Arthur Cravan's topics - tribe.net

Arthur Cravan Tribe set to disappear....

2008-06-16T00:17:51Z

If a new moderator is not found, this tribe will vanish in a rowboat off the Mexican coast

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Hardly a Moderate - Arthur Cravan needs some...

2008-06-14T22:24:37Z

...new moderation.

Any volunteers?

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Arthur Cravan Novel Last Stop Salina Cruz

2007-09-07T08:17:46Z

There's a debut novel out this month by a chap called David Lale. It's called Last Stop Salina Cruz and is about a fellow who quits his job/life to follow Cravan's journey and life in France-Barcelona-America-Mexico leading to his final scene in Salina Cruz. Narrative split between the really funny 'travel' story and related historical narrative about what Cravan was doing in these places. I've just read it and feel enlightened and desperate to quit it all and get on the boat....

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Breaking news on Arthur Cravan

2007-06-29T12:02:07Z

He is still missing - presumed dead.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 3 replies

Cravan in History

2007-06-29T11:58:05Z

I think that I should at least post what is on the Socialists' webpages in terms of the Cravan movie. Note that he came to America on the same ship as Trotsky, though the Trot was not much taken with him. There is a subtext of prizefighters in modernism that is not investigated, but note that the co-founder of Cubism with Picasso - Georges Braque was an amateur prizefighter. I have always considered Cravan a precurser to the Beats and the post beats especially since he took off his clothes in Greenwich Village and scandalized the Bohemian society of that period (at the behest of Marcel DuChamp yet!).
From the site:
Cravan vs. Cravan (directed by Isaki Lacuesta) takes a look at the life and disappearance, permanently in this case, of “Arthur Cravan” (1887-1918?), nephew of Oscar Wilde, self-styled poet-boxer, critic-provocateur, anarchist, claimed later by the surrealists as a precursor. Born Fabian Lloyd (the son of Wilde’s brother-in-law) in Lausanne, Switzerland, the future Cravan grew up in a family that desired nothing more than to live down Wilde’s “disgrace” (the writer had died poverty-stricken in Paris in 1900). His discovery of Wilde’s writings and fate transformed his life and propelled him into a career of aggressive confrontation with the cultural establishment.

Cravan’s activity, in fact, seems to bear within it the seeds of a number of movements, including the Dadaists, Futurists and Vorticists. He dressed in outlandish waistcoats, half green-half red, praised the machine and violently denounced all the leading cultural figures of the time. His attack on André Gide was particularly memorable. In Paris he edited a magazine, Maintenant (two of whose numbers are available on-line, in French: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/Maintenant/index.htm), and wrote all the articles himself, under a variety of pseudonyms. “Oscar Wilde is living!” was one piece, in which he describes an imaginary encounter with his uncle and sums up “All of literature” as “ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.”

Cravan verbally assaulted everybody, the avant-garde too. The poet Apollinaire once challenged him to a duel. Typically, his attack on the painter Robert Delaunay begins, “Once more I must admit that I have not seen his paintings.” Cravan wrote in his magazine, “If I write it is to infuriate my colleagues, to make people talk about me and to try making a name for myself. With a name, you succeed with women and in business.” He also wrote: “I refuse to be civilized.”

Cravan, a large, powerful man, really did become a boxer, in fact, a European champion. In 1916, in front of 30,000 people in Barcelona, he fought heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who knocked him out in the sixth round. “The day of the revolution, Johnson will be king,” Cravan remarked, according to the film. The poet-boxer was in Spain because of his hostility to the war. He sailed for New York City on December 25, 1916 ... aboard the same ship as Leon Trotsky (this is not mentioned in the film).

Trotsky wrote in My Life: “The population of the steamer is multicolored, and not very attractive in its variety. There are quite a few deserters from different countries, for the most part men of fairly high standing. ... A boxer, who is also a novelist and a cousin of Oscar Wilde, confesses openly that he prefers crashing Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German stab him in the midriff.”

For his part Cravan later wrote of Trotsky with a combination of respect and irony. “The poor fool!” he observed, “He sincerely loves humanity. He sincerely desires to make other people happy. And he truly thinks that one day there will be no more war.”

In New York Cravan continued his effort at scandalizing society. Invited by Marcel Duhamp to deliver a lecture, Cravan reportedly began his talk by swearing and disrobing, whereupon he was arrested. Moving on to Mexico, Cravan apparently attempted to set up a boxing academy. In the fall of 1918 he sent his pregnant wife on to Buenos Aires, intending to follow her by boat. He never arrived and is presumed to have drowned. Legends grew that he was seen years later.

Frank Nicotra, a present-day boxer, acts as guide through Lacuesta’s film. He is described as a poet too, but we never hear or see any evidence of his writing. So the reason for his presence is unclear. In any event, Cravan’s life is interesting enough without gimmicks. [http://www.excentriques.com/cravan/index.html (in French)]

-Sal DIGiacomo
The future is much like the present, only longer. - Don Quisenberry

posted in Arthur Cravan - 2 replies

Arthur Cravan and B. Traven

2007-03-08T19:09:36Z

What do make of the theory that they are the same person? Do you really think Arthur Cravan could have written "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"? It just seems like a book far away from his idiom and personality. I personally think that Arthur Cravan would have most likely reappeared as a professional wrestler like "Pampero Firpo" or "Dr. X"

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Beatrice Wood...and Arthur Cravan?

2007-01-18T02:18:38Z

Noted ceramicist Beatrice Wood, who earned the title "Mama of Dada" because she outlasted the original crowd by half a century (dying in Ojai, California in 1998 at age 105!), was a close friend of the Arensbergs and habitue of their salon. She was also the apex in the triangle of Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roche, which was supposedly at least partial inspiration for Roche's JULES ET JIM.

Given Wood's admitted lust for handsome lovers (her secret to long life was "chocolate and young men"), Cravan's attraction to women Duchamp found attractive and his claim to have collected phone numbers from every woman he met at the Arensbergs', is there any mention of hanky-panky between our boy and Ojai's randy patron saint prior to his hooking up with Mina Loy?

Inquiring minds want to know...and then dish about it on my next trip up to that artists' haven in the California hills.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 3 replies

Arthur Cravan Action Figure

2007-01-17T17:10:33Z

It seems to me that the time has come to design, build, manufacture and distribute an Arthur Cravan Action Figure (TM). The figure should come with a set of boxing trunks and gloves, a copy of Maintenant, a bowler hat and a hip flask. What else should it have? Does it also require a companion Mina Loy Action Figure (TM)? What do you think?

posted in Arthur Cravan - 5 replies

Cravan Thought for the Day

2007-01-06T15:21:49Z

"You must dream your life with great care
Instead of living it merely as amusement"

posted in Arthur Cravan - 6 replies

The Self Immolation Of Arthur Cravan

2006-12-22T19:14:38Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSF-a9hngnI

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Anybody visit Strasbourg in Jan or Feb of 2006?

2006-12-13T06:13:05Z

Arthur Cravan, une légende?

Exposition dossier au musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg sur l’excentrique poète et boxeur Arthur Cravan qui sévit, à travers provocations et autres frasques, dans l’univers culturel des années 1910. Colosse de deux mètres et de 120 kg, il défie sur le ring le champion du monde de boxe Jack Johnson, annonce son suicide public et accuse les spectateurs venus en masse de voyeurisme, pratique la conférence et se complait dans le scandale, publie une revue culturelle intitulée Maintenant (1912-1915), dont il est l’unique auteur, assassinant, avec un humour frisant parfois la grossièreté, les personnalités du monde artistique de l’époque.

Sa vie de bohème, ses prises de position radicales vis-à-vis du monde artistique et ses bouffonneries, lui vaudront la fascination de nombre de ses contemporains, dont un certain André Breton qui lui accorda une place de choix dans son anthologie de l'humour noir. Une véritable légende dont la disparition en mer au large du Golfe du Mexique en 1918 fera de lui un personnage mythique, à découvrir absolument !

Jusqu'au 26 février, tous les jours sauf le mardi de 10h à 18h

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Head v. Heart

2006-11-02T21:22:11Z

"Le Coeur decouvre, la tete invente."

The heart discovers, the head invents.

-- Arthur Cravan.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 3 replies

On n'a jamais trouvé un artiste pendu devant une rose.

2006-09-27T06:07:41Z

"One never found an artist hung in front of a rose"

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

I know where Arthur Cravan lives...

2006-07-24T05:24:26Z

do you?

http://radioaperitivo.blogspot.com/2005/12/i-know-where-arthur-cravan-lives.html

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Cravan - The Comic

2006-07-18T03:39:46Z

I recently completed reading Cravan by Mike Richardson & Rick Geary. If ever there were a life story more appropriate for a graphic novel, it is indeed the life of Arthur Cravan. Since really quite little is known about the life of Mr. Cravan, the resulting volume is rather slim. It does however hit the high points that are well known and documented in other texts like "Four Dada Suicides". It also focusses almost exclusively on his life and makes fleeting mentions of his work. This is, I think, an appropriate approach. The story veers off towards the end as it attempts to postulate what had become of him after his disappearance. It suggests the possibility that Cravan was a conterfeiter who pawned off manuscripts as being Oscar Wilde's and even being the writer of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (written by B. Traven, also a reclusive mystery man).

The comic is an easy read that gives you a good background into what is known about the life of Arthur Cravan. The drawings are colorful and appropriate although none-to-challenging nor original. I would recommend this volume with three punches to the solar plexus out of five possible.

A better text is the aforementioned "4 Dada Suicides" which also includes a selection of Mr. Cravan's work.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

A Few Words About Art

2006-07-08T02:42:38Z

"M. Delaunay, who has the face of an inflamed pig, or perhaps a Duke's coachman, might be expected to paint like a brute. The exterior is promising, but the interior isn't up to much...Unfortunately for him, he married a Russian...I don't say I wouldn't f*ck Madame Delaunay just once. Like most men, I'm a born collector, so it would give me a cruel satisfaction to debauch a kindergarten teacher...Marie Laurencian (haven't seen her picture) needs someone to pull up her skirts and give her a big...to teach her that art isn't just a little pose in front of a mirror. Oh! My dear! (keep your trap shut!) Painting is walking, running, drinking, eating and fulfilling your natural functions. You can say I'm disgusting, but that's just what it is..."

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

It's Moderator gift purchase time!

2006-07-06T16:25:06Z

Contact me for shipping instructions!

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/ListingDetails?bi=752417059

posted in Arthur Cravan - 2 replies

Who the heck is Arthur Caravan?

2006-06-30T01:21:24Z

Lookin' for mistela

We're gonna look in for mistela,
we're gonna look in for mistela
in the night, in the niiight!
We're gonna look in right now.

An' if you want to drink mistela,
you better come and take a chance with us:
we're gonna go to the bodega;
you're gonna look in right now.

Doo doo doo doodoo doodoodoo,
doo doo doodoo doodoodoo...
Come on now, we're drinkin' mistela
'n' if you want to go to bodega
I want to escape, I wanna go with you there.
...doo doo doodoo doodoodoo,
doo doo doodoo doodoodoo...

An'if you want to drink mistela,
you're gonna come and take a chance with us
to Benimaclet: party foreeever!
I wanna look in right now.

Doo doo doo doodoo doodoodoo,
doo doo doodoo doodoodoo...
Come on now, we're drinkin' mistela
'n' if you want to go to bodega
I want to escape, I wanna go with you now.
...doo doo doodoo doodoodoo,
doo doo doodoo doodoodoo,
doo doo doodoo doodoodoo...

Lyrics © 1998 by Arthur Caravan.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

"Spitting: is it an insult or a caress?"

2006-06-25T09:12:07Z

-- Arthur Cravan

Discuss.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 6 replies

One Possibility

2006-06-20T03:57:00Z

...in 1959, Gillot de Saix , the celebrated Wilde missioner in
France, said he had met the "_faussaire Arthur Cravan_" in Paris
in the 1930's, and that Cravan "had continued to make a living
forging Wilde manuscripts for Charles Carrington, the shady
publisher and purveyor of erotica in the rue de Chateaudun".

Excerpted from "Introduction: Arthur Cravan" by Roger Lloyd Conover
from _4 Dada Suicides_

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Art Criticism in Maintenant

2006-06-20T03:55:08Z

From 1912 to 1915 he published, in Paris, under the name of
_Maintenant_, a little polemical journal magazine which was
certainly the forerunner of _391_ and other aggressive post-war
publications. It served as his loud-speaker with which to make
known to artists (lest any should be unaware) what he thought of
them. His conclusions were often surprising. Von Dongen, alone,
found grace in his eyes. But he was not always wrong, and his
account of a visit to Andre Gide, for example, is an extraordinary
piece of ironically clever criticism. The article devoted to the
Independents Exhibition in Paris in 1914 made him famous, and
unleashed a tempest of protests. He attacked the more outstanding
names. The women painters, no less than the men, were the object
of his insolent commentaries, which were all the more irritating as
they were characterized by an irresistible verve and drollery. And
although everybody said it was outrageous, they could barely
control their chuckles. But he did go too far, nonetheless.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Cravan Thought for the Day

2006-06-17T14:03:32Z

"For if I had known Latin when I was 18, I would be emperor."

[Moderator Notes: This did not work for me. I knew Latin when I was 18 but, sadly, despite my best efforts, was not able to become emperor.]

posted in Arthur Cravan - 1 reply

It happened here...

2006-06-17T04:01:44Z

480 Lexington Ave,
[West side of the street, between 46th & 48th]
New York, New York:

This was the site of the Grand Central Palace, which hosted in April 1917 the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Dadaist art critic Arthur Cravan was arrested there for shouting obscenities and undressing during a lecture. Later it served as New York City's main induction center for World War II draftees. The present building dates to the 1960s and is the headquarters of the financial firm Bear Sterns.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 1 reply

Cravan Thought for the Day

2006-06-14T12:24:46Z

"Il faut regarder le monde comme le fait un enfant ..."

"It is necessary to look at the world as a child does..."

posted in Arthur Cravan - 6 replies

Cravan vs. Cravan TRAILER!

2006-06-13T13:54:36Z

After searching and searching I found the Trailer ; )

The film does not seem to be available in the us...

Neither is Arthur btw.

http://www.yatv.com/video/yatv2_video_n_229663_1.html#

~ConfettaVs.Cravan

posted in Arthur Cravan - 2 replies

Cravan Thought for the Day

2006-06-11T19:51:26Z

"Genius is nothing more than an extraordinary manifestation of the body."

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

ooooH! LOOK what I FOUND!

2006-06-05T18:30:03Z

Have YOU seen THIS??

http://es.geocities.com/dada1391/arthurcravan.htm

Now..

um, can you TRANSLATE IT???

hehehe

fettz

posted in Arthur Cravan - 2 replies

Cravan Thought for the Day

2006-06-05T04:37:55Z

"I should like to inform my readers that I shall accept with pleasure anything they see fit to send me: jars of jam, money orders, liqueurs, postage stamps of all countries, etc., etc. If nothing else, each gift will make me laugh."

posted in Arthur Cravan - 1 reply

Save up your pennies....

2006-06-03T05:13:46Z

This from http://www.abebooks.com

Maintenant n° 4. Mars-Avril 1914., CRAVAN (Arthur). Maintenant n° 4., Revue Littéraire. Directeur : Arthur Cravan. Paris, fascicule in-8, broché. Numéro spécial consacré à L'Exposition des Indépendants.

Bookseller: Librairie Fourcade, Paris, FRA
Price: EUR 800.00 (US$ 1054.43)

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Did anyone happen to catch this?

2006-06-02T21:05:46Z

It was held at UC Santa Barbara. There were free refreshments, too.

Dr. Peter Bloom
"'To be or not to be American:' African-American Boxing in Interwar France"
Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The celebration of African-American boxing figures in France during the interwar period is starting point for this discussion of how French perceptions of African-Americans were differentiated from African performers. Dr. Bloom will discuss the intersecting itineraries of Jack Johnson, Battling Siki, and Panama Al Brown, and their integration into the boxing and music hall culture. He will address the question of how African-American figures were appropriated in France as a more creative kind of American: Jack Johnson's boxing style was a source of inspiration for the French Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan (1992), and Panama Al Brown was an icon for the French Surrealists. Battling Siki, a French colonial subject born in Senegal and brought up in Marseilles, became persona non gratis in France after defeating Georges Carpentier, the French middle-weight champion, in a fixed match that he was supposed to lose. "To be or not to be American," a Dadaist credo, suggests a French interwar fascination with African-American style, movement, and music in opposition to the colonial African subject.

