Fantasia of the Unconscious: D.H. Lawrence and the Autumn Equinox – THE POETRY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: A SEASONAL SERIES with Emmalea Russo

“For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious

The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence wrote a wild text on creativity, the unconscious, and sexuality: Fantasia of the Unconscious. In this class, we’ll explore passages from this intriguing work by Lawrence, as well as his own relationship to psychoanalysis. Lawrence, a Virgo, will take us into Virgo season and the autumn equinox.

On the eve of each season, the poet, novelist, and astrologer Emmalea Russo will present on a particular poet or artist who has dealt with psychoanalysis in their work in interesting and generative ways. There will be time for discussion and free association during class. Our first classes in the series, in March and June 2026, focused on the life and work of the poets H.D. and Cynthia Cruz and their relationships to psychoanalysis.

REGISTER HERE

We will meet online for 2 hours beginning at 10AM NYC (7AM Vancouver/ 3PM London/ 16:00 Stockholm/ 17:00 Beirut/ midnight Sydney) on Sunday, September 6th.

This event will be recorded and made available for all those who register.

All paid subscribers at RU Center for Psychoanalysis are automatically enrolled for this event and the recording will be archived at RU Center for Psychoanalysis Substack.

This series aims to connect poets and psychoanalysis in wild and unexpected ways while catapulting us into the next season. Freud wrote that the poets discovered the unconscious well before he did. So, what can poets teach us about the unconscious, psychoanalysis, and the seasons we move through?

REGISTER HERE

Upcoming events in this series:

September 6th: Fantasia of the Unconscious: D.H. Lawrence and the Autumn Equinox

December 6th: Extreme Activities: Louise Bourgeois and the Winter Solstice

Watch previous events in this series:

June 7th: REPETITION, RETURN, REBIRTH: On the Psychoanalytic Poetry of Cynthia Cruz

March 7th: WE MUST NOT TALK ASTROLOGY! On poet H.D. & her Tribute to Freud

Emmalea Russo is a writer, astrologer, and teacher. She is the author of two novels: Vivienne (2024) and The Moon Papers (forthcoming summer 2026). Her books of poetry are G (2018), Wave Archive (2019), Confetti (2022), and Magenta (2023). Recent poems and essays have appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Compact, Granta, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has been a writer in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York and 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles and a visiting critic at Parsons School of Design and The Art Institute of Cincinnati. She has taught courses on poetry, philosophy, and art at various institutions including Saint Peter’s University, Northeastern University, The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, and GCAS. Her books have been reviewed in The Chicago Review, The Yale Review, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. She writes a popular substack newsletter on culture and the cosmos, Cosmic Edges, and teaches classes on literature, art, psychoanalysis, and the occult. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and at the Jersey shore. Follow her at Emmalea Russo

Went to see “Evil Dead Burn” in our small town cinema. Very happy I did. I expected 90 minutes of trash, as the bar seems to get lower each year. But… to my surprise, this latest offering in the Evil Dead Universe (to paraphrase the Marvel et al idiocies) is a pure schlocker/shocker that took me right back to the initiation rites of yesteryear. Nostalgic splatter violence with very little irony: HELLELUJAH!

Let’s not delve into plot because essentially there is none. Yes, the same old hocus pocus book looms in the background but who really cares? From beginning to end, there is just one brutal race against time and for survival – futile! – and it’s just a matter of seeing how grossed out you can remain before you actually turn your head away.

The special effects are grimly exquisite, and probably keep the nerds busy analyzing what’s what, and how it was possibly made. End-times occupations! But the thrill here isn’t the “illusion” or semblance of reality (because there is none) but rather the relentless force with which the occult zombie-monsters thrash their surroundings (including human bodies and all their contents). It’s a roller-coaster, and I don’t mean that in the clichéd jolly old way. It’s a roller-coaster of nefarious, brutal, insidious, mean-spirited violence that makes you feel sick and look away (but the sound effects then fill in exactly what’s going on)…

Why is this a brilliant film? Because it literally takes no prisoners, and it rips out any tendencies of irony from the rotten bowels of the PC horror we’ve sadly grown accustomed to. It actually breathes of Gaspar Noé more than of Sam Raimi (who is still a franchise producer), and it’s a liberating breath. This is exactly the kind of Synaptic Overheating we were looking for as teenagers (and the original Evil Dead from 1983 was part of that experience for me, personally) but then saw wither away along the decades in favor of smart, ironic, tongue-in-cheek safe splatter – thereby inadvertently (?) making real life peer to peer clips zooming by on Instagram from an assortment of war zones and natural disasters the new expressions of horror film. When reality is more brutal and more disgusting than any attempts at making commercially successful film school horror, then grass roots horror needs to step up and gross the “normies” out for real. That is exactly what “Evil Dead Burn” does.

“Evil Dead Burn” is also very literally an anti-Odyssey film, which adds greatly to its allure (as Nolan’s “Odyssey” sword & sandal cock-rocking fantasy just made one billion dollars!), in which the protagonist chick is trying to get away from home and family – very understandably in this case – while the fates try their hardest to keep her back in the violent fold of genetic decline, battery, brains, and blood. As such, the film is a great counter-point to the proto-protagonism shenanigans of Odysseus, who’s kept us excited for many thousands of years. Nolan’s film made me yawn; “Evil Dead Burn” made me wake up. That’s the power of filmmaking right there.

As of today, the thirteenth issue of The Fenris Wolf is published and available to order. The wait is finally over, and I’m grateful for the patience of Fenris fans and readers alike. I often wonder how it can take so long to assemble these monsters, but that just leads down similar rabbit-holes (or worm-ditto) as ”what’s beyond outer space?” Etc. So better to just repeat: As of today, the thirteenth issue of The Fenris Wolf is published and available to order.

It’s a special issue that bounces off the third ”PSYCHARTCULT” conference (Copenhagen 2022), and anthologizes many of its papers. The overarching theme is ”Film as a visionary medium.” We have also included many great papers and talks from the many psychartcult events we’ve had online together with Morbid Anatomy over the years. Here follows the blurb and a list of the contributors:

Step through the flickering darkness of the cinema and into the realm where celluloid becomes sorcery. This thirteenth issue of the long-running occultural journal The Fenris Wolf gathers essays, personal testimony, fiction, and visual art exploring cinema as humanity’s most potent modern mythology—a medium capable of trance, transformation, and genuine magical operation.

Drawn from a landmark international conference on psychoanalysis, art, and the occult held in Copenhagen in 2022, this substantial anthology treats film not as mere entertainment but as ritual technology. Contributors trace the hidden occult lineage of cinema itself—from ancient light-and-shadow magic and ocular science through the birth of the motion picture camera as an instrument obsessed with recreating human vision and consciousness.

Genre cinema receives rigorous reappraisal throughout: theme-park science fiction and its real-world echoes in immersive “total environments”; folk horror as a vessel for ecological anxiety and buried myth; the Satanic and esoteric undercurrents running through classic horror, cult exploitation films, and arthouse provocation; a controversial epic of Roman decadence read through the lens of Dionysian philosophy; the psychic violence embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s editing techniques; and gothic fantasy as a lifelong artistic language for outsiders and misfits.

Deep biographical excavation forms a major thread, with extensive newly-uncovered archival material documenting Anton LaVey and his surprisingly extensive, often frustrating, sometimes hilarious dealings with Hollywood producers, B-movie directors, and exploitation filmmakers spanning decades—love scenes with a witch’s coven, sequences shot in a Mexican desert town, disputes over ownership and misrepresentation, and the strange Satanic afterlife of forgotten grind-house curiosities.

Additional territory includes the cut-up method as literal magical technique linking underground filmmakers, Beat writers, and sound experimentation; ketamine-assisted psychotherapy explored through the lens of ceremonial magic and inherited demon-lore; precognitive dreaming and its uncanny relationship to cinematic imagery; the liminal symbolism of glass, screens, and thresholds in ritual and viewing experience; feminist reclamation of witchcraft, seduction, and glamour on screen via filmmaker Anna Biller; the historical erasure of Black witches and spiritual practitioners within horror and prestige television; the mythology and dubious real-world reenactments of a fictional telepathic cinema device; possession, hysteria, and trance states connecting Haitian Vodou, Mesmerism, and early psychoanalysis; visionary directors’ unique treatment of gaze, gender, and violence; and a closing meditation on a recently departed David Lynch, master of dream-logic filmmaking.

Illustrated throughout and rich with citation, rare imagery, and firsthand testimony, this volume rewards film historians, practicing occultists, psychoanalytic thinkers, and cinephiles alike. Whether examining pianola technology’s strange kinship with android uprisings, the alchemical properties of the editing cut, or the folkloric roots of Halloween as high holy day, every essay insists that the moving image has always been, and remains, a doorway to something larger than entertainment—a mythic, psychological, and frankly magical force shaping how we dream, fear, and desire.

Authors in this issue of The Fenris Wolf: Anders Lundgren, Kasper Opstrup, Billie Steigerwald, Mara Norman, Charlotte Rodgers, Vanessa Sinclair, Ojoboca, Martin Munthe, Gustaf Broms, Ayesha Adamo, Anna Sebastian, Gast Bouchet, River, Carl Abrahamsson, Blanche Barton, Mitch Horowitz, Chaweon Koo, Bri Luna, Gary Lachman, Ana Leorne, Todd McGowan, Peggy Nadramia, Vanessa Sinclair, Sabina Stent, Matthew Levi Stevens & Locke Fitzroy, Jack Stevenson, Ad Vat, and Mary Wild.

Available as a paperback, hardback, and e-book. You can order your own copy right HERE.

We embark on so many journeys; most of which end up at the very same point of departure. Seconds may pass, aeons may pass. But still, these journeys cling to faith and hope and charity towards the feeling of necessary inspiration that is a hard currency among the cynics of our own spheres. Everyone wants the same, and sets out ambitiously; seldom to give but often to demand whatever they feel they need – which they rarely do, really.

Youthful zest, libido, will to live, will to power, questing and questioning. We cherish the instigation – even if it’s only a second hand notion or impulse. Engagement, development, resonance, advancement (so called). Then, after proven diligence follow first hand encounters with the glamorous interpreters of the mysteries, sources, and schools.

You go to school, and one day you yourself may become a teacher and interpreter, guiding the youth onwards and upwards. These fairly causal adventures are all necessary, and they are all parts of the main one – which is your own adventure. In retrospect, some trips may feel like detours or distractions but it’s enough with just a tiny bit of awareness to realize that nothing is ever wasted.

Youth is not “wasted on the young,” but is rather just a source and phase in a linear apprehension of time and progress. Time is not wasted on anything for the adventurer who regards the journey through wide-angled lenses rather than microscopic ones.

Read more

In the ripples of the recently published and highly recommended J.G. Ballard biography The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, I have put together an introduction class about this truly amazing and prophetic author. For four consecutive Sundays, beginning July 5th, we will go through his life, literary work, and why it still has relevance today. Sign up for ”The Psychosexual Pathology of Industrial Culture: The World of J.G. Ballard” HERE.

Some writers describe the world. J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) rearranged its furniture in our dreams and then asked why we found the new arrangement so seductive. Across four richly interconnected sessions, this class traces how a boy who grew up watching empire collapse from behind the fence of a wartime internment camp became one of the most unnervingly prescient imaginations of the last century—and why his “Ballardian” vision now feels less like science fiction than like a description of any Tuesday afternoon.

We begin in Shanghai, 1930. Ballard’s childhood in a foreign concession—cocktails and tennis courts coexisting with poverty and distant gunfire—taught him a lesson he would never unlearn: you can watch an entire social order collapse from a balcony. Interned by the Japanese at Lunghua, the young Ballard discovered that catastrophe is not only trauma but a peculiar kind of liberation, a laboratory in which the scenery falls away and you learn what people truly are.

Repatriated to a grey, rationed Britain, he found postwar suburbia almost metaphysically drab—and channelled all of it into science fiction. But not the rockets-and-rayguns kind. Through the magazine New Worlds and its “New Wave,” Ballard famously turned the genre’s gaze from outer space to “inner space”: the psyche under pressure from media, cars, high-rises, and the afterlife of empire. His real alien planet was the human mind.

Here the course slows down to savor Ballard’s great catastrophe novels. In The Drowned World, a flooded London becomes not a disaster to be solved but a mirror reflecting humanity’s pull toward deep time and dissolution. The Drought hardens this into a parched parable of fraying social bonds; The Crystal World freezes it into glittering, beautiful stasis. In each, Ballard refuses the heroic rescue plot. His characters don’t fight the flood—they walk into it. The disturbing question beneath all three: what if the disasters we fear are also the fantasies we secretly rehearse?

Then comes The Atrocity Exhibition, his most radical work—a fragmented anti-novel that reads like a deranged clinical report on media-saturated culture. Assassinations, car crashes, celebrity faces, and weapons tests collide and recombine. Decades before the smartphone, Ballard mapped the psyche trained to greet atrocity with a mixture of arousal and numbness. It now reads, uncomfortably, like a user manual for the scrolling feed.

The course’s middle stretch follows Ballard out of dreamlike landscapes and onto the actual motorways of West London. Crash fuses sex, technology, and death on the Westway, treating the road system as a new unconscious—and unmasking the eroticism already lurking in car culture. High-Rise seals a cross-section of the professional middle class inside a luxury tower and watches, almost gleefully, as petty grievances curdle into tribal warfare. No villain commands the collapse; the residents simply discover they enjoy it.

We trace these obsessions through Concrete Island, and their adoption by the industrial-music underground, where “Ballardian” became shorthand for a whole aesthetic. As Thatcher’s Britain reshaped the country into business parks and shopping malls, Ballard didn’t need to change course. The world simply caught up with him.

The final session opens with Empire of the Sun, his semi-autobiographical war novel—the “Rosetta stone” revealing that every drowned city and fractured tower descends from that boy watching planes above a camp fence. From there we enter his late “corporate dystopias”: the sun-drenched resort of Cocaine Nights, the business park of Super-Cannes, where executives are prescribed nocturnal violence as psychological hygiene, and the mall-fascism of Kingdom Come. In these worlds, power wears no uniform. It operates through gated communities, security protocols, and charismatic insiders—crime repackaged as social glue, transgression in the service of productivity.

The course closes by asking why Ballard still matters. The answer isn’t that he predicted everything. It’s that he taught us a way of seeing: to read tower blocks, motorways, and malls as diagrams of who moves freely and at what psychological cost; to refuse comforting villains and recognize how ordinary desires—for speed, privacy, spectacle—aggregate into inhuman systems; to notice what our own screens are doing to us.

Ballard is offered here not as an oracle but as a companion—and a provocateur who refuses to flatter us. His great impoliteness was to insist that the lure of disaster lives inside ordinary people, that we are not just victims of modern structures but their dreamers and willing engineers.

To finish this course is to step out into a car park or departure lounge and realize, with a slight chill, that you were never quite outside his pages to begin with.

Sign up for the class here.

In my essay ”Mondo Transcripto” (published in my book Source Magic, as well as online here. ) I mention the concept of Spontaneous Synaptic Combustion (SSC). It’s a key to understanding great art beyond any academic or intellectual constructions. Yes, it’s personal and highly subjective of course. However, the SSC function and dynamic can work for anyone. One way of describing it would be ”that which surprises or transcends the expected to the extent of creating a real WOW! impression.”

If you go to an exhibition of the work of an artist it can create a Yay or Nay or lukewarm impression. It sort of is what it is. The same goes for watching a film, listening to a piece of music, reading a book, etc. You probably picked it because you know/feel that it will provide a dose of something you like and would like to replenish. A mood enhancer of sorts, often approved by self-appointed experts and authorities. But how often are you really surprised when partaking of art in general – whether positively or negatively?

When we’re young we usually seek the extreme to find out where and what our own taste limits are, and this is of course very healthy. I fondly and vividly remember all-nighters with splatter & gore films, extreme horror, intense and laughable B-movies, exploitation classics, pornography, etc. The same with art and literature. There’s a reason why Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is better than Proust when you’re eighteen (or even sixty, actually): you need to feel that transcendental or perhaps even transgressive voice in order to understand the world in a more open-minded way. It makes you go WOW!, because it shocks and tilts you, and this teaches you something substantial about yourself that mere acceptance of others’ gospels and canons simply cannot.

