In 1963, Belgian writer, painter and mystic Henri Michaux collaborated with film maker Eric Duvivier on Images Du Monde Visionnaire. It was produced by Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz as an educational tool to demonstrate the visual effects of mescaline and hashish. The film was based on Michaux’s experiences with psychedelics which he documented in his books Miserable Miracle, L’Infini Turbulent and Paix Dans Les Brisements.
Michaux denounced the film as not being truly representative of the psychedelic experience. He felt that Duvivier, who had never taken mescaline, had no grasp of the drug experience and that film itself was incapable of replicating the visionary aspect of tripping.
When it was proposed to make a film about mescaline hallucinations, I have declared, I have repeated and I repeat it again, that that is to attempt the impossible. Even in a superior film, made with substantial means, with all one needs for an exceptional production, I must state beforehand the images will be insufficient. The images would have to be more dazzling, more instable, more subtle, more changeable, more ungraspable, more trembling, more tormenting, more writhing, infinitely more charged, more intensely beautiful, more frighteningly colored, more aggressive, more idiotic, more strange.
With regard to the film’s speed, it should be so high that all scenes would have to fit in fifty seconds.
While I am sympathetic to Michaux’s frustrations on a spiritual level, I disagree with him about film not being up to the task of duplicating the psychedelic experience on a visual level. Of all the art forms, cinema can come closest to bending the mind in ways that approximate the psychedelic experience. The best examples of which are the films of Stan Brakhage and fragments of James Cameron’s Avatar.
More of an avant-garde tone poem than educational film, here is Images Du Monde Visionnaire in its entirety:
The actress Billie Whitelaw couldn’t imagine what it was like. The theater darkened, apart from a spotlight on Whitelaw’s mouth, as she delivered Samuel Beckett’s babbling stream of consciousness Not I.
It’s one of the most disturbing images in theater: a disembodied mouth, telling its tale “at the speed of thought.” It takes incredible discipline and strength for the actor to perform: the text isn’t easy to learn, its full of difficult instructions, pauses, repetitions and disjointed phrases; add to this the speed of delivery, which means the actor has to learn circular breathing in order to deliver the lines. Jessica Tandy once gave a performance that lasted twenty-four minutes, only to be told by Beckett that she had “ruined” his play. And let’s not forget the rigidity of the piece: the actor’s lack of mobility, the mouth tethered to a spotlight, all of which says everything for Whitelaw’s brilliance as an actor.
Here, Whitelaw introduces Not I in the short documentary, A Wake for Sam, and explains the effect it had on her:
Plenty of writers can write a play about a state of mind, but [Beckett] actually put that state of mind on the stage, in front of your eyes. And I think a lot of people recognized it. I recognized it. When I first read it at home, I just burst in to tears, because I recognized the inner scream. Perhaps that’s not what it is, I don’t know, but for me, that’s what I recognized, an inner scream, in there, and no escaping it.
Jean Cocteau was disingenuous when he wrote, “It is often said that The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète) is a surrealist film. However, Surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it.”
Cocteau was wrong. Surrealism not only existed, it was a major artistic and cultural force.
The idea of a film had its germination during a house party given by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles at Hyeres in 1929. Georges Auric, Cocteau’s lifelong musical collaborator, surprised his hosts by announcing that he wanted to compose the score for an animated cartoon. Cocteau was asked on the spot to provide a scenario. After some discussion, the Noailles agreed to give Cocteau a million francs to make a real film with a score by Auric. This became The Blood of a Poet, still one of the most widely viewed of all Cocteau’s screenworks. Cocteau described its disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux as “a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body.”
By then, Max Ernst had painted the first major Surrealist painting, “The Elephant Celebes” in 1921, and André Breton had written the Surrealist Manifesto, in 1924.
Blood of a Poet can’t even be classed as the first Surrealist film, as Entr’acte had been made by René Clair, in 1924; The Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le clergyman) arguably the first true Surrealistic film, directed by Germaine Dulac, and written by Antonin Artaud, was made in 1928; and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí had made two landmark Surrealist films, Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Âge d’Or (1930), by the time Cocteau was ready to put his thoughts on celluloid.
While there are undoubted references to Surrealist imagery (i.e. the lips on the artist’s hand), The Blood of a Poet shouldn’t be tied into any group or movement, for it is a film very much centered in Cocteau’s artistic sensibilities:
The Blood of a Poet like so much of what Cocteau created, abounds in autobiographical motifs: the macho Dargelos and the snowball fight, the opium smoker, the poet with his sexual stigmata, and the gunshots that, intentionally or not, echoed his father’s suicide long before.
Like all great artists, Cocteau sourced ideas from what was around him, what was new, to create his own distinct artistic vision. Of course, such magpie instincts left him open to the criticism of dilettantism, which was unfair, when considered against the range and diversity of his output as artist, writer, film-maker, designer, poet and man-about-town.
It was while out on the tiles at his favorite hot-spot “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” that Cocteau met the model, and later photographer, Lee Miller. Cocteau was casting for his film, and Miller breathlessly volunteered her services. It was her only film, and she would later describe the difficulties in making the film:
Feral Benga, the black jazz dancer who played the angel, sprained his ankle and became an angel with a limp. Cocteau put a star on Enrique Riviero’s back to cover an old bullet wound from the pistol of some cuckolded husband. The mattresses used to soundproof the studio walls were, unfortunately for the cast, infested with ravenous fleas and bedbugs. When the “bull” (really an ox) rented from an abattoir arrived at the studio with only one horn, Cocteau made a second one himself.
The film was financed by Charles, Vicomte de Noailles at a cost of one million francs. The Vicomte and his wife agreed to appear in the film, a scene where they talked amongst themselves and, on cue, began applauding. However, Cocteau intercut this footage with a another sequence, which ended in a suicide. Upon seeing the completed film, they refused to let Cocteau release it with their scene included. It was therefore re-shot with Barbette, the well-known female impersonator, and some extras.
Prior to its release, there was further controversy when it was rumored the film was filled with hidden symbolism:
Cocteau himself always denied the presence of hidden symbolism in the film, but word got about that it had anti-Christian undercurrents. This greatly distressed the Noailles. After the scandal caused the Viscount to be expelled from the elegant Jockey Club, and even brought threats of excommunication from the Church, they forbade Cocteau to allow public release of The Blood of a Poet for over a year.
It is often said that The Blood of a Poet is a surrealist film. However, surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it. the interest that it still arouses probably comes from its isolation from the works with which it is classified. I am speaking of the works of a minority that has opposed and unobtrusively governed the majority throughout the centuries. This minority has its antagonistic aspects. At the time of Le sang d’un poète, I was the only one of this minority to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth.
I applied myself only to the relief and to the details of the images that came forth from the great darkness of the human body. I adopted them then and there as the documentary scenes of another kingdom.
That is why this film, which has only one style, that, for example, of the bearing or the gestures of a man, presents many surfaces for its exegesis. Its exegeses were innumerable. If I were questioned about any one of them, I would have trouble in answering.
My relationship with the work was like that of a cabinetmaker who puts together the pieces of a table whom the spiritualists, who make the table move, consult.
The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes.
He was the bad boy artist whose life inspired film-makers and writers to cast him as a sexual revolutionary or a proto-anarchist of the Renaissance, but the release of his police files suggest the genius painter Caravaggio was more of a gang member with a list of petty crimes and one murder to his name.
An exhibition of documents, at Rome’s State Archives, details Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s numerous run-ins with the police, all of which are described in “handwritten police logs, legal and court parchments,” the BBC reports:
The picture the documents paint is that of an irascible man who went about town carrying personal weapons - a sword and dagger, and even a pistol - without a written permit, boasting that he enjoyed the protection of the ecclesiastical authorities who commissioned some of his most famous works.
He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.
All these events are documented with eyewitness accounts in this collection of yellowing parchments - difficult to decipher for the non-specialist, but rich in contemporary detail for a skilled archivist.
The documents provide a completely new account of his most serious brawl in May 1606 in which he killed a certain Ranuccio Tommassoni. This brawl - just like a modern-day clash between warring gangs - was arranged in advance by eight participants who have all now been named.
