Or, everything really is cinema, more or less: part one in an ongoing series
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| Your humble correspondent pausing a moment to pose alongside a prostrate Otesánek, who, doubtless a mite peckish, is just biding his time... |
Some of what follows – whether for better or for worse, I cannot say – will adopt certain of the characteristics of a travelogue. This is somewhat unavoidable as this post's central cases in point were the stuff of recent adventures abroad, for, not so terribly long ago, I was summoned to my beloved city of Prague to sit on a jury at Mezipatra, the Czech Republic's wonderful queer film festival, or at least for the Prague leg of it. Now, to either side of my gleefully adopted Mezipatra duties – not to mention right smack-bang in its midst as well, of course (samozřejmě!) – I had me some (extra-)cinematic adventures, as demonstrated below and which will link to my corresponding part in Senses' 2012 world poll, as and when it's live.
By the way, wrapped up in all the pictorial splendour and waffle below lies in wait an allusive announcement, whose time I can comfortably say has almost now come, with respect to a project of mine and certain esteemed others set to launch in mid-2012 and shake up stuffy old Melbourne town, where too many film festivals is never enough...
But let's deal with one horse before its cart at a time – on with the picture show – roll camera!
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| Here's the rather de Chirico-esque big-screen backdrop above the stage at Kino Lucerna ahead of this year's Mezipatra closing ceremony. Should I hasten to add that de Chirico was cinema? After all, I've just watched Alain Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After (1970) (thank you thank you thank you! the Slovak Film Institute, for releasing this on DVD!), and if those scenes in the Eden nightclub weren't de Chirico all over (if also a few parts Mondrian, after a '60s Godardian fashion), then my name isn't Cerise Howard, and nor has it always been. (Mezipatra's website hosts a fab gallery covering its closing night, which was altogether rather busier and more glamorous than my photo above would suggest, and in which I make a few appearances.) |
"Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue – Between Film and Fine Art"
in the House at the Stone Bell in Prague's Old Town Square(26 Oct 2012 – 3 Feb 2013)
Per my world poll contribution, "Dimensions of Dialogue" is "room after Rudolphinian room a-glut with Švankmajeriana. Magical, obsessive, capital-S Surrealist objects abound, all riffing on relationships, direct or indirect, with Švankmajer's 48-year-long filmic output, with one film, whether long- or short-form, looping in its entirety in each room, and the exhibition's great plenty of uncanny objects organised correspondingly. Magnificent!"
Please find here following a corroborating, annotated gallery:
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This is a room devoted to Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), which also
featured a number of "tactile portraits", object-characters from the film and, centre-frame, its
unforgettable masturbation machine, which had in fact been switched on for the exhibition. (On which note, Prague's Sex Machines Museum is just a hop, skip and a wank away from the House at the Stone Bell and the Old Town Square,
but I don't recall it having
anything half so elaborate, nor half so modern, let alone half so amusing, as the Conspirators of
Pleasure machine amongst its offerings. If anything, as memory
serves – I visited it several years ago – its exhibits are not
terribly far removed from those in Prague's cheesy mediaeval torture
museums...)
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| In the room devoted to Historia Naturae, Suite (1967) can be found collaged drawings and objects, imaginary creatures, and taxonomic descriptions thereof galore, in a fabulous demonstration of the full rein Švankmajer has always given himself towards the creation of alternative zoologies, ones to long outlive we sadly less fabulous critters to presently have the run of our grimly imperilled planet. |
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| Natural enemies in the wild? |
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| The scenes in this and the preceding image have more than just a little in common with Salvador Dalí's 1936 painting, "Autumn Cannibalism". See also the second section of one of my favourite Švankmajers, his final short film, Food (1993). |
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| A tableau familiar from Alice (1988). This, like so much of JS' work, is equal parts Švankmajer and Švankmajerová. | ||
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| Characters and sets from Švankmajer's Alice. | ||
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| Waiting in the wings with some of the cast from Švankmajer's Faust (1994) |
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| Some of the cast atop and within a set from Faust. |
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| Several of the oversize puppets from Faust, and one oversize human from Wellington, by way of Melbourne. |
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| Scary prop from Švankmajer's The Pit, the Pendulum and Hope (1984), as designed by the late, great Eva Švankmajerová. Fortunately, perhaps as much an OH&S consideration as anything else, it was rather more still in the exhibition than in Švankmajer's brilliant film. I don't think Poe has ever been as frightening on screen as in The Pit, the Pendulum and Hope. |
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| Otesáneks, and parts thereof, galore. As seen in Little Otik (Otesánek) (2000). |
"Slovanská epopej" ("The Slav Epic", Alfons Mucha, 1912-1928)
Now hanging permanently, if not without controversy, at Veletržní Palace, a campus of the National Gallery in PragueNow, I may have made some slightly contentious claims in my poll contribution, if, I would argue, not really either as specious nor as spurious as all that, for Czech Art Nouveau godfather Alfons Mucha's 20-colossal-canvas-strong magnum opus "The Slav Epic" as cinema...
Here follow only a meagre few photos – my photography simply hasn't done these magnificent pictures justice – in under-substantiated support of certain aspects of my flimsy hypothesis. Happily, much better quality reproductions of Mucha's magnificent masterwork can be found all over the Web, and they do my lunatic theorising far prouder than my own underwhelming photography here can hope to.
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| This is the 2nd canvas in "The Slav Epic" – now, I ask you, is that a big screen, or wot? (Refer relative size of awestruck, darkened space-inhabiting gallery patron to artwork.) This is "The Celebration of Svantovit in Rügen" (1912). |
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| This is a detail – almost a close-up, even – of that same canvas, from centre bottom. To stand but a foot away from the painting is for mother and child to fill "the frame". This woman's eyes have haunted me ever since I laid mine upon them. |
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Eyes no less haunting –
a detail from the 1st canvas of the Slovanská epopej, "The
Slavs in Their Original Homeland" (1912).
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| An awful purdy doodad which wouldn't be at all out of place in Argento's Suspiria (1977) but which is in fact merely a detail of the 5th canvas in "The Slav Epic", "King Otakar II of Bohemia" (1924). |
Further postcards from Europe to prop up one's claim that everything is cinema
And now for a little more photographic everything-is-cinema-ness, surplus to requirement as addenda for my contribution to the 2012 Senses of Cinema world poll, as I in no way alluded to the following in my poll text, nor need have. But I no got worry.
I'll let the photographs, if necessarily aided to some extent in each instance by their captions, speak for themselves...
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Elsewhere in Veletržní
Palace, this permanent installation pays tribute to the great puppet
animator, Jiří Trnka. (He was pretty handy in a few other fields,
too.) There'll be more from me about Trnka hereabouts, and in the pages of
Senses of Cinema, soon – that's a promise! (For
many happy reasons which will become apparent in due course.) It's a shame
about the shadow of a certain gormless pillock in this one.
Reflective surfaces: the scourge of amateur photographers everywhere!
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In the same room as the
Trnka installation can be found these gorgeous vintage film
posters. The two leftmost are for Gustav Machatý's 1931 film, From
Saturday to Sunday. "Jsem děvče s čertem v těle"
translates as "I'm a girl with the devil in (her) flesh";
it's credited to director Karl Anton and is instantly as tantalising
a film to hunt down as any I've heard tell of any time lately.
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Also from that same
room. I haven't figured out which films these gorgeous images pertain
to – something by Martin Frič, perhaps? Anyone, any leads?
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| The Wiener Riesenrad – which is to say, this is the Ferris wheel seen in The Third Man (d. Carol Reed, 1949) in Vienna's nowadays impossibly kitsch Prater amusement park. | ||
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| Kitsch? The Prater? With this photo, I rest my case. Still: what is this post if not a paean to the "Magic Dreamland" that is the cinema, anyway? And is that really any less naff a term than "Dream Factory", that popular epithet for Hollywood? |
But wait – a pledge! Yes, I hereby pledge, contrary to all recent indications, that this blog will actually regularly feature new content in 2013. Truly!
Let's see then if I'm not yet as good as my word. (And here I'll confess to knowing something you don't, at least, not for very much longer – my year in film in 2013 will be a very busy one, and it'll sure need some documenting and ballyhooing here. Stay tuned!)
Toodles for now then,
C.
