René Magritte – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist

It’s a short step from Dada to Surrealism, and George Melly provides a brief skate through the philosophies of both in this 25-minute BBC film from 1978. Melly, like JG Ballard, was struck by Surrealism at an impressionable age, and the love affair was a lasting one. Both Melly and Ballard championed Surrealism during periods when it was deeply unfashionable, an oppositional stance that Ballard seemed to relish.

Melly’s enthusiasm was so well-known that he was often called upon as a token advocate of Surrealism whenever one was required by the TV channels, hence this film whose title implies an admission of something disreputable. A major exhibition of Surrealist art was taking place in 1978 at the Hayward Gallery in London, and it’s to this exhibition that Melly journeys, explaining (and demonstrating) what it means to be a Surrealist along the way. I saw this when it was first broadcast, and the absurd phone calls to strangers inspired myself and a few school-friends to similar activities; teenage pranks seemed less frivolous with an artistic justification. There’s a slight connection to yesterday’s post in Melly’s recounting of an anecdote from the 1950s when he was spared a night-time beating by his reciting of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate to a group of belligerent youths. Elsewhere you get to see punk band The Stranglers scowling at the camera—Melly suggests that the punks might be inheritors of the Dadaist attitude—and director Alan Yentob standing at a urinal.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley

Morning of the Magicians book covers

Éditions Gallimard, France, 1960.

Yesterday’s post proved popular so it seemed worthwhile taking another look at the book that birthed Planète magazine. The main problem The Morning of the Magicians presents for an art director is how to encapsulate such wildly diverse contents in a cover design. To judge from the examples here, most people seem to have either given up or gone for vaguely symbolic designs which at the most correspond to the contents in a minor way. The biggest surprise for me was seeing the cover of the first edition above, one of those typically sober French titles which gives away nothing of the intellectual fireworks within. Few of these designs have any credits, and this is nothing like a complete list (more editions may be seen at Goodreads). More recent editions have been avoided altogether since they’re pretty terrible.

Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Italy, 1963. This edition, which runs to 476 pages, includes three translated stories inserted into the text: The Nine Billions Name of God by Arthur C. Clarke, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr, and The White People by Arthur Machen.

A hardback edition showing an alchemist at work.

Stein and Day, USA, 1964.

You know a cover is failing when it could easily be applied to any number of other titles.

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Weekend links 185

L’uomo che piantava gli alberi (2013) by Sofia Rondelli. Via Form Is Void.

• I’m looking forward to hearing the new album by Chrome Hoof, a band whose ambition and attitude makes many of their contemporaries seem lukewarm at best. Mick Middles gets to grips with Chrome Black Gold here. John Doran interviewed the group in 2010, a piece which includes a Chrome Hoof mix of tracks by other artists.

• Jay Roberts: “I was a young Marine scout sniper, definitely his type. And for a single, unforgettable afternoon, Orange County’s most notorious serial killer coaxed me into a place from which many didn’t escape.”

• Jonathan Meades: “Why I went postal … and turned my snaps into postcards.” “Meades isn’t your average architectural fanboy,” says Rachel Cooke who went to talk to him at his home in Marseille.

“Faced with a Nabokov novel,” Zadie Smith writes, “it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper.” Certainly, while Humbert asks the reader “not to mock me and my mental daze”, the suspicion is that the power dynamic in his tale is a little different.

Tim Groenland on the difficulties of writing, publishing and reading Lolita.

• Cosmic Machine is a double-disc collection of French electronic music from the 1970s & 1980s. Justice enthuse about the music here where you can also preview the tracks.

• The Midnight Channel, Evan J. Peterson’s horror-poetry homage to the VHS era, is available now from Babel/Salvage. There’s a trailer here.

• “Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things,” says Robert Twigger.

• Another musical Chrome: Richard Metzger on newly resurrected recordings by one of my long-time cult bands.

• Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism: An interview with Gary Lachman.

• A stunning set of photos of London in the sweltering summer of 1976.

• Pye Corner Audio live at The Outer Church, Madrid, November 2013.

