Hokusai Manga (early 19th century)

Image | January 27, 2009May 25, 2018 | Paul Greer

“The Hokusai Manga (北斎漫画, “Hokusai’s Sketches”) is a collection of sketches of various subjects by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Subjects of the sketches include landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and the supernatural. The word manga in the title does not refer to the contemporary story-telling manga, as the sketches in the work are not connected to each other. Block-printed in three colours (black, gray and pale flesh), the Manga comprise literally thousands of images in 15 volumes, the first published in 1814, when the artist was 55. The final three volumes were published posthumously, two of them assembled by their publisher from previously unpublished material. The final volume was made up of previously published works, some not even by Hokusai, and is not considered authentic by art historians.”

“The first volume of ‘Manga‘ (Defined by Hokusai as ‘Brush gone wild’), was an art instruction book published to aid his troubled finances. Shortly after he removed the text and republished it.The Manga evidence a dedication to artistic realism in portrayal of people and the natural world. The work was an immediate success, and the subsequent volumes soon followed. The work became known to the West since Philipp Franz von Siebold’s lithographed paraphrases of some of the sketches appeared in his Nippon: Archiv Zur Beschreibung von Japon in 1831. The work began to circulate in the West soon after Matthew C. Perry’s entry into Japan in 1854.”

Neighbours by Norman Mclaren (1952)

Video | January 23, 2009December 27, 2025 | Paul Greer

“I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People’s Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao’s revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (…) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war.”

—NM

NFB

“The term ‘pixilation‘ was created by Grant Munro, who had worked with McLaren on Two Bagatelles, a pair of short pixilation films made prior to Neighbours. While Neighbours is often credited as an animated film by many film historians, very little of the film is actually animated. The majority of the film is shot with variable-speed photography, usually in fast motion, with some stop-frame techniques. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate: this effect was actually achieved in stop-motion; the men repeatedly jumped upward but were photographed only at the top of their trajectories. Under the current definition of an animated short, it is unlikely that Neighbours would qualify as either a documentary short or an animated short.”

Norman McLaren: Pen Point Percussion

Video | January 23, 2009May 21, 2018 | Paul Greer

Norman McLaren explains how he makes synthetic sound on film. With an oscilloscope he first demonstrates what familiar sounds look like on the screen; next, how sound shapes up on a film’s sound track; and then what synthetic sounds sound like when drawn directly on film. This technique is also demonstrated in Dots and Loops.

“On Photography”

Quote | January 23, 2009September 12, 2018 | Paul Greer

“It is a nostalgic time right now and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

— Susan Sontag

via

Happy Birthday Mr. Lynch

January 21, 2009August 30, 2018 | Paul Greer

image via

Yesterday, as well as being New President Day, it was the birthday of illustrious film maker David Lynch.

I recently finished reading his book “Catching the Big Fish“, a very personal account of his approach to creativity, and the role that meditation plays in it.

I have often felt that techniques like meditation may result in bland art, due to lack of “pain”, a deluded idea partly inspired by Captain Kirk (I’ll explain another time). Mr Lynch is a very good example of how this is not the case.

In the book he writes:

“Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a a story, but they’re like poison for the film maker or artist. They’re like a vice grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.”

Here is a little seen, very short film by Mr Lynch:

movie via Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Belated birthday greetings to you, Mr Lynch.

You’re set free.

Quote | January 20, 2009June 1, 2018 | Paul Greer

“Sometimes you know things have to change, or are going to change, but you can only feel it. Like in that Sam Cooke song, “Change is Gonna Come”. But you don’t know it in a purposeful way. Little things foreshadow whats coming, but you may not recognize them. But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, you have an instinctive understanding of it. You’re set free.”

– Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Judex (1963)

Video | January 20, 2009June 8, 2018 | Paul Greer

“The French fictional character Judex is a mysterious avenger who dresses in black and wears a slouch hat and cloak, created by Louis Feuillade and Arthur Bernède. Originally conceived as a heroic version of the criminal character Fantômas, Judex appears to have been an inspiration for the American pulp hero The Shadow, who was himself an inspiration for Batman.”

the most facile

Quote | January 20, 2009September 12, 2018 | Paul Greer

“As cartoonists and comics still attempt to acquaint themselves with not only how to express real human emotion but also try to decide exactly what human emotions are worth expressing, the most facile and immediate way to do it is to write about oneself”

– Chris Ware

The Notebook of William Blake

Image | January 15, 2009June 8, 2018 | Paul Greer

N50
“This folio is one of the most closely filled in the notebook. In the centre, we see a naked figure of a man, on the point of stabbing himself with a dagger held in his right hand. In a later emblem in the notebook, Blake suggests that those who take their own lives cannot go to heaven, yet here the man is turning his face towards heaven with a hopeful – and possibly ironic – gaze.”

N99 & N98
“We see workings here of several poems for which the notebook has been rotated to enter fair copies of poems. We see workings here of several poems, including ‘Several Questions Answerd’ in the top left, with lines salvaged from previous drafts in the notebook (see N103). To the right of this poem, ‘Let the Brothels of Paris be opened’ is a strongly felt criticism of the overindulgent French monarchy. The poet’s attack on Marie Antoinette in the final stanza (‘The Queen of France just touchd this Globe And the Pestilence darted from her robe’) distorts Edmund Burke’s romantic description of the French Queen and Court in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): ‘surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.'”

Paul Greer

(Animation, etc)

Author: Paul Greer