I can't imagine why this didn't make the finished film.
Showing posts with label clip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clip. Show all posts
Danses macabres
"Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence,
Striking a tomb with his heel,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.
The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
White skeletons pass through the gloom,
Running and leaping in their shrouds."
-extract from text for Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.
THE HANGED MEN DANCE
On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.
Beelzebub jerks ropes about the necks
Of small black dolls who squirm against the sky;
With slaps, with whacks and cuffs and kicks
He makes them dance an antique roundelay!
Excited jumping jacks, they join thin arms;
Black organ lofts, their fretwork breasts
That once beat fast at beauteous damsels' charms
Now clack together in a perverse embrace.
Hurrah the jolly dancers, whose guts are gone!
About the narrow planks they jerk and prance!
Beelzebub roars the rasping fiddles' song!
Hop! They cannot tell the battle from the dance!
Hard heels, that never wear out shoes!
They've all put off their overcoat of skin;
What's left beneath is hardly worth excuse -
Their skulls are frail and white beneath the rain.
A crow provides a crest for these cracked heads,
A strip of flesh shakes on a skinny chin;
They swing about in somber skirmishes
Like heroes, stiff, their armor growing thin.
And the breeze blows for the skeletons' ball!
The gibbet groans like an organ of iron;
In violet forests the wolves wail;
The distant sky flames with hell's own fires!
Oh, shake me these dark commanders down!
Who slyly rake through broken fingertips
Love's rosary across their pale ribs:
This is no monastery, you dead men!
And there in the midst of the danse macabre
One wild skeleton leaps in the scarlet clouds,
Stung with madness like a rearing horse
With the rope pulled stiff above his head.
He tightens bony fingers on his cracking knees
With squeals that make a mock of dead men's groans,
And, like a puppet floating in the breeze,
Whirls in the dance to the sound of clacking bones.
On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.
On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.
Beelzebub jerks ropes about the necks
Of small black dolls who squirm against the sky;
With slaps, with whacks and cuffs and kicks
He makes them dance an antique roundelay!
Excited jumping jacks, they join thin arms;
Black organ lofts, their fretwork breasts
That once beat fast at beauteous damsels' charms
Now clack together in a perverse embrace.
Hurrah the jolly dancers, whose guts are gone!
About the narrow planks they jerk and prance!
Beelzebub roars the rasping fiddles' song!
Hop! They cannot tell the battle from the dance!
Hard heels, that never wear out shoes!
They've all put off their overcoat of skin;
What's left beneath is hardly worth excuse -
Their skulls are frail and white beneath the rain.
A crow provides a crest for these cracked heads,
A strip of flesh shakes on a skinny chin;
They swing about in somber skirmishes
Like heroes, stiff, their armor growing thin.
And the breeze blows for the skeletons' ball!
The gibbet groans like an organ of iron;
In violet forests the wolves wail;
The distant sky flames with hell's own fires!
Oh, shake me these dark commanders down!
Who slyly rake through broken fingertips
Love's rosary across their pale ribs:
This is no monastery, you dead men!
And there in the midst of the danse macabre
One wild skeleton leaps in the scarlet clouds,
Stung with madness like a rearing horse
With the rope pulled stiff above his head.
He tightens bony fingers on his cracking knees
With squeals that make a mock of dead men's groans,
And, like a puppet floating in the breeze,
Whirls in the dance to the sound of clacking bones.
On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.
-"The Hanged Men Dance," Arthur Rimbaud, very loosely translated by Paul Schmidt
The dance lasts for about a minute and a half, and begins around 55 seconds in:
More "danses macabre" here, here, and here.
Top picture: Remedios Varo,"Les Feuilles Mortes", inspired by its use here.
Tony de Peltrie
I saw this cartoon when I was a little kid. It terrified me - I think it gave me nightmares. Reminded by Max's icon of Tony the Piano Man, I sought it out on You Tube this morning. Still scary.Apparently this was considered the first successful reproduction of a human form in CGI. It's certainly among the creepiest and, now that I'm a bit older and can take it (I hope), the coolest...
"Smoking hernia and taking odium, and getting very high (some were only four foot three high, but he had Indian hump, which he grew in his sleep)."