Caravaggio and his three companions, one a Captain in the Papal army, met their rivals at a pallacorda court in the Campo Marzio area, where the artist lived. (Pallacorda was a game played with a ball with a string attached - an early form of tennis, which some older Romans still remember seeing played in the streets of the capital in the mid-20th Century.)
Some biographers have suggested that there may have been an argument over a woman, but the text of the court report suggests the quarrel broke out over a gambling debt. Caravaggio killed Ranuccio and fled the city.
One of Caravaggio’s own supporters was seriously injured. Taken to prison, he was subsequently put on trial, and the new evidence emerges from the report of this trial.
Caravaggio himself fled south to Malta and to Sicily where he received important new art commissions. The death sentence from Pope Paul V - whose portrait he had just painted - was imposed in absentia for this offence.
About 17 o’clock [lunchtime] the accused, together with two other people, was eating in the Moor’s restaurant at La Maddalena, where I work as a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil, and I told him to smell them, which would easily enable him to tell the difference.
He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my moustache, injuring me slightly… and then he got up and grabbed his friend’s sword which was lying on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it, but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint…
The documents also shed light upon Caravaggio’s death at Porto Erole, north of Rome in July 1610. He did not die alone on a beach after escaping from his creditors and the police, as some of his biographers say, but in a hospital bed.
Only 38 years old, he was on his way back to the city from the south in the belief that his powerful friends had secured a pardon for his offences.
The documents that record Caravaggio’s life in Rome are written in a mixture of Latin legal jargon and racy Italian vernacular that any modern Roman could easily understand.
They needed careful restoration, as parts of the parchment were breaking up - the acid in the ink literally devouring the pages.
Detail of case against Michelangelo De Caravaggio charged with illegal possession of a sword and a dagger.
The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don’t look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.
Historian Schama wrote of the great painter:
“In Caravaggio’s time it was believed that artists were given their talent by God to bring beauty to the world and to put mortal creatures in touch with their higher selves or souls. Caravaggio never did anything the way it was supposed to be done.
In this painting of the victory of virtue over evil it’s supposed to be David who is the centre of attention, but have you ever seen a less jubilant victory? On his sword is inscribed “Humilitus Occideit Superbium”, that is, humility conquers pride. This is the battle that has been fought out inside Caravaggio’s head between the two sides of the painter that are portrayed here.
For me the power of Caravaggio’s art is the power of truth, not least about ourselves. If we are ever to hope for redemption we have to begin with the recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David.”
Hauntingly-beautiful images of iconic landmarks created by layering similar photos from hundreds of tourist photographs found on the Internet. Each image contains up to 300 shots.
Switzerland-based artist Corinne Vionnet is the mastermind behind this ghostly project entitled “Photo Opportunities.”
Here’s an odd video short titled “Butterflies” directed by Sandro Miller, design/VFX by Gentleman Scholar and starring John Malkovich. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information on “Butterflies” except for the folks who created it listed on its Vimeo page.
Can it be? Why, yes it can… announcing the LIVE debut of YouTube weirdo, Tonetta!
Yes, this Friday at Show Cave here in Los Angeles, the pervy, thong-wearing purveyor of his own special flavor of nasty ass R&B will be exhibiting his art and video work and doing a special live performance in celebration of his new album 777 Vol. II. So what if he looks like he’s got someone chained up in his basement, Tonetta knows how to party.
Show Cave, 3501 Eagle Rock Blvd , Los Angeles, CA.
Below, Tonetta wants to be your “drain” if you know what I mean and I think you do:
I’ve seen stills and gifs (Kiss went viral) of James Kuhn’s bizarre face paintings but until today had not had the pleasure of viewing his videos. They’re extraordinarily creative and in some cases genuinely spooky.
Kuhn describes himself as “an artist, face paint illusionist, drag queen, performance artist, and full time Christian.” For the past couple of years he’s been creating a new face painting every day. You can view his work on his YouTube channel. Here’s a couple of my favorites:
