Sergei Parajanov – Page 2

Weekend links 386

Lynd Ward again, and one of his illustrations for Frankenstein (1934).

• “Julio Mario Santo Domingo was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world’s greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic, and rock and roll: a library of more than 50,000 items…” Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo by Peter Watts catalogues some of the artefacts.

• “His vision of Gay Liberation was deeply, and uniquely, inflected by his study of, and belief, in anarchism.” More on the late Charles Shively: Michael Bronski remembers a pivotal figure in the gay liberation movement.

• William Friedkin’s Sorcerer was released on region-free blu-ray a couple of years ago but it’s being reissued again in the UK for its fortieth anniversary. Julian House has created a series of designs for the insert.

• Electronic musician and podcaster Marc Kate talks to Erik Davis about nihilism, horror movies, New Age music, and transmuting Nazi black metal into the ambient soundscapes of his latest album, Deface.

• “Beware the polished little man“: an extract from The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe by Franziska zu Reventlow which is available now from Rixdorf Editions.

• Another welcome blu-ray release, Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates appears later this month in a special edition from Second Sight.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 626 by Sharp Veins, XLR8R Podcast 515 by Sammy Dee, and Secret Thirteen Mix 236 by Beta Evers.

• The Witch Wave with Pam Grossman is a podcast for bewitching conversation about magic, creativity, and culture.

• Call me by the wrong name: Benjamin Lee on Hollywood’s perennial attempts to straight-wash gay films.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ronald Firbank Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).

• Zoë Lescaze reviews Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years by Christopher Frayling.

• Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.

• Stewart Smith on The Strange World of…Linda Sharrock.

• Colors (1969) by Pharoah Sanders | Frankenstein (1972) by The Edgar Winter Group | Pomegranate (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Parajanov posters

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964).

A selection of the better ones. Last week I was rewatching Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates and was curious to see how it had been advertised. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is also known as Wild Horses of Fire (or Horses of Fire), after the novelette by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky which provided the story. The Russian poster above shows the fateful axe which kills Ivan’s father at the beginning of the film, while the French and Japanese posters below play on the horses of fire in their titles.

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Weekend links 134

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian.

• The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show.

• Sra is the final book in the Aedena Cycle by Moebius. It’s never been translated into English but Quenched Consciousness has just finished posting the entire book in an unofficial translation.

• “It’s better to have a small amount of good comics, than a big amount of mediocre comics.” Dutch comic artist Joost Swarte interviewed.

• From 2007: The Strange Lovecraftian Statuary of Puerto Vallarta (Thanks, Ian.) Related: More art by Alejandro Colunga.

A novelty mechanical clock barometer in the form of a steam engine (c. 1885).

• The MR-808: a room-size TR-808 drum machine by Moritz Simon Geist with real instruments played by robot hands.

• “Shoot us and dig the grave; otherwise we’re staying.” The women living in Chernobyl’s toxic wasteland.

• Hotel Room Portraits 1999–2012 by Richard Renaldi, a new photo exhibition at Wessel + O’Connor.

• Lane’s Telescopic View of the Opening of the Great Exhibition, 1851.

• “I’m the target market, and I don’t like it!” A Creative Catharsis.

• Brian Eno’s new ambient album, Lux, is released on Monday.

• Collages by Sergei Parajanov.

• Techno City (1984) by Cybotron | Techno Primitiv (1985) by Chris & Cosey | Techno Dread (2008) by 2562.

Symbolist cinema

Symbolist? Arguably. Decadent? Certainly. Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) again this weekend I thought it worth making note of some of these resonances. The real age of Symbolist cinema was the Silent Era from around 1910 onwards, something I discussed in more detail here. That being so, several films made since can be taken as Symbolist (more usually Decadent) productions even if this was never their original intention. Kenneth Anger‘s Magic Lantern Cycle comes immediately to mind, so too Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

Bram Stoker’s novel was published in 1897 at the ebbing of the fin de siècle but vampires and vampirism were already recurrent Symbolist themes. Aesthetic magus Walter Pater wrote of the Mona Lisa in 1893, “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave…” Dracula almost demands a Symbolist interpretation, and for now Coppola’s production is the closest we get. I’ve found this makes the film more satisfying in a way: you can ignore the shoddy performances by secondary characters and concentrate on the decor and details (and the tremendous score by Wojciech Kilar). Some of the following screen grabs argue my point.

Oh look, peacock feathers. I loved the artificiality of this film, the excessive palette, the obvious models and miniatures, the layering of images. The dissolve from a peacock feather to Jonathan Harker’s infernal train journey is a great moment.

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The Epigenesis by Melechesh

This new piece of work, a cover illustration for metal band Melechesh, was still in progress only a month ago but the album in question, The Epigenesis, has been announced so I can post it here. This follows a design I produced for an earlier Melechesh album, Emissaries, in 2006, both of which refer to the Sumerian mythology which powers the band’s music. There’s some vague Parajanov influence in this piece which isn’t the kind of thing that usually extends to the metal world but Sergei Parajanov’s films were one of the reference points the band offered. The suspended carpets at the top left are the most obvious allusion to the director but for the composition as a whole I also had in mind the tableaux scenes he creates in The Colour of Pomegranates and other films.

The Epigenesis will be released on the Nuclear Blast label on October 1st, 2010.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Short films by Sergei Parajanov
• New things for October