Roland Topor – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 214

San Francisco Sound (1967). Art by Wallace Studio, Seattle.

• RIP gay porn pioneer Peter de Rome. BUTT posted de Rome’s surprisingly daring Underground (1972), a film in which two men have an unfaked sexual encounter on a New York subway train. That film and others are available on the BFI’s DVD collection. Related: Brian Robinson remembers a director of films whose supporters included Andy Warhol, William Burroughs and John Gielgud.

• “My stuff is implicitly critical of television as it is now,” explains Jonathan [Meades], “Television used not to be as openly moronic as it has become…” A lengthy and typically pugnacious Meades interview with Remy Dean.

• Thurston Moore remembers the Burroughs-themed Nova Convention staged in New York in 1978. William Burroughs 100—Nova Convention is a retrospective exhibition running at Red Gallery, London, next month.

How are we expected to take seriously…any work which appears to have engaged less than the whole passionate attention of its author? To be fobbed off, at the last, with something which we feel to be less true than the author knew it to be, challenges the importance of the whole art of writing, and instead of enlarging the bounds of our experience, it leaves them where they are.

Katherine Mansfield was also a book reviewer.

• JG Ballard’s Crash is reissued in August by Fourth Estate with an introduction by Zadie Smith. There’s a tantalising extract from the intro at the NYRB or you can read the whole thing if you’re a subscriber.

• “Between 1959 & 1980 Shirley Collins changed the course of folk music in England & America. Thirty years after disappearing, she’s back.”

• Photos by Anne Billson of one of the more attractive Parisian arcades. Related (in a flâneur sense): Christina Scholz‘s Vancouver dérive.

• “Why did Borges hate soccer?” asks Shaj Matthew. Related: George Orwell on the same subject.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 447 by Forest Swords, and Programme 13 from Radio Belbury.

• At Dangerous Minds: Roland Topor’s cheerfully violent illustrations from Les Masochistes.

• Rainy Day Psychedelia: Ben Marks on Seattle’s neglected 1960s poster scene.

• Strange Flowers looks at Oskar Schlemmer‘s Triadic Ballet designs.

• A Journey to Avebury: Stewart Lee interviews Julian Cope.

• It’s All Over Now (1963) by The Valentinos featuring Bobby Womack | It’s All Over Now (1964) by The Rolling Stones | It’s All Over Now (1974) by Ry Cooder

Polanski details

Roman Polanski as Alfred in Dance of the Vampires (1967).

I’ve always admired the attention to detail in Roman Polanski’s films, a quality evident not only in his careful adaptations but also in areas that lesser filmmakers might ignore. Dance of the Vampires (1967) is a good example (sorry, I refuse to call it by the title MGM used for its edited US release): the sets and decor are remarkable, and the editing and camera work so skilfully blends studio constructions with location shots that for years I was convinced the film was made in a genuine European castle. The atmosphere is so carefully sustained that I found the whole thing as terrifying on first viewing as any Hammer film, despite the broad humour. In the set-piece moments Polanski (and soundtrack composer Krzysztof Komeda) put many of the later Hammer vampire films to shame.

The Vampire Portraits

The production design and art direction for Dance of the Vampires was created by Wilfred Shingleton and Fred Carter, both of whom later worked on Polanski’s Macbeth, and who fill the rooms with mouldering furnishings and rotting decoration. One striking sequence concerns a walk through a gallery of vampire portraits that are the creepiest paintings seen on film since Ivan Albright’s portrait of a decrepit Dorian Gray. Film credits in the 1960s were sparse so there’s no indication of the artist responsible. However, one portrait glimpsed at the end of the gallery (below) is a copy of the “Ugly Duchess” painting by Quinten Matsys.

Rosemary’s Book

A sign that filmmakers care about detail is when they make their fictional books look like the genuine article. The history of witchcraft in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) could easily have been glimpsed very briefly but Polanski shows Rosemary leafing through its pages in a sequence of Hitchcock-like view-reaction-view shots that make it appear as convincing as possible. The shots also make the viewer examine the book through Rosemary’s eyes, something Polanski does throughout the film.

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Les Jeux des Anges by Walerian Borowczyk

Les Jeux des Anges.

Following yesterday’s post, we can be certain that Terry Gilliam had seen Les Jeux des Anges because in 2001 he included it in a list of ten favourite animated films. Jan Lenica co-directed Dom (1959) with Walerian Borowczyk but doesn’t work on this film which is the darkest and strangest of all Borowczyk’s works I’ve seen to date. Once again there’s some unavoidable subtext, although whether that applies to the Holocaust or to Stalinist repression is for the viewer to decide. What we see is a series of painted tableaux in which various mechanical processes are butchering angels. The atmosphere isn’t far removed from the cruelties of Roland Topor while the painted scenes are very similar to those that David Lynch would be animating a couple of years later. The soundtrack is credited to electronic composer Bernard Parmegiani. Watch it for yourself here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Les Temps Morts by René Laloux
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk

Le Grand Macabre

Yesterday I mentioned Leslie Megahey’s Ligeti film, All Clouds Are Clocks, an hour-long documentary based around an interview with György Ligeti filmed in 1976. A unique feature of that film was that Megahey returned to film Ligeti in the same room in 1991 where they discussed the composer’s work during the intervening period. Of these, Le Grand Macabre, written in the late 1970s, was the most ambitious piece.

Bartók and Ligeti share some attributes: both were Hungarian, and both were forced to flee their native country. Both composers also wrote only one opera apiece. Le Grand Macabre is Ligeti’s opus, an absurdist drama based on Michel de Ghelderode‘s 1934 play, La Balade du grand macabre. In the film Ligeti explains that he didn’t want to repeat the mid-century concept of the anti-opera but was also dissatisfied with the traditional variety, hence Le Grand Macabre‘s description as an “anti-anti-opera”, a work that combines the tradition and its reaction.

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Now we are six

Number Six/The Prisoner (1990?) by Roland Topor.

Welcome to post number 2,618, and the sixth anniversary of this here weblog. Roland Topor’s drawing could be interpreted as a cry for help from your narrator—imprisoned by the daily necessity to file copy—but it’s there mainly because I couldn’t think of another picture featuring the requisite numeral.

WordPress’s Site Stats shows that these pages had over 2,000,000 visits in the past year, something I find very surprising. Many will be from either regular readers or one-off hits from the Google hordes searching for a particular picture but all the same…that’s a lot of people. A large percentage are no doubt visitors to the gay artists archive which continues to be the most popular page here, and one I feel compelled to keep adding to as a result. There’s always more to discover.

As always, thanks for reading and commenting!

John x