Antonin Artaud’s Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most extreme, revolutionary and deranged book, and likely now also to prove his most influential in the contemporary moment with the publication by Infinity Land Press of this first complete English-language translation, by Alexis Lykiard.

Dating from the period when Artaud was preparing his legendary ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ experiments, Heliogabalus anatomises and recreates the sperm and blood-constellated life of the infamous Roman emperor who was assassinated by his own guards at the age of 18 after four years spent relentlessly deriding and disintegrating the empire’s power. Artaud asserts that ‘The entire life of Heliogabalus is anarchy in action… fire, gesture, blood, cry… Fanatical, a real king, a rebel, a crazed individualist.’

Artaud explicitly wrote his account of Heliogabalus’s acts as an embodiment of himself and of his own insurgency in art. Three years after the book’s publication, he was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum, emerging only shortly before his death in 1948.

This edition includes an introduction by Stephen Barber and his translations of all of the surviving letters written by Artaud about his work on Heliogabalus.

Translated by Alexis Lykiard
With an introduction by Stephen Barber
Artworks by Martin Bladh
Photographs by Karolina Urbaniak

Hardbound, 196 pages, 190 x 148mm
ISBN 978-1-9160091-1-0
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/heliogabalus-by-antonin-artaud

 

 

From the introduction by Stephen Barber

The grandiose and arbitrary abuse of unlimited power, the overriding infinite desire for immediate sexual ecstasy and oblivion especially through violence and subjugation, and the nonchalant eradication of entire populations, are now ever-more familiar preoccupations. Of all the Roman Emperors, it is the figure of the anarchist child-god Heliogabalus (along with the crazed Caligula and the matricidal Nero), with his ephemeral and implosive reign of gold, blood, semen and excrement, which most intimately infiltrates contemporary manias, panics and desires. The four-year reign of Heliogabalus, who was slaughtered by his own guards at the age of eighteen, was characterised by performances and spectacles of incest, sodomy, butchery, debauchery, and an anarchic ridicule for all powers of government. Of all the many responses to the Roman Emperors, it is Antonin Artaud’s extraordinary account of the life and work of Heliogabalus which most exactly aligns those forces of uncontrollable uproar with the seisms that now seize and impel contemporary voided empires, corporealities, audiences and art.

 

 

EXTRACTS

If there was around the corpse of Heliogabalus, tombless, its throat cut by his police force in his palace latrines, a heavy flow of blood and excrement, there was around his cradle a heavy flow of sperm. Heliogabalus was born in an era when everybody slept with everybody; and it will never be known when or by whom his mother was actually impregnated. For a Syrian prince like him, consanguinity came from the mother’s side; – and as regards mothers, around this newborn son of a charioteer was a pleiad of Julias; – and whether or not practising when in power, all these Julias were highclass whores.

The father to them all, to the female wellspring of this river of rape and infamy, must, before he became priest, have been a coachman, since otherwise it would be incomprehensible – the zealousness which Heliogabalus, once enthroned, put into being buggered by charioteers.

 

 

A mass of gold flung into a pit fed by the Cyclopeans, at the very instant the Grand High Priest frantically ravages a vulture’s throat and drinks its blood, intimates a theory about the alchemical transmutation of feelings into forms and forms to feeling, according to the ancient Egyptians’ sacred ritual.

But to this notion of bloodletting and the material transmutation of forms there corresponds an idea of purification. It has to do with isolating the very essence of any sensual ecstasy experienced momentarily and individually by the priest, so that this explosion and this rapid outburst of frenzy may return, unencumbered by matter, to the first principle from which it’s been born.

Then there are the innumerable rooms consecrated to a single action or even to one simple gesture, with which the underbelly of the temple and its rumbling bowels seem to be crammed. The rite of ablution, the rite of abandon, diversion, renunciation; the rite, in every sense, of absolute nakedness; the rite of the biting power and unforeseen bursting forth of the sun, parallelling the sight of a wild boar; the rite of the savagery of the Alpine wolf and that of the stubbornness of the ram; the rite of the warm zephyrs and that of the great solar conflagration at the time when the first male scored his victory over the serpent; all these rituals, in ten thousand chambers, are observed daily or monthly, biennially, – they link a robe to a gesture, a stride to a spurt of blood.

 

 

With hindsight one can pour scorn upon the blood-drenched rites of the Tauroboli, to which – in a sort of mystical line whose course has never been superseded, running from the High Plateaux of Iran to the exclusive precincts of Rome – the adepts of the Mithraic cult devoted themselves; one can hold one’s nose in horror at the mingled emanation of blood, sperm, sweat and menses, combined with that intimate stench of putrefying flesh and unclean sex rising from the human sacrifices; one can exclaim in disgust at the sexual pruritus of the women stimulated to frenzy by the sight of a member freshly torn off; one can deplore the craziness of people entranced, who, from the rooftops of the houses into which the Galli flung their members, tossed them down onto the shoulders of women’s garments, the while invoking their gods; which is not to say that all these rites didn’t contain a certain amount of violent spirituality that went beyond their sanguinary excesses.

If in the religion of Christ heaven is one myth, in the religion of Elagabalus at Emesa heaven is a reality, but a reality that acts like another, and reacts dangerously upon that other. All these rituals unify heaven – heaven or what is separated from heaven, man or woman, under the sacrificial knife.

That is because there are in heaven gods, forces in other words, which are seeking only to swoop down.

The force that builds up tidal waves, that makes the sea lap at the moon, that has lava rising from the depths of volcanoes; the force that shakes buildings and creates deserts; the force red and unpredictable that sends thoughts like so many crimes seething through our heads, and crimes innumerable, like lice; the force that supports and aborts life – these are concrete manifestations of an energy whose heavier aspect is the Sun.

 

 

In the sun, there’s war, Mars – the sun is a warrior god; and the ritual of the Gallus is a rite of war: man and woman melted in blood, at the cost of bloodshed.

In the abstract war of Heliogabalus, in his battle of principles, in his war of semblances, there is human blood as in real war, not abstract blood, unreal blood of the imaginary, but real blood that flowed and can flow; and if Heliogabalus shed no blood in defence of territory, he paid with his own for his poetry and ideas.

The entire life of Heliogabalus is anarchy in action, since Elagabalus the unitary god who brings together again man and woman, the hostile poles, the ONE and the TWO, is the end of contradictions, the elimination of war and anarchy, but by way of war, and that’s also – on this earth of contradiction and disorder – the putting into action of anarchy. And anarchy at the point to which Heliogabalus pushes it, is poetry realised.

There is in all poetry an essential contradiction. Poetry is pulverised multiplicity and it produces flames. And poetry, which restores order, first revives disorder, disorder with semblances ablaze; it causes appearances to clash in restoring them to one singular point: fire, gesture, blood, cry.

To restore poetry and order to a world whose very existence is a threat to order, is to bring back war and the permanence of war; it is to bring in a state of enforced cruelty, to arouse a nameless anarchy, anarchy of things and appearances which awaken before sinking anew and melting into unity. But he who arouses this dangerous anarchy is always its first victim. And Heliogabalus is a diligent anarchist who begins by devouring himself, and ends by devouring his excrement.

 

 

Whenever Heliogabalus dresses as a prostitute and sells himself for forty pence at the doors of Christian churches, at the temples of Roman gods, he’s not only seeking the satisfaction of a vice, but humiliating the Roman monarch.

When he appoints a dancer to head his praetorian guard, he’s thereby establishing a sort of incontestable yet dangerous anarchy. He exposes to ridicule the cowardice of the monarchs, his predecessors, the Antonines and the Marcus Aureliuses, and finds that a dancer’s perfectly fit to command a bunch of policemen. He calls weakness strength and theatre, reality. He’s overturning the received order, ideas, the everyday notions of things. His is a meticulous and dangerous anarchy, since he reveals himself to all eyes. To tell the truth he’s risking his own skin. And that’s a courageous anarchist.

He continues his enterprise of the debasement of standards, of monstrous moral disorganisation, in choosing his ministers by the enormousness of their members.

“He placed at the head of his night watch”, says Lampridius, “the charioteer Gordius, and made chief steward a certain Claudius, who was censor of morals; all other preferments were dependent upon the outstanding size of member of those recommended. He appointed as collectors of the five per cent inheritance tax a muleteer, an athlete, a cook and a locksmith.”

It didn’t prevent his taking personal advantage of this disorder, this shameless slackening of morals, nor of making a habit of obscenity; and into broad daylight, like a maniac and a man obsessed, he brought what is normally kept hidden.

 

 

There’s a strange rhythm to the cruelty of Heliogabalus; this initiate does everything with art and everything is doubled. I mean that he does everything on two levels. Each of his gestures is double-edged.

Order, Disorder,

Unity, Anarchy,

Poetry, Dissonance,

Rhythm, Discordance,
Grandeur, Childishness,

Generosity, Cruelty.

From the top of the newly erected towers of his temple to the Pythian god, he scatters corn and male members.

He feeds a castrated people.

There are certainly no theorbos, no tubas, no orchestras of citharas accompanying the castrations he decrees, but which he decrees each time like so many personal castrations, and as if it were Elagabalus Himself being castrated. Sacks of male sexes are cast from the tops of the towers with the cruellest abundance on the day of the festival of the Pythian god.

I couldn’t swear to it, but an orchestra of citharas or squeaky-stringed, hard-bellied nebels might have been concealed somewhere in the darkest cellars of the spiral towers, so as to drown the shrieks of the parasites being castrated; but these shrieks of martyred men almost simultaneously match the acclamations of a rejoicing populace to whom Heliogabalus distributes the equivalent of several fields’ worth of corn.

Good, evil, blood, sperm, rose-wines, embalming oils, the costliest perfumes, all create, alongside the generosity of Heliogabalus, innumerable irrigations.

 

 

Letter to Jean Paulhan
1 June 1934

Dear friend,

With boredom, I notice that you understand me less and less, and from my side of things, I no longer understand your reactions. Supreme Truth: I’m looking only for that – but when someone starts to talk to me about what is true, I always ask myself what kind of ‘true’ they’re talking about, and I ask myself to what extent the idea that you can have some kind of delimited, objective truth hides another truth which obstinately eludes all capture, all limits, all localisation, and finally eludes what is called the Real.

So that’s what I wanted to say to you – and while your letter irritated me and made me say to myself: whether it’s true or not shouldn’t matter to him as long as it’s beautiful and as long as you can find in this book the idea of the true and of the Superior Real, I’ll tell you anyway that the dates are true, all of the historical events are true in their origins and then interpreted, with many invented details; I intended that the Esoteric Truths are true in their spirit, while they are often intentionally FALSIFIED in their form – form is really nothing; the imagining is excessive and exaggerated, with desperate affirmations; but then, an atmosphere of panicstrickenness establishes itself in the book, the rational loses its footing, while the mind advances forward, armed to the teeth. In the end, a kind of desperate sincerity underpins the book even in my apparent deformation of the truth, which happens rarely in really being a deformation. I’m not going to say anything more to you – but I’m simply astonished that when you are confronted with a book written with my heart and the skin of my entrails, you dare – you – to ask me if it’s true. I believe that you can either feel it, or not.

I’m going to have to tell you that for the past three weeks, I’ve been overwhelmed by demonstrations of authentic enthusiasm. Whether he’s ‘true’ or not, the figure of Heliogabalus is alive, right through to his depths, I believe, whether those depths are those of the historical figure Heliogabalus or those of a figure who is myself. You’ve liked books of mine which are less alive, less accomplished, less complete, and I don’t understand why this particular book – in which I think I’ve been able to incorporate myself, even with my deficiencies and my excesses, as well as with the qualities that I may possess – provokes your resistance. By contrast, I liked very much this letter from Daumal – forwarded on by Vera – whom many passages in the book touched deeply.

Yesterday evening I took charge of the lighting design for the dances of Helba Huara at the Salle Pleyel. The dances were a triumph in that immense auditorium which was almost full and my lighting design contributed to that success, despite the poor means at my disposal.

Your friend,
ANTONIN ARTAUD

 

 

***

About the Author

 

Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud’s work has a world-renowned status for experimentation across performance, film, sound, poetry and visual art. In the 1920s, he was a member of the Surrealist movement until his expulsion, and formulated theoretical plans across the first half of the 1930s for his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and attempted to carry them through. He made a living as a film actor from 1924 to 1935 and made many attempts to direct his own film projects. In 1936, he travelled to Mexico with a plan to take peyote in the Tarahumara lands. In 1937, preoccupied with the imminent apocalypse, he travelled to Ireland but was deported, beginning a nine-year asylum incarceration during which he continued to write and also made many drawings. After his release in 1946, he lived in the grounds of a sanatorium in Ivry-sur-Seine, close to Paris, and worked intensively on drawings, writings and sound-recordings. He died on 4 March 1948. His drawings have been exhibited on several occasions, notably at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in 2002 and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris
in 2006.

 

Biographies

Alexis Lykiard
Alexis Lykiard (born 1940) is a British writer of Greek heritage, who began his prolific career as novelist and poet in the 1960s. His poems about jazz have received particular acclaim, including from Maya Angelou, Hugo Williams, Roy Fisher, Kevin Bailey and others. He is also known as translator of Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud and many notable French literary figures. In addition, Lykiard has written two highly praised intimate memoirs of Jean Rhys: Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006).
http://www.alexislykiard.com

Stephen Barber
Stephen Barber’s books have been acclaimed as ‘brilliant, profound and provocative’ by The Times newspaper in the UK, and he has been called ‘a writer of real distinction’ and ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’ by The Independent newspaper. The Sunday Times newspaper hailed his books as ‘exhilarating and disquieting’.

He is the author of many fiction and non-fiction books, including studies of Antonin Artaud, Pierre Guyotat, Jean Genet and Eadweard Muybridge. Among his recent books are England’s Darkness (SunVision Press) and Berlin Bodies (Reaktion Books). He has also collaborated on books with the poet Jeremy Reed and the photographer Xavier Ribas. His books have been translated into many languages and have won numerous prizes and awards. He is currently a professor of art and film at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London.
https://stephenbarber.me/

Martin Bladh
Martin Bladh is a Swedish-born artist of multiple mediums. His work lays bare themes of violence, obsession, fantasy, domination, submission and narcissism. Bladh is a founding member of the post-industrial band IRM, the musical avant-garde unit Skin Area and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. His published work includes To Putrefaction, Qualis Artifex Pereo, DES, The Hurtin’ Club and Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome and Marty Page. He lives and works in London.
http://www.martinbladh.com/

Karolina Urbaniak
Karolina Urbaniak is a visual artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Urbaniak’s published work includes To Putrefaction, 2014, Altered Balance – A Tribute to Coil, 2014/15, The Void Ratio, 2015, Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, 2018 and Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead, 2018. Her recent multimedia projects include the soundtrack for Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome and the audio/visual installation On The New Revelations of Being inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud. She lives and works in London.
http://karolinaurbaniak.com/

 

 

https://www.infinitylandpress.com/

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. The writer Rob Halpern has written an interesting essay about New Narrative pioneer Bruce Boone’s and my books in the new issue of Tripwire, and anyone can read it in pdf form if anyone is interested (starting on p. 224). There’s also a special section on the amazing writer Renee Gladman and work by all kinds of excellent authors like Robert Gluck, Isabel Waidner, Julia Bloch and many others. Here. ** JM, Hey! Thanks a lot, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Here’s hoping LA-ers pony up for your no doubt great booty before it’s too late. ** _Black_Acrylic, Very happy you liked them. I don’t think that’s a facile comparison at all. I think it’s only interesting to think about club environmental transformation and abstract films in cahoots. Have a great weekend! ** Steve Erickson, That was my situation with WWD until just recently too. Everyone, Steve Erickson weighs in on ‘the Quad’s June series of ’70s and ’80s queer German cinema’ in a place that can be accessed through this. Don’t know about ‘Dare to Stop Us’, or rather didn’t until now. It’s a fiction film, I’m guessing? I’ll look into it. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Obviously very happy that the intro/post on WWD stuck with you. I’m glad Julien Calendar is now officially back on the live circuit. That does sound like a tricky and vexing space. Can’t think of any excuse for the fully lit aspect at the very least. No, I don’t believe I’ve even heard of ‘Red Shift’. Of course I’ll a do a hunt to see what’s what. Very interesting. Thank you for the good thoughts. It’s inescapably dire. I don’t really want to go into it because it requires a complicated explanation that isn’t suited to this situation, but, once it settles, it’ll be easier (or something) to elucidate about. Hope your weekend rules. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. I’m very happy you liked his work. Me too, I mean obviously. Happily packed or unpacked weekend ahead? ** Misanthrope, We get those kinds of rain storms here a lot. Not recently because it’s fucking summer, but in most seasons Paris gets rain bursts most days. We’ve crept up into almost horrible heat here, but it’s supposed to get bored with Paris and go fuck with Germany or somewhere starting tomorrow. The talent to save up money is a real talent that I do not have, so respect to Kayla. That place by Hyde Park does sound like quite a bargain. I’m sure there must be a catch, but it’s hopefully a catch that you/we laissez faire Americans won’t even notice. Ah, LPS is up to his old … I was going to say tricks but it’s more like a lifestyle, I guess. Thanks about the Halpern piece. Curious piece. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. My pleasure, and thank you again for giving me an ‘in’ with your video. Any news? Cool you watched ‘The Fall.’ It’s been ages since I saw that one. I think Whitehead considered it his best work. Enjoy your folks. Speech therapist, interesting. I interviewed a few speech therapists ages ago when I was trying to develop my writer ‘voice’ and to get the inexpressible-but-linguistically-present thing finessed. Ha ha, nice old guy exercise. Yours. That’s cool. Oh, man, thank you about that poem. Boy, that’s an ancient one. I think I was 16 or 17 when I wrote it. Amazing that it ended up having anything going for it. The weather is supposed to reenter fairly pleasant territory tomorrow. I don’t know if I know that particular Chris Ware book. I can be bad with titles. I’ll check. He’s pretty amazing. What a completely odd TV ad. So much stuff in it I can’t decode. Huh. Thanks for that. That’s got me weirdly thinking. Have a swell weekend. ** Right. The fine people at Infinity Land Press, whose books are always among the most superbly designed and visually presented out there, are just now putting out the Artaud book you see up there. I believe it’s the first translation of that Artaud text, so it’s a real occasion. Be with the book’s evidence over this weekend and see what that leads you to do. See you on Monday.

 

‘Wheeler Winston Dixon is a masterful film editor. His sensitivity to the movement within the frame and of the camera itself allows for fluidity in his editing that is exuberant and refreshing. He is skillful not only in manipulating the flow of images but the flow of ideas as well. He has assembled his images and juxtaposed them in such a way that their very ordinary nature suddenly becomes extraordinary. It is as though his films tap into our collective unconscious by exploring the surface realities that permeate our lives. Magical realms, pubescent fantasies, dreams of wish fulfillment, all assume strangely mythic proportions through Wheeler’s editing, so even the mundane world we accept so readily begins to look somehow dreamlike and unreal.’ — Bruce Rubin, Associate Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art

“Though he’s best known today as a scholar (his book The Exploding Eye provides a who’s who of 1960s experimentalists), Dixon’s short films…are themselves visual catalogs of underground techniques: snarky Bruce Conner-ish montage, psychoactive Conrad/Sharits flicker effects, and Mekasian home-movie diaries. The distinctive Dixon kick comes from witty edits to far-out music. His loopy Americana remix Serial Metaphysics (1972) grooves to an increasingly trippy reverb and teen portrait The DC 5 Memorial Film (1969) prowls through Charles Ives, while the magnificent acid-structuralist London Clouds (1970) rocks to a Henri Pousseur electronic psych-out. The rich filmic collapse of personal memory into cultural history is summed up at the end of Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), a Fluxus performance set to a Gerard Malanga poetry reading. ‘It will take you a long time,’ intones Malanga, ‘to understand why I wrote poems for you.” — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

‘Wheeler Winston Dixon, the prolific author of books on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema, and film theory, has also been making experimental films of his own for the past three decades. Dixon’s career stretches from the late 1960s to the current day, including early works like The DC Five Memorial Film (1969), which interweaves home movies of Dixon’s 1950s Connecticut childhood with footage shot in 1969 in New York City and at a farm upstate; Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), featuring a Fluxus group-performance piece and a poetry reading by Gerard Malanga; and Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy’s Sinful Life in London (1976), in which a fictional Caroline recovers from a hangover. Other notable early films include Serial Metaphysics (1972), an examination of the American lifestyle recut entirely from existing television advertisements, and What Can I Do? (1993), a rigorous, tender portrait of an elderly woman who holds dinner-party guests in thrall to her difficult family life.’ — Joshua Siegel, The Museum of Modern Art

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Wheeler Winston Dixon Official Website
WWD @ IMDb
WWD @ Vimeo
Wheeler Winston Dixon’s books
WWD @ Senses of Cinema
WWD @ Experimental Cinema
Wheeler Winston Dixon Tolls the Death of the Moguls
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON ON THE LOST ART OF BLACK & WHITE
Crowhurst and Bonemagic – Dedicated To Wheeler Winston Dixon
Audio: WHEELER WINSTON DIXON: THE FILMS OF TERENCE FISHER
SOME NOTES ON STREAMING, BY WHEELER WINSTON DIXON
Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema
Audio: The Spy Whom We Loved: The Enduring Appeal of James Bond

 

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Extras

Frame By Frame: Movie Trailers

Frame By Frame: Film Criticism

Frame By Frame: Camera Moves

Frame by Frame: Minorities in American Cinema

 

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Critic

There can be no doubt that the digitisation of the moving image has radically and irrevocably altered the phenomenon which we call the cinema, and that the characteristics of this transformation leave open an entirely new field of visual figuration. For those who live and work in the post-filmic era – i.e., those who have come to consciousness in the past twenty years – the digital world is not only an accomplished fact, but also the dominant medium of visual discourse. Many of my students remark that the liberation of the moving image from the tyranny of the “imperfect” medium of film is a technical shift that is not only inevitable, but also desirable.

For younger viewers, the scratch-free, grain-free, glossily perfect contours of the digital image hold a pristine allure that the relative roughness of the filmic image lacks. Indeed, by doing away with film, many of my students persuasively argue that we are witnessing the next step in what will be a continual evolution of moving image recording, which, in turn, will be followed by newer mediums of image capture now unknown to us. For others, those of my age, the filmic medium is a separate and sacrosanct domain, and the “coldness” of the digital image, stripped of any of the inherent qualities of light, plastics and coloured dyes, betrays a lack of emotion, a disconnect from the real in the classical Bazinian sense. DVDs are easy to use and cheap to produce, but can’t afford the visual depth and resonance of a projected 35mm filmic image. And, it seems to me, both arguments have valid points and are equally worthy of serious consideration. (cont.)

 

Four Nights of a Dreamer is, for me, one of the most sublime films by Robert Bresson, along with his much-maligned French Resistance drama Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, with a script by Bresson from Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste and incomparably witty dialogue by Jean Cocteau. But while Les Dames is readily available on DVD, Four Nights is not. I saw it when it first opened in New York at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on a gorgeous 35mm print, and was stunned by the film’s sensuous beauty, and its rendition of Paris at night as a city of romance and artistic endeavor, in which the young – giving their lives to love and art – were the film’s undoubted protagonists. (cont.)

 

For most of his long career, Éric Rohmer created a series of ‘moral investigations’ that were resolutely spare and enigmatic in their construction, dealing with matters of the heart, personal intrigues and disappointments, and the vicissitudes of human existence. He began his career shooting on 16mm film, and then as his commercial clout increased, switched to 35mm (with exceptions such as his gorgeous and mostly improvised 1986 feature The Green Ray, shot on 16mm film to keep costs down), but no matter what format Rohmer used, his films remain rooted in the real world, devoid of both spectacle and special effects.

The Lady and The Duke, however, represents a dual departure in both style and structure from Rohmer’s previous work. For the first time, “aside from La Cambrure, a 17-minute film presented at Cannes in 1999”, Rohmer used digital cameras rather traditional 35mm film to capture his chosen images. In addition, Rohmer made extensive use of ‘blue screen’ technology to create non-existent sets through the use of digital backdrops that are, by design, completely stylised and artificial. As Frédéric Bonnaud noted shortly after the film’s release in 2001, “the results are spectacular, recalling early cinema projection techniques and 19th-century magic lantern presentations, as well as the panoramic views of Venetian painting, the canvases of painters like Hubert Robert, and children’s slide shows and shadow play, with vague silhouettes seemingly floating against exterior backdrops.” (cont.)

 

Many years ago, in 1969, when I was working as a writer for Life magazine under editor Thomas Thompson, one of the highlights of my working week came on Monday, when the screening schedule of newly released films would be distributed throughout the office, and we’d all post the list on our respective bulletin boards. In that resolutely pre-digital era, every new release was screened in its original 35mm format at one of the many excellent facilities that existed in Manhattan at the time, and being absolutely omnivorous about film, I would make it a point to attend every single screening, every single day, of absolutely every film that was being released.

And thus it was one day that I found myself in a screening room at Preview Theater, located at 1600 Broadway, sitting in a screening room watching Alain Robbe-Grillet’s debut feature, L’Immortelle. The film absolutely stunned me with its originality and brilliance in every aspect, from its enigmatic screenplay, to the dreamy mise-en-scène. But unlike the much better known Last Year at Marienbad, which Robbe-Grillet scripted but did not direct — Alain Resnais did the honors on that one — for some reason, L’Immortelle never caught on in the states, even on the art house circuit. (cont.)

 

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is a film almost unlike any other. Starring classical harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as Bach, the film tracks the composer through his everyday life as a church organist and composer for hire, and is composed of only about 80 shots for the entire film. Filmed on many of the actual locations of Bach’s life, using period musical instruments, real musicians rather than actors pretending to be musicians, and photographed in 35mm using direct sync-sound recording, the film is truly a one of a kind project. Though Straub is often credited as the sole director of the film, it’s clear to me that it was co-directed by both Straub and Huillet, as a documentary on the making of the film demonstrates. (cont.)

 

When the cinema was first invented, women were responsible for some of the major breakthroughs in the medium, and often advanced to the director’s chair. Such early figures as Alice Guy, Ida May Park, Cleo Madison, and Lois Weber all made films during the silent era, and the impact of their work was considerable. Alice Guy directed what is often considered the first film with a plot, La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy) in 1896, and then went on to direct nearly 1,000 films, of which some 350 survive, as well as developing an early sync-sound process, an equally pioneering color process, and directing some of the first multi-reel films. Lois Weber was one of the most successful and highly paid directors working at Universal during the teens and early 1920s, with such controversial films as Hypocrites (1915), Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Blot (1920).

It was during this period that Dorothy Arzner broke into the film industry, starting out as a stenographer in 1919 at Paramount Studios, rapidly moving up as a screenwriter, and later as a film editor on Fred Niblo’s 1922 version of Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino. As an editor, screenwriter and script doctor, Arzner was much in demand, but Paramount refused to give her the chance to direct a feature film. Incensed, Arzner finally threatened to move to Columbia Pictures, where Columbia’s studio head, Harry Cohn, was actively courting her as a director and scenarist. Dismayed at the prospect of losing her services altogether, Paramount relented. Arzner soon became one of the studio’s most prolific directors, directing such box office hits as Fashions for Women (1927), Ten Modern Commandments (1927), Get Your Man (1927) and The Wild Party (1929), her first sound film, starring the “It” girl, Clara Bow. (cont.)

Many more of Wheeler Winston Dion’s essays and reviews here

 

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Interview
from Senses of Cinema

Gwendolyn Foster: Let’s start with your obsession with movies. When did you first realize that you were interested in movies and the moving picture art form?

Wheeler Winston Dixon: I was born March 12, 1950 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I first realized that I wanted to make movies when I was about four years old. I recall sitting in a crib and looking out the window at a church in the distance. There was a cross on top of the cathedral, and I wanted to capture that image and keep it with me always. That was the first image that I remember, and I guess that was when I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

GF: Did your mom let you play with a still camera? Did you start playing with an 8mm movie camera?

WWD: She gave me a small still camera and I took pictures of my classmates in kindergarten in black and white; this was about 1956. About that same time, when I was about six years old, I got a standard 8mm camera, and started making home movies in earnest, particularly of our cross country trip in 1960, when I shot about three hours of 8mm film, all lost now, and some animated cartoons.

GF: I remember seeing some of your early animation that you made when you were a little kid. Want to talk about them a little bit?

WWD: I first started making animated cartoons in 1956 or ’57, but then I found I couldn’t draw. So that was pretty much the end of the animated cartoons. But I made a bunch of them. One was called Skate Crazy, which was made in 1958. I drew them a frame at a time with crayons and photographed them with this camera that was set up with a homemade animation stand that was built out of a Dewar’s whiskey box. Really a pretty primitive affair. I’d get a friend over to help me color the drawings, because there really were thousands of them to do for a very simple four minute cartoon. People thought that they were more or less like the Tex Avery cartoons from MGM in the 1940s, which I was heavily influenced by. Television started in New York in the early fifties, and I began watching television voraciously; the first thing they ran were old cartoons, and old British movies, because the Hollywood studios were scared of TV at that point, and didn’t want to sell them any movies. So I grew up on Ealing comedies and British “quota quickies,” plus Monogram, PRC, and Republic films, which were sold to TV early on. When I was about 10, somebody gave me a 16mm print of Strange Illusion (1945) a really interesting Edgar G. Ulmer film, and I learned how to thread it in a 16mm projector that someone loaned me for a weekend. I watched the film that one weekend something like 20 times. I just memorized it. Later, I was involved in film societies, and began traveling into New York City to see films, and meet some experimental filmmakers.

GF: Tell me a bit more about these film societies; who was there, what you saw, and the like. With videocassettes, they’re pretty much defunct. But this was all 16mm film projection.

WWD: In New Brunswick, at the Public Library, they screened classic films in 16mm format every Saturday or Friday night, for free. That was when I first saw Len Lye’s films, the Marx Brothers, Maya Deren, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, René Clair. I saw right away that there were two models. There was the Hollywood model, and there was the independent model. The independent model attracted me more, because you didn’t have to deal with all of the sets and the casts and the crew and the money and the overhead. And independent cinema at that time was very cheap to make, so it was a possible alternative. That’s when I got involved in the Co-op, when it was still a pretty fluid scene. When I was about 14, I bought my first Bolex 16mm camera, and from that point on, I began to make 16mm films with optical sound tracks and never looked back.

GF: Did you have any friends that you would show these films and maybe make films too?

WWD: My friends at this point, even when I was 14, were mostly graduate students at Rutgers University. Robert Atwan, Donald McQuade, Mark Gibbons, Dick Arthur, Robert Pingree; these were all people who were passionate about film, and supported my work. These were people who were basically involved in creating stuff, creating art, creating literature. So by the time I was 14, I was already involved with the graduate program at Rutgers University, hanging around a group of graduate students, going to their parties, and dividing my time between that and New York City. When I found the people at Rutgers University, I just walked in on the film screening one day. It was open to the public. I started talking to the projectionist. I said to myself, “This is it. These are the people. I’m talking to them. We’re on the same level here.” And the next thing you know, they drew me into their circle really fast.

GF: Let’s talk about some of the stuff you were interested in at the time.

WWD: Well, I was obsessed with comic books, pop culture, television shows like The Untouchables. American International films like I was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr, 1957) and Invasion of the Saucer Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957). I also really liked a show called Open End, hosted by David Susskind. And at that point, it really was open-ended! It would start at about 10 o’clock at night and run until everyone was exhausted, depending on the topic.

New York television in the ’50s and ’60s was sort of an extension of your living room. It was another living room somewhere, with a camera televising the discussion. Soupy Sales did a live hour-long show every day, which I adored. There were no glitzy sets, no replay graphics, just some people in a room. It was very amateurish, very “from our home to your home.” It was mostly live. Now, in 2003, we’re going back to live TV, but it’s live TV intercut with video clips and other image sources, and it loses its liveness and its immediacy. The interesting thing about ’50s live television was that it was raw. When videotape first came in, you couldn’t edit it, it had to be a straight run; we’re talking the very early ’50s here. So, it was all live and uninterrupted.

So I saw a lot of films, and knew it was my life. From the time I was four or five, I was covering my walls with stills from movies. I knew a lot about movies. I could rattle off statistics. There was no “standard” film history out there. There were no film historians, there were no cult movies. It was really something I was doing on my own.

GF: A lot of these films are really short. How would you describe them? Were they assemblage type of films? Did you use appropriated images or shoot them yourself? Were they structuralist? What kind of films were they?

WWD: Well, Gee Whiz (1966) was shot in color in 8mm, intercut with shots of planes blowing up and Michael Landon turning into a werewolf in I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Then I blew it up to 16mm and released it, without a track. The second silent film, 60 Seconds of the City (1966), was basically just a sort of Bridges-Go-Round (based on Shirley Clarke’s 1958 film of that title) approach to New York City; footage of New York at the time.

Jon (1966) was a 45-minute film starring a guy named Chris Saia, and that was made in 1966. I shot that in Regular 8mm sound, with a Fairchild 8mm sound camera. This was sync sound, the standard 8mm Fairchild camera, and was then considered the technological marvel of the age. It had a magnetic stripe on the side of the film, and took 100′ loads of 8mm film. The sound quality was terrible, but the camera was lightweight, and completely portable. The film was about a 16-year-old kid and his problems in high school; highly autobiographical.

GF: It strikes me that it wasn’t hard to get in on a scene. Was that partially because you were handy with technical equipment, or was it just a really open scene?

WWD: It was an open scene. You could walk in the door, and if you were perceived as being useful, you were allowed to stay. That’s basically it.

GF: Who were some of the other filmmakers hanging around at this time?

WWD: Shirley Clarke; I remember her being very kind to me. Gerard Malanga and I fell in very rapidly. Bob Cowan. Warren Sonbert. Jerry Hiler. Nick Dorsky. Jud Yalkut. John Dowd, a very fine collage artist in the school of Ray Johnson, was working at the Cooperative. Gordon Ball, also a filmmaker, was working at the Co-op, as well. Marie Menken worked at the Time/Life Building. When I was working at the Time/Life Building, Marie Menken would come up and we would sit and talk. Ernie Gehr was working at the Cooperative. He began making films in Super-8. I later met Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland.

I remember running some early reels for my film The Visionaries (1969) at Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow’s loft in New York. Filmmakers would get together and have chamber screenings and run each other’s movies. I mean, basically you had a projector, and you had a wall. We’d all sit around and run each other’s films.

GF: Experimental film now seems so incredibly competitive and so hierarchical. I can never put my finger on what kind of a scene it really was then. Did you all seem like kids running your films, having a good time? Or was it already becoming hierarchical?

WWD: The film scene, when I became aware of it in New York, was very non-hierarchical. Jonas Mekas was publishing his column in The Village Voice called “Movie Journal” saying, in essence, that film should be open to all. There was a long period of the 60s, from ’60 through ’68, where valuations were not made; everyone was considered to be a creative artist with something to say. All styles and methodologies were encouraged; nothing was censored, and there were no ‘schools’ of thought or practice.

One of the things that I’ve done in my book The Exploding Eye is to talk about the people who have been dropped by the wayside, people who were superb filmmakers but have somehow dropped off the radar. Rudy Albers, Rudy Burckhardt, Norman Berg, a lot of great people, some of whom have resurfaced. Yayoi Kusama, who came back after years and years of wandering in the wilderness. Valie Export. Carolee Schneeman. She was pretty notorious during that time. Charlotte Moorman, Steve Anson, Takahiko Iimura, people like that.

But then in 1967, Michael Snow made Wavelength. People were deeply impressed by the film, and saw it as the first film which really played with the structural qualities of the motion picture image. It’s a very sophisticated and accomplished work. There’s no getting around it. But Wavelength suddenly became a model for all other filmmaking. Structuralism took over as a school and dominated independent production for all of the 1970s. Unfortunately, that’s what really killed the ’60s film scene more than anything else.

The critical establishment embraced formalism with a frenzy, and all other styles of filmmaking were thrown out. This marginalized a number of enormously valuable filmmakers, many of whom simply left the scene. Jerome Hiler, for example, never even exhibited his films; he had his first exhibition in 1995. He was making films from 1964 on, but he never screened them, or made prints of them. So, until 1968 it was an open scene. Suddenly it became a very closed scene. The minute the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City closed down, that was the end of it. It turned into Anthology Film Archives, at the Public Shakespeare Theatre, running a closed set of films called “The Essential Cinema,” and suddenly, except for a few places like UP Screen, Millennium, and The Collective for Living Cinema, there was no place to show your films. So that put a real stop to the whole ’60s film scene in Manhattan.

In the sixties we made films about people, about their lives, their concerns, their loves and passions. The seventies were very sleek and empty, more concerned with structure, form, and a certain kind of ascetic rigorousness. I didn’t really care for it; I’m a romantic. It was also the height of disco, which was omnipresent in New York City in the early ’70s, and which, of course, was absolutely brain dead. WKTU, “Disco 92,” played disco around the clock; it was awful. Most people just followed the crowd to Studio 54, but that struck me as really dull and elitist. Everything I was against. But then CBGB’s started putting on The Ramones, Blondie, Television, a lot of interesting New Wave bands, and that was something of a haven. But there was definitely a sense of paradise lost; it was just too good to last.

 

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17 of Wheeler Winston Dixon’s 53 films

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Bits & Pieces (1969)
‘Late one night in the Time/Life Building in 1969, the television speaks.’ — WWD

 

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Children of Light (1969)
‘On The 4th of July in upstate New York, 1969, at a small farm I owned at the time, local children and their parents play with sparklers in the evening – a very simple film.’ — WWD

Excerpt

 

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Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969)
‘The rich filmic collapse of personal memory into cultural history is summed up at the end of Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), a Fluxus performance set to a Gerard Malanga poetry reading. ‘It will take you a long time,’ intones Malanga, ‘to understand why I wrote poems for you.’’ — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

 

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London Clouds (1970)
‘No matter where you arrive in legend, you find yourself at the point of initial departure.” — Wheeler Winston Dixon. ‘His loopy Americana remix Serial Metaphysics (1972) grooves to an increasingly trippy reverb and teen portrait The DC 5 Memorial Film (1969) prowls through Charles Ives, while the magnificent acid-structuralist London Clouds (1970) rocks to a Henri Pousseur electronic psych-out.’ — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

 

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Stargrove (1974)
‘A brief film from 1974 – really an experiment – which uses eight layers of superimposition to create a work of such density that no one image dominates for more than a few seconds.’ — WWD

 

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Gaze (1974)
‘In 1971, I drew a large mural on the wall of my studio – involving painting, tracing, and photo-silkscreens – which was located on the top floor of an abandoned building in New Brunswick, NJ. In 1974, the building was demolished. One morning, just before the demolition crew moved in, I set up my Bolex and shot 100′ of the mural before it was completely destroyed, and here it is. The film is silent; the light is all natural; the film is Ektachrome Reversal 7241, a really beautiful daylight film stock – 2.5 minutes of contemplation.’ — WWD

 

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Numen Lumen (1974)
‘Meditations on light and a window fan for Jerry Hiler and Nick Dorsky.’ — WWD

 

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Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy’s Sinful Life in London (1976)
‘This is a short film based on an incident I read in the National Enquirer, a really innocuous item about Caroline partying late at night with Erskine Guinness, the heir to the Guinness Brewery fortune. I imagined Caroline waking up the next morning, recovering from the excesses of the night before, and trying to mix some orange juice in a blender, but being so out of it that she used three cans of gin instead of water to make the concentrate into OJ. It’s an odd film.’ — WWD

 

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Distance (1987)
‘With Richard Lea, Jane Back-Patton. Memories of a long-ago summer, London 1968; morning tea and departures. Produced with the assistance of the New Arts Lab, London.’ — WWD

Excerpt

 

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Slap (2015)
‘Made entirely from found materials, this film documents the moment before impact, the slap itself, and then recapitulates the moment leading up to the slap – three times. This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.’ — WWD

 

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A Typical Day (2016)
‘Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you’re doing it.’ — Srikumar Rao

 

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The Ninth Circle (2017)
‘At the bottom of the well Dante finds himself on a huge frozen lake. This is Cocytus, the Ninth Circle, the fourth and the last great water of Hell. Here, frozen in the ice, are punished sinners guilty of treachery against those to whom they were bound by special ties. The ice is divided into four concentric rings marked only by different positions of the damned within the ice. This is Dante’s symbolic equivalent of the final guilt. The treacheries of these souls were denials of love and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead center of the ice will serve to express their natures . . . As they denied all human ties, so are they bound only by the unyielding ice.’ — John Ciardi

 

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Sleep (2017)
‘This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.’ — WWD

 

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Catastrophe Series (2018)
‘Here’s a series of videos dealing with catastrophic events, stylized and accelerated to about 1 minute or so each. “The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.’ — Simon Winchester

 

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Access Granted / Access Denied (2018)
‘New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform humankind. The extent to which that transformation is positive will depend on how we navigate the risks and opportunities that arise along the way.’ — Klaus Schwab

 

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Prison State (2018)
‘In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.’ -– Wikipedia

 

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The Language of Dreams (2019)
‘Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of images. And in real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.’ -– Federico Fellini

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** JM, Hi. Yes, actually, I think Deleuze becomes more relevant every day. I’m happy the blog is bolstering you, and I’m sorry to hear about the thin, sad times. Things are rough and weird at the moment on my end. Long story. I’m fine, but some work I’m doing is in limbo and endangered, and someone both close to me and in involved in the work appears to be dying. What a world. Take care, pal. ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, I think you’re probably pretty safe. Look forward to the review. Everyone, Steve Erickson has reviewed Torche’s forthcoming album ‘Admission’ here. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I don’t know that I agree with everything Deleuze writes in this book, but I find all of it inspiring and exciting, and I haven’t thought he was wrong so far. I’ve read a little Oudart, but I need to read more. ** KK, Hi. I’m in-between writing right now, in-between writing for the film and TV projects, but it’s too short a break to get back into my novel, which, yes, I started but haven’t worked on in a focused way for a few years. I do want to finish it, hopefully starting ASAP. I do seem to be very driven, writing- and work-wise. But I think it’s just a happy accident of my biology or something. That’s very nice of Joseph Grantham. I like his work. Wow, cool story of how you got ‘Period’. That’s very cool to hear. Happy that you’re writing, and good luck with the waiting on the venue responses. I hope they’re diligent. You enjoy your enjoy early weekend big time too! ** DJWaKeasaton, Ha. Uh, no, I hated seafood with all my heart and soul even when I last ate meat/fish as young teen. I’m totally cool when eating with people who are downing meat and fish and stuff across a table, but when they’re eating oysters or clams or lobster or that kind of thing, I feel ill. You sound like a totally revved song constructor, yes! I suppose you’ve read about the horror movie Danzig directed that’s supposed to be the most embarrassingly terrible movie ever made or something. ‘The Room’ of its generation, etc. If it ends up on youtube, I’m there with finger on the FF. There are awesome new films, but you have to really hunt them down, and I’m just guessing that the hunt is especially hard in Florida, but maybe that’s just northern naivete. Oh, twink assassin, back cracking … I’m so there. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Cool, yeah, ‘The Conformist’ is amazing, right? I’m happy the blog helped lead you to it. Yes, what do I know, but pushing for a change in your treatment seems like a no brainer? There’s always the possibility that consultants get complacent and unambitious and too accustomed to the easy answer of staying the course. Yeah, Ben, I encourage you to press for what the possibilities are and to urge them to up their game. ** Misanthrope, That’s some rain, it would seem, if your poetry is at all accurate. Our fireworks are on the 14th. They’re already turning Concorde into a giant VIP area for the parade and all of that. I’m getting sympathy sweat and lethargy just reading about your temperature. Hang tight. Or loose. ** liquoredgoat, Hey, D! Thanks about ‘Long Gone’. I’ve never read Ottessa Moshfegh as far as I know. Huh. I’ll try to hunt down that short fiction collection. Thanks, buddy. I hope things are thoroughly good and sharp with you. ** Okay. I only knew Wheeler Winston Dixon’s very fine film writing until Mr. E mentioned that there was a screening of his films in LA, whereupon I went on a discovery mission re: his films, and I liked them very much, so I made a post, and that’s the story. Check out what he does if you don’t know it, or, obviously, even if you already do. Excellent stuff. See you tomorrow.