Warhol's Dracula

Great Japanese (?) poster for Andy Warhol's Dracula, capturing some of the film's sleazy, psychedelic weirdness.

Re-blogged from Monstercrazy.

Last Harbour Tour Poster

Two versions of posters I've designed, for the band Last Harbour.

Zigomar

Zigomar

French serial from 1911-1912. A precursor to FANTOMAS, the French 

super-criminal.

For the full story, see Movie Morlocks.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" 1953, Directed by Ted Parmelee

I can't quite pinpoint exactly when I first saw Parmelee's 1953 adaptation of Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart". It was sometime around 1992-1993 on the Channel 4 animation strand, 4-mation, possibly as part of a Halloween special (also featured that night was The Sandman). I was video-taping these animations fairly regularly at that time. But there was something about "The Tell Tale Heart". It was creepy and strange and old. It wasn't like the other animations. James Mason narrates, frantically. There is very little animation, lots of montage and the camera drifting around still images which illuminate, then fade away. And it is nightmarish. Not in the sense of horror and gore, but more personal, the backgrounds symbolic, stripped to the core, all subconscious and weird.

It seems pitched in so many camps. Surrealism, expressionism, Freudian, a little Victorian, modernist. The interior world of the protagonist is slowly turned inside out, becoming the exterior. The investigating police are shadowy cut-outs of authority, without character or personality. A fearful THEM in silhouette. The Old Man is hideous, decrepit and frail. His frailty makes us hateful. His eye montages into a rotten, pitted moon. The house is an Escher like puzzle, all doors and stairways. Grandfather clocks without faces or workings, the pendulum still swinging. There are windows but no walls. Nightmarish.

Released in 1953 by United Productions of America, who had just found great success who their "Mr Magoo" cartoons, the film was an oddity. Audiences were unsure what to do, faced with an animation which wasn't intended to be funny. No singing, no anthropomorphic slapstick, no pratfalls, no jokes. It was the first animation to be rated X by the British Board of Film Censors. Suitable only for adult audiences. Critically it fared better, receiving an Oscar nomination (it lost, to Disney for  Adventures In Music : Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom - a fairly saccharine history of the evolution of musical instruments. With jokes.) 

 Paul Julian was the designer and colour artist for the film. Julian had a career with Warner Brothers and created the voice of "Road Runner". His designs for "The Tell Tale Heart" were influenced by theatre set designer and artist Eugene Berman, a Neo-Romantic and Surrealist, who had exhibited with other explorers of the subconscious, Dali, Duchamp and Man Ray. It is the language of Surrealism which is used to visualise the mind of the narrator. Looking at some of Berman's designs- gates without walls, structures we can see through- relates to a dream logic, of objects we can understand because they exist according to rules we have created within our dreams.

Eugene Berman's theatre designs

Julian went on to co-direct "The Hangman" - very much in the vein of "The Tell Tale Heart"- in 1964.

Ten years after the Poe adaptation, "The Hangman" echoes with the nightmarish weirdness of it's predecessor. In Post-Kennedy America, this call for equality and compassion - framed in surrealist horror- was more acceptable, less perverse than the slippery, damaging, psychological web of "The Tell Tale Heart". Although Poe's story was first published in 1843, the internal horrors of the psychopath of the story were given flight and vision in the 1953 animation - a medium of fun and laughter, seven years before Norman rented rooms in the Bates Motel. "Psycho" has been called the "first psychoanalytical thriller". "The Tell Tale Heart" was bested by a cartoon with a singing owl.

U.P.A site

America's film legacy

http://www.sullivangoss.com/eugene-berman/

BBFC Certificate History

Hollywood cartoons: American animation in its golden age

Barrier, M.  Published New York  : Oxford University Press 1999

The Fall Of The House Of Usher And Other Writings

Poe, E.A.  Reprint published England: 1986 Penguin Books

Masters of animation

Halas, John.  British Broadcasting Corporation. Published London : BBC Books 1987

Cartoon modern: style and design in fifties animation

Amidi, A.  Published San Francisco : Chronicle Books 2006

Surrealism

Waldburg, P. Published London: Thames & Hudson 1997


Art & Psychoanalysis
Fuller, P. Published London: Writers And Readers 1980

Blade Runner and The Act of Seeing

The motif of the eye, and the importance of seeing, recurs throughout Blade Runner.  From the opening shot of the future city reflected in the eye, to the Voight-Kampff machine, to Roy's final speech of a life experienced through the act of seeing, the gaze and the eye are everywhere. 

Even Dr Tyrell's glasses are huge and distorting- the creator has exaggerated eyes and the creations- the Replicants- can be determined as non-human through the reactions of their eyes.

When Roy finally destroys his creator (with shades of Frankenstein,Freud and Nietzsche- creator, father, God), he pushes his thumbs through Tyrell's eyes, the same method we see foreshadowed when Leon attacks Deckard. 

Rachel's outward appearance alters once she and Deckard sleep together. From the icily beautiful to a very human natural unconstructed look, her appearance is the signifier of her humanity. The icily beautiful a signifier of her perceived humanity, the unconstructed natural appearance a signifier of her newly found humanity.


See The Eyes Tell All A What, Where, Why Commentary of the Bladerunner Theme John McCoy

Play, Animation and Bla Bla

Bla Bla, created/directed by Vincent Morisset is a strange creature. It isn't an animation, or a game, but something that subtly uses elements of both. There is no defined narrative, but a series of interactions between the viewer/player and the animation. The actions offered to the viewer/player are limited, but produce a sense of playfulness, interaction and 
discovery.

“The youngest kids navigated their way through BLA BLA easily, without any guidance. An adult who doesn’t have a strong grasp of interactivity might find themselves clicking the same spot over and over, missing all kinds of possibilities.” Morisset adds, “There’s an element of culture in all this. Younger people understand the principles of interactivity, and they know what to do.”


Produced for the National Film Board of Canada, Morisset calls the work a "film for computer".
Here is an interview with Morisset. 
You can watch/play Bla Bla here. 

The Gaze

Here's an image from Think Eye Tracking Market Research Blog, 
"In 1967 Yarbus eye tracked people viewing the painting “They did not expect him” by Repin. The instructions given to the participants varied from, among other, free examination, to the people’s ages, and how long the visitor had been away."