Specializing in French and francophone cinema and society, Dr. Bloom's interests range from the development of international film technologies at the turn of the twentieth century to contemporary film and media in Europe and Africa. His ongoing research examines the relationship between French colonial cinema, the history of ethnographic film, postcolonial francophone visual culture, and historical practices of media production. Bring a bag lunch. Light refreshments will be served. Noon-1:30. FREE.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

(More on) Arthur Cravan Still Lives by Robert Barnes

2006-06-01T15:24:59Z

Barnes became interested in the proto-Dada poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, and began a group of paintings that were planned to comprise a series about Cravan first conceived in London, inspired in part by Mantegna's Triumphs at Hampton Court. He first made several independent studies on the Cravan theme between 1966 and 1968, then began the very large painting Arthur Cravan Still Lives in 1968, finishing it that same year.
Barnes had first learned of Cravan in the late 1950's through Marcel Duchamp who had known Cravan in New York in 1917. Cravan was Julien Levy's step-father-in-law through Levy's marriage to Joella Loy, Cravan's step-daughter. Levy had a large film and photography collection which included a private film of Cravan's 1916 fight with Jack Johnson which was shown to Barnes, and Levy later introduced Barnes to Fabienne Bénédict, Cravan's daughter, who had married the Colorado architect Fredric Bénédict in the 1930's.

In an undated letter to Barnes (c.1965), Fabienne expressed interest in purchasing his "imaginary portraits" of Cravan. She explained that she was becoming "acutely curious to know what happened to him" and that she had hired a Dutch 'voyant' named Croiset to help solve the mystery of Cravan's disappearance. Fabienne later wished to involve Barnes in a séance to call up the spirit of Cravan; she believed that Barnes was his reincarnation. Considering the events of Barnes' youth and his disposition which mirror Cravan's, Barnes himself started wondering whether Fabienne might be right.

These investigations into the supernatural coupled with Barnes' troubled relationship with his first wife, from whom he had separated and was to divorce in 1972, made Barnes very uncomfortable. Having finished the final Cravan painting, which came to reflect a particularly dark period of Barnes' life, he later offered it as a gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Institute declined his offer but in 1987 purchased a painting chosen by the 20th-Century Department curatorial staff.

Wishing to be rid of the painting which was a constant reminder of this period of his life, Barnes says he decided to blow it up in one of the quarries outside of the university as both a site specific happening as well as a fitting end to his Cravan cycle. However, the painting was purchased by its current owners, the Chicago collectors James Garrett Faulkner and John Jones, before Barnes could carry out his plans.

(images of work included)
http://www.levatodesign.com/robertbarnes/paintings_nav_pg.html#

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

"Allusion and Metaphor in Robert Barnes' Arthur Cravan Still Lives"

2006-06-01T05:09:22Z

Robert Barnes' huge painting Arthur Cravan Still Lives (1968) might well have been inscribed with Arthur Cravan's credo : "On ne me fait pas marcher moi!" -- "They can't put anything over on me!" For the painting as well as its author defy the pigeonholes of art historic categorization. Despite the influential presence of Cravan and his writings in the beginnings of the European and American avant garde, he has remained an esoteric figure. Comparably, Barnes has remained an almost private enthusiasm of a select group of painters, collectors and critics even though his work was well known, admired and collected by such notables as his friends the artist William Copley, Marcel Duchamp, and the major Surrealist dealer Julien Levy.

Barnes began painting imaginative portrayals of Cravan in the 1960's because Cravan's life reflected his own which Barnes described as then "totally out of control." Following up on the relationship between Cravan and Barnes, the Cravan painting generates a multitude of thematic connections and associations in what has been called "a self-sustaining chain reaction of patterns of meaning." This is accomplished in part through layers of allusions and "quotes" from literary and visual sources throughout the painting.

This methodology has often been acknowledged by reviewers who touch upon it only cursorily, preferring to discuss formal qualities. However, this paper shall examine in depth Barnes' sources, and the themes that are generated in Arthur Cravan Still Lives with the intention of demonstrating his artistic and intellectual processes and revealing some aspects of meaning in this painting and in Barnes' oeuvre between 1956 and 1968.

In particular, the painting, described by its author as "autobiographical," will be shown to have been presented in relation to artistic traditions, concepts and constructs from Duccio to Duchamp, and its "autobiographical" elements will be shown to have special significance in relation to Barnes' friends and acquaintances in New York such as Roberto Matta, William Copley, Julien Levy and Marcel Duchamp, thereby connecting the painting with Modernist ideas and affinities.

http://www.artic.edu/saic/art/projects/alumni/mrooks.html

[Michael Rooks]

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Just picked up the Comic Book CRAVEN....

2006-05-31T22:54:51Z

from the library....

exciting indeed!

can't wait to read it.

will prolly take ten minutes (I am a slow reader ; )

~confetta

posted in Arthur Cravan - 9 replies

The Benedict House?

2006-05-30T21:43:21Z

WHY The Benedict House? you ask??

okay - so it is very remotely connected to Craven..well, hmmmm...come to think of it, it is not even REMOTELY RELATED, but what the HeLL!

(forgive me if this has already been posted my short term memory is not what it used to be ; )

The Benedict House
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen1/sanctuary.html

Just some fragments here but worth reading if you have any interest in finding out more about
Frank Lloyd Wright, Stillwater, peacocks or Fabie Benedict's favorite recipes!

cc

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Arthur Cravan in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

2006-05-30T06:36:44Z

Once Mina [Loy] invited me to meet John Craven [another alias, or an inaccuracy on Williams’s part?]. I was a bit late and the small room was already crowded – by Frenchmen mostly. I remember, of course, Marcel Duchamp. At the end of the room was a French girl, of say eighteen or less, attended by some older woman. She lay reclining upon a divan, her legs straight out before her, surrounded by young men who had each a portion of her body in his possession which he caressed attentively, apparently unconscious of any rival . . .

I looked and turned to Mina. But she was engrossed with Craven. I was introduced to the man after a drink or two and in the end wandered wearily home as was my wont.

Later Mina married Craven and went to Central America with him where he bought and rebuilt a seagoing craft of some sort. One evening, having triumphantly finished his job, he got into it to try it out in the bay before supper. He never returned. Pregnant on the shore, she watched the small ship move steadily away into the distance. For years she thought to see him again – that was how long ago? What? Thirty-five years. He was reputed to be a son of Oscar Wilde and had been a capable boxer and boxed in fact with Jack Johnson once in Spain.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 7 replies

"The Sweet Science" on Arthur Cravan

2006-05-27T07:30:39Z

… From the sublime to perhaps the ridiculous comes an article from El Universal in Mexico, the Miami Herald in the U.S., that focuses on one of the more obscure pugs in the annals of the fight game, the boxer/poet Arthur Cravan. The piece begins: “The NAFTA era has finished off whatever was left of Mexico’s mythical status as a no-man’s-land where troubled foreigners escape to redefine themselves, lose themselves, or die.” Before the insane border wars with our neighbors to the south became the norm in Fortress America, Mexico used to hold a special place in northern minds. U.S. journalist Ambrose Bierce once wrote of Mexico’s “good, kind darkness.” And for the novelist Malcolm Lowry, Mexico was a hallucinogenic puppet show fueled by ambition, rotgut, sweat and the DTs. “But another candidate has recently emerged – or rather, re-emerged – to fill the prototype of the mysterious stranger who made Mexico his last address under curious circumstances.” That mysterious stranger was the boxer/poet Arthur Cravan. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in Lausanne, Switzerland, on May 22, 1887, to Otho Holland Lloyd and Helene Clara St. Clair, little Fabian’s dad’s sister, Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to the poet, playwrite, wit and raconteur Oscar Wilde (“Illusion is the first of all pleasures”), whose connection to the Marquess of Queensberry, whose Queensberry Rules from 1867 govern boxing to this day, is worth looking into. The boxer/poet Fabian Lloyd changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honor of his fiancée, who was born in the village of Cravans in western France. Why he chose the name Arthur is still in dispute. Arthur Cravan was a personal favorite of the Dadaists and the Surrealists. He reinvented his public persona on a regular basis and was given to issuing a steady stream of outrageous remarks and cryptic statements. To confuse future academics, Craven even left behind a paper trail of farcical documents and hoax poems, some of which he signed “Oscar Wilde.” Although Cravan had been described by others and/or himself as a conman, an adventurer, a thief, a muleteer, a chauffeur, and a gold prospector, it was Cravan’s skill as a boxer – he fought Jack Johnson in Barcelona in 1916 – that gave him instant cred in avant-garde European art circles. His rowdy poetry readings and provocative lectures often degenerated into drunken brawls, which in keeping with Dada was a sign of success. Cravan fled France to avoid conscription in World War I and entered the U.S. He bolted the States for Mexico in 1917 when Uncle Sam tried to enlist the boxer/poet to fight in the “war to end all wars.” Cravan married a New York poet he met in 1918 and in October the newlyweds planned a trip from Mexico to Venezuela. Because they were strapped for cash, Cravan’s wife booked safe passage on a ship, whereas Cravan went to Salina Cruz, the Oaxacan seaport on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, looking to buy a sailboat – and was never heard from again. Cravan may have been murdered. Cravan may have set sail, capsized and drowned. No one knows for sure. There were intermittent and unconfirmed reports of sightings of Cravan in Mexico for many years. There were even rumors, probably more hopeful than true, that A. Cravan was actually the mysterious anarchist novelist B. Traven, who wrote of the Mexican Revolution with such empathy, insight and grace. Viva Zapata. Viva Arthur Cravan. Viva Boxing.

[The Sweet Science is a boxing blog]

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Beware of Imitations

2006-05-26T15:17:08Z

Canadian author Nicky Drumbolis has written several stories under the pseudonym "arthur cravan".

Let me be perfectly clear: Nicky Drumbolis is not Arthur Cravan.

Let me know if you have any further questions on this matter.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 2 replies

Cravan vs. Cravan [Complete list of subtitles]

2006-05-23T21:31:42Z

[typos unchanged]

This is the story of a ghost,
Arthur Cravan,
the poet and boxer who disappeared in 1916
in the Gulf of Mexico.
No one ever knew what became of him.
It's the story of a ghost.
It's my story.
My travel log begins here,
in Lausanne, where Cravan was born over a century ago.
There's no monument here to commemorate him.
However, this exhibition is intended to celebrate his memory.
But, what memory?
What can these people know about Cravan?
Cravan was one of the most interesting poets
of the 20th centuty.
He was a boxer, that's true,
but isn't it surprising that he was a poet?
A boxer, a writer...
He's vety much an unrecognized poet.
But he was one of the driving forces of Dadaism, of Surrealism
and of performance.
I think he was some relative,
a nephew, perhaps,
or a cousin of Oscar Wilde.
It seems like he was something of...
an anachronism in his time. You don't know
if it's more surprising that he was a boxer or a poet.
He didn't live...
vety long. I believe he died
in rather strange circumstances. I don't know.
He went swimming and disappeared.
-Really? -Yes! It's fantastic!
Maybe we should have read some of his stuff.
I'm surprised,
there are lots of people here.
Where are the petits fours?
This is my third glass of champagne!
One doesn't know
if it's because he was a boxer or because he was a poet.
I still prefer the Impressionists.
-Modigliani? -Yes.
It's vety strange.
Im not surprised Cravan left here as soon as he could.
Excuse me, sir.
I'm looking for Arthur Cravan's house.
-Whose house? -Arthur Cravan's.
And here...
We have Mr. Oscar Wilde.
His tomb was paid for by a female admirer and built in 1901.
But when it was built in 1901, the statue wasn't broken.
Now, as you can see here...
There's nothing left.
In 1901, there was a beautiful monument here,
and morons, homosexuals and nymphomaniacs
were always crawling up on top and getting it on with the statue.
In 1910, the cemetety decided to remove the object of ecstasy
and it's now a paper weight on the director's desk.
-Both sexes climbed up? -Yes.
-It is lovely. -Not just girls?
No... What was Oscar Wilde?
He was a homosexual.
There are girls who like it from behind.
And there are the gays.
They've forgotten what he had between his legs.
And after 9 years they took it away.
And now, do people still...?
They just look at it, it's all they can do.
I was looking for someone who could give me some information.
I heard about Cravan and I wanted to get
some specific information, some more details.
Yes, I've done a bit of research on Cravan's life.
It isn't that I'm an expert,
but I've translated
several literaty works by people of that time, by artistes,
and gradually
I came to like him as a person. I'm fascinated by him.
But I don't know if I'll be able to help you.
What would you like to know?
I'd like to know when he came here.
-To Paris? -Yes.
He came to Paris in 1909.
He was drawn here
by the literaty world
and by all that was starting to happen at that time in Paris.
So he was looking for adventure?
Yes, that's it exactly. He was a born adventurer.
When he arrived in Paris he didn't waste any time.
The first thing he did was visit, one by one,
the members of the French Academy.
I think he must have done some kind of survey
and he went to the home of each one.
He was serious about it.
He went to see them personally to introduce himself as a writer.
I can just imagine the expression on those men's faces,
because writers were vety stiff then.
In fact, I think they still are today.
He was a colorful character.
He was well built too, but vety colorful.
Whether he was on the streets of Paris, in Montparnasse
or mingling with the painters and writers of the time,
he was vety provocative.
Everything that could shock or help to make him well known
was welcome, and that was what he wanted.
Good morning.
Pleased to meet you.
-Frank Nicotra. -My pleasure.
He really was a poet, without a doubt.
And as I said earlier,
he was certainly a forerunner in behavioralism,
but he was also a forerunner because of the style
of his writing.
I'd like to see what you're writing.
I must say, his texts are vety... vety dense,
and really...
vety daring for the time.
From time to time, editors ask me
to bring out a book.
-Maybe we could do one together. -That would be a pleasure.
-I write novels. -Yes, novels, and poetty too.
Yes, I tty.
He'd just turned 21, so he'd come of age,
and since he'd arrived he'd been causing havoc,
because he was quite something.
He was vety well built. He was...
He was over six feet tall.
Women said he was better looking than Modigliani,
and a bit more disturbing, so he must have been interesting.
What's more, he loved to attract attention.
He loved making a fuss, causing a scandal.
He'd go out in the evenings with his friends,
people like Blaise Cendrars.
Do you think he came here, to La Closerie?
He came here. Yes, he came here. It was one of their meeting places.
And over there as well, on the corner. Le Bal...
Le Bal Bullier. The original one burned down
and it was rebuilt with the same name.
At Le Bal Bullier, Cendrars,
Delaunay, who was a painter, and Cravan were a threesome.
And they really lived it up!
They'd dress in an outrageous way,
with unmatching shoes,
dinner jackets that were half green, half red.
You know, sheer provocation.
Cravan was...
a bit of a dandy and he loved to dress like that.
He'd wear the tail of his shirt hanging over his trousers
and his shirt, which would be black, would be open
to show off the tattoos and the obscene writings on his skin.
Oh, yes! And they made all that fashionable.
The Futurists copied it quite soon afterwards.
People copied it in Italy, in Russia.
They set the fashion.
They did that because it was the theoty,
and later the practice too,
that scandal was a way of rocking society,
and of changing the structures.
So he was a bit of a brawler.
Maybe that's why he liked boxing.
I think so, yes. They go together, of course.
And he'd hit people too,
when the three of them went out partying.
17 fights, 17 victories, 10 before the final bell.
25 next month,
the great hope in the light heavyweight categoty,
still unbeaten after 17 fights.
