Jan Svankmajer – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 745

Eros (1905) by Julius Kronberg.

• At the Internet Archive (for a change): All 15 episodes (with English subs) of Návštevníci (The Visitors, 1983/84), a Czech comedy TV serial about time travellers visiting the present day. Directed by Jindrich Polák, better known for the serious science fiction of Ikarie XB-1 and another time-travelling comedy, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea. The main interest for this viewer is the involvement of Jan Svankmajer who creates collage animation for the first episode while animating food and other objects in later episodes. This was the period when Svankmajer was mainly working as an effects man at the Barrandov Studios after the Communist authorities had put a stop to his film-making. Even with Svankmajer’s involvement I’m not sure I can endure 450 minutes of Czech wackiness but it’s good to keep finding these things.

• “…for the melomaniac who wasn’t in and around Bristol in the 1980s or 90s, the term [trip hop] simply opens the door to a whole universe of music that blurs the lines between so many styles in a way that is still compelling three decades on.” Vanessa Okoth-Obbo on the 30th anniversary of Protection by Massive Attack.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Moon’s Milk: Images By Jhonn Balance, compiled by Peter Christopherson & Andrew Lahman.

For some in Ireland, [The Outcasts] is a dim but impressive memory, glimpsed on late-night television during its only broadcast in 1984. The Outcasts over the decades became a piece of Irish cinema legend, less seen and more peppered into conversations revolving around obscure celluloid. The Irish Film Institute describes this film as “folk horror”, a phrase I find too liberally applied these days to just about anything featuring sticks, rocks, and goats or set in the countryside. The Outcasts does not necessarily strive for the ultimate unified effect of horror. Instead, this film is of a rarer breed, more akin to Penda’s Fen (1974) in its otherworldly ruminations. I’ve come to prefer the phrase “folk revelation” as perhaps a more accommodating description for these sorts of stories. Whatever the case, I hope you get to see this remarkable film.

Brian Showers discussing the contents of The Green Book 24, newly published by Swan River Press. The Outcasts has just been released on blu-ray by the BFI

• Still casting a spell: Broadcast’s 20 best songs – ranked!

• New music: Earthly Pleasures by Jill Fraser.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: John Carpenter‘s Day.

• RIP Maggie Smith.

• The Visitors (1981) by ABBA | Two Different Visitors (2003) by World Standard & Wechsel Garland | We Have Visitors (2010) by Pye Corner Audio

Magic Lantern: A Film about Prague

There are many documentary films about the city of Prague but Magic Lantern is the only one written and presented by playwright Michael Frayn. Very good it is too, a personal view of the city’s political and cultural history which takes in the usual names and subjects: Rabbi Loew and his Golem, Emperor Rudolf II, Rudolf’s alchemists, artists and scholars, photographer Josef Sudek, the ubiquitous Franz Kafka, puppets, automata, and so on. While Frayn discusses the Communist and post-Communist periods there’s a brief clip of Jan Svankmajer’s The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia.

Frayn’s film was directed by Dennis Marks, and broadcast in 1993 as part of the BBC’s long-running Omnibus strand. (There’s a further Svankmajer connection in the person of executive producer Keith Griffiths whose Koninck company produced this film at a time when they were also helping Svankmajer make his features.) Magic Lantern wasn’t the only film that Marks and Frayn made together, and not their first metropolitan essay either. Imagine a City Called Berlin (1974) is a portrait of the former capital of Germany during its Cold War isolation; there’s also The Mask of Gold: A Film about Vienna (1977), and Jerusalem: A Personal History (1984), all of which may be seen at The Dennis Marks Archive. My complaints about YouTube are copious enough to paper the walls of the Hradcany, but the site is at its best when it provides this kind of haven for television history that would be impossible to find elsewhere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Golem, 1967
• Gustav Meyink’s Prague
• Stone Glory, a film by Jirí Lehovec
• The Face of Prague
• Josef Sudek
• Liska’s Golem
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague

Phosphor: A Surrealist Luminescence

In the mail this week, a living Surrealist journal from the Leeds Surrealist Group. I ordered the entire run of Phosphor and received a couple of bonus extras (thanks!). Among the contents, issue 3 has an interview with (and article by) the great Jan Svankmajer, there are various pieces about other Czech Surrealists, also an obituary for Franklin Rosemont in issue 2 with a photo that shows him meeting Bugs Bunny. If the last detail is perplexing, see the previous post.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine

From One Dough (1996) by Martin Stejskal, Jan Svankmajer, Eva Svankmajerová.

From A Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre (Eyre Methuen, 1974):

Exquisite corpse. The most famous of the surrealist games takes its name from the opening sentence that materialized: “Le cadavre—exquis—boira—le vin—nouveau” (1925) (The exquisite corpse—will drink—the new wine). It was produced by five players writing in turn subject, adjective, verb, object, complement, each folding over the paper so that the next player could not see what had been already written. The violent whiff of strangeness and the droll effects obtained by these verbal collages reappeared in the drawn “exquisite corpses” in which Surrealist poets and painters often combined. Despite the fact that each contribution—especially in the case of painters—is relatively identifiable, the total effect (mostly in the form of a “personage”) results from the combined elements. In this, the “exquisite corpse” can claim to have scored a victory for collective invention over individual invention and over the “signature”.

Nude (1926–27) by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray.

Exquisite Corpse (1927) by André Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, Max Morise, André Breton, Yves Tanguy.

Continue reading “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”

Forbidden reproductions

La Reproduction Interdite (1937) by René Magritte.

English translations of the title of Magritte’s painting vary, with Not to be Reproduced and Reproduction Prohibited being two of the most popular. I prefer Reproduction Forbidden, a title that sounds more serious, and with a use reinforced by Forbidden Games, the English title of a René Clement feature film, Jeux Interdits. Whatever the translation, this is one of Magritte’s most popular inventions, one that people like recreating.

The Flat (1968).

Jan Svankmajer’s short has more justification for copying the painting than some of the examples which follow. Svankmajer and Eva Svankmajerová were members of the long-running Prague Surrealist group, and The Flat is very much a Surrealist piece, with a man trapped inside a room where none of the mundane objects behave as he expects. In addition to the overt Magritte quote there’s an appearance by Svankmajer’s film-directing friend, Juraj Herz, as a bowler-hatted man carrying a chicken.

Sabotage (1975) by Black Sabbath.

The front cover is the Magritte idea but with them all facing away from the mirror.

One Of The Boys (1977) by Roger Daltrey.

One of the things that makes Magritte’s original work so well is the blank space in the mirror which directs attention to the impossible reflection. I suspect that if design group Hipgnosis had been asked to imitate the painting they would have done something similar, avoiding the lacklustre effect achieved here by photographer Graham Hughes. Hipgnosis acknowledged their own debt to Magritte in the title of their first book, Walk Away René in 1978, and often constructed whole sets for photo shoots. Hughes tried another Magritte-like effect for the back cover of the Daltrey album but with diminished success.

Dolores Claiborne (1995).

The following images are from films (and a TV series), two of which are coincidentally based on Stephen King stories. To date I’ve only seen Secret Window which isn’t one I’d recommend. Are there any more forbidden reproductions out there?

Secret Window (2004).

The Double (2013).

Us (2019).

Euphoria (2019).

Update: Added Sabotage and Euphoria.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• René Magritte, Cinéaste
• Magritte: The False Mirror
• Magritte, ou la lecon de chose
• René Magritte album covers
• Monsieur René Magritte, a film by Adrian Maben
• George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley