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Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
We tend to think of cinema as a modern medium, quintessentially 20th century, but the modern medium was born in the 19th century, and the heyday of the Silent Age (the 1920s) was closer to the...
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Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
Philosophy from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). I’ve procrastinated for an entire year over the idea of writing something about Hugh Ferriss and now this marvellous Flickr set has forced my hand....
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The Evanescent City
The cover of The Evanescent City shows a night view of Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few remaining structures from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that was held in San...
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Missing scenes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis rediscovered
Missing scenes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis rediscovered
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Tunnel 228
Lightning & Kinglyface’s paper forest; photo by Jeff Moore. Tunnel 228 is a collaboration between Kevin Spacey in his position as artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre, and experimental theatre...
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Metropolis, mother of science fiction movies, reborn in Berlin
Metropolis, mother of science fiction movies, reborn in Berlin
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Weekend links 13
• Watch the trailer for the newly-restored version of Fritz Lang’s masterwork, Metropolis. • My cover design for Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch was voted best cover in the 2010 Spinetingler Awards. • Figment...
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Weekend links 19
Peafile (2006) by Shawn Smith; plywood, ink, acrylic paint. • Surreal Friends, an exhibition of work by Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK....
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A Secret Wish by Propaganda
A Secret Wish (1985). Design by the London Design Partnership. The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns — William Blake It’s a hallmark of musical obsession when you find yourself...
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Metropolis!
Design by Boris Bilinsky (1927). The restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) was released in the UK this week by Eureka Video and my head is still spinning from having finally seen the...
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Ballet Mécanique
A film to round off a week of connected posts. Ballet Mécanique (1924) is more Dada than Surrealist if you want to get strict about the taxonomy, but the latter movement grew out of the former, and...
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Weekend links 107
Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe. • “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends:...
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Weekend links 117
Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky. Above and below: samples from Die Lux-Lesebogen-Sammlung, an exhibition of booklets for young people published by Sebastian Lux from 1946–1964. All were...
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Rackham silhouettes
Another recent work-related discovery, this edition of the tale of Sleeping Beauty was published in 1920. The text is by CS Evans, and the book is illustrated throughout by Arthur Rackham who forgoes...
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Dr Mabuse posters
This picture of a séance in the 1920s circulates endlessly in the Tumblr labyrinth, usually without attribution so many of the people seeing it won’t be aware that it’s a still (or a set photo) from...
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The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss
Crowding Towers. The work of architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss (1889–1962) has appeared here before. The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) was a major influence on the architectural style I deployed in...
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Uncharted islands and lost souls
The pulp fiction of the early 20th century favoured remote or uncharted islands as locations for the bizarre and the fantastic; in isolated jungles all manner of savage and grotesque behaviour could...
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Einstein on the Beach
Well this was a revelation. Einstein on the Beach (1976) is Philip Glass’s first opera, a collaboration with theatrical producer Robert Wilson, and the only Glass opera with which I’m familiar. With a...
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Blade Runner vs. Metropolis
Given the chronology this should really be “Metropolis vs. Blade Runner” but most people are more familiar with Ridley Scott than Fritz Lang so I’ve let Blade Runner determine the order of the shots....
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In Germany before the war
1: Fritz Haarmann (1879–1925) Arrow shows Haarmann’s attic residence in Rote Reihe, Hanover. Haarmann was one of several serial murderers haunting Weimar Germany, variously nicknamed “the Butcher of...
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Weekend links 323
Mescaline Woods (1969) by Gage Taylor. • The soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth will be released for the first time next month in a double-disc set (CD & vinyl). This isn’t, as some people...
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Weekend links 421
The Death of American Spirituality (1987) by David Wojnarowicz. • Dau: “Art imitating life on an unprecedented scale”. Siddhant Adlakha on a colossal Russian feature-film project that sounds like a...
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Weekend links 494
Aurora Borealis (1865) by Frederic Edwin Church. • December is over-stuffed with enervating cultural lists, most of them reminding you of things which received enough attention earlier in the year....
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Chance encounters on the dissecting table
In times of great uncertainty about our mission, we often looked at the fixed points of Lautréamont and De Chirico, which sufficed to determine our straight line. André Breton, Surrealism and...
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Weekend links 528
The Rhinoceros (after 1620) by Albrecht Dürer. • “Today—Tolkien, Lovecraft, Miéville and M John Harrison!” Paul StJohn Mackintosh at Greydogtales explores HP Lovecraft’s lack of interest in fictional...
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The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse
Among the weekend’s viewing was the third and final film in Fritz Lang’s Mabuse cycle, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). This was also Lang’s final feature, made after his return to Germany in...
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Hands with a mind of their own
My weekend viewing included two films based on The Hands of Orlac (1920), a novel by Maurice Renard. This is one of those books that remains little read and seldom discussed even though its central...
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Weekend links 602
High Times, May 1980. Cover art by Frank Frazetta. • Desperately Seeking Mothman: “The Scythian Lamb, after all, was equal parts Venus flytrap and baby lamb, a mysterious woolly gourd,” says Tara...
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