Month: June 2022 (Page 3 of 13)

 

‘Like a psychedelic, eastern European Ray Harryhausen, Karel Zeman’s unique films create super-stylised environments and vivid fantasy worlds, using stop frame animation or combining stop frame creatures and live action actors. Not so much attempting to create a Harryhausen type effect of realism as invent whole new phantasmagorical universes, Zeman’s films are acknowledged as influential on groundbreaking contemporary directors such as Terry Gilliam, Jan Švankmajer, Tim Burton and many more. But the difference is that far from trying to create an impression of uniqueness, Zeman didn’t seem to think he was doing anything that weird at all, and the type of eccentricity and whimsy that seemed to come naturally to Zeman from within himself was perhaps adapted more as a self conscious, stylistic decision by others.

‘Born in Moravia, Zeman worked as a window dresser and poster designer and studying at business school. Following an early interest in Czech puppet theatre he moved to Paris to study commercial art and work in advertising. Returning to Czechoslovakia, Zeman continued in commercials until offered a job in the animation studio run by Hermina Tyrlova, one of the rare breed of leading early 20th century female animators and often called the ‘Mother of Czech Animation’. Zeman and Tyrlova then collaborated on Vanocni Sen (Christmas Dream, 1946) which won the award for best animated film at Cannes.

‘Soon after this in Zeman started his series of popular short children’s comic films featuring the character Mr Prokouk, but it was this extraordinary 1948 short Insparace (Inspiration), an ‘art film’ using miniature posed glass models and sets, which more defined his desire to push the envelope of stop frame and special effects to create unique dreamlike imaginary universes.

‘Later Zeman created his first feature Kral Lavra (King Lavra) in 1950 followed by his first live action/ animation film, Cesta du Praveku (Journey into History), a genre for which he would become world renowned. It was Zeman’s next film Vynalez Zkaky (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, 1958) which brought wide international acclaim and which many consider his masterpiece. Based on Verne’s novel Facing the Flag and designed to look like the kind of illustrations that would have featured in the original publication, the sets and backgrounds in this Victorian style give the feel of a toy cardboard puppet show from that era except in this case containing real actors. A favourite on television in the 1960s the film is now rarely seen, and like the rest of Zeman’s beautiful work, is criminally neglected

‘Zeman followed this with other Jules Verne adaptations such as Na Komete (Journey by Comet) and the whimsical fantasy Baron Prasil (The Fabulous Baron Munchausen), seemingly influencial on Terry Gilliam’s later version of the tale; indeed, a lot of Zeman’s work seemed to influence Gilliam’s whimsical style. His later work includes a version of Sinbad (Pohadky Tisice A Jedne Noci, 1974) and the fantasy story of love conquering evil, Krabat (1977).’ — Stephen Cavalier

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Karel Zeman Museum
THE FABULOUS WORLD OF KAREL ZEMAN
Karel Zeman @ IMDb
Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman
Karel Zeman @ MUBI
The Faboulos World of Karel Zeman
Karel Zeman: Genius, who was ahead of his time
The world of Karel Zeman’s fantasy: where animation and real-life meet
100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Inspiration / Karel Zeman
Karel Zeman vfx inventor
STEPPING INTO THE PHANTASMAGORIC OTHERWISE WITH KAREL ZEMAN
A FIX OF FANTASY: REVIVING THE WONDROUS FILMS OF KAREL ZEMAN

 

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Extras

The Special Effects of Karel Zeman: Movie Making Animation

Film director Karel Zeman shows off his impeccable practice FX skills

THE MAGIC WORLD OF KAREL ZEMAN

 

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At work

 

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Dreams of Jules Verne: Karel Zeman’s Invention of Destruction (Vynález zkázy)
by Wheeler Winston Dixon

Like so many others in the United States, I was first exposed to Karel Zeman’s exotic adventure film Vynález zkázy (Invention of Destruction, 1958), when it was released in the West in a dubbed and retitled as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne in 1961. Zeman was one of the greatest of all Czech animators and special effects artists, and used a process unique in Vynález zkázy combining 19th century pictorial steel engravings with live action photography. This created a fantastic vision of what can be identified today as a steampunk past, where elaborate mechanical devices, hot air balloons, oddly constructed airplanes, submarines, and other infernal machines were brought to life in a manner at once poetic and yet deeply sinister.

Jules Verne (1928-1905) was in many ways one of the most forward thinking of all imaginative popular writers, and his works were both commercially and critically successful. Films such as De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to The Moon, 1865, famously made into an early film by Georges Méliès in 1902), Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, 1869-1870), Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1872), and L’Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island, 1874-75) consolidated his reputation as a prolific and prophetic futurist. Verne’s works have been filmed countless times, either as straight adaptations or updated versions, but Zeman’s film stands alone as perhaps the most faithful of all filmic versions of Verne on the screen. It embraces not only his then-fanciful (and now all too real) vision of the future, but also remains faithful to the iconic images of Verne’s own era.

As Alex Barrett notes, Vynález zkázy

“. . .sets about recreating the look of the woodcut and steel-engraved images illustrating the published texts: here, etching lines are painted onto sets and superimposed over shots of the clashing sea to give them an authentic, hand-drawn look. Furthermore, the film combines all manner of tricks and effects – double exposures, painted animation, cut-out animation, stop-motion animation, puppets, miniatures, models, stylized matte-paintings, and who knows what else – with its live-action footage to create a seamless blend of startling, crisp, black-and-white material . . . The film’s faithful recreation of the feel and look of Victorian illustrations . . . gives the film a tactile texture that would be impossible to create in our current CGI-dominated era. In fact, the film harks back to the days of Méliès and shares with the early pioneer a clear sense of wide-eyed wonder for the possibilities of cinematic fantasy.”

As the film’s title implies, the narrative for Vynález zkázy was cobbled together from various stories by Jules Verne, but for the most part finds its inspiration in Verne’s little known novel Face au drapeau (Facing The Flag, first published in 1879). This book predicted a future in which super powers would compete for weapons of mass destruction, and technology would be turned towards destructive ends. The film’s narrative runs along those lines; wealthy industrialist Artigas (Miloslav Holub) owns and operates a killer submarine that roams the oceans from its headquarters inside a huge volcano. It looks for boats to sink for treasure, reminiscent of Captain Nemo’s exploits in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

As the film opens, Artigas kidnaps the distinguished scientist Professor Roche (Arnošt Navrátil) and his assistant Simon Hart (Lubor Tokoš), giving them unlimited access to the latest equipment to create an explosive device with which Artigas can rule the world. Hart is suspicious, but Roche – an impractical idealist oblivious to Artigas’s real aims – persists in working for the power-mad would-be dictator. Roche’s daughter Jana (Jana Zatloukalová) is taken hostage when Artigas’s submarine rams the Amelie (a ship on which she is a passenger), and Hart and Jana fall in love. Hart comes up with a plan to get news to the outside world, and eventually foils Artigas’s plans.

Though released as a children’s film in its English-language version, Vynález zkázy was originally marketed as a prestige art film. It screened at Expo 58 in Brussels, and won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Film Festival. André Bazin gave the film a rave review in Cahiers du cinema, and Alain Resnais named it one of the ten best films of 1958. What gave the film its surreal and almost transcendent quality was Zeman’s life long love of Verne, and his agility and skill in creating striking visual effects to bring Verne’s stories to life.

As Zeman himself noted in a short film about Vynález zkázy, “Jules Verne was a dreamer. He was a dedicated follower of technology, but he saw it through his own eyes, and the eyes of his time. But with his vast imagination, he created a whole world of magical things imbued with a delightful naiveté, which charms us even today.” His daughter Ludmila adds, “my father continued in this Vernean tradition. As a child, I remember I had all the books with those beautiful engravings. I really can’t visualize the story any other way”.

An entrancing combination of stop-motion animation, period engravings, and a whimsical sense of humor pervades the film. The flying machines are fantastic contraptions, and one even gets a glimpse of an early attempt at a motion picture camera which Artigas captures, which displays the fanciful newsreels, all accompanied by a haunting score by Zdeněk Liška. The addition by this distinguished Czech composer suits the flavor of the film, by turns forceful, melancholic, or nostalgic as the mood requires.

Perhaps the most commercially successful Czech film ever released in the West, in its Americanized version as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne was hailed by Pauline Kael as a “wonderful giddy science fantasy [which] sustains the Victorian tone, with its delight in the magic of science, that makes Verne seem so playfully archaic”. Zeman’s other films are equally marvelous in their use of period special effects and 19th century technology. But it is perhaps in Vynález zkázy that Zeman created his finest and most accessible film, now in the pantheon of the greatest hybrid animation/live action films ever made. Vynález zkázy is an imaginative delight, and a stunning personal achievement. Once seen, never forgotten.

 

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13 of Karel Zeman’s 33 films

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Rêve de Noël (1946)
‘Christmas has arrived. As a little girl and her parents enter the room, the little girl finds all kinds of toys under the Christmas Tree. She immediately throws her old doll aside and starts playing with her new dolls. But that night she has a dream. Or isn’t it a dream…’ — IMDb

 

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Inspirace (1948)
‘Apparently made as the result of a wager Zeman accepted that he wouldn’t be able to make a stop motion film using glass, most of the figures in Inspiration are seemingly reheated and reshaped for every frame of movement to create remarkably fluid figures in a unique stop frame world. Bookended by live action sequences, Inspiration is mainly a series of animated vignettes set inside a universe contained within a drop of water. Beginning with lovingly filmed semi abstract technicolour images of light and colours refracting, reflecting and blurring through glass and water, (putting me in mind of a music video director I worked with who used to move pieces of broken glass about right in front of the camera lens for that trippy psychedelic effect) we see an artist who’s gaze settles of raindrops on his window as he stares out in search of inspiration. Whether the artists (or indeed Zeman’s) mind has been expanded by some particularly potent Czech absinthe or such like we can only speculate but he seems to achieve a moment of enlightenment as, in a series of films within films, he imagines worlds within worlds contained in the water droplets.’ — Stephen Cavalier

 

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King Lavra (1950)
‘A half-hour stop-motion puppetoon by Karel Zeman, King Lavra (Kral Lavra, 1950) was based on a fairy tale poem by Karel HavlÌcek Borovsky. It is deceptively “cute,” set in a pre-machine age puppet town, starting off with the mild adventures of a cart driver & his donkey. When the donkey is parted from the driver, it begins braying, & all the mules in the city follow suit, until the cacophony awakens King Lavra asleep in his throne, whose ears are unusually atuned specifically to the sound of jackasses.’ — Paghat the Ratgirl

 

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M. Prokouk inventeur (1954)
‘After a hard day at work, Mr. Prokouk decides to invent a machine to ease his labor. But inventing is work too, and Mr. Prokouk spends more time dreaming about inventions than actually inventing anything. Can he find an easy solution?’ — IMDb

 

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A Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
‘A beguiling mix of natural history and science fiction, this early feature by Karel Zeman follows four schoolboys on an awe-inspiring expedition back through time, where they behold landscapes and creatures that have long since vanished from the earth. Hewing closely to the scientific knowledge of its era, Journey to the Beginning of Time brings its prehistoric beasts alive through a number of innovative techniques—including stop-motion, puppetry, and life-size models—creating an atmosphere of pure wonderment.’ — The Criterion Collection

 

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Invention for Destruction (1958)
‘The most successful Czechoslovak film in history, which became a global phenomenon in 1958. In New York alone it was screened simultaneously in 96 cinemas. This fantasy adventure won a number of prestigious awards, including the Grand Prix at EXPO 58 in Brussels.

‘This is the first of Zeman’s films to be inspired by Jules Verne, in which the director tries out a new style of art direction, which he was later to develop even further. The story-book sets, striking design and innovative music of Zdeněk Liška – all contribute to the unique appearance of this thrilling story with its antiwar subtext. The black and white narrative is deeply influenced by the classic engravings of Édouard Riou and Léon Bennett – the original illustrators of Verne’s novels.’ — Muzeum Karla Zemana

 

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The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)
‘Of all the takes on the oft-filmed debonair teller of outlandish heroic tales introduced to the literary world in Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), Karel Zeman’s remains the most novel, formally and narratively. With its imagery tinted like Victorian postcards and with colour applied with Expressionistic gusto, it’s surely the most beautiful, too, as it melds live-action with cut-out and other forms of animation, rhyming all awhile with a dreamlike Zdeněk Liška score.

‘Zeman tookGottfried August Bürger and Gustave Doré’s interpretations of Raspe’s Munchausen stories, in text and engravings respectively, as springboards for a febrile re-imagining of the Munchausen mythos in which he populated his film with not one Munchausen figure but, ultimately, two.

‘A further point of distinction is Zeman’s idea to link the long bygone times of the source material with contemporary events. Avowedly to differentiate his film from the well-known WWII-era, German Münchhausen (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Josef von Báky, 1943), Zeman’s idea was “linking a modern man with the past, using the Moon-flight”. While an actual moon landing would still be several years away, Russian Yuri Gagarin sensationally become the first human to enter outer space contemporaneously with the production of this film.

‘Further inspiration was drawn from two key figures with whom Zeman is often associated: Georges Méliès and Jules Verne, both no strangers to lunar stories themselves.’ — Cerise Howard

Trailer

Excerpts

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A Jester’s Tale (1964)
‘After three feature length triumphs mixing live-action with animation, Karel Zeman took a departure from sci-fi and fantasy missions implausible and instead engaged mockingly with terrible historical fact. With A Jester’s Tale, Zeman presented an entertaining spoof of the Thirty Years’ War, initially a Catholic-Protestant conflict which began in Prague and preoccupied much of Europe between 1618 and 1648, spilling over into the Ottoman Empire.

‘In order to realise this project, Zeman collaborated with a key player in the nascent Czechoslovak New Wave, Pavel Juráček, who would share screenwriting credits with him. While Zeman’s previous films had their satirical elements, the greater bite in this film is in part attributable to his one-off collaboration with this fellow Czech filmmaker of protean talents but a full generation younger and, it would transpire, on an inexorable collision course with the authorities.’ — Cerise Howard

 

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The Stolen Airship (1966)
‘The Stolen Airship is a nice boy’s adventure yarn with satiric undertones, which shines by its flawless atmosphere and seamless mix of live action and animation. Zeman achieved this by hand-colouring the whole movie – as a result, the live-action sequences have a beautiful pictorial atmosphere which blends excellently with the painted backgrounds and animated sequences, often giving the impression of colour lithographs and coloured engravings. Which fits the general mood of the movie exceedingly well, there are few movies that capture the Jules Verne atmosphere like this one.’ — IndustriousAngel

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On the Comet (1970)
‘In 1970, Zeman made his last expedition into the world of the unrestrained imagination of Jules Verne. he movie was inspired by Verne´s novel “Off On a Comet”, and it marked the culmination of Zeman´s creative period in which he combined live action and animation. After a collision between a comet and planet Earth, part of a French colony ends up living on the surface of the comet wandering thru outer space. The colonists face the dangers of an approaching apocalypse. The director makes the point that the greatest threat to the world is its people, always fighting for power among themselves. The film won awards in Venice, Tehran and Paris.’ — Karel Zeman Museum

Trailer

Excerpt

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A Thousand and One Nights (1974)
‘For a children’s film, this is absolutely wild. Pulling stories from Arabian Nights and Sinbad The Sailor, Karel Zeman’s A Thousand And One Nights is a series of adventurous vignettes following a single protagonist encountering evil sultans, monsters, and magic. Produced using paper cutouts, the animation looks fantastic – I can’t even comprehend how painstaking of a job it was to create this film. Many of the action sequences play around with animation speeds, and there is Zeman’s distinct attention to detail. I can’t help but feel that this animated gem inspired the likes of Disney’s Aladdin and even Richard William’s fantastic The Thief and The Cobbler in some regard. I can safely say that this is a beautiful, underrated piece of animation history, and more people should seek it out.’ — Jack @ Letterboxd

 

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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978)
‘A beautiful Czech folktale told through Karel Zeman’s simplistic but lovely animation that looks like a woodcut illustration brought to life. It tells of an evil sorcerer who practices black magic at his black mill and employs 12 boys at all times to work the mill and help in his evil schemes. But at the end of each year, he challenges the eldest to a duel, kills them, and brings in a new boy. This story’s boy is Krabat, who is more resourceful than the other boys and discovers the secret to defeating the sorcerer. The tale is new to me, except in the minor resemblance to the Mickey Mouse version we all know, and it’s a great story. The whole ambience of the film is magical and strangely hypnotic. The animation is charming in how Zeman utilizes the limitations of the format to make them into strengths. I haven’t long been on my discovery of foreign animation but there is some truly incredible stuff out there that I feel has always been suppressed by Disney’s American monopoly and American isolationism. It’s exciting to find this wealth of animated masterpieces that I never dreamed existed.’ — Michael Shawn

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The Tale of John and Mary (1980)
‘Karel Zeman’s final film, The Tale of John and Mary, is hypnotic and gorgeous stuff. Though certainly not on the scale of his greats, the animation is impressive with its blend of different techniques and snippets of live action. It has a certain oddball charm that can only be found in Eastern European animated films for children. Its characters are deeply creepy, even its protagonist, and there’s the occasional moment of delightfully inappropriateness (full frontal nudity, a horse being gorily shot down by arrows, romance between a boy and a swan). Definitely a must for Zeman fans, but don’t start with this one if you’re yet to see his work.’ — Dave Jackson

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Watch the entirety here

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yay, in the nick of time! Everyone, All of us, especially you in the suddenly and shockingly beleaguered USA, need some adrenaline and joy right now, and no one provides like _Black_Acrylic and his PlayTherapy sound fest, i.e. ‘The new episode of Play Therapy is online here via Tak Tent Radio! Broadcasting direct from Leeds, Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson brings you Italo, German Synth-pop and even Swiss Darkwave too.’ Treat yourselves! Seriously! Can not wait. ** David Ehrenstein, He was and always shall be, yes. ** Impossible Princess, Ha ha, hi. Yes, ‘Impossible Princess’ is really good. His short fiction collections are across the board. ‘Fascination’, the compilation of early and newer works that Semiotext(e) put out, might be the best entrance? His poetry books are great too. I love them all, especially ‘Action Kylie!’. **  brendan, Oh, slurp city. Thank you, magic man! I wrote to you, and, yes, if you’re not nodding out, Sunday’s good. Hit me up. Easiest flight possible. Love, me. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! I don’t believe Kevin’s work has been translated into French yet. You were at the Morgan Fischer screening? We keep being at the same events and I don’t see you. My eyes must be weirding out on me. The art I saw and especially liked and that I think is still up is … Morgan Fischer’s show @ Galerie Mitterand, Luc Tuymans’ show @ Zwirner, Charles Gaines’ show @ Max Hetzler, and Laura Henno’s video installation @ Palais de Tokyo (although the rest of the show there kind of sucks). You have a great weekend too! ** Steve Erickson, The last couple of days in the USA have been absolutely horrendous. Kevin’s early novel ‘Bedrooms Have Windows’ and ‘Bachelors Get Lonely’ are in the Semiotext(e) book ‘Fascination’ from 2018. And I just saw on Facebook this morning that they’re going to republish ‘Shy’, but they didn’t say when. I’ll try Chrisman, of course. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! I think you might have seen this already, but Semiotext(e) is indeed going to republish ‘Shy’, but they didn’t give a date. No, I haven’t read that Keith Waldrop novel, and I didn’t even know he wrote a novel until right now. Huh, I’ll definitely track that down, thanks. I know Ulrike Ottinger’s work, but I haven’t seen ‘Paris Calligrammes’. If it’s on Criterion, I’ll go catch it. Cool. I have those Wire demos because they were included in the reissues of ‘Chairs Missing’ and ‘154’ several years ago, and, yes, they’re extraordinary, I agree. Film fundraising … err, we’re in a big push to get the funding by August 1st. I’m praying we get there. It’s possible, and we kind of need to or we’re fucked. So, we’ll see. It’s hard, quite hard, but it’s doable if we get very lucky. How are you? How’s writing and etc., etc.? ** Misanthrope, I’ve got your back when a pen is in your hand and otherwise. Or, wait, when your fingers are on the keyboard and otherwise. Buck up, buddy, it’s the truth. ** Bill, Same with my copy of ‘Shy’ even though it’s as crumbly as a very dry leaf. The new Peter Strickland … is it called ‘Flux Gourmet’? I didn’t know about it until just now. So, no, but obviously I’m curious. I’ll skip the trailer then. Great weekend to you, buddy. ** John Newton, Your friend is one lucky dog so far. Kevin and Dodie kept Kevin’s cancer pretty quiet. I never took LSD with Kevin, no. Or MDA, MDMA/ecstasy. I don’t think we even drank alcohol together. Mm, I can’t remember what cigarettes he smoked. ‘Desiree’ is terrific. It’s quite short, a chapbook. When I first moved over here, I was editing a big ‘Kevin Killian Reader’ book for the publisher Carroll & Graf, but they went out of business, and the book never happened. But, as a result, I have all of Kevin’s books here with me, which is nice. Cool dad story. My dad dated and almost married Mary Martin, most famous for playing Peter Pan, so she was almost my mother or, rather, I almost never existed. Excellent weekend to you! ** Okay. I thought I would give you a weekend to feast on the pioneering and giantly influential animation auteur Karel Zeman. Lots of fun up there in the post if you’re in the mood. See you on Monday.

 

‘“The dead of winter,” is a phrase that unfortunately has become cliché. In Iowa, winter was for me the season of the dead. Reading Kevin Killian’s Shy and Bedrooms Have Windows kept the dead away from me—the apparitions who came to me at night, just as they have visited so many queer men these past two decades. “There were nights when he felt the recent dead getting into bed, climbing over him as if they had just come from the shower.” (Allen Barnett). “Each ghost has a hunger brought to me for his own fulfilling” (Aaron Shurin). My dictionary says that hell is a netherworld where the dead continue to exist. Iowa hell. Where could I hide from the shades of my past? Only by replacing my story with someone else’s could I escape, as if trading one soul for another. I bartered with my own memory—stories, people, boyflesh—Kevin Killian’s books replaced my dead with significant fictional others.

‘We can intellectualize the hell out of any writing; I know, I’ve done it. But the truth is that what really matters is how we respond to the work in the body. “Ladies voices give pleasure” (Stein). “I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up” (Whitman). “Why do we have to exhume all this paraphernalia when we could just walk forthrightly into a dark closet and read something.” (Steve Benson). In the bed, in the dead, in the closet that was Iowa, I took Kevin Killian into my body. Hot. My body giggled. My body wept. My body came. Doesn’t the queer writer know the flush in his cheek from reading something true about himself. Doesn’t the lesbian poet know the delight her tongue feels repeating words that have secret meanings, cow, jelly, belly. Pull back the covers and set your body free. Live.

‘As a queer spectator, I would be lying to say that I ignore a writer’s erotic appeal. Once, when I was reviewing a book by Peter Gizzi, I opened with Frank O’Hara’s famous dictum from his essay on personism: “As for measure, and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.” I chose this quote because it described Gizzi’s common sense approach to the line and because the poetry was informed by an obvious connection to O’Hara and to the New York school. But I was also aware that my attention was first drawn to Gizzi’s poetry because of the picture of him on the back of the book, a portrait of the artist as trade: rough, brooding, and (was this just me?) sexually available. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” (Oscar Wilde). Yes, I judged Kevin Killian’s books by their covers.

‘The binding of Kevin Killian’s first published novel, Shy, looks suspiciously similar to those anthologies from Boyd MacDonald’s Straight to Hell: True Homosexual Encounters: Lust, Meat, Cream… Shy? Is this a trick? Speaking of “tricks,” the cover is a photo of a shirtless young man, hand on hip, bare feet crossed at the ankle, leaning against the refrigerator in a bare apartment and gazing out the window. We view him from behind—his vulnerable naked shoulders, his full, firm ass. He is available. The space between him and the window is filled by a pink bookmark with rough edges, on which is printed “Shy” and “a novel by Kevin Killian.” The title draws us into the space between the young man and the window like a come on. Trick. “Deceiving to the eye,” says Sandy Dennis in “Come Back to the Five and Dime…” Trick.

‘As Shy opens, Kevin Killian, a supplemental character in his own novel, shuts the refrigerator door to extinguish what light there is in his flat; he moves toward the window to see who’s moving into the apartment downstairs. Is Kevin Killian that same boy gazing out the window on the cover of the book? Throughout the novel, Kevin Killian the character is eavesdropping, spying through windows, mining the other characters for information; using them for sex. In turn, the other characters overhear Kevin Killian pounding on his typewriter into the night, ostensibly writing a book about Mark McAndrew, a “dead boy.” Alas (and fortunately), that book does not get written. Instead, the characters in the novel are transformed into… well… characters in a novel. Trading the dead for the living, trading the real for the fictive. Sleight of hand performed by Kevin Killian, secret hero of his own novel. Trick.

‘In his second novel, Bedrooms Have Windows, Kevin Killian is once again a character, though this time more prominently featured by Kevin Killian the author. Bedrooms is the story of Kevin Killian’s friendship with George Grey, the affable, sexy boy who teaches Kevin Killian how to be a writer. Again, from the front cover on, Kevin Killian leads us on a voyeuristic journey, peering through windows. That the novel is often categorized as “memoirs” is both accurate and inaccurate. Although Kevin Killian mines his life for material, the rubric “memoirs” is reductive, disallowing the transformative work that makes a novel from facts. As if autobiography is not a way of fictionalizing.

‘The history of queer literature in the modern era, after all (that is, beginning with the historical point at which heterosexuality and homosexuality begin to be socially differentiated as sexual orientations—a whole nother subject that could be written about and probably has) is resplendent with examples of fictions which are formed from queer writers’ own lives. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Picano’s Ambidextrous (subtitled “a memoir in the form of a novel”), Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Dorothy Allison’s Trash. Queer writers working with what is available to them as story. Wearing the drag of fiction. Or the drag of life. Those who know what to look for can spot the performer beneath the slap. Adam’s apple.

‘Oh sure, perhaps Roland Barthes was oversimplifying the condition of story when he asked, “after the Oedipus complex and marriage, what is there left for us to tell?” But Barthes recognized beneath that generalization the fundamental heterosexuality of classical plots. And yes, queer authors have co-opted these plots a-plenty, but they have done so to the exclusion of (or marginalization of) queer lives. How can I write a tale that ends in marriage (the classical notion of comedy) in a society where marriage is not available to me? And how can I write the tragedy of a queer hero without the hero’s queerness being perceived as the source of tragedy?

‘I do not wish to simply categorize—certainly, queer writers have been more inventive with queer characters than merely to present their own lives as fictions. But, I pursue this line of argument to show that autobiographical fiction is a queer genre; and, even though we have reached out into all manner of story—from Jean Genet to Radcliffe Hall to Sapphire—we own the autobiographical as a tradition, and we revisit the form as an expression of cultural identity.

‘In Little Men, Killian presents us with his own self-interview, “Who is Kevin Killian,” in which he coyly asks himself questions about his shifting and subversive sexual identity. As interviewer he is bi-curious; as interviewee he is evasive and disinterested, as if sexuality could not be any more important than what he had for breakfast. But this cat-and-mouse game around the bed is precisely where Killian wants us—author as exhibitionist.

‘Just as Killian is changing roles and identities in his work (posing as Ryan O’Neal in one of his won plays; remembering in Little Men how his mother would chide him that he’d never get anywhere if he continued to act like Audrey Hepburn), he is manipulating the reader (with all of the sexual connotations inherent in that little phrase) into new roles and new identities. Perhaps this is in the end the most seductive quality of his fictions—that we can be sexually various, amorphous and as fragmented in our selves as Sally Field in the made-for-tv movie “Sybil” (a particularly Killianesque simile, that one). Oh, he is a dark master of the word, Kevin Killian, an inviting bridegroom and a voyeur who’ll let us play in his fictions until we’re spent. Trick.‘ — D.A. Powell

 

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Further

KEVIN KILLIAN (1952–2019)
Remembering Kevin Killian Who ‘Gave Us Courage’
Kevin Killian: I Can Explain Everything
‘A Common Misadventure in Queer Bohemia’: Kevin Killian (1952–2019)
On the Work of Kevin Killian
Kevin Killian on being unlikeable in your work
Remembering the polymath poet
Kevin Killian’s Memoirs of Sexed-Up, Boozy Long Island
Kevin Killian @ goodreads
Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy papers
Peter Gizzi Remembers Kevin Killian
Kevin Killian on Queer Art and Coming of Age in New York
But I Did Learn to Swim: A Few Memories of Kevin Killian
REVIVING JACK SPICER: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN KILLIAN
YOU MUST CONTINUE AT ALL COSTS: talking with Kevin Killian about his TWEAKY VILLAGE
‘One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism: Imagine If You Can the Death of the Prison House’
AIDS as Monster: Kevin Killian’s Argento Series
‘Triangles in the Sand’
Podcast: Kevin Killian on ‘Bookworm’
A MEETING FOR RAY JOHNSON: THE MINUTES BY KEVIN KILLIAN

 

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Extras

Kevin Killian interview, 2011-03

Kevin Killian – Is It All Over My Face?

KEVIN KILLIAN | NPF KEYNOTE ADDRESS | 29 JUNE 2012

Kevin Killian (Condensery.m4v)

 

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THIS SENTENCE WILL ALWAYS BE THERE: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN KILLIAN

 

Miranda Mellis: I’m excited to do this interview, but also unsure of where to begin. I feel at once an admiring, strangerly shyness and a knowing, readerly closeness with you. I imagine others have this dual feeling, of both shyness and intimacy. This is surely one of the effects (or affects) of working autobiographically and also gossiping, in the New Narrative mode, with readers as friends. It’s a sort of love triangle between the reader, the writer, and books. I can’t help but wonder: will you be like your writing?

Kevin Killian: I hope people aren’t as shy around me as I have been around others I admire, painfully so, or else I would get drunk to overcome my inhibitions and that was the other side of the coin. I can still recall the embarrassment of having one’s hand removed scornfully from the crotch of one’s idol. But if people have read my writing at all, they know I’m not exactly a smooth operator, so maybe they feel more kindly towards me, like I was the backwards little girl in the house across the way, who would be so pleased with a handful of daisies. Yes, that’s me. OK, let me think, the people who I have met who were least like their writing were Dennis Cooper, of course, so Sadean in his imagination and in the thicket of his writing, and yet, one on one, unimaginably sweet and considerate, and kind. Rae Armantrout, her poetry a brilliant zigzag of thought and feeling, condensed and sparkling, and in person, I think, my favorite gossip of all time. I suppose there are also the opposites of these two—a witty writer or artist, say, who shows the ravages of deep depression as did Tennessee Williams— or the Jean Stafford types, once geniuses, who now can barely flip through the pages of a glossy. New Narrative is perhaps not so much a style as a way of living in the world, in the terrible social world which is so excruciating, as well as in the socio-economic nightmare we’re all trying to breathe in and breathe through and we can’t. I don’t know now if Bob [Glück] and Steve [Abbott] and Bruce [Boone] were actually encouraging us to gossip, but we certainly felt we’d been given French leave to do so 24/7. Gossip shores up, even creates, community; community leads to action—to direct political action. Well, that’s a shorthand method of explaining what happens in Jack the Modernist and The Truth About Ted and The Lizard Club.

MM: On the subject of identification (“I am just the backwards little girl…”), in your keynote at Orono last summer you spoke of Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and other gay poets in San Francisco in the 80s identifying as sages and mages, “without irony” as you put it. Does irony dip in the 80s then peak in the 90s? How does irony connect for you with your curiosity about the artist-without-talent, the magical confluence that drew you to Kylie Minogue? Is irony key because of arriving in San Francisco, as you put it at Orono, “after the party was over”? I remember being bombarded with sex positive and safe sex propaganda in equal parts in the mid-90s, the era of the “ethical slut.” Judith Butler’s performativity and John Cage’s indeterminacy were the theories that went with our practices: gender and sound as continuums. But where are we on the irony continuum today?

KK: I got caught up in your story about growing up when Judith Butler was already in the ascendant, already a fact of life, and your subtle interweaving of the concurrent insistence on safe sex and STD testing, with the fertility I have found in facing the blank canvas of the talentless, like he or she who would look at the sun during an eclipse, or the POP art fan who empties his or her intake of a Jasper Johns flag by glancing at the white gallery wall nearby and seeing the mocking Johns colors realign themselves into the good ol’ red, white and blue.

OK—whether irony peaked in the 1990s. I saw the 90s dominated by a series of efforts to combat irony and to return it to minor league status, but for you, maybe that came later. I saw the whole rise of the internet as a force by which people would put aside their ironies and find love somewhere, even in dark corners, at which point they would be freed from irony’s thrall. But so much of that is subjective, depending on where one’s standing. Is Conceptualism, for example, all about irony, or is it irony-free? Is the work of Marina Abramovic or of Thomas Kinkade ironic in some way? I use irony to buffet my vanity from a host of perceived (or possible) enemies, but eventually when one has reached the 1 per cent on the one hand or has sunk behind the poverty line on the other, I will no longer need it. Those paying off their student loans must still need it, like drowning sailors their shards of driftwood.

MM: Cassie Thornton had the terribly ironic insight (on which she based subsequent projects) that as a graduate student, the art she was producing was debt, circulating invisibly. Talk about a non-site! Currently, I’m co- teaching a class on site-specific art, which tends not to be ironic. Who are the crucial artists for you, Kevin?

KK: In history, so many favorites but I always return to Picasso, Florine Stettheimer, Marsden Hartley, Duchamp, Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Frink, Warhol, Jacob Lawrence, Tchelitchew, Sturtevant, Mike Kelley. Oh—and Kylie of course! In real life I’ve known and worked with a few great artists and each interaction has been an important one for me. I’m spoiled, really. I’ve gotten to work closely with Raymond Pettibon, Fran Herndon, Kota Ezawa, Colter Jacobsen, Matt Gordon, Ugo Rondinone, Gregg Bordowitz, etc. Some do work in site-specific ways, but I can’t say that site specificity has ever been a big thing for me. If someone told me, “wow, we’re half an hour away from the Spiral Jetty,” I would say “driver, drive on, I think I see a Howard Johnson’s up ahead.” One story that appealed to me was the one that had Duchamp getting ready for war by making mini-versions of all of his prewar masterpieces, versions small enough to pack together in a single suitcase, one suitable for crossing borders. That said something to me, perhaps about nomadism, something about the times being such that we might all be forced to flee at any moment. All sorts of people love site- specific work: maybe I live too much in my head?

MM: I am a sucker for the Spiral Jetty. It’s so monumentally butch and yet… it’s a spiral made of crystals! Very witchy. But speaking of monumental works: you’ve just published a novel you have been working on for two decades, Spreadeagle (Publication Studio, 2012). Can you say something about what the novel allows that the story or poem does not?

KK: Stories and poems are all very well (that’s a nice Maggie Smith way to begin), but what a novel gives me is the challenge. I’m sort of a short-term memory kind of guy, so writing a story over a span of days is more difficult than for some others I think. I blame it on my day job, which is largely answering the phone. Has the phone ever interrupted you when you were writing a sentence? It can be trying, but when it’s what they’re paying you for, you answer it anyway, and this sentence will always be there when you get off the phone. And then it will ring again within two minutes time, so your style becomes disjunctive. I used to write ornately, now I write in little blips and squeaks, like Astro barking in The Jetsons. I start a sentence, the phone rings, I go back and I start a new sentence. Who cares about finishing that last one. And the subject of my phone interchange naturally colors what I’m writing. So in some ways the lyric form works better for me, for often I don’t have the energy to find my notes from yesterday, or even turn back in my notepad to half an hour ago. I’ve tried to write short stories with the heft and depth of a novel, as Faulkner did—and I have once or twice, “Greensleeves” in Impossible Princess (City Lights, 2009) was a novel in miniature, as was “Santa” in Little Men (Hard Press Editions, 1996). But in other ways I’ve a long-term mind—I’m a Capricorn, so I’m steady and loyal. I would like to have written more novels, and I have two or three in the works, some from years back, that make the 22 years it took to finish Spreadeagle feel like ten minutes ago.

I love biographies maybe for the same reason, the immensity of the task. Spreadeagle was more difficult to finish than either of my other novels, Shy (Crossing Press, 1989) or Arctic Summer (Masquerade, 1997) because of the social challenges first of all. When I began I was writing a novel about the AIDS crisis and the activist response. I kept a finger on the pulse of the storyline, mirroring it on my own experience in the middle of the homocore days (which were tremendously exciting in San Francisco), but with the widespread use of the so-called drug cocktails in the mid 1990s, some of the wind seemed to vanish from my narrative’s sails. I couldn’t even acknowledge that much, for quite a long time. What was stalling my own little novel was, of course, a great boon for society in general, so it seemed churlish, even evil to complain. Some folks asked me, why don’t you make it a novel set in 1990? But my first two novels were set in long ago historical periods and I felt like I wanted to make it a contemporary story, so the plot constantly shifted from year to year, and sometimes I thought I would never finish it, or that maybe it should have been written as two books instead of one. And also I didn’t know how it would end, as the Internet and allied technologies came along and one by one made obsolete every plot point I had counted on. In Spreadeagle, a handsome stranger comes to a little town and for a long time the plot was that the townspeople were wondering who he was, whereas nowadays they could just Google him. And the other plot was all about how I couldn’t reach him (so X and Y happened), and nowadays the question would be why didn’t you just reach him on his cell phone? I’m sure these two inventions alone have scuttled more novels than any others in all of literary history, or else I’m crazy. You couldn’t have Wuthering Heights with Google, right? Nor Evangeline if she or Gabriel had a cell phone.

MM: Forms are so contingent! Was Woolf the first to clearly articulate how money, gender, and genre are laminated? Disjunction has been claimed as the poet’s weapon against ideology and univocality, but as you point out, it’s also just a description of what time is like and therefore what forms
are possible when our labor is for rent. Which comes first the chicken of necessity or the egg of theory? How have theorists helped you do your work?

KK: I’m not sure, Miranda! You know how hard it is to see the thing when you’re in the middle of it, and it’s in your nose and you’re just trying to swim through it, like Ellen De Generes in Finding Nemo. To get the big picture I have long depended on theory and criticism, though sometimes that turns into a different kind of immersion, the way that when one talked to Bruce Boone long enough in the 1980s, one became convinced that the world was pretty much run by disciples of the Societé d’Acephale, and that we should all be having SM sex and giving each other vast quantities of potlatch, while in the 1990s he convinced me that gnosticism was both the way out and the way in—and p.s., after all these years I’m still not 100 per cent sure I could tell you what gnosticism is, but could pinpoint it through rhetorical analysis of an ad or a reality TV show. But anyhow, broadly speaking, when I was your age I knew nothing except a little bit of Angus Fletcher and Northrop Frye and I.A. Richards, and Marx, Frazer and Freud, but today I know more. I think I write better now, but was that just quitting booze? I can’t say which came first, but I suspect it was several things. Arriving in San Francisco when I did meant a total brainwash, exposure to all sorts of new systems (including full time work!) which required gargantuan effort, against which my lazy ass received a new kind of pounding. I wonder what it would be like to have two weeks off for vacation—I’d just fill it in with professional work of one kind or another. I’d be the worst sort of father, that’s for sure—the sort of Dad who doesn’t remember his children’s birthdays or even their age. “Words,” Spicer wrote (in “Homage to Creeley”) “turn mysteriously against those who use them / Hello says the apple / Both of us were object.” I always, thanks to Bruce, read this as, “Both of us were abject.”

MM: Last year, Camille Roy sent me the Nag Hammadi text The Thunder Perfect Mind. It was so familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I realized I’d heard it sung at the Reclaiming Collective’s Spiral Dance! A gnostic number, and here I thought Starhawk made it up. The dead live on in writing and singing.

In the short story “Dietmar Lutz Mon Amour” (Impossible Princess), memoir is cued by a plurality that includes all of the dead–history itself: “He and it and history and my age all prompt me to tell this love story as though Marguerite Duras were watching me.” I can’t imagine writing a memoir except as a fiction or a plurality, a collective composition. I find writing down actual memories, as scenes, immobilizing—turns me to sludge. What relation does your memory of yourself as a character in your fictions have to your memories per se?

KK: I wonder if The Thunder Perfect Mind isn’t what the authors of the musical Les Miserables had in mind when the despairing heroine sings that even at the moment when everything seems to be bliss, “the tigers come at night…with their voices soft as thunder”? It’s a word so vivid and yet one to which meaning sticks and repels like a brand of physics.

As you say, the dead live on in writing and singing. In the days since you sent your question we have heard of the death of French poet Anne-Marie Albiach, 75 years old, in Paris, whose work came as a revelation to me in the months leading up to her 60th birthday in August 1996. I don’t know French well enough to read it properly, but Albiach seems to have attracted more than her share of wonderful translators who gave it to me good, the equivocations, the hesitancies, the blanknesses of speech impermeably allied to a wild range of emotional and phenomenological tenors—I had almost said terrors. This part of being alive, of tending to the realm beyond our senses, was her bread and butter, de tous les jours. You cite my use of Duras in writing my memoir “Dietmar Lutz Mon Amour.” When a great love occurs between people of two nations, what author do you think of? For me it was her, the crazy NATO-isms of Hiroshima Mon Amour. “All these years I have been looking for a love impossible.” He points to her, “Your name is Nevers. My name is Hiroshima,” the places we come from substituting for our names. Speaking across the divide of nations as an allegory for speaking across the thin line between life and death. Really, she had it all—didn’t she?—and it wasn’t about making sense of things per se.

“I can’t imagine,” you say, “writing a memoir except as a fiction or a plurality.” I wonder if that might be because the event hasn’t come yet in your life that you want to treat in terms of non-fiction? I started as a novelist, wrote a Nancy Drew book when I was ten (laid in Japan!), but then as things mounted up that I could not deal with in life, fiction shrank from me like a wet piece of cellophane set on a bush in the mid-day sun. I do understand your sense that writing things down freezes them in one’s mind to a certain “immobilizing” totality. But when you’re on as much Wellbutrin as I, that’s exactly what you need, that and a camera. Collective composition—yes, I subscribe to that too. I write often in collaboration with others. For me it is a way of studying at their feet, of secreting their juices, like I’m the bee sleeping in the honeysuckle. Can you imagine what it was like for me to write a story with Gail Scott, with Glen Helfand, with Derek McCormack or Lawrence Braithwaite? Street cred isn’t the word for it!

MM: The events have certainly come that I ought to try to treat in terms of nonfiction, but I don’t know if I have the stamina. Or maybe it’s just my indoctrination: “Who are you to tell the story of your life!” As if the most ominous structure of authority of all is the idea of the individual (Maybe so!). I should co-write it with someone who wasn’t there.

A few years ago I asked you what you were working on and you said (do you remember?), “I’ve written enough.” So I’d like to ask you what you’re writing next, but I’ll ask a perhaps more capacious question instead: What is on the horizon?

KK: Funny thing but just this weekend your cousin Frances Richard and I were talking about this very subject! I was telling her that in the coming months I want to buckle down to the introduction that Dodie and I will be writing to our forthcoming anthology of New Narrative materials from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. It’s almost as though, I explained to her, that we are the wrong people to write this critical introduction for precisely the reason that we were there through it. Not enough distance. Frances countered spiritedly that in her work on Matta-Clark she has found the primary materials (are they primary? I mean taped interviews with Matta-Clark and his circle, oral histories, etc.) absolutely the foundation for the things she’s thinking about today. This seems to chime in with what you’re saying about needing a co-writer who wasn’t there!

I’m working on a new novel; on a sequel to my memoirs called Bachelors Get Lonely; I’m starting a new play with poet Suzanne Stein, for the San Francisco Poets Theater. I’m continuing to add more photos to Tagged, my series of portraits of artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, creative types, mostly guys, most of them naked or nearly so, their junk hidden, sometimes, by a drawing of male genitalia that Raymond Pettibon made a few years back. I’ve had a few shows with these photos, and a book, and I want to do more. It’s the funnest project I’ve ever done, I think. And I have finished a new manuscript of poems called Tweaky Village, now I’m entering it in contests and losing to people with MFAs of course. Sigh. So many projects that I won’t finish all of them before I die. But Dodie and I have secured a literary executor so I can rest easy knowing that life was better to me than to nearly anyone else I can think of. That’s one thing Miranda: I’ve been super lucky.

 

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Book

Kevin Killian Shy
The Crossing Press

‘Those who read past the disorienting first chapters of this gritty debut novel will be richly compensated by its intellectually stimulating and emotionally gripping prose. Killian produces a pantheon of distinctive characters–including himself as a young writer whose half-hearted work on a book about his murdered gay lover is stalled by his absorption in the dramas of others around him. The misfits, losers, adolescent rebels and rootless souls of Smithtown, Long Island (N.Y.), whose petty dreams and futile hopes the author sets forth with mercy, are the spiritual kin of Christopher Isherwood’s creations in The Berlin Stories. Killian displays a facility for developing teenaged characters, such as Harry Van who, at 15 or 16, is continually aware that his golden youth is temporary; and Paula, a romantic who finds enlightenment in the music of David Bowie. His work is also noteworthy for unlikely phrasings (“Her face lit up like a jack-o-lantern, from inside, with the incredible light and heat of love”)’ — The Crossing Press

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, All of those, yes. ** tomk, Hi, T. Yes, I was very happy when I found that star-quality quote, you bet. ** _Black_Acrylic, Funny, I didn’t know he ventured there. I’ll find ‘We Are What We Are’ somewhere somehow, thanks, buddy. Happy you aced some relief for that disrespectful nail. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Hm, how far and wide have you submitted your stuff? I surely don’t need to remind you how many, many places rejected ‘Closer’ before someone finally bit. I understand the despair and the ego testing/ smashing process of submitting and getting rejected, but I say get the thing with Callum published and then see what happens. Once you’ve published one thing it becomes much, much easier. It’s that first leap that’s the big hell. Submitting anywhere when you have no track record and no ‘name’ at all is super tough for anyone. It’s up to you, but don’t put the cart before the horse and all of that. I think your general blah mood, as you’ve been describing recently, is probably a big culprit in this fatalism about your writing. Buck up, big guy. ** Tosh Berman, Based on what I know, which is mostly through Gisele’s work and her passing things along based on her great interest in puppets, mannequins, dummies, etc., yes, most ventriloquists have their dolls made, and they usually have at least one extra if not many, if they’re very successful. I think there were 8 Charlie McCarthys if memory serves. ** brendan, Thanks, pal. I mean …  don’t crowd out what you need, obviously. I’ll live. I’m in the 8th, near Concorde. The 5th is easy, maybe a walk from me but a short metro ride if nothing else. It’ll be amazing to see you! ** Bernard, Hi, B. You know, I’m not absolutely sure I’ve seen ‘Dead of Night’. I must’ve. I know it’s a biggie for Gisele. But I don’t think I have. And now I have to. Which should be easy, I would think. Thanks, sir. Let’s hang again in the next couple of or few days. ** Bill, I drove through Cincinnati once. On a road trip in high school. To somewhere. To NYC probably. No memory of it whatsoever. Is it near Cedar Point, I wonder? That would be another reason. As Frameline rejected both of Zac’s and films, I would have to concur. ** John Newton, Glad you liked it. I collaborate with a French theater director/ choreographer named Gisele Vienne, writing the texts. She’s obsessed with puppets, marionettes, mannequins, etc., and there’s only been maybe one of our works that didn’t feature one of those forms or another. I’m writing her next piece now, and, sure enough, one of the characters/performers is a ventriloquist dummy. There is a film of ‘Jerk’, and it turned out really well. It’s on DVD/BluRay and it’s streaming and playing in theaters in France right now. Not sure how and when it’ll get out internationally. Thanks! Huge amounts money for each and every one of us this very second! ** Okay. Today I spotlight Kevin Killian’s best novel, and, arguably, his best work in general, I maybe think. Unfortunately, it’s out of print to the point where copies sell for a small fortune. It was supposed to be reprinted at one point, but it never was, I don’t know why. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.