John Coulthart's Blog, page 2

The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet

French artist Jean-Michel Nicollet isn’t really known as a comic artist but one of his strips appeared in the Métal Hurlant Lovecraft special in September, 1978, and was reprinted in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special a year later. Nicollet’s three-page story, H.P.L., is a slight thing which you can read below but his paintings present more of the atmosphere of Lovecraft’s fictional worlds than many of the other strips in those issues, including the equally slight contribution from Moebius. Prior to this, Métal Hurlant had been using some of Nicollet’s paintings for cover art, as a result of which one of the same illustrations appeared on the cover of the very first issue of Heavy Metal magazine in 1977. The winged Lovecraft from his comic strip turned up again on the cover of a Robert Bloch story collection for French publisher Nouvelles Éditions Oswald (NéO) in 1980.

Nicollet seems to have retired now from cover work but during the 1970s and 80s he was a very prolific illustrator, especially for NéO. NooSFere has a gallery of his covers which are mostly for reprints of early 20th-century horror, fantasy and adventure tales, also a few detective stories. He seems to have enjoyed illustrating classic detective fiction (photos show him posing with a large Holmesian pipe) so there may well be more covers which aren’t included in the NooSFere list.

The selections I’ve chosen here match my own preferences for cosmic horror and weird fiction, and represent another attempt to look further afield for this type of illustration. French cover design can be unsympathetic to cover illustration, crowding the paintings with poor type choices and purposeless graphics. The uniform layouts of NéO treat the artwork with more respect.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 796

Academy by Lamplight (1770) by Joseph Wright of Derby.

• “He recounts, for example, the death of the custom of ‘Stephening’ in Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire, where ‘all the inhabitants used to go on St. Stephen’s Day to the Rectory, and eat as much bread and cheese, and drink as much ale as they chose, at the expense of the Rector’. Stephening was discontinued by the Rector, as the event ‘gave rise to so much rioting’.” Ross MacFarlane on A Collection of Old English Customs, and Curious Bequests and Charities (1842).

• “He should be known as a film music revolutionary”: Milos Hroch on revitalising the legacy of Czech composer Zdeněk Liška.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Ian Thompson’s Synths, Sax And Situationists: The French Musical Underground 1968-1978.

Wright’s choice of subject matter was not only contemporary, but bordered on the heretical. In his candlelight paintings of the orrery, the air pump and the alchemist at work, he not only employed dramatic lighting and plunging shadows to heighten the drama, but the scenes themselves dealt in mortality and the insignificance of man in relation to the natural world, as well as suggesting that the scientist was now usurping the divine creator.

Charlotte Mullins on the chiaroscuro paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby

• New music: Daylight Daylight by Steve Gunn; Hard Ware by Patrick Cowley; WhiteOut by Lawrence English.

• At Spoon & Tamago: GAKUponi: A self-sustaining loop of fish and plants that hangs on the wall.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – September 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great German horror films.

• At Unquiet Things: A conversation with Benz and Chang.

• RIP Robert Redford.

• The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus) (1972) by Yes | Fish Culture (1980) by Marc Barreca | Filter Fish (1995) by Leftfield

Winter Days: a renku

Winter Days is two things: a renku, or collaborative poem whose creation was initiated by Matsuo Basho in Japan in 1684; and a 40-minute collaborative film from 2003 based on the same renku, with contributions by 35 animators from Japan and elsewhere, all under the direction of Kihachiro Kawamoto. The title of the poem provides the theme which the poets follow, with each poet repeating the last line of the previous stanza before adding a new of line of their own. The animators follow the same procedure, albeit much more loosely.

The results of this when transformed to animated sequences lacks the cohesion you’d get from a page or two of verse, especially when each sequence is self-contained. The moods of the individual sections also vary widely, from horror to broad comedy, but the film as a whole is a marvellous assembly of animation techniques, from simple drawings to clay animation, painting, puppetry, and computer graphics. The biggest attraction for animation aficionados will be the opening sequence which features a rare two minutes of film by the great Yuri Norstein. Among the other non-Japanese animators are Raoul Servais (whose piece appears to refer to Japanese ghost stories), Jacques Drouin with his pinscreen, and Britain’s Mark Baker. Wikipedia has a convenient chart that lists all the animators and the techniques they use. The Wikipedia page also notes the absence of any DVD release with English subtitles, but since all the sequences are wordless translation is only required for the intertitles and the readings that separate them. If you’re used to pairing video files with subtitles, however, you can download English subs here.

Given the allusions in some of the poem’s stanzas it no doubt helps when watching this to be familiar with Matsuo Basho’s other writings, as well as the subtleties of Japanese poetry. But there’s more than enough artistry in Winter Days to warrant repeated viewing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tokyo Loop
• Raoul Servais: Courts-Métrages
• Yuri Norstein animations

Cats and butterflies

Cat Playing with a Toy Butterfly, from the series Thirty-six Pictures of Birds (1828) by Hokkei Totoya.

The Daughter of Dainagon Yukinari (c.1842) by Kuniyoshi Utagawa.

Butterfly Dancer and Monster Cat – Kabuki (1870s) by Yoshitaki Utagawa.

The Orchid (1896) by Gekko Ogata.

Cotton Spinning (no date) by Harunobu Suzuki.

Cats & Butterfly (1967) by Kiyoshi Asai.

Cats and Butterfly (1967) by Tomikichiro Tokuriki.

Cat and Tulip (1972) by Tomoo Inagaki.

Cat and Butterfly (1985) by Miyashita.

Cat plays with butterfly by his tail (1994) by Iwao Akiyama.

Miss B (2001) by Tadashige Ono.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Twenty-four octopuses and a squid
• Seventeen views of Edo
• The art of Yuhan Ito, 1882–1951
• Eight Views of Cherry Blossom
• Fourteen views of Himeji Castle
• One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
• The art of Kato Teruhide, 1936–2015
• Fifteen ghosts and a demon
• Hiroshi Yoshida’s India
• The art of Hasui Kawase, 1883–1957
• The art of Paul Binnie
• Nineteen views of Zen gardens
• Ten views of the Itsukushima Shrine
• Charles Bartlett’s prints
• Sixteen views of Meoto Iwa
• Waves and clouds
• Yoshitoshi’s ghosts
• Japanese moons
• The Hell Courtesan
• Nocturnes

Weekend links 795

Heksenkeuken I: The Witches’ Sabbath (1916) by Lizzy Ansingh.

• A trailer for The Ice Tower, a new feature film by Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Good to see the Hadzihalilovic brand of weirdness being supported once again, but then they do things differently in France. Charlie Kaufman was complaining this week that nobody in Hollywood will fund his films. Maybe he should look elsewhere?

• Dreaming of Shadow and Smoke: Jim Rockhill talks to John Kenny about the enduring influence of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s stories of the supernatural. Rockhill’s latest book is A Mind Turned in Upon Itself, a collection of writings about Le Fanu published by Swan River Press. I designed the exterior of this volume which I’ll be discussing at a later date.

• “Eerie strangeness is abroad, sometimes beautiful, much more often menacing.” Derek Turner reviews Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, a novella by Rebecca Gransden. The book is published by Tangerine Press. I recommend it most highly.

• At Public Domain Review: Ivan Aivazovsky’s miniature seascapes (c.1887), which the artist painted into small photographs of himself at work.

• At The Wire: Against The Grain: Mattie Colquhoun on Mark Fisher’s cultural pessimism.

• At the BFI: Miriam Balanescu chooses 10 great mockumentary films.

• Winners and finalists of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Emma Kunz.

• New music: Magnetism by Kali Malone and Drew McDowall.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix 308 by DJ Food.

• Daveed Diggs’ favourite albums.

• Magnetic Dwarf Reptile (1977) by Chrome | Magnetic North (1998) by Skyray | Feed Me Magnetic Rain (2018) by Cavern Of Anti-Matter

Wilfried Sätty and the Cosmic Bicycle

Listen, Sleep, Dream (1967), a poster by Wilfried Sätty.

Continuing the San Francisco theme, twenty years ago today I was visiting the city myself. Jay Babcock, Richard Pleuger and I had driven up there from Los Angeles to research some of the history of Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982), master collagist, psychedelic poster artist, record cover designer and book illustrator. We spent 24 hours driving around the Bay area: up to Petaluma, where we met Sätty’s friend and artistic collaborator, David Singer, a fine collage artist in his own right; then to Berkeley to talk to Walter Medeiros, custodian of the Sätty estate and one of the leading scholars of the psychedelic poster scene; finally to North Beach, where we found the house in Powell Street where Sätty was living and working in the 1960s and 70s.

Sätty and an unknown woman in the artist’s basement pad/studio at Powell Street, a place he referred to as “the North Beach U-boat”. This was from a magazine feature that I photographed at David Singer’s house. I forget the source, it may have been from a 1972 TIME article about San Francisco artists.

The trip was a dizzying experience, but fascinating for what it revealed about Sätty and his work. From David Singer we learned, among other things, that the name “Sätty” had been chosen as a pseudonym by the former Wilfried Podriech for its echo of Ancient Egypt; the pronunciation, when you pay attention to the umlaut, conjures the word “Seti”. Walter Medeiros showed us stacks of original Sätty artwork, including all the collages intended for the artist’s final book, Visions of Frisco, a visionary history of the city which was published in 2007. Medeiros later emailed me a few additional notes which I have filed somewhere, correcting my guesswork in the piece I’d written about Sätty for Strange Attractor Journal earlier in 2005. At the time the only information I had to hand was the scant biographical information in Sätty’s books, the interview that he gave to Man, Myth and Magic in 1970, and a few web pages devoted to the artist which someone had put together in the late 1990s then never updated.

The house at 2143 Powell Street as it was in 2005. Those trees have grown considerably in the past 20 years.

All of which had me looking last week to see whether Sätty had a more substantial web presence today. Happily, he does, with this dedicated site maintained by Ryan Medeiros, Walter’s son. I’m saddened to read that Walter Medeiros is no longer with us but it’s gratifying to discover his family continuing his efforts to preserve Sätty’s legacy. Sätty is often reduced to a minor figure in the history of San Francisco poster art but he was more than this: a book creator as well as an illustrator, and a collage artist who extended Max Ernst’s engraving collage into new dimensions, using printing presses to multiply and overprint his assemblages.

Sätty’s first book, The Cosmic Bicycle, was published in 1971 by Straight Arrow Books, the publishing imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. This is a collection of collages, a few of them in colour, in which the compositions have a distinctly Surrealist quality. Sätty’s subsequent work downplayed the wild juxtapositions in favour of greater compositional control. His subsequent collection, Time Zone (1973), is a wordless “novel” in the manner of Max Ernst’s collage books.

The Cosmic Bicycle is also the title of a 4-minute animated film which brings to life some of Sätty’s pictures from the book. I linked to a copy of this years ago but that link is now defunct so here it is again, an odd little film which runs the artwork through a solarisation process then moves pieces of them around to the accompaniment of an electronic score. (As usual with Vimeo today, you have to log in to see it.) The film was directed by Les Goldman, an animation producer who was mentioned here recently in relation to The Hangman (1964), a short film he made with Paul Julian. Goldman’s own film seems almost amateurish in comparison but the music is by Moog pioneers Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, credited here as Parasound Inc. Beaver and Krause’s Gandharva album features one of Sätty’s finest cover designs, with title lettering by David Singer. The film score isn’t the duo’s finest by any means—I’d even describe it as rather annoying—but it’s good to see their Sätty connection reinforced.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The original Gandharva
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty album covers
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty

Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual

Writing about Steven Arnold last week I was wondering whether Arnold and Kenneth Anger had ever crossed paths. Anger moved to San Francisco in 1966 in order to channel the counter-cultural ferment into the film that would eventually become Lucifer Rising. I’m sure he must have been aware of Arnold’s midnight movie shows but if so there’s no mention of Arnold in the Bill Landis Anger biography.

When Anger died two years ago I posted links to some of the better online material related to the film-maker and his works. One of these was a German TV profile, Kenneth Anger–Magier des Untergrundfilms, a 53-minute documentary made in 1970 by Reinold E. Thiel for German TV channel WDR. The post included my complaint about the only copy of the film being blighted by an obtrusive graphic fixed to the footage by the person who uploaded it to YouTube a decade ago. The copy was further spoiled by burned-in subtitles but I felt sure that a better version would turn up eventually, and here we are with Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual, the same film under a different title, and free of obtrusive graphics. (There’s still that “WDR” in the corner but they paid for the damned thing so their proprietorial logo is at least justified.)

As a guide to Anger’s cinema, Thiel’s film only skates over the surface, with Anger being interviewed in piecemeal fashion, and explaining his work and magical philosophy to the camera. He doesn’t seem very happy in any of these sequences but WDR had paid to help with his own film so he was obliged to co-operate. We’re fortunate that they did. Thiel’s film is most valuable for having been made when Anger was shooting new scenes for Lucifer Rising in London. As far as I’m aware, this is the only documentary that shows Anger at work on any of the Magick Lantern films. The discussion of his career includes a mention of Rabbit’s Moon, the lost footage of which had been discovered in Paris but not yet pieced together into its finished form. The shots we see here are more rarities, being raw footage, untinted and unedited. The same goes for some of the shots from Lucifer Rising which include brief moments that didn’t make it to the final cut.

Anger had moved to London following his aborted attempts to make Lucifer Rising in San Francisco, a period which saw his first choice for the role of Lucifer remove himself from the production by means of suicide. His second choice, Bobby Beausoleil, fell out with Anger and stole most of the existing footage before being imprisoned for life as a result of his involvement with the Manson murders. The London phase of the film’s production was much more fruitful. In addition to the WDR funds and assistance from the Rolling Stones’ photographer, Michael Cooper, Anger was given a small grant by the BFI which helped pay for the sequences filmed in Germany and Egypt. Thiel’s footage shows Anger and assistants filming shots of the basement ritual with Aleister Crowley’s magic circle painted on the floor. Anger’s third Lucifer, Leslie Huggins, left the film before it was finished but we get to see him in several sequences, including shots of him wearing his “Lucifer” jacket. Thiel inadvertently clears up one minor mystery by revealing that the white-haired, ermine-robed Francis Cyril Rose is saying “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” to Huggins’ Lucifer during the ritual. In the finished Lucifer Rising we see Rose’s lips moving but the only words you ever hear in Anger’s films are the lyrics in the songs he uses.

Leslie Huggins doesn’t say a word either, even when Anger is directing his actions during the later sequences shot among the standing stones of Avebury, the same stones that would summon Derek Jarman to their circle a year later. Avebury’s megaliths have cultivated a great deal of mystery and legend but their aura is dispersed a little when you can hear an endless procession of motor traffic going by in the background. Anger shoots the stones from a low angle to make them seem more impressive, and also keep a flock of curious sheep out of the frame. Another minor mystery in Lucifer Rising was the shot of Huggins standing by the stones while making conjuring gestures towards a very stormy sky. Was the dark sky a special effect like some of the other shots in the film? Thiel reveals it to be a genuine Wiltshire thunderstorm which Anger hurries to photograph. The inhabitants of Avebury village were no doubt used to the sight of film crews gathered around the stones—a few years later the village became the location for an entire TV series—but even they must have been surprised by the sight of two film crews arriving simultaneously, with one of them filming the other. Thiel ends on a self-reflexive note, with a shot from Anger’s camera showing the camera filming him.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Weekend links 794

Green Castle (1975) by Roger Dean.

• Roger Dean’s first book, Views, was published 50 years ago this month. The book sold 60,000 copies in its initial run, and was reprinted twice the following year. This extraordinary success gave Dean and his associates at the newly-formed Dragon’s Dream the resources to publish a line of art books by other imaginative artists such as Chris Foss, Ian Miller and Syd Mead. Without Views there wouldn’t have been a Dragon’s Dream, and without Dragon’s Dream there wouldn’t have been Paper Tiger, a publishing house launched by Roger Dean, Martyn Dean and Hubert Schaafsma in 1976. All this activity made a huge impression on me at the time, with books that provided a showcase for artists whose work would otherwise only be seen on the covers of paperbacks or vinyl records.

• At Alan Moore World: 3 novels and The Great When, an extract from a new video interview in which Alan talks about three of the books that have influenced his novels.

• At the BFI: “Dead of Night: 80 years on, Ealing’s anthology horror is still a waking nightmare,” says Edward Parnell.

…Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology was a chimera. It was like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible. I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both.

These are not simply technologies of the future that we don’t yet have the means to realise, like the super-advanced technologies that Arthur C Clarke said we would be unable to distinguish from magic. Rather, oneiric technology takes a wish (or a terror) and clothes it in what looks like scientific raiment so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible. Perpetual motion is one of the oldest oneiric technologies, although only since the 19th century have we known why it won’t work (this knowledge doesn’t discourage modern attempts, for example by allegedly exploiting the ‘quantum vacuum’); anti-gravity shielding is probably another.

Philip Ball on unrealistic prognostications in science, from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence

• New music: Rún by Rún; Other Sides Of Nowhere by Underwater Sleep Orchestra; I Believe In You by Ladytron.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Curtis Harrington‘s Day.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ritualist.

• A View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | A Private View (1982) by Bill Nelson | Aerial View (2014) by Jon Hassell

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies

One consequence of writing posts like this for the past 19 years is the blossoming into familiarity of previously unknown subjects. Such has been the case with the work of Steven Arnold (1943–1994), an American artist/photographer/film-maker whose photographs I hadn’t seen until I was pointed towards the Steven Arnold Archive by a reader in 2009. (Hi Thom, if you’re out there!) Since that brief post I’ve logged the occasional appearance of Arnold exhibitions and, more recently, the blu-ray release of Arnold’s sole feature film, Luminous Procuress.

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies is a feature-length documentary by Vishnu Dass about Arnold and the circle of friends and collaborators who helped create his films and photographic tableaux. The documentary was released by the Steven Arnold Archive in 2019, and is now freely available for viewing at Vimeo. (The “Mature” tag means you need to either log in or create an account to watch it.) Dass presents a collection of video interviews with Arnold and his associates, together with more recent interviews with surviving friends and enthusiasts, to supply the biographical detail behind Arnold’s extraordinary endeavours. Angelica Huston narrates the film which also includes poignant testimony from Arnold’s close friend, Ellen Burstyn.

The interviews chart the artist’s progress: education in Oakland and San Francisco; his early experiments with film; his experience as a member of Salvador Dalí’s circle of hippy acolytes; the creation of all those beautiful black-and-white photographs in his Los Angeles studio. Arnold is revealed to have been a pioneer even by the elevated standards of San Francisco in the 1960s; he was taking acid in 1964, and at the height of the psychedelic era was cultivating with his friends an attitude of glamorous, polymorphous sexuality and gender play that went beyond the out-gay status of the Beats. In one of the interviews he talks eloquently about his concept of androgyny, which he regarded as an almost spiritual state, an attitude the alchemists of old would have endorsed. Arnold was the founder of San Francisco’s midnight movie shows in 1967, the same shows which saw the birth of the Cockettes, an anything-goes performing troupe who turn up later in Luminous Procuress. I didn’t know that Arnold’s midnight shows (for which he designed the posters) were taking place three years before the screening of El Topo in New York, the event which is usually cited as the origin of the nationwide Midnight Movie trend.

Luminous Procuress was the culmination of his time in San Francisco, and the film that caught the attention of Salvador Dalí when it too was screened in New York. The film is a rare example of Arnold arranging his tableaux in full colour. When he moved to Los Angeles he was living among vividly coloured fabrics and decorations yet all his photographs are high-contrast black-and-white creations. I was hoping we might hear more about the reason for this. Arnold does refer at one point to enjoying the directness of the black-and-white image, and monochrome no doubt made his tableaux arrangement easier if he didn’t have to worry about harmonising colours. But he doesn’t explain the choice in any detail.

This is an inspiring documentary, and a valuable record of a thread of San Francisco’s cultural history which is seldom acknowledged in recountings of the psychedelic era. It’s also a dispiriting portrait when you’re watching another creative life cut short by the AIDS pandemic. When considering histories like these it’s easy to fret over the loss of unrealised works. Better, I think, to appreciate anew the work that remains. (Thanks to Larry for the tip!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique
• Luminous Procuress
• Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold

Karel Zeman film posters

A festival poster from 2022. Zeman’s films are popular in Japan.

Last week’s post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman prompted me to see whether any more of his feature films have become available on disc. The international success of Zeman’s semi-animated adventures led to the production of more films along similar lines, although not all of these are as fantastic (or as popular) as Invention for Destruction or Baron Munchausen. A Jester’s Tale, for example, is a historical drama, albeit one which still makes use of Zeman’s skill with animation and special effects. The Karel Zeman Museum in Prague has been slowly restoring and reissuing the director’s features on DVD and blu-ray discs, the most recent title being The Stolen Airship, another film based on Jules Verne’s novels which I’m looking forward to seeing. The museum has also been increasing its production of spin-off products, including poster prints which include a couple of designs I hadn’t seen before. Browsing the poster sites revealed a few more attractive designs for international releases.

The Treasure of Bird Island (1953)

Czech, 1953. Art by Jindrich Cech.

I still haven’t seen Zeman’s first two features. The Treasure of Bird Island is wholly animated story based on a Persian fairy tale.

Journey to Prehistory (1955)

Poland, 1955. Art by Jan Mlodozeniec.

Zeman’s second feature is his first film to mix live action and animation, with a story about a group of boys whose journey down a river leads to an encounter with prehistoric creatures. I like the way this poster reduces the narrative to its basic elements while also looking like a design for a Godzilla-themed postage stamp.

Invention for Destruction (1958)

Czech, 1958. Art by Karel Knechtl.

A film I’ve enthused about before, and an ideal place to start with Zeman’s fantasies.

Poland, 1958. Art by Jan Lenica.

“That looks like a Jan Lenica design,” I thought, and so it is. The human-headed fish vehicle has little to do with Zeman’s film but a character like this wouldn’t be out of place in one of Lenica’s own animations, especially Labirynt.

Hungary, 1958. Art by Gabriela Hajnalova.

France, 1961. Art by Roger Soubie.

The French, unsurprisingly, give a prominent credit to the author whose novels inspired the film.

Japan, 2004.

The Japanese produced a number of vivid collage posters for Zeman’s films in 2004. The best ones are this and the one for Baron Munchausen.

Baron Munchausen (1962)

Czech, 1962. Art by Josef Flejsar.

Zeman’s other great fantasy feature, and another good one start with. It’s also probably the best Baron Munchausen film (not that I’ve seen them all), having the requisite lightness of tone while also looking like a succession of engraved illustrations brought to life.

Poland, 1962. Art by Franciszek Starowieyski.

A typically inventive composition by Starowieyski which gives the Arcimboldo treatment to an arrangement of Munchausen-related objects including the Baron’s horse and the Baron himself. Those tiny white marks look like print errors or jpeg artefacts but I think they’re supposed to be labels fixed to all the different objects.

Japan, 2004.

A Jester’s Tale (1964)

Czech, 1964. Art by Jiri Hilmar.

Poland, 1966. Art by Franciszek Starowieyski.

The Stolen Airship (1967)

The Stolen Airship, 1967. Czech design by Zdenek Ziegler.

A pair of impressive designs by one of the best Czech poster designers.

Czech, 1967. Art by Zdenek Ziegler.

Poland, 1967. Art by Andrzej Krajewski.

On the Comet (1970)

Czech, 1970. Art by Zdenek Ziegler.

Another pair of Ziegler designs for the last of Zeman’s Verne-derived adventures. This was also the last of his big feature films, after which he returned to producing animated stories for children.

Czech, 1970. Art by Zdenek Ziegler.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Inspiration, a film by Karel Zeman
• Zemania