Many thanks to Au carrefour étrange who did me a great favour.

These two handsome seminarists in Jean Renoir’s Une partie de campagne are Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Bataille in the flesh. Being an extra wasn’t Bataille’s only foray into movies. He wrote a screenplay under the title of La Maison brûlée about a peasant (modeled very clearly after Bataille himself) who marries a woman five days after he has met her for the first time. His fellow villagers are against the marriage as they suspect him to be the murderer of his father as well as that of his first wife and of his female cousin who all died under dubious circumstances. Although rather tame and conventional in comparison with Bataille’s other writings the scenario has some nice touches. It’s conceived as a thriller and contains some elements reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (which also features a burnt down house prominently, for instance). Another Laurence Olivier vehicle, William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, definitely made a lasting impression on Bataille. He would identify himself with its protagonist Heathcliff:

I come from Helder, where I have seen Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff, living with Cathys spectre just as I wanted to live with Laure’s ( Colette Peignot.) spectre … On Saturday, in La Vaissenet, I thought of Wuthering Heights. I had even thought about it in Ferluc. I suppose that this travelling around in mountain cabins made me forget my disgust for “comedies”.

Bataille tried to interest French comedian Fernandel in another screenplay, which is sadly lost. Henry-François Rey – cowriter of this screenplay describes its content as follows:

There was a bourgeois soap manufacturer (Marseille soap of course), respected and honoured in his city, belonging to the best society of notables, president of a charitable society, whose favourite pastime, when his children went on holiday, was to pretend to be the Marquis de Sade. I mean that he assumed his clothes and appearance and engaged in the practices described in 12o Days of Sodom and Philosophy in the Bedroom with local prostitutes. It all ends badly. The (Marseille) soap manufacturer really does murder one of the prostitutes. Of course, the incident is hushed up, but the fake Sade – a veritable bastard – kills himself so that morality can triumph.
From Michel Surya’s – Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography

It was in Bernd Mattheus’ very comprehensive (three tomes) chronicle Georges Bataille – Eine Thanatographie where I learned about Bataille’s film work for the first time. A while ago Documents tracked down the very interesting connection between Bataille and Jean Rollin.
The Fernandel photo is from Philippe Halsman’s book The Frenchman.

At Documents you can see Germaine Dulac’s film The Seashell and the Clerygman. Also featured are a text of Antonin Artaud who wrote the screenplay in which he writes favorably about Dulac’s adaptation and an account which fuses various testimonies of the film’s premiere with the surrealists protesting violently against the film. The post closes with the following question:

What happened between the glowing praise Artaud wrote on October 29th, 1927 and the premiere on February 2, 1928? Did Artaud see the film die on the cutting room floor? Or did the Surrealists hijack the premiere, did they take advantage of some critical remarks Artaud might have made about the film to create a row?

Artaud’s later remarks on the film would remain contradictory. In a letter to Jean Paulhan, written in 1932, he expressed his conviction that Seashell was a better film than both L’Age d’Or and Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and that they borrowed heavily from it. On the other hand he felt disenchanted that he was kept from participating in its filmmaking process. He wouldn’t even get a credit as a screenwriter but merely as dreamer, as the caption was “rêve d’Antonin Artaud”. This would especially outrage him as he …

… proposed not a translation of the dream and its content, but an exhaustive investigation of the systems of dreaming, to discover their mechanisms and their structures in collapse. In this way, he wanted to reconstitute the violence and independence of dreaming, as a process directly projected into cinematic imagery; his aim was to ‘realize this idea of visual cinema where psychology itself is devoured by the acts’.
Stephen Barber, Blows and Bombs

But did Dulac betray Artaud’s intentions? When comparing Artaud’s source to the film one must say that she transmitted its content onto the screen quite faithfully and some of the scenes are still impressive, but there are only glimpses in it of the raw energy which Artaud imagined for his film- and theatreprojects and to which he would refer as “barbarity” or “theatre of cruelty”.
Germaine Dulac belonged – together with Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and Marcel L’Herbier – to a more formalist streak of French avant-garde directors called the Impressionists. A movement to which surrealists were openly hostile. Jacques Brunius for instance referred to their style as a “a fashion, a box of tricks, a set of easily copied mannerisms. (…) any anecdote from a novel, however vulgar, may be accepted or chosen as long as it is disguised by an exuberant ornamentation of technical effects to ‘look visual’ . A further outstanding characteristic of this school: total lack of humour.”
Desnos – by other accounts the main perpetrator at the premiere of Seashell – made clear that the directors who were appreciated by the surrealists had different aims:

When René Clair and Picabia made Entr’acte, Man Ray L’Étoile de Mer and Buñuel his admirable Chien andalou, it was not a matter of creating a work of art or of a new aesthetic but of obeying profound, original impulses, in consequence necessitating a new form.

Maybe the most original criticism came from the British Board of Censors which refused Seashell on the grounds that it is “so cryptic as to be meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.’

Artaud wrote a couple of other scenarios which sound very promising but none of them would make it to the screen. The 32 was an attempt to make a horror film. By Stephen Barber’s account Artaud tried to find financial backing for it in Germany and Hollywood. Another one, The Butcher’s Revolt, experimented with disparity of image and sound.

The madman considers him with a baleful air, and as the gigolo advances, he punches him right in the face saying without raising his voice:

Take care, your head to the butcher’s.

At this moment the waiter drops his tray. The thunderous noise of the tray makes a terrible impression on the madman. The gigolo becomes of no account in his hands; and as everyone in the café is on his feet, coming toward him, the madman suddenly has a blank spell during which everything stands still, and we hear the sound of the butcher’s cart grinding the asphalt in the morning, to the sound of hoofbeats.
Then the sounds of the café resume. The madman recovers his senses, but has before his eyes the vision of the cart passing by, rolling along in one corner of the screen like those tiny images that move about on the ceiling, in a camera obscura, by the chink of light from the drapes. He cries out, looking at the people in the café who are staring at him like animals:

To the slaughter-house.

Excerpt from J. H. Matthew’s Surrealism and Film

“Restent à définir les conditions de la lutte, puisque tant est que la jeunesse et le risque de désœuvrement absolu que nous courions nous l’ont fait engager.”

“It still remains to define the conditions of the fight, since both youth and the risk of absolute idleness that we took led us to start it.”
André Breton, Pourquoi je prends la direction de la Révolution Surréaliste
La Révolution Surréaliste N° 4

I’m leaving for my holidays. So there will be no posts for a couple of weeks.

Just one thing though. What do I think of writing which covers the same ground as I do, but in a more coherent and academic way? Well, I very often appreciate it.
Or as Henri Rousseau said to Picasso:

We are the two greatest painters of this era: you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern style!

Cover of the “Warm Leatherette” single by The Normal

Daniel Miller on his song which is based on J.G. Ballard’s novel  Crash:

“Warm Leatherette” got a much better response than I thought. I didn’t think anyone would like it at all, and I did it as a hobby, really. It was in l978, right after Punk had started. The music at the time was quite unusual — apart from a few groups like Kraftwerk, that kind of electronic music wasn’t really being used. It was before the Human League. The people who’d read the book recognized the imagery of the lyrics instantly, and the rest just thought I was some kind of sicko. I made up a few hundred copies of the single, which was all I expected to sell. I would have been pleased to sell them all! But a reviewer at Sounds, which was the most forward-thinking magazine of the time, called it “Single of the Century” and the demand grew. It sold a few thousand and then it got to America and all these strange radio reports started filtering through. It got on K-ROCK and Grace Jones did a cover of it. It never was a huge hit — it became a cult record. http://finelinefeatures.com/crash/cmp/warm-interview.html

And J.G. Ballard on Grace Jones.

R/S: Surrealists have also influenced photography in the direction of inventive manipulation and juxtaposition —
JGB: There was a feature in Time Out about — I don’t know whether she’s American of Jamaican — the singer Grace Jones, who’s a black singer with a sort of robotic appearance — a very powerful character. She sings a song called “Warm Leatherette,” which I gather is based on Crash. Her manager, eminence grise (Jean-Paul Goude - Ombres Blanches), is a photographer who has lived with her for five years. He gave her her image. He takes photos of her in, say, a running pose, and then cuts the photo at various points so that each thigh and leg and arm is cut; next he puts in little inserts that make her arms longer and legs longer, then retouches them so that the woman, in reality, would have to be about nine feet tall. But you don’t realize this, because she’s posed against naturalistic backgrounds like hotel rooms, and because it’s so beautifully done. He’s published a book of photos on Grace Jones, and they’re extraordinary. She’s sitting on a chair or lying across a bed, with an extra three inches of thigh or leg. Bizarre….
From Re/Search # 8/9: J.G. Ballard

A couple of days ago I received the ‘Thinking Blogger’ award from Esotika Erotica Psychotica. I don’t know if I deserve an award with such a name as it took me quite a while to understand that I received it.
Well, I accept this award (which is basically a meme) because I’m in such good company and because it looks cute. Documents who was also honoured by Esotika wrote a really interesting essay on chainletters for this occasion so I advise you to read it.

The rules are as follows:

1. If, and only if, one gets tagged, one is obliged to write a post with links to five blogs that make one think,
2. One must link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. And one may display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’.

Esotika imposed on himself a rule which I’ll try to follow as well.

I’m not going to name any blogs that have, to my knowledge, already received the award. Of course, I don’t read every blog on the internet, but I figure the addition of this rule can help generate more linkage for more people!

This one’s hard because almost everyone on my blogroll already has the award. Here are my tags:

La main gauche
La main gauche made me aware that there are present day equivalents to Grandville and Alfred Kubin and that Joel Peter Witkin isn’t necessarily the last word in staged photography.

The laughing bone
A cross between the Amok catalogue and National Geographics. In Sean Casey’s blog you’ll find fascinating articles on spermaceti, diableries and the most beautiful assortment of skeletons.

Cartoon Modern
I found this blog while collecting material about UPA for one of my posts. I’m usually not prone to nostalgia but Amid Amidi’s devotion for the animation of the fifties brings us back to a golden age in this field.

Sedmikrasky
I got the feeling that ’The Thinkin Blogger’ award doesn’t go very far beyond the anglophone world. So, although my Spanish is virtually non-existant, I award the filmblog Sedmikrasky (the original Czech title of Daisies), because his selection spanning from Busby Berkeley to Michel Gondry seems to reveal a kindred spirit.  

This Jazz Ain’t Free
I recently became interested in the short short story. Here is one by Fredric Brown for example.
The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.
Oliver’s blog is very minimalistic, too and I must admit that this kind of restriction has something really disquieting and mysterious.

Still from Un honnête homme directed by Ado Kyrou

Just found out that Jahsonic is currently reading Ado Kyrou’s Le surréalisme au cinéma. Readers of my blog will be aware of my penchant for this author. I think it was in Ian Buruma’s Behind the Mask where I read about the distinction being made by the Japanese between their own wet (humane, emotional, intuitive) sensibility and the dry (cold, rational, intellectual) western culture.
Well, Kyrou didn’t shy away from being wet (Incidentally the only translation of Le surréalisme au cinéma I know of is into Japanese).

But today’s post will concentrate on his son Ariel Kyrou, who wrote a book on electronic music, which has been quite a success in France – Techno Rebelle. http://www.d-i-r-t-y.com has a very interesting interview with him, conducted by Bernard Mordano, which reveals that his approach to the history of modern music is very much in the tradition of his father’s thought.

When reading Ariel Kyrou’s book … one realizes that the twentieth century’s opposition serious music/ popular music is a great stupidity. The most interesting artists fell between those stools, creating avant-garde art without knowing it.

And so his book is not limiting itself to the genre of techno, but to “the inventiveness which electronic music brought with it”. In this vein it covers everyone from Luigi Russolo, Edgar Varèse and John Cage to Kraftwerk, Lee Perry or Afrika Bambaataa, albeit in a non-linear form reminiscent of hypertexts.

Ariel Kyrou admits an influence by David Toop’s book Ocean of Sound and Marcus Greil’s Lipstick Traces, but thinks that there is a lack on really good writing on the subject of modern music.

The writing about music is divided too often between professors who have the intention to be serious and amateurs who aren’t very rigorous, between the musicologist and the fan, between the graduate and the journalist apprentice(…)

I think it isn’t possible to write about music without assuming ones own subjectivity with a maximum of honesty.

On condition that the subjectivity is grounded on thorough research and the verification of the facts. The interview goes into much more detail, I only add a quote which offers a rare biographical glimpse on the Kyrous.
If you speak French, read the full interview.

BM: Your mother Michelle Kyrou signed a composition along with Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and Iannis Xenakis in the beginning of the sixties. Is it her who’s at the origin of your appetite for the exploration of sound?

AK: It’s her and my father. My parents were sort of uprooted, split from their families and cut off from their worlds, respectively Greece and Egypt. We had only little money, but we were rolling in culture, especially popular culture, in science fiction books and Jazz records, crime novels and experimental rock LPs. There was an emphasis on cinema, the passion of my father, on music, which my mother quit for the education of her kids and on surrealist aesthetics, since my father was a member of the post-war surrealist group. He wrote a book, Le surréalisme au cinéma, which is still regarded as a reference book in encyclopedic and iconoclastic subjectivity.

