Vignette 4: Twenty-five words
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A naked maiden, mouth parted in the breathlessness of desire, instinctively defends herself against the closing of her eyes by probing fingers that seek to prolong her dream of her phantom lover. (Love Blinded, 1884, by Donato Barcaglia, 1849-1930.) |
Vignette 3: Twenty-five words
Mayfair. 1924. Midnight. Party games.
‘Barefoot challenge! Cherchez votre femme!’
Screened by bedsheet, their women display bare feet.
Host mistakes feet of mistress for wife’s.
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| La Vénus d’Arles. (Louvre museum, Paris.) |
See also Vignette 1
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/08/vignette-1-twenty-five-words.html
See also Vignette 2
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/08/vignette-2-twenty-five-words.html
See also Vignette4
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/11/vignette-4-twenty-five-words.html
Deposition of a Rebel from the Cross
Since, in each case of my lantern slides this evening, the image is a species of ideological propaganda let us compare and contrast the exhibits for intended (or possibly unintended) effect.
Exhibit 1: What do we see? The anti-englische propaganda is reproduced here from Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie ([National] Socialism vs. Plutocracy, 1940) a product of the ministry of Dr Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who in his youth had considered the Catholic priesthood. Does it not resemble The Deposition of Christ from the Cross? (See Exhibit 2.)
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Exhibit 1 A demonstrator is removed. |
We cannot escape the concordances that link the imagery with the conventions of devotional art that depict the Thirteenth Station of the Cross as the stark, unconscionable indignity of a man reduced to vermin to be rubbed out as Enemy of the State.
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Exhibit 2 A demonstrator is removed. |
The ‘Compare-and-contrast’ page-spread is a technique of Photojournalism stolen from the British Lilliput men’s magazine (founded 1937), which suggests a further level of propagandist subtlety, never mind the nostrums of Goebbels’s partner-in-crime, Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, who in 1937 pronounced: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’
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Exhibit 3 ‘The Cruel Ones.’ |
So . . . Wem gehört die Zukunft? Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie. (Who Owns the Future? [National] Socialism against Plutocracy.) Are the concordances I find imaginary or is there substance in my suspicions? You can see here how page 74 (Exhibit 1) and facing page 75 (Exhibit 3) are images staged for contrast, side-by-side. So let us compare the diptych of ‘The Darling Bobbies [British policemen] lead an unemployed demonstrator away’ with its facing text of calculatedly nudge-nudge knowingness,‘The “cruel” SS helps two girls who want to see the Führer.’ The cynicism of Goebbels has the bitter taste of wine mixed with gall.
Certainly, a captive rebel – pinioned to evoke crucified limbs and hauled off to his Golgotha (‘Place of the Skull’) – can be considered to possess a sort of commonality with the ‘Death’s Head’ unit on the opposite page (their Totenkopf insignia may be discerned above their peaked caps) if we accept the birth of another myth . . . the apotheosis of their fair-headed Mädchen as goddesses destined to be the Aryan race’s progenitresses to magnify the thousand-year Reich.
Any resemblances end, however, when we compare the duty of unarmed policemen to serve British democracy – bound in law courts by oaths sworn to Almighty God – with the sacred oath of the pistol-packing praetorian guard, the dagger-wielding SS, who swore by God to render unconditional obedience to one god-like man, Adolf Hitler, the self-proclaimed Führer of the German Reich.
The contradistinction of the two cultures, as perceived by Dr Goebbels, may be examined on the double-page spread of Exhibit 4 (pp. 18 and 19). Apparently, the combined might of the Eton and Harrow Officer Training Corps was no match for Hitler Youth on the march. (Winston Churchill was an Old Harrovian.)
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| Exhibit 4 |
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| Exhibit 5 |
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Who Owns the Future? 1940 [National] Socialism against Plutocracy. |
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Sunday Best. Yevgeny Khaldei, soviet photographer: ‘ [In 1945] I was in Vienna. We were closing on the square in front of the parliament. This senior Nazi had come with his family, all in their Sunday best. He shot his wife and his son, but his daughter did not want to die. So he pinned her on the bench and shot her. Then he killed himself as we arrived.’ |
Now You See It Now You Don’t
‘Battleship grey! Inconspicuous? Take my word for it,’ declared our camouflage unit’s senior Training Officer, ‘a grey that declares itself to be a battleship is almost guaranteed to be seen!’
Of course, these days, my knowledge of camouflage paints probably has no equal outside the armed services.
On what grounds do I make this claim?
See for yourself. There’s my old uniform on its hook behind my secret studded door. That battledress jacket was once worn by a supernumerary Concealment Officer commissioned to draw enemy fire from Allied airfields by decoy and deception . . . no canvas of any academic painter (a calling in which I have gained no small repute) has ever been on such a colossal scale.
You’ll recognise our elite shoulder insignia. The scops-owl (a superbly camouflaged species, almost indistinguishable when perched against the bark of a tree).
But I will not rehearse here the history of DG-SCOPS: the Directorate-General for Secret Camouflage Operations based at Cleremont Park.
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The Outside
Viewing-tank of the Directorate of Camouflage (1943). Painting by Commander J. Yunge-Bateman of the Directorate. A model of an aircraft carrier floats in the tank. |
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A camoufleur may fool the enemy but he is not in the business of fooling himself . . .
If only I could now vanish into thick darkness as wholly as we did then.
No human eye can penetrate the dark fastnesses of the human spirit where I would wish to wander.
In the boatshed, above the slipway, Ingrid peered into the gloom.
‘I see no ships.’
‘Trust me.’ I took her hand, leapt towards the water and, without a splash, disappeared.
I heard her gasp, bewildered.
‘It’s not possible,’ she whispered.
But it was.
For three months we’d been refining a special heavy-duty marine paint that a wag in stores, because of its dead matt blackboard-type properties, had labelled Nightschool No. 9.
By studying the adaptive camouflage of cuttlefish in starlight, together with the spectrometric theories advanced by that master painter of moonlit waters, Julius Olsson RA, and compounding our findings with the principles of M.C. Schwab’s hull-camouflage-through-downlighting system modulated by rheostats (filed in U.S. Patent 2,300,067 and devised to dissipate the under-shadow cast by a battleship by night) the state of nigh invisibility had been achieved for our Mk. 5 experimental hooded coracle into which I’d stepped.
‘It’s as I thought,’ I called from the blackest void. ‘I’m nothing to you.’
I gripped Ingrid’s wrists and she stepped aboard to fall into my arms.
‘Tell me!’ My grip tightened. ‘Has anyone ever mattered to you?’
‘I nursed a baby monkey once,’ she murmured. ‘It was everything to me. Everything I ever wished!’
My hands brushed her shoulder blades. It was as though I had touched a razor-backed mule.
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As I trod the narrow cinder foot-path that runs between the railway’s boundary fence and the water meadows, I contemplated my crooked shadow in a gibbous moonlight that by my reckoning measured eighty selinolumens.
At Cleremont Park the Camouflage Directorate had built a Moonlight Vision Chamber above a circular tank on a turntable, presenting a shallow sheet of water for our crypto-shaded model warships, which permitted the measurement of all kinds of marine light effects, from the diffused radiance of starlight to brightest moonlight, so we could judge our visual trickery in miniature from the vantage of an aircraft circling at any altitude.
I was still contemplating the secrets of nocturnal mimesis, unlocked by that distant peepshow, as I stealthily entered No. 56 by the trade gate.
In my lab-cum-dispensary, fearful of waking Ingrid, I closed the door and, before I switched on the light, drew the heavy drapes against the prying moon.
You don’t hear the one that gets you.
Her kid sister, Lena, came up behind me, unheard.
Extract from Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
(A Bad Case, 2014, Salt.)
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Anthony Deverell-Hewells. A Sketch.
(Narrator of Now You See It, Now You Don’t.)
The character of this bristling, irrepressible artist, and camoufleur, Anthony Deverell-Hewells, is alluded to in a number of Eisner’s narratives. The ‘Prof’ was said to have ‘more opinions than the Queen has soldiers.’
And ‘the professor’s raw complexion rivalled the face of an engineroom stoker ... and, certainly, “the Prof” never ceased to relish stoking up controversy, for the “rummy old coot” had often claimed that he was the first practitioner of Optical Art (a claim that rivalled Picasso’s), and that he had not only invented an invisibility cloak but had caused a battleship to disappear, in a series of trials that had surpassed the Philadelphia Experiment.’
(Sister Morphine by Catherine Eisner. Page 312, 344, 346 and 403, Dispossession and A Stranger in Blood.)
It should be noted that Henrietta Goodden’s Camouflage and Art (2007), in a very real sense, omits a number of the Royal College of Art’s alumni who were distinguished serving artists in the camouflage section of the Air Ministry in WW2, whilst only a select rollcall of RCA artists is favoured with inclusion.
Set Designers, Couturiers and the Aesthetics of Camoufleurs.
Later I took Ingrid dancing at the Starlight Rooms in Stoneburgh.
In the event, my invisibility cloak and my self-denying ordinances were needless since, returning through the moonlit park by way of Cleremont Chase, to my surprise she quite voluntarily led me into a New Brutalist pillbox, now adorned with pilasters and rustic trellises, which a foppish stage designer dragooned into our unit had sweetly transformed into a Greek temple for Lord Jewkes of Cleremont.
In the moonlight, Ingrid’s hair was greyish mauve and her bright red lipstick had turned black, the accident of a not displeasing nocturnal aesthetic.
Her war paint, like the actinic chlorophyll pigments of military camouflage, changed under certain conditions.
But her cool grey eyes were no less grey and no less watchful.
I had been of the belief that I’d trained myself aright in night-time peripheral vision to avoid the blind spot; yet, despite all my best efforts, I hadn’t seen what was there to be had for the taking.
I repeat: in the night-time deceptions of a camoufleur, the light can become dark and the dark can become light . . . so even a wary seducer can be seduced by a fledgling seductress . . .Extract from Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
Vignette 2: Twenty-five words.
No sooner had he performed the Ritual of the Word than an Imperial Edict expunged the Ritual Word. The Ritual Word was never spoken again.
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At the temple of the Oracle at Siwa, Alexander the Great was reputedly acclaimed Pharaoh of Egypt and proclaimed the son of Zeus. The worship of the deified Alexander superseded the pharaonic rule and supplanted worship of the ram-headed sun god Amon-Ra. |
Vignette 1: Twenty-five words.
Harvest.
Hope lives on air.
The empty hay barn,
stacked with raw sky.
