H R Giger - The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961 - 1976

Giger Counter

H R Giger - The Oeuvre 
Before Alien 1961 - 1976
Scheidegger & Spiess
ISBN 9783039421367

Just a quick shout out to a really lovely (and inspirational, to boot) book which a very special friend sent from her home town of Chur, in Switzerland. The subject of the book is my favourite artist and it’s called H. R. Giger - The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961 - 1976, being a reprinting of what was originally a catalogue to accompany a 2007 exhibition, H R Giger, Das Schaffen vor Alien 1961 - 1976 at the Bünder Kunstmuseum in the small town where he grew up, which also happens to be Chur, although my understanding is he later moved to Zurich. 

The book has a lot of interesting early works, including a fair few I’d not seen before so, that was a nice thing. It also includes a foreword by Beat Stutzer and a separate essay by him called Between Stool and Bench: Aspects of Giger’s Reception. This looks at the relevance of Giger’s output appearing alongside artists contemporary to this early period of his work. A conclusion to this section seems to be that, like many artists, he’s said to be drawing from all the fears in the face of the cold war, the threat by nuclear destruction and the risk that human labour would be undermined by robots.

This section is then followed by a prologue featuring the work of older artists which are supposed to have been an influence on Dali, such as Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare and Max Klinger’s Isle Of The Dead. 

After this there are four more essays by a variety of writers, with each section split by a relevant selection of Giger’s work, relating to the upcoming sequence of writing. 

So Liberation Through Horror: Giger and the Fantastic in Art by Carlos Arenas, starts off as it means to go on by printing a quote from H. P. Lovecraft. It looks at what is considered fantasy art, talks about how he drew inspiration as a child from the works of both Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe (don’t we all?) and also lifts the lid a little on how Giger is also discussed in realms far beyond the usual scope of the visual arts... such as philosophy, social sciences, politics and discussions around the manifestation of the cyborg. 

Then we have The Beauty and Surrealism of H R Giger by Fritz Billeter, in which I found out that the pistol used in those sinister, baby bulleted birth machine paintings is actually a P38 Walther (turns out Giger was an avid collector of fire arms). Then we have another piece by Beat Stutzer called On Tachism, Bathtubs and Garbage Crushers; or, Observations and Remarks on Giger’s Pictorial Strategies which, aside from some of the influences made clearer, I have to confess was couched in language which was a little harder for me to understand on its own level, perhaps. Although, as always, that minor hurdle didn’t stop me from reading it. 

The book finishes with Portrait Of An Immortal Love: The Painting Li II by Kathleen Bühler, which is worth the price of the book alone (you know, if I’d actually bought it myself, thanks again Katrin) which talks about his history with his long term girlfriend of the time, aspiring actress Li Tobler. The paintings he used her in, which depict her decapitated head hooked up to his signature biomechanical shenanigans, were completed not long before she killed herself with a revolver and Bühler reflects on his relationship to her through his repeated use of her image and inspiration in his art, both then and later. It’s also noted he went on to marry someone who looked very much like Tobler too, before making a point of looking at the relationship between female death and beauty in art and... I think there’s some further reading opportunities I need to have a look out for in regard to this last subject. 

Overall, then, a pretty fantastic book and, even this jaded old book burrower was inspired once more by the works inside and, in most (but not all) cases, inspired by the more truthful ringing batches of analysis served up in this quite splendid tome. So, yeah, if you are a fan of the legendary Giger and his work then, H R Giger - The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961 - 1976, is definitely one to grab hold of. 

Alien: Covenant

Xenomorphing Cower Strangers

Alien: Covenant
USA/Australia/New Zealand/UK 2017
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK cinema release print.

Warning: There’s a clearly marked SPOILER ZONE in this article. So I’ll warn you when you get there.

Gosh... this is kind of a difficult film to process. I really liked the ALIEN films up to and including the fifth in the series, the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie (despite the glaring continuity error in that last one and not including their cameo appearances in any solo Predator movies). However, the last two in the franchise, ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM and the so called A L I E N prequel Prometheus (reviewed by me here) really didn’t sit well with me. AVP: REQUIEM pretty much reduced the beautiful Alien Xenomorphs to the level of a teenage slasher movie and might better have been called 'Aliens Meet Jason' or some such dreadful thing (although, it has to be said the movie did have one thing going for it... an outstanding score by Brian Tyler)... and Prometheus, which I and pretty much everyone I know had high hopes for, suffered from some really bad artistic choices.

In Prometheus the three biggest sins were the reduction of the beautiful space jockey designed by H. R. Giger for the very first film... transformed into tall men wearing bone suits (known as Engineers), the absence of the actual Xenomorphs themselves and, finally, the absolute lack of actually leaving us in a place where the first movie could actually pick up from in the first place. The film was beautifully executed and absolutely gripping during the first half and then it just got really disappointing very quickly, not long after the crew went on board the alien ship.

