John Coulthart's Blog, page 21

Music beyond time: Jenzeits

Where Monday’s post was about the cosmic music of the 1970s, this one concerns something in the same zone that’s more contemporary. Chad Davis is an American musician who likes to compartmentalise his activities as separate projects with different names. Jenzeits is Davis in kosmische mode, drawing heavily on the Berlin School of electronica and similar music of the 1970s, with a name that collides Jenseits, a title from Join Inn, the fourth album by Ash Ra Tempel, with Zeit, the third album by Tangerine Dream. (“Jenseits” is the German word for beyond, while “zeit” means time, so “Jenzeits” might be taken as a pun meaning “beyond time”. German speakers, however, may see this less as a pun than simply poor use of their language.)

There’s been a lot of Berlin-School pastiching going on over the past few years, the mid-70s albums by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze being very popular among the period imitators. I’m always referring to Redshift and Node as my favourite exponents in this idiom. Chad Davis is obviously inspired by the same albums but my attention was caught on a first hearing by his homages to the music that Manuel Göttsching was making under the Ash Ra Tempel/Ashra name during the same period, especially Le Berceau De Cristal, New Age Of Earth, and (to a lesser extent) Blackouts. Göttsching was always primarily a guitar player, but by the mid-70s he was combining his guitar work with sequencers and synthesizers to create instrumental electronic music with a different texture to his keyboard-based contemporaries. New Age Of Earth has a hippyish title that might be off-putting to curious listeners but it’s long been one of my favourite electronic albums, with a unique atmosphere that I wish Göttsching had pursued a little further. (The title in German on the back of the original French release is Neuzeit der Erde, literally “New Time of Earth”. Zeit again.) The album’s unique qualities are a product of its blend of processed guitar, keyboards and electronic rhythms, the latter being created by the EKO Computerhythm, an early programmable drum machine which could also be used to trigger other instruments to create sequencer patterns.

New Age Of Earth (1976). Design by Peter Butschkow.

I can’t say for certain whether Davis had this music or instrumentation in mind when recording his third Jenzeits album, Jenzeits Cosmic Orbits, but the similarities were enough to make me want to hear more. One of the frustrations of electronic music historically has been the way the evolution of technology has dictated its form. Tangerine Dream’s music changed according to the instrumentation they had available at any given time; new equipment meant new sounds and musical possibilities very different to the ones the group had been exploring a couple of years before. This doesn’t happen to the same degree with other musicians, especially guitarists who are often happy to play the same battered instrument for years on end. For a listener, the technical evolution of electronic music has often left behind abandoned areas or unexplored avenues. In this respect, the music of Jenzeits is less a series of pastiches than an attempt to further some of these explorations.

There are 12 Jenzeits releases to date, all of which are available on Bandcamp. Some of the earlier ones have also appeared on vinyl and cassette. If a CD box of the entire Jenzeits catalogue appeared I’d buy it in a second but I doubt this will happen any time soon. For the curious, Jenzeits Volume 1 is a good place to start. The last Jenzeits release was in 2020 which suggests we’ve seen the end of this particular project. For those who’d like more (and I still do), an earlier Chad Davis project, Romannis Mötte, ventured into similar territory.

Jenzeits Cosmic Universe (2017).

Jenzeits Cosmic Lifeforms (2017).

Jenzeits Cosmic Orbits (2017).

Jenzeits Volume 1 (2018).

Jenzeits Cosmic Worlds (2019).

Jenzeits Cosmic Meditations (2019).

Jenzeits Cosmic Themes (2019).

Traveler Return EP (2019).

Jenzeits Volume 2 (2019).

In Search Of The Seas Of The Pleiades (2019).

Theme From Deep Space (2020).

Jenzeits Cosmic Dimensions (2020).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cosmic jokes and a cosmic conundrum
• Early Water
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror
• Tangerine Dream in concert
• Pilots Of Purple Twilight
• Synapse: The Electronic Music Magazine, 1976–1979
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Edgar Froese, 1944–2015
• Synthesizing
• Tangerine Dream in Poland

Cosmic jokes and a cosmic conundrum

Tangerine Dream in 1973.

Here’s an item of news that will be of little interest to many readers but I’ve not seen it reported widely so it’s worth noting. (This place is nothing if not a cornucopia of deeply excavated niches, so you can take this as further niche excavation.) The news concerns recordings that Tangerine Dream made with Timothy Leary in 1973…or Leary recordings which were added to Tangerine Dream music in the same year. One problem with writing about all of this is that documentation remains elusive. Bearing this in mind, the details are as follows:

• Tangerine Dream were signed to Ohr Records from 1970 to 1973, a label for whom they recorded their first four albums plus one seven-inch single. During this time they were also featured along with label-mates Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze on an Ohr compilation, Kosmische Musik.

• “Kosmische” is the key word here. Ohr boss Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser liked the word enough to create an Ohr offshoot, Die Kosmischen Kuriere (The Cosmic Couriers), which later became the short-lived Kosmische Musik label.

• Also in the early 1970s, Timothy Leary, on the run from the US authorities, arrived in Switzerland where he and his allies (including Brian Barritt and Leary’s future wife, Joanna Harcourt-Smith) began hanging around with various members of the Swiss psychedelic avant-garde. Among the latter were writer Sergius Golowin, and a pair of artists, Walter Wegmüller and HR Giger.

• Ohr/Kosmische Kuriere/Kosmische Musik was based in Berlin, but at some point after Leary’s arrival in Switzerland R-U Kaiser and a handful of his recording artists met up with the Swiss psychonauts, an encounter that led to a series of musical collaborations: Seven Up, the third Ash Ra Tempel album which featured vocal intrusions from Leary and friends; Lord Krishna Von Goloka by Sergius Golowin, an album of Golowin readings with music by Klaus Schulze and others; and Tarot, an ambitious double-disc concept album narrated by (and credited to) Walter Wegmüller which included contributions from many of the major Ohr/Kosmische Kuriere artists. No Tangerine Dream, however.

Spalax CD reissues from the mid-1990s. Cover designs by Peter Geitner.

• Here’s where things get complicated. At some point while the above were being recorded, R-U Kaiser decided to release a series of “kosmische” jams by Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze and others which were credited to an imaginary group, The Cosmic Jokers. There are various reports about these sessions, with claims and counter-claims about whether or not permission was granted by the musicians. I can’t comment on the legal history (which led eventually to the collapse of Kaiser’s company) but Kaiser and his wife, Gille Letteman, appear to have been gripped by a kind of cosmic megalomania in 1974. The Cosmic Jokers album was quickly followed by four more releases in the same year: Galactic Supermarket (yet more jams by the same musicians but credited to Galactic Supermarket); Gilles Zeitschiff by Sternenmädchen (in which Gille Letteman and friends recount Timothy Leary’s flight to Switzerland and the meetings with the Cosmic Couriers); Planeten Sit-In (a quadrophonic sampler album created as a promotion for the Kosmische Musik label in conjunction with Germany’s Hobby magazine); and Sci Fi Party, an uneven compilation album which blends various Kosmische Musik recordings into a cosmic slop presided over by the label bosses who dominate the front cover.

• So where are Tangerine Dream in all this? Edgar Froese seems to have kept himself and his group at a safe distance from the drug-addled Swiss shenanigans. Until very recently the only connections that Tangerine Dream had with the Cosmic Couriers/Cosmic Jokers were the TD tracks on the 1972 Ohr compilation, and Gille Letteman mentioning the group when she introduces the Sternenmädchen album. No TD music appears on Sternenmädchen, however…or it didn’t until now. Which leads us to the next development.

• Three years ago, Dieter Dierks, the studio engineer for many of the Kosmische Musik albums, began to reissue the Cosmic Jokers albums through the Breeze Music label*. I’ve had all the albums since they were first released on CD by Spalax in the 1990s so it’s taken me a while to become aware of this. The thing that grabbed my attention was a review of one of the new reissues at Discogs that mentioned the album being a different mix from the original. This is indeed the case: Gilles Zeitschiff, Planeten Sit-In and Sci Fi Party are all different mixes to the originals (or at least the Spalax releases), with new sounds and instruments evident on some of the tracks, different emphasis to others and so on.

Three of the latest reissues. I’ve read complaints about the packaging being flimsy but they used metallic silver for the printing which shows some care applied to the presentation.

More than this, however, the Sternenmädchen album, which is a kind of semi-compilation mixing old and new pieces, contains a short piece of new music mixed into Cosmic Courier Bon Chance which can only be the Tangerine Dream contribution that Gille announces in her introductory spiel and which has been missing from the album since 1974. The giveaway is the sudden emergence of notes played on a Mellotron, an instrument which is absent from all the Cosmic Couriers recordings but which Froese and co. had started using on Atem, their fourth and final album for Ohr, and which became a fixture of the group’s music for the next few years. That’s not all. There’s a further three-and-a-half minutes of new music (Der Herrsher, Part 2) added to Sci Fi Party which sounds like yet more Tangerine Dream, with a voice mixed into the music that sounds very much like Timothy Leary burbling lines from some kind of science-fiction scenario. To date I still don’t know for certain what these pieces are—there’s no information about them on the reissues, not even a mention of them being new additions to the albums—but speculation at Discogs and on a music forum mentions an aborted Tangerine Dream project, Alert!, which might have been the group’s fifth album for Ohr if Edgar Froese hadn’t decided to sign with Virgin Records. There’s more, apparently: a recent Tangerine Dream video documentary includes a scene where Dieter Dierks presents the current members of Tangerine Dream with tapes he discovered when remastering the Kosmische Musik recordings. I say “apparently” since I’ve yet to see this documentary but this raises tantalising questions. Does there now exist an unreleased album (or parts of one) from Tangerine Dream’s pre-Virgin period? It’s possible. (It’s also probable that the Edgar Froese memoir or one of the Tangerine Dream books has more to say about this episode but since I’ve not read them I wouldn’t know.) One of the revelations of the recent In Search Of Hades box was the two discs of out-takes from the recording of Phaedra which showed the group improvising at length until the pieces which became the album tracks emerged. The Hades box also contained an entire album, Oedipus Tyrannus, which had been recorded after Phaedra but which had remained (mostly) unreleased since the 1970s.

That’s a lot of words about five minutes of music but, as I said, I’ve not seen very much discussion about this discovery elsewhere so feel it my duty to mention it here. The music itself isn’t earth-shattering but the Leary vocalisations sound more interesting than the tone-deaf yammering that spoils the Seven Up album. There’s still the question of whether this was a bona fide collaboration between Leary and Tangerine Dream or another studio concoction dreamed up by an overbearing label boss. There’s also the question of whether we’ll get to hear what was on those tapes that Dieter Dierks gave to the Froese estate. You’d think this period would have been thoroughly exploited by now but overlooked oddities remain, like the 30 minutes of Vampira, a score that Tangerine Dream recorded in 1971 for a German TV production which has never been officially released.

I’ll end this with six more minutes of kosmische music from 1973: Tangerine Dream playing Atem live (with pre-recorded drums) on Spotlight, an Austrian TV show.

* A word of warning about the Breeze CD reissues. There are several complaints at Discogs about mastering faults on the first Cosmic Jokers album and Galactic Supermarket. I can’t confirm this but I can say that the reissues of the other albums mentioned in this post—Gilles Zeitschiff, Planeten Sit-In and Sci Fi Party—all sound fine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Early Water
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror
• Tangerine Dream in concert
• Pilots Of Purple Twilight
• Synapse: The Electronic Music Magazine, 1976–1979
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Edgar Froese, 1944–2015
• Synthesizing
• Tangerine Dream in Poland

Weekend links 733

Armenian postage stamps for this year’s Sergei Parajanov centenary.

• At Criterion.com: David Hudson on 100 Years of Sergei Parajanov. The director is honoured with postage stamps and endless plaudits but when do we get blu-ray releases of more of the films that created all this attention in the first place?

• Steven Heller helps round off a noir-themed week with a look back at New York, the city where letterers never sleep. See also Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York.

• New music: Natur by KMRU; Associated Tone Services by Associated Tone Services; The Berklee Sessions by Scanner & Neil Leonard.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hyper realistic pencil drawings of metallic objects by Kohei Ohmori.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: You are there: Les Cabarets du Ciel et de l’Enfer.

• Chris Corsano’s favourite albums.

• Signs by Daniel McKee.

• RIP Robert Towne.

• Ciel Ouvert (1985) by Yello | Ciels Ténébreuse (1990) by :Zoviet*France: | Monter Au Ciel (1994) by Transglobal Underground

Noir dreams and nightmares

Murder, My Sweet.

One of the bonuses of the Big Noir Watch was getting to see just how many dream/nightmare/hallucination sequences there were in the listed films besides those I remembered from previous viewings. The dream sequence is almost as old as cinema itself but the often lurid and melodramatic nature of noir storylines makes dreams and nightmares another recurrent feature of the the landscape. Beleaguered, paranoid characters are liable to find the Expressionist roots of noir cinema lurking behind their closed eyelids, ready to tip them into an unstable world of blurred vortices and looming, underlit faces.

Stranger on the Third Floor.

Production credits referred to these sequences (when they refer to them at all) as montages, a rather confusing term when montage is another word for film editing in general. The sequences were invariably the work of people other than the director, either a montage specialist or a photographer familiar with optical printing and camera effects. Before Don Siegel became a notable noir director he was a montage creator at Warner Brothers; the sequence showing the invasion of France in Casablanca is one of his. He credited his montage work with teaching him all about cinema craft.

The following examples are all the sequences I noticed during the recent noir binge. If you know of any other good ones from the 1940s or 1950s then please leave a comment.

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

An aspiring reporter is the key witness at the murder trial of a young man accused of cutting a café owner’s throat and is soon accused of a similar crime himself.

Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward mark the beginning of what they term “the noir cycle” with The Maltese Falcon in 1941. But many other writers choose Stranger on the Third Floor as the beginning of the genre that would dominate the 1940s. With good reason: the film is 60 minutes of non-stop fear and paranoia photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, one of the RKO cinematographers whose use of shadows would help define the noir style. The celebrated dream sequence is almost a film in itself, with huge, shadow-filled sets in which reporter Mike Ward (John McGuire) undergoes accusation, an unwinnable trial and a slow walk to the electric chair.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

After being hired to find an ex-con’s former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.

The first adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely changed the title so that viewers wouldn’t think it was another Dick Powell musical. As with The Big Sleep, the adaptation mangles the plot but it has its plus points, especially Mike Mazurki as Moose Malloy, an ex-wrestler whose performance as the overbearing ex-con is definitive. It also has this great hallucination sequence. In the novel Marlowe is blackjacked by rogue cops then wakes in a mysterious clinic with a head full of drugs. The film takes us inside Marlowe’s head during his unconscious episode, the Surrealist montage sequence being credited to Douglas Travers.

Conflict (1945)

An engineer trapped in an unhappy marriage murders his wife in the hope of marrying her younger sister.

Humphrey Bogart plays the scheming engineer who finds himself besieged by accusatory faces following a serious car crash. The sequence was directed by Roy Davidson with camera work by HF Koenekamp. Bogart’s dream includes repeated shots of swirling water racing down a plug-hole, a cheap vortex effect that reappears in later sequences.

Black Angel (1946)

When Kirk Bennett is convicted of a singer’s murder, his wife tries to prove him innocent…aided by the victim’s ex-husband.

Based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. One of the great noir villains, Dan Durea, endures another accusatory episode after drinking too much. The “special photography”, most of which involves liquid ripples of one sort or another, was by DS Horsley.

Fear in the Night (1947)

A man dreams he committed murder, then begins to suspect it was real.

Based on a short story, Nightmare, by Cornell Woolrich. Most dream sequences occur somewhere in the middle of a narrative but this film opens in the middle of the nightmare, with DeForest Kelley in his screen debut fighting for his life inside a mirrored room. More like a Twilight Zone episode than a feature film, and rather poorly made compared to the remake (see below). Also very difficult to find in a watchable print.

Odd Man Out (1947)

A wounded Irish nationalist leader attempts to evade police following a failed robbery in Belfast.

After seeing faces talking to him in the beer bubbles spilled across a pub table, James Mason’s delirious fugitive hides out with a crazed painter in whose studio he suffers further hallucinations when the portraits float off the walls to provide an audience for his ravings. As with The Third Man, director Carol Reed showed that the noir idiom could be situated away from the streets of America. Special effects by Stanley Grant and Bill Warrington.

The Big Clock (1948)

A magazine tycoon commits a murder and pins it on an innocent man, who then tries to solve the murder himself.

Another drunken montage, with Ray Milland revisiting the dipsomania he portrayed in The Lost Weekend.

The Dark Past (1948)

An escaped psychopathic killer who takes the family and neighbours of police psychologist hostage reveals a recurring nightmare to the doctor.

A minor cinematic trend of the late 40s/early 50s saw escaped criminals taking people hostage inside their homes. The Desperate Hours is the most famous example but this one came before it, adding Freudian psychology to the drama. William Holden plays the troubled killer whose brainstorm sequence is filmed entirely in greyed-out negative. The umbrella (reminiscent here of Francis Bacon’s Painting) is a clue to his traumatic past.

The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

Fascinated by gorgeous Mrs. Bannister, seaman Michael O’Hara joins a bizarre yachting cruise, and ends up mired in a complex murder plot.

Not quite a dream sequence but very dreamlike in effect, the end of Orson Welles’ film sees his character escaping a trial for murder by swallowing painkillers that eventually knock him out. He wakes to find he’s been concealed from the police in a San Francisco funfair, a place of vast shadows, Expressionist decor (there’s even a nod to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) and the Magic Mirror Maze where the final showdown takes place.

The Thief (1952)

A chance accident causes a nuclear physicist, who’s selling top secret material to the Russians, to fall under FBI scrutiny and go on the run.

Ray Milland again in one of the oddest films in the entire noir cycle, an espionage drama with no dialogue at all. Milland’s treacherous scientist communicates with Soviet agents via wordless phone calls: they ring three times then he goes to deliver a new document stolen from his workplace. After he kills an FBI agent he suffers a restless night where giant phone dials provide the de rigueur spinning visuals.

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

A telephone operator ends up drunk and at the mercy of a cad in his apartment. The next morning she wakes up with a hangover and the terrible fear she may have committed murder.

Norah (Anne Baxter) slugs a would-be rapist with a poker before swooning into another swirling plug-hole while animated shapes flare in the background. Special effects by Willis Cook.

Nightmare (1956)

A New Orleans musician has a nightmare about killing a man in a strange house but he suspects that it really happened.

A remake by director Maxwell Shane of his earlier Woolrich adaptation, Fear in the Night, with Kevin McCarthy in the lead role. McCarthy is just as frantic here as he was in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers made in the same year. The nightmare sequence in Fear in the Night had slightly more detail but this one has better picture quality. The special photographic effects are by Howard A. Anderson.

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by paroled convict Moose Malloy to find his girlfriend Velma, former seedy nightclub dancer.

Dick Richards’ adaptation stays closer to the novel than Murder, My Sweet, with Robert Mitchum a better fit for Marlowe’s trench coat even if he was too old for the role by this point. But Richards makes no attempt to match the delirium of the earlier film’s drug episode, all we get is some sweaty stumbling in the dark while the face of a bullying whorehouse madam guffaws at Marlowe’s predicament. This is a good example of the way in which the dream or hallucination sequence could no longer work in a more realistic presentation unless the director was determined to try something new. After this the best film dreams are either parodies of the form—as in The Big Lebowski—or a part of the texture of the film itself, as in the work of David Lynch or any number of horror films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…
• Art on film: Crack-Up
• Art on film: The Dark Corner
• A theme for maniacs
• Invasion revisited
• In the Shadow, a film by Fabrice Mathieu
• Film noir posters

The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…

Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947). Photography by Nicholas Musuraca.

“His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.” —Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

1: The Big Project
This is a big post about a big subject: the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, also the “neo-noir” revival of the following decades. The project in question was my attempt to watch all the films listed in a comprehensive study of the form, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, which was published in 1979. There are many books about film noir but this one, which I often refer to as The Big Noir Book, is hard to beat, a heavyweight guide in which editors Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward construct a definition of the genre, chart its history, and compile indices for the key creators: actors, writers, directors and cinematographers. The core of the book is a detailed list of 300 films (see below), with production credits for each entry, a précis of each story and a short critical essay.

“Big” is an apposite term; many of these films involve big characters, big passions, big crimes and big predicaments, the latter invariably matters of life or death. The word “big” turns up in a number of noir titles, thanks no doubt to Raymond Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep. Howard Hawks’ adaptation of the Chandler book is one of the defining films of the genre, one that was very successful despite the plot being rendered incoherent by bowdlerisation and competing screenwriters. The studios spent the next few years offering picture-goers The Big Clock (1948), The Big Night (1951), The Big Heat (1953), The Big Combo (1955) and The Big Knife (1955). Also The Big Carnival (1951), an alternate “big” title for Ace in the Hole.

The big book. On the cover: Joan Crawford and Jack Palance in Sudden Fear (1952).

I can’t be the only person to have encountered Silver & Ward’s list then thought about trying to watch everything on it. But unless you’re an academic or a film reviewer this would have been difficult until very recently, if not impossible when many of the titles are obscure B-pictures that you wouldn’t usually find on TV. The idea first arose in the 1980s when a friend bought a copy of the noir book shortly after I’d been reading Robert P. Kolker’s Cinema of Loneliness, a substantial analysis of five American directors which, in its first edition, includes some discussion of the noir influence on the films of the 1970s. Three of the films that Kolker examines are examples of neo-noir that make the Silver & Ward list: The Long Goodbye, Taxi Driver and Night Moves. Kolker also acknowledges Stanley Kubrick’s grounding in the noir idiom. Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss and The Killing are both on the list, while the film that followed these, Paths of Glory, features hardboiled dialogue by Jim Thompson, and a cast filled with noir actors. My growing interest in the genre happened to coincide with the arrival on British television of Channel 4, a TV station which spent its early years filling the afternoons and late evenings with re-runs of old films. Silver & Ward’s book had the effect of making me pay closer attention to films I might otherwise have ignored or only watched if there was nothing else on. The book also contextualised these films in a way that’s never required with other genres. This period was an introduction to noir as it really is, as opposed to the clichés which still surround the genre today.

Claire Trevor in Raw Deal (1948). Photography by John Alton.

2: The Big Definition
Everyone knows the noir clichés: private eyes, duplicitous dames, lethal hoods, nightclub singers, sardonic voiceovers, light slanting through venetian blinds, the American metropolis, rain-washed nocturnal streets, big cars, big hats, trench coats, guns, cops, more cops, etc, etc.

Hollywood films of the 1940s do, of course, feature all of these things many times over, but the genre definition offered by Silver & Ward is as much about a pessimistic world-view as it is about the aesthetics of life in the American city. The “noir” quality that French critics of the 1950s identified in post-war American cinema was a visual attribute before it was anything else, a realisation that many of the recent Hollywood films were saturated with angled shadows and endless night. But the black (or, more properly, dark) character of these films is as much a set of circumstances as it is a visual style, one where the wheel of fate is often the most important element driving the story. The visual style can contribute a great deal to the storytelling and the overall mood but noir circumstance can exist, as it does in Leave Her to Heaven, in bright Technicolor sunlight miles away from any city. Fate may manifest as blind chance—mistaken identity, someone in the wrong place at the wrong time—or a deterministic inevitability that leads a protagonist to their destruction. A doom-laden finale was frequently imposed by Hollywood’s Production Code which insisted that crime can never be shown to pay, but the Code’s moral stricture is only obtrusive in the films about criminals. Many noir situations concern ordinary people whose attempts to live decent lives are thwarted by bad decisions or unfortunate circumstance. Despite Hollywood’s reputation for happy endings a negative resolution is a noir staple, as is an atmosphere of desperation, entrapment and paranoia; a Pyrrhic victory is often as good as it gets. Meanwhile, the shadow of war hangs over all the films of the 1940s. Many of the wartime pictures refer in passing to events in Europe, while the post-war films are often informed by the recent ordeals of returned veterans. There’s even a sub-class of noir involving veterans with damaged brains whose amnesias or violent mood swings lead them into trouble.

The noir stereotype of the private eye is well-founded when Silver & Ward mark the beginning of the genre with Humphrey Bogart’s appearance as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Many films about private eyes followed Bogart but not all of them are truly noir, while the genre itself is flexible enough to depart from the detective formula. Film noir doesn’t have to involve cities at all: a number of the films on Silver & Ward’s list are entirely set in small towns or remote rural areas. The genre doesn’t have to be set in the USA either: there are London noirs, South American noirs, Caribbean noirs, European noirs and Far East noirs. The films aren’t always black-and-white or filled with shadows: several of the noirs from the 1950s are in colour, as are all the ones from the 1970s.

Richard Basehart in He Walked By Night (1949). Photography by John Alton.

3: The Big List
The idea of watching all of the films on the list returned a few years ago when I yielded to an urge and finally bought myself a copy of The Big Noir Book. Since 1979 Silver & Ward’s study has been reprinted several times in updated editions but I found a relatively cheap first edition on eBay which I was surprised to discover had been part of the personal library of the late Nick Roddick (the listing didn’t mention this), a film writer whose columns I used to read in Sight and Sound. I think “Mr Busy”, as he styled himself, might have been pleased that at least one of his books went to a good home. Shortly after this, and in quick succession, my local charity shop turned up blu-rays of The Maltese Falcon and The Killers. Watching these films again, then reading what Silver and co. had to say about each of them, impelled me to look for more titles.

What follows is the list of films that Silver, Ward and the book’s other contributors regard as best representing the genre in its many guises. The “noir cycle” as they call it, runs from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to Touch of Evil in 1958, although the list overlaps these dates. The entries prior to 1941 are significant for being early examples of themes or stylistic qualities that would become more prominent in the years that followed. The genre had run out of steam by the early 1960s but it returned with a vengeance in 1967 with John Boorman’s extraordinary Point Blank, a film that revitalised the presentation of noir’s stock scenarios with techniques informed by European cinema.

How many of these films have you seen?

Abandoned (1949), The Accused (1949), Act of Violence (1949), Among the Living (1941), Angel Face (1953), Appointment with Danger (1951), Armored Car Robbery (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Baby Face Nelson (1957), Beast of the City (1932), The Beat Generation (1959), Behind Locked Doors (1948), Berlin Express (1948), Between Midnight and Dawn (1950), Beware, My Lovely (1952), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Beyond the Forest (1949), The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole) (1951), The Big Clock (1948), The Big Combo (1955), The Big Heat (1953), The Big Knife (1955), The Big Night (1951), The Big Sleep (1946), Black Angel (1946), Blast of Silence (1961), The Blue Dahlia (1946), The Blue Gardenia (1953), Body and Soul (1947), Border Incident (1949), Born to Kill (1947), Brainstorm (1965), The Brasher Doubloon (1947), The Breaking Point (1950), The Bribe (1949), The Brothers Rico (1957), Brute Force (1947), The Burglar (1957)

Caged (1950), Calcutta (1947), Call Northside 777 (1948), Canon City (1948), Cape Fear (1962), The Captive City (1952), Caught (1949), Cause for Alarm! (1951), The Chase (1946), Chicago Deadline (1949), Chinatown (1974), Christmas Holiday (1944), City Streets (1931), City That Never Sleeps (1953), Clash by Night (1952), Conflict (1945), Convicted (1950), Cornered (1945), Crack-up (1946), Crime of Passion (1957), Crime Wave (1954), The Crimson Kimono (1959), Criss Cross (1949), The Crooked Way (1949), Crossfire (1947), Cry Danger (1951), Cry of the City (1948)

D.O.A. (1950), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), Danger Signal (1945), Dark City (1950), The Dark Corner (1946), The Dark Mirror (1946), Dark Passage (1947), The Dark Past (1948), Dead Reckoning (1947), Deadline at Dawn (1946), Decoy (1946), Desperate (1947), Destination Murder (1950), Detective Story (1951), Detour (1945), Dirty Harry (1971), Double Indemnity (1944), A Double Life (1947), Drive a Crooked Road (1954)

Edge of Doom (1950), The Enforcer (1951), Experiment in Terror (1962)

Fall Guy (1947), Fallen Angel (1946), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Fear (1946), Fear in the Night (1947), The File on Thelma Jordan (1950), Follow Me Quietly (1949), Force of Evil (1948), Framed (1947), The French Connection (1971), The French Connection II (1975), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Fury (1936)

The Gangster (1947), The Garment Jungle (1957), Gilda (1946), The Glass Key (1942), The Guilty (1947), Guilty Bystander (1950), Gun Crazy (1950)

The Harder They Fall (1956), He Ran All the Way (1951), He Walked by Night (1949), Hell’s Island (1955), Hickey & Boggs (1972), High Sierra (1941), High Wall (1947), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Hollow Triumph (1948), House of Bamboo (1955), House of Strangers (1949), House on 92nd Street (1945), The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), Human Desire (1954), Hustle (1975)

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), I Died a Thousand Times (1955), I, The Jury (1953), I Wake Up Screaming (1942), I Walk Alone (1948), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950)

Johnny Angel (1945), Johnny Eager (1942), Johnny O’Clock (1947), Journey into Fear (1943)

Kansas City Confidential (1952), Key Largo (1948), The Killer is Loose (1956), The Killer that Stalked New York (1951), The Killers (1946), Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Kiss of Death (1947), Kiss the Blood off my Hands (1948), Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), Knock on Any Door (1949), The Kremlin Letter (1970)

The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Lady in the Lake (1947), Lady on a Train (1945), A Lady Without Passport (1950), Laura (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), The Letter (1940), The Lineup (1958), Loan Shark (1952), The Locket (1947), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Long Wait (1954), Loophole (1954)

M (1951), Macao (1952), Madigan (1968), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Man Who Cheated Himself (1951), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Manhandled (1949), Marlowe (1969), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), Ministry of Fear (1945), Mr Arkadin (1955), The Mob (1951), Moonrise (1949), Murder is My Beat (1955), Murder, My Sweet (1944), My Name is Julia Ross (1945), Mystery Street (1950)

The Naked City (1948), The Naked Kiss (1964), The Narrow Margin (1952), New York Confidential (1955), Niagara (1953), The Nickel Ride (1975), Night and the City (1950), Night Editor (1946), The Night has a Thousand Eyes (1948), The Night Holds Terror (1955), Night Moves (1975), Nightfall (1957), The Night Runner (1957), Nightmare (1956), Nightmare Alley (1947), 99 River Street (1953), Nobody Lives Forever (1946), Nocturne (1946), Nora Prentiss (1947), Notorious (1946)

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Other Woman (1954), Out of the Past (1947), The Outfit (1973)

Panic in the Streets (1950), Party Girl (1958), The People Against O’Hara (1951), Phantom Lady (1944), Pickup on South Street (1953), The Pitfall (1948), Plunder Road (1957), Point Blank (1967), Possessed (1947), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Pretender (1947), Private Hell 36 (1954), The Prowler (1951), Pushover (1954)

The Racket (1928), The Racket (1951), Railroaded! (1947), Raw Deal (1948), The Reckless Moment (1949), Red Light (1950), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), Roadblock (1951), Road House (1948), Rogue Cop (1954)

Scandal Sheet (1952), Scarlet Street (1945), Scene of the Crime (1949), The Scoundrel (1935), The Second Woman (1951), The Set-Up (1949), 711 Ocean Drive (1950), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Shakedown (1950), The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Shield For Murder (1954), Side Street (1950), Sleep, My Love (1949), The Sleeping City (1950), Slightly Scarlet (1956), The Sniper (1952), So Dark the Night (1946), Somewhere in the Night (1946), Sorry, Wrong Number (1949), Southside 1-1000 (1950), The Split (1968), Storm Fear (1956), Strange Illusion (1945), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), The Stranger (1946), Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Strangers on a Train (1951), Street of Chance (1942), The Street With No Name (1948), The Strip (1951), Sudden Fear (1952), Suddenly (1954), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Suspense (1946), Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

T-Men (1948), Talk About a Stranger (1952), The Tattered Dress (1957), The Tattooed Stranger (1950), Taxi Driver (1975), Tension (1950), They Live By Night (1948), They Won’t Believe Me (1947), The Thief (1952), Thieves’ Highway (1949), The Thirteenth Letter (1951), This Gun For Hire (1942), Thunderbolt (1929), Too Late For Tears (1949), Touch of Evil (1958), Try and Get Me (aka The Sound of Fury) (1950), The Turning Point (1952)

Uncle Harry (aka The Strange World of Uncle Harry) (1945), The Undercover Man (1949), Undercurrent (1946), Underworld (1927), Underworld USA (1961), Union Station (1950), The Unknown Man (1951), The Unsuspected (1947), Vicki (1953)

When Strangers Marry) (aka Betrayed) (1944), Where Danger Lives (1950), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), While the City Sleeps (1956), White Heat (1949), The Window (1949), Witness to Murder (1954), The Woman in the Window (1945), Woman on the Run (1950), World for Ransom (1954), The Wrong Man (1956), You Only Live Once (1937)

It’s taken me almost two years to work through this list; I started in August 2022 and finished last week. I’ve dutifully watched everything with the exception of the three earliest films, Underworld (1927), The Racket (1928) and Thunderbolt (1929), all of which are listed for being notable precursors. (The Racket from 1951—which I did watch—is a remake of the earlier film.) Looking back over the list I’d have trouble saying what happens in some of the more obscure entries without reading descriptions. Those vague and unmemorable one-word titles can be shuffled around to chart the progress of a noir narrative: Tension, Suspense, Fear, Conflict, Desperate, Cornered, Caught, Convicted. While tracking down the more elusive pictures I was also re-watching a handful of films that aren’t on the list: Odd Man Out (1947), Split Second (1953), Rififi (1955), Klute (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), The Driver (1978), Cutter’s Way (1981), Thief (1981), Hammett (1982), Blood Simple (1984), The Last Seduction (1994) and A Simple Plan (1998).

Many of the listed films are currently available on disc but most of the ones I watched were downloads of some sort. The Internet Archive now has a Film Noir section which was very useful, although quality there is often lacking, and some of the better prints are only available with burned-in Spanish subtitles. People who do this belong in the Big House. A few of the films are so neglected they’ve been difficult to find at all. A recurrent frustration was discovering that films which are now in the public domain aren’t always available as decent prints. Being free for everybody seems to dissuade anyone from doing a proper restoration job. I struggled through a handful of titles that were old dupe prints with poor sound and missing frames. Artistic quality, on the other hand, was surprisingly high considering the list is so long. I think there were only around ten or twelve films that I thought especially bad but I watched them all the same. Worst of the lot, and a film I’ll be happy to never see again, was The Other Woman, one of several melodramas written, directed, produced and starring Hugo Haas. If you ever decide to work your own way through Silver & Ward’s list then save Mr Haas and his other woman for last.

T-Men (1947). Photography by John Alton.

As for the best films, there are too many to mention. One of the great pleasures of this endeavour was being surprised on a regular basis by films I might never have seen without having had my viewing programmed in this manner. I carefully avoided reading any of the critical pieces in the noir book before watching each film, mainly to avoid spoilers, but I also enjoyed knowing next to nothing about each film before it began. I’ve been impressed by directors and actors that I’ve paid little attention to in the past. Richard Conte was among the latter. After watching him for years as the sinister Don Barzini in The Godfather it was good to finally see him at the peak of his popularity, and in roles which anticipate his Godfather appearance.

I’ve not seen any of Silver & Ward’s updated lists but I believe they may have added more of the neo-noir titles from the 70s and 80s. This is a tricky area since neo-noir is the place where the genre becomes even more self-conscious than it was already. The best noir films of the 1970s are those that develop the genre or comment upon it in some way rather than simply adopting its surface characteristics. The Long Goodbye, for example, is a much more interesting adaptation of a Philip Marlowe novel than the period retread of Farewell, My Lovely. Neo-noir at its best pursues the themes of fatalism and entrapment without wheeling out the stylistic cliches. The 1970s was a decade especially suited to this sensibility, as Robert P. Kolker noted in 1980: “Feelings of powerlessness in our daily lives have become realised in our recent film with images and themes of paranoia and isolation stronger than forties film noir could have managed.”

Brian Donlevy, Richard Conte and Cornel Wilde in The Big Combo (1955). Photography by John Alton.

4: The Big Lesson
Things I learned in the two years I’ve spent watching these films:

• Any noir starring the following is worth watching: Dana Andrews, Humphrey Bogart, Lee J. Cobb, William Conrad, Richard Conte, Joan Crawford, Kirk Douglas, Dan Durea, Glenn Ford, John Garfield, Gloria Graham, Farley Granger, Sterling Hayden, Van Heflin, William Holden, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum, Edmond O’Brien, Jack Palance, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Ryan, George Sanders, Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, Gene Tierney, Claire Trevor, Richard Widmark, Shelley Winters. If the film stars two or more of these actors then you’re onto a winner.

• Raymond Burr played a lot of heavies.

• Ellen Corby played a lot of maids and cleaning ladies.

• George Raft was as wooden as his surname.

• A few actors make very early appearances in these films then turn up later as major players. Edmond O’Brien is in so many of the listed films that he runs the gamut of noir characters: good cop, crooked cop, insurance detective, crime boss, crime victim, state prosecutor, doomed man, etc.

• Noir was flexible enough to allow actors known for other types of films to try something new. One of the oddest entries on the list is Christmas Holiday, a film whose title and cast (Gene Kelly and Deanna Durbin) suggests a musical comedy. Far from it: Kelly plays a mentally unbalanced man who ends up in jail for murder, leaving his estranged wife (Durbin in her first adult role) earning a living as a hostess and singer in a seedy New Orleans bar.

• Any film that’s photographed by John Alton is worth watching, regardless of the cast.

• The Hitch-Hiker is justly celebrated for being a tough picture by one of Hollywood’s few women directors (also a noir star), Ida Lupino. But many of the other films on the list are written by women, if not the screenplays then the stories those screenplays were based on.

• Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain are often regarded as the godfathers of noir but Cornell Woolrich beats them all where this list is concerned. Eleven of the films are based on Woolrich novels or stories.

• Noir films are generally regarded as formulaic, and many of them are, but generic restraints often lead to formal invention. Gun Crazy features a scene in which a bank robbery is filmed on location from start to finish in one long take with the camera in the back of a car; The Lady in the Lake is filmed entirely from the point-of-view of Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe; The Set-Up takes place in real time, beginning and ending with views of a ticking clock; The Thief is a film without any dialog at all.

• Crime is a common noir subject which means that money is a predominant concern. But what was it worth in the 1940s and 50s? If someone mentions a figure I usually add a mental zero to the number for contemporary scale.

• Gangland terms such as “contract killing” and “hit” were introduced to American cinema by The Enforcer in 1951. Other films of the early 1950s present the first discussion of nationwide crime syndicates. By the end of the decade all of this is taken for granted and doesn’t require explaining to an audience.

• Several of the films feature urban car chases years before Robbery and Bullitt.

• New York and Los Angeles are the primary noir cities but San Francisco is also a common location.

• The Art Deco tower of Los Angeles City Hall gets to be a very familiar sight in these films. So familiar it may be the building that appears more than any other in the noir cycle.

• Other recurrent LA locations are Union Station (one of the films on the list is even set there), the Angel’s Flight funicular railway, and the steep streets and wooden buildings of the old Bunker Hill district. Raymond Chandler in The High Window describes Bunker Hill as “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.” The dilapidated buildings were demolished years ago but many of these films give you a view of the area as it was in the 1940s.

• I don’t like films set in prison very much but I was impressed by Caged—about the corrupting nature of a women’s prison—and the shockingly bleak and nihilistic Brute Force.

• And I don’t like boxing pictures very much but I was happy to re-watch Body and Soul—the archetypal rags-to-riches-to-corrupted-loser boxing picture—and The Set-Up, the directorial debut of Robert Wise.

So after all this effort am I done with the genre? I don’t think so, in fact I’m looking forward to watching many of the new discoveries again. There were a few occasions when I felt distinctly noir’d out, and didn’t want to spend another evening watching ill-fated men and women walking the mean streets of post-war America. But the pleasure of discovery was a real thrill which kept me going and makes me want to see more. Long as it is, the Silver & Ward list contains a good percentage of the films which can be called noir, but a more complete list might run to 400 films or more. The peak of the genre coincided with a period of over-production in Hollywood, which is why you can find 24 films on the list released in 1946 alone. And the genre boundaries are so fluid that it’s a matter of taste (or definition) as to what gets classed as truly noir. Silver & Ward address this question at the end of their book, with a discussion of marginal cases and generic hybrids such as noir westerns (Blood on the Moon), noir horror (Cat People), period films (The Spiral Staircase) and comedies (Unfaithfully Yours). No mention is made of science fiction but there are a few examples to be found. Robert Wise was a significant noir director, and the genre was still thriving in 1951 when he made The Day the Earth Stood Still, a film replete with shadow-filled visuals, fear and suspicion, an apocalyptic storyline, a Bernard Herrmann score and a cast of noir actors. Five years later another noir director, Don Siegel, was making Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film that puts an SF twist on the typical noir concerns of paranoia, entrapment and desperate flight. By the 1980s the neo-noir trend of the previous decade had leaked into Blade Runner and The Terminator, while cyberpunk literature was energising the SF genre with a hardboiled prose style that harked back to the days of Dashiell Hammett and Black Mask magazine. Film noir deals with elementary passions and predicaments that have no sell-by date, whatever the world may look like outside the window. The future has been, and will continue to be, a dark one.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Crack-Up
• Art on film: The Dark Corner
• Invasion revisited
• In the Shadow, a film by Fabrice Mathieu
• Film noir posters

Weekend links 732

Chasing Fireflies, A Lady of the Tenmei Era, from the series Thirty-six Elegant Selections (1894) by Mizuno Toshikata.

• While working on the Herald of Ruin cover late last year I was wondering when we might get to see the BFI or Eureka releasing Louis Feuillade’s silent serials on Region B blu-ray discs. Six months later, Eureka have announced this very thing: Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials (1913–1918), a box comprising the Gaumont restorations of Fantômas, Les Vampires, Judex and Tih Minh. I’ll probably have more to say about this in September.

• At A Year In The Country: Wyrd Explorations: A Decade Of Wandering Through Spectral Fields, a book which collects revised and extended pieces from the first ten years of A Year In The Country posts.

• At The Paris Review: Eliza Barry Callahan visits and revisits Joseph Cornell’s house at 37-08 Utopia Parkway, NYC.

• New music: Jinxed By Being by Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance.

• Browse artworks by Pablo Picasso at the Picasso Museum, Paris.

• At Unquiet Things: Victor Kalin’s Paradoxical Paperback Art.

• Strange Transmissions: The World Of Experimental Radio.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Satoshi Kon‘s Day.

• Aaron Turner’s favourite music.

• DJ Food’s haul of Acid Badges.

• Acid Head (1966) by The Velvet Illusions | Acid Heart Mother (2000) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. | Acid Death Picnic (2013) by Cavern Of Anti-Matter

Félix Vallotton woodcuts

La Paresse (1896).

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a Swiss/French artist often classed among the Symbolists although few of his paintings really suit the label. The closest he comes to Symbolism is in his membership of the Nabis, a small group of artists whose approach to painting was as much concerned with the surface of the picture as with the image that surface represented, something they pursued throughout the 1890s with a revolutionary fervour. Japanese prints were popular among the Nabis, an influence which is evident in Vallotton’s woodcuts although you don’t always seen many of these in Symbolist studies. Vallotton’s paintings are of such a high standard that most of my books favour his canvases over his woodcuts, with the latter appearing, if at all, in the form of the small portraits he made of notable writers. The examples here are from a substantial collection at Wikimedia Commons which include many I haven’t seen before, including the complete set of Intimités (Intimacies), a series which shows encounters between men and women in darkened rooms.

Le Poker (1896).

Le Piston (1896).

Le Piano (1896).

La Flûte (1896).

La Guitare (1897).

La Symphonie (1897).

Intimités III (1898).

Intimités IV (1898).

Intimités V (1898).

Intimités VII (1898).

Intimités VIII (1898).

L’Âge du Papier (1898).

Fireworks, The World’s Fair VI (1901).

L’Assassinat (1893).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Henri van der Stok, 1870–1946
• The art of Simon Moulijn, 1866–1948
• The art of Frantisek Kobliha, 1877–1962

Oz: The Tin Woodsman’s Dream, a film by Harry Smith

Ubuweb slipped into archival stasis earlier this year, which means that everything uploaded there will remain as it is but we won’t be seeing anything new. I don’t know when this Harry Smith short was posted there but it’s one I haven’t seen before. (There’s also a copy at Rarefilmm where I evidently missed it.) Oz, The Tin Woodsman’s Dream was made in 1967, and is one of the fragments of a much longer film that would have adapted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using a similar cutout animation technique to that deployed by Smith for Heaven and Earth Magic. The adaptation remained unfinished after Smith’s backer died but the extant pieces (including another self-contained short, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz) show him working in widescreen 35mm for the first time.

All of Smith’s films were given opus-style numbers: Heaven and Earth Magic is no. 12, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz is no. 13, and The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is no. 16. As with the films of Len Lye and other animation pioneers, Smith’s early shorts are often given a “psychedelic” label even when they predate the popular use of the term. The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is one of those where the psychedelic quotient becomes overt, comprising a few minutes of animated play with the title character and a small dog, followed by many minutes of kaleidoscoped film footage that’s more redolent of its period than Smith’s other films. I’m happy to watch the kaleidoscopics but this is the kind of thing that any number of film-makers might easily do. The Woodsman, the dog and the other characters are inhabitants of Smith’s inner landscape, as are the fly agaric mushrooms that appear here and in his other films. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them. There’s no soundtrack for this film so you can either watch the gesticulations in a Stan Brakhage silence or find 15 minutes of music to match the visuals.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Number 10: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Number 11: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Meeting Harry Smith by Drew Christie
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith
• Harry Smith revisited
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991

Weekend links 731

The Electrical Experimenter, Vol. 5, no. 1. April, 1918. Electrical cover art by Vincent Lynch.

• Coming soon from Rocket 88 Books: Electricity and Ghosts, a collection of art and graphic design by John Foxx/Dennis Leigh. The book itself has been designed with a regular Foxx collaborator, Jonathan Barnbrook. Last year I put together a post collecting Dennis Leigh’s book covers.

• At Strange Flowers: Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, their Expressionist dance costumes, and their short, tempestuous lives. There’s more about the couple’s costumes and dances here.

• New music: Road to Mandalay by Laurie Anderson; Panorama (French Soundtracks & Rarities) by Various Artists; The Passage Of Time by Cosmos In Collision.

• At Public Domain Review: Raffaele Mainella’s illustrations for Nos Invisibles (1907), a Spiritualist text by Clotilde Briatte (writing as Charles d’Orinio).

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2024 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• John Cale’s favourite music. Also The Records That Made Me by Carsten Nicolai/Alva Noto.

• The mysterious mirrored monolith returns.

• RIP Donald Sutherland.

• BBC Sound Effects.

• Electricity (1967) by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band | Electricity (1980) by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Electricity (1995) by Pet Shop Boys

The art of Hannes Bok, 1914–1964

Altars of Patagonia (1946)

Like the huge cache of Virgil Finlay art that turned up at the Internet Archive a couple of years ago, the pictures here are from a two-volume collection made by an enthusiast gathering together yet more illustrations from the pulp magazines of the 1940s and 50s. Hannes Bok (real name Wayne Francis Woodard) wasn’t as prolific as Virgil Finlay, but the careers of the two men intersected in the pages of Weird Tales where they both used stipple shading to compensate for the poor reproduction of pulp paper. Bok’s work tended to be more stylised than Finlay’s, with a quirkiness that makes his art easy to spot once you’ve seen a few examples.

Boomerang (1947)

The two volumes contain a total of over 300 illustrations so any selection will only be a small sampling. Many of the drawings were new to me. The first volume is mostly work from magazines such as Weird Tales and the minor SF mags; the second includes book covers, calendar illustrations and other work. As with the Finlay collections, both volumes are available in a range of file formats which include cbz files, a format I prefer to pdf for browsing image-heavy documents. For more about cbr/cbz files, see the end of this post.

Cross of Mercrux (1942)

Daughter of Darkness (1941)

Dimensional Doors (1944)

Gravity Trap (1949)

Haunted Hour (1941)

He Wasn’t There (1941)

Hell on Earth (1942)

Into the Darkness (1940)

Kazam Collects (1941)

Mandala (1956)

Masquerade (1942)

Mr. Packer Goes to Hell (1941)

Passage to Sharanee (1942)

Pickman’s Model (1950)

Planet Leave (1941)

Reader, I Hate You (1943)

Red Coral (1951)

Seven Out of Time (1949)

Tarrano the Conqueror (1941)

The Coat (1952)

The Fox Woman and the Blue Pagoda (1946)

The Sorcerer’s Ship (1942)

The Unfinished (1951)

Voice in the Void (1942)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virgil Finlay’s magazine illustrations
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• The Fantastic Fiction of Hannes Bok
• Things