The personal & cultural web journal of George M. Wallace, an attorney practicing in Pasadena, California.
a fool in the forest
Epigraphs
A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool; a miserable world! As I do live by food, I met a fool Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms and yet a motley fool.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Les Fleurs du Mal, “Correspondances”
[T]here is almost no subject-matter, and what little one can disentangle is foolish.... One would call the style verbose, except that by definition verbosity is the use of words in excess of the occasion, and there seems to be no occasion.
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:
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.
This is something a summer repeat, because I already highlighted it two years ago: "Tyger," conceived and directed by Brazilian filmmaker Guilherme Marcondes. Inspired by William Blake, puppetized, percussed, animated, and urbanized, to impressive effect:
More information on the film and its making, as well as large and lovely downloadable Quicktime versions, can be had from the official TYGER website.
The pulsing, pounding, growling musical score is by ZEROUM -- paulistanos under the influence of High Krautrock (Faust, Neu, Magma, Can, etc.) -- and can be downloaded on its own via that link to the ensemble's MySpace page. Or, heck! you might as well just get it here:
Although "California Video" has concluded, Viola's slow and remarkable Emergence remains on display at the Getty, in a dark and quiet room of its own, through August 24.
D: I was totally expecting to see demons, and bondage stuff . . . V: This is Hell, Dante, not your personal fantasy . . . .
Via LAist, I learn of what sounds like an interesting exhibition running through August 9 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "The Puppet Show." The Museum provides this description:
International in scope, the exhibition brings together works by 28 contemporary artists who explore the imagery of puppets in sculpture, film, video, time-based media, animation, and 2D work. . . .
The Puppet Show takes as its historic point of departure a great work of European avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, which was originally conceived as a puppet show. The despotic King, who strode on stage roaring the French scatological word 'merdre,' is the perfect source for all puppet allegories of grotesque government and acts of puppet transgression. More recently, puppets have taken hold of popular consciousness. They show up on stage, on television, in film, and even online, where assuming a fake identity to garner public opinion is called 'sock-puppeting.' Seen in correspondence with these pop culture images, the works in The Puppet Show advance the question: why do puppets matter now?
The Museum's listing of exhibition-related events led me to the real find of the day: a new film adaptation of Dante's Inferno, which will be shown on July 19. The filmmakers describe it thus:
DANTE’S INFERNO has been kicking around the cultural playground for over 700 years. But it has never before been interpreted with exquisitely hand-drawn paper puppets, brought to life using purely hand-made special effects. Until now. Rediscover this literary classic, retold in a kind of apocalyptic graphic novel meets Victorian-era toy theater. Dante’s Hell is brought to lurid 3-dimensional, high-definition life in a darkly comedic travelogue of the underworld — set against an all-too-familiar urban backdrop of used car lots, gated communities, strip malls, and the U.S. Capitol. And populated with a contemporary cast of reprobates, including famous — and infamous — politicians, presidents, popes, pimps. And the Prince of Darkness himself.
The film, directed by Sean Meredith, is based on the contemporizing adaptation of the Inferno created by California painter Sandow Birk in collaboration with Marcus Sanders -- the two actually tackled entire Divine Comedy -- with Dermot Mulroney voicing Dante and James Cromwell (Farmer Hoggett! Inventor of the warp drive!) as Virgil. Here is the trailer, which concludes with the bit of dialogue at the top of this post:
Did you spot Paulo and Francesca?
Superior quality smallish and largish QuickTime versions of the trailer are available at the film's Official Site. Dante's Inferno is scheduled for a DVD release on August 26.
When last we encountered Dante Alighieri at the cinema, he was traveling through the underworld in the first-ever (vintage 1911) feature-length Italian film, freshly restored with a new score by Tangerine Dream. I hadn't yet mastered the gentle art of YouTube embedding back in 2005, so here is a belated repeat of the lengthy trailer for that rather more traditional version:
Shredded morsels of Luis Buñuel [Un chien andalou, L'Âge d'or] and Jean Cocteau [Le sang d'un poète] tossed in a piquant Gotan Project vinaigrette:
Via Yashar Ahad Saremi's Xuxanov, a weblog of which I would say more if only I could read the ancient and honored language in which most of it is written.
~~~
Recommended for the weekend: If you are looking for some fine, free American music to download -- music fraught with sin, redemption, and recreational vehicles -- you can not do better than the recently posted Daytrotter session with Jim White, of whom I once wrote:
If Flannery O'Connor had a brother, and if Flannery O'Connor's brother had a band, then Flannery O'Connor's brother and his band would probably sound something like Jim White.
Each of us collects personal aesthetic blind spots, artists and works that are acclaimed by those who Know About These Things and that we can understand why we "ought" to admire or seek out or even enjoy, but that ultimately Do Not Interest us. There's none so blind as those that will not see, and one of my major personal blind spots, for decades now, has been and will remain the films of Martin Scorsese. I just cannot bring myself to care about or to be interested in seeing (even once in most cases) any of his most lauded films -- Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and the like -- no matter how often I hear or read or am told of their consummate craft and depth and the heft of their greatness.
I make one exception, for a film usually classified as "minor" Scorsese: 1985's After Hours, which I praised and appreciated here back in August of 2004. I had not known until today, however, that After Hours' original screenplay, by Joseph Minion, was not so original as it seemed. Andrew Hearst reports, on his panopticist blog, on "The Scandalous Origins of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours:"
Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours — a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact — were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist. . . . Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet.
There is plenty of detail provided, including audio of the full Joe Frank monologue. The plaster bagels, it seems, are actually a smoking gun.
[Link to panopticist via Defamer. If you click through that Defamer link you can view an After Hours poster that I do not recall having seen before and that demonstrates that, in 1985, (1) Rosanna Arquette was still indie cinema's sex symbol of choice (I think John Sayles' Baby It's You was largely responsible for that development) and (2) you could still use complete, multi-clause sentences on a film poster.]
We first saw After Hours at home, on a rented VHS tape, early on in our marriage. My wife was skeptical, and watched the entire thing with the remote aimed and at the ready to fast-forward, fast, if events threatened to get too unpleasant. She never did hit the button, and in the end allowed as how the film was nervous-making but ultimately pretty good, even pretty funny.
The one instance of actual Scorsese-style violence in After Hours is a throwaway, the set up for one of the best and bleakest jokes in the film. Our hero, on the run from an angry mob that blames him (in error) for a variety of crimes and civil wrongs, takes refuge on a fire escape. Hilarity ensues:
"I'll probably get blamed for that, too."
That line immediately entered our personal lexicon, to be quoted between us with surprising frequency ever since.
A post at Idolator with a self-explanatory title -- "YouTube Users Post The Craziest Things" -- provides links to a smörgåsbord of musical stylings, ranging from New Order to Roxy Music to Miles and Coltrane, drawn from, yes, YouTube, in the course of which we learn that the Pet Shop Boys, of all people, created and performed a new score for that bulwark of Film Studies 101, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Some enterprising soul has taken the whole thing, as performed in Berlin in 2005, and posted it in 28 bite-sized video snippets.
The YouTube upload has the triple drawbacks of (1) being on YouTube and thus of dubious video quality, (2) being handheld footage of a live performance, and (3) being in 28 bite-sized morsels. However, a further search at France's Dailymotion turns up a good-quality version of the sequence at which one most wants to take a proper gander -- the Gunpowder 'n Baby Carriage extravaganza that is the Odessa Steps:
The PSBs' score seems not to have been all that well received when it premiered in 2004. ("[D]ecidedly ho-hum and noodly," said the BBC.) Should you wish to make up your own mind about it, there is no complete, synced DVD version, but a recording is available. For the full experience, you might play it while watching the forthcoming 2-disc Kino edition of the film. (Further details here.)
Yes! It's Salvador Dali -- il est complètement fou! -- hawking choccies. And here he is again, with thanks to Megan McArdle, as the mystery guest on What's My Line?
Discussion Questions: Has there been a visual artist, at least since Warhol, who would have the sort of immediate recognizability that Dali possessed? And when was the last time the panelists on a game show were so obviously a collection of grownups?
Dali seems never to go out of style, and today marks the opening at London's Tate Modern of "Dalí & Film," an exhibition focusing on Dali's work in film in collaboration with Bunuel, Hitchcock, and Disney, among others, and on the influence of film on Dali's painting. Dali & Film will (oh joy!) be traveling to Los Angeles in October.
For the occasion, the Guardian calls on JG Ballard to say a few words. Here, Ballard takes up Dali's famed limp watches, which the Museum of Modern Art (oh joy yet again!) has lent out as part of the show:
Dalí's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle. The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum.
What monster would grow from this sleeping embryo? It may be the long eyelashes, but there is something feminine and almost coquettish about this little figure, and I see the painting as the 20th century's Mona Lisa, a psychoanalytic take on the mysterious Gioconda smile. If the Mona Lisa, as someone said, looks as if she has just dined on her husband, then Dalí's embryo looks as if she dreams of feasting on her mother.
Far from the final corruption of the renegade surrealist the movement's leader André Breton nicknamed 'Avida Dollars', Dalí's attempt to bring surrealist radicalism to a Disney cartoon has a striking quality of innocence and integrity - he really was trying to popularise modern art.
Disney, too, comes out of this story well, and let's face it, with intellectuals it's his image that needs the boost. Disney was not, as an artist, anything like the conservative all-American propagandist invented by hostile biographers. Whatever he was in his life, in his imagination he was sublimely audacious. His attempt to collaborate with Dalí was an avant-garde follow up to the Wagnerian ambition of Fantasia. Disney's films are full of surrealist moments: he even shared Dalí's obsession with bottoms. Forests of thorns, skull islands, dancing skeletons and clock-swallowing crocodiles abound in Disney's cinema which goes further than the surrealists ever could in unlocking the dream life of children and adults.
Is it October yet? To tide us over, here is an obscure and appropriate musical selection drawn from Ellen Foley's 1981 album, Spirit of St. Louis:
Ms. Foley's gentleman companion at the time was Mick Jones of the Clash. Spirit of St. Louis features numerous contributions from Jones and fellow Clashster Joe Strummer as players, producers and songwriters. "Salvador Dali" is one of six Strummer/Jones tunes on the record and with its self-consciously surreal lyrics -- "Priests married themselves using Bibles and mirrors" -- is certainly the oddest of the bunch.
For her part, Ellen Foley contributed vocals to "Hitsville UK" on the Clash's own Sandinista! album, and the Mick Jones-penned hit "Should I Stay or Should I Go" is reputed to have been inspired by his relationship with Foley. A deliciously eclectic concoction and worth hunting down if one could do so affordably, Spirit of St. Louis is sadly out of print. A bit more information on the recording can be found at Lost Bands Of The New Wave Era.
Chris Lott's Cosmopoetica points to Le Grand Content, an animated film by Clemens Kogler that, in its creator's words, "manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters." As Pauline Kael said of Woody Allen's Interiors, "It's deep, on the surface." Screenshot:
Kogler's site includes other samples of his work, of which my favorite is his animation of the text of Rainer Maria Rilke's famous poem, "The Panther." Screenshot:
Study Aids:
Here, under the panther's baleful gaze, you can follow the German text.
of the Inferno created by California painter 
