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A song for the young believers who woke up and found themselves neither
1. This post somewhat delayed by the fact that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesser_celery showed me Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), which is probably going to need its own writeup. [edit: see remarks to asakiyume in comments.] It feels like it explains a lot of Simon Logan's industrial fiction, though.
2. I dreamed last night of trains and apocalyptic landscapes. One of them was New Haven, which surprised me only insofar as it looked like Hartford.
3. Shamelessly reposted from comments inhandful_ofdust's recent post, because they came out rather well: my years-belated thoughts on FairyTale: A True Story (1997), which nineweaving screened for me in 2009.
More than the supernatural or childhood, it's a film about belief. I thought at first it should be double-featured with Dreamchild (1985), but then I realized its correct spiritual cousin is The Prestige (2006). Everyone wants to see something impossible, but no one wants to know what it really is. To believe in angels is good Christianity; to believe in fairies is childish. To believe that your father will come home safe from a war that is chewing up men like red mud? Equally fantastic, but everyone's doing it. If it were true Disney, the film would divide itself neatly between the skeptics and the believers; instead, its characters cross back and forth in the harm or the good they do on both sides. Gardner the theosophist is touching when he stammers an explosive "Good heavens!" on seeing the fairy photographs for the first time or takes a moment to compose himself before hearing the expert's verdict—a weary believer finally, finally granted proof—but he shortly makes such a nuisance of himself with his crystally technobabble about ectoplasmic materialization (God, I love Bill Nighy), he's as bad or worse as the reporter who won't leave the girls alone for debunking. The mother believes, but not so far she'll see the children made a show of; the father doesn't believe, but he slams the door in the reporter's face. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the most dangerous of all, because his belief takes the story away from them. And Harry Houdini is a trickster, professionally and upfront about it: of all the characters, he understands best what the girls have done and he leaves it to them. He's the only character who never asks how they took the pictures.
It is also a much less sweet film than I imagined from its reputation, which was probably part of the reason I didn't see it in 1997. The Bradford fairies are a link to dead Joseph, who painted them as compulsively as Richard Dadd and was building them a house in the attic and who knows, maybe they liked his attention so much, they took him in thanks; the film does not take the leanan-sídhe route, but the folklore is there. His obvious reflection is Charles Altamont Doyle. Their drawings are almost identical: the eleven-year-old dreamer and the madman who died in Crichton Royal. (The girls speak with fairies, the boys go mad.) The shadow side of Peter Pan's exhortation to believe in fairies is the boy in the Great Ormond Street Hospital asking the fairies to make him well. Except for the one character of the half-blinded soldier, the war is never as deeply felt as the film could have done with, but it's not just a Victorian hangover that makes Conan Doyle and all those besieging fairy-hunters as susceptible as Gardner to the myth of innocent youth and a visitation of fairies just when Britain needs an otherworld, Machen's Bowmen, Titania on the home front. The war is a mechanized thing; everyone wants the comfort of something gauzy and pastoral, even if the truth is (unsurprisingly, unavoidably) more nuanced than Merrie England vs. dark Satanic mills, film at eleven. The fact that Frances and Elsie are working-class is blithely accepted by various experts as proof that the girls cannot have faked the photographs—it is assumed they have neither the technical proficiency nor, concomitantly, the imagination—but to Arthur and Polly it means that Elsie starts at the mill in six months and Joseph would have been working for years already if he hadn't died. It makes a pleasant change that Arthur is not automatically classed with the naysayers because he's an electrical engineer; he's identified with modernity and progress, but the camera which enables all this myth-chasing is an instrument of the future. (And yet its purpose is the preservation of the past: he bought it because he never again wanted to forget his child's face.) I agree that it goes a bit sloshy at the end; the plotline with the prying reporter pays off too neatly and while I like the ambiguity of real fairies vs. faked photographs, something about it feels overplayed or weirdly tamer than the previous rumors and suggestions. What works for me about the ending is the way Frances looks right past the fairies at the sound of tires on the gravel: the full pageantry of Queen Mab's court invisible against the chance of a father come home. The ghost of Joseph still sits in the attic, drawing his fairies. You wonder who will let him go.
(The soundtrack has treacle issues. There should be a moratorium on the use of celesta in films with even the slightest connection to fairyland. But the cinematography is very good and the casting is impeccable: Peter O'Toole as Conan Doyle, Harvey Keitel as Houdini. I do not know the actresses who played the girls beyond this film, but they're only affected when they're trying to be.)
4. When Craig Arnold disappeared three years ago on Kuchinoerabujima, I hoped that someone who knew and loved him would write him a poem. His lover has written him a book.
5. I really like this Wondermark.
I am out of five things, but this interview with Lindsay Kemp is still pretty awesome. I discovered him with The Wicker Man (1973); I should have known all the best people had something to do with Derek Jarman.
lesser_celery showed me Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), which is probably going to need its own writeup. [edit: see remarks to asakiyume in comments.] It feels like it explains a lot of Simon Logan's industrial fiction, though. 2. I dreamed last night of trains and apocalyptic landscapes. One of them was New Haven, which surprised me only insofar as it looked like Hartford.
3. Shamelessly reposted from comments in
handful_ofdust's recent post, because they came out rather well: my years-belated thoughts on FairyTale: A True Story (1997), which nineweaving screened for me in 2009.More than the supernatural or childhood, it's a film about belief. I thought at first it should be double-featured with Dreamchild (1985), but then I realized its correct spiritual cousin is The Prestige (2006). Everyone wants to see something impossible, but no one wants to know what it really is. To believe in angels is good Christianity; to believe in fairies is childish. To believe that your father will come home safe from a war that is chewing up men like red mud? Equally fantastic, but everyone's doing it. If it were true Disney, the film would divide itself neatly between the skeptics and the believers; instead, its characters cross back and forth in the harm or the good they do on both sides. Gardner the theosophist is touching when he stammers an explosive "Good heavens!" on seeing the fairy photographs for the first time or takes a moment to compose himself before hearing the expert's verdict—a weary believer finally, finally granted proof—but he shortly makes such a nuisance of himself with his crystally technobabble about ectoplasmic materialization (God, I love Bill Nighy), he's as bad or worse as the reporter who won't leave the girls alone for debunking. The mother believes, but not so far she'll see the children made a show of; the father doesn't believe, but he slams the door in the reporter's face. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the most dangerous of all, because his belief takes the story away from them. And Harry Houdini is a trickster, professionally and upfront about it: of all the characters, he understands best what the girls have done and he leaves it to them. He's the only character who never asks how they took the pictures.
It is also a much less sweet film than I imagined from its reputation, which was probably part of the reason I didn't see it in 1997. The Bradford fairies are a link to dead Joseph, who painted them as compulsively as Richard Dadd and was building them a house in the attic and who knows, maybe they liked his attention so much, they took him in thanks; the film does not take the leanan-sídhe route, but the folklore is there. His obvious reflection is Charles Altamont Doyle. Their drawings are almost identical: the eleven-year-old dreamer and the madman who died in Crichton Royal. (The girls speak with fairies, the boys go mad.) The shadow side of Peter Pan's exhortation to believe in fairies is the boy in the Great Ormond Street Hospital asking the fairies to make him well. Except for the one character of the half-blinded soldier, the war is never as deeply felt as the film could have done with, but it's not just a Victorian hangover that makes Conan Doyle and all those besieging fairy-hunters as susceptible as Gardner to the myth of innocent youth and a visitation of fairies just when Britain needs an otherworld, Machen's Bowmen, Titania on the home front. The war is a mechanized thing; everyone wants the comfort of something gauzy and pastoral, even if the truth is (unsurprisingly, unavoidably) more nuanced than Merrie England vs. dark Satanic mills, film at eleven. The fact that Frances and Elsie are working-class is blithely accepted by various experts as proof that the girls cannot have faked the photographs—it is assumed they have neither the technical proficiency nor, concomitantly, the imagination—but to Arthur and Polly it means that Elsie starts at the mill in six months and Joseph would have been working for years already if he hadn't died. It makes a pleasant change that Arthur is not automatically classed with the naysayers because he's an electrical engineer; he's identified with modernity and progress, but the camera which enables all this myth-chasing is an instrument of the future. (And yet its purpose is the preservation of the past: he bought it because he never again wanted to forget his child's face.) I agree that it goes a bit sloshy at the end; the plotline with the prying reporter pays off too neatly and while I like the ambiguity of real fairies vs. faked photographs, something about it feels overplayed or weirdly tamer than the previous rumors and suggestions. What works for me about the ending is the way Frances looks right past the fairies at the sound of tires on the gravel: the full pageantry of Queen Mab's court invisible against the chance of a father come home. The ghost of Joseph still sits in the attic, drawing his fairies. You wonder who will let him go.
(The soundtrack has treacle issues. There should be a moratorium on the use of celesta in films with even the slightest connection to fairyland. But the cinematography is very good and the casting is impeccable: Peter O'Toole as Conan Doyle, Harvey Keitel as Houdini. I do not know the actresses who played the girls beyond this film, but they're only affected when they're trying to be.)
4. When Craig Arnold disappeared three years ago on Kuchinoerabujima, I hoped that someone who knew and loved him would write him a poem. His lover has written him a book.
5. I really like this Wondermark.
I am out of five things, but this interview with Lindsay Kemp is still pretty awesome. I discovered him with The Wicker Man (1973); I should have known all the best people had something to do with Derek Jarman.
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Same dream. I've never observed a volcanic eruption from the window of the Amtrak Northeast Regional, but at least now I know what my brainstem thinks it would look like.
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You're welcome. I was glad to see it.
And good poems, I think, too.
(That last one is eerie for me, not so much because of the poem itself, but because I can see myself and several people I know writing those first few lines.)
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*snarfle*
New Haven makes a perfect apocalyptic landscape! I agree: nothing surprising at all.
(some may argue that at the third highest murder rate in the US, it already counts? One of the more surreal places I've seen.)
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When were you in New Haven? I lived there for three years.
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The light in the forest on East Rock is otherworldly. I just found it hard to forgive the university for building a utopian bubble in the breaking shell of its host-town.
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I still haven't seen that! You've made it sound amazing!
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The book is well worth reading too.
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That cover photograph. Dude. That is some serious mad science hair for a sculptor.
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Thanks so much for the follow-up on Craig Arnold--your posting about the book made me go back and read your original entry and comments. So cool that someone who knew him swung by to comment.
That was indeed a good Wondermark.
And good to see your writeup of Fairy Tale: A True Story here, where a new array of people will be able to read it.
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I didn't find it a horror movie so much as a very extreme kind of mad science ghost story—I really have trouble classifying it as cyberpunk, seeing as its scrap-metal infections are much lower-tech than even dial-up internet, nozzles and barbs and wires, bolts and pistons, power drills. There is television, but I don't remember computers. Memories are scribbly videotapes, grainily replaying. I doubt there was any budget for effects, but even if it was a deliberate choice, the director uses stop-motion with his live characters to uncanny effect. I should explain the film is black-and-white, extremely lo-fi—much of it has the same cut-up second-generation look I associate with punk films like The Blank Generation (1976) or Jubilee (1977). And yes, there is a high level of graphic violence, sexual and otherwise; for whatever reasons, it didn't bother me. Possibly it helps that almost every time you see blood, it's a cartoonish ink-bomb explosion that looks more like a misfiring pen than anything from a human body. Possibly it's that the film has its own deadpan, surreal humor; nothing else explains the cheesy '50's doo-wop that swings periodically through the otherwise industrial soundtrack or the way the screen flashes "GAME OVER" as the last of the credits scrolls off. I don't know how often I'd rewatch it, but I was really glad to have seen it this time.
Thanks so much for the follow-up on Craig Arnold--your posting about the book made me go back and read your original entry and comments. So cool that someone who knew him swung by to comment.
I hope they see the book.
That was indeed a good Wondermark.
The rollover text!
And good to see your writeup of Fairy Tale: A True Story here, where a new array of people will be able to read it.
Hah. Thank you. I hope so!
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Judging by your remarks, I'm looking forward to your post on this.
2. I dreamed last night of trains and apocalyptic landscapes. One of them was New Haven, which surprised me only insofar as it looked like Hartford.
Interesting combination. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one whose dreams do that thing where it's supposed to be one place but has the look of another.
I had a dream last week where I knew I was in Cork City, but it looked like a cross between London and downtown Chicago. A hotel clerk and I made local injokes with each other, which in the dream I obviously knew, but which had no more relationship to the city where I once lived in waking life than the strange cityscape outside had to that city.
...my years-belated thoughts on FairyTale: A True Story (1997)...
I like your thoughts. I'm trying to remember if that's the film I saw a couple of years after it came out, or if it was the other Cottingley Fairies-based film that came out round the same time.
4. When Craig Arnold disappeared three years ago on Kuchinoerabujima, I hoped that someone who knew and loved him would write him a poem. His lover has written him a book.
I'm glad of this. I'm getting a 403 from the first link. The excerpt at Beatrice.com is lovely.
Thanks for sharing the Wondermark! The Lindsay Kemp interview is tremendous as well.
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If you think it was Photographing Fairies, read Gemma Files.
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Reading that link, for which I thank you, it's definitely Fairytale: A True Story that I saw.
I think I should probably watch it again.
Rereading your original post, I noticed that you referenced Richard Dadd. Did you by any chance see the exhibition of fairy paintings that was at the Frick Collection in October 1998 through January 1999? Not my favourite review, this, but it did confirm the dates.
It was a fantastic little gem of an exhibit. I remember it fondly. I also remember a small room filled with Renaissance drawings from the Frick's own collection. And a lovely little French restaurant nearby where my mother and I had lunch, which we were never able to locate again.
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I watched "Tetsuo" a long time ago. I can't recall much of it, but it did disturb me. It's not something I could watch again, but some twist in my head insists on it looking rather like a Brothers Quay animation. Which would be truly nasty.
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Paul McGann is in FairyTale; he plays the father of one of the girls (the uncle of the other), Arthur Wright, the engineer. You might also have seen Photographing Fairies, though, in which case you should read this article.
It's not something I could watch again, but some twist in my head insists on it looking rather like a Brothers Quay animation. Which would be truly nasty.
There is stop-motion. It's a striking effect.