{ feuilleton }

A minor entry in the Nicolas Roeg filmography that few people will have seen. In March 2001 the BBC broadcast four 15-minute films that the corporation had commissioned for an occasional arts strand, Sound on Film. Each episode featured a new piece of music by a living composer, with visual accompaniment by four very different directors. Pilgrimage was directed by Werner Herzog with music by John Taverner; The New Math was directed by Hal Hartley with music by Louis Andriessen; In Absentia was…

Japan, 1998. I’m currently in the middle of a Nicolas Roeg rewatch season after acquiring a blu-ray of the recently reissued Castaway, Roeg’s 1986 adaptation of Lucy Irvine’s memoir (which shouldn’t be confused with 2000’s Cast Away). In the early 1980s when I was becoming more acquainted with his films I went through a phase of buying film posters, and managed to pick up copies of the UK quad sheets for Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing. I would have preferred the one for The Man Who Fell to Earth…

In the Constellation of Pisces by Adolf Hoffmeister. • “Comb through many of the numerous ‘greatest post-punk albums of all time’ lists that you’ll find dotted around the internet and one fairly continual omission is Thirst, which is something of a travesty. It’s difficult to think of many albums that embody the more pioneering and progressive elements of the post-punk spirit than Thirst.” Daniel Dylan Wray on the early, anarchic performances of Clock DVA. • Warner Brothers have decided at long…

Léonard Rosenthal’s follow-up to In the Kingdom of the Pearl was this volume with illustrations by Léon Carré. In the Garden of Gems was published in 1924 in an edition that matches the earlier book for page layout, print quality and decoration. The illustrator, Léon Carré (1878–1942), was more of a painter than a book illustrator, being one of the many Orientalist artists that France produced in the 19th century. Given the quality of his illustrations it’s a shame he didn’t work on more books,…

An unusual commission for Edmund Dulac, being a work of non-fiction published in France in 1920, with a British edition following in the same year. The author, Léonard Rosenthal, was a French diamond merchant who wrote a handful of books intended to celebrate and promote his line of business, of which this was the first. In the Kingdom of the Pearl is a history of the pearl-fishing trade and the use of pearls in jewellery, decoration and storytelling. I can’t vouch for the text but the book…

Visitation (1976) by Gilbert Williams. • “It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case.” Daniel Lavelle explores the Rendlesham Forest mystery of 1980, Britain’s own answer to the Roswell Incident. The case has more substantial documentation than most close encounters but it also has its share of conflicting reports, claims and interpretations. The truth is out there but it’s not evenly distributed. • The Science of Spooky Sounds: Kristen French talks to researcher Rodney Schmaltz about his theory that…

Finally, finally, Keith Griffiths’ documentary about Len Lye (1901–1980) turns up on YouTube. Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye was made in 1987, and is one of several films that Griffiths made about avant-garde film-makers. There’s some slight crossover with his later history of abstract cinema—Stan Brakhage turns up in both films—but Lye was always much more than a film-maker despite his pioneering work of the 1930s. Doodlin’ charts Lye’s progress from his youth in New Zealand, where his…

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. This is a minor entry but a worthwhile one if only to draw some attention to an unusual fantasy film by Albert Lewin, an equally unusual director. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was made in 1951, a British film with an American star (Ava Gardner) and a Spanish setting. Gardner plays Pandora Reynolds, an American nightclub singer living in the coastal town of Esperanza where she’s the centre of attention for the small colony of…

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips. • “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before…

Disconsolate. More unknown Kay Nielsen, although “little-known” would be more accurate since the sombre nature of these drawings has made them popular among the image-hoarders in the Tumblr labyrinth. Nielsen created the series known as The Book of Death around 1910 when he was an art student studying in Paris, the “Book” being a cycle of ten (or more?) drawings that chart the progress of one of those Pierrots who we find mourning a lost love. The series was exhibited in London but wasn’t…

