H. R. Giger (1940-2014)

Giger (right) with ELP in 1973

News just in that H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist has passed away at the age of 74 following a fall in his Zurich home. 

As this news story on the BBC indicates, Giger was most popularly known as the man who conceived of the nightmarish alien in Ridley Scott's classic sci fi film of the same name. In fact his production designs for the film had been honed by his work in previous years on Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune project which I've written about at length several times on this blog. What's more he worked again with Scott on the woeful prequel Prometheus, where his paintings (and the use of designs from his Dune days) were just about the best thing about the film.

Alien made Giger, if not a household name, then certainly a bona fide cult amongst everyone devoted to both fantasy art or 'alternative' approaches to life. 

On paper Giger wasn't the kind of man you'd probably want to have sunday dinner with your parents. A complex man, by his own admission he was troubled (I recall the first time I was impressed by his candour in print when he explained the symmetry in his work as an obvious sign of insanity). The son of a chemist, as a young man he was obsessed with guns and weaponry; he suffered from night terrors, openly indulged in drugs and ritual 'magick', was a scholar of Crowley and Eliphas Levi, and had a tendency to use pornographic imagery extensively in his work. Added to this as his life progressed his somewhat louche appearance and croaking demeanour took on a decaying decadence which made him fairly repulsive to the eye. 

And, of course, like most people who profess their strangeness, he was also extremely canny as a businessman (having his own museum in Gruyeres as well as a giving rise to a plethora of publications, posters, prints, not to mention the 'Giger bars' in places such as Tokyo) and continued to hawk his nightmarish visions to Hollywood via schlock such as Species, not to mention THIS beauty.

By the release of Alien I was already well aware of Giger's work via firstly the fantastically complex cover art he created for Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery (above), after which I got a copy of his first book in English, from Big O Publishers, the company that had helped blow my generation's minds with posters by Roger Dean and Giger amongst many others. The Necronomicon (named for H. P. Lovecraft's fictional 'forbidden book' written by the 'mad arab': Abdul Alhazred) is still in print (albeit only in German)  and pretty much sums up what made Giger important, both to me and to a generation of art directors, designers and visual artists who followed. There's barely a horror or science fiction movie since which hasn't been touched by his grimy, post industrial aesthetic. His palette of bluish greys and decaying flesh tones prefigured a high-definition breed of horror and computer gaming. I'm sure that feeble copyists such as Clive Barker and his 'body horror' ilk would not have existed without Giger's visionary work. 

Not that all H.R's work inevitably led to schlock and lazy shorthand for 'hellish' visuals. He did regular work as a record sleeve designer, including the infamous sleeve for Debbie Harry's solo album, Koo Koo as well as for Magma and a host of others. And let's not forget the unlikely attention he garnered when The Dead Kennedys included a poster of one of his 'penis landscapes' with one of their albums, Frankenchrist, leading to obscenity charges. In the end, none of his 'followers' had an iota of Giger's originality or skill, and perhaps that too is a good thing. I, for one, never would want to live in a world where there was more than one H.R.

In a sense just about everything he achieved following the mainstream breakout of Alien was merely a reiteration of the personal language he'd perfected in the late '60s and early '70s through his work with theatre and fine art. Personally I was drawn to his work, not only for its nightmarish qualities, but for the singularity of vision that transcended his suspect role models in hacks like Dali, Austria's Ernst Fuchs or even Hans Bellmer. His early engravings have a grim intensity to them. Yet it was undoubtedly his discovery of the airbrush which truly liberated his style from previous shackles. It gave his 'biomechanicals', temple settings and fleshy landscapes a gruesome realism which added a very palpable sense that here was a true vision of some alternative dimension where sanity and decency had fallen prey to the more extreme prophesies of an immediately post-war Europe.

Giger's biomechanical visions are the antithesis of, say, fellow middle-Europeans, Kraftwerk, with their idyllic dreams of man and machine in perfect harmony. Compare his 'Biomechanische Landschaft' (1976) (above) with the celebratory exploration of man and bicycle on 'Tour De France'! The post-acid claustrophobia of landscapes crawling with orgiastic demons, cyborgs and instruments of torture shone a brutally honest light on a world that had experienced the Holocaust and still proclaimed itself (especially in his homeland) as rational.

Anyone who has seen Giger's recent interviews couldn't really have doubted that his days were numbered, yet it's sad that another of the key figures in my personal pantheon of great commercial artists from my youth has (along with Jean Giraud who also worked on Dune) been taken from us. 

Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)

At last! You could probably hear my cries of relief and joy all over the home counties this weekend as I finally saw the documentary film which, above all others, ticks innumerable boxes in my personal pantheon of GOOD STUFF: Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Frank Pavich’s film concerns itself with the career of the great maverick director/shaman/writer Alejandro Jodorowsky up until 1972 and his subsequent attempt to make the greatest science fiction film of all time: Dune. To clarify: for anyone who doesn’t know (although I doubt that you’d have read this far unless you DID know about it): this is not about David Lynch’s epic folly (of which more later) or the truly dull TV series, but a film which was never allowed to progress beyond a meticulous planning stage and thus gained a mythical status, not just for its breadth of vision but also for the team which ‘Jodo’ (as he’s nicknamed by his friends) assembled to make his vision materialise.

Pavich’s documentary is a treat because, even to an obsessive like myself, there are plenty of facts hitherto unrelated, as well as Jodo’s own ability to talk with seemingly endless energy and commitment to a body of work which to many would be a bitter reminder of a still-born project, doomed by Hollywood money men and people who weren’t brave enough to trust in his vision. Only at the very end of the movie, after Jodo reaches the point in the story where the death blow comes, do we even glimpse him as anything like the 84-year old man he actually is. At other times you’d swear he was half that age. Such is the power of the man.

As an avowed fan of his previous mystical films, ElTopo and The Holy Mountain, it might be easy to see this as hagiography, but once you’ve sat through Jodorowsky’s Dune I’m willing to bet that even the most prosaic amongst you would have fallen for him.

But why should such folly be so celebrated? The reasons are manifold: At the London Film Festival screening I attended other legendary unborn projects such as Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness were mentioned, and that’s no coincidence. Because Jodo’s Dune was all set to bring together not only actors like Welles, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, David Carradine, Amanda Lear and even Salvador Dali (as the Emperor), but more importantly a production team that included Dan O’Bannon, H.R Giger, Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, Chris Foss and music by bands such as Pink Floyd (harangued into the project in the middle of mixing Dark Side of the Moon while having a break for burgers) and Magma. And that’s not to say that these were just on Jodo’s wish-list for the film. They’d all agreed to take part in what he wanted to be nothing less than a new form of revolutionary cinema which, in his words, would be the equivalent of an acid trip. But overall, the reason that Dune is still mentioned in awed tones is because just about everyone connected went on to have a massive effect on the way in which we view not only Science Fiction cinema, but cinema as a whole.

Even the early poster was by Philippe Druillet!

The real star of the film isn’t, however the hyperactive Jodo, but the book which he and his producer Michel Seydoux took to Hollywood, containing not only a complete shot-by-shot storyboard of the script (drawn by Moebius) but also all the production designs for costumes, spaceships and buildings. Only two copies of this legendary book exist and the film lingers long over the pages of Jodo’s copy, demonstrating Nicholas Winding Refn's (who dedicated his last film to Jodo and is regarded by the master as his successor) claims that when Alejandro sat down and went through the storyboard with him frame by frame, explaining the plot, he was, in effect, the only man to have ‘seen’ the unmade film.

The size of a telephone book (as Frank Herbert apparently described it) THIS is the real film. Any publisher with an ounce of intelligence would, at this very moment, be negotiating the rights to publish it.

Chris Foss' design for a spice pirate ship

Without giving away too much, the stories surrounding Jodo’s Dune are often (as you’d expect from a Tarot master and countercultural icon) larger than life itself. The basic facts are themselves hilarious. Jodo never even bothered to read Frank Herbert’s book before approaching his producer (“I could have made Romeo and Juliet, I just chose Dune because I knew it was popular’). Actually it seemed that very few of the production team of Jodo’s ‘spiritual warriors’ had more than a passing familiarity with the source material. Jodo’s cast and crew were assembled from a wish list that became reality by a process of almost literally magic coincidence and Chilean guile. Orson Welles was tracked down by staking out all the best Parisian restaurants and lured by the promise of catering from his favourite chef; Dali was promised the largest rate per minute of all time for any film actor (little did he realise that Jodo only wanted about three minutes work from him); but best of all is Dan O’Bannon’s tale of how Jodo got him stoned on ‘very special marijuana’ and then seemed to hypnotise him into agreeing to move all of his life to Paris to work with the other ‘warriors’.

Jodo, Moebius and friend

Most importantly Jodo seemed to operate on a brilliant combination of gut instinct and dream-fulfilment to choose his cast. When he met the legendary Doug Trumbull to ask him to design the special effects he instantly disliked him for his lack of spiritual depth. Never mind that Trumbull was THE guy at the time for FX (2001 etc), if it didn’t feel right he wasn’t onboard. This integrity only adds to the sense that Jodo knew what he was doing.

Central to all of this was Jodo’s vision of a film that would loosely use Herbert’s tale of intergalactic Jihad and planetary consciousness-raising as a jumping of point to convey his own tale of transformation and rebirth. And so committed was Jodo that he even cast his 12-year old son Brontis (who also had starred with his dad in El Topo) as the central Paul Atriedes character; committing him to a punishing regime of martial arts training in a move that, even to this day, neither father nor son seem to know whether it was cruelty or artistically justified. It has to be said, however, that the extremely handsome Brontis seems like one of the most well-balanced men you could hope to meet.

Moebius' costume designs 

Months of hard work resulted in the legendary production bible that then was taken to Hollywood to raise the final $5 million. Only then did the moneymen realise what they were signing on for. Jodo himself thought the film could easily run for 10 or 20 hours, but even discounting such bravado, what seems to have finally sunk the project was the fact that his vision was SO complete. Meeting with film industry financiers with just about every detail fixed and realised seems to have scared them more than a Don Simpson-like 30 second high concept pitch and a line of toot. Already a little freaked out by El Topo and The Holy Mountain the whole grand design unravelled. Hauling the book around the studios it became rapidly apparent that this was doomed to failure. No one would back him. The production stalled and finally the rights were bought by Dino DeLaurentis; the rest being rather painful history.

It’s here that the film falters a little. It’s very easy indeed to poke fun at Lynch’s critically-flawed attempt at capturing the sweep of a story that – let’s face it – could only be done justice to in a 20 hour movie. Cut down from a five-hour print, Lynch’s film isn’t ALL bad. It has its own production design delights and (as you’d expect from Lynch) its dark portrayal of the evil Harkonnen family is brilliantly twisted. While it’s a joy to see Jodo relate how he finally gave in to friends’ insistence that he needed to see Lynch’s version, only to discover to his relief that it was awful (‘It was a human reaction’), Pavich admits that he hasn’t seen it, making the mocking tone a little hypocritical.

But this is a small gripe. The film’s point (well-reinforced by a montage of clips from other films at the denouement) that what Dune really did was provide creative fuel for a whole generation of great movies (O’Bannon, Moebius and Giger making Alien for starters) is well made. Essentially Dune did more good as an unmade production, and in a sense, as Jodo points out, it was made: not only in the various elements that crept into other films but in the subsequent collaborations that Alejandro completed with Moebius (The Incal) amongst others. Ultimastely it’s a story of creative freedom versus the money machine, and of how one man’s indomitable spirit refused to be broken. More than just a SF fanboy’s dream, Jodorowsky’s Dune shows us all how to be brave in the face of adversity.

The Gods Want Their Fire Back - why Prometheus really isn't very good

In space no one can hear you plot… but they sure can hear the marketing department muttering to themselves.

One day I'll get around to writing a huge piece about the failure of science fiction in the early 21st century: the way that for a brief moment at the end of the 20th century it seemed - like everything else that was new, young, bold and full of possibility - sci fi could be the new narrative medium to truly reflect, critique and analyse the psyche of homo postmodernus. Truth is, the state of sci fi in literature IS fairly healthy. But apart from me and 20 other people, who reads that stuff any more? The battlefront of modern culture long since moved onto different platforms. But for some reason speculative fiction in cinema seems to have been relegated to the box marked 'unchallenging summer blockbuster' and left there to rot. An expensive corpse, but a corpse nonetheless.

And Ridley Scott's Prometheus is the worst offender. Promising all the visceral thrills and doomy, grainy space vérité of his earlier classics, it swaps actors for cyphers (the most engaging character supposedly has no emotion), horror for gratuitous laughs and poetry for spectacle. Maybe it's the final sign that cinema is redundant as a useful cultural thermometer. As an old friend once rightly stated - to tell the big stories in proper detail you need the massive story arc of a TV series, several seasons long. That's why, in many ways Babylon 5 was the best Lord Of The Rings adaptation possible, and Battlestar Galactic was the keenest commentary on the state of US contemporary politics that you could ask for. Mind you, TV really ballsed up Dune, didn't it? But maybe we can all agree that since Jodorowsky abandoned his first attempt in 1975, it's an unfilmable book, best left on the page.

More importantly - how did we get to the stage where a 200 million dollar movie, scripted by supposedly one of the brightest minds in speculative screenwriting (along with two others), doesn't make much (if any) narrative sense. While I fully understand the pressure that studios and distributors put on even the most respected of auteur's work it still seems astounding that Prometheus is so, well, silly. And while the original Alien allowed for a sequel, Prometheus seems only geared for that one outcome - extending the franchise to infinity and beyond. If it ever happens it'll need someone with cojones the size of Gore Verbinski's to paper over the cracks.

If we discount the truly avant garde and non-linear we have to accept that Scott's in the business of making stories come to life with that fabulous OCD-adman-level attention to detail. To play devil's advocate for a second, maybe this film that seems to be approaching the condition of swiss (space) cheese in its logic while looking undeniably incredible, has come about because Scott wanted to play with all the latest digital toys that his best mate Jim Cameron has whipped out in recent years, and just caved in to a marketing dept's craven wishes? That, in itself, is a travesty, but when you also think about clunky details such as Guy Pearce's laughable prosthetic make-up even THAT argument falls down.

Apparently, in the nauseating 'viral' online videos that preceded the opening we see Pearce as a young man, which is why in the film he looks like Peter Gabriel onstage in about 1972. This is the studio desperately chasing 'cutting edge' methods of 'story-telling across new and emerging platforms'. Well, that's what they'll be telling themselves. It is, of course, bullshit. Just because some 30-something idiot with ironic facial hair tells you that your 'product' needs such gewgaws to make a younger audience relate to it, it ain't necessarily so. Maybe, just maybe, if you have a respected director who's a known safe pair of hands and a record of delivering classy, yet box office, fare, maybe concentrating on the film itself - giving the characters depth or at least motivation would have been a good idea? Maybe people would have ben excited enough to go and see it?? Like George Lucas' travesties in prequel-land, demographic chasing has wrought a universe that looks cool but where we care little for characters or chain of events.

The first third of the film is rushed exposition as dumbly obvious as just littering the set with signs saying 'look, this will become important later'. This, in turn, fails to build the requisite amount of tension before the body horror onslaught we all paid to see. A useless bums-on-seats rating means that no film required to recoup vast amounts was ever going to give us a real shock. When the first two victims succumb to generic nastiness it's an actual relief. The main 'good' characters are too irritating to be objects of sympathy or empathy. Logan Marshall-Green as Noomi Rapace's boyfriend/co-evangelist is so irksome that you feel cheated by the almost merciful death in flames. So we have a film that has us rooting for the bad guys to do something quick to wake us up (the two most compelling performances are from Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron). This is a trope of the worst of horror movies these days - that we only end up lusting for more gruesomely inventive ways to see the innocents dispatched. It's both voyeuristic and deeply unhealthy, and leads to awful stuff like Saw.

Visual élan is high on the agenda, and it's a genuine thrill to see that H.R.Giger has returned to the designer's chair. A brief glimpse of his murals (see above) just tantalises, although the knowing nod to his designs for the aforementioned Dune are a sweet touch (see below). It's soon back to a lot of sets that looked like Apple designed them - all gleaming white surfaces, scrubbed and ready for the blood that's waiting to be sprayed across them. How on earth are we supposed to believe that such advancement was ignored on the Nostromo - the grimy transport ship that was so believable (this is why Duncan Jones' Moon worked so well).

By the final act you just have to hold up your hands and give in. Is Michael Fassbender good or bad? What the hell was that 'engineer' doing in the waterfall at the beginning of the film? Is a self-inflicted caesarian really that easy to get over? And was Stephen Stills' accordion REALLY only there to allow Idris Elba to sing 'Love The One You're With'? The questions go on and on, and not in a 2001-like 'woah, that blew my mind' way. But that's what you get for hiring a man who lead us through six seasons of mumbo jumbo to just hang us all out to dry.

Having said all this, it wasn't an unenjoyable experience overall, and most of these glaring questions have been answered by this canny blog post from the excellent Den Of Geek, yet amazingly what made the paucity of the deal more evident was the surprising fact that Barry Sonnenfeld's return to the Men In Black franchise turns out to be a reasonably tightly-plotted, enjoyable romp. Yes, that's right, I preferred it to Prometheus! The nifty time-travel paradoxes were flagged and dispatched with admirable attention to detail, the main characters turned in enthusiastic and engagingly comic performances and at no point did the CGI overtake the essential premises on offer - that of the deepening relationship between Will Smith and his farther figure partner Tommy Lee Jones. Josh Brolin expertly impersonates Tommy Lee as his younger self, there's a great series of knowing jokes that simultaneously pointed at the awful injustices of late '60s American culture while still managing to be affectionately nostalgic. The Andy Warhol jokes are particularly amusing. A surprise, then, that the script was by the same team that gave us Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull - a sequel that seemed like one long computer game. Maybe the producers realised that the fans of the originals may have, after all, grown up and got themselves educated and don't necessarily need to be patronised or coerced so bluntly. Blimey. It may not be such a mystery as to why hardly anyone watches anything European made between 1950 and 1980 anymore, but it would be nice to think that we could return to an art that doesn't treat us all as idiots.