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Mr. Beetle should have guessed that the aggressive grasshopper was a movie cameraman
I was not expecting to find myself written up alongside Nicole Kornher-Stace and Dan Beachy-Quick in this Sunday's Lobster and Canary. It was a nice start to the afternoon.
Most of today vanished in work I should have done this week, but I did promise some raving. The short version: if the Alloy Orchestra ever plays a program called Wild and Weird at a theater near you, unless you have a problem with insects, nicotine fairies, self-willed prosthetic arms, clarinets being rammed through people's heads, or Welsh rarebit, you want to go. Failing that, there is a DVD. The films turn out to be not so much formally surrealist as catch-all weird, but they do live up to their billing. Four of them would have been worth the ticket price alone:
Władysław Starewicz, The Cameraman’s Revenge (Месть кинематографического оператора, 1912). Just your run-of-the-mill tale of adultery, artistic temperaments, and cinema-wrecking fistfights . . . enacted by dead insects in stop-motion. If Jan Švankmajer was not influenced by this film at an early age, I have no explanation. Possibly the same should be said about Terry Gilliam. Brilliantly, there's nothing weird about the story; it's a satirical domestic fable about an unfaithful couple and the ways their respective affairs backfire on them, most satisfyingly when the husband after magnanimously forgiving his wife for her transgressions decides to take her out to the movies and discovers his own philanderings with a burlesque dancer blown up to 35 mm. It's the fact that the characters are a pair of stag beetles, a dragonfly, a grasshopper, and they're all chitinous little carrionettes animated in fantastic, feeler-waving detail with anthropomorphic gestures, although Starewicz does remember to give the extra legs something to do. (The grasshopper packing up his hand-cranked camera, then hopping on his motorcycle is particularly fun to watch.) It's not creepy, precisely. The sight gags are great, the title cards perfectly tongue-in-cheek, the combination of miniature human life with hedgerows and giant flowers nicely realized. Then you remember again it's real insects and Starewicz started puppeting them because all his live subjects died. It's like Aardman by Kafka. You find yourself wondering if Franz ever did catch a showing.
Winsor McCay, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend: The Pet (1921). I believe Ratatosk's elevator pitch for this film was "If Edward Gorey illustrated Katamari Damacy," a description which somewhat elides McCay's own famously dreamlike sensibilities, but it's honestly the best thumbnail of the plot I can think of. Refusing to learn from years of weird experience, the rarebit fiend once again indulges before bed and dreams that his wife takes in a strange little creature with button-white eyes, stuffed-toy swivel ears and a flicky rhinoceros tail; it announces itself at the door with an all-caps "MEOW!" but resembles a cat only in that it licks up the dish of milk which the wife pours for it—and visibly grows, kitten-size to teddy bear. At night it creeps into their bed and turfs the husband out. At breakfast, it begins to investigate the edible potential of the household, starting with the family's cat. The husband flees to the chemist: "Say Doc—my Wife as you know is a bug on Pets—how can I murder the latest one she's found?" It's all to no avail: thirty years before I thought any kaiju had laid waste to a downtown metropolis, the erstwhile pet is browsing on streetcars and biting airplanes out of the sky, swelling ever more monstrously with every building it sucks down. It's hand-drawn animation, in case I didn't mention. If you'd scored the final scenes to the parade theme from Paprika (2006), I'd probably have been a basket case.
Hans Richter, Filmstudie (1926). I don't know how to describe this one except to note that the filmmaker was one of the founding members of Dada and involved with nearly every avant-garde, experimental, or anti-art movement of his time and therefore to call the film non-representational is an understatement. I have no idea what theories Richter may have been using it to express; it comes across as less surreal than abstract, free-associating the multiplied image of a glass eyeball with mask-like human faces and sliding geometric forms, split-second photonegative footage followed by self-eclipsing circles or searchlight rays. The soundtrack had a man's voice reciting the poetry of Hugo Ball, although not "Karawane." I really liked it.
Slavko Vorkapić and Robert Florey, The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1927). And this is the one that blew me away, although it's worth noting that it left my viewing partner cold. The story is straightforward and traditional: a man comes to Hollywood in search of artistry and fame and finds only exploitation, obscurity, and a penniless grave, although in Heaven he is at least restored the nameless, human individuality that he loses when the studio system literally writes him off—golem-like, black crayon curlicues across his brow—with the number 9413. What sticks is the expressionism, the sky flickering greyly as run-out film as skyscraper silhouettes crane like Metropolis (1927), the extras' underlit faces already cut into masks by tight close-ups and the silent nonsense their mouths fall open and shut on, their numbered foreheads further dehumanized by the paper-plate line-drawings they raise to play their parts. Everything is always blurring in and out of focus, telescoping only briefly through the real. Everything is absences: signs for Hollywood and "Casting" or "No Casting Today" are burnt spikily out of I-beams, the single-word intertitles feverishly white-on-black. The sets are shadow cutouts, dangling chains of film stock and what frankly looked like an Erector set to me. (Did anyone else have one of those as a child? I used to build cranes.) Sometimes there is the claustrophobic corner of a room, cheap wallpaper, a clattery old telephone. A handful of street-level location shots only serve to disorient. The star 15 is screen-tested, holds over his face the mask of a hero, then a villain. 9413 turns away, clutching his crumpled little rag of a character mask. There are always wheels turning, turning. He can never reach the top of the stairs. It all amounted to one of the most impressive short films I've seen. I'd never heard of Vorkapić, although IMDb tells me I've seen his montage work in Meet John Doe (1941) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); I have the terrible feeling the only Florey I've seen is The Cocoanuts (1929), even though he directed Peter Lorre at least twice. The cinematography was by Gregg Toland, whom I will love forever for The Long Voyage Home (1940) and everyone else remembers for Citizen Kane (1941). I had never heard of any of the actors, which is perhaps appropriate. Would buy from seller again.
That was less than half the program. I should maybe write about the rest, but I think instead I'm going to lie down.
The music was great.
Most of today vanished in work I should have done this week, but I did promise some raving. The short version: if the Alloy Orchestra ever plays a program called Wild and Weird at a theater near you, unless you have a problem with insects, nicotine fairies, self-willed prosthetic arms, clarinets being rammed through people's heads, or Welsh rarebit, you want to go. Failing that, there is a DVD. The films turn out to be not so much formally surrealist as catch-all weird, but they do live up to their billing. Four of them would have been worth the ticket price alone:
Władysław Starewicz, The Cameraman’s Revenge (Месть кинематографического оператора, 1912). Just your run-of-the-mill tale of adultery, artistic temperaments, and cinema-wrecking fistfights . . . enacted by dead insects in stop-motion. If Jan Švankmajer was not influenced by this film at an early age, I have no explanation. Possibly the same should be said about Terry Gilliam. Brilliantly, there's nothing weird about the story; it's a satirical domestic fable about an unfaithful couple and the ways their respective affairs backfire on them, most satisfyingly when the husband after magnanimously forgiving his wife for her transgressions decides to take her out to the movies and discovers his own philanderings with a burlesque dancer blown up to 35 mm. It's the fact that the characters are a pair of stag beetles, a dragonfly, a grasshopper, and they're all chitinous little carrionettes animated in fantastic, feeler-waving detail with anthropomorphic gestures, although Starewicz does remember to give the extra legs something to do. (The grasshopper packing up his hand-cranked camera, then hopping on his motorcycle is particularly fun to watch.) It's not creepy, precisely. The sight gags are great, the title cards perfectly tongue-in-cheek, the combination of miniature human life with hedgerows and giant flowers nicely realized. Then you remember again it's real insects and Starewicz started puppeting them because all his live subjects died. It's like Aardman by Kafka. You find yourself wondering if Franz ever did catch a showing.
Winsor McCay, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend: The Pet (1921). I believe Ratatosk's elevator pitch for this film was "If Edward Gorey illustrated Katamari Damacy," a description which somewhat elides McCay's own famously dreamlike sensibilities, but it's honestly the best thumbnail of the plot I can think of. Refusing to learn from years of weird experience, the rarebit fiend once again indulges before bed and dreams that his wife takes in a strange little creature with button-white eyes, stuffed-toy swivel ears and a flicky rhinoceros tail; it announces itself at the door with an all-caps "MEOW!" but resembles a cat only in that it licks up the dish of milk which the wife pours for it—and visibly grows, kitten-size to teddy bear. At night it creeps into their bed and turfs the husband out. At breakfast, it begins to investigate the edible potential of the household, starting with the family's cat. The husband flees to the chemist: "Say Doc—my Wife as you know is a bug on Pets—how can I murder the latest one she's found?" It's all to no avail: thirty years before I thought any kaiju had laid waste to a downtown metropolis, the erstwhile pet is browsing on streetcars and biting airplanes out of the sky, swelling ever more monstrously with every building it sucks down. It's hand-drawn animation, in case I didn't mention. If you'd scored the final scenes to the parade theme from Paprika (2006), I'd probably have been a basket case.
Hans Richter, Filmstudie (1926). I don't know how to describe this one except to note that the filmmaker was one of the founding members of Dada and involved with nearly every avant-garde, experimental, or anti-art movement of his time and therefore to call the film non-representational is an understatement. I have no idea what theories Richter may have been using it to express; it comes across as less surreal than abstract, free-associating the multiplied image of a glass eyeball with mask-like human faces and sliding geometric forms, split-second photonegative footage followed by self-eclipsing circles or searchlight rays. The soundtrack had a man's voice reciting the poetry of Hugo Ball, although not "Karawane." I really liked it.
Slavko Vorkapić and Robert Florey, The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1927). And this is the one that blew me away, although it's worth noting that it left my viewing partner cold. The story is straightforward and traditional: a man comes to Hollywood in search of artistry and fame and finds only exploitation, obscurity, and a penniless grave, although in Heaven he is at least restored the nameless, human individuality that he loses when the studio system literally writes him off—golem-like, black crayon curlicues across his brow—with the number 9413. What sticks is the expressionism, the sky flickering greyly as run-out film as skyscraper silhouettes crane like Metropolis (1927), the extras' underlit faces already cut into masks by tight close-ups and the silent nonsense their mouths fall open and shut on, their numbered foreheads further dehumanized by the paper-plate line-drawings they raise to play their parts. Everything is always blurring in and out of focus, telescoping only briefly through the real. Everything is absences: signs for Hollywood and "Casting" or "No Casting Today" are burnt spikily out of I-beams, the single-word intertitles feverishly white-on-black. The sets are shadow cutouts, dangling chains of film stock and what frankly looked like an Erector set to me. (Did anyone else have one of those as a child? I used to build cranes.) Sometimes there is the claustrophobic corner of a room, cheap wallpaper, a clattery old telephone. A handful of street-level location shots only serve to disorient. The star 15 is screen-tested, holds over his face the mask of a hero, then a villain. 9413 turns away, clutching his crumpled little rag of a character mask. There are always wheels turning, turning. He can never reach the top of the stairs. It all amounted to one of the most impressive short films I've seen. I'd never heard of Vorkapić, although IMDb tells me I've seen his montage work in Meet John Doe (1941) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); I have the terrible feeling the only Florey I've seen is The Cocoanuts (1929), even though he directed Peter Lorre at least twice. The cinematography was by Gregg Toland, whom I will love forever for The Long Voyage Home (1940) and everyone else remembers for Citizen Kane (1941). I had never heard of any of the actors, which is perhaps appropriate. Would buy from seller again.
That was less than half the program. I should maybe write about the rest, but I think instead I'm going to lie down.
The music was great.
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Truly.
Nine
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It's a very complimentary writeup! I wasn't expecting it at all.
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Thanks for describing the films--that last one sounds especially interesting. I'm glad you had a good time!
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It was a really pleasant surprise.
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Two new words for the week - "carrionette" and "jackdavian", which sounds as if it should be some sort of club.
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Truly. I just watched it, and you're right; you forget you're watching
dead insects, and it's unsettling when you remember. The pains Starewicz took are immense. God knows how long it took him to make. Thanks for the heads-up.
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It does! You write a club story called "The Jackdavians," I'll read it.
I believe I stole "carrionette" from
Thanks for the heads-up.
You're very welcome! I'm glad you found it online.
(I'm impressed you found it online. It means I should look for some of the others.)
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I'm game.
I didn't expect to find it so easily on ThouTube! Speaking of which, and going back to the Morell Quatermass and The Pit discussion a while back, you can find the whole serial there now. It's hardly ideal for you to watch it this way, but I thought you might like to know.
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I saw! I'm conflicted. Three and a half hours is a long time to stream something off a screen, especially at ripped-to-YouTube resolution. Unless they marathon the serial at a convention sometime, though, I don't see how else I'm ever going to see it.
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Sold.
---L.
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Here!
Without the Alloy Orchestra, I'm afraid, but at least you can see what we were talking about.
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---L.
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Was this a good thing?
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---L.
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Yay.
under the radar
http://youtu.be/0WdgQVbu0XI
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I've actually never seen the movie, only heard about it. Thanks!
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It was very memorable!