I sincerely hope you know what I’m talking about. But if you don’t, here are five suggestions from cinema history that will hopefully shock and guide you right in this important SSC context.

Read more

In the ripples of the recently published and highly recommended J.G. Ballard biography The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, I have put together an introduction class about this truly amazing and prophetic author. For four consecutive Sundays, beginning July 5th, we will go through his life, literary work, and why it still has relevance today. Sign up for ”The Psychosexual Pathology of Industrial Culture: The World of J.G. Ballard” HERE.

Some writers describe the world. J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) rearranged its furniture in our dreams and then asked why we found the new arrangement so seductive. Across four richly interconnected sessions, this class traces how a boy who grew up watching empire collapse from behind the fence of a wartime internment camp became one of the most unnervingly prescient imaginations of the last century—and why his “Ballardian” vision now feels less like science fiction than like a description of any Tuesday afternoon.

We begin in Shanghai, 1930. Ballard’s childhood in a foreign concession—cocktails and tennis courts coexisting with poverty and distant gunfire—taught him a lesson he would never unlearn: you can watch an entire social order collapse from a balcony. Interned by the Japanese at Lunghua, the young Ballard discovered that catastrophe is not only trauma but a peculiar kind of liberation, a laboratory in which the scenery falls away and you learn what people truly are.

Repatriated to a grey, rationed Britain, he found postwar suburbia almost metaphysically drab—and channelled all of it into science fiction. But not the rockets-and-rayguns kind. Through the magazine New Worlds and its “New Wave,” Ballard famously turned the genre’s gaze from outer space to “inner space”: the psyche under pressure from media, cars, high-rises, and the afterlife of empire. His real alien planet was the human mind.

Here the course slows down to savor Ballard’s great catastrophe novels. In The Drowned World, a flooded London becomes not a disaster to be solved but a mirror reflecting humanity’s pull toward deep time and dissolution. The Drought hardens this into a parched parable of fraying social bonds; The Crystal World freezes it into glittering, beautiful stasis. In each, Ballard refuses the heroic rescue plot. His characters don’t fight the flood—they walk into it. The disturbing question beneath all three: what if the disasters we fear are also the fantasies we secretly rehearse?

Then comes The Atrocity Exhibition, his most radical work—a fragmented anti-novel that reads like a deranged clinical report on media-saturated culture. Assassinations, car crashes, celebrity faces, and weapons tests collide and recombine. Decades before the smartphone, Ballard mapped the psyche trained to greet atrocity with a mixture of arousal and numbness. It now reads, uncomfortably, like a user manual for the scrolling feed.

The course’s middle stretch follows Ballard out of dreamlike landscapes and onto the actual motorways of West London. Crash fuses sex, technology, and death on the Westway, treating the road system as a new unconscious—and unmasking the eroticism already lurking in car culture. High-Rise seals a cross-section of the professional middle class inside a luxury tower and watches, almost gleefully, as petty grievances curdle into tribal warfare. No villain commands the collapse; the residents simply discover they enjoy it.

We trace these obsessions through Concrete Island, and their adoption by the industrial-music underground, where “Ballardian” became shorthand for a whole aesthetic. As Thatcher’s Britain reshaped the country into business parks and shopping malls, Ballard didn’t need to change course. The world simply caught up with him.

The final session opens with Empire of the Sun, his semi-autobiographical war novel—the “Rosetta stone” revealing that every drowned city and fractured tower descends from that boy watching planes above a camp fence. From there we enter his late “corporate dystopias”: the sun-drenched resort of Cocaine Nights, the business park of Super-Cannes, where executives are prescribed nocturnal violence as psychological hygiene, and the mall-fascism of Kingdom Come. In these worlds, power wears no uniform. It operates through gated communities, security protocols, and charismatic insiders—crime repackaged as social glue, transgression in the service of productivity.

The course closes by asking why Ballard still matters. The answer isn’t that he predicted everything. It’s that he taught us a way of seeing: to read tower blocks, motorways, and malls as diagrams of who moves freely and at what psychological cost; to refuse comforting villains and recognize how ordinary desires—for speed, privacy, spectacle—aggregate into inhuman systems; to notice what our own screens are doing to us.

Ballard is offered here not as an oracle but as a companion—and a provocateur who refuses to flatter us. His great impoliteness was to insist that the lure of disaster lives inside ordinary people, that we are not just victims of modern structures but their dreamers and willing engineers.

To finish this course is to step out into a car park or departure lounge and realize, with a slight chill, that you were never quite outside his pages to begin with.

Sign up for the class here.

Antonio Margheriti was one of those Italian genre mechanics who seemed to exist in a permanent state of cinematic emergency: give him a crumbling set, a half-cooperative international cast, some toy tanks, a cave, a matte painting, a handful of explosions, and he would return, somehow, with a movie. Maybe not a good movie by the standards of people who use the phrase “good movie” as if it were a prerequisite for polite conversation. But a movie that moved, smoked, collapsed, flashed, and occasionally produced the sort of cheapo wonder that makes rational criticism feel like an incurable bourgeois, academic disease.

Margheriti — often hiding in plain sight under the export-ready name Anthony M. Dawson — was not a stylist in any refined sense. He was a trafficker in effects, momentum, and attractive fakery. He loved miniatures, forced perspective, infernal machines, jungle stock footage, volcanic hideouts, war-movie hardware, laser beams, lost worlds, booby traps, and men in sweat-stained shirts barking exposition in dubbed voices. His cinema belongs to the great Italian tradition of opportunistic mutation: see what the Americans have made money with, then rewire it overnight using half the budget (at most), twice the nerve, and a far less obedient relationship with plausibility.

And in the early-to-mid 1980s, after Raiders of the Lost Ark made the bullwhip respectable and turned archaeological plunder into family entertainment, Italian cinema went raiding too. Suddenly every producer with access to khaki shirts, rubber snakes, and a quarry outside Rome could smell treasure. Margheriti, veteran of gothic horror, sci-fi, peplum, war pictures, spy junk, and whatever else the marketplace demanded, waded into the cycle with three gloriously shameless adventure pictures: The Hunters of the Golden Cobra (1982), The Ark of the Sun God (1984), and Jungle Raiders (1985). These gems have recently been assembled by Severin into a most delightful box of BluRays, and yes, I have enjoyed this release a lot.

Are the films great? That depends on what you mean by “great.” If you mean disciplined screenwriting, coherent geography, moral seriousness, or the sort of carefully burnished Hollywood spectacle that comes with union-certified dust particles, then no, perhaps not. If you mean sweaty pulp contraptions full of fake danger, bargain-bin exotica, postcolonial nonsense, exploding huts, and treasure maps, then yes: they are, in their mangy way, very great indeed.

They are not especially sleazy, at least not compared to the more diseased provinces of Italian exploitation. Anyone arriving with expectations of mondo cruelty, giallo perversity, cannibal-movie degradation, or women-in-prison sadism may feel decidedly underfed. Where are the tits and asses? Not here. These films are closer to matinée adventure — but matinée adventure seen through a smeared grind-house window. The sex is mostly implied, the violence often comic-book, and the sadism rarely lingers long enough to become truly rancid. Yet something better, or at least stranger, seeps through: a fever dream of imitation, a handmade delirium, a total absence of shame.

Let’s begin with The Ark of the Sun God (1984), also known in various territories under names that sound like they were assembled from loose nouns left behind after a drunken title brainstorming session. The plot is, technically, about a precious artifact, sinister factions, desert intrigue, and the sort of treasure-hunting mechanics that require people to hold ancient objects up to the light while solemnly muttering things nobody in the audience believes. But the real plot is much simpler: men run, men shoot, men double-cross, men find caves, things explode.

David Warbeck, one of the great utility players of Eurocult cinema, takes center stage with his usual air of amused, battered professionalism. Warbeck always looked like he understood exactly what kind of movie he was in and had decided to enjoy himself without letting the whole thing become camp. He had that marvelous semi-creased British charm: part soldier of fortune, part nightclub owner, part man who knows the catering truck will not arrive on time. He gives these films something invaluable — a hero who does not quite believe the script, but believes completely in the necessity of getting to the next scene. A semi-suave Roger Moore type dutifully serving the incomprehensible Italian B Movie Industry.

The movie has the usual Italian adventure geography, meaning countries, deserts, ruins, villages, caves, and military installations seem located approximately three minutes apart by jeep. Characters cross borders with the efficiency of dream logic. Maps are consulted, but they function less as navigation than as sacred props. Somewhere there is treasure. Somewhere there are villains. Somewhere there is a location manager looking at his watch. Andiamo!

What makes The Ark of the Sun God delightful is its complete commitment to pulp clutter. It knows that an adventure film needs objects: idols, crates, guns, documents, keys, explosives, ancient chambers, hidden switches. Margheriti piles them up like a junk-shop archaeologist. The movie becomes less a story than a chain of tactile irritations: open this, steal that, shoot him, decode this, get captured, escape, enter cave, find relic, betray partner, repeat until finale.

It lacks the cruel erotic kick of harder exploitation, yes. Nobody is pushing the envelope of depravity. The women are not treated with anything like the lurid obsession one finds in the rougher Italian cycles, and the violence generally aims for Saturday-afternoon stimulation rather than midnight moral injury. But that also gives the film its odd charm.

Margheriti’s hand is most visible in the effects and action business. He loves to break things. Not always convincingly, but enthusiastically. His explosions have that special Italian quality: fireballs blooming in dusty spaces while extras fling themselves sideways with operatic despair. His caves and ruins are stagey, sometimes obviously artificial, but they have texture. You can feel the production building its own world out of plaster, smoke, and nerve. That handmade quality is the secret drug. Hollywood gives you seamless illusion; Margheriti gives you seams, glue, wires, and a grin.

Then there is The Hunters of the Golden Cobra (1982), which may be the purest of the bunch as an Italian Raiders clone, because it embraces the holy nonsense of the exotic artifact with almost liturgical fervor. The title alone is magnificent. Not just a cobra. Not just gold. A golden cobra. And not merely one hunter, but hunters, plural, because pulp adventure requires groups of sweaty people with competing claims on imaginary antiquities.

The film has all the necessary components: military uniforms, jungle skulking, colonial leftovers, secret chambers, treachery, native menace rendered through the usual dubious exploitation shorthand, and heroes who treat priceless cultural objects as if they were raffle prizes. If one wanted to mount a sober critique of the film’s politics, one would not lack material. These movies inherit the whole rotten adventure tradition: foreign lands as obstacle courses, local populations as atmosphere or threat, treasure as something waiting for Europeans and Americans to locate, remove, and moralize over. But the films are so artificial, so visibly comic-strip, that their ideology often feels less like a coherent worldview than like another borrowed prop, something grabbed off the shelf along with the pith helmets.

Still, that does not absolve them; it just makes them revealing. The Italian exploitation machine was never shy about recycling old imperial fantasies, and Golden Cobra is absolutely part of that lineage. But what complicates the pleasure is the film’s very cheapness. The fantasy is threadbare. The seams show. The jungle is not a jungle so much as “jungle,” an unstable theatrical category made from foliage, smoke, animal noises, and frantic cutting. The exoticism is bogus, but the bogusness becomes part of the aesthetic. You are watching imperial adventure as a decaying stage act, still going through its motions in a half-empty theater (or your own couch).

And those motions are often terrific. Margheriti understood forward thrust. Even when the plot is gibberish, the movie rarely lies down and dies. Someone is always sneaking, plotting, escaping, shooting, or being surprised by a trap that looks like it was engineered by an especially theatrical carpenter. There is joy in the contrivance. The ancient mechanisms work because the genre requires them to work. The villain explains because villains must explain. The treasure gleams because treasure must gleam.

Originality would almost be rude here. The film’s greatness rather lies in the conversion of imitation into ritual. You already know the beats, the types, the betrayals, the perils. The pleasure comes from seeing how this particular low-budget machine processes them. It is not Raiders of the Lost Ark; it is the fever dream of Raiders produced by men who have fewer resources, looser ethics, and a much more intimate relationship with dynamite.

And again: is it sleazy enough? Maybe not. The title promises a certain reptilian depravity that the film does not fully deliver. One might wish for more venom, more sweat, more sexual danger, more outright sadism. The movie is naughty in reputation more than in content. But that restraint — accidental or commercial — gives it a peculiar accessibility. It is exploitation adventure you can watch for comfort, which sounds like a contradiction until you realize that comfort viewing for some of us involves exactly this: secret temples and dubbed mercenaries.

Jungle Raiders (1985) is where the formula starts looking even more ragged, which is not necessarily a complaint. Raggedness is a form of truth in this cinema. By the time you get to Jungle Raiders, you may feel the cycle eating itself: treasure, jungle, mercenaries, old grudges, suspicious allies, traps, firepower, all fed back through the Margheriti apparatus until the movie resembles a pulp magazine left out in the rain.

This one has the special charm of late-cycle exploitation: everyone knows the game, no one is inventing anything, but the routines have become comfortingly unhinged. The jungle-adventure template is stretched across whatever assets are available. There are moments when the film seems less directed than assembled from a producer’s inventory: a location here, a stunt there, a miniature, a burst of gunfire, a cave, some uniforms, a couple of actors who look like they were booked through three different agencies on four different continents.

But Margheriti’s craftsmanship — and yes, it is craftsmanship, even when it looks like madness — keeps it alive. He had the old-school genre director’s gift for making insufficiency active. Not enough money? Move faster. Not enough extras? Smoke and cutting. Not enough jungle? Shoot the same foliage from twelve angles and hope the audience is too busy watching the grenade. He was not hiding poverty so much as weaponizing it.

Jungle Raiders also benefits from the particular Italian pleasure of mismatched elements. War-movie hardware crashes into treasure-hunt mythology. Mercenary cynicism rubs against ancient-civilization hokum. The film wants to be exotic, violent, romantic, comic, and explosive, often within the same five-minute stretch. It is tonally undisciplined in a way that modern filmmaking rarely permits. Today, genre pastiche is usually curated, signposted, and smirking. Margheriti’s films simply are what they are: commercial mutations trying to get theater bookings.

As with the others, one can lament the shortage of true grindhouse transgression. Jungle Raiders is not a descent into jungle hell. It is not Cannibal Holocaust, not Eaten Alive!, not even one of the nastier mercenary pictures. It does not have enough blood to satisfy the gorehounds, enough nudity to satisfy the prurient ”raincoat brigade”, or enough depravity to disturb the well-adjusted. But maybe expecting that from these movies is a category error. Their sleaze is not in explicit content; it is in their existence as knockoff goods, in their shameless borrowing, in their market-stall vitality. They are sleazy as objects, not always as spectacles.

The films feel illicit not because they show the forbidden, but because they seem produced by a cinema with no respect for borders: national, generic, aesthetic, moral, or copyright-adjacent. They are smuggler cinema. They traffic in images already made famous elsewhere, rough them up, re-dub them, and sell them back under louder titles.

So why are these films so enjoyable? First, because Margheriti had no contempt for pulp. He also did not elevate it, which is often a disguised form of embarrassment. He served it. He gave the audience caves, cobras, guns, treasure, villains, and explosions because those are the sacraments. He understood that adventure cinema is fundamentally childish, and that the way to make it pleasurable is not to deny the childishness but to energize it.

Second, because the films move. Even when they are nonsensical, they are rarely inert. They have the choppy, episodic rhythm of boys’ adventure comics, cliffhanger serials, and dubbed television episodes. The scenes arrive as units of sensation: ambush, chase, betrayal, trap, discovery. Psychology is minimal because psychology would only slow down the jeep.

Third, because they possess the handmade charm of pre-digital fakery. Margheriti’s miniatures and effects may not convince in the strict sense, but conviction is overrated. They delight. They bring the viewer into a contract not of realism but of purposeless play. You see the model, the matte, the stage smoke, and instead of feeling cheated, you feel invited into the machinery.

Fourth, because Christopher Connelly, David Warbeck, and the international casts bring precisely the right level of battered professionalism. These actors are not slumming; they are probably just surviving. They make the absurdity playable.

Are they actually great films? No — or yes — or not in the way official culture means. They are minor works by a major minor director, if that makes sense. They are not the summit of Margheriti’s career, and they are certainly not the wildest products of Italian exploitation. They are too tame to be truly scandalous, too derivative to be masterpieces, too slapdash to be classics in the conventional sense.

But they are great fun, and fun is not nothing. In fact, fun may be the most abused and undervalued category in cult film criticism. These movies offer the pleasure of junk expertly mishandled: familiar formulas bent through budgetary desperation and genre instinct until they become something both ridiculous and oddly personal. Margheriti’s signature is not thematic depth; it is kinetic fraudulence. He basically makes fake things happen with genuine conviction.

That is the charm of The Ark of the Sun God, The Hunters of the Golden Cobra, and Jungle Raiders. They are not forbidden enough to be genuinely dangerous, but they are disreputable enough to feel alive. They do not drown you in sleaze, sex, or violence, but they give you a cinema of dust, sweat, bad maps, glowing idols, collapsing sets, and men diving away from fireballs. They are exploitation films wearing adventure-movie trousers, with a theater prop switchblade tucked somewhere in the sock.

Perhaps they are not as great as memory, nostalgia, or a lurid VHS sleeve might promise. But then again, that gap — between promise and delivery, between imagined depravity and actual Saturday-night knockabout — is part of the genre’s melancholy beauty. Italian exploitation was always selling dreams it could not afford. Margheriti, bless him, sold them with flair.

So yes: they are great. Not great like monuments. Great like contraband fireworks. Great like a dubbed print on a battered VHS tape at 1:30 in the morning. Great like something you know is bad for the critical faculties but excellent for the cinematically sensitive soul.

The Antonio Margheriti BluRay box with these films and a lot of very cool bonus material is available from Severin Films.

American artist Peter Beard (1938-2020) was blessed not only by having lived an amazing and creative life, but also by having had his work preserved in several great monographs and catalogs. Thus the work lives on – certainly beyond his control, but at least available to be enjoyed by many a future generation.

Being an avid fan, I’ve been collecting many of his books, and they all provide great insight into Beard’s universe, consisting of Africa, New York, models, celebrities, and wild animals (and then some). My favorite book is probably a predominantly textual book called Zara’s Tales. It’s a collection of African adventures written for Beard’s daughter, Zara. Of course it also has many images and illustrations as well, but the fascinating thing is that it allows a different kind of insight into this explosively creative psyche – as well as into his memories of life in Africa over many decades.

My favorite Beard book when it comes to his art, pure & proper, is Fifty Years of Portraits (Arena Editions, 1999, coinciding with a retrospective exhibition in Los Angeles). The title is appropriate: the book is a seductive piece of history-writing in faces, persons, personas, in strong images and hand-written words, chronicling five decades of creative developments.

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The video also ends with a recording of a live performance by Nicolas’ own musical project.

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There are many exciting things happening here at AAA HQ. Not only are new documentary films forthcoming this year, but also a book anthology of the AAA interviews with interesting and inspiring artists.

As you know, this AAA Substack is the place where I keep all of my films easily available. Some of them are on YouTube or DVD/BluRay but the easiest and safest bet is to watch them right here.

The Films Section!

On that note, I will actually be showing my documentary on Anton LaVey – Into the Devil’s Den – and do a Q & A afterwards on Saturday May 30th (7pm CET). It’s online and open for paid subscribers to the Fenris Wolf Substack (which also hosts a lot of bonus material from this film). Come watch the film and ask me questions!

On June 2nd I will be at Gothenburg University “live” to show the same film and talk about it. Always happy to show my films and interact with people, whether online or in vivo!

There are many ways cinema can make us afraid. A shark will do it. A slasher. So will a demon, a plague, an investment banker with perfect teeth, or a Baz Luhrman musical. But really paranoid cinema offers a more refined unease: the suspicion that power is organized, faceless, patient—and perhaps already in the room—perhaps even watching you through the screen?

Films about government and political control are rarely just “political.” They are also about paperwork, obedience, surveillance, memory, language, and that ancient human fear that somewhere, someone has made a file about us for later scrutiny. What makes these movies endure is not simply that they show oppressive systems, but that they understand a subtler truth: domination is most effective when it becomes atmosphere.

Here, then, are five films from different eras that dramatize paranoia about political power with style, intelligence, and varying levels of psychic damage. Enjoy (?)!

1. The Conversation (1974, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Harry Caul, a surveillance expert in San Francisco, is very good at recording other people’s lives and very bad at living his own. Hired to tape a young couple’s conversation in a crowded public square, he becomes obsessed with a fragment he may have misheard—or heard too well. As he revisits the recording, his technical professionalism curdles into moral panic. What exactly is going to happen to the couple, and what role has he played in it? The story tightens not through explosions but through repetition, doubt, and the terrible intimacy of listening.

Why it belongs here: this is one of the great films about surveillance before the digital age made surveillance seem efficient, sleek, or… gasp… inevitable. The Conversation understands that the real horror is interpretive: once everything can be recorded, every inflection becomes a trap. The apparatus of political and corporate power is mostly offscreen, which makes it more frightening. We do not confront Leviathan directly; we hear it in the static.

Want to check out The Conversation?

2. Z (1969, dir. Costa-Gavras)

In an unnamed Mediterranean country that resembles Greece a little too closely to be accidental, a charismatic left-wing politician is assassinated after a public rally. Authorities immediately begin the usual dance of official nonsense, blaming drunkenness, confusion, and essentially the weather. But an investigating magistrate starts following the evidence, and the evidence, being impolite, keeps pointing toward a coordinated conspiracy involving the military, the police, and the state’s loyal hooligans. The film proceeds with the speed of a thriller and the indignation of a civic document.

Why it belongs here: Z is paranoia cinema with conviction & receipts. Rather than merely implying that shadowy forces manipulate democracy, it shows how respectable institutions collaborate in broad daylight while preserving the fiction of legality. Its brilliance lies in how little mysticism it allows power. The conspiracy is not exotic; it is bureaucratic, cowardly, and procedural. That may be the most unnerving version of all.

Want to check out Z?

3. Brazil (1985, dir. Terry Gilliam)

Sam Lowry is a low-ranking bureaucrat in a retro-futurist state whose administrative machinery has achieved the sublime: it can transform a typo into a life-destroying event. When a harmless man is arrested because of a clerical error, Sam stumbles into a labyrinth of paperwork, security services, plastic surgery, ducts, forms, receipts, and institutional madness. There is, somewhere amid the cables and stamped documents, a woman he believes he loves; there is also the distinct possibility that modern governance has become one enormous self-propelling hallucination.

Why it belongs here: if Kafka had been handed a bigger art department and a taste for industrial slapstick, he might have made something like Brazil. The film’s political paranoia is comic, but not frivolous. It captures a central feature of control societies: they do not merely repress; they administrate. People disappear not because Big Brother is always glaring, but because systems become too intricate, too absurd, and too insulated to correct themselves. Terror arrives wrapped in office memo formatting.

Want to check out Brazil?

4. The Lives of Others (2006, dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Set in East Berlin in the 1980s, the film follows Gerd Wiesler, a disciplined Stasi officer assigned to monitor a playwright and his actress partner. At first, his task seems straightforward: listen, report, preserve ideological order. But constant exposure to the couple’s private life begins to alter him. The machinery of surveillance, intended to erase ambiguity, instead produces it. Meanwhile, the state’s motives prove less noble than merely jealous, punitive, and self-serving.

Why it belongs here: this film is relevant because it shows political control not as an abstract doctrine but as a daily practice of intrusion. Walls have ears, yes, but those ears belong to tired men with headphones, ambitions, resentments, and occasional consciences. The Lives of Others is especially sharp on the intimacy of authoritarianism: the state does not only regulate speech in public squares; it colonizes bedrooms, manuscripts, friendships, and silence itself.

Want to check out The Lives of Others?

5. Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

In a near-future Britain, humanity has become infertile, and society has responded to civilizational despair not with wisdom but with militarized border policy. Theo, a disillusioned former activist, is pulled into a mission to protect a miraculously pregnant refugee woman. Their journey through checkpoints, propaganda, refugee cages, urban warfare, and collapsing institutions becomes both chase film and political lament. The plot moves with urgency, but the world around it tells the deeper story: a frightened state has converted emergency into permanent method.

Why it belongs here: although it is often discussed as dystopian science fiction, Children of Men is also one of the most persuasive modern films about government control justified by crisis. Its paranoid force comes from plausibility. The state does not announce itself as evil; it presents itself as necessary, temporary, regrettable—while normalizing brutality. The lesson is ancient and renewable: exceptional measures have a genius for becoming banal routine.

Want to check out Children of Men?

What unites these five films is not just suspicion of government, but suspicion of systems that claim necessity as their alibi. Some are overtly authoritarian, some are democratic in name, some are exaggerated into satire, and some are realistic enough to consider keeping your phone in the basement. Yet all of them understand that political control is not only exercised through force. It is exercised through records, classifications, euphemisms, technologies, and the dull, technocratic management of what may be seen, heard, or believed.

Paranoia is therefore not merely a psychological condition. It is a form of literacy. One learns to read the memo, the transcript, the official explanation, the missing document, the cheerful slogan. One learns, in short, that power prefers not to look like power. It prefers to look like bureaucratic procedure.

Which is perhaps why these movies remain so enjoyable, even when they are bleak. They flatter us with a grim invitation: pay attention, they say. The plot is always larger than the plot. And if, after watching them, you feel a sudden reluctance to speak near telephones, elevators, or men carrying clipboards, cinema has done its old magical & miraculous work.

On the very day that I wrap up this essay, Roman Polanski turns 92 years old. Somehow his cinematic brilliance has always been there in my life. With very few duds under his belt, it’s been a life long journey of more or less absolute mastery, and one that’s presented fans like me with endless hours of movie-going joy. From ”Knife in the Water” (1962) to ”Palace” (2023), and via an existence filled with strife, trauma and disaster, Polanski has somehow managed to continually share his visions with us in a seemingly uncompromising way.

For me it began in Stockholm in 1979, when I was thirteen. My uncle snuck me in to a screening of Polanski’s ”The Tenant” (1976) and I was terrified in the best possible way. The mix of dark, beautiful cinema, sheer psychological terror, and Polanski as an actor as well, created some form of deep impact respect that’s been with me to this very day.

Based on Roland Topor’s 1964 novel of the same name, ”The Tenant” completes what critics often call Polanski’s early “Apartment Trilogy,” following “Repulsion” (1965) and “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). Yet “The Tenant” stands apart not merely as an adaptation, but as a haunting meditation on identity, paranoia, and urban alienation that feels as much like autobiography as adaptation. And most likely because it is.

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My wife and I recently pushed through all of the James Bond films, from Dr No (1962) to No Time to Die (2021). It took us a good couple of weeks but of course it was worth it. Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig showed us the ropes and the tropes in this highly enjoyable formulaic franchise.

Let us conduct an autopsy — affectionate, obviously — on the sixty years of Bond cinema. Not because the films are great art, though some occasionally stumble into it, but because they are something rarer and more instructive: a perfectly preserved mythic ritual, performed in darkness, before millions of willing communicants.

Every Bond film is, at its structural core, the same film. This is not at all an ironic criticism but rather an acknowledgment of greatness and necessity.

M dispatches our hero into a world of organized menace. Bond encounters a woman who is initially adversarial, then horizontal. He meets a villain of such baroque self-regard that megalomania seems almost understatement. He is captured — always, inevitably, humiliatingly captured — and subjected to an exposition monologue so comprehensive that one suspects the villain secretly wants to be a dark side TED speaker. He escapes. Things explode. The world is saved. The girl is kissed. Curtain. ”James Bond will return.”

This is, with only superficial modification, the Hero’s Journey as described by Joseph Campbell — itself a formula extracted from ten thousand years of human storytelling. Bond is Odysseus with a Walther PPK. He descends into the villain’s underworld (invariably an underground base, a hollowed volcano, a submarine lair that must have cost more than Portugal’s GDP), confronts the shadow, and returns to the ordinary world. The ordinary world, in Bond’s case, is usually a yacht. But the mythic scaffolding is perfectly orthodox. However, Bond is here dissimilar to Odysseus – he has nothing and no-one to return home to.

What Bond adds to Campbell’s schema is brand identity. The Martini. The introduction. The gun barrel sequence. The Aston Martin. The gadgets from Q’s department, which function precisely as the magical talismans of folklore — objects that seem useless until the narrative moment arrives when a watch that fires grappling hooks is exactly what the universe requires.

The Bond villain is perhaps cinema’s most reliable character archetype, and the most revealing. Because villains, unlike heroes, are entirely products of their historical moment.

Blofeld and SPECTRE emerged from Cold War anxieties about invisible, borderless power — the terror of not knowing which side anyone was really on. Goldfinger was capitalism’s id made flesh, a man who loved gold with a sincerity that would embarrass a central banker. Jaws was pure atavistic dread, the medieval monster with metal teeth. By the 1990s, with Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, the villain had become a media mogul manufacturing reality itself — a plot that seemed paranoid in 1997 and documentary by 2015 – and even more so today. Let’s not forget Hugo Drax in Moonraker, intent on creating a master race in space – how prescient these films can be!

Then came Silva in Skyfall (2012): a cyber-terrorist with mother issues and a grudge against the surveillance state. Then Blofeld again, reimagined as Bond’s literal stepbrother, because apparently geopolitics had become insufficient and only familial trauma would do. And finally, in No Time to Die, Safin — a bioweapon-deploying aesthete in a Japanese poison garden — arrived precisely as a real pandemic was rearranging the world’s sense of invisible biological threat.

The formula is consistent: the villain is always the nightmare version of the current moment’s deepest anxiety. He is what we fear the future contains if the hero fails to show up. Luckily for us, Bond always does.

The Bond Girl is where the formula most visibly strains against history, and where the films’ relationship with their own Zeitgeist becomes most awkward (and yet we enjoy and laugh at/with them!): Honey Ryder emerging from the sea in 1962 is pure mythological imagery — Venus from the foam, simultaneously innocent and erotic. It is also, let us be frank, a male fantasy so unsubtle it could have been drawn with a crayon. For two decades, Bond Girls were largely decorative, given names of ironic innuendo (Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead, Christmas Jones, May Day) as if the screenwriters were operating a dare.

Then something shifted. Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies was better at martial arts than Bond. Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006) broke his heart. Madeleine Swann became, astonishingly, the mother of his child. Nomi in No Time to Die took over the 007 designation herself. Moneypenny morphed from lady-like Brit to hot black chick with field experience (even to the extent of shooting Bond by mistake!). The formula was retrofitting feminism in real time, with varying degrees of grace — sometimes achieving genuine complexity, sometimes merely adding competence to the decorative function and calling it progress. Come to think of it, the ultimate & classic line of the franchise is perhaps not so much ”Shaken, not stirred,” as it is ”Oh, James…”

Is it the same story? Yes. Structurally, semiotically, mythically — yes. But this is not a flaw in the machine. It is the machine’s entire purpose. Because ritual works through repetition. The Mass is the same Mass. The Odyssey contains the same homeward-striving Odysseus whether told in Greek, Latin, or the language of a 1990s action franchise. What changes, productively and necessarily, is the costume — the specific anxieties, the cultural temperature, the acceptable boundaries of gender and race and violence. Each Bond film is a document of when it was made, pressed like a flower between the pages of the same eternal book.

Which brings us to No Time to Die, and to something genuinely unprecedented in the sixty-year franchise: James Bond died. Not a fake death. Not a temporary death. He stood on a hilltop as missiles descended, having been injected with nano-bots keyed to kill everyone he loves, choosing sacrifice over reunion. He died, having become, in Daniel Craig’s incarnation, something the earlier Bonds never were — emotionally available.

And this matters enormously. Because in the mythology of the invulnerable hero, death is the one move that cannot be taken back. When Achilles dies, the age of heroes is over. Bond’s death signals something our culture is clearly processing: the end of a particular fantasy of masculine invincibility — the man who feels nothing, risks everything, loses no one, and is always, Martini in hand, fine. Bruised but undeniably firm tongue in cheek.

