John Coulthart's Blog, page 8

Omnibus: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler

The full title of this BBC documentary is Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler. The film was broadcast in 1969, ten years after Chandler’s death, and has been on iPlayer recently to judge by the logo in the corner, but it’s not one I’d seen before. It would have been ideal viewing a couple of years ago during my attempt to watch all the films listed in The Big Noir Book. While working my way through the film list I was also reading some of Dashiell Hammett’s novels (The Maltese Falcon is excellent; The Dain Curse is terrible) and all of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Or almost all…I didn’t read Poodle Springs, his final book, left unfinished then completed by other hands. I enjoyed the Philip Marlowe novels so much I was tempted to start them all over again after I’d reached the end of Playback. Added to the enjoyment was the opportunity to see how much the books were mauled when they passed through the Hollywood mill. The BBC documentary opens with a clip from The Big Sleep which has always been the best of the adaptations (it can be difficult getting Humphrey Bogart out of your head when you’re reading Philip Marlowe’s narration) but even this one alters the story while downplaying the sexual content (homosexuality and pornography in the novel), something that all the films of the 40s do their best to avoid.

A Portrait of Raymond Chandler was written by John Foster and Fred Burnley who present the writer via his own words in a sequence of dramatised interviews and enactments of scenes from the novels. There’s also a brief interview with JB Priestley, an intriguing thing in itself as I’d no idea that Priestley knew Chandler. The enactments don’t work very well—all the very small and very English rooms look nothing like Los Angeles architecture—but Edward Judd makes a decent attempt to apply his hard-boiled manner to the detective role without any Bogart impersonations. Judd appeared throughout the 60s in a succession of science-fiction films, and the film works best when he’s reading from the novels. Omnibus used him for the voiceovers a few years later in another portrait of a writer, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, a film about Hunter S. Thompson. The Chandler documentary appeared just ahead of the wave of renewed Hollywood interest in the Marlowe books that broke in the 1970s. Among the film clips there’s a short scene from the soon-to-be-released Marlowe, an updated adaptation of The Little Sister which isn’t one of the best Marlowe films but it has some nice interior shots of the Bradbury Building, and you get to see Bruce Lee demolish James Garner’s office with his feet and fists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…

The art of Dick Ellescas

The Boy Friend (1971).

I chanced upon the album cover art of Dick Ellescas a few weeks ago when I was searching for something on Discogs. Classical music labels are extraordinarily lazy when it comes to packaging their recordings, as a result of which the commissioning of original art always stands out. Dick Ellescas turned up again more recently when I was working my way through the Ken Russell filmography. Russell’s Sandy Wilson adaptation, The Boy Friend, was released in the US with an Ellescas poster that combines an Art Deco style with the modishness of early 70s graphics. This also stood out from the crowd and sent me in search of more of the same. The examples here are only a small selection from the Ellescas oeuvre; Discogs credits him with over 30 album covers. The Strauss cover below is uncredited so there may be more out there. Some of Ellescas’s illustrations for Cosmopolitan magazine may be seen here.

The Magic Christian (1969).

Borodin/Liadov: Symphony No.1/From The Book Of Revelation From Days Of Old/A Musical Snuff-box (1971); Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, USSR Symphony Orchestra.

Strauss: Die Frau Ohne Schatten (1971); Kurt Eichhorn, Orchestra of Bavarian Radio, James King.

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker (Complete Ballet, Op. 71) (1972); André Previn, The London Symphony Orchestra.

Stravinsky: The Firebird (Complete Original Version, 1910) (1973); Seiji Ozawa, Orchestre De Paris.

Tchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty (Complete Ballet) (1974); André Previn, London Symphony Orchestra.

Wagner: Tristan Und Isolde (1974); Wilhelm Furtwängler, Philharmonia Orchestra, Kirsten Flagstad, Ludwig Suthaus.

Sibelius: Four Legends From The “Kalevala” (1975); Sir Charles Groves, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Swan Lake, The Complete Ballet, Op. 20 (1976); André Previn, London Symphony Orchestra.

Ravel/Debussy: Bolero/La Mer/Prèlude À L’après-midi D’un Faune (1977); Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ketèlbey: In A Monastery Garden (1978); John Lanchberry, Philharmonia Orchestra.

Prokofiev: Romeo And Juliet (Suite From The Ballet) (1979); André Previn, London Symphony Orchestra.

Verdi: Aida (1980); Riccardo Muti, New Philharmonia Orchestra, Montserrat Caballé, Placido Domingo.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade (1983); Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Weekend links 776

Illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister for a Czech edition of The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• It’s good to hear that Czech animator Jiri Barta is back at work on his long-gestating feature film based on the Golem legend. The new iteration looks like a reimagining of the entire project.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey breaks down more of his Great Enchanters pages.

• At Colossal: Charles Brooks photographs the interiors of musical and scientific instruments.

• At Igloomag: Philippe Blache on neo-noir, doom jazz and related atmospheric music.

• At The Daily Heller: The book-brick that is the 1,264-page Emigre Specimen Encyclopedia.

• New music: Changing States by Matmos, and Of Shadow Landscapes by Skotógen.

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams selects 10 great Japanese time-travel films.

• Lawrence English remembers the sound-art pioneer Alan Lamb.

• Tunde Adebimpe’s favourite albums.

• Time Machine (1967) by Satori | Time Machine (1968) by Lemon Tree | Turn Back Time (1971) by Time Machine

Documents Décoratifs by Alphonse Mucha

I’ve had a copy of the Dover edition of these plates for some time, but it’s good to find a digital copy at last, especially now I can see that Dover bleached all the subtle background tones to a solid white. The artwork looks much better in its original state. It was also a little surprising to discover that Documents Décoratifs was originally a collection of loose sheets in a portfolio, not a book as I always thought.

The plates were Alphonse Mucha’s contribution to that small collection of publications intended to assist other designers and craftspeople in their decorative work. Mucha’s drawings break down his style into a series of isolated motifs and design elements: panels, borders, figures, flowers, lettering and other details, together with a few pages of more complete designs. He also offers several pages of suggestions for applying his Art Nouveau flourishes to jewellery, furniture and other household objects. I’ve used parts of these designs a few times in my own work, most recently in the Bumper Book of Magic. Even if you don’t have a practical use for the plates they’re all very beautiful pieces in themselves, especially the pencil drawings.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alphonse Mucha et Son Oeuvre
• Alphonse Mucha’s Ilsée, Princesse de Tripoli
• Alphonse Mucha record covers
• Combinaisons Ornementales

Art on film: Crimes of Passion

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks working my way through the Ken Russell filmography, rewatching familiar documentaries and feature films while acquainting myself with the portions of the Russell oeuvre that I’d missed in the past. Crimes of Passion (1984) was a film that I did see when it turned up on video in the late 1980s but I didn’t remember much about it apart from its overheated erotic atmosphere and a red/blue lighting scheme. It’s not one of Russell’s best—the script lurches uncomfortably between mundane domestic drama and lurid, sex-crazed delirium; Rick Wakeman’s synthesizer score is persistently annoying—but it does feature spirited performances by the lead actors, Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins.

Turner is Joanna Crane, a swimwear designer who deals with the vacuity of her life by moonlighting as an in-demand prostitute named China Blue. (The polite term “sex worker” didn’t exist in the 1980s.) Russell delivers the art references early on, with unexpected cuts to erotic figures from Aubrey Beardsley’s Lysistrata (above), various Japanese shunga prints, and a flash of The Rape by René Magritte. Since the real woman behind the China Blue persona isn’t revealed until later in the film we don’t know at first that Joanna Crane’s apartment contains reproductions of some of the same pictures. She eventually admits to thinking of them during stressful moments.

Despite this admission, there’s nothing in the script of Crimes of Passion that warrants the references, Crane’s apartment could easily have been furnished in a blandly expensive manner suited to a successful designer. The only other character who seems remotely interested in art is Anthony Perkins’ Reverend Shayne, a splenetic, sex-obsessed preacher who has a hotel room next door to China Blue. In one of several references to Psycho, Shayne watches his neighbour’s erotic encounters through a spyhole. The walls of his own room are covered in a collage of religious and pornographic imagery but little is made of this.

The Lovers by René Magritte.

Joanna Crane and Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) in Joanna’s apartment. Among the pictures on the walls are Romeo and Juliet by Marc Chagall, The Embrace by Gustav Klimt, and The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.

I’d guess that Russell rather than writer Barry Sandler was responsible for the art inserts. In addition to showing us something of Joanna Crane’s inner life (such as it is) the artworks also embellish the unprepossessing material that Russell had been offered. Russell used Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings a few years later in Salome’s Last Dance, while one of the paintings that China Blue brings to mind, Ophelia by Millais, is shown as a work in progress in Dante’s Inferno, Russell’s TV film about the Pre-Raphaelites. Leaving aside Savage Messiah, Russell’s feature about sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, other notable art references may be found in Song of Summer (paintings by Edvard Munch), Billion Dollar Brain (paintings by Gallen-Kallela), Mahler (a series of Gustave Doré engravings), and Gothic (Fuseli’s The Nightmare which appears in painted form then in a dream sequence, as I noted here).

Aubrey Beardsley’s Lacedaemonian Ambassadors from Lysistrata being threatened with a whipping by the woman in the frontispiece for A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender.

On the subject of embellishing weak material, there’s a coincidental parallel to the previous film addressed in this series, The Medusa Touch. The paintings that surround John Morlar and Joanna Crane are presented as emblems of a psychological torment that finds expression in the outside world; Morlar and Crane also favour René Magritte in their artistic selections. In both films all the references are unattributed even though the pictures fill the screen at times.

Ophelia by Millais.

Klimt’s Kiss again.

The Dancer’s Reward from Salomé by Aubrey Beardsley.

Just before the climactic encounter between Crane and Shayne we see Joanna rearranging the Beardsley prints on her apartment wall. I had an idea once of trying to compile a list of Beardsley artwork appearances in other film and TV productions but Crimes of Passion shows the futility of such an endeavour. For a start it was so long since I’d seen this film that I’d forgotten there was any Beardsley in it, while the film itself is an example of the way that Beardsley’s work can appear in unlikely places. As with the print that turns up in the dreadful Carry On Loving, you never know where else his drawings may be hiding.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: The Medusa Touch
• Art on film: Crack-Up
• Art on film: The Dark Corner
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Space is the Place
• Art on film: Providence
• Art on film: The Beast

Weekend links 775

The Bride of the Wind (1914) by Oskar Kokoschka.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (translated by Cranstoun Metcalfe).

• This week’s Bumper Book of Magic news: the Brazilian edition of the book, titled A Lua e a Serpente: Almanaque de Magia, will be published in June. It’s available for pre-order here.

• “The basis of compilations as far as I’m concerned is, ‘I like this stuff, you may like it too.’” Jon Savage on the art of the compilation album.

• At Public Domain Review: The strange story of Oskar Kokoschka, Hermine Moos, and the Alma Mahler Doll.

• At the Daily Heller: Psychedelics, Day-Glo, Hallmark and The Peculiar Manicule.

• Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a new version for sale from Important Records.

• The Strange World of…Michael Chapman.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Boris Karloff Day.

• RIP David Thomas of Pere Ubu.

• Dream Machine (1968) by Les Sauterelles | Dream Machine (1980) by The Androids | Dream Machine (1981) by Phantom Band

A Book of Studies in Plant Form

A recent arrival at the Internet Archive, A Book of Studies in Plant Form (1896) by Albert Lilley and W. Midgley is a guide to using the shapes of flowers and plants in various types of design. Plants were the common currency of Art Nouveau, and this book is very oriented towards the latest design trend, showing a variety of design suggestions that would fit easily into the pages of The Studio magazine. Despite their age, books like this (and similar volumes by Maurice Verneuil and others) are still useful today in showing how to convert the untamed actuality of a living plant into a harmonious repeatable design. Lilley and Midgley’s book contains many fine illustrations, also a number of photographs. Browse it here or download it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantaisies Florales

Twenty-four octopuses and a squid

Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus (c. 1773-1774) by Katsukawa Shunsho.

Cephalopods in Japanese prints. There are many more octopuses than squids, especially the marauding variety, and that’s before you get to the erotic encounters like Hokusai’s notorious shunga dream.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) by Katsushika Hokusai.

Seven Divers and a Big Octopus (c. 1830–40s) by Utagawa Kunisada.

Ario-maru Struggling with a Giant Octopus (1833–1835) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Popular Octopus Games (1840–1842) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Parallels for the Cloudy Chapters of the Tale of Genji (1845–1846) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Parody of Umegae Striking the Bell of Limitless [Hell] (c. 1847) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

A Female Abalone Diver Wrestling With An Octopus (1870s) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

Delicacies of the Sea by Totoya Hokkei.

Fish and Octopus by Setsuri.

Sea Monster – Kaiju Manga – No. 8 (2007) by Tom Kristensen.

Squid (1940) by Ohno Bakufu.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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 774

Fish and Octopus (Colourful Realm of Living Beings) (circa 1765) by Ito Jakuchu.

• At Aeon: “Could extraterrestrial technology be lurking in our backyard—on the Moon, Mars or in the asteroid belt? We think it’s worth a look.” Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq Misra explain.

• At Smithsonian magazine: The first confirmed footage of the Colossal Squid. Only a baby one, however, so not very colossal.

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

Less than six months later, Lindsay signed an executive order that effectively turned the city into a movie set. The new Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting was designed to cut through existing red tape and facilitate location filming. Script approval was centralized in a single agency. A production now needed but a single permit to shoot on the streets; a specific police unit would remain with the filmmakers as they moved from location to location. Thus, Lindsay created the necessary conditions for the tough cop films, bleak social comedies, and gritty urban fables that captured the feel of New York in the late sixties and early seventies—the cinema of Fun City.

J. Hoberman explores New York City’s popularity as a film location

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by John King; and DreamScenes – April 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: Water droplets cling to fluorescent plant spines in Tom Leighton’s alluring photos.

• At the BFI: Alex Barrett on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s unmade film about Jesus.

• Anne Billson ranks 20 films starring Julie Christie.

• Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (1964) by Paul Sawtell | Das Boot (1981) by Klaus Doldinger | Ambient Block (Sequenchill/Mission Control #2/Lost In The Sea) (1993) by Sequential

Playhouse: Aubrey

Aubrey was a TV play for BBC 2’s Playhouse strand, an eighty-minute drama enacting events from the last three years of Aubrey Beardsley’s life. It was broadcast on 22nd January, 1982, and never repeated. After I digitised my own VHS copy in 2008 I wrote a somewhat taunting post about it, showing stills from the scenes that matched Beardsley’s drawings while refusing to make the video itself more widely available. I was subsequently surprised when the writer of the play, John Selwyn Gilbert, turned up in the comments to justifiably bemoan the BBC’s refusal to make so much of its vast archive publically available, an iniquity always compounded by the British public having paid for all those broadcasts in the first place.

Fast-forward seventeen years and here at last is a copy of Aubrey at YouTube, albeit in compromised form (see below). Since I wrote my original post I’ve become more acquainted with the TV productions of director Philip Hammond so it’s worth giving Hammond a little more credit for the success of the production than I did originally. Hammond’s directing career ran from the 1960s through to the 1990s, with significant contributions to Granada TV’s landmark adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and a very creditable three-part adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas which the BBC broadcast as The Dark Angel in 1989. Television has never encouraged the kinds of stylistic flair you find in cinema but Hammond’s later productions stand apart in their mise-en-scene and frequent use of artistic detail. Many of his later productions achieve unusual effects by shooting scenes through reflections in sheets of glass. Elsewhere you’ll often find characters framed in mirrors (as happens in the opening scene of Aubrey) or lit by saturated light from a stained-glass panel.

Hammond takes a different approach with Aubrey which was shot on video in studio sets. The production design is almost exclusively black and white; many of the sets and compositions frequently mimic Beardsley’s drawings, with decorative motifs framing the scenes. The general appearance is stagily artificial but the details of the script are nevertheless accurate. John Selwyn Gilbert was also the writer, producer and narrator of Beardsley and His Work, a documentary which had been broadcast on BBC 2 three days before Aubrey. Gilbert’s drama follows Beardsley from his dismissal as art editor of The Yellow Book in 1895, through the foundation of The Savoy magazine with Arthur Symons and Leonard Smithers, to his untimely demise in Menton on the French Riviera. Rula Lenska plays Aubrey’s sister, Mabel, with Sandor Elès as André Raffalovich, Simon Shepherd as John Gray, Ronald Lacey as Leonard Smithers, Christopher Strauli as Arthur Symons, Mark Tandy as WB Yeats, and Alex Norton as Max Beerbohm. John Dicks was evidently chosen for his facial resemblance to Beardsley but he’s a decade too old for the role, and looks too healthy for an artist enduring the final stages of a tubercular illness that would eventually kill him. But this is a minor complaint.

More of a problem is the way the play has been uploaded to YouTube in the wrong screen ratio. All TV broadcasts prior to the 1990s are 4:3 but this one has been horizontally compressed to something closer to a square. It is possible to rectify this if you download the video (I currently use 4K Video Downloader) then use Handbrake to write a new copy of the file with the picture size set to a 4:3 ratio. Or maybe you’d rather watch the squashed version…

And while I’m on the subject of Beardsley on screen, Chris James has made available a new copy of his short animated film, After Beardsley, which is now complete, and not chopped into three parts as it was before.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive