Archive Page 2
A door of perception?
The first time that I read something about The Black Dahlia murder was in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon . It must have been around the same time that I read Robert Lebel’s study on Marcel Duchamp. I was immediately struck by the similarities of the gruesome photo to be found in Anger’s book and Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés – his last work of art which he secretively prepared from 1947 – 1968. Imagine how surprised I was when I read Jonathan Wallis brilliant article Case Open and/or Unsolved at tout-fait The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal in which he suggests that Etant donnés was indeed inspired by the famous murder case.
The parallels between the Black Dahlia and Étant donnés are numerous. By far the most striking similarity involves the two bodies. In a photograph of Elizabeth Short’s body at the crime scene, she lies in thick, tall grass not unlike the twigs that surround the body in Étant donnés; her legs spread wide displaying her sex…
In mid-January 1947 Duchamp returned from a stay in Europe, arriving in New York at the moment the Dahlia case began to unfold. The particulars of the murder and its surrounding controversies were appearing daily in newspapers. The New York Daily News ran headlines and follow-up stories about the Dahlia murder for several weeks. More importantly, at the time of the killing Los Angeles was the home of the artist’s close friend Man Ray. The relationship between these two artists is well documented, and Man Ray’s influence on Duchamp’s conception of Étant donnés has already been suggested. In addition to being engulfed in a sea of newspaper headlines and Hollywood gossip about the killing, Man Ray, like Elizabeth Short, frequented the popular bars and clubs in Hollywood and knew many people in the jet set of the movie community. With his lifelong fascination with sado-masochism, Man Ray would certainly have taken an interest in the particulars of this crime…
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Illustration by Winsor McCay
As far as I know laziness is rarely treated as a subversive strategy. My next posts will deal with various aspects of this trait which was classified by Thomas Aquinas as one of the seven capital sins.
Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl Marx, wrote in 1880 the pamphlet The Right to be Lazy as a refutation of The Right to Work , which was one of the main claims of the Revolutions of 1848 in France, and many of its arguments are are as astute in our times (of course mutatis mutandis) as they were then.
Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics, strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks…
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work…
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Strange Guy
What is it that I stumble on Guy de Maupassant everywhere?
He made his first appearance in my blog as a forerunner of surrealist mythology. Then I covered The Bel Ami International Art Competition, which was held for Albert Lewin’s adaptation of Maupassant’s novel. Two of his novellas were the source for films which I’ve recently seen on behalf of my ongoing research on the hidden intersections of surrealism and cinema: Partie de Campagne and La Chevelure.
Sylvia Bataille in Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne.
Maupassant’s fiction served of course very often as source material for films. The following small selection offers the ones that I find especially promising.
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Far too many coincidences
Around the age of ten or twelve I was struck more than anything by The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the fear of seeing a gorilla appear at the window haunted my childhood insomnia for a long time (at the age of three I had been extremely frightened of a small marmoset which suddenly leapt up at the window; it is perhaps the only precise memory of my earliest years).
This childhood memory of Jean Ferry anticipated strangely the experience of seeing King Kong, a film which should in later years by turns delight and horrify him.
The text he wrote about this film for the magazine Minotaure in 1934 (translated by Paul Hammond for The Shadow and its Shadow) intrigued me by its notion that logical lapses could actually heighten the appeal of a film.
To sum up, through the absurdity of its treatment (an inept script with numerous incoherent details), its violent oneiric power (the horribly realistic representation of a common dream), its monstrous eroticism (the monster’s unbridled love for the woman, cannibalism, human sacrifice), the unrealitiy of certain sets… the film seems to correspond to all that we mean by the adjective “poetic” and in which we had the temerity to hope the cinema would be its most fertile native soil.
As I dug further into Ferry’s life I found out that he was very prolific as both screenwriter and participant in surrealist activities (click here to see 4 surrealist tracts signed by Ferry). But the conjunction of these was rather seldom in his career. Maybe that’s the reason why he is so underrepresented in film history as well as in accounts of the surrealist movement.
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Most vivid images
Images du monde visionnaire is a film which would match very well with UBUWEB. But in this case the place to go is Canal-U a French website for medical films. And it’s indeed not an experimental but an educational film which was produced in 1963 by the film department of Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz (best known for synthesizing LSD in 1938) in order to demonstrate the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish. Still it shares many traits with some of the more interesting efforts in avant-garde film making of its time. Maybe the most remarkable about it is that it is the only venture in film of notable French writer and painter Henri Michaux who wrote several accounts of his experiments with drugs. In charge with the filmic translation of Michaux’ prescriptions was director Eric Duvivier (a nephew of Julien Duvivier) whose other films include an adaptation of Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes. Sceptical from the start about the success of such an undertaking Michaux was said to be quite disappointed by the result. But the following conversation with famous photographer Brassaï shows Michaux in a different mood.
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The YouTube of the Avant-Garde
I guess you’ll have to forget YouTube for a while, because at www.ubu.com/film you can see loads of “really” magnificent films.
UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.
Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally “be free”: on UbuWeb, we give it away …
The following recommendations offer only a small glimpse of UBUWEB’s filmarchive.
Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell
Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn’t feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.
On Rose Hobart see also Jahsonic’s post Make it my thing .
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I was able to track down “the first summary study” (Gérard Lenne) of horror and science fiction cinema. The list of authors who contributed to this special issue of Cinéma 57 is really impressive:
Included are articles by favorite surrealists Robert Benayoun and Ado Kyrou; Lotte H. Eisner (The Haunted Screen); Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, co-authors of Panorama du film noir américain; Jean Boullet, a draughtsman (something between Cocteau and Tom of Finland) and horror film aficionado who afterwards became a frequent collaborator on Midi Minuit Fantastique and last but not least André S. Labarthe, critic for the Cahiers du Cinéma and producer of the groundbreaking TV-series Cinéastes de notre temps.
Jean-Louis Caussou was formerly unknown to me, but he came up with the wonderful headline which I used for this post.
www.devildead.com features a great dossier on Midi Minuit Fantastique where those of you who speak French will find further information.
Click here for a complete synopsis.
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Things are not as they seem
Hans Holbein The Ambassadors
Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. “Ana – morphosis” comes from the Greek words meaning “formed again.” more…
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Phantastische Bibliothek Suhrkamp: One of Germany’s best series of fantasy and science fiction. Stanislaw Lem called it the “pink ghetto”. My collection includes books by Algernon Blackwood, Jonathan Carroll, H.P. Lovecraft, Jean Ray, Clark Ashton Smith. Not visible are the science fiction titles – J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick for instance.
Complete Short Stories by Philip K. Dick (one tome missing) + biography.
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