“Animated cinema is the demiurgic art par excellence: matter comes to life and is transformed in the hands and imaginations of the creators. They, more than anybody, know about the secret life of objects.” This description, comes from the exhibition “Metamorphosis: Fantasy Visions in Starewitch, Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers,” now playing at the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea (CCCB) in Barcelona, Spain, and it's a good summary of the work of these four visionary animators.
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Blog: Cartoon Brew (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Luis Buñuel, Bruno Schulz, Max Ernst, Brothers Quay, Georges Melies, Walerian Borowczyk, Ladislas Starewitch, Emile Cohl, Lotte Reiniger, Arnold Böcklin, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea, Charles Bowers, Emma Hauck, Francisco de Goya, Gustave Courbet, James Ensor, Jean Grandville, La Casa Encendida, Max Klinger, Monsu Desiderio, Robert Walser, Segundo de Chomón, Events, Stop Motion, Jan Svankmajer, Salvador Dali, Add a tag
Blog: Cartoon Brew (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Saul Steinberg, Comics, Fine Art, Terry Gilliam, UPA, Max Ernst, United Productions of America, Ad Reinhardt, David Malki!, David Zwirner Gallery, The Brotherhood of Man, Add a tag
Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) was an artist’s artist, renowned among critics and curators, but hard for the general public to warm up to. His most famous fine art works are his Black Paintings, from the 1960s, which at first glance appear to be solid black, but on closer inspection turn out to be blocks of black and almost-black shades. Important, but challenging.
Add a CommentBlog: An Awfully Big Blog Adventure (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Marvel Comics, Max Ernst, Captain Britain, David Thorpe, writing comics, Add a tag
I am lost in a forest of the night in a lucid nation. I awake, feeling uprooted. I find myself in a country deluded by surfaces.
Dawn offers its mechanical chorus. If I peel off the bark of the night it reveals a stark, blank-eyed whiteness.
Nothing is apparent of the frenzy within.
There was a crucial dream. It came when my life was at a junction, at University. I had nurtured a childhood fantasy: to be a writer; more specifically, of comics.
Yet, since then, the world's sicknesses had been displayed to me. Dismayed, I thought I ought to lend my life to healing them.
Torn by the thorns of this dilemma I took myself away, to Paris. I sought answers in its galleries.
In one, I witnessed, as if in another universe, a film of Max Ernst's surrealist collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté.
I am not sure whether this is the version I saw, but the Schoenberg soundtrack is entirely appropriate (thanks, Helen). Originally published as a book, it can be argued that this is an early example of a graphic novel, and has influenced later comics writers, for example Grant Morrison, in particular his Doom Patrol, as best exemplified by the story The Painting That Ate Paris.
Nothing could have seemed more shocking and disturbing. I was an intruder in another reality, feeling as one transported to ours from a foreign culture might feel.
I fell under its spell. Its alien logic, after a while, became as normal.
That night, under canvas on the hard ground of the Bois de Boulogne, I returned to my origin nation.
There, in a dust bowl, I met a famine-shrunken African boy:
...wrapped in torn pages from Strange Tales 118.
This was the first Marvel comic I ever read, as potent as a first cigarette.
I woke, convinced that the message conveyed was that: if I were to write comics, then, should one child's life be changed for the better from reading one of my stories, it would be worth my while.
Eight years later I found myself writing for Marvel comics.
Taken from a recent issue of SFX magazine, containing an article on Captain Britain, including my stint on the title. |
Nowadays I find myself writing prosaic tips for combating climate change.
Yet nightly, I still bathe in the radiation from hidden worlds.
Max Ernst's Europe After The Rain |
I plan to lose myself in those forests soon.