He'd already started to do some boxing in London,
but it was in France,
in Paris, that he started taking it seriously.
I think it was in his temperament. He trained hard as a boxer
and I think that he wanted to succeed at this sport.
Both he and his brother Otho boxed.
not for vety long,
intensely, but for a short period of time.
You box too, don't you? Or so I believe.
-Not any more. I used to. -You used to?
How did you start? What made you do it? I think you'd need
a special motivation.
It's a bit complicated.
It's a kind of a personal thing, but I started boxing vety early,
when I was 11.
You're not serious?
-That's interesting. -But this isn't about me.
No, but it's odd.
In fact, the similarities with Cravan
are boxing and writing.
And writing with boxing. Because the truth is
I've always loved writing,
and I've written some poems too,
and when, one day, someone told me
about a poet who loved boxing
and who'd been a boxer, I tried to find out who it was.
That's why we're meeting now.
I think the great provocation was
that there's nothing more extraordinaty,
not conflicting or antagonistic,
but further apart and more crazy than a boxer and a poet.
You have an idea of the boxer,
an idea of the romantic poet in the cemetety,
his true love weeping,
tubercular...
And he overturns that image.
He becomes a boxer poet. I find that vety beautiful
because that's where you have true provocation.
He called himself a poet and boxer.
The review he edited, ''Maintenant'',
called one of his poems ''Poet and boxer''.
And he really took boxing vety seriously
I mean that he had fights.
And, undoubtedly, he was also a poet.
I'm vety touched when a boxer is interested
in art or in literature.
It touches me deeply because I think
he's someone who has come through a tough experience
but has also widened his point of view.
It's a bit like your case which interests me vety much.
You have an experience which a poet can't have.
That solitude which says so much about, for example,
the condition of a painter today, or a poet or a writer.
I'm sure that what I like so much about boxing
is that victoty is already announcing defeat.
You can already see a trace of the melancholy of defeat in the victor.
It's hard to get to the top. But it's even harder at the top.
That's Cravan's apartment. He lived there for a while.
-Number 29? -29, Avenue de l'Observatoire.
I love the number 29. I always bet on it at the casino.
-You're joking, right? -No.
I didn't knowthat you bet.
I do a lot of things you don't know about.
Yeah.
Well, Craven used to come here,
to the race track, to sell his reviews.
You know, at that time, there were a lot of reviews,
a lot of literaty magazines
in which people defended their ideas.
It was the time of all the -isms.
But Cravan was the only one who had a reviewjust for himself.
He wrote all the articles under lots of different names.
That reminds me of a phrase, a verse, that he wrote.
He said: ''I am all things, all men, all animals.''
But he wasn't unknown,
because it became the strangest, oddest review
in all of the Latin quarter.
Evetyone knew it,
and I'm not surprised.
He covered the Blvd. San Michel with posters
and had sandwich men in the streets.
-A lot of publicity. -Right.
He wanted to sell his review at any price.
He came here with a little wheelbarrow,
or a trolley, something to transport his reviews.
He can't have sold many.
I think that, even if he didn't sell many,
he must have given some away
because he had a list of evetyone who received his review,
and it includes André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein,
Maurice Ravel, Ezra Pound
and the painter Van Dongen, his best friend.
In his address book,
you'll find the names of all the artistes of that time.
Composers like Debussy, famous painters of the time
like Delaunay, Van Dongen and many others.
All the people to whom he must have sent a copy of his review
in order to publicize it, and many writers too.
In his review,
where the texts are signed by pseudonyms
but were all written by him,
you find poems,
you find a criticism of the ''Salon des Indépendants'',
you find a visit, true or false,
that he paid to André Gide
and also evocations of his uncle, Oscar Wilde,
for whom he felt a great admiration.
He promoted mechanization,
praising trains, liners, electricity,
everything that arrived along with what would be
the centuty of the machine,
and perhaps he coincided there with the Futurists' attitude.
There's something he used to say:
''In order to live and to write, you have to be like a wild horse.''
The sentences, the words,
collide against each other with an unbelievable modernity.
The Futurists were fascinated by speed, by aviation.
It was a world, at that time,
of mixing art with important things in life.
Strength, for example, or speed.
Let's look at this obituaty
of Kees Van Dongen. It's all that's left.
He was his best friend. We may find something.
Kees Van Dongen,
one of the most important Fauvist painters,
died this week at the age of 91.
Van Dongen lived in his home in Monte Carlo,
nostalgically named ''Le Bateau Lavoir',
and surrounded by his dearest mementoes.
Stop, stop.
Rewind. You see?
That painting, it's of Cravan.
In Paris, Van Dongen was Cravan's best friend.
They always hung out together.
And really Van Dongen devoted more time
to his social life and to partying than to painting.
He'd organize tremendous fancy dress parties in his studio,
attended by all of Paris.
Van Dongen loved to organize balls, competitions, boxing matches...
And Cravan was in his element,
surrounded by all the artistes of the time.
One of them, for example, was Gino Severini, an Italian Futurist.
The day they met, Severini was giving a lecture.
It was a huge scandal and the audience ended up fighting
and wanting to lynch him.
Fortunately, Cravan was there, he jumped up on the stage
and he saved the other's life with his fists.
Severini was so grateful
he painted his portrait.
Soon, other painters and artistes became fascinated by Cravan
and some of them painted his portrait.
I was looking for the painters who painted Cravan,
but you painted him too,
I painted him.
I painted him a lot.
But what I did wasn't exactly painting.
It was a series of sketches that I made,
which amused me greatly,
of the state the poet was left in after he'd been boxing.
So it's a bruised head,
