Martin Scorsese – Page 2

Weekend links 700

Lux in Tenebris (1895) by Evelyn De Morgan.

• “NASA celebrates the worm logo designer, Richard Danne“. Until I read this story (and this one) I wasn’t aware that the NASA logos were known as The Meatball and The Worm.

• The Red Shoes: behind the scenes of the classic Powell and Pressburger film – in pictures. Related: Kings of the movies: Martin Scorsese on Powell & Pressburger.

• The 700th weekend post happens to arrive on Alan Moore’s 70th birthday. Many happy returns to the Northampton Magus.

Fundamentally, we face a choice. Either:

• it’s a coincidence that, of all the possible values that the finely tuned constants of physics may have had, they just happen to have the right values for life;

or:

• the constants have those values because they are right for life.

The former option is wildly improbable; on a conservative estimate, the odds of getting finely tuned constants by chance is less than 1 in 10^-136. The latter option amounts to a belief that something at the fundamental level of reality is directed towards the emergence of life. I call this kind of fundamental goal-directedness ‘cosmic purpose’.

As a society, we’re somewhat in denial about fine-tuning, because it doesn’t fit with the picture of science we’ve got used to. It’s a bit like in the 16th century when we started getting evidence that our Earth wasn’t in the centre of the universe, and people struggled to accept it because it didn’t fit with the picture of the universe they’d got used to. Nowadays, we scoff at our ancestors’ inability to follow the evidence where it leads. But every generation absorbs a worldview it can’t see beyond. I believe we’re in a similar situation now with respect to the mounting evidence for cosmic purpose. We’re ignoring what is lying in plain view because it doesn’t fit with the version of reality we’ve got used to. Future generations will mock us for our intransigence.

Philip Goff, professor in philosophy at Durham University, making an argument for cosmic purpose

• At Spoon & Tamago: Exploring Japanese Hell through art from the 12th to 19th century.

• New music: Turning The Prism by Ben Frost, and Sanctuary Of Desire by Steve Roach.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – November 2023 at Ambientblog.

• DJ Food looks at Tomi Ungerer’s Electric Circus posters.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Alain Resnais Day.

• Strange Flowers visits the Villa Stuck.

• Diet Of Worms (1979) by This Heat | Opera Of Worms (1981) by Van Kaye & Ignit| Wormhole (2002) by Cliff Martinez

Weekend links 696

The Brownie of Blednoch (1889) by Edward Atkinson Hornel.

• “None of the theatrics of most films are available in Bresson, because in some ways Bresson’s characters, along with Dreyer’s and Cassavetes’s are the most inscrutable in motion pictures—maybe since their creators are the best believers in suggestion.” Greg Gerke explores the later films of Robert Bresson.

• Iizuna Fair is a short animated film by Sumito Sakakibara that will be viewable at Vimeo for the next few months.

• Occult scholar Mitch Horowitz returns to the Aquarium Drunkard podcast for a wide-ranging discussion.

Marty [Scorsese] went to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1974 to collect an award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. They asked him who he wanted to present it to him, and he said Michael Powell. They had no idea who he was. No one did, but I found an American doing publicity for Kubrick’s 2001 who knew where he was. He introduced Michael to Marty at a lunch where Marty bombarded Michael with questions about how he did this and how he did that. Michael writes in his autobiography that the blood started to run in his veins again, it had been so long that he and Emeric had been living in oblivion.

Marty brought Michael to America, where we had already started working on Raging Bull. Marty had been educating me about Powell and Pressburger’s films, sending me home with VHSs. I had fallen in love with them, and then he said that Michael Powell was coming for dinner one night and asked if I would like to meet him. That’s how we met and eventually became involved, all thanks to Marty.

Thelma Schoonmaker remembering her husband, Michael Powell, and discussing the ongoing restoration of his films. Good to hear that plans are afoot to resurrect Gone to Earth

• Whole Earth Index is a near-complete archive of the Whole Earth Catalog and its related publications.

• At the Daily Heller: David Byrd, the East Coast’s psychedelic poster man.

• See the winners of the Nikon 2023 Photomicrography Competition.

• New music: Golden Feelings by Better Weather.

• Mikrostruktury (1963) by Wlodzimierz Kotonski | La Chasse Aux Microbes (1977) by Michael Bundt | Microscopic (1995) by Gas

Into the Midnight Underground

Browsing Vimeo recently I found a film by Anna Thew, Cling Film, which I remembered seeing years ago on Midnight Underground, a TV series devoted to avant-garde cinema. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) for eight weeks in 1993, with each episode being screened shortly after midnight. The presenter was the always reliable Benjamin Woolley, sitting before a backdrop resembling one of Verner Panton’s psychedelic environments from where he introduced the cinematic offerings, an eclectic blend of avant-garde and experimental films, unusual dramas plus a couple of animations. Episodes ran for around an hour, with each installment following a different theme. The films were a mix of the old and the new: “classics” (for want of a better term) of underground cinema set alongside more recent works. This was very much a television equivalent of the screenings of avant-garde cinema which Film and Video Umbrella had been touring around Britain’s arthouses since the mid-1980s; one of the founders of FVU, Michael O’Pray, is thanked in the series credits. Midnight Underground was so tailored to my interests at the time it was easy to feel like this was being screened for my benefit alone. I taped everything as it was broadcast but I never got round to digitising all the episodes, so that many of the films shown there, Cling Film included, I haven’t seen for a long time.

Benjamin Woolley.

The discovery of Anna Thew’s film set me wondering whether it would be possible to replicate the contents of Midnight Underground via links to various video sites. Since this post exists, the answer is obviously yes, or almost… Of the 44 films shown in the series only 3 are currently unavailable, with one more being limited to an extract and another as pay-to-view. This was a much better result than I expected, especially for works with such a limited appeal. The majority of the films shown in the series were being screened on British TV for the first time, also the last time for most of them. In 1993 Channel 4 was still maintaining its original brief, offering a genuine alternative to the programming on the other three terrestrial channels. As I’ve often complained here, this didn’t last; the underground remained underground. Woolley’s series was a brief taste of a televisual world where the concept of diversity could apply to form and content as well as identity. It’s a world the corporate channels will never show you, one you have to find for yourself.

* * *

1: Strange Spirits
The opening episode shows why I felt they were broadcasting this for me alone. Derek Jarman’s grainy film of a Throbbing Gristle performance is probably the first (and only?) time the group appeared on British TV. This was the first surprise. The second one was Kenneth Anger’s film being shown with its Janácek score. I’d seen this at an FVU screening a couple of years before with its ELO soundtrack, the so-called “Eldorado Edition”, which Anger later discarded. As for Daina Krumins’ weird and creepy religiose short, I expected this one to be unavailable but the director now has several of her films on YouTube. Don’t miss her even-weirder animated slime moulds, Babobilicons. The angel in Maggie Jailler’s film is artist (and Jarman/TG associate) Cerith Wyn Evans.

• TG: Psychic Rally in Heaven (Derek Jarman, 1981)
• The Divine Miracle (Daina Krumins, 1973)
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
• L’ange frénétique (Maggie Jailler, 1985)

2: Music for the Eye and Ear
Bruce Conner’s films are continually elusive on the internet, especially those made to accompany music by Devo and Eno & Byrne. The version of Mongoloid linked here differs slightly from the original but it’s essentially the same film. Versailles II is taped from the Midnight Underground broadcast, and includes Benjamin Woolley’s introduction.

• Eaux d’artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953)
• Mongoloid (Bruce Conner, 1978)
• Versailles II (Chris Garratt, 1976)
• Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (Quay Brothers, 1992)
• All My Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)

3: New Sexualities
Stephen Dwoskin’s film is the one that shows a close-up of a woman’s face during the act of masturbation. This is paralleled later in the series by Antony Balch’s masturbatory self-portrait in Towers Open Fire. Cling Film is all about safe sex, and was broadcast in a slightly amended form to avoid being too explicit. The version on Vimeo is uncensored.