This new film in the franchise, once again directed by Ridley Scott, is pretty much more of the same combination of awesome movie making coupled with some disappointingly poor artistic choices as far as I’m concerned. I’d rate it a definite improvement on Prometheus but this is very much a sequel to Prometheus than it is a prequel to A L I E N, it has to be said.

The film starts off, after a scene with Michael Fassbender reprising his role of David, which is set some time before the events of Prometheus, before fast forwarding past the previous film by a good ten years. My first danger signs that made it feel like Ridley was trying way too hard and, more importantly, too clumsily, to win franchise fans back came with an opening credits sequence that tried to mimic the first film badly in terms of the typefaces appearing in sections but with the twin mistakes of having them appear way too fast and also going to a second line of the same for the film’s subtitle at the bottom of the screen. This already felt a bit rubbish but then having the composer Jed Kurzel, who does an appropriate job for a lot of the time, using a new variant of Jerry Goldsmith’s famous, unused opening titles for the original A L I E N to play out over them was just a little bit too much.

Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Kurzel’s score to this and am looking forward to acquiring the CD of it at some point soon, the first third to a half of the movie seems to be intent on parodying various moments of Goldsmith’s original score for A L I E N. Now, this maybe wouldn’t have seemed so out of place if the Alien franchise had a very definite musical identity grounding it. Alas, as far as I am aware, every single movie in the Alien series (including the Predator versions and Prometheus) have had a different composer and, while some of the orchestral textures shared a commonality in some of the movies, there is no underlying style which has given them a consistent, coherent musical identity (the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe films are guilty of exactly the same crimes against musical filmanity, by the way). So, much as I appreciated hearing all of this pseudo-Goldsmith pumped through the cinema speakers... it just seemed a little misplaced here.

Although the film makers have tried to at least retrofit the space ship Covenant to the Nostromo of the first movie, they somehow neglected to remember that they never had a load of hologram style technology in A L I E N, which was obviously set some time after the events in this film (although a big shout out to the set dressers for the return of one of my favourite things to the series, the drinking duck). We also have the continuation of the synthetic David character, portrayed so brilliantly by Michael Fassbender, who is, in himself, something of an anomaly. In James Cameron’s ALIENS, we had the idea that a synthetic crew member as part of the family, so to speak, was a normal thing to take with you on board a spaceship. However, people should maybe remember that the second film was set quite a long time in the future from the original A L I E N movie so, you know, things had moved onto where it became normal to have a synthetic on board. Before that, though? In A L I E N, Ian Holm portrayed Ash, a synthetic who was not known as an android to the rest of the crew. He was a secret plant by the Weyland Yutani company. So... and Prometheus had this problem too... how come that before the events of A L I E N, having a synthetic human on board seems to be par for the course already? It kinda makes no sense.

Okay... this is where the spoilers start, people.

Also, while I’m on the subject, it also makes no sense that he would posess superhuman speed and strength. Certainly Ash and Bishop in the first two movies displayed none of that and yet, here, they are hurling people around like action figures. So... yeah, the continuity is screwed. And the continuity is also screwed when it turns out that the Alien Xenomorphs we are familiar with through the original Giger designs are, in fact, engineered by David. Because this is still set many years in our future folks so, if this is the case, how in heck did they come to the planet Earth many years in our past, as established in the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie? None of it is really making much sense. Honestly people, we laugh at how screwed up the continuity is from film to film on those old 1940s sequels to Universal’s The Mummy but modern franchises like the X-Men films, the Resident Evil films and this ALIEN franchise are just as bad, if not worse. Future generations of film fans will look at these movies and laugh at how quaintly people of our time must have forgotten what was going on between films.

Okay, so I was hoping for a reappearance of Noomi Rapace as the sole human survivor of the last movie... Dr. Elisabeth Shaw... but she really doesn’t get anything more than an illegible visual recording and a sound recording in here. Which is a shame because, opening credits aside, the first half of the film is quite strong, leading all the way up to an attack by alien life forms of some sort, not long after the spaceship Covenant touches down on the Engineers planet. What’s left of the crew are ‘rescued’ by a hooded figure and I was really hoping the rescuer would be Shaw but, alas, it was Fassbender as David. Now Fassbender also does double duty here as a later model of the same character called Walter but, it has to be said, the story is really crude and obvious from this point on. Once we are shown that a synthetic human can grow hair (seriously?), we have two almost identical looking characters, one who is a good and loyal android and an evil/mad version of the same. So I have to say I defy anyone who doesn’t know what’s going to happen towards the end of the movie here. And when David starts cutting his hair it’s pretty much spelled out long before we ever get to that point in the film. It’s a crude plot device which wouldn’t seem out of place in the early days of TV but to still be using this whole ‘evil twin’ surprise thing here (and this franchise is not the only modern franchise using this tired, over played, intelligence insulting template) really shows how sloppy and uninventive modern movie writers have become.

End of spoiler zone.

Another bad thing about this movie is the xenomorphs themselves. For most of the film the key alien monster is a whitish pink thing not unlike the terrible ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ looking Alien at the finale of Alien Resurrection... it’s not quite as crude as that but... yeah, really not impressed, in all honesty. The smaller, ‘just hatched’ versions of these are much more effective here in terms of suspense than the grown versions. The xenomorphs do feature in this eventually... just not very much and, it has to be said, they looked really clunky in some scenes. In fact, they looked almost more like a man in a suit (which I’m told they’re not, here) than the original version in A L I E N and, it has to be said, are far less effective. The face huggers are way better used here but... well... remember when the acidic blood of these creatures could eat through several hulls of a spaceship? Well here it can’t even eat its way fully through the front of a human face so... seriously some major continuity errors here, I feel.

Well that’s all the bad stuff.

The good stuff is... it looks and sounds awesome. Ridley Scott makes beautiful looking films... of that there is no question. The cinematography is amazing and although a fellow movie goer was complaining that it was too darkly lit (especially compared to the same scenes in the trailer), I think this works in its favour to cover up some clunky CGI in some parts and allow the audience to bring their imagination to the party... which is always more effective. I think Scott really knows what he’s doing visually and it certainly shows here.

We also have a cast who are quite brilliant. Michael Fassbender always brings a lot to the party and seems to be extraordinary in anything he puts his mind to. His costars are all great in this too and with a special mention for Katherine Waterston who is the ‘strong but emotionally vulnerable female’ Ripley surrogate of this movie. She does some good work here, especially when it comes to one of the film’s key themes... how characters deal with the emotional loss of a loved one when they are suddenly taken from them with no warning. There’s a fair bit of that in this movie for several of the characters and I suspect I know just why that theme is touched upon quite so often here but, due to my own, admittedly slightly twisted, moral compass, I don’t want to point it out here because it’s an issue which may be sensitive to at least one of the artists involved with the making of this film.

There are a lot of things I could be saying about Alien Covenant, many of them bad and some, probably, fairly good but I don’t want to labour the points and I think I’ve touched on the key things I wanted to cover in this review. The more I think about this film, the more disappointed I am in it... although it was a heck of a lot more focused than Prometheus, that’s for sure. While I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to non-Alien fans, I would certainly shout it out to all of those who do love the majority of the previous movies. It’s going to make some money, I hope, because I really want to see Ridley finish it up with a link back ot the original A L I E N movie (which it gets nowhere near doing here) but, in all honesty, I think the xenomorphs are a little played out now, to tell the truth. Not a terrible film... not a great one. A kind of a quaint, almost 1950s style sci-fi/horror yarn with a few little shout outs, in some moments, to Scott’s greatest masterpiece, the original studio cut of Blade Runner. Glad I saw this one but it’s not a repeat watcher for me.

Jodorowsky's Dune

Dune And Dusted

Jodorowsky's Dune
2013 USA
Directed by Frank Pavich
Screening 12th October 2013 at the London Film Festival

Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of those directors who seems to violently split people when his name comes up in conversation. There are those who think he is quite mad and find his films too challenging to stick with and will let you know about that in no uncertain terms. And there are others who relish the directors own style of creative madness and embrace his films as the great works of art that they should, like all great art, be perceived to be.

Having said all that, I tend to have a more muffled and jaded reaction to his work than most people I talk to on the subject, who seem to be pretty much outspoken either for or against his films... which I think says something in that, at the very least, Jodorowsky’s work has effected them to that extinct (which I personally feel is a good thing). I know that I myself, while having no real shocks or surprises from this director’s works (nor many others in recent years) do, nevertheless, enjoy his movies and speak of them in a positive manner. And, certainly, I remember heading off to the Metro cinema in London (now sadly lost to us) with my friend Kerry back in 1989 to see the movie which was to be my personal introduction to this director’s work, Sante Sangre. I loved that movie a lot, with it’s comfortable and seductive blend of high art and trashy b-movie sensibility... and this has carried through over the years in a more sedate manner as I’ve seen his earlier works such as Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain. In fact, my friend Kerry bought me a box set of this man’s first three movies as a Christmas present a few years ago... for which I am grateful.

Back in about 1979/80, when I would have been about eleven or twelve, I was in one of my favourite comic/book stores (Forbidden Planet) and spied in the “art books” section, two very expensive tomes by the person who would soon become one of my favourite artists... H. R. Giger (Necronomicon and Necronomicon II). I can’t remember if the text was in English on those original editions but I suspect not. When I received these two books for Christmas and birthday, I fell in love with the bleak artwork in the pages and was astonished to see a photograph of the artist, H. R. Giger, sitting around in a desert with my other art hero of the time, Salvador Dali. It was pretty amazing and, from what I could work out from the text (yeah, it must have been in a language foreign to me, I reckon) the two had been collaborating on conceptual designs for a movie version of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic Dune. As it happens, I was wrong about the nature of the collaboration, but I’ll get to that soon.

Now, I’d not read Dune at that time in my life but, as a child growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost as impossible a book to escape as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. It, and it’s sequels (I think there were only three sequels at the time but, as I’m sure you know, there are many more now) were all over British bookshops for many years and, even had they not been, there was usually a copy hanging around the house as my dad was a big fan at the time. When the David Lynch version of the movie got made I was not all that impressed with it, to be honest (neither was Jodorowsky, in one of the funniest and most memorable scenes in this film). Perhaps if I revisited it nowadays I might be more receptive to it but, to me, David Lynch was the spirit of Eraserhead... not the version of Dune that ended up on the big screen and underwhelmed audiences at the time.

Frank Pavich’s new documentary film, Jodorowsky's Dune, tells the story (of which there have been many rumours in the past) of the time when Jodorosky wanted to make an epic version of the movie... and how it all fell into place and then, after a long time in pre-production, got thrown away in favour of a version which was simpler to understand by the suits in control of Hollywood. And as you may expect from anything associated with Jodorowsky... it’s a mad tale.

H. R. Giger was, indeed, invited to do some of the conceptual art for one of the planets, which he did and which was pictured in those Necronomicon books I was given as a teen. Another major designer on the film was Chris Foss, the illustrator who many will remember had a gift for paintings of highly detailed starships which graced the covers of almost every science-fiction book going in the seventies and eighties. If you see a Chris Foss starship design, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. His work is so distinctive. What the documentary doesn’t mention, and I’ve no idea why, is the other thing that Fosse is equally well known but actually less famous for. The black and white illustrations in the original best selling editions of The Joy Of Sex.

The tale of the movie gets more and more brilliant and less and less likely as Jodorowsky talks extensively for the documentary. He recruits Dan O’ Bannon’s services for the film (after saying no to one of Hollywood’s leading special effects men, Douglas Trumbull) and then secures the services of, among others, Salvador Dali to play the Emperor, Orson Welles to play the Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as somebody who I completely forget and Pink Floyd to do the music for one of the planets. They are Jodorowsky’s “Dune warriors”. He even gets his son trained in various combat styles to ready him for the part of Paul.  And as crazy a mix as that all sounds, Jodorowsky’s stories of how, for the most part, these people just turned up in unlikely places when he had no idea how to find them and then said yes, is even crazier. And the way he courted both Dali and Welles is absolutely amazing and something I don’t think I’d heard before.

The documentary culminates in the famous, rare book which was put together to sell the project (honestly, I can’t describe this here, you just have to see this movie) and  finishes by showng the influences on cinema resulting from the pilfering and reusing of the concepts created by Jodorowsky’s extended “Dune family”. Some of which are easy to see and others... which are not great examples, I would have to say.

Pavich’s film is absolutely fascinating and rivetting, using mostly talking head footage by Jodorowsky, Foss, Giger and others close to the production, but also from the underused director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) and Jodorowsky’s good friend, the director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). There’s also some animated sequences where the director brings some of the storyboards and designs for the film to life and, as I was very relieved to discover in the Q & A session with the director after the screening, the people in question had been very careful to just breathe a little life into the original drawing and paintings for the animations, rather than add their own baggage into the mix.

The whole thing sails along at a pace which is a reflection of Jodorowsky’s own unique personality and enthusiasm for the project and it also has a kick ass score by Kurt Stenzel, which is quite “in your face” but catchy and appropriately mixed into the film. It’s a bit reminiscent of the small scale chamber works of Philip Glass but it is quite distinctive and hypnotic and although it strikes you right away as you’re watching, the music doesn’t distract from the people who are talking on screen and is very mindful of the job it needs to be doing.

So there you have it.

Jodorowsky's Dune is a great documentary made by a director who knows when to step back from the material when needed and who knows well enough when to add a bit more to it to make it interesting without intruding on the hearts, minds and words of the people being interviewed on screen. It also brings us the full tale of one of the classic unmade films in movie legend, which is something we should all be grateful for. So, if you want to know about all this stuff then you should definitely try to see this movie. It’s worth the price of admission just for the late Dan O’ Bannon’s description of his first, drug tinged meeting with Jodorowsky. Don’t miss out on this one.