I’ve got a bit of a difficult film writing assignment hanging over my head this week so rather than posting another horror film post, here’s a selection of recordings from the 1920′s and 1930′s featuring Aleister Crowley reciting occult poetry in both English as well as the Enochian language that Queen Elizabeth I’s court wizard claims to have transmitted from actual angels. Here’s the skinny on Aleister Crowley: The Great Beast Speaks…

20 minutes’ worth of devious recitations, transferred off the original wax cylinders. Wonderful piece of spoken wordedness, with the only drawback being that it’s a horribly crackly lo-fi recording (though faithfully bootlegged into the digital medium). It sounds spooky, and it’s definitely the Man, though it’s really hard to hear what he’s saying. Then what do am I supposed to expect, right; it was made in 1920. More poetry than ritual, I’m afraid, but you do get to hear Uncle Crowley sing in the last track.

This playlist seems to lineup pretty well:

1.
The Call of the First Aethyr (Enochian Version)
2.
The Call of the First Aethyr (English Version)
3.
The Call of the Second Aethyr (Enochian Version)
4.
The Call of the Second Aethyr (English Version)
5.
La Gitana
6.
The Pentagram
7.
One Soverign for the Woman
8.
The Poet
9.
At Sea
10.
The Fingernails
11.
The Titanic
12.
Hymn to the American People
13.
Excerpts from the Gnostic Mass
14.
Vive La French Republic

Now here’s the voice of The Beast…

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Annie Besant was a rabble rousing labor activist, a religious non-conformist, and a proto-feminist during a time before and after the turn of the 20th century when none of these preoccupations was the province of a proper English lady. I found myself looking up a documentary about Besant after finding an online catalog of Lucifer magazines published in .pdf format, available for free download, and in facsimile editions through Amazon. The magazine was founded by Madame Blavatsky, but Besant was its godmother, shepherding the publication through its run from 1889 – 1895. Here’s a bit of history from the Wiki…

The journal was first published by Blavatsky. From 1889 until Blavatsky’s death in May 1891 Annie Besant was a co-editor. Besant then published the journal until September 1895, when George Robert Stowe Mead became a co-editor. The journal appeared twelve times a year and was 50 to 60 pages long. The last of twenty volumes was published in August 1897. More than 2800 articles were published in this journal between 1887 and 1897. Then the journal was renamed to The Theosophical Review.
The journal published articles on philosophical, theosophical, scientific and religious topics. There were also book reviews (e.g. of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra).

This page links to both .pdf copies of Lucifer as well as print copies available through Amazon.

Here’s Annie Besant’s story…

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1980 wasn’t a great year for Alejandro Jodorowsky. Having just barely survived the end of the 1970′s when the film that was to be his magnum opus — an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune — fell apart for the final time, Jodo was anxious to get back to work. He agreed to make a children’s film.

At first, the idea of the anarchist auteur making a movie for kids might sound odd, but Tusk (Poo Lorn L’Elephant) told a tale about the shared fate of an English girl and an Indian elephant. The story had the kind of spiritual overtones that Jodo had marshaled so furiously in The Holy Mountain and the coming of age tale shared some similarities with El Topo — even the Indian locations promised exotic settings that surely inspired the director.

Alas, a classic it was not meant to be. Tusk is roundly criticized by those who’ve been able to see it — the only home release is an un-subtitled French language version on VHS. Even Jodo has disowned the movie.

But is it really that bad? Isn’t the parallel birth scene at the beginning of the film remarkable? Doesn’t the fact that you can follow the film without knowing French say something about the master’s mastery of visual storytelling? Don’t you want to run out and find this prog/raga soundtrack on vinyl?

Here’s what the Cue Dot Confessions blog has to say:

If Jodorowsky’s mark is seen anywhere it is in the strong anti-colonial sentiment that runs through the film and in the scattered inconsistency of the message. Tusk is a film for children and viewed side by side with other slapstick-centric “ethnographic” films of that period (The Gods Must Be Crazy springs to mind), it could possibly be viewed as quite unremarkable, and yet the way that Jodorowsky handles the Indian landscape and its people still seems fresh and surprisingly natural. There are sweeping, long take crane shots that literally drink up all the vibrancy of country. The Indian extras act quite unselfconciously in the face of the stiff “acting” of the English and the bald, over-drawn comedy of the film’s villains.

Jodorowsky has an obvious affinity with India and an affection for the people and the animals. The elephant scenes, and there are many, are impressive in their National Geographic-ness even if they add little to the momentum of the film. These scenes make Tusk’s first half a joy to watch. Unfortunately, all of this freshness is squandered as the on again, off again romance, machinations, and motivations of the cast twist, overlap, lie dormant and then snap to life. By the time everything has fallen into a jumbled heap…

Regardless of its ultimate value in Jodorowsky’s oeuvre, Tusk is required viewing for any completist. Here is the film in its entirety:

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British filmmaker Peter Watkins is a docudrama pioneer who has combined documentary and dramatic cinematic techniques to deconstruct historic events and cultural trends. A pacifist and a radical, Watkins’ best work examines media in general and film in particular to ask questions about the relationships between media and audiences.

A powerful and provocative filmmaker, Watkins’ films have regularly gathered both opponents and admirers. The War Game imagined a nuclear war in Britain. It was banned by the BBC but eventually won an Academy Award in 1966. Punishment Park explored a violent political conflict in the U.S. just as the shootings at Kent State were screaming from the headlines.

Even John Lennon name-checked Watkins as an influence:

Citing their 1969 Bed-in efforts and Peace Concert, an interviewer asked John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Is there any one particular incident that got you started in this peace campaign?”. John answered, “…the thing that really struck it off was a letter we got from a guy called Peter Watkins who made a film called The War Game. It was a very long letter stating just what’s happening – how the media is really controlled, how it’s all run, and everything else that people really know deep down. He said ‘People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace’. And we sat on the letter for about three weeks thinking ‘Well, we’re doing our best. All you need is love, man.’ That letter just sort of sparked it all off. It was like getting your induction papers for peace!” (p.144, The Beatles – A Celebration by Geoffrey Giuliano)

The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins provides a great primer on the man, his movies and the making of La Commmune in 2000.

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