O, SYLVIA!

 

Sylvia Koscina as the last minute heroine of Judex: Daisy, the fortuitously passing acrobat.

WAR OF DREAMS

 

Judex, d. Georges Franju (1963)

Thirty years ago, when I was a film student, I'd spend my down days lying on the bed in my little room and watching film after film I'd taped off the telly over many years, sometimes all day until it was dark and time to go to the pub. I watched everything I could, but I had a somewhat self-conscious bias for 'the pantheon': Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Hawks, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Franju. 

Hitchcock, Cocteau and Franju provided the most watched films - Vertigo, Orphee and Judex, respectively. Whatever criteria of film art I currently possess was largely formed by repeat exposure to these three masterpieces.

Judex has, over the years, become my favourite, not least because its wears its brilliance so lightly. Franju's homage to Louis Feuillade's seven hour crime serial from 1914* is a hugely engaging 90 minute film that moves quickly but smoothly, as if on castors, from one striking scene to another until it ends (the transitions sometimes take the viewer by surprise, and it takes a minute to become reoriented). Franju is an inventive and stylish director, but not a flashy one: his greatest skill here is in creating a wholly believable secret dream world where people with incredible talent (for good, for evil) are conducting an epic running battle while everyone else goes about their boring business.

Judex has an incredible internal integrity: everything is off by a few degrees, but it is never weird or outlandish - the settings and the situation and the people all makes sense, they are recognisably real. There is something of the 'uncanny valley' in it, i.e. the discomforting feeling real humans get when confronted with something almost but not quite human-like, here extended to a world which is familiar in most ways but simultaneously slightly askew. The viewer is not uneasy, however, instead they are intrigued and, besides, Franju does everything he can to entertain: a non-stop plot, crisp cinematography, wonderful visuals, convincing and attractive characters, and a great score of music and composed sound by Maurice Jarre.

Towards the end, the absurdities begin to pile up to almost delirious effect. The mysterious crimefighter Judex, who so far has been presented as an almost omniscient mastermind and technical genius, is reduced to sending the comic relief detective and his street urchin sidekick to a local bar to make a phone call to get help. From nowhere, a passing Circus provides a hitherto unknown beautiful acrobat (the wonderful Sylvia Koscina) who is immediately caught up in the action. Ironically, it is her, not Judex, who hastens the conclusion, becoming engaged in a life or death struggle on a Parisian rooftop with the delightfully evil, catsuit clad supervillain(ess). 

The heroic acrobat Daisy also has the best line in the film (perhaps any film), when she meets up with her old flame, quite by chance: 'Remember my Uncle, the evil lion tamer? The lions ate him! We are free to be together!'

I've probably seen Judex forty times. I never tire of it, I hope I never will.

* an end title states that the film is 'in memory of an unhappy time', but then 1914 did mark the beginning of the slaughter of WW1, in which 1.3m French soldiers were killed along with half a million civilians.

SNAPS I

I'm not an unhappy or cynical person, but I am something of a nihilist: I struggle to get the point of it all.  That said, I am moral and law-abiding and absolutely fascinated with the world, particularly the world we humans have made for ourselves to see out our meaningless lives. As I stumble around I try to record as much surface detail as I can. I'm not a particularly good photographer, but I am persistent, and the world presents a never-ending cavalcade of stuff - here is just some of it.

EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS

 

013: Indicator Audible Warning

HANS (JEAN) ARP / JEAN (HANS) ARP

 

Eierschlager / Egg Beater (1923)

COOL LOOKING PEOPLE

 

Dancer, choreographer, teacher, artist and rule breaker Anna Halprin (1920-2021).

I'm not really an envious sort of person: there are things I've got and things I'd like, but I'm not usually bothered about what other people have. The exception that proves the rule, however, is Halprins 'Dance Deck' at her Mountain Home Studio in Kentfield, California. 

I seethe with burning envy about her wonderful dance deck and, for that matter, about her mountain home studio, her brilliance at dancing and her very long and extremely fruitful creative life, so I'm obviously not quite as chill as I make out. Please send money or, at the very least, several hundred planks of wood.

VISTAMATIC

I've always had a soft spot for Studio Vista / Dutton Picturebacks: the 'comprehensive pictorial surveys written by experts for laymen' on a wide range of topics: cinema, art, crafts, antiques, architecture, ballet, cars, cybernetics, guns, etc. so I thought I'd share some of my (far from complete) collection. Yeah, it's no problem, really, please don't mention it.

This pictureback covers Andy Warhol (his paintings, films and everything else) and was published in 1971, a great time to review the career of an artist who had been both brilliantly creative and incredibly influential in the sixties, but whose subsequent work was far less daring in comparison for all sorts of reasons, including being shot and nearly dying, then, later, totally dying. 

STOP! HAMMER TIME

 

The comic book industry is nothing is not commercial, so the first Marvel tie in's came early. The Marvel Super Heroes was a 1966 syndicated cartoon featuring five of their superheroes, three of which (The Hulk, Iron Man and Thor) had debuted in Kirby & Lee's annus mirabilis, 1962 (Captain America and Namor, the Submariner had been knocking about since the 1940s).

Produced quickly and cheaply by Grantray-Lawrence Animation, the 'animation' took copies of art from the original comics, then added stiffly moving mouths, darting eyes, waving limbs and the odd mobile silhouette. You couldn't get away with it now, but the cartoons are short and bright and noisy and fast moving and must have seemed quite exciting to children at the time. I still like them now, but then, as we have already established, there is something wrong with me.

In 'The Tomorrow Man', the God of Thunder faces Zarrko, a megalomaniac villain from the 23rd century. It does not end well for Zarrko, or for Thor's half-brother, Loki, who, as usual, is stirring the shit behind the scenes with a big wooden spoon.

BRIGHT STAR

 

Fear No Evil, d. Frank LaLoggia (1981)

An atmospheric, slightly hysterical movie teling the hitherto untold tale of the son of the Devil's troubled teenaged years in in the suburban hell of Rochester, New York, Fear No Evil has a great punk / new wave soundtrack, an often unwholesome blend of sex and violence, and a genuinely exciting, partially animated climax in which Lucifer Jr. is destroyed by the coruscating, cleansing light of a processional cross to semi-psychedelic and eye rubbing effect.

DANCE AWAY

Luis Bunuel's 1965 film Simon Of The Desert is a huge favourite of mine for a number of reasons, a mere eight of which I will now detail below:

1. I have come to consider Bunuel as the single greatest film director of all time.

2. This film is a superb example of his mature style, being beautifully staged and filmed, but without any fussiness or obtrusive 'artistic' interventions.

3. It's ostensibly the story of a 5th Century Syrian Saint who lived on top of a pillar for 39 years, but Bunuel makes it far more relatable and, no pun intended, down to earth. Simon is just trying to get on with stuff, but it's just one thing after another for the guy.

3. It is very funny, particularly in how petty and pathetic and powerless the Devil actually is (see also Bedazzled).

4. It doesn't have the 'logic' of a dream, but it does work in the same way as a dream, i.e. it makes sense as you are having it rather than when you later remember it. This may, of course, be the point of Surrealism in general.

5. Fanatical religiosity is intrinsically weird and disturbing, a mental disorder, so Bunuel doesn't have to labour the weirdness, he just shows us the basics.

6. Bunuel cuts only when necessary, and each shot is exactly the right length no matter how long or short it is.

7. The film is only 45 minutes long, which, again, is exactly how long it needs to be.

8. It ends in an extraordinary way*.

* The Devil (Silvia Pinal) transports Simon Stylites (Claudio Brook) six thousand miles and fifteen centuries into the future to a nightclub in contemporary New York. They smoke, sip beer and watch the kids lose their shit to a groovy band. The frenetic dance, according to the horned one, is called Radioactive Flesh. 

Bored and out of his element, Simon wants to leave, but the Devil tells him he'll have to stick it out - he'll have to stick it out to the very end. Such is the lot of the Ascetic, I suppose. 

FAMILIAR STATES (DEJA VU)

 

'Anxiety may be debilitating or stimulating; it can result in neurotic symptoms or in improved, heightened performance in an actor or athlete. It is something every human being has experienced'

CREATIVE THINKING

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'  (Arthur C. Clarke)                     

I'm 57 years old. I'm white, male, heterosexual, English, middle class, liberal, woke a.f, and I try to be aware of my privilege. I work in local government and my life is steady and although I try to vaguely keep up with things, I haven't been fully tapped into the zeitgeist for over thirty years. Despite all of this, I really like Tyler the Creator, and I'm totally in awe of his eclectic, powerful and multi-faceted artistry although I actually understand only a little of who he is, what he does and what it means.

I can't pretend to know the life Tyler leads, or has had in the past, or to say that I parse the cultural references, artefacts, influences, microtrends, clap backs, look forwards and leaps into the unknown which comprise the kaleidoscopic shards of a voice and viewpoint which extend beyond music into dance, film, fashion, sport, performance art and social commentary. I don't like all he says, because he says some provocative things, some of which he apologises for, some of which he doesn't (his song 'Sorry, Not Sorry' covers this in revealing detail). But Tyler is a Creator, an artist, an individualist, an adult: he does what he likes. He doesn't need any sort of approval as far as I can see, least of all from me.

His art is not fully knowable to me and, as such, it has an even more potent allure. It's gleeful co-opting and mutation / usurpation of every facet of culture seems like the future right here and now, and is clearly the refined product of a fully formed and highly sophisticated permaculture that has developed all around me whilst my attention was elsewhere. This system is febrile and fertile and is strong with hybridity, diversity, variance. It is resilient, and seems better adapted to how we must live on this planet now. This is a good thing, a natural and necessary evolution and I welcome it, even if it is not really for me and it doesn't need any of my attention to exist. 

No, I don't fully understand Tyler the Creator or, for that matter, lots of things in contemporary music, film, art and literature, and if I were born a  hundred years earlier, I might have felt the same about Dada, or Stravinsky or  Eisenstein. But gaps in comprehension are not the same as disapproval or, at least, they shouldn't be. The fact is that, despite Francis Fukyama's 1992 announcement about the end of history*, new and exciting things still happen or, rather, like Tyler the Creator, simply and steadfastly refuse to stop happening - whether you as an individual are in the right space or place to get that is a completely different matter.

* There is more to this statement than meets the eye, of course, and Fukyama may have even been right at the time, but  he didn't reckon for a. the seething complexity of the world outside the West and b. the broiling insanity of the twenty first century.