exegesis, Hawkwind: Days of the Underground, now has its own website.

• Mix of the week: The Stations Of Summer by Cafe Kaput.

• Photos of London’s abandoned Underground stations.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Alan Boyce grows invisible.

• Gudrun Gut‘s favourite albums.

• Tanz Der Vampire (1969) by The Vampires Of Dartmoore | Ketch Vampire (1976) by Devon Irons | Vampires (1999) by Pet Shop Boys

Six Into One: The Prisoner File

Patrick McGoohan.

Network DVD had a sale recently so I finally capitulated and bought the blu-ray set of The Prisoner which I finished watching this weekend. The picture quality is so outstanding it might have been made yesterday, and many of the extras are also essential for Prisoner obsessives, not least a restored print of the original cut of the first episode, something that was believed lost for years.

Episode 9: Checkmate.

There’s no need to enthuse about the series when I’ve done so already; this time round I’ll note that while the Cold War background is thoroughly outmoded some of the themes of particular episodes seem more relevant than ever. The model of total surveillance seen in the Village has for some time seemed to be one that Western governments and tech corporations would love to emulate. (“The whole world as the Village?” asks The Prisoner. “That’s my hope,” says Number 2.) The Prisoner isn’t the only drama to deal with authoritarian control, of course, but it also deals with the soft tyranny of closed communities, ideology and group-think. Episode 12, A Change of Mind, concerns a process whereby disobedient Villagers are confronted by their peers, declared “unmutual” then bundled off for corrective therapy; when they return they repent their antisocial crimes in public. In 1967 such a scenario would have seemed reminiscent either of McCarthyite America, or Soviet Russia and Maoist China; in 2015 you can be declared “unmutual” for minor infractions every day on the internet, and find yourself rounded upon by a sanctimonious horde.

The allegorical and symbolic qualities of The Prisoner have kept the series fresh for almost 50 years while the character who launched the genre that gave rise to series—James Bond—has required several overhauls in order to keep up with changing times. Bond may bicker with his superiors but he’s always been a tool of the status quo, an agent of the Control virus in Burroughsian terms. In episode 8, The Dance of the Dead, The Prisoner is lectured by a judge in a kangaroo court on the importance of “the rules”. “Without rules, we have anarchy,” she says. The Prisoner, who happens to be dressed in a Bondian dinner jacket, replies “Hear, hear.”

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