Dell 5, Four Frightened Women by George Harmon Coxe, was the first of the mapbacks. On the back cover of each of these books is, naturally, a map—a cutaway bird’s-eye view of the apartment building, house, hotel or city-section in which the events of the book take place. These drawings were generally quite faithful to the books; the most careful one was probably the map sketched by author Hake Talbot for his own book, Rim of the Pit (Dell 173), and executed, as were most of the mapbacks, by…

Hexa (1971) by Victor Vasarely. • New music of the week is Tape 05, three minutes from Boards Of Canada following their thirteen-year silence, which was released on Thursday after several days of the group and their record label teasing a comeback with mysterious VHS cassettes and cryptic posters. I’ve been listening to the Sandison brothers’ discography for most of the week while trying to get a major illustration commission finished; this revelation has been the icing on a deteriorated,…

Telemann. The DVD of Piotr Kamler’s animations released by aaa a few years ago contained almost all of the director’s works, comprising a handful of short films together with the 50-minute Chronopolis. The most recent film in the collection was Une mission éphémère, made in 1993, but this wasn’t the last of Kamler’s films. He … Continue reading "Three short films by Piotr Kamler"

Prologue. Last week a Kay Nielsen illustration passed through my RSS feed, a picture I thought for a moment I hadn’t seen before. A quick search revealed that the illustration is in fact present in a book on my shelves, The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977), one of the series of art books co-published … Continue reading "Kay Nielsen’s Arabian Nights"

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric. • Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having … Continue reading "Weekend links 825"

Synopsis: This flamboyantly poetic film includes two works of art: Livret De Famille and Carte De Vœux. A hallucinogenic voyage, psychedelic images float across the screen, of family and friends (Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Yves Beneyton, Valérie Lagrange…) as they share their adventures. A slight return to Cyrille Verdeaux via actor Pierre Clémenti. If you watch enough … Continue reading "Visa de censure numéro X"

The Clearlight that concerns us here is a French musical ensemble with a shifting line-up, formed by and oriented around the activities of its keyboard-playing composer Cyrille Verdeaux. Clearlight, in other words, shouldn’t be confused with the short-lived American psychedelic band known as Clear Light. Cherry Red have just released five Clearlight albums in one … Continue reading "Clearlight: Symphonies"

“A view of Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows after completing the translunar injection burn on April 2, 2026. The image features two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.” • … Continue reading "Weekend links 824"

Good to see this again even if it is an unofficial “remastering” of the original. Visions of Light is a feature-length documentary about the art of cinematography as practiced in (mostly) American cinema. The film was made by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels for the American Film Institute in 1992, and is unique … Continue reading "Visions of Light"

Earlier this year when I wrote about Tadami Yamada’s illustrations for William Hope Hodgson I mentioned the existence of books by other authors that were published along with the Hodgson as part of a series. Kokusho Kankōkai published ten of these books from 1976 to 1977, most of them being collections of short horror fiction … Continue reading "Tadami Yamada’s weird covers"

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“ • Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from … Continue reading "Weekend links 823"

You can’t really say there are always more Rubáiyáts—the Fitzgerald translation isn’t as popular today as it was a century ago—but there are many illustrated editions even though the poem makes for a slim volume when not bulked out by variant translations. The popularity of the text when combined with the ease of imitating Edward … Continue reading "RS Sherriffs’ Rubáiyát"

Shogi Chess Board. I ought to have posted this several weeks ago for the advent of the Year of the Horse. Umazukushi is a series of wood-block prints by Katsushika Hokusai created to celebrate another Year of the Horse, 1822. Umazukushi (also Uma-zukushi) is usually translated as “A Selection of Horses”, and this is what … Continue reading "Hokusai’s Horses"

Untitled (2013) by Fred Tomaselli. • The latest book from A Year In The Country is Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968–1995, an exploration of “a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet”. • New music: After The Rain, Strange Seeds by … Continue reading "Weekend links 822"

It’s been a while since Scotto Moore’s newsletter turned up any of the abstract animated visuals I enjoy. Locked Groove by Emanuele Kabu fits the bill perfectly, an exercise in vibrant random symmetry which bears the subtitle “A hypnotic audiovisual animation inspired by pareidolia”. The video might also have been inspired by psychedelic hallucination given … Continue reading "Locked Groove"