The films will continue, of course. The formula will survive its practitioner. A new Bond will rise, as gods do, reincarnated for a new anxiety. But for one extraordinary moment, the ritual acknowledged what ritual never usually admits: that even the immortal hero is mortal, and that meaning, finally, requires loss. Bond became gradually more human, and that, as we all know, is a death sentence in itself. Bond lost not only his original parents (which led to his indirect adoption of a shadow brother in Blofeld through brilliant Christoph Waltz) but also M the father and M the mother, only to be survived by M the brother-of-sorts (Ralph Fiennes). And the loves… It took decades to get over the death of his wife Teresa, but Vesper and Madeleine did their bit in humanizing Bond, giving him a license – and reason – not to kill but to live.

Bond is temporarily dead. Long live Bond. The projector hums. The gun barrel appears. We settle into our seats, comfortable in the familiar dark, ready — always ready — to believe again. But will the myth succeed next time, if there actually is such a thing as a next time?

Check out the James Bond films here.

Throughout the decades I’ve been writing a lot of different things for a lot of different people. The following review of William Eggleston’s beautiful Chromes book was written for a short-lived online art magazine called Grounded Magnet (ca 2010-2011). Enjoy!

William Eggleston (born 1939) is mainly known as an American photographer who has brought color photography to new (art) heights from the 1960s and onwards. Not only by using particular printing techniques to really saturate the colors but also because he has developed a tradition of seeing and working that up until the 1960s had been almost trademarked by black and white photography (adherents): the mix between Walker Evans’ ambitious anthropological curiosity and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s poetically geometrical everyday snapshots and portraits.

In Eggleston’s world, predominantly the American South, there are cars, bars, gas stations, fields, supermarkets, fast food, lost souls, dreamy stares, signs, streets, reflections… All of which constitutes the essential everyday life for many of us, even if we’re far away from Eggleston’s Memphis. These hyper-American surroundings though, in which human beings almost act as ”extras” and only rarely as protagonists, have become Eggleston’s trademark. The distanced poetry of his images never cease to attract, surprise or fascinate.

In a recent book, Before Color (Steidl 2010), a selection of Eggleston’s black and white photos from the late 50s and early 60s was presented, showing that the way of looking at things was already firmly established. In many ways, this early work can be seen as sketch work. When Eggleston found his epiphany in strong colors, there was simply no turning back.

But, as mentioned, the way of looking at things was already there. The flare, the detachment, the perspective had already been established. That’s one key to the Egglestonean mysteries. Another key is revealed in a funny story, presented in the film William Eggleston in the real world (Michael Almereyda, USA, 2005) by his wife Rosa. Eggleston, ever the aesthete, complained to a friend that everything around him (referring to the surroundings) was so ugly and what was he going to take pictures of? The friend simply replied that he should focus on ”the ugly stuff”. And that Eggleston certainly has, diligently, to the extent that whatever was really ugly back then is now preserved as pieces of highly beautiful and lovingly deadpan Americana through his own creative perspective.

All of these seemingly commonplace environments, details and situations of the American South today function as both aesthetic and psychological time capsules, but also as something completely timeless.

Eggleston’s view seemingly never rests. It is apparent that he’s getting old – the recent book Paris (Steidl, 2009), consisting of new images, plus his own drawings made while in Paris, is rather weak – but the magical moments of his eye-to-finger-to-camera are never far away. He never takes more than one exposure of each instantaneous attraction and seems happy to temporarily forget what he’s just taken a picture of. In many ways, this is exactly how human beings really perceive the world: in fragments, partially, in color and of which most is immediately filtered out or forgotten. What remains are the valuable memories and the useful information. Just as in Eggleston’s photographs.

The most recent of Egglestonean tomes (a seemingly endless industry) is Chromes, a monster of a boxed set containing three books. I’ll cut to the chase right away: Chromes is very much the quintessential Eggleston presentation one needs to have. Where William Eggleston’s Guide (1976) initially defined his work for a wider audience, it was still basically based on curator John Szarkowski’s selection. In the later Los Alamos (images from the early 70s published in 2004) we can see a wider spectrum of the same era. And in many other volumes as well.

Chromes very much brings out more of the same, but in a far, far superior way. Of course much of this is based on personal preference or points of view, but I do think there’s a specific reason for the project as such. In volume one there’s an image of Eggleston himself sleeping on a bed. Ending the final volume is a similar picture, although taken when he has his eyes open. That kind of intrapersonal narrative is not something we’re used to in the apparently free-floating work that Eggleston usually presents. It’s as if he’s commenting on the value of this specific body of work (or, rather, era) as supreme. A waking up phase or trip.

And it truly is. Not only in the sense that there are a lot of images here that have never been shown before, but also because they’re so immensely rich in poetry, color and detached amateur anthropology. In a great documentary on Eggleston and his work (William Eggleston: Photographer, by Rainer Holzemer, 2008), he recounts that someone asked him what he takes pictures of. The answer came (slowly) in two words: ”Life today”. And that really sums it up. Eggleston, the eternal stroller, armed with a great way of looking at things and a camera or two, is simply doing what he’s doing. Nothing more and nothing less. There’s something highly philosophical about the way he does it and the way it turns out, but I doubt that he’d ever see it that way himself.

Is it possible to overdose on William Eggleston? Maybe. Chromes is a borderline experience. But there’s something so inexplicably poetic about his images that make them defy usual patterns of analysis. Although the view can be recognizable, there’s still always something new that surprises. ”The ugly stuff” has never been so beautiful as in Eggleston’s photographic communications. That, I guess, will be his legacy: a preservation of his outer and inner surroundings expressed in his very own way, for others to be amazed by.

The main thing is that his legacy is already alive. Not so much in the hordes of young photographers trying to re-create instead of re-seeing themselves, but in these very impressive volumes. I rarely go bananas over art books, but I really did when I got my hands on Chromes. It’s all beautifully done in every possible way, but more important is that there has simply never been a more relevant or beautiful selection of Eggleston’s work in one batch, like here. Chromes contains a master at work, waking up to the possibilities of not only using saturated colour photography as a means of expression but also of a loose, cool, detached, désinvolture lifestyle as a means of seeing and understanding what’s really there around you. ”Life today”. Camera optional.

Check out the work of William Eggleston here.

It’s been said that one image says more than a thousand words. I’m not entirely sure about that. But I do believe that a good image speaks in a language uniquely its own. Although this is not really relevant when you’re out there “taking” photos, it can definitely be helpful – fun, even – to ponder when you look at the photos in question afterwards.

Here are some images from my book More Americans that I like a lot. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with either form or content but rather an immediate form of psychic teleportation that takes me back to that specific space-time-intersection where/when I snapped it – which of course logically would mean that it also opened possibilities forwards to the very moment when I write this.

No matter what… “Look at that picture. Is it persisting?”

Later in the evening we performed at the club Nefertiti as Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & White Stains. A recording of this concert is available here. An amazing show!

If you want to watch the full documentary, it’s available in the FILMS section. And if you want to read my many conversations with Gen, please check out the book Sacred Intent (2020).

A brilliant and creative mind, gone too soon. But at least Gen was thoroughly documented!

As a journalist, I am basically a fanzine writer. Always was, always will be. What that means is that I’ve always been driven by my own desires rather than waiting for an assignment from some editor. I’ve always chased, retrieved, amassed and written up stories based on my own whims and interests – fairly indifferent as to whether any magazine, newspaper or website would eventually take the piece in question. Somehow it’s always worked out, and I cherish that independent spirit. The safety of being employed by a magazine would probably have made greater financial sense, but there’s certainly something to be said for the actual freedom of freelancers.

I like people who think, feel and will things. And who then create art based on that existential bedrock trio. I know it’s an extremely vague and worn-out word, but “passion” can be both endearing and inspiring – even if you’re not really super interested in what a certain person is doing. The mere force of passion can definitely be good enough for a great story.

In 2007, I anthologized some interviews in a Swedish book called Olika Människor (that’s right: “Different People”). It was suggested by an underground publisher, and I thought it was interesting to see how these pieces (basically written between 2000 and 2007) would work as a whole.

The book didn’t really do that well. Sweden is, after all, a very small country, and most of the people I like to talk to are under the radar of norm-core reality. I was, however, happy about the fact that many younger journalists liked the book, and found my attitude of allowing people to truly talk engaging and refreshing. Being a journalism college dropout myself, I knew exactly what they meant. I absolutely hated the taught formality of standardized journalism, and decided, at age 23, to just carry on with my own approach, no matter what. I have never regretted that decision.

Returning to this specific material in 2021, I can see it all from a better and wider bird’s eye view. When you put loose ends together, you can sometimes see a pattern emerging, and you can – hopefully – tie all these ends up. Are the voices too disparate? Perhaps, but then so is every day of our lives. Are the voices too desperate? Perhaps, but then that just makes them create great things. Are they representing something homogenous? I hope not.

There is one thing that unites them, though: these people create culture, whether we like that culture or not. Personally I do like it, because once upon a time I made it clear that I did want to talk to these very different people. As many current affairs aspects of these talks are already long gone, what remains is hopefully some kind of psychological, intuitive insight into creative minds that experience trials and tribulations just like you and me. Perhaps not of exactly the same nature or essence, but trials and tribulations none the less.

Creators of culture often have a quite problematic relationship with themselves and the inherent aspects of creativity: compensation, narcissism, solipsism, bitterness, etc. It seems to be part of the psychological make-up of most creatives to feel a strong need to be acknowledged. I’m not here to specifically analyze why this is in each specific case, but I am certainly here to acknowledge and appreciate these creatives and their work, as they were and as it was. Whatever is needed to keep them going is all fine by me.

I already more or less knew what these people wanted to say – sometimes even before the meetings and actual conversations. But to see beyond the predictable, and keep asking “why” and “why not” is still my job after some 35 years of talking to creative people. This anthology reflects a mere portion, a segment, a piece of the pie of curiosity that will hopefully remain after we’ve gobbled it all up.

This book is very different from the Swedish test pilot edition of 2007. Not only because I’ve added several more interviews (running up until 2011, basically) but also because I’ve contextualized them through myself; through my own voice. I didn’t want to simply display a collection of talks, but rather to tell a story of why all of this happened. Because that makes more sense in that better bird’s eye view I mentioned. Seen from this perspective, I have orchestrated the voices rather than merely presented them. The anthology has now become a choral work, if you will, celebrating heterogeneity, integrity and creativity as such.

Does this choral composition sound harmonious enough? Well, that’s not really for me to judge, is it?

Carl Abrahamsson, Stockholm, February 2021

To check out the Different People book, please go here.

(Some of the interviews in the book are available to paid subscribers here at the site.)

Photo of me and June Newton, Los Angeles 2007, by Peter Bisley.

As much as I’ve had and still have a problem with Jean-Luc Godard and his utterly pretentious attitudes to film-making, I cannot but agree in the praise of Richard Linklater’s ”Nouvelle Vague” epic (basically chronicling the production of Godard’s ”Breathless” from 1960). What a sweet and pleasing film, in so many ways.

I could of course obviously argue that it’s not a Godard film in itself but one about Godard. Which is true, but it also seems honest enough to relay the immature and über-intellectualized shenanigans that were already in place in Godard’s mind at this time. Lucky for him to have had great friends in far superior filmmakers such as Truffaut, Chabrol, Bresson, Melville et al. According to ”Nouvelle Vague” (a highly romanticizing film) they all helped out with good advice, contacts, etc.

No-one denies the fresh energy of ”Breathless” – it is a great film-noir pastiche set in a Paris so vibrant and cool that it could have hosted any kind of film, and surely did. The problems with/in Godard – that in the Linklater film come across as charming and quirky – are essentially French in essence: the weight & complexity of the language, the overindulgence in the appreciation of culture but not necessarily in its creation (vide: their religious infatuation with and embrace of American culture at this time), and an obsessive mind-frame that actively removes any risk of just ”liking” something without demounting/deconstructing the very essence that makes it potentially likable. However, it is not merely a cultural issue but an individual one. Truffaut, for instance, was a master director who could convey feelings and stories without any problems or hurdles; Godard, not so much.

This conundrum was visible in other arenas as well at the time: Jacques Lacan’s talking psychoanalysis to death and thereby making a functional method of therapy completely impotent. Another example is the entire spectacle of ”May 68” in which toxic and childlike ideas of betterment emanated like a plague from French universities (!) and took on defending the so-called proletariat, which was never asked what they felt about anything. Et cetera. The French are indeed a very special people, and Godard was 100% French in this regard: obsessive, childlike, unable to communicate, and therefore jumbling the means of communications on his own terms and for his own sake. In better minds and more capable hands this could actually work to amplify whatever degree of genius that might actually be there.

What turned me off forever was Godard’s horrible ”One Plus One: Sympathy for the Devil” (1968), in which he was allowed to be present at the recording of the Rolling Stones album ”Beggars Banquet” but manages to fuck it up by involving political ”ideas” and zeitgeistish romanticizing of chaos, pure & simple.

I have tried time and time again to give Godard a chance but he has never delivered anything to me except for unjustified grandiloquence and formal inanities. ”Breathless” would be the one exception but that is the work of a daring yet unformatted filmmaker. ”Nouvelle Vague” captures this in a loving and respectful way, and is, again, very worthy of the praise it’s received.

I know, I know… I don’t have to watch any Godard movies. And believe me, I usually don’t. But ”Nouvelle Vague” at least made me respect Godard more than I have. He did what he did and in the way he did. More power to him! That said, I’ll be happy to revisit some Truffaut gems instead, while realizing that the era itself must have been fun, creative, and in many ways liberating, despite the French headiness – not thanks to it.

Check out Jean-Luc Godard here.

Henry Darger… What’s not to love? That intensity and total immersion in a more or less secret creativity is often deemed ”outsider” or ”insane” by those who can’t relate, or those who find the work unpalatable or un-commodifiable. Be that as it may; the intensity mentioned often becomes undeniable in itself (URGENCY!), whereas academic artistic pursuits and sly career strategies rarely last longer than the life of a particular coterie (recommended reading: Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word – truly insightful in so many ways).

There are artists who court the world, who hunger for galleries and critics and the validation of peers. And then there is Henry Darger — a man who spent the better part of a century constructing one of the most extraordinary artistic and literary universes in American history, entirely alone, in a single rented room in Chicago, with no expectation that any living soul would ever see it. That he is now celebrated as a titan of outsider art, his watercolors hanging in major museums and his name spoken in the same breath as William Blake and Adolf Wölfli, would almost certainly have bewildered him. But it would not, perhaps, have surprised the part of him that always knew the world he was building had a grandeur all its own.

Darger was born in Chicago in 1892, and his childhood reads like something from a Victorian orphan novel — which is perhaps no accident, given what he would later create. His mother died when he was four. His father, too ill to care for him, placed him in a Catholic boys’ home, and when Henry was around twelve, he was sent to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln — an institution whose name alone tells you something about how the world regarded those it could not easily categorize. He was not, by any credible measure, feeble-minded. He was sensitive, solitary, and internally vast in ways that institutional life had no language for.

He eventually escaped — literally, walking away from the asylum — and made his way back to Chicago, where he would spend the rest of his life working as a hospital janitor and custodian. He attended Mass daily, sometimes multiple times. He collected trash from the street: old magazines, newspapers, coloring books, photographs of children clipped from advertisements. To his neighbors, he was simply the quiet, odd old man down the hall — unremarkable, invisible, barely there. He died in 1973 in a nursing home, aged eighty-one, having given almost nothing of his inner life away.

What his landlord Nathan Lerner discovered when he began clearing out Darger’s room after his death was nothing less than a revelation. Stacked and rolled and folded throughout the small space was the evidence of a lifetime’s secret labor: a handwritten novel of approximately 15,145 pages — believed to be the longest work of fiction ever written by a single person — titled In the Realms of the Unreal, along with hundreds of large-format illustrations that accompanied it, many of them double-sided and stretching several feet across. There was also a second manuscript, a 5,000-page autobiography and weather journal. The room was, in effect, a private cosmos.

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