• Kiss (Chris Newby, 1992) (no video)
• Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1965)
• Cling Film (Anna Thew, 1993)
• Stain (Simon Pummell, 1992)
• Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
• 6/64: Mama und Papa (Materialaktion Otto Mühl) (Kurt Kren, 1964)
• Moment (Stephen Dwoskin, 1969)

4: London Suite
Sundial and Mile End Purgatorio have both appeared here before as a result of my seeing them on Midnight Underground.

• Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (Alnoor Dewshi, 1992)
• Sundial (William Raban, 1993)
• The London Story (Sally Potter, 1987) (pay-to-view)
• Mile End Purgatorio (Guy Sherwin, 1991)
• London Suite (Vivienne Dick, 1989) (no video)

Continue reading “Into the Midnight Underground”

Georges Méliès, Mage

Georges Méliès: magician. Yes, indeed. I was watching Martin Scorsese’s Hugo again recently, a film I found more enjoyable the second time around mostly for the Méliès side of the story. The flashback to the Star Films studio offers in miniature a history that this book delivers in detail. Georges Méliès, Mage (1945) by Maurice Bessy and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca is a copiously illustrated guide to Méliès’ entire career, beginning with his early years as a conjuror and a creator of the kinds of theatrical fantasies that formed the basis for his first films. The text is in French throughout but there’s a wealth of pictorial material, with many production sketches and drawings that show how some of his more complex effects were achieved.

One of the things I’ve always found attractive about Méliès’ films is the way they resemble 19th-century illustrations brought to life. The same can be said about some of the later Hollywood productions, especially the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad, but they lack the overt theatricality of Méliès. For a taste of those hand-tinted marvels, go here.

Continue reading “Georges Méliès, Mage”

Weekend links 593

Cover art by Gwinn (?) for The Inland Printer, October 1901.

• The 50 British films that inspired a young Martin Scorsese. No Michael Powell (or Hitchcock, for that matter) but I think we’re supposed to take The Archers as a given. And he’s always had a commendable taste for British horror; few directors of Scorsese’s stature would put so many Hammer films and minor chillers on a list like this.

• New music: Grey Frequency return with Essentia, an album that explores “the connections and conflicts between internal and external worlds, and our sense of place and function in an unfathomable, transcendent universe”. Ideal Halloween listening, as is much of the Grey Frequency catalogue, especially Paranormal.

• “You don’t want to have a brilliant idea for a novel at the age of 87,” says Alan Garner. Justine Jordan reviews Treacle Walker, the novel in question, here.

In his gloomy tales, predominantly written in French, journalists disappear while hunting for esoteric secrets, ships sailing to mythic islands get lost in unreal waters, protagonists track down occult artefacts such as Dr Dee’s black spirit mirror, and the living wander down alleyways that lead to the hereafter. These are all unfaithfully retold in Ray’s uniquely arcane, often kaleidoscopic prose.

Robert Davidson on Belgian author Jean Ray

• “Poe brings forth, as if out of thin air, a grotesque world fully crystallized.” Sudipto Sanyal on you-know-who.

• At Bandcamp Ed Blair compiles a list of John Carpenter-like music beginning with an album from the man himself.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the current condition of second-hand bookshops in Britain.

• Mix of the week: Samhain Séance 10: There and Back Again by The Ephemeral Man.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Terence Hannum presents…Horror Soundtracks Day.

• No One Here Knows I’m a Vampire: A Spooky Matt Berry Reading List.

• New/old music: Aqua by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

• More dark arts at Unquiet Things.

• Treacle Toffee World (1968) by The Fire | Treacle People (1970) by UFO | Woodsmoke & Treacle (2010) by Moon Wiring Club