a fool in the forest

Animations of Mortality

Man does not live by serious, sophisticated music alone.  No, sometimes man lives by peppy, poppy, non-serious music.  And sometimes man lives by the animated videos that accompany that peppy, poppy and/or non-serious music.  Such as the three exemplars below, which I offer for your Friday or weekend consideration.

1.

First in line, with the most prominent pedigree, is the newest from Moby, "Shot in the Back of the Head."  There is shooting involved, and a head, as well as a severed arm.  Head and arm apparently find romance in an otherwise dark and harrowing world.  

Moby has written that his forthcoming album, wait for me, was inspired by a speech he attended on creativity and the marketplace.  The speaker was director David Lynch.  Moby thereafter prevailed upon Lynch to create a video for the initial track from the album, and Lynch thereupon created this:

2.

Batting second: Devo.  

Akron's finest dystopians are reportedly midway through the writing and recording of their first proper album in some 20 years, and are teasing their believers with a new video, "Don't Shoot (I'm a Man)."  Yes, more gunplay and  more visions of life in an unsettling urban realm, with topical references ["Don't Taze Me, Bro!"], a dollop of tawdry role-playing sexuality, and some of those irritating inflatable advertising wiggler things thrown in for spice:

3.

In search of a final animated treat we turn north to Toronto and the widescreen piano pop of Brad Lyons and Carly Paradis, doing business as Oceanship.  For the video to accompany their song "Hotblack," Lyons and Paradis turned to Israeli animator Ofir Sasson, who produced a largely hand-drawn tale of love, lust and betrayal as a starring vehicle for the ever-popular Wolf and Sheep.  It is what you might have gotten if Warner Brothers hired John Cheever to write a "reboot" of the Looney Tunes franchise.  

It ends in tears.  Firearms are again in evidence, as is the inevitable long, slow fall from a cartoon cliff.  The song, with a swooping "nah-na-na-na" chorus, is easily the best one included in this post.  (Although it is embedded below, I recommend watching this video in its largest and clearest size, here.)

Enjoy your respective weekends, folks.

~~~

Title reference: a now out-of-print book by Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam.

~~~

The Persistent Influence of Mel Brooks

It is a sign of a misspent youth, surely, that this headline (from the Drudge Report) --

OBAMA MOVES TOWARD 'SWEDISH MODEL' FOR BANKS

-- instantly made me think of this:

Someone should warn the First Lady to keep a watchful eye on the President's moves.

God dag på dig!

And Darwinner is . . .

Charles Darwin is 200 years old today, and I believe him even if too few of my fellow citizens do. 

In honor of the grand old man, this fool presents the highly evolved setting of Ravel's "Bolero" from Bruno Bozzetto's 1977 Fantasia send-up, Allegro Non Troppo.  Here is Part 1:

And here is Part 2:

(Better quality, but non-embeddable, versions are here (Part 1 - 10:43) and here (Part 2 - 2:16).)

~~~

Photo: "Darwin Has a Party" [at Swarthmore] by Flickr user Colin Purrington, used under Creative Commons license.

Drive-In Saturday:Technicolor Pachyderms is Really Too Much for Me

Is it true, or merely a cliché, that Disney's Dumbo contains more camera angles than Citizen Kane? 

Whatever the case, Dumbo is very well made and features one of the Disney studio's more wackily inventive sequences, the cautionary tale of "Pink Elephants on Parade."  In today's featured video, some clever soul has combined the original footage with a performance of the song by Sun Ra and his Arkestra.  Sun Ra's version comes from Hal Willner's 1988 Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, and is one of the best things in that collection.  (Tom Waits' dada version of "Heigh Ho" is not to be missed, either.)  As any flying elephant can tell you, space is indeed the place:

The synchronization between sound and vision breaks down a bit midway through that clip, when the Arkestra takes a more leisurely turn than the original arrangement.  Here for the purists is the same sequence as we all remember it from childhood -- provided we spent our childhood in Gdansk:

By way of a bonus, here is a tribute to the late Yma Sumac, incorporating her contribution to Stay Awake, "I Wonder" from Disney's Sleeping Beauty:

Yessir, that Miss Sumac sure could sing, when she wasn't brawling with the LAPD.

~~~

[Sun Ra and his proboscid pals via Yashar A. Sarami, whose weblog always makes me wish I could read Farsi.]

Drive-In Saturday:"And what is the use of a blog," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

Pogo is the nom du mix of Australian Nick Bertke, who creates trip-hop electronic reimaginings of snippeted bits from film musicals, with a particular specialty in film musicals whose female protagonists' names begin with the letter "A". 

To wit, "Anna"

and "Alice"

The Pogo Promise in each case is that 90% of the sounds you hear in these mixes are taken directly from the respective films' soundtracks, and who are we to doubt it?

MP3s of "Anna," of "Alice," of several other Alice-derived tracks -- two of which have a bad case of the slithy toves -- and of other Pogo music are available for free download at Last.FM, here.

["Alice" discovered via My Old Kentucky Blog.]

Hicks Nix Flute Flicks?

I remember reading a few years back that Kenneth Branagh was directing a film adaptation of Mozart's Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), but I had heard nothing more about it until this morning, when the Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed let it be known that "Kenneth Branagh's 'Magic Flute' deserves to be seen."

Shown at the Toronto and Venice film festivals four months [after premiering out of competition at Cannes in 2006], Branagh's 'Flute' was not disliked, but it failed to generate much enthusiasm.  Since then the film has had limited release in parts of Europe, Asia and South America and has been moderately well received.  French and British DVD versions have been released.  But the film has never been shown in the United States, and there is no word about a domestic DVD.

Swed turned up a bargain priced DVD copy in Amsterdam and, with a touch of trepidation, sat down to watch.  He declares Branagh's slightly eccentric take on the Flute to be "a joy."   

Branagh's "Flute" fascinatingly re-imagines Mozart's opera.  All the music is intact and excellently conducted by James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera.  The English actor and humorist Stephen Fry translated the German libretto into colloquial English and supplied pertinent new dialogue.  The cast is attractive. Young characters are played by young singers.  Good teeth must have been a priority of the filmmaker.

Branagh's vision of the Great War is awful and magical at the same time, which is very strange and surely British.  The film opens with bright sun, lush fields and bouncy soldiers in the trenches.  This is cinema with a smile as big as Bergman's, but the sweetness doesn't last.  During the overture's development, soldiers charge, shells blast, bodies fly.  No composer dealt with darkness and light quite like Mozart, and Branagh is on continual lookout for every mood flick.

Says I to meself 'pon reading this, "This is exactly the sort of thing for which the good Lord made YouTube!"  And sure enough, a quick search yields up the complete overture sequence:

And here is a nine-minute selection of other well-known scenes in Branagh's version, including the Queen of the Night atop her armored transport and Papageno's encounter (at about 8:14) with an osculatory vision straight out of Man Ray:

Branagh's 1920's song and dance version of Love's Labours Lost was a hopeless misfire, but his choice to set Mozart in the trenches of the Great War is more a case of "It sounds crazy, but it just might work."  His innate theatricality is on full display, as seen in the long fluid tracking shots - and the butterflies, bunnies and military band -- of the overture.  It seems plain that Branagh loves and respects the material he's been given, and that he is trying to work with Mozart and not against him.   

Branagh's is never going to supplant Ingmar Bergman's Flute, but these excerpts combined with Mark Swed's article are quite enough to convince me that I Would Really Like to See This.  This is America: we are supposed to be able to get what we want here.  So who will heed the Mozartean call?

~~~

UPDATE [082508]: Independently, but also under the influence of Mark Swed's piece, A. C. Douglas has come to the same conclusions as I did, i.e., a serious hankering to see Branagh's entire film.  That's not so much to ask, is it?

Drive-In Saturday:Fun With Your New Head

Here's a purely frivolous item for you all : a sequence from Head,  The Monkees' 1968 film debut recently described by the Los Angeles Times as

a plotless, weirdly self-lacerating and sometimes angry piece of arty surrealism they conceived with Jack Nicholson in an apparent attempt to kill whatever remained of their popularity.

In this segment, Davy Jones shows off the song 'n' dance skills he honed in his pre-popstar West End days.  The fun derives from shooting the sequence twice, once with Jones all in white on a black set and once with Jones in black on a white set, and then editing the two versions together more or less seamlessly, if a bit trippily:

Davy's song is "Daddy's Song," written by Harry Nilsson.  Nilsson was a smidgen more eccentric than Jones in his vocal stylings in his own 1968 recording of the number:

• Harry Nilsson - Daddy's Song [MP3 link]

Drive-In Saturday: Gremlins From the Kremlin

The UBUWEB Film & Video archive is a one-stop source for film by or about the once and future avant-garde.  It is something of a surprise therefore to find at that site, listed alphabetically below Cage and Cale and above Cornell and Cocteau, snuggled up between the Cinema of Transgression ("We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again") and René Clair, the name of Robert Clampett.  Clampett of course, with Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones, was a key member of the great troika of talents that made the Golden Age of Warner Brothers cartoons so golden.  To a certain segment of the Boomer generation, he is also fondly recalled for his post-Warner creations, Beany and Cecil.

So, what earns Clampett his unexpected spot among the cutting edge worthies at Ubuweb?  It's the "Russian Rhapsody" of 1944, a touching bit of World War II propaganda (supporting the forces of Good) in which the despicable sociopathic despot of our enemies receives his comeuppance at the hands of the supernatural minions of the despicable sociopathic despot of our friends. 

You know what they say: "Ich bin ein Gremliner!"

Russian Rhapsody (1944)