Ariel Kyrou’s last book sounds very interesting, too.

Reality is penetrated, soaked, perfused with images and fictions: But there are good fictions, leaving a place for liberty, favorising openness and interpretations. And there are bad fictions, leaving no choice, imprisoning, impoverishing…
From the blurb of Paranofictions: Traité de savoir vivre dans une réalité de science fiction

The good fictions being very similar to those of paranoids like Philip K. Dick, Kolkoz, Francis Picabia, Ultralab, Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner), les Yes Men, David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard.

Postscript:
There’s one more Kyrou we should mention here, Ariel’s brother Alex, who founded the Industrial band Vox Populi (as there were many bands with this name he had to rename it Gitanjali recently) in the eighties.
Click here for an interview. 

Recently I had some clicks on my about page. As the informations on this page are sparse, I’ll roam in future posts through the topography of my childhood and adolescence with special consideration of its media-landscapes.
In this one I’ll concentrate on my mother and her interests before I was born, for the simple reason that my father hasn’t been talking too much about the interests he had in his youth.
Both my parents were born and grew up in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which was a republic of Yugoslavia when they were young. If you want to catch some of the charm Zagreb had in that time, see Orson Welles’ The Trial, as a great part of it was shot there.

Interestingly, I saw another film which used Zagreb as stand-in for Prague not long ago. Short Night of the Glass Dolls by Aldo Lado, a giallo with a nice atmosphere which you should also check out. My mom has never seen these films, but I remember her talking about the following ones vividly:

My mother was also a voracious reader in her teens by her accounts and her favorite novelists were Hemingway, Tolstoi (the choice of my first name was inspired by War and Peace) and Zane Grey.
Especially the novels of the latter should prove somewhat prophetic in the anticipation of the future role my mother should assume in her marriage and in her life.

Women from the east who preach love, forgiveness and pacifism get hold of violent men from the west in these works. But eventually the women learn to appreciate the glamour of violence and to take advantage of it. They even go so far as to put the guns in the hands of the men or if necessary to use them themselves.
Joe Hembus: Western, Geschichte von 1540 – 1894

This is of course not to be taken literally, but it isn’t symbolic only, either.

Cover for the Italian edition of Riders of the Purple Sage
by Guido Crepax

My mother also had a knack for poetry (Neruda, Lorca and Yesenin). Here she was certainly influenced by one of her Serbocroat teachers, himself a poet, who was a disciple of Tin Ujević  one of the most famous and prolific Croatian writers of the twentieth century. Ujević’s poetry was based on traditional native forms and incorporated various modernist streams like symbolism, expressionism and surrealism. He and his literary fellows who frequented the Kazališni kavana (Theatrical Café) in Zagreb were referred to as the Bohemians.
I also remember an article in the Yugoslavian magazine Politikin zabavnik which I read as a kid about his eidetic memory and his seemingly infinite ability to learn foreign languages (among them the Chinese languages, Japanese and Swahili). Ujević used his talent to translate into Croatian the works of Walt Whitman, Rimbaud and Gabriele D’Annunzio for instance.

Tin Ujević 64

I’m not apt to translate his poetry (at least not into English), but to give you a sample of his work, I’ll present to you the very useful list that he compiled specifying the age that each of the following poets reached respectively.

Chatterton 18
Novalis 19
Lautréamont 23
Georg Heym 25
Keats 26
Lucanus 26
Laforgue 27
Jules Tellier 27
Georg Trakl 27
Hégésippe Moreau 28
Marlowe 29
Gilbert 29
Shelley 30
Yesenin 30
Sidney 32
André Chénier 32
Jarry 33 (34)
Kleist 34
Byron 36
Robert Burns 37
Rimbaud 37
Mayakovsky 38
Apollinaire 38
Klabund 38
Leopardi 39
Juliusz Słowacki 40
Alexander Blok 41
From The Scalpel of Chaos (1938)

Bio-comic on Philip K. Dick by Robert Crumb
At http://www.philipkdickfans.com you can read all of it.

Astonishing passage in Lawrence Sutin’s Philip K. Dick biography Divine Invasions.

In December 1976 came the “Zebra Principle”. Back in the sixties, Phil had read The Mask of the Medusa, a study of insect mimicry which suggested that humans could be as deceived by a hypothetical “high-order mimicry” as birds are by insect mimicry (or lions by zebras’ stripes). Phil’s Zebra Principle asks: “What if the “high-order mimicry” were that of a higher, or even divine, intelligence?”