A radio interview (no pictures, folks) conducted with John Lennon on December 10, 1963. After playful but nonetheless quite straightforward discussions with the other Fab Three, the reporter turns his attention to Lennon, only to be skewered on the nonchalantly vicious lance of the laconic pop star. Hilarity ensues (if not for the hapless questioner), followed by a reading of one of Lennon's poems from which the above quotation was plucked.
Desistfilm
Expect several posts on Stan Brakhage in the coming days. As you may have noticed, my recent movie write-ups have been progressing through the early sixties. That's because I assembled a Netflix queue, chronologically ordered, of movies I felt I had to see before assembling a personal "top 150" list which will then lead into my long-announced, upcoming series of great movies. Anyway, I've reached 1964 and with it Dog Star Man. I knew I'd seen the prelude but wasn't sure I'd ever watched the whole film, so I rented Criterion's gorgeous "by Brakhage" 2-disc set to catch up with everything I'd missed when perusing the discs in the past.I love experimental cinema, but have been uncertain about Brakhage, possibly the most celebrated avant-garde filmmaker. Some of his work intrigues me, some leaves me cold. Upon just re-viewing Dog Star Man, I found much of it rather unsuccessful, but some of it fascinating and effective. I'll do a separate piece on that tomorrow, as I don't have the time to write much on it now.
Instead I'd like to embed one of his earliest films, Desistfilm, which has been described as his "breakthrough." I enjoyed it in part, I think, because it's as much a home movie as an experiment - there's something stirring about all these fifties kids with their distinctively period hairdos and costumes, living on the edge of reality, or at least appearing to do so as captured by Brakhage's stuttering camera and uncanny soundtrack. It's both playful and oddly mournful - at once a portrait of Blakean "experience" and nostalgic innocence (those edgy Beats are such little kids!).
I love the Brakhage quote which precedes the Criterion presentation: "A seven-minute film made with four rolls of gun camera film from the Second World War, spooled in the dark and spliced. Just an explosion of Denver beatnik nerves." Like seeing the quivering soul behind your parents'/grandparents' attic snapshots. Brakhage's other films rise or fall on the power of their visual purity: they are what they are, with most representative functions stripped from the image. This one, for me at least, is pure association.
Beatles on your screen
Tonight I finally received my Beatles stereo package, which included a DVD with short documentaries on each album. I was reminded of the wonderful proto-videos the band churned out in the 60s, ranging from sequences in their features to stand-alone promotional films designed specifically for a certain single. So here are my favorites. (Granted, I'm not quite sure "Rain" was actually created in the 60s; methinks it was perhaps concocted out of outtakes from their "Paperback Writer" promo-film for the '96 Anthology series. Still, it's pretty sick, and is thusly included.)"Can't Buy Me Love" from A Hard Day's Night (1964)
"Rain" (1966)
"Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967)
"I am the Walrus" from Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
"Eleanor Rigby" from Yellow Submarine (1968)
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" from Yellow Submarine (1968)
This is Your Brain on Cartoons
We used to watch this religiously in elementary school: at least once a year from about kindergarten to third grade. Oddly enough, none of my friends recognizes it. Was it a local phenomenon? As for the plot, a high school student is getting high and stealing from his kid sister's piggy bank, so a variety of cartoon characters, including Garfield, Tigger, Bugs Bunny, Muppet Babies, and the Smurfs, decide to scare him straight.This is certainly one of the trippier anti-drug films - the weed that the teenage protagonist smokes must be laced with acid. For some reason, the film posits the Ninja Turtles as narcs rather than stoners, which is a bit hard to believe (maybe they turned stoolie so the cops would turn a blind eye to the mutants' own dealing?). Not all the cartoon characters are virtuous - a vaporous and malevolent dopester is voiced by George C. Scott of all people, and oddly enough (in the wake of the Reagan era) the ghoul has a decidedly slick Gordon Gekko vibe. All in all, the video is more enticing than intimidating - it remains so unclear what drugs actually do, and yet they seem so adventurous, that one can imagine Winnie the Pooh and Alf inadvertently turning a generation of kids onto marijuana (naturally one of Alvin's chipmunk brothers recognizes the smell instantly).
The first third of the video is embedded below, with the rest available on You Tube. If you'd just like to sample it, go here. But be warned, it can lead to harder stuff...
(If you want to see the pre-film cameo by a very special guest, here you are.)
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