John Coulthart's Blog

Innsmouth, Japanese-style

When it comes to film and TV dramas based on the writings of HP Lovecraft I’ve always been very selective, to a degree that I avoid most adaptations unless they receive reviews good enough to provoke my curiosity. I do, however, keep an eye out for unusual (or unusually inventive) adaptations whose shortcomings I’m prepared to forgive if they promise to be more than another wearying trudge through cinematic cliches. Such is the case with this Japanese TV adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which was written and directed by Chiaki Konaka in 1992.

Konaka’s adaptation isn’t immediately attractive, being shot entirely on video, a very unsympathetic format for horror productions when the harshness of the image works against any attempts to create an eerie atmosphere. (Even The Stone Tape suffers in this area.) Konaka presents a sketch of Lovecraft’s story which he updates to the present day and moves to contemporary Japan, with no explanation as to why the Japanese coastline is a home to towns with names like “Innsmouth”, “Arkham” and “Dunwich”. Lovecraft’s detailed history of the blighted backwater and its inhabitants is also ignored. Konaka’s narrative begins with an unnamed photo-journalist (Renji Ishibashi) securing a job at a travel magazine where he convinces the editor that the remote coastal town of “Insumasu” is worthy of a feature. As with the anonymous narrator of Lovecraft’s story, the photographer is drawn to the place as much by ancestral impulses as by his curiosity about a place where a strange fish-human corpse has been washed ashore.

Konaka’s direction is more functional than suspenseful, with the photographer’s biographical history telegraphed so much in advance that none of the revelations come as a surprise. The soundtrack is also very uneven, being a collage of music borrowed from other films: there’s a brief snatch of Goblin’s Suspiria score at one point, and I think the repeated flute refrain is borrowed from a Preisner score. This is a well-made adaptation all the same even if the Japanese Innsmouth isn’t as deteriorated as the decayed fishing town that Lovecraft describes. (To be fair, any film depicting Lovecraft’s Innsmouth would require a serious budget to do the place justice.) Fishy details abound, and Konaka uses green light as a recurrent motif that refers to Innsmouth’s secret history, like an inversion of the emerald glow that signifies magic or the supernatural in John Boorman’s Excalibur. I was especially pleased to see borrowings from the George Hay Necronomicon during a cermonial invocation to Dagon that takes place in a cave. Later on we see a copy of the Hay book being perused by the curator of the Innsmouth museum. This makes a change from the tiresome ubiquity of the “Simon” Necronomicon whose sigils are always turning up in Lovecraftian adaptations when people are at a loss to create symbols of their own. The symbology in the Hay book was the work of Robert Turner, an occultist with an aesthetic sensibility more finely attuned to the world of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Chiaki Konaka has been described as bringing a Lovecraftian influence to his other work but when most of this is anime scripts for juvenile fare like the Digimon franchise you can’t expect very much. One of his credits is for something called Cthulhu’s Secret Record but I’ve no idea what this might be. Konaka’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth many be viewed in full here. The translated subtitles are larger than I prefer (and in vivid green) but I’m still pleased that someone went to the trouble of making this curio available to a wider audience.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Ambagious Tactics

Ambagious Tactics is a box containing 120 small white cards, most of which show a short aphorism, suggestion or piece of advice for the creatively-minded. A few cards at the end of the box feature line drawings instead of words; there are also three blank cards for the user’s own contributions. Anyone familiar with  Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies will recognise the form: “over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” which artists, writers (and anyone else) can use as a prompt to jolt a creative endeavour away from familiar ruts or to provide a solution to an impasse or problem.

The first deck of Oblique Strategies was published in an edition of 500 copies 50 years ago which makes Ambagious Tactics an anniversary celebration as well as “An Oblique Tribute Act—A choir of over 100 versatile enigmas”. The main difference between the Strategies and the tributes is that the Strategies were mostly the work of Eno and Schmidt, although I think Eno says somewhere that the pair asked friends and colleagues for contributions. For the tributes Alistair Fruish has collected a single suggestion from many different people, myself included:

Some of these creatives are connected to Eno and Schmidt, and some are folk who regularly used Oblique Strategies, others are members of Arts Labs around the country, and some people were asked for the hell of it.

I’m very familiar with Oblique Strategies, mostly via their recent manifestations as online editions or freeware applications. The only physical deck I’ve seen is Alan Moore’s heavily-used first edition, and Alan happens to be one of the contributors to this deck.

My own contribution may seem a little glib or obvious at first: when you’re creating something you’re invariably on the lookout for things you don’t like. The question is intended to have a wider reach than this, and refers to something Jon Hassell used to talk about with regard to his own creations: the question of what you really like in a fundamental sense, and how this can be distilled into your own creative activities. Asking yourself what you really like helps you avoid falling into the slipstream of prevailing trends (unless that’s what you really like…), or doing something solely to fulfil other people’s expectations. Hassell couldn’t be involved with the project so this was my attempt to bring some of his own thinking to the tribute act. My original idea—”Do the washing up”—was one I had to reject after I confirmed that it’s one of the suggestions you’ll find in Oblique Strategies. (It’s one I recommend all the same. Try it.)

Ambagious Tactics has been published by the Northampton ArtsLab and Alan Moore’s Mad Love imprint. I don’t know how much you might have to pay if you want a set of the cards but there’s an email address on this page for those requiring further details.

Before I started writing this post I thought I’d see what random suggestion the Oblique Strategies application on my phone might have to offer. The advice is suitably oblique and rather fitting as well:

Revaluation (a warm feeling)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, 1937–2021
• Imaginary Landscapes: A film on Brian Eno

Weekend links 799

A Night Alarm: The Advance! (1871) by Charles West Cope.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Meet the artist creating humorous, nihonga-style images of daily life with their rescue cat.

• The thirteenth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• New music: I Remember I Forget by Yasmine Hamdan; Clearwater by Maps And Diagrams.

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown—and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly”—for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities.

William T. Vollmann reviews Shadow Ticket, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon

• At Colossal: Twelve trailblazing women artists transform interior spaces in Dream Rooms.

• At Public Domain Review: Ballooning exploits in Travels in the Air (1871 edition).

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams on where to begin with the films of Satoshi Kon.

• Colm Tóibín explains why he set up a press to publish László Krasznahorkai.

• At Print Mag: Ken Carbone on a pool of perfection in Paris.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #310 by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is OTC Textura.

• Ron Mael’s favourite albums.

• Shadowplay (1979) by Joy Division | Shadow (1982) by Brian Eno | Shadows (1994) by Pram

Two new covers

My latest cover designs have arrived in time for Spook Month, although the first of these suits the season more by association than its appearance. Jim Rockhill’s A Mind Turned in Upon Itself is a study of the work of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Ireland’s leading writer of ghost stories and Gothic drama. This is another design for Swan River Press which adheres to the publisher’s preferred format of a dustjacket that wraps a small hardback with textured and illustrated boards. The brief was fairly straightforward, to present a rare photograph of Le Fanu in a suitably attractive manner. My initial idea was to create a frame that would reflect to some degree various aspects of Le Fanu’s fiction, but it quickly became apparent that the portrait photo was too tall and narrow to sit easily inside a frame that matched the ratio of the book. A better option was to look for a frame which could fit the shape of the book while also filling in the space around the photo.

A page from The Workshop: a Monthly Journal Devoted to Progress of the Useful Arts.

When Le Fanu was writing in the mid-19th century book design had become very lavish, with a proliferation of presentation volumes gold-blocked and embossed on their covers and spines. The Heztel editions of Jules Verne are prime examples, as are the many editions of Gustave Doré’s books. My cover is an adaptation of a German edition of Doré’s Bible which had an unusual panel in the centre that happened to be a good size and shape to accommodate the Le Fanu photo, although I still had to extend the design a little. My version also includes a pair of small Le Fanu monograms embedded in the frame.

For the board illustration I followed the form of an earlier Swan River book with an Irish theme, The Far Tower, whose boards I covered with an engraving collage. The end result, which looks like a single illustration, is a composite of two smaller illustrations from a book of views of Ireland, together with a quantity of foliage which frames the design and joins the pictures together.

The second cover is for a book I’m working on at the moment, Lovecraft’s Brood, a sequel to Tachyon’s well-received Lovecraft’s Monsters. I was very pleased to be asked to work on this one, the earlier book is a favourite of mine from among the books I’ve done for Tachyon, and Ellen Datlow is an expert at compiling well-chosen story collections. There’s not much I can say about the cover which follows the form of the previous book. As with Lovecraft’s Monsters, the framed face will also appear as one of the interior illustrations. You’ll have to wait a while to see the results of this, however. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, I’ve neglected to mention another Tachyon book whose interiors I’ve designed which is available now. The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale is a great introduction to the work of a master of horror fiction whose stories manage to be grim and witty in equal measure. Very grim at times; visceral horror is Lansdale’s forte. The collection includes his best-known story, Bubba Ho-Tep, and features cover art by another Swan River Press cover artist, Dave McKean.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraft’s Monsters

Elliott Dold’s Night

Looking for artwork by Elliott Dold turned up this remarkable set of illustrations for an unremarkable collection of poetry, Night, by a friend of the artist, Harold Hersey. Elliott Dold (1889–1957) was an American illustrator during the early days of the pulp magazines, best known today for drawings of huge machines which are a match for those by his more prolific contemporary, Frank R. Paul. The pulp magazines are so often filled with mediocre illustration that it’s a pleasure to find another talent lurking in their pages. But Dold was more than an illustrator of big science, as these illustrations for Hersey’s dubious poetry demonstrate.

Night is a collection of vaguely erotic poems, all of which Hersey labels “Nocturnes”. The collection was published in 1923 in a privately-printed subscriber-only edition, and every description I’ve read of it agrees that the illustrations are the best thing about it. The drawings are also radically different to Dold’s science-fiction art, to a degree that they could easily be taken for the work of a different illustrator. “What a pity the artist has to waste his time grinding out art for the pulps,” said HP Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith. A pity, indeed. Dold’s illustrations are on a par with those that Wallace Smith was producing in the same year, and are close enough to Smith’s style that’s it’s tempting to accuse him of imitation. Smith’s style wasn’t unique, however; Ray Frederick Coyle was another American artist at work in the 1920s who favoured the same combination of strict black-and-white, careful linework and stylised figures. It’s curious that three books with somewhat controversial contents should have been published in the USA in 1922/23, all of them illustrated in a very similar manner: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Malare (illustrated by Wallace Smith), James Branch Cabell’s new edition of Jurgen (illustrated by Ray Frederick Coyle), and Hersey’s Night. Rather than look for spurious influence I’d guess that this was a combination of coincidence and American literature acquiring a belated taste for Decadence which required suitably Beardsleyesque illustration. Similar trends were evident in cinema, especially in Alla Nazimova’s 1923 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, where the costumes and settings were all based on Beardsley’s illustrations.

The images here are from a copy of the book at HathiTrust that’s another poor Google scan. The Hathi website isn’t as convenient for reading as the Internet Archive so I’ve downloaded all of the illustrations and, when necessary, cleaned the grey tone left by the scanner’s camera.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Weekend links 798

Atlantis (1971) by Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos.

• “Given the workaday settings of many of his movies (a hotel, a summer camp, a science fair), their mortal stakes may come as a surprise, or at least as a paradox—yet paradox is at the heart of his entire body of work.” Richard Brody explores the New Yorker roots of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

• “The power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in how all the elements harmonise to create something visually spectacular.” Michael John Goodman on William Morris and his reinvention of book design.

• At Smithsonian Mag: “What actually sparks Will-o’-the-Wisps? A new study traces the science behind the mysterious, wandering lights“.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: .

• At Wormwoodiana: The novels of Derek Raymond and the type of crime fiction he called “The Black Novel”.

• At Colossal: Untamed flora subsumes abandoned greenhouses in Romain Veillon’s Secret Gardens.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from James Tenney: Writings and Interviews on Experimental Music.

• The Strange World of…Mulatu Astatke.

• RIP Patricia Routledge.

• The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Secret Garden: Main Title (1993) by Zbigniew Preisner | Secret Garden (2011) by Sussan Deyhim

Firebird, a film by Rein Raamat

There’s a Firebird of a different kind in this short film by an Estonian animator whose equally short Hell was featured here some time ago. Hell and Firebird are so stylistically opposed they look like the work of two different film-makers, although in the case of Hell this is a result of the film being based on the etchings of an Estonian artist, Eduard Wiiralt,  Firebird (1974) is simpler fare, another example of the cultural fallout from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and a rather late one at that, not only in style but in the progress of its scenario.

Where The Beatles had Pepperland as a frozen monochrome world which has to be restored to life and colour by the Fab Four, Rein Raamat presents a monochrome city whose listless inhabitants are enlivened by the arrival in the sky of a giant coloured bird. The bird’s changing colours bring further life to the city itself; flowers and fountains burst forth, to the annoyance of a ferocious black cat who evidently preferred the earlier dispensation. As with any symbolic story made in the Soviet bloc, you can’t help but see this as a mirror for life in the world outside the cinema. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look
• Hell, a film by Rein Raamat
• Tadanori Yokoo animations

Firebirds

Ivan Tsarevich Catching the Firebird’s Feather (1899) by Ivan Bilibin.

The firebirds are those that you find on the covers of recordings of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet score, or on its popular distillation, The Firebird Suite. The latter has long been one of my favourite pieces of classical music, in fact it was one of the first I owned, via a cheap vinyl pairing with The Rite Of Spring that was mainly of interest for being conducted by Stravinsky himself. The cover photo showed a ballerina as the Firebird in a ballet performance, a common choice for the covers of Firebird recordings.

No artist/designer credited, 1955.

Much better was the cover of Tomita’s Firebird album (see below) which I bought around the same time, an uncredited tapestry design which is also a better album cover than the painting used on the earlier Japanese release. Depicting the Firebird itself is the other obvious choice when designing Stravinsky albums, and the dazzling, magical bird has helped this particular opus fare better in the world of classical album design than many other recordings.

No artist/designer credited, 1958.

It’s easy to cast aspersions at the designers or art directors of classical records when you see an uninspired cover design, but the format presents a number of difficulties. There’s no such thing as a fixed design for a classical album because classical albums have no fixed form. With the exception of albums devoted to a single long composition most classical albums are compilations, pairing longer works with shorter ones, often by two or more composers. This confusion of identity creates problems for the designer, as does the huge quantity of classical releases. Then there’s the problems posed by the music itself which is so often abstract; you can’t “illustrate” The Goldberg Variations. The default choice is to use a painting or a drawing or a photograph of the composer as a cover image, or a photo of the conductor or performer. The easiest assigments, as these Firebird covers demonstrate, are albums based around a composition with a well-defined theme that can be depicted visually. Nobody has ever had a problem designing a cover for recordings of Debussy’s La Mer, for example, the only difficulty is deciding what picture of the sea you want to use.

No artist/designer credited, 1960.

I’ve never had the impression that classical devotees care very much about these issues, it’s the music and the performance they’re interested in. Record labels (or their marketing departments) do seem to pay attention to visual matters now and then, and you’ll find occasional attempts to create a new line of themed covers. (The Orphic Egg series was one of the more bizarre examples from the 1970s.) Deutsche Grammophon have a history of decent cover design but even they resort to using photos of the artist or conductor far too often. I’ve never been asked to design a classical release, and I’m not sure I’d relish the task, but the problems raised by the form fascinate me. This is a subject I’ll no doubt keep returning to.

Irma Seidat, no date.

No artist/designer credited, no date.

Marc Chagall, 1960.

Alexis Oussenko, 1960.

Leon Bakst, 1970.

Claude Jouaire, 1973.

Dick Ellescas, 1973.

Peter Wandrey, 1975.

No artist/designer credited, 1976.

Martin Springett, 1976.

No artist/designer credited, 1978.

No artist/designer credited, 1981.

An album cover whose pairing of the name Firebird with the Sukiyaki font seems to have influenced the design choices for Firebird software later in the decade.

Tsunemasa Takahashi, 1983.

An album by a jazz guitarist based on Stravinsky’s compositions.

Holly Warburton, 1986.

Felix de Gray, 1989.

Maureen Cox, no date.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Weekend links 797

Bloomsbury Roofs (no date) by J. Elspeth Robertson.

• “Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge…are only offshoots of a huge central corpus of mad experimental writing, prose and poetry and just research notes. Pages and pages and pages of this lunacy.” Iain Sinclair describing to Robert Davidson the genesis of his influential poem/book Lud Heat. Related: Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes.

• At Criterion Current: Deeper into Robert Altman, a look at five lesser-known films from the director’s expansive filmography. Good to see Quintet receiving some attention, a science-fiction film that’s not without flaws but is still closer to the written SF of the 1970s than the decade’s box-office hits.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction, by Charles Beaumont.

• Mix of the week: Ambient Focus 26.06.21 by Kevin Richard Martin aka The Bug.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great films set in 1970s America.

• At Colossal: Frédéric Demeuse’s photos of ancient forests.

• RIP Claudia Cardinale and Danny Thompson.

• New music: If the Sun Dies by Greg Weeks.

• The Strange World of…Rafael Toral.

• Silver Forest (1969) by Organisation | A Forest (1980) by The Cure | A Forest In The Sky (2024) by Hawksmoor

The Hand, a film by Jiří Trnka

Regular readers may have noticed that Jiří Trnka’s name has been written here with all the Czech accents intact, something that hadn’t been possible until a few days ago thanks to a database coding fault. This had long been the case with accents like those used in Czech, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, and other languages, to my endless frustration. I’ll spare you the technical details but the solution, which I resolved at the weekend, turned out to be easier than I expected, as a result of which I’ve been going back through posts adding accents to names which until now had been incomplete.

Jiří Trnka (1912–1969) came to mind while I was restoring the accents for Jiří Barta; both men are Czech animators, with Barta having been mentioned here on many occasions. Trnka was one of the founders of the Czech animation industry whose puppet films aren’t always to my taste but I thought I might have mentioned The Hand (1965) before now. This was Trnka’s final film, and one of his most celebrated for its wordless presentation of a universal theme: the freedom of the artist in the face of authoritarian demands. Many of Trnka’s previous films had been stop-motion puppet adaptations of fairy tales which lends The Hand a subversive quality when the scenario seems at first to be pitched in a similar direction. The artist character is a typical Trnka puppet with a persistently smiling face who spends his time in a single room making flowerpots with a potter’s wheel. “The hand” in this context refers both to the manual nature of the potter’s craft as well as to the huge gloved appendage that forces its way into the room demanding that the pots be abandoned in favour of hand-shaped sculptures. The resulting battle of wills shows the strengths of animation in delivering a potent visual metaphor.

Trnka’s message at the time of the film’s release was especially pertinent for the Soviet satellite nations where the promise of post-war Communism had been corrupted by decades of repressive governments, a situation that Jan Švankmajer bitterly addressed in The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Trnka isn’t as savage as Švankmajer but his message is still an ironic one, and may have been fuelled by an equivalent bitterness. Trnka’s career was bookended by films showing the struggle of assertive individuals against authoritarian oppression, but in the first of these, The Springman and the SS (1946), the contest is between a Czech chimney-sweep and the Nazi occupiers. The Hand could only be taken by Czech viewers as being aimed at their own oppressive government, and as such may be seen as Trnka’s contribution to the Czech New Wave, especially those films (Daisies, The Cremator) that the same government regarded as politically subversive or otherwise harmful. The Hand, like The Cremator, was withdrawn from distribution a few years after its release. Jiří Barta is a very different director to Trnka but Barta’s The Vanished World of Gloves (1982) features a dystopian sequence showing a fascist world of marching hands which looks like a homage to Trnka’s film. Watch The Hand here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jiří Barta: Labyrinth of Darkness
• Jiří Barta’s Pied Piper