Leo Dillon

I was sad to hear of the death of Leo Dillon who, in close (indeed inseparable) collaboration with his wife Diane had been one of the finest book illustrators of the last half century. The couple met on a design course in New York in 1953 and married after graduating in 1956, and have been together ever since, apparently rather reclusive and living in creative domestic bliss. Their book cover designs, which have appeared since the late 1950s, have always been dually attributed, and the signature Leo and Diane Dillon was a guarantee of a visually distinctive and strikingly imaginative graphic style. This was particularly gratifying as far as their work in the SF and fantasy genres was concerned, where clichéd images of spaceships, aliens and mighty thewed, sword-wielding barbarians and bronze-brassiered amazons were the wearisome norm. The Dillons style was very diverse, but always with an instantly recognisable signature. They produced blocky, heavily outlined designs which had the look of prints; watercolours in which translucent figures interpenetrated each other, often creating further images at the point of overlaid intersection; pictures resembling pieces of marquetry; illustrations with the jewelled colours and oriental atmosphere of Leon Bakst’s designs for Diaghilev or Kay Nielsen’s fairy tale pictures; intricate, intertwining pen and ink drawings; paper cut-out collages; paintings emulating stained glass (the beautiful cover to CS Lewis’ Till We Have Faces); and bright pop art assemblages (the cover to the US paperback of Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat). They often arranged images representing the subjects or moods of the stories they were illustrating into larger designs, so that a peacock might be made up of marching figures, trees, a river with boats and a bridge; or a sad woman’s trailing veil containing cars, basilisks, levered and crank-shafted mechanisms, triceratops, ape-like faces and the outline of a carrion bird with a skull extending towards its hooked beak (Ellison’s Deathbird Stories). Leo Dillon’s parentage means that there is a significant representation of African American figures in their work, too, which again makes their work particularly distinctive (sadly). They worked outside of the field of book cover design, providing the covers for many LPs in the Caedmon series of spoken word recordings. I particularly like their series of paintings for the Sing Children Sing records, which cover various countries around the world. They all have a large planetary globe with the country in question prominently outlined, a choir of open mouthed figures in costumes associated with the place, and a distinctive landscape in which well-known or vernacular buildings are placed. For Britain, we have the white cliffs of Dover, the houses of parliament, a castle and a small thatched cottage and an array of figures which includes Henry VIII, a friendly bobby, a pearly king, a yeoman of the guard, a Norman knight, an extravagantly bewigged Regency lady, a judge and a Scotsman. I think they’ve captured our character rather well.

Deathbird Stories

They have enjoyed a long and close personal and artistic relationship with the writer Harlan Ellison, who has himself always sat rather awkwardly upon the generic shelves to which his intensely felt short stories have been consigned. Their covers for Ellison’s collections display a unique and deeply rooted understanding of his work. They are expressionistic, reflecting the heightened style and feeling of the stories within. The cover of one of Ellison’s rare novel-length works, Spider Kiss, has the pattern of the rock star protagonist’s pink shirt made up of the anguished faces of his worshipping fans, whose looks of devotion are indistinguishable from grimaces of agony. Gentleman Junkie is a study in cross-hatched shading worthy of Mervyn Peake, whilst Web of the City is one of their woodblock prints (by the looks of it) whose distorted faces are reminiscent of those in the Expressionist paintings of Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann or George Grosz. The cover of the original hardback edition of Dangerous Visions, the influential anthology which Ellison edited in the 60s, is a hugely inventive and imaginative design, which manages to conflate a diagram of the eye with a stringed musical instrument, also incorporating a portrait of Ellison as some kind of knowing harpie. The image on the front cover, contained within the eye and projected by arrowed lines focussed through the lens, is deliberately slightly out of focus. An indication that what lies within is a projection of reality, and not reality itself – a highlighting of the artifice of art, and its permission therefore to explore what would be taboo in the society in which it operates. The lens itself is rendered so that it appears transparent, with a lighter green limning the white disc making it stand out from the background. The Dillons also produced a series of small woodblock prints which illustrated each story. These were done as a last minute commission, which Ellison insisted upon with the publishers, and as a result have a raw, instinctive immediacy which fits in perfectly with the tone of the book. Unfortunately, they are not terribly well reproduced in the 70s paperback editions which I have, which are also lumbered with hopelessly inappropriate spaceships and aliens covers. All of which makes you appreciate the Dillons even more. Of the Ellison covers, the one for Deathbird Stories is a particular favourite (and the story The Deathbird one of my favourites of Ellison’s). The blending of the elements is done so effortlessly, the composition working as a whole and then drawing in the eye to examine the details, the component parts which go to make up the strange amalgamation of the mourning woman and the crow (a different sort of deathbird to the one which Ellison writes about). The way that the long black hair of the woman morphs into the upward sweep of the crow’s black tailfeathers is superbly done, and the iridescent colours which bloom at the core of the outer darkness reflect the balance of the stories within, which vary from the ‘heart’s blood’ tales of intense introspection and moral interrogation to the demonically comical, carnivalesque stories which delight in loosing chaos upon the world. The mournful, noble profile of the woman at first draws attention away from the two small, red horns spiking up from her brow, an indication that all is not always as it seems. Although in Ellison’s fiction, demons are not necessarily to be considered a force for evil. The way in which the human skull is incorporated into the curve of the crow’s silhouetted cranium is beautifully done, the bird’s cold, dead eye staring out of the shadowy socket, and echoing the upturned, nictating eye of the lizard on the opposite side of the composition. The woman’s veil becomes part of the pattern on the mask, whose upper browns, curved and crooked, echo the claws of the crow, which themselves connect with the semi-organic machineries above. Everything connects with, or emerges from, everything else and it’s all marvellous. The cover of The Beast That Shouted Love At the Heart of the World is also fine, depicting a chthonic beast curled up beneath the earth like a seed waiting to unfurl. It sends its tongue up through the soil, its tip forking into a pink heart which expands into a bubblegum speech bubble, containing the words of the collection and its title story.

The Essential Ellison - front cover

The Dillons included affectionate portraits of Ellison on several of their covers for his books, reflecting the extent to which his personality inhabits his work (not least in the introductions he writes to most of his stories). Some of these take the form of an Ellison warped and transformed by the products of his own imagination. These are variants on Goya’s print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, except that in this case, the author is awake, and the monsters, demons and night creatures are invited in and welcomed. On the back cover of Strange Wine, Ellison (looking alarmingly like a young Prince Charles) is crowned with a Dylanesque thicket of hair comprised of fungi and locusts (suggesting he’s been spending time wandering through the cities of Ambergris and Viriconium in the worlds of Jeff Vandermeer and M.John Harrison). On the cover of the Savoy Books edition of his collection of TV polemics, he is a goat-legged satyr, his curling tail holding up the aerial whilst green imps watch him type, the colourful smoke emerging from the platen bearing up further demons. The cover of the US edition of The Illustrated Ellison has a respectably suited and bow-tied Ellison pestered by his double, a grinning, wild-haired trickster with horned hat and coat with watch-faces and cogs – clearly a version of Harlequin from his renowned story ‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’. A further Harlan peers from a porthole in Harlequin’s hat, the writer as observer, watching this encounter with interest to see how it turns out, and how it can be used. A couple of particularly ingenious covers create portraits of Ellison from elements of landscape, architecture and assorted objects, in the manner of Arcimboldo or Dali. The Essential Ellison has his face composed of a ramshackle assortment of half-timbered houses on a mountainside, with a stream flowing alongside suggesting the lapel of a shirt. The same portrait is repeated on the back cover, but with a night full of stars having fallen, and Harlan’s eyes having shut. From the holes of mine shafts dotting the jagged rocks of his hair, figures fly in dream flight, the imagination taking wing. Ellison has always been effusive in his praise of the Dillons, and has clearly felt privileged to enjoy such a lengthy and fruitful creative relationship with them. He puts it clearly and unequivocally in his short piece on them in the 1978 collection The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, which includes a small portfolio of their work under the title An Ellison Tapestry: ‘Beyond my love for them and my understanding that they have influenced my ethical and moral life almost more than anyone else I’ve ever known, my respect for their artistic intelligence and their incomparable craft is enormous. Leo and Diane Dillon are the best. Simply put: the best’. Amen to that. Thankfully, you can find a large selection of the Dillons’ work over at the blog The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon.

The Essential Ellison - back cover

The Red Balloon

New Wave sprint

I watched Albert Lamorisse’s classic 1956 short film The Red Balloon the other night, and found it was as wonderful as childhood memories recalled. The Technicolor cinematography is gorgeous, with the balloon itself appearing redder than red, a hyperreal irruption of shiny, primary brightness into the muted, rain-grey world of the Montmartre streets in which the story takes place. Lamorisse seems to deliberately seek out the most grey areas of town, and even dresses the boy all in grey, as if to make the Technicolor splash of the balloon stand out even more. A good deal of the film is of a gently observational nature, with the small boy who is our protagonist, played by the director’s son Pascal Lamorisse, wandering around the cobbled streets and climbing the steep steps of the old town, accompanied by the bobbing, cherubically round form of his new floating friend. This gives ample to observe the life of the Parisian streets of the late 50s, its people, its shops, its cars (not many) and its open backed buses. The fact that it was shot on location on the streets of Paris, with life carrying on as normal all around, puts it very much in line with the films of the French New Wave which were just hitting their stride at this time, although Lamorisse is never counted as being amongst their number, or even as a marginally connected figure. Perhaps the film’s blending of everyday life with the fairytale put it at a remove from the predominantly realist leanings of the New Wave auteurs, with their preference for the generic forms of Hollywood. It may also have been consigned to the ghetto of the children’s film, in much the same way as children’s literature tended to register below the critical radar in the days before Potter and Pullman. It possibly more akin to the Louis Malle’s Paris-set romp Zazie Dans le Metro, although it doesn’t have that film’s self-conscious zaniness and relentlessly madcap pace, settling into a more relaxed rhythm. With its lack of any but the most cursory dialogue and emphasis on visual storytelling, it also resembles the films of Jacques Tati. The scene in which the camera keeps pace in front of the boy as he runs pell-mell along the street, the balloon caroming along behind him causing startled passersby to look askance, is archetypally New Wave in style, however. It comes two or three years before Truffaut’s famous sequence in which Jeanne Moreau races Oskar Werner and Henri Serre across the railway bridge in Jules et Jim. And Lamorisse manages to keep the camera a good deal steadier.

Parisian roofscape with boy and cat

The film opens with the boy approaching the precipitous descent of one of the set of steps which take you down from the crest of Montmartre, and we are thus offered the classic view over the Parisian roofscape which these heights afford. The balloon is discovered entangled with a lamp-post, as if it has been lured down from the sky by the beacon of its light, and the boy climbs half up the post, half up the wall to free it and carry it down to earth in his teeth. The balloon itself is imbued with a very human personality, a difficult feat of characterisation given its lack of any features. But it is somehow conveyed through its movements, in combination with the music of Maurice Leroux (who would go on to score Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Petit Soldat), which imply an initial hesitancy and shyness, and a playfulness and cheeky sense of rebellion and non-conformity. It provides the kind of blank surface, shiny and reflective, upon which any number of symbolic interpretations could by imprinted. I tend to see it as representing the boy’s untamed imagination, bright, vivid and paint-fresh; as yet unsullied by the compromises and conformities society demands.

A grey place to come home to

This is a film of exteriors, of the freedom found wandering the streets of the city and finding your own pathways through it. Whenever the boy does go inside, the balloon acts to disrupt or alleviate his confinement. We are given a glimpse of the arid and joyless atmosphere of his home life when the balloon follows him inside to the apartment where his parents live, and is shortly thereafter ejected from the window by his grim-faced mother. The boy later opens the window to allow it to sneak back in, the balloon somehow managing to look furtive, as if it is glancing over a non-existent shoulder. The father, briefly glimpsed as the headmaster collars him as he leaves his respectable-looking job to discuss his son’s behaviour, seems merely indifferent. The balloon disrupts a class at the school which the boy attends, causing eruptions of laughter from the children (we never actually see any of the interiors which the boy or the balloon enter). It follows the headmaster who has detained the boy in his study after school on account of the unruly behaviour for which he is held responsible, distracting and harassing him and generally causing people to point and comment, until he returns to release his friend. The balloon also follows the boy in the church into which he is led, dressed up in his smart jacket, on Sunday, causing evident turmoil inside before both run back outside and escape to a neighbouring patch of rough grass (which appears to have its own makeshift shrine). The music rises to an uplifting swell at this point, and there is a beautifully composed shot of boy and balloon against the backdrop of city and spire. This small area of open wasteground provides a tiny corner of grubby pastoral within the urban wind of narrow streets and apartment buildings.

Urban pastoral

The boy, with the help of his buoyant companion, has escaped from the constricting confines of The Church, with its attendant concern with respectability and conformity (there seems to be some pompous doorman uniformed in Napoleonic garb in attendance at the door of this cathedral), but the scene here gives a sense of a more unfettered religiosity; one which enjoys the freedom of the open skies to which the cathedral’s spire points. So the balloon could also be seen in a religious light, as an externalisation of the boy’s soul, shining with the innocent brightness of the Lamb. When it is caught by the gang of thuggish boys, it is dragged up the hill along cobbled streets in what amounts to a Via Dolorosa (one boy at the rear hitting it with a stick). It is taken to a patch of lifeless, brick-strewn wasteground beyond a wall, a space which seems to exist outside of the city (without a city wall). Here it is tethered and pelted with stones, the faces of the boys who carry out this scourging leering with a mocking hatred, like those in Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of The Crowning With Thorns and Christ Bearing The Cross. After the boy briefly rescues it, the balloon is taken back to this Parisian Golgotha, where it is once more pelted and stoned until its brightness fades and its skin blisters, its living rotundity slowly deflating until one of the boys stamps on it with a boot of Orwellian brutality. The red has become the colour of blood and sacrifice, of the Sacred Heart. Finally, of course, there is The Ascension, a rebirth and renewal in which life reasserts its vibrancy tenfold.

Via Dolorosa

The final scenes are uplifting in a literal, emotional and symbolic sense, and have not been cheapened in the least by their appropriation for several recent advertisements. I wonder whether Harlan Ellison had this finale in mind when he wrote the scene in his classic short story ‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’ in which the Harlequin releases a hailstorm of multi-coloured jellybeans onto the heads of the workers in his obsessively timetabled and conformist city of the future. The sheer outpouring of bright colour which overwhelms the city, bursting from from every rooftop, and around every street corner, creates a feeling of joyous release after the scenes of mean-spirited violence (and it’s a mark of the skill with which the film creates its own world that the deflation and bursting of a balloon is so harrowing and upsetting). It’s a transformative explosion of imagination and unbounded spirit, a defiant assertion of the vividness and burgeoning multiplicity of the life force in the face of the sullen and aggressively marshalled conformity of the gang, whose members are destined to compliantly take their place in the regimented and institutionalised world which the balloon carries the boy above.

The Ascension

The Red Balloon, with its relatively slow-paced depiction of Parisian street life, would make an interesting double bill with Claude Lelouch’s 1976 short C’Etait Un Rendezvous, which explores the city’s byways at a much more breakneck speed than the gentle perambulations of boy and balloon. This 9 minute, single take film is essentially achieved through Lelouch fixing a new type of camera he’d got his hands on to the front of his car. He then races through the early morning streets of Paris, which mercifully are relatively empty, going appreciably above the speed limits, and reaching the heights of Montmartre just before the film in the camera runs out (it was capable of 10 minute takes), where he meets a beautiful woman who rushes over to embrace him on the steps in front of the Sacre Coeur. Those crazy French peoples.

Shoreline Western

The DVD of The Red Balloon is paired with an earlier Lamorisse black and white short from 1954, White Mane (or Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage). This is a blend of Western and fable set in the Camargue region of South France (a Southern then?) where the plains meet the sea. This makes it a curious sort of Western, since few examples of that particularly American genre ever make it to the ocean. The Western elements are embodied by the French equivalent of cowboys (who look more like Spanish gauchos in their flat brimmed and crowned hats) who round up the wild horses who roam the plane. The leader of this group of rancheros is obsessed with the idea of capturing and taming the wildest of the herd of horses, known as White Mane. There is much footage of the horses and the attempted capture and corralling of the stallion, which has the air of lightly fictionalised documentary. The story proper, which once more has a fairy tale air, concerns a young fisherboy, who lives with his Monet-bearded father (or possibly grandfather) and his baby sister in a hut by a marshy inlet of the sea. Having witnessed its capture and cheered at its subsequent escape, he befriends White Mane and attempts to ride him away from the relentless attempts of the posse of riders to catch him again and once more place him in captivity. The horse is a more fierce embodiment of the freedom of the spirit than the red balloon, and has the instinct of the wild creature to kick and bite and fight in order to preserve that freedom. This is what attracts the young boy to it, what makes him willing to be dragged through marshland and over mudflat in order to get close to such a spirit. The final fairytale scene is a beautifully poetic actualisation of the figurative image of the breakers of ocean waves as white mares, as boy and horse ride off into the horizon, which follows the line of sea and sky.

Merman and Sea Horse