Jean Cocteau – { feuilleton }

The Return of the Sorcerer

The story’s first appearance in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931. No illustrator credited.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery is a series I’d have happily watched if one of the UK channels had rebroadcast it in the 1980s, the way that Channel 4 did with the original Twilight Zone. This weekend I watched for the first time the opening episode of Night Gallery‘s third and final season, an adaptation by Halsted Welles of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Smith is a writer whose works are still mostly neglected by film and television but he was in good company in Night Gallery, a series which featured adaptations of stories by a number of fellow Weird Tales writers including HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. The story is one of Smith’s modern-day horror tales in which a poverty-stricken translator is offered a lucrative position at an old and sinister house, a place where a fearful occultist requires translations of an ancient volume. The Arabic text turns out to be passages from an early edition of everybody’s favourite forbidden tome, the Necronomicon, and Smith’s story, which was published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in 1931, is the first outside Lovecraft’s own to mention the book, thus beginning the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos by other hands.

The Night Gallery adaptation was broadcast in 1972. Unlike the first two seasons, where episodes ran for an hour, the third season reduced the running time to under 30 minutes which doesn’t give director Jeannot Szwarc (credited as Jean Szwarc) any time to build up the suspense, if he was capable of such a thing. If you’ve ever seen any of Swarc’s feature films you know not to raise your expectations. As a compensation for the absense of atmosphere we get some striking set designs and a decent cast. The fearful magus, John Carnby, is played by Vincent Price, encountering the Necronomicon for the second time in his career after he’d earlier used the book to summon an eldritch monstrosity in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. Bill Bixby plays the wary translator, while Patricia Sterling is Carnby’s toad-loving partner in Satanism, an addition to the story by Halstead Welles, whose presence adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. The episode could never be considered a lost classic but I enjoy seeing stories by the Weird Tales writers making their first infiltrations into the wider culture. This one is worth watching for Vincent Price and the magical decor alone. I think I ought to go looking for more Night Gallery episodes.

More of those Cocteau hands-through-the-wall. Bixby’s character doesn’t seem very perturbed that the scarlet hall is filled with mysterious vapours.

Mystical decor: on the left, Frieda Harris’s Ace of Discs from the Thoth Tarot deck; on the right, The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

Mystical/Satanic decor: the painting in the background is Frieda Harris’s Ace of Cups from the Thoth Tarot deck.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• Illustrating Zothique
• The Plutonian Drug
• More trip texts
• Yuggoth details
• The Garden of Adompha
• The City of the Singing Flame
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

Weekend links 703

Njommelsaska i Lappland (1856) by Carl Svantje Hallbeck.

• 101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen. Not another clickbait listicle of Hollywood fare that you really have seen, this is 101 films from Sight & Sound‘s annual poll of critics and directors, each of which only received a single vote. Cinema from the silent era to the present day, “from every continent but Antarctica”, all presented on a single page, and with accompanying notes from the voters. I’ve only seen four of these so it’s a list to mine for the future.

• 2024 will see the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Surrealist manifestos, so the following new books are making their presences known before the celebratory rush. At Colossal: extracts from New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting by Robert Zeller; at AnotherMag: photos by Coco Capítan of Salvador Dalí’s home at Port Lligat.

• “Cocteau was like one of those magicians who, having announced that they are going to reveal the secret of one trick, immediately perform another.” Pierre Caizergues introducing extracts from The Secrets of Beauty, a small book of aphorisms by Jean Cocteau, newly translated into English by Juliet Powys.

• More Michael Powell: “Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA”: Thelma Schoonmaker on her life and work with Michael Powell and his friend Marty.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2023. Thanks again for the link here!

• At The Daily Heller: Book covers by Iris Alba (1935–1993), art director, illustrator and graphic designer.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See the newest underwater sculptures residing on the floor of the Caribbean.

• At Wormwoodiana: Douglas A. Anderson goes looking for the fantasy fiction of Raymond Chandler.

• At Public Domain Review: Paige Hirschey on Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes.

• Entries for the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year 2023.

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Der Mann in der Photographie, 1954.

• Aurora (1971) by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band | Aurora (2005) by Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto | Aurora Liminalis (2013) by William Basinski + Richard Chartier

René Magritte, Cinéaste

The title at the Internet Archive has this one as “Magritte Home Movies” which is a more accurate description than the title of the film itself. René Magritte, Cinéaste was apparently made in 1975 (although the print bears a copyright date for 1989), being a compilation of films from the late 1950s made in and around the Magritte household by René and wife Georgette (plus LouLou the Pomeranian) with contributions from friends in the Brussels art world: ELT Mesens (an artist who was later a member of the British Surrealist Group), Paul Colinet (artist), Louis Scutenaire (poet), Irène Hamoir (writer), Marcel Lecomte (writer), and others.

The film opens with some contextual narration in French but the rest of the footage is soundless with a simple musical accompaniment. As with many home movies there’s a lot of mugging and dressing-up for the camera. What you don’t get in similar films is the setups that involve either quotes of Magritte’s paintings or the paintings themselves. If you’re familiar with the art then some of the props are also familiar, such as the plaster head (or heads) from the various versions of La Mèmoire, and the euphonium which in its painted form Magritte often showed in flames. The most Surrealist sequence is Le Dessert des Antilles, a Cocteau-like experiment with reverse-motion. Where Cocteau preferred to show a flower being pieced together from its constituent parts, Magritte has Irène Hamoir regurgitating a banana, bite by bite, which is then presented unpeeled to her husband, Louis Scutenaire. (This sequence has been flipped horizontally. A duplicate copy here shows the original title card.)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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

Cocteau and Lovecraft

This one arrives via Tentaclii, via ST Joshi’s news page. Jean Cocteau paying homage in pencil to HP Lovecraft is both unlikely and almost too good to be true. But the drawing, circa 1951, is from a Beverly Hills gallery where other Cocteau artwork is up for sale so it can be accepted as the genuine article.

Cocteau’s enthusiasm for Lovecraft’s fiction doesn’t seem to be news either, even though this is the first I’ve heard of it. Another of Joshi’s links is to this newspaper feature from 1954 in which Cocteau together with various notables of the time are asked to choose their books of the year. While the other contributors list the kinds of titles you’d expect, Cocteau has a book about Atlantis by Denis Saurat, books about parapsychology and “les soucoupes volantes” (flying saucers), plus the first French collection of Lovecraft’s stories, translated by Jacques Papy. I knew that Cocteau had a mystical side—you’d expect nothing less from the director of Orphée—but this combination of Lovecraft and full-on crankery is a surprise. He lived just long enough to see the first publication of Pauwels and Bergiers’ Ur-text of the 70s’ crankosphere, The Morning of the Magicians, so I can imagine him lapping up that one as well.

As for the doodle, this is Cocteau’s version of a sea-monster illustration from Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1551–1558), a five-volume study which includes a number of fantastic creatures among its descriptions of the animal life known to 16th-century Europeans. Gessner has a page or two about the so-called “sea bishop” which includes this illustration together with another one I adapted myself in 2010 for the Neil Gaiman story in Lovecraft’s Monsters. Good to know that Cocteau and I were on the same page, as it were.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cocteau drawings
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Weekend links 567

Cover art by Roger Dean for Woyaya (1971), the second album by Osibisa. Dean’s flying elephants made their first appearance on the group’s debut album, and have been an Osibisa emblem ever since.

• Many of Roger Dean’s early album covers are better creations than the music on the albums they decorate. This isn’t the case with Osibisa, however, a Ghanaian group based in London whose discography includes (uniquely, I think) two covers by Dean together with one by Mati Klarwein. The group’s first two albums, Osibisa and Woyaya, are exceptional blends of Ghanaian music with rock, funk and jazz whose omission from the generally reliable Kozmigroov list is a serious error. Garth Cartwright talked to Teddy Osei and Lord Eric Sugumugu about Osibisa past and present.

• “The antiheroes of Angry Young Men cinema railed against the limited life opportunities available to them. Wired and frustrated, they especially chafed against girlfriends, wives, domesticity. Yet they never questioned heterosexuality itself. Not, at least, until The Leather Boys (1964), a relatively little-known film directed by Canadian expatriate Sidney J. Furie.” Sukhdev Sandhu on a film about gay life in pre-decriminalisation Britain that offered a slightly more positive view of its subject than the justifiably angst-ridden Victim (1961).

• “Brian Aldiss once confided to me that the big problem with American science fiction writers was that they loved to write about Mars but knew nothing about Indonesia.” Bruce Sterling on the attractions of being an expatriate writer who adopts a foreign persona, as he did for the stories collected in Robot Artists and Black Swans.

• New music: Fire Tower by The Grid / Fripp. Dave Ball, Richard Norris and Robert Fripp have been collaborating on and off since The Grid’s 456 album in 1992. Fire Tower is a preview of Leviathan, a new album out in June on CD/DVD and double vinyl.

• RIP Michael Collins, the astronaut who orbited the Moon alone, listening to Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz in the Command Module of Apollo 11 while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the satellite’s surface.

• “‘Walking with a thesis’ could easily function as the subtitle for a significant number of Iain Sinclair’s books.” Tobias Carroll on Iain Sinclair and the radical act of walking through a city.

• “‘Plain speaking, like plain food, is a puritan virtue and thus no virtue at all,’ Meades pronounces.” Steven Poole reviews Pedro and Ricky Come Again by Jonathan Meades.

• Building a panorama: Clive Hicks-Jenkins‘ latest progress report on his Cocteau-inspired illustrated edition of Beauty and the Beast.

• At Unquiet Things: Groovy Goddesses From Dimension X: Gene Szafrans’ Kaleidoscopic Book Covers.

• From leather boys to leather men: Miss Rosen on the little-known photography of Tom of Finland.

• Alexis Petridis attempts the impossible again, with a list of Grace Jones’ best songs.

• At Dennis Cooper‘s: Cars.

• I’m A Leather Boy (1967) by The Leather Boy | Warm Leatherette (1980) by Grace Jones | Leather Bound (2017) by Patrick Cowley