I Demand To Know Who Built This Pig.

 

 

 You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before, in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to the film have been understandably strong but, beyond the fact that it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act, I can't find much information about what it is I'm actually seeing. Who was the act? How was it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like, for example? How many people would we find? Just the one costumed actor, moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? A little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?

 

 The dancing pig is shamed.

  

 And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who built this pig!

 

 

(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)

 I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...

 

 My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...

 

 Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" – that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why, because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.

 

 So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel. 

 

Artists Honour the Supreme Purveyor of the New Baboonist-Chainsaw Tendency

 

chosen by Robin Smith

 

 Pictures from a burnt book taken with a broken phone, to honour an artist who, more than any other, helped me realise my place was among monsters. The book is the 1988 2000AD annual – published in 1987 – and the pictures are from a feature asking its creative team of "droids" to choose their favourite covers from previous year. Of the eighteen images chosen, six are by Kevin O'Neill. Hyperbole is the comic book's stock-in-trade, but "thrill power" was a real thing, and O'Neill drew covers you just really wanted to show people, like something inexplicable found under a hedge or a world opening up in your satchel. Sorry for these poor reproductions but maybe new-comers shouldn't see these too clearly...

 

 

 

chosen by Glenn Fabry

 

chosen by Brendan McCarthy

 

 

chosen by Pat Mills

 

 chosen by Cam Kennedy

 

chosen by Bryan Talbot

 

 And Kevin O'Neill operated on my brain. Thanks, Kevin, and I'm deeply sorry you left today.  

 2000AD honours him here.

Heads Held at Arm's Length

 

 

 

 I'd not noticed the Medusa outside Tate Britain before. Henry C. Fehr's The Rescue of Andromeda isn't the only depiction I've seen in which Perseus and the woman's head he brandishes look identical – I don't know the reason for that (and I haven't bought Natalie Haynes' new book yet, so it might get explained there) – but it's the only depiction I've seen in which Medusa's hair is bound. I suppose that's a sensible precaution, although it's possible Fehr just couldn't be bothered with all the snakes. It's odd that Perseus is also holding a sword though: he's about to turn a sea monster into stone, what was the plan?

 Similarly bound and held at arm's length, I realised, is the head in the centre of Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Not "the Crucifixion" I now note. According to Bacon they're Furies: raging demons from Greek Tragedy broken into the Christian Iconography of a triptych. The artist decided in 1944 that pity was no longer enough I guess. Every time I walk into that room of the Tate I'm fifteen again, seeing those girning horrors in that orange boom for the very first time, and recognising the one in the middle from Swamp Thing's first trip to Hell. "Flutch" Alan Moore called him in that. Pencils by Stephen R. Bisette. Inks by John Totleben. Outside of comics I suppose it's odd for a drawing to have two artists, but I looked at those drawings a lot.

 

 Another triptych was playing in the dark round the corner: John Akomfrah's gorgeous The Unfinished Conversation, a study of the immigrant intellectual life of the Stuart Hall who didn't present It's A Knockout. And thread through the whole building, Hew Locke's mighty Procession. Two new highlights. I can't remember when I last spent as long there – I went Monday; it might be where I picked up the bug – I really recommend going.

Sometimes this blog will just be "The Black Dog".

 Here's a good dream. There's the confidence of a lifetime's work behind it, and when it turned up on television sometime around the late nineties, it immediately became one of my favourite things a person had made. I knew nothing about the person though – Alison de Vere – and that changed little in the intervening decades. She had no channel of her own, no website, and it seemed impossible to find any pictures of her online, unless we count this. Even this was hard to find, and I don't know how long it will stay up, which is why I want to share it while I can, so – quick! – let The Black Dog's nineteen minutes leave their mark on you before they disappear. Alison de Vere died in 2001 it turns out, at the age of 73. I found her obituary this week. Everything I'd guessed about her was wrong.

 

The Terrible Trivium Interviewed

 

"I would describe myself as nicely dressed, and pretty evil."

 

 I'm not sure I've ever written anything that wasn't a little like The Phantom Tollbooth (when I wasn't moving sand from one side to the other with tweezers). But, in the best way, The Phantom Tollbooth was a little like a lot of things worth copying, so maybe I copied its copying too. Milo was a child's Danté, lost in the forest of his life at the prodigious age of ten. Like Wonderland, the world he found on the other side of the Tollbooth was packed with unapologetically academic silliness, and momentous thought experiments. And like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – and I suppose Everyman from Everyman ("Everymun"?) – his way through that world was a handy quest. This Christmas just gone, my sister gave me a beautiful annotated edition of it.

 

 So thanks, Norton Juster, for writing The Phantom Tollbooth, and for teaching me the names of some of the demons, and I'm sorry you're gone. 

Méliès' Munchausen's Missing Missing Mirror Routine

 

 First, let's at least celebrate the surprises of Georges Méliès' first flop, including this Cassandran vision of Snorky from The Banana Splits. Best value though is probably given by the manic dragon marionette left over from Méliès' The Witch, four years earlier. At twelve minutes' running time, The Witch was considerably slower-moving than this, but only because something actually happened in it. There's nothing to wait for when you watch someone dream.

 Source

 

 The sad truth is, despite its aesthetic, when it turned up on the Public Domain Review I didn't even recognise 1911's Baron Munchausen's Dream as Méliès' work. It has the feel of a contractual obligation: the spectacle's there but sloppily thrown on, and on and on, the interactions are uninspired – there's only so long one can watch someone pretend to be poked – and Méliès' trademark jump cuts don't seem to be even trying to match any more. Also, the man himself (pictured above), whose amoral charm, spry timing and alpha goatee would have made him the perfect Baron (pictured below, by Gustave Doré)... 

 

Source

 

... is nowhere to be seen. Instead we have a Baron far more ineffective, overweight, and cleanshaven. Actually we have two, which bring's me to the film's strangest omission: Munchausen's dreams are shown emerging from a giant mirror, but use of an actual mirror probably would have been prohibitively expensive, and definitely have reflected the camera and studio, so instead, Méliès constructs the room's reflection as a separate set, and casts a second actor as Munchausen's reflection to imitate the lead's movements exactly, which he does. Without deviation.

 Throughout the entire film. 

 There is no Mirror Routine.

 Georges Méliès – Georges Méliès! – built and populated a studio-sized mirror set in a film about a dream – BARON MUNCHAUSEN'S dream! – and then used it to... just pretend there was a mirror there. In fairness, it's the film's one genuinely effective effect, so maybe the Baron was cast because he was part of a double act, and this was their specialty. Anyway, here it is, but I won't judge you if you don't stick with it.

 

 

 

 Do you know what I mean by the Mirror Routine? I've read that it was already a staple of the music hall when this film came out, but maybe they just meant this illusion, in which case Méliès would indeed have been – so far as I know – the first to film it. But an illusion's not a routine. What I'm thinking of involves the breaking or setting up of that illusion for comic effect, a little like what Charlie Chaplin would do five years later in The Floorwalker...

 

... only there's no fake mirror here, and it's being shot side on, so the illusion wouldn't work for the audience, even if there was. 

 In 1921, the French comedian Max Linder made 7 Years' Bad Luck, in which a hungover toff's staff try to cover up the breaking of his mirror during a canoodle, by electing someone to dress up as his reflection. This is generally considered to be the cinematic début of what I think of as the Mirror – or Missing Mirror – Routine, and it is excellent...

 

 

 In 1924, Leo McCarey directed the even more excellent Sittin' Pretty with Charlie Chase – last seen on this blog man-spreading admirably in Tillie's Punctured Romance - in which, mistaken for a cop, Chase tries to capture a knife-wielding maniac by going undercover as his reflection. The stakes are higher than in 7 years' Bad Luck, but the rules of the game are the same. The routine starts seven minutes in. I'm posting the whole ten minutes though because, frankly, despite its title-heavy opening, I think this might be a perfect comedy. Maybe I should have just blogged about Sittin' Pretty...

 

 Nine years later, in 1933, Leo McCarey found himself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, which is both generally and fairly considered one of the greatest comedies ever filmed, and just stuck the mirror routine from Sittin' Pretty right in the middle, joke for joke. By this point though, the routine's own familiarity had become one of its ingredient, but this is the version people now know best. And of course it is excellent.

 

 

 I would stop there, if I hadn't on my searches turned up this from Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan. You may have thought there was nothing to add after Duck Soup, but Spike manages it, with an arm through the door. Excellent.

 

 

 Do you know any more? Do you know any earlier? Are they excellent? Let me know in the comments. (Oh, if you're reading this on your phone, there are loads of videos here. I've heard they don't always show on a phone.)

Martian Or Ultra-Martian? Round

    Things just seemed to be naturally heading towards a "Spot the Martian" round, I feel, so below are twenty images I found online of aliens from film and television. Can you identify the ten from Mars? For example: if I showed you the picture above, you would, of course, say "Yes, these are Martians! From the 1951 film Flight To Mars, set on Mars, which is why their helmets have holes at the front, because they live here so they can just breathe normally!" Bonus points if you can name the show or film the image is from, and additional bonus points if you just decide you deserve them, because why not? As many as you like! I'm WiIly Wonka. I'm the Childlike Empress. Infinite Wishes! Aswers will be posted as ever in the comments, where you can also tell me how many points you decided to award yourself. 

 Identify!

 

1.

 

2.

 

 

3.

 

 

4.

 

 

5.

 

 

6.

 

 

7.

 

 

8.

 

 

9.

  

10.

 

11.

 

 

12.

 

 

13.

 

 

14.

 

 

15.

 

16.

 

 

17.

 

 

18.

 

19.

 

 

20.

Hélène Smith's Ultra-Martian Insects

  "Palais martiens" (Martian palaces) by Hélène Smith

 

 This is a view of the surface of Mars, as recorded by Catherine-Elise Müllerin Martigny, a late nineteenth-century Swiss medium who claimed to have conscious recollection not only of previous lives on Earth, but of contemporary life on other planets.

 

"paysage ultramartien avec bipèdes" (Beyond-Martian countryside with bipeds)

 

 The details of her space séances – including "houses with fountains on the roof", and "carriages without horses or wheels, emitting sparks as they glide by" – were recorded by a sympathetic psychology professor from the University of Geneva called Théodore Flornoy. It was Flornoy who suggested Müller adopt the pseudo nym "Hélène Smith". They really were proper séances too: conducted around a table, and with assembled mourners, like Mme. Mirbel, whose dead son Alexis was apparently – according to Smith – now attending lectures at a Martian university. Flornoy records Alexis' newly Martian ghost berating his mother through Smith 'for not having followed the medical prescription which he gave her a month previously: "Dear mamma, have you, then, so little confidence in us ? You have no idea how much pain you have caused me !"' He does not go into detail about the argument which then breaks out between mother and son "by means of the table".

"insecte ultramartien" (Beyond-Martian insect)

 

 From India to the Planet Mars, a full tanslation of Flornoy's account of Smith's visions – including black-and-white plates of these illustrations – was posted on the ever excellent Public Domain Review blog in celebration of the latest Mars landing, which is how I know about it. Also included in the book are examples of Martian typography that Smith took down – essentially French in code, as deciphered by Flornoy:

 

 

 It reminds me of the man who claimed in an interview with Patrick Moore to be able to speak Venusian, although the latter was adamant that the process by which his particular aliens communicated was mechanical, not mental – "through rays" – and he'd never personally heard from a Martian. Nor had he ever been Marie Antionette in a previous life, now I think of it, unlike Smith. (Or if he had, it hadn't come up.)

 

"insecte ultramartien" (another insect from further away than Mars)

 

  It also reminds me of the Voynich Manuscipt, lending credence perhaps to David Reed's theory that the manuscript is just the work of a bored princess in a tower... Colour reproductions of Hélène Smith's sometimes beautiful illustrations (very popular later on with the surrealists) were a little harder to find, until I started looking in French – typing "martien" instead of "martian – and hit upon this post, from which most of these images have come. 

 Here is one exception:

 This I found in a lovely summary of Smith's life on the blog "Burials and Beyond". I believe it shows a Martian accompanied by one of the planet's many "dog-like creatures with heads that looked like cabbages that not only fetched objects for their masters, but also took dictation." Good boy! No wonder he's patting it.

 Here's the real thing: