Steven Berkoff – { feuilleton }

The Metamorphosis of Mr Samsa, a film by Caroline Leaf

Caroline Leaf’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s most famous story was made by animating sand on a pane of illuminated glass. Leaf made several films using this technique which gives painterly, if monochromatic, results, and is probably less time-consuming than other techniques that aim for similar effects. This is one story that’s best treated as an animation (or theatre, as Steven Berkoff demonstrated); Kafka’s Ungezeifer is a famously difficult word to translate into English, and an even more difficult concept to bring to life in a film studio.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafkaesque
• Screening Kafka
• Designs on Kafka
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka

Wildeana 13

Oscar Wilde, no. 26 (1882). One of a series of photo portraits taken by Napoleon Sarony when Wilde was in New York.

Every day is an anniversary for something. Among other things, October 16th 2014 is the 160th anniversary of the day that Oscar Wilde was brought to Earth in a spaceship—see Velvet Goldmine for details—so in honour of that moment here’s a few more Wildean links.

• One item of news I missed last month was Al Pacino’s announcement that he’ll be bringing his production of Wilde’s Salomé to the London stage in 2016. Good to hear that his enthusiasm was sparked by the excellent Steven Berkoff production, and this detail is especially noteworthy: “There will be make-up, sets, costumes… and decadence. It will be a whole different thing to what we did in America.”

• Turkish censors still have problems with Anglophone novels that publishers attempt to present in Turkish translations—the work of William Burroughs caused a fuss a couple of years ago—but last month an uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published there for the first time.

• Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland: “We’ve got as close as we can to hearing him speak” Holland has co-written The Trials of Oscar Wilde, a dramatisation of Wilde’s court appearances which opens at Trafalgar Studios, London, this week.

• The extraordinary story of Oscar Wilde’s holiday in Worthing in 1894. James Connaughton interviews Antony Edmonds about his new book, Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath.

• The beau of Reading jail: was prisoner 1122 Oscar Wilde’s lover? (The answer to any newspaper headline ending with a question mark is invariably “No”.)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Salomé and Wilde Salomé

Three years on and Al Pacino’s recent pet projects—Salomé and Wilde Salomé—have yet to be given a general release. Salomé is the one I’m most eager to see, a filmed performance of the Oscar Wilde play with Jessica Chastain in the title role. There is at least a trailer now, which gives an intriguing taste of the production. Like Steven Berkoff, Pacino has opted for modern dress while making some of the details—the moon, Jokanaan’s well—more material. If Wilde’s Symbolist melodrama seems rather effete for a man known for playing gangsters it should be noted that the play features a suicide and two executions, as well as a strong theme of paternal incest and even necrophilia. Herod, of course, is notorious for being a child-murdering king.

Pacino and Jessica Chastain are in London on Sunday at BFI Southbank talking with Stephen Fry about Salomé and the feature-length production documentary, Wilde Salomé. Both films will also receive screenings. Here’s hoping the rest of us won’t have much longer to wait before we can see them.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive
• The Salomé archive

Kafkaesque

Another book design of mine (interiors only) which I completed last September for Tachyon and about which I had this to say at the time:

Kafkaesque [is] edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high calibre of contributions from writers including JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Jonathan Lethem and Philip Roth, and also the comic strip adaptation of The Hunger Artist by Robert Crumb.

The book gained a positive review at SF Site recently, reminding me that I hadn’t written anything about the design. As with some of my other Tachyon work the interiors take their cue from a pre-determined cover by another designer, in this case Josh Beatman. I followed Josh’s type choices (Senator for the titles and headings) and also extended his use of an insect as a recurrent motif. Before I saw the contents I was fairly determined to avoid any further insect imagery but it became apparent that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a repeated reference in many of the stories.

As for the recurrent “K”, that seemed inevitable given Kafka’s own use of the letter as well as its presence not only in Kafka’s own name but in the names of the editors. The frames were an idea borrowed from (and referring to) Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of The Trial in which portable frames serve on the stage as doorways, windows, corridors, picture frames and so on. I was hoping to do more with this idea but (as is often the case) ran out of time to develop it further.

And while we’re on the subject of Tachyon designs, I don’t seem to have mentioned my interiors for a Joe R Lansdale collection, Crucified Dreams, which also appeared last year. This is a hard-boiled anthology of Lansdale’s favourite stories for which I supplied suitably rough-and-tough graphics comprising scanned scalpel blades and lettering assembled from torn newspaper pages. I’m due to start on some new work for Tachyon this week. More about that at a later date.

Continue reading “Kafkaesque”

Virgil Finlay’s Salomé

While chasing down Virgil Finlay’s illustration for Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space earlier this week I came across another Finlay drawing I’d not noticed before in a book I’ve owned for years. Makes me wonder what else is lurking on the shelves. Finlay’s depiction of Salomé was an illustration for Waxworks, a story by Robert Bloch published in Weird Tales for January 1939. I’ve never read much of Bloch’s fiction, this story included, so can’t say anything about it, but Finlay’s drawing impresses for the solid black night sky, and the peculiar flaming headdress, the kind of unique detail he often added to his pictures.

Bloch and Finlay had a memorable encounter a couple of years years before when Finlay illustrated The Faceless God, another Weird Tales piece which so impressed HP Lovecraft that it inspired a poem, To Mr. Finlay, Upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch’s Tale, ‘The Faceless God’. Lovecraft’s handwritten draft can be seen (but not necessarily read) here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive