Picture of the Week #21: Alice in Wonderland’s Magic Lantern Slides 19 March, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Picture of the Week.Tags: Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, magic lantern, Picture of the Week, pre-cinema
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Everyone’s fussing about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. I won’t pass judgement until I see it this weekend – I’ve been bitten and cuddled by Burton’s films in roughly equal measure over the years (Batman Returns, Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!Sweeney Todd all had their share of joys, and I seem to be able to love and hate Sleepy Hollow simultaneously), so I’ll wait and see how it turns out. In the meantime, one of the happy upshots of the film’s release is increased attention to Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 adaptation, and the BFI National Archive’s efforts in restoring it. You can see the whole film here.
So, while we’re bringing to light antecedents to Burton’s 3D Disneyfest, I offer to you the Picture of the Week, which is actually twenty-four pictures of magic lantern slides that tell the story of Alice. These would have been projected onto a screen by a lanternist, who would also provide the narration that links them together in narrative sequence. You can see the full set of slides at the website of their current home at The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture. They’re based on the illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, but have been adjusted to dodge copyright infringement.
Picture of the Week #20: Salzburg Marionette Theatre 12 March, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Picture of the Week, Puppetry.Tags: marionette, Puppetry, Salzburg
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I’m off to Salzburg to attend the Magic and the Supernatural conference, where I will be presenting a paper on fairy tales, enchantment and puppet animation. Not necessarily in that order. I’m honoured to be speaking about puppets in the home of the world famous Salzburg Marionette Theatre. Sadly, they will be on tour during my stay, so I won’t get chance to see them perform, but above is a picture I took in their museum the last time I visited. You can see more of my puppet photos here. I’ll be back next Wednesday, a very decadent excursion to take during term time but then, if they insist on moving the Easter Break around, then my conference season will be out of sync with other places.
Picture of the Week #19: Film Posters from Ghana 5 March, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Advertising, Picture of the Week.Tags: Cujo, Evil Dead II, Ewoks, film poster, Ghana, James Bond, Planet Terror, Poster, Terminator, The Spy Who Loved Me
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The arrival of home video to Ghana in the early 80s produced the phenomenon of mobile cinemas, travelling around the country with a television, a VCR and a generator. To advertise their wares, these micro-distributors used large, hand-painted posters. When more people had their own TVs and video players at home, the tradition largely faded away (though the existence of posters for Terminator 3 and Planet Terror suggests it hasn’t really died out), but some of the posters remain, wearing the scars of having been outside in the elements, but evidencing an industrious attention to detail with their distinctive colours and bold posturing. I’m not sure if this confirms a popular taste for violent action movies, or a coincidence that posters for those films lasted longer than most.
You can see and buy more of these unique artifacts here. Or find galleries at Ephemera Assemblyman’s blog, or if you’ve got money to spend, buy yourself a book.
Picture of the Week #18: Lillian Gish 27 February, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Picture of the Week.Tags: Lillian Gish
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This week’s pin-up is Lillian Gish, who died on this day in 1993, her 100th year. Most famous for her work with D.W. Griffith (Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Orphans of the Storm), her career spanned more than 100 films over eight decades, including King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, up to her final appearance, alongside Bette Davis in Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August.
Read Dan Callahan’s fulsome appraisal of Gish’s career at Bright Lights Film Journal, or visit her official website for starters.
Picture of the Week #17: Film-makers who Paint 18 February, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Art & Architecture, Picture of the Week.Tags: Akira Kurosawa, Anthony Hopkins, art, artist, cinema, David Lynch, Derek Jarman, Film, painting, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sylvester Stallone, Takeshi Kitano, Tim Burton
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The discovery that Anthony Hopkins has been working away at some figurative paintings (see image above) inspired me to dedicate Picture of the Week to film-makers who also paint. And I wonder if you, dear reader, can work out which is which. You’ll find paintings by Sylvester Stallone, Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch, Takeshi Kitano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tim Burton, and Derek Jarman below (or after the break). Rolling your mouse over the image (in some cases you can click for a larger view) will reveal the name of the artist. And if you know of any more film-makers, actors and the like who have a portfolio of paintings I can add to this little gallery, please let me know and I’ll build up a collection.
Picture of the Week #16: Animated Exeter 12 February, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Animation, Art & Architecture, Picture of the Week.Tags: Animated Exeter, Animation, BIll Plympton, Rose Bond
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There’s a very good reason why this week’s picture features an angel mooning you. It’s a still from Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels, one of the star attractions at this year’s Animated Exeter Festival. Now into its second decade, the festival brings together workshops, screenings, public events, talks and exhibitions at various venues. Plympton will be guest speaker on Saturday, and his latest feature screens tonight – see the trailer below. While the mainstream animation studios are squabbling over whether or not CGI will become the dominant aesthetic for the industry, Plympton continues to fine-tune his own distinctive hand-painted style. I can’t wait to find out how he does it.Check out the full programme here.
If you’re in or near Exeter, don’t miss Rose Bond’s animated projection on the walls of Devon’s Crown Court. It runs Friday to Sunday, 7pm – Midnight. I’ll come back with photos if you can’t make it…
Picture of the Week #15: Santo Posters 6 February, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Advertising, Picture of the Week.Tags: action, genre, Mexico, Santo, wrestling
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El Santo (real name: Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta (1917 – 1984)) was a masked Mexican wrestler (luchador enmascarado), folk hero and semi-mythical star of over fifty movies (1958-1982). He has also been represented in comic books and cartoons; the scale of his renown, divorced from the actual person around whom it was all built, is extraordinary, as evidenced by these marvellous movie posters. Mysteriously masked, barrel-chested and ripped without being prettily sculpted, battling monsters, aliens and crooks with his big bare hands, he’s possibly the closest we’ve come to having a real life superhero walking the Earth.
Picture of the Week #14: Famous Monsters of Filmland 29 January, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Monster, Picture of the Week.Tags: Famous Monsters of Filmland, Forbidden Planet, Forrest J. Ackerman, Frankenstein, make-up, Monster, The Dark Crystal
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[Issue #57 features The Green Slime on its cover: an MGM production shot at Toei studios in Japan, it was directed by Kinji Fukasaku, who would later become better known as the director of Battle Royale.]
This Friday’s fotographic fiesta is a fabulous full-fat feast of freakish filmic fings from Forrest’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. Gorgeously garish covers from Forrest J. Ackerman’s (1916 – 2008) legendary magazine (1958 – 1983), they show a side of cinema that is a gallery of great characters, a toytown of rubbery make-up, miniature models and marauding aliens. Siphoning off the scares to show these hoardes of monsters as almost near-friendly creatures happy to pose for a portrait or crack a half smile for the artist, the mag captures Ackerman’s affection for the films and the ephemera they left behind. His collections of memorabilia were peerless. Click below for many more covers, and take a YouTube tour of his mansion if you don’t believe me:
PIcture of the Week #13: The Movieland Wax Museum 23 January, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Picture of the Week.Tags: Brigitte Bardot, Clark Gable, Laurel and Hardy, museum, Vivian Leigh, waxwork
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I’ve been too busy to complete some of the other blog posts I’ve been preparing, so all I have to offer you this Friday is another picture of the week, this time some stills from the legendary Movieland Wax museum in Buena Park, California. It was the largest wax museum in the USA, with over 300 figures in 150 sets, some of them using actual costumes and props from the movies on show. It was opened in 1962, and finally closed in 2006, when the waxworks were auctioned off. I wonder where they are now. I hope they’re being looked after. I’ve always found waxworks, dummies and statues a little bit creepy. I wouldn’t say I was an automatonophobe, because they’re fascinating enough to stop me running away. The eerie sense of liveness and presence, even when faced with inert matter in the shapes of people, is part of the appeal of these things, a shiver to be indulged rather than avoided.
The strange thing about waxworks is how they provide a different form of the usual engagements we have with film stars. When we watch a film, these people are both present and absent to us. We see them in gross detail, but we have no physical proximity or interaction with them. We are voyeurs, seeing but not seen. Waxworks let us do something similar, inspecting the celebrity body in frozen form. But of course, they’re not really there. It’s just a likeness imprinted in the pliant medium of candle-stuff. No wonder horror films about waxworks (House of Wax, The Mystery of the Wax Museum) play on the possibility of the figures coming to life, being made of corpses or burning down. Charged with celebrating famous lives, a wax museum is just as likely to remind us of death, decay and the impossible distance between ourselves and our idols. Take the kids.
Understandably, somebody took greater care over Bardot’s body than they did over Stan Laurel’s face…
Picture of the Week #11: Abbot and Costello go to Mars 8 January, 2010
Posted by Dan North in Picture of the Week.Tags: Abbott and Costello, Comedy, Film, Mars, Picture of the Week, Science Fiction
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Who is the 9 year-old boy at the centre of this opening scene form Abbott and Costello go to Mars (1953)? Take a good look. He’s a comic actor, broadcaster and very familiar voice artist. And here he is getting a start in showbiz by giving some backtalk to Lou Costello. Can’t guess? Then find the answer by clicking this link.
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