It's going to storm and snow
here tonight. I went to the city center to buy tea,
and then went to the one good dvd shop. I had a moment of nostalgia
there
when I saw a film called Slaughter of the vampires.
When I was 13, I started film collecting. The only films you could
buy then
were Castle films, which were 3- or 9-minute exerpts from long
films, and
they were quite expensive. Three years later, on a trip to London,
I found a
little shop owned by Mountain films. It was full of films, like a
paradise. They
even had a small number of long, complete sound films. It was
unheard of!
(That may have been the year my school acquired a video recorder,
which
didn't impress me at all, because it was meant to tape stupid
educational tv pro-
grams. It seemed the most boring thing in the world). But to own a
sound
projector, and films to show on it, seemed an impossible dream of
the future!
I've often devoured the Mountain catalogue (and others like it,
which I sent for
by mail) and one of their complete films was Slaughter of the
vampires. Later
I read somewhere that it was rather a good film, with romantic
music like the
"Warsaw Concerto"(film music which used to be quite famous). So I
bought
it today, together with one of Joe d'Amato's opuses.I just had a
look at it, and it
seemed the dvd was made from a very worn print. I've never seen a
dvd with
lots of splices before! Maybe they used an 8mmprint? And the film
seems
boring. The cover's nice, though.
8 and 16 mm
In those days, collecting films depended on so many arbitrary
factors, like
where were you, how much money did you have, or someone wanted to
trade
films and you gave him films you didn't like in exchange for films
you didn't
know, sometimes I even bought piles of films without knowing what
they
were, if they seemed cheap enough.It was not like now, when one can
just
order titles from a vast amount of books, dvd's and cd's.
But then collecting films was almost the only way of seeing old or
special
films, they were rarely on tv, there were no dvd's and video was
almost
nothing.
But nowadays there's another problem which I would have never
thought of
before. Film prints of silent films mostly had no sound, sometimes
there was a
music track but then the film ran at the wrong speed, so I made
cassettes for
the films I liked most. And now when I buy a dvd of a silent film
the image
is often very good, but someone has been pasting a music track on
to it which
is completely wrong and ruins the film. And then I put the dvd away
and don't
look at it anymore, it just doesn't interest me anymore. Of the
silent dvd's I
bought (only 7, I just counted them) only 1 has music I really
like, that's Ima-
ge's 2-dvd set of The Phantom Of The Opera ('25), with orchestral
music by
Carl Davis. Why didn't they ask him for better films? Anyway, I've
become
very cautious about buying silent films, because these dvd's are
very expensive!
To me, the music has become a big issue because I can't spend weeks
making
sountracks for dvd's! Once the soundtrack is ready you've seen the
film so of-
ten it makes you sick. There seems to be no
solution.
Harold Lloyd
Did you know that Harold Lloyd was completely obsessed by the
problem I've
just described? In the twenties, for some years he was more popular
than Chap-
lin, and earned a lot of money, but his sound films earned less and
less, until he
had to stop making films. He had money and a big house and indulged
in his
hobbies. In the sixties there was renewed interest in silent comedy
because of
tv. Lloyd had carefully kept the negatives of almost all his films
(hundreds),
but he refused to sell them to tv because he was sure they would be
shown at
the wrong speed, and with piano music which he hated. For many
years the on-
ly way people could see his films was to go to his lectures, where
his films
were shown like he wanted it, with an orchestra or cinema organ.
And when he
died, the first thing that happened was that his films were sold to
tv and shown
in a mutilated form, but by that time most people had forgotten who
he was.
Realism in Mannequins
It's very funny, but you could see traces of male
genitals in papier mache
mannequins of the forties and fifties. Maybe these were made from
casts
made from real people in underwear. I noticed this for the first time
in a shopwindow full of old, undressed mannequins when I was 8 or 9
and I was very shocked by it! In British antiques programs on the BBC I've
seen several times very old dolls with realistic genitals, and in these cases
the expert/presenter was shocked. "This is a family program", she said, "there
are children watching!" And for that reason mannequins don't have genitals,
sometimes they are in the shopwindows without clothes on! Old
manne-
quins were even prudishly dressed in a kind of under garment that
was
fastened with many nails.
Nico
I started the mannequin collection mainly to be
able to make photos. Some of
the old ones are made up of separate parts I collected; the others
I restored.
One of them I worked on for quite a long time: when I bought the
head, there
was a large hole in the face and when I had put a new mouth in,
the nose and
eyes were all wrong, etc. Plaster and cardboard is a horrible
combination! Next
time I went to the fleamarket I found a perfect body for the head,
it was almost
too much of a coincidence. That body really looked like something
out of a Fulci
film, it left little heaps of debris wherever it stood. And when he
was ready, I
wasn't satisfied, and later started again, and again! The face is
very subtle. He's
quite old too, 1905 - 1910, or older. People often ask for his
desktop picture
"lonely boy".
The Greek Helmet
Very nostalgic weather we're having, the dutch writer Reve
called
it in the 60s "weather of all people", gusts of wind, no wind, sun,
lots
of clouds, he hated that weather, but I always like it as long as
it doesn't
rain. Ideal weather to go to the fleamarket. Because of the good
weather
the market wasn't busy, people started packing up early and
everything
was cheap! As always, I found nothing, and then at the last moment
a lot.
O yes, there was a woman desperate to get rid of stuff, she sold
me 4
Chinese singing and moving birds, all for 1 euro and even packed
them
in quite a good shopping bag. Then someone else gave me a glass
Murano
sweet, with gold leaf in it. At first the cat liked one of the
birds, but it star-
ted chirping a merry song when he touched it, and he didn't like
that so
much. They're so monstrous already, maybe I'll make them more
mon-
strous and put them in a strange room. But the strangest thing I
bought
is a big helmet for a Greek soldier, boy's size, judging by a
little metal
plate inside it must be from the twenties. I tried it out on
several manne-
quins, and it really looks best on the head of the boy-mannequin
which I
repaired and painted last year. It isn't on my website yet, I've
been planning
to make a new version of that chapter for a long time. I bought
that manne-
quin's head many years ago, and used it as a model for several
paintings,
later I found a suitable body for it, but it had a broken foot,
which I only
managed to repair last year by filling it with plaster. Then I
made the clothes,
and cloth flowers, stiff with many layers of lacquer paint. Pity
the helmet
has been painted. It's made of copper and it should be possible to
make it
look much better, when I have the right stuff to take the paint
off.
Yesterday I've been working on the helmet, I repainted the gold and
took
the broom out and painted it blue, I used a lot of turpentine.
Maybe purists
won't like that but it looked just like a broom. It's still wet
and as it dries
the color becomes paler. When it's dry maybe I'll make the bottom
part
darker again, and touch the tips of the hairs with gold! I found a
beautiful
big white and pink flower which goes marvelously on the top of the
helmet,
and some other flowers, and now it really suits the glittery boy.
It's the War
of the Roses! I've also made him a wooden sword, but he can't hold
it yet, he
hasn't got a right hand. Imagine that helmet full of ostrich
feathers! It'd be
just like the Folies Bergeres. But I'd need quite a lot. When drag
queens die,
the faded collections, smelling of sweat and patchouli, are passed
on to
other drag queens, or thrown away in shame, but are rarely sold on
flea-
markets. Click
here for my other painted mannequins.
