Mad Max – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 259

The Endlessness (2012) by Emma Bennett.

• “Clearly if you’re familiar with The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin you’ve got a leg up on what Rivette and company are up to. […] Like all Rivette works, it’s obsessed with the interrelationship between theater and life—reality and fantasy.” David Ehrenstein makes Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 sound even more intriguing. The 729-minute film is being reissued later this year.

• “It’s all your artistic friends. They frighten me…they seem evil, somehow—somehow unhealthy. And when you’re with them, dear, you change…” Steven Cordova reviews To the Dark Tower (1946), the debut novel by gay writer Francis King.

• “Sex isn’t a subtext in The Bloody Chamber, but the text itself. (Carter would explain that she was only making explicit a ‘latent content’ that is ‘violently sexual.’)” Laura Miller on Angela Carter’s re-told fairy tales.

Yet, as a citizen, and especially as an artist, [Chimamanda Ngozi] Adichie refuses to censor herself. “There is already enough silencing in public discourse,” says Adichie, and this is certainly true when the topic is race, and especially when the conversation is in America. It is our addiction to comfort that demands our silence regarding certain truths. Too often in America, Adichie claimed, “the goal of public discourse is comfort, not truth.” Comfort, Adichie said, also demands “international digestibility,” a reduction of complicated stories to a simple narrative. In the lecture, Adichie also warned of the silencing that is sometimes a product of social media outrage.

Kay Iguh on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival

• New books: The Strangers and Other Writings by Robert Aickman, and Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco by Stephen Thrower & Julian Grainger.

• The world is rediscovering Mad Max and George Miller’s prowess for action cinema so Anne Billson posted a transcript of her 1985 interview with the director.

• Mixes of the week: Dmytro Fedorenko presents artists from Ukrainian record label Kvitnu, and The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. VII by David Colohan.

• Assault on Precinct 13 goes disco: The End (John Anthony’s New Scratch Mix) (1983) by “John Carpenter” (The Splash Band).

• John Coltrane talked to Frank Kofsky for an hour in November 1966.

• Sleazy Cinema: A guide to Peter Christopherson‘s music videos.

• Six hours of women in electronic music.

• The weird world of Alfred Kubin.

• Giallo Magic Orchestra

• Blood (1972) by Annette Peacock | Blood On The Moon (1981) by Chrome | Blood From The Air (1986) by Coil

Weekend links 253

A painting by Stephen Mackey.

• “Creativity is visual, not informed thought. Creativity is not polite. It barges in uninvited, unannounced—confusing, chaotic, demanding, deaf to reason or to common sense—and leaves the intellect to clear up the mess. Above all else, creativity is risk; heedful risk, but risk entire. Without risk we have the ability only to keep things ticking over the way they are.” Revelations from a life of storytelling by Alan Garner. Related: Tygertale on Garner’s Elidor (1965), “the anti-Tolkien”. The BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Elidor remains unavailable on DVD but may be watched on YouTube.

• “One of my revelations was to reverse everything I’d been taught. Making lettering as illegible as possible falls into that way of thinking.” Psychedelic artist and underground cartoonist Victor Moscoso talks to Nicole Rudick about a life in art and design. Related: “I’ve gotten a lot of bad write-ups in newspapers over the years and they like to refer to my stuff as ‘kitsch’…Well, my stuff is way fuckin’ kitsch. It’s kitsch to an abstract level, you understand. It’s fuckin’ meretricious.” I love it when Robert Williams kicks the art world.

• “…a cerebral, challenging, visually stunning piece of 1970s American science fiction that enweirds the human perspective by challenging it with a nonhuman one.” Adam Mills on the inhuman geometries of Saul Bass’s Phase IV.

• “[Delia Derbyshire] taught me everything I knew about electronic music.” David Vorhaus talks to David Stubbs about White Noise and why he prefers the latest technology to old synthesizers.

• Costumes from Alla Nazimova’s film of Salomé (1923) have been discovered in a trunk in Columbus, Georgia.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. I, “music for a residual haunting” by David Colohan.

• At Dangerous Minds: Queer, boho or just plain gorgeous: photographs by Poem Baker.

• Grimm City, a speculative architectural project by Flea Folly Architects.

• Mad Max: “Punk’s Sistine Chapel” – A Ballardian Primer.

• In Search of Sleep: photographs by Emma Powell.

• Drains of Manchester

• Road Warrior (1985) by The Dave Howard Singers | Warriors Of The Wasteland (Original 12″ mix, 1986) by Frankie Goes To Hollywood | Drive It Mad Max (Super Flu Remix, 2009) by Marcus Meinhardt

Richard Matheson, 1926–2013

The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Of Richard Matheson’s many books I’ve only read I Am Legend so can’t say much about his fiction other than to confirm (as everyone else does) that none of the three adaptations so far have managed to do it justice. Of his work for film and television there’s too much to say, it’s so copious and indelibly memorable. Here’s a list of five favourite Matheson creations.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

JG Ballard frequently referred to this as one of his favourite science fiction films, not because of the SF element, which is never properly explained, but because of its inadvertent Surrealist qualities. For my part, every time I watched this I was always impatient to get to the later scenes where the unfortunate Scott becomes trapped in the cellar, and his own house becomes an increasingly alien and hostile environment. The ending where he accepts his condition is very Ballardian.

Duel (1971)

A sweating and manic Dennis Weaver is pitted against an anonymous truck driver who remains unseen but for a few shots of an arm and some boots. The lethal game of cat-and-mouse was famously directed by Steven Spielberg, his second feature, and one that’s a lot more impressive than some of his subsequent films. Watch it on YouTube.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Matheson’s take on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—four investigators in a haunted mansion—with the gain ramped up 100%. The film starts off quietly but is very soon into full-on hysteria; director John Hough finds so many eccentric camera angles you could actually calm down after this by watching a Terry Gilliam film. Meanwhile Roddy McDowell chews the scenery as though over-acting is going out of fashion. Bonuses are a grown-up Pamela Franklin (Flora in Jack Clayton’s superb The Innocents), and a great score from Radiophonic synthesists Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire. Watch the trailer.

Trilogy of Terror (1975)

A three-story TV movie in which Karen Black took all the leading roles. No one remembers the first two stories but everyone who’s seen this remembers the third, Amelia (based on a Matheson short story, Prey), in which Ms Black is hunted in her apartment by a Zuni fetish doll. It’s on YouTube!

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1983)

Sorry, Shatnerphiles, but the superior version of this story is the one from Twilight Zone: The Movie. John Lithgow is a much better actor than William Shatner, the gremlin on the wing of the plane is a fearsome creature that’s seriously destructive (not, as Matheson lamented of the original, “a surly teddy bear”), and the whole sequence is directed by George Miller fresh from Mad Max 2. The original Twilight Zone episode wasn’t bad but it can’t compete with Miller pulling out all the stops. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New York City abandoned