~~~

Incidentally:

• The Wikipedia entry for the cartoon reports that many of the "Russian Rhapsody" Gremlins are caricatured versions of members of the Warner Brothers animation staff, including the aforementioned Freleng and Jones and Clampett himself.  Illustrated details available here.

• Additional gremlinalia -- including the involvement of Walt Disney and Roald Dahl in the original wartime popularization of the little critters -- is available on the Toonopedia, here.

Drive-In Saturday: Drive-In Satie Day

This week's Saturday video selection is Satiemania, a 14-minute series of vignettes and impressions running from the pastoral to the grotesque and stopping at all stations in between, encompassing something to appeal to, and something to offend, just about everybody.  Let's run it down:

• Cartoon naughty bits?  Check. 
• Ridiculous violence?  Check.
• Post-war urban angst?  Check.
• Puckish surrealism?  Check. 
• R. Crumb-like misogyny and ethnic exaggeration?  Check. 
• Grosz/Beckmann-style decadence with equal parts sensual romanticism?  Check. 
• Lovingly animated reflections on the moonlit water?  Check.
• Men in elegant pinstriped suits, with the heads of chickens?  Check.
• All of it accompanied by Aldo Ciccolini interpretations of the piano music of Erik Satie?  Check, check, and check.

Czech?  Not a bit of it.  Croatian.  Directed by Zdenkó Gasparovich, the films comes from the Zagreb Studio in what was then still very much Tito's Yugoslavia: heaven knows you could do worse, but still a dreary socialist autocracy.

Although his C.V. before and after Satiemania seems to consist principally of lowbrow American cartoonery  -- Scooby Doo, Rugrats, and the like -- Gasparovich somehow managed to produce this one stylishly eccentric masterwork.  Contrary to the information reported on some sites, the film apparently was not an Academy Award nominee.  But it should have been.

Satiemania, by Zdenkó Gasparovich, 1978

[Should you wish to carry this film around on your iPod or such, a downloadable version can be had via Google Video.]

Drive-In Saturday:Joe's Rose [Amour Fou en Bleu]

Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes and collages, but he also dabbled in film.  This is his first, Rose Hobart.

Having stumbled on a 16mm print of the 1931 "exotic" action romance East of Borneo, Cornell whittled away three quarters of the picture, leaving behind little but the shots that included the female lead, the aforementioned, titular Rose Hobart.  Cornell shuffled the remaining bits, slowed some it down, stripped the soundtrack, and projected the result through a blue filter to an accompaniment of live cocktail music.  The result was something like this:

Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936)

[Downloadable .avi version available at UBUWEB.]

A story goes with it, per Ed Halter in the Village Voice:

Cornell's best-known film is his first, Rose Hobart (1936).  Editing down a raggedy scrap-heap print of the 1931 jungle melodrama East of Borneo into 19 time-jumbled minutes, Cornell concentrates on the ethereal expressions of actress Hobart and set-piece moments that gain new surrealist power: crocodile-herding by natives, an eclipse, a volcano revealed behind a theatrical curtain, monkeys gamboling.  When the movie premiered at one of Cornell's 'film soirees' at the Julien Levy Gallery, attendee Salvador Dalí flew into a rage and had to be restrained by his wife, Gala.  Later, Dalí said he'd already thought of inventing the found-footage film, but Cornell beat him to the punch.

For an alternative version of the anecdote, see Brian Frye.

More Joseph Cornell film:

• A Legend For Fountains (1957, 1965).

More of Rose Hobart:

Its Secret Hidden in a House of Ominous Mystery! 
"Everything points to you, even the cat! The cat knows!"