Fabric fantasies narrate ruinous love in Senso

The first sequence of Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) unravels like a long bolt of silk let loose from the vertiginous upper balconies of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice. A performance of Verdi’s Il trvovatore is underway, the aria climaxing with a near-riot breaking out amongst the Fenice’s patrons. It’s 1866, the Italians are getting restless, the Austrian occupation in its twilight. The War of Liberation is eminent. Nonetheless a romance ignites between the Italian Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) and the Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger). You’ll note that their first exchanges are made with the opera being performed literally in the background of their two-shot, and it’s no accident. Visconti, scion of wealthy aristocrats with centuries of rule behind them, conflicted Communist, by then already a pretty major name in theatre and opera as well as cinema, unshakable in his vision and not to be rushed or compromised, uses this first sequence to lay the groundwork for what will be an absolute, go-for-broke, multilingual melodrama. So get ready.

The 1882 source novella by Camillo Boito, also entitled Senso, has Livia young, vain and inexperienced, but Visconti’s interpretation very smartly opts to make her older and more complex than Franz, with more to lose, and the brilliantly cast Valli, who was in fact four years older than Granger, actually seems over the course of the picture to look increasingly wrung dry by l’amour fou. Her naked shoulders, loose, waist-length hair and kittenish gaze in the early post-coital scene brim with fortifying eroticism, while the final scenes find her face strained and body seemingly unable to stay erect. Valli was still fresh from The Third Man (49), as was Granger from Strangers on a Train (50), so Senso was indeed something of a star-studded affair. Granger is even seductive at points, though the Italian version’s isn’t his voice, which makes an enormous difference. (Criterion’s new edition features the English version too, titled The Wanton Countess—with dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles!—as a supplementary feature.)

Yet, with all due respect to the story and performances, the most dynamic aspect of Senso however would arguably be its décors. Desire is the undoing of Livia, but it’s money that poisons Franz—but how could he not succumb to avarice when surrounded by such boundless luxury? Fabulous fabrics are endlessly flowing across the screen like a current of punch-drunk longing made tactile: veils, capes, bedclothes, night gowns, curtains, skirts that could provide shelter to entire families of very short people. The sets, the clothes, the furniture, the battlefields, the extras, those perfect patterns of grime on the doors of the Austrian officer’s dormitory: Visconti’s urge toward grandeur spared no expense. In fact, production ran three times longer than scheduled, went through three cinematographers (the first, Aldo Graziati, died), and finally bankrupted Lux Films. But watch how the look of everything in the film it what tells the story, from the morbid elegance and rich colours of Venice, to the final scenes in Verona, which looks like a sooty smudge, barren, used up, shadowy and blackened as an abandoned fireplace. It strikes me as apt that this story, which could be regarded as something of an adult, corrupted version of Romeo and Juliet, draws to its close in the very city where Shakespeare’s beloved teenage tragedy took place. More apt still that Visconti’s assistant director was none other Franco Zeffirelli (and if Granger’s memoir, excerpted in Criterion’s package, is to be trusted, Zeffirelli was also Visconti’s lover at the time), who would go on to helm the cinema’s most celebrated version of Romeo and Juliet (68). But then everything about Senso, maybe even the film’s failure to find international success, seems to conform to the dictates of destiny.

Paul Bowles at 100

There’s an incident described in Paul Bowles’ autobiography Without Stopping, relayed without sentiment or much elaboration, in which the author flips a coin as a method of deciding between two actions: heads he sets off for Europe as soon as possible, tails he overdoses on barbiturates. Bowles doesn’t recall having had the idea to do this, only suddenly, compulsively, performing the act. “It occurred to me,” he writes, “that this meant that I was not the I I thought I was or, rather, that there was a second I in me who had suddenly assumed command.” Whichever “I” took command of Bowles’ life at such turning points was clearly drawn to games of chance, and at times to outright danger—yet perhaps this “I” had a shapr eye for the odds. Had Bowles found tails, and had he followed through with its dictates, he would have died far too young, far in advance of most of the journeys and friendships with famous and talented people that would bless his life, far in advance of becoming the celebrated composer and fiction writer so many cherish. But Bowles got heads, went to Europe and many other, much stranger places, married a woman who would also prove a marvelous, eerily like-minded writer, produced a great deal of music and wrote or translated a good number of books, and lived until the age of 88. Last 30 December he would have turned 100. So this is a belated happy birthday.


As usual I reminded myself that since nothing was real, it did not matter too much.
—Without Stopping

William Burroughs, who came to know Bowles in Tangier in the 1950s, once quipped that Bowles should have titled his autobiography Without Telling, referring to Bowles’ indefatigable reticence regarding his sexuality. But Without Stopping actually tells us a lot about this very particular, very peculiar man, especially his enduringly hazy sense of volition and sense of the fluidity of self. That troublesome “I” referred to above tells us something about the narrator of ‘You Are Not I’, an escapee from a mental institution who seems to undergo some sort of psychic transference by placing a stone in her sister’s mouth. I read Without Stopping only after reading Bowles’ more famous works, namely the novels The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down and those incredible short stories, and found it to be easily one of the most vivid and fascinating items in the canon, though to be sure, it only deepens the mysteries surrounding Bowles’ life and work. The couple traversing the Sahara in The Sheltering Sky find only death or perdition; the widower in ‘Pages From Cold Point,’ who relocates he and his son to a remote island so as to escape what he deems a doomed and grotesque civilization, finds that what’s most repulsive about the life he’s left behind has been following him all along. Nearly everything Bowles published reads like a warning to Westerners to stay home, yet Bowles, raised comfortably—if under the terror of a reportedly draconian father—in the Eastern US, cultivated a legacy as the quintessential expatriate, always seeking roads less traveled and living out much of his life in North Africa. He couldn’t bear staying home. Thing is, however terrifying or fraught Bowles made traveling sound, something in his stories remained seductive. He certainly made me want to go everywhere.


“You don’t take a honeymoon alone,” he interrupted.
“You might.” She laughed shortly.
—‘Call at Corazón’

It’s easy to emphasize Paul Bowles’ weirdness—we’re talking about a guy who took an extraordinarily long time to differentiate between the sexes as a boy, and one who happily married a woman despite the fact that both he and Jane Bowles seemed primarily if not exclusively homosexual. But I think Bowles’ manner of grappling with ambivalence in both his personal life and his fiction is what resonates so intensely with readers. Those characters who most resemble Bowles seem perpetually torn between companionship and solitude. In an especially memorable chapter of The Sheltering Sky Port returns at night to a desolate, beautiful place he’d visited earlier in the day with Kit. By returning alone and in secret he seems to be correcting the earlier, shared, and somehow flawed experience of the place. Yet Port isn’t tempted to abandon Kit—he wants to keep sharing things with her, even at risk of spoiling some of them. Perhaps this tension is itself desirable. Perhaps, for all its detached, quietly unnerving qualities, The Sheltering Sky is simply an accurate portrait of marriage. It is, in any case, as good a place as any to discover Bowles if you’ve never read him. That or The Delicate Prey and Other Stories.

Futbolistas, pornographers, rat detectives, rabid rabbits: Two new volumes of stories by Bolaño

Photo courtesy of New Directions

A story might begin like so: “William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman from Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me…” There’s the suggestion that what’s about to unfurl was simply transcribed from a friendly conversation, or perhaps a drunken, wee-hour confession. Sometimes the names of the characters are the same as those of real people, such as the late porn actor John Holmes. Sometimes these names read as obvious covers for the author himself. These qualities imbue the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s The Return (New Directions, $30) with a seductive intimacy, the allure of secrets being shared, of something once hiding in the world being excavated. But then we remember that there’s no such place as Santa Teresa in the state of Sonora, that John Holmes died in 1988, not 1990, and that it might be advisable to avoid confusing Arturo Belano with Roberto Bolaño, however compelling the illusion. Bolaño’s best stories often hover in this twilight realm where the conviction of the narrator’s voice, speaking to us softly as though over the airwaves, allows us to lose sight of the frontiers between the factual, the apocryphal, and the dream-drawn invention. A lucid voice speaking to us of obscure and illucid things. If you like spending time in this place, keep reading.

The 13 stories in The Return, translated by Bolaño’s award-winning steady Chris Andrews, are culled from two collections already published in Spanish, 1997’s Llamadas telefónicas and 2001’s Putas asesinas. The selections seem arranged in pairs: two about Russia, two about mentally unstable women, two about the porn industry. These little diptychs make for a pleasing fluidity. They also emphasize the freedom Bolaño might have found in working within diverse milieux, that the author of such ambitious novels as 2666 and The Savage Detectives was having fun sinking his teeth into the microworlds of Russian thugs, the adult film industry, necrophile French clothing designers, and international soccer stars. Yes, death lurks in most every corner, but the titular tale assures us that dying is actually pretty much like it’s depicted in the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore mega-hit Ghost, and that forging connections with some living person will set us free to leave our shells behind and roam the afterlife.

Dedicated to Mexican author Juan Villoro, ‘Buba,’ the soccer story, recalls a winning streak that may or may not have been the result of magic blood rituals undertaken by an African playing for Spain. It may have also been the result of a peculiar and impermanent sort of friendship between young men with their lives still ahead of them. The narrator of ‘Clara’ attempts to chronicle the life of a girl he dated in his youth. Clara remains a peripheral figure in his life—it’s only when she vanishes that he recognizes his need for her. ‘Prefiguration of Lalo Cura’ concerns the child of a renegade priest and the female star of the Olimpo Movie Production Company, now a confused adult trying to make sense of his mother’s career. Passing through life with a moniker like Lalo Cura—“la locura” means madness in Spanish; Bolaño liked the name so much he recycled it in 2666—our narrator obsesses over how names determine our fate. Lalo was born in a neighbourhood called The Impaled. “The name glows like the moon. The name opens a way through the dream with its horn and man follows that path.” It also reminds him of how many times his mother was impaled by her costars while acting in the bizarre, surrealistic blue movies authored by a mysterious German working in Latin America. Bolaño’s synopses of these movies make for some lively reading.

Coming just a month after The Return, The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions, $28.50), also translated by Andrews—who even has a story dedicated to him—is a somewhat slimmer collection of short work. There are fewer, longer stories, and a couple of these might just be among the finest writings available in English from Bolaño. The titular story concerns a retired lawyer and judge who, following the departure of his adult children from his Buenos Aires home and the collapse of the Argentine economy, moves to his long-abandoned ranch in las Pampas, where he very gradually sheds an entire way of life and adopts another. Along the way he becomes familiar with the local rabbit population, some of which prove to be shockingly bloodthirsty, their appearances resembling something out of Paul Bowles. Bolaño’s evocation of place is rife with typically odd details and utterly immersive. There’s something almost like optimism here, too, a sense that there are brief windows in our lives that, should we heed their invitation, will offer up the opportunity to change everything.

A sort of homage to Kafka’s final short story, the unambiguously titled ‘Rat Police’ at first glance seems like the least likely Bolaño project yet: a detective fiction set in the sewer-washed world of rats. Rats, we’re told, rarely make art and they rarely murder, so this story is about the exceptions to the rule, narrated by a rat cop whose life brushes against both phenomena. As is often the case in Bolaño’s cosmology, art and murder share something essential that’s never quite articulated but dangles brilliantly in the imagination. The rat authorities lack of interest in what appears to be serial murders could almost read as a dry run for the under-investigated killings in 2666.

The Argentine novelist at the centre of ‘Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey’ discovers he’s plagiarized by a European filmmaker. Still a minor author, perhaps vaguely flattered, he lets it slide. Time passes, Rousselot publishes another novel, the filmmaker makes another movie—and plagiarizes Rousselot again! Not only that, the filmmaker actually kind of improves on the source material. Rousselot still doesn’t take legal action. In fact, he despairs that the filmmaker might have abandoned him, that he might lose his best reader, “the reader for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully responding to his work.” The story is very funny, shaped by unexpected encounters, and there is a delicious irony at work here, but there’s also an allusion to the secret destinies that seem to lay waiting for everyone, should they take off the lid and peer into the burbling stew. What you see might make your blood curdle. It might also startle you with the beauty of its design.

Let there be lightning: Jennifer Baichwal discusses Act of God

The cloud looks lonely and monstrous, cradling some dying sun inside it. Though it’s only the first of many such ominous masses of droplets to loom throughout the film it’s the one that lingers in my mind. It seems to hold an unusually potent charge of destruction and wonder, but it rests there in the sky, suspended static, all threat. Act of God by contrast could be described as all question, an essay on chance and meaning that uses stories of being struck by lightning as a platform for meditation, without concern for hard results.

Paul Auster

Featured among the film’s subjects is novelist Paul Auster, modern literature’s custodian of chance, and musician Fred Frith, for whom improvisation forms the bedrock of his practice. Act of God ends not with a summation of theoretical points but rather a sort of duet between these two, with Auster describing an incident from his childhood where the kid next to him was fatally struck. The interplay between narration, guitar and percussion is buoyed by the filmmakers’ reining in of atmosphere, their evocation of the electrical brooding that precedes a great storm.

Fred Frith

There’s also James O’Reilly, whose monologue about death by lightning inspired the film. There’s Dannion Brinkley, the Las Vegas Lazarus whose near-death experience spurred a career as caregiver and New Age guru. There’s Alex Hermant, who remains off-camera while his lightning museum in Marcenat, France is on curious display. There are trips to Cuba and Mexico, where reverence for lightning assumes religious properties. There’s also a trip to a lab where we get to peek inside the electrical currents flowing through Frith’s brain while he develops one of his spontaneous creations.

Jennifer Baichwal

Jennifer Baichwal’s previous films Let It Come Down, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes profiled author Paul Bowles and photographers Shelby Lee Adams and Edward Burtinsky respectively. In each case the subject served less as material for straight biography than as a launch pad for a discussion of larger themes extrapolated from their lives and work. Act of God breaks from Baichwal’s established model by using a chorus rather than a single subject to address its theme. The result—sculpted in part by Baichwal’s husband and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, not to mention editor Roland Schlimme—works quite well more often than not, and the coda is exquisite. I spoke with Baichwal during the film’s premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto last spring. Appropriately, her responses to my questions rarely leaned toward conclusions.

JB: Act of God proceeds along these two distinct parallel thematic trajectories. It addresses a phenomenon that directly effects only a very small number of people, yet at it also invokes ontological questions that effect everyone. Which aspect sparked the film?

JBa: My background is in philosophy and theology, so I think about these sorts of questions a lot. How much meaning can you ascribe to events before becoming deterministic? How little meaning can you ascribe before becoming nihilistic? I read James O’Reilly’s monologue Act of God, about being struck as a young man and this existential crisis that happened as a result. His description of the moment of the strike and his immediate response to it were so interesting. On one level there’s this physical event, something that can be explained by weather and science and probability, et cetera. On another it’s the perfect metaphor for this struggle between meaning and chance. So what sparked the film was really both things simultaneously. I mentioned to Michael Ondaatje that I was thinking of doing this and he suggested I talk to Paul Auster. As well, Nick has always been fascinated by lightning.

JB: Funny that someone whose medium is photography would be so fascinated by something so difficult to photograph.

JBa: Almost impossible. It’s so fleeting. But Nick taught himself to be an electrician when he was young and knows a thing or two about electricity. We wanted to shoot our own images of lightning. If you look at the existing archive, most of it’s very unsatisfying. It’s generally only about the event itself. It gives no contextual information whatsoever.

JB: Your films thus far has been to some extent profiles of artists. I wonder if Act of God somehow also emerged from a desire to understand generative acts or creativity, accidents that bring flashes of insight or inspiration.

JBa: It’s no accident, I guess, that two people in the film are writers, and one’s a musician. I always turn to art when examining questions of the human condition. Even though Auster and O’Reilly resist ascribing meaning to what happens to them they can’t help but frame it in narrative, which you could argue is another way of doing just that. If the film’s thesis is that narrative is the most basic way we can create meaning, then the parallel of that was Frith’s improvisation, which struck me almost as an existential state of being between meaning and randomness. The fact that he embodies an electrical current somehow; to be able to see what that internal electrical storm in his brain looks like; to hear Frith’s brother explain how the brain learns by being confronted by the unexpected; to hear Auster describe his essay ‘Why Write?’ as an ars poetica but without theory, just stories—these are the essential things the film tries to address.

Plugging into Fred Frith's brain

JB: By creating these narratives we’re also attempting to free ourselves of the burden of these experiences on our consciousness.

JBa: It’s true. Why does that process allow us to be free of these experiences? Is it just because it stands in for making sense where sense can’t really be made? We tell stories about these things and it’s a way or ordering, of creating coherence.

JB: Did you ever consider a more didactic approach? Bringing in some sort of authority on meteorology, say?

JBa: I did wonder at one point if we might bring in someone to talk more about the science. The funny thing is that whenever you see TV shows about lightning, for example, the emphasis is always on demystifying it, where I really kind of wanted to do exactly the opposite. I wanted it to remain a mysterious force that precipitates all of these questions. I’m never really interested in making things didactic because I feel like if these questions we’re asking were very easy to answer then the subject wouldn’t be a very interesting thing to spend five years of your life working on. I don’t think it would be interesting for a viewer to spend 80 or 90 minutes on. Making a film like this is about opening up a space to think about something that’s not easily dismissible.

JB: There’s a significant gamble making a film like this because while it is a sort of essay film you’re entirely dependent on the quality of material you get from your subjects. How do you get them to align their statements reasonably closely to the thread of your film?

JBa: Finding the right stories is part of the process. When we went to France, for example, we didn’t know that Alex Hermant was going to say that he didn’t want to be on camera. We went a long way to interview him—the guy wasn’t in Paris, he was in the mountains. We went there with the kids and my mother, who was there to take care of them. So when Hermant laid this on us, Nick and I just looked at each other and thought, Well, this must be the essential thing about this person. This is the key to him. Let’s use it. Your relationship with our subjects is the most important element in any documentary. Unless there’s some exchange of vulnerability, some sense of authenticity, it’s not going to work. Finding a place where you can communicate can sometimes take days. Sometimes it can happen immediately. With Paul Bowles it took 30 hours to reach that place. With James O’Reilly, just the act of taking him back to this place where he hadn’t been for 30 years, watching him walking around trying to find the site for two days, watching him perform this spontaneous recreation, it seemed to find us all together in that place we needed to be. Because we didn’t set up that recreation. I could never set that up. I just don’t do that. I feel like I can always tell the directed act in a documentary. The person walking away thoughtfully, or whatever. You can always tell when it’s something they’ve been told to do.

JB: That’s something that Herzog seems to have mastered though, the created/spontaneous act. Of course he also made numerous fictional films before he was able to do that. But I was thinking that you do have one very Herzogian character in your film, this Dannion Brinkley. Were you ever concerned about the authenticity of his testimony?

JBa: There’s something completely bizarre and coincidental about him living in Las Vegas, the city of odds. When I asked him why he lived there he said it was the most spiritual place on earth. [Laughs] I don’t quite agree with that. But I absolutely believe that Dannion’s transformation is real. I’m sure there’ll be people who feel what he’s saying is untrue. But in some ways it’s not important whether you believe him or not. I wanted his story to be told the way he wanted to tell it.

Baichwal and Nick de Pencier at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

JB: Given that Act of God is so much about the search for meaning, I wonder if you feel like your own beliefs have made their way into the film, even if only through some unconscious process.

JBa: It’s impossible for me not to be in every frame in some way. It’s not like these stories are somehow being directly transmitted and there’s no author behind it all. There’s no question that we—Nick, our editor Roland, myself—had an enormous impact on how those stories were told. Yet despite the fact that I would disagree strenuously that objectivity is ever possible in documentary, I do think truth is possible. We tried to shape things to retain as much fidelity to how people tell their own stories as possible with the tools at our disposal. It’s the way the whole is framed that’s very much informed by my own personal questions about these things. And also my lack of an answer. I don’t mind living in that uncertain place.

On fiction, formats and forgotten gems: Millipede Press revives The Deadly Percheron, The Tenant

When we talk about vintage pulp fiction, we talk about how it’s presented. We actually refer to it by its published format. There are purists who scoff at the re-packaging of pulp fiction in prestige editions, the idea being that you’re not getting the full experience if you read Rendezvous in Black or The Postman Always Rings Twice or Dark Passage on acid-free paper bound in leather. The argument is simultaneously compelling and degrading. There is indeed something appealing about consuming material deemed lowbrow or excessively sanguine by the elite in the same cheap, disposable paperbacks as their original consumers. But those original paperbacks now sell for luxury prices. Ironically, they are now valuable antiques. Furthermore, if this material is worth revisiting, if it may even be great literature, then why shouldn’t it be reprinted in formats designed to endure? Why let these books perish in the literary ghetto?

I discovered the great hard-boiled pulps I’ve grown to adore in the gaudy but sturdily bound Black Lizard trade paperbacks of the 1980s and 90s—editions that have now also become collector’s items. I still regularly scour used bookstores trying to hunt down some new-to-me title in this noble imprint, only to balk at the price. In the end, all I really care about is being able to actually read these books, to have the opportunity to find forgotten gems and keep the established masterpieces available to all. So I was very happy to recently discover Millipede Press, a publisher out of Lakewood, Colorado, who’ve been resurrecting some superb crime fiction in editions that run the gamut from limited edition deluxe boxed hardcovers to trades that’ll only put you out about $13.

I’d never heard of The Deadly Percheron, not of its author John Franklin Bardin. It was Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the new introduction to Millipede’s reprint, and that got me intrigued. The Deadly Percheron, originally published in 1946, is a masterwork of amnesia fiction, a genre Lethem coined and defined in The Vintage Book of Amnesia, his anthology featuring the likes of Nabokov, Murakami and, of course, Lethem's beloved Philip K. Dick. Lethem wanted to include The Deadly Percheron in the anthology in its entirety, but for obvious reasons this proved impractical. Thanks to Millipede however, it has a new life.

A psychiatrist interviews a new patient who tells him of leprechauns who pay him to perform strange antics. The psychiatrist accompanies the patient to a bar to meet one of his employers, who turns out to be, apparently, nothing more than a fanciful midget. But that very night an actress is murdered and the patient becomes a suspect. The psychiatrist tries to help, but soon finds himself led into the New York subway and knocked unconscious. Next thing he knows he’s in a mental hospital, badly scarred, and taken for a tramp. Months have passed. The man he used to be is reportedly dead, his widow moved away. Gradually the one-time shrink comes to accept his new identity and lives an exceedingly humble life as a soda jerk working the graveyard shift in some Coney Island joint. He’s oddly content. Until his past catches up with him…

The finale is a little too wrapped up, disappointing in the way the finales of a lot of great film noirs are disappointing—but the getting-there is more than worth it. I can recall very few stories where the labyrinth of amnesia is more fraught with strange detours of multiple meaning. The scene in which the hero feels he’s being chased down a dark street: is he being chased by his past self? The rumpled nighthawk with whom this once respectable professional takes up with: is she really just another factor in his transient life or in fact the embodiment of a repressed desire to flee his “real” life? The Deadly Percheron feels less like conventional crime fiction than a precursor to the films of David Lynch.

Roland Topor’s The Tenant, originally published in 1964, a book I’ve wanted to read ever since I first saw Roman Polanski’s wickedly disturbing film version, has also received the Millipede treatment in an edition featuring the author’s enigmatic illustrations, some long out-of-print short stories, and an introduction by Thomas Ligotti. It it’s way, The Tenant is also a sort of amnesia tale, its protagonist gradually losing his sense of identity until it becomes fully fused with that of the suicidal woman who’d previously inhabited his two-room Paris apartment. Written with cool detachment, the narrative trajectory recalls Paul Bowles’ ‘A Distant Episode,’ with the considerable difference that the true culprits behind the protagonist’s psychological breakdown remain entirely ambiguous to the very end.

Our protagonist initially seems exceedingly normal, only slowly revealing Kafkaesque tendencies toward self-appointed guilt and sexual anxiety. The imagery surrounding his sense of being persecuted is uniformly vaginal: the oval bathroom window he watches from his apartment; the single eye visible on the face of the heavily bandaged previous tenant, and her screaming mouth; holes hidden in walls and doors with doors; everywhere cavities await and threaten. Topor’s narrative feels at once inevitable and lined with shock, a chilling exploration of mental corrosion and how we come to terms with what constitutes self. In an inspired choice, Millipede’s edition features a Topor illustration of a figure without a face.