Click images for desktop size: "Louise Brooks"When I was a kid I read monster magazines. One of the biggest thrills of my young life was when "Castle Of Frankenstein" published a 3 page letter I'd written about films and why monster films were the superior art form.
One day when I was hitting my local news stand - the drug store on San Vincente - I saw a magazine called "Film Comment". It had a yellow cover and an article on some horror film.
I snapped it up.
It wasn't until now that I'm wondering why my local drug store was carrying such an effete type of mag. Blame LA.
The cover story was an over view of King Vidor.
I understood maybe half of it.
I became a huge Vidor fan and secretly wished he'd made horror films. A populist version of Dracula made sense to me.
A monster rejoicing in his monstrosity and then being compelled to rejoin society had it merits too - as long as he ate a lot of people I thought it would be a great movie.
As usual my thoughts are always digressions.
The article on Vidor was written by some guy named Raymond Durgnant.
Some years later, when I was in college I chanced across Durgnant only this time published in a book.
A book on Georges Franju. Now at the time the only thing I knew about Franju was his film released in America as "Dr Faustus Chamber Of Horror" which, then, appealed to me more than it's real title "Les Yeux Sans Visage" - Eyes Without A Face.
Remembering the Vidor article and figuring this Franju guy was a french horror film maker I got the book.
The book was beguiling. Franju didn't make horror films as I thought of them. He was a surrealist who admired Cocteau. He though believed that the true surrealism lay in what we experienced everyday, not in the, in his example, the "putting the telephone in the raspberry jam pot" school.
His proof was his short film his first film, "Le Sang Du Bete" (The Blood Of The Beasts).
This ten minutes may have been the most horrifying film ever made. It's a documentary of a slaughter house told with ice cold black and white photography in every intimate detail.
The killers sing French pop tunes while hot blood cascades around their galoshes. And the banal voice over is read by an innocent 9 year old girl.

Click images for desktop size: "Two Terriers" by Ralph HedleyOr Franju's next monstrous film, "Un Chien" which explores the bizarre Parisian habit of releasing your dog to the whims of the street when it comes time to take your long summer vacation. told with the same human but distant eyes as "Beasts" we are subjected to the indignities heaped upon a poor little dog.
So powerful was this 12 minute film that it was necessary for Franju to appear on TV several times with the films star in tow, proving he was not as devastated as the film made out.
The film changed what was a good natured habit into the lazy despicable act it truly was. Twelve minutes of horror that changed, if not the world, than at least a city.
I go into detail over Franju's career because Durgnant's book - Franju, is basically a combination of review of all of Franju's films, an interview with Franju and a hodge podge of old Franju interviews.
Durgnant took a difficult subject, an obscure filmmaker who followed an even more obscure path and managed to write a riveting book.

Click images for desktop size: Black & White Study Of A Male Peacock"Each chapter was a film. As you read the chapter you began to understand the aesthetics, you began to understand the filmmaker, and you were drenched in the cold bleak love of Durgnant's.
At first there was a compulsion to see all these films, to view them and store them up one at a time so you could feel the fiery passion of Durgnant.
It was another dozen years before I read Northrop Frye's, "Anatomy Of Criticism". At the time of this book the bog wheel was Peter Weller and his "Sign And Meaning", which convinced the world of the auteur theory and espoused semiotics as the only valid mode of viewing life, art and pleasure.
Durgnant didn't subscribe to any theory, like Bazin he only knew what he loved, he quested to understand what he loved, and then he had enough talent to make me love it too.
If nothing else he wrote one of the all time greatest lines. It's brief and it gives an insight into the power of this book - "As we watch the movie we see it transcend dreams which are, after all, mere poetry."
Mere poetry.
Got to love it.
I want, once ion my life to do something that goes beyond being "mere poetry."
My puppy went to the vet today.
Everything is fine. She's very healthy. I worry about her weight. I want her to have a little puppy fat on her, but they assure me her present weight is fine.
In relation to human development she's about 2 years old now, which means she's a maniac always into things, always exploring and nearly always in trouble.
I wouldn't want her any other way.