• Judee Sill, the shockingly talented occult folk singer time forgot.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook answers twenty questions.

• Don’t trust the painting: Morgan Meis on René Magritte.

• Laurie Anderson’s farewell to Lou Reed.

• Philippe Druillet at Pinterest.

• The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny (1968) by The Mothers of Invention | March Of The Chrome Police (1979) by Chrome | Chrome (1981) by Debbie Harry

Two sides of Liska

Et Cetera (1966).

A little more on the music of Czech soundtrack composer Zdenek Liska (1922–1983). Liska seems to stand in relation to Czech cinema as Ennio Morricone does to that of the cinema of Italy, being similarly prolific, highly regarded, and idiosyncratic to a degree that makes his work immediately recognisable. Both men could also draw on their experience outside the film world to fuel their scores: Morricone for many years was a performer with Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a group of Italian free improvisers, while Liska’s work with electro-acoustic composition and early electronic music explains the frequent eruptions in his lush orchestrations of tape effects, exaggerated echoes and other forms of artificial processing. This kind of cross-pollination doesn’t seem so surprising today but it’s striking and surprising in soundtracks from the 1960s.

Good examples of the opposite poles of Liska can be found in two of Jan Svankmajer’s early shorts. Et Cetera (1966) is one of the director’s most formal exercises, a series of crude drawings (or cut-outs) coming to life to perform a repetitive routine before being interrupted by the words “ET CETERA”. The film plays with the audience by beginning with a title card that states “The End”, and the piece as a whole could easily be screened as an endless loop. Liska’s score is a combination of fairly minimal orchestration with a variety of electro-acoustic effects which are closer to Pierre Henry or Ilhan Mimaroglu than other Eastern European composers.

Shade of Magritte: The Flat (1968).

At the opposite end of the scale there’s the score for The Flat (1968), a typical piece of Svankmajer Surrealism with an unfortunate individual locked in a room where everything, from walls to furniture, contradicts his expectations. René Magritte casts a long shadow over this one, with director Juraj Herz making a brief appearance as a bowler-hatted man carrying a chicken. Liska’s score has a driving and reverberent choral rhythm that always makes me think of Krzysztof Komeda’s similar music for Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967). For such a short film it’s a remarkable piece of orchestration. The Brothers Quay are great Liska enthusiasts, and used some of the score from The Flat (and two other Liska pieces) for their 1984 film The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, an animated portrait of the director.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Liska’s Golem
• The Cremator by Juraj Herz

Atalanta Fugiens

Alchemy (1969) by the Third Ear Band. Design by Dave Loxley.

For an idea of how these posts often come into being, this one is the result of the following chain of association: an article by Leo Robson about the films of Roman Polanski > A re-viewing of Polanski’s Macbeth > A re-listening to albums by the soundtrack artists for Macbeth, British folk group the Third Ear Band > A tracking down of the famous cover image from the first Third Ear Band album.

Alchemy is the dominant theme of the first two Third Ear Band albums. The engraving used on the cover of their debut album is one of the most frequently reproduced of all images associated with this branch of occultism, one of fifty emblems from Atalanta Fugiens (1618) by the German alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1622).

The plates are by Matthäus Merian, an artist whose career produced a number of notable alchemical illustrations. A detail from one of his other oft-reproduced pieces, Macrocosm and Microcosm from the Basilica Philosophica (1618), appeared on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Saucer Full of Secrets album a year before the Third Ear Band debut. Merian would no doubt be astonished that his work was so visible to future generations even though his name is seldom mentioned at all. The popularity can be accounted for by the way the best of these images seem almost archetypal whilst being resistant to any easy interpretation. Some of Merian’s plates remind me of Magritte’s paintings; they share a tension between carefully rendered yet impossible images that imply a hidden meaning. As Borges considered metaphysics to be a branch of fantastic literature it’s possible to consider this kind of alchemical illustration as a branch of fantastic art.

A 1687 edition of Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (retitled Scrutinium Chymicum) may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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