the head of someone who has just been fighting.
I enjoyed taking the poet
and putting him in the world of boxing,
in the world of this boxer's head.
It can happen, after a fight, you see the painting
of the fight...
And yes, I made quite a few sketches.
It's amazing when you see all of Craven's portraits together.
It's like a little resume of avant-garde painting:
Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism...
There's almost a painting in each style.
What exactly happened at the ''Salon des Indépendants''?
There was a scandal, I believe.
Yes, the thing was he spoke out vety clearly
about what he didn't like and he caused a great scandal
because his criticisms were caustic.
He was insulting.
Even today, perhaps,
he would have ended up in court, you know.
It was all vety... Vety violent.
It's hard to imagine today what it was like in those days.
They fought over their ideas, but they fought physically.
When I came to Paris in 1958,
there were gangs, like neighborhood gangs.
Noisistes, Abstractionists, Figuratives.
And it must have been even harder around 1900,
when Cravan was active, than it is today.
This is vety important.
More important than the ''Salon des Indépendants''.
No, it's different but it's a bit similar.
There's something I'd like you to see.
It's this, a lovely sketch by Malevitch.
And I must say...
that Cravan wasn't vety fond of him. He was one of his bêtes noires.
There are criticisms of Malevitch
in the Salon des Indépendants,
as well as of Chagall.
He called him '' jackal''
He wasn't an easy person and he said what he thought.
I like him vety much.
He is perhaps the greatest figure of the time, of Russian painting.
But I think that Cravan was against him.
''Why, if I'm contemptuous of painting, do I review it?
Vety simple. It's to drive my colleagues wild.
And my pen can help me pass for a connoisseur,
because no more than two intelligent people
will visit the Salon.
Seen from outside, I like it. But it'll be filled with lousy artistes.
Soon you'll only see artistes in the street
and it'll be hard to find a man.
False Cézannes, Gauguins, Maurice Denis.
I'd give them all a kick on the ass!
Maurice Denis is equally unaware of fine living and dirty feet.
I don't find it daring to paint an acrobat or a turd.
However, a rose painted with innovation is much more devilish.
Hayden, I'd rather sit under water than in front of this painting.
I'd feel less suffocated. Chamier, a nothing. Frost, nothing.
Run through the fields, race across the plains,
and, when you're six years old,
you won't know any more.
Metzinger, a failure grabbing on to cubism.
Malevitch, a sham. Cara or Boccioni, nonentities.
Hagin, sad, sad.
Peské, rotten! Deltombe, an asshole!
Aurora Folquer, get lost! Puech, the pink rose, shut up.
It isn't that I'm prejudiced against Cubism.
I prefer the eccentricities of a banal spirit
to the dullness of a bourgeois idiot.
Delauney went wrong. If you can be a brute, remain like one.
It's obvious I prefer a large St. Bernard to Miss Faufreluche,
a yellowto a white, a black to a yellow,
a black boxer to a black student.
Painting is walking, running, drinking, eating, relieving oneself.
You may say I'm disgusting, but it's all that.
I'll say it for once and for all: I will not be civilized.''
What connection did Arthur Cravan have,
though Dadaism, with you circus people?
He toured with a circus in the U.S.
He toured with a circus and he was a boxer.
-He did a boxing routine? -Yes.
-In a circus? -Yes.
Pierre works in a company called... Go on, tell him.
I work in a company called Délice Dada,
and it does street theater,
a bit like the circus,
and we use Surrealist and Dadaist techniques.
to write the shows.
I heard about Cravan.
Then I looked for information about him and found nothing.
-Not even in the encyclopedia? -Not a mention of Cravan.
You told me about
a Dada manifesto.
The Surrealists also said
that the circus arts were superior to the traditional arts.
That's right. Cravan said that the circus arts,
athletes, homosexuals...
-Lunatics. -Lunatics,
the Louvre thieves, were superior to artistes.
All in together!
So do you know about the lectures that Cravan gave?
Cravan's lectures were a real theatrical spectacle.
It was vety newfor the time.
You could even say they were the first ''happenings''.
But do you really think Cravan had something to say?
Yes, but Cravan said that,
artistically at least, you had to change the method,
take the theaters by storm
and bring the punch into the artistic struggle.
-Nice, isn't it? -But he didn't propose
-a new method. -Yes, the punch!
And in his lectures, he did just that.
He'd arrive drunk, he'd get undressed...
He'd do a striptease. I love that.
No, really. It's great. It doesn't happen now.
Men don't give lectures and undress. I'd go if they did!
He did three. One in 1913, one in June 1914,
and one earlier when he didn't turn up at all.
-He didn't turn up? -No. He was in a bar.
He was drunk.
He started to fight with his brother,
and his mother wrote that she was afraid for Otho, his brother,
because Arthur was much stronger.
-But Otho was much faster. -A good mother.
You know about the dodge with the posthumous works?
-No. -Yes, you do!
Oh, yes, yes! He wrote... He pretended he was dead.
-No, he wanted to do that. -That's right.
I read that he wrote to his mother saying: ''I'm coming,
I'm going to die, I'm going to pretend to be dead...''
''Don't tell anyone. I'm going to hide at your house.''
He found a way to become famous vety quickly.
And then he said:
''No one has ever had this brilliant idea.
I'll write my posthumous works. I'll pretend to be dead.''
-But he never did it. -It was a good strategy.
And he organized huge publicity for his lectures, didn't he?
Yes, yes, he did a lot of promotion. He dressed as a sandwich man,
he walked up and down the streets, he announced his lectures.
There were a lot of people, who thought,
who were looking for independent ideas.
Come and see the poet
Arthur Cravan.
Cravan,
boxing champion.
Oscar Wilde's nephew.
Weight: 125 kilos. Height: 2 meters.
A brutal critic.
He'll talk. He'll box. He'll dance.
The new boxing dance. The vety box.
Another eccentric act.
Black, Boxer and Dancer.
But it's funny when you read about his striptease.
People were scandalized because he took off his detachable collar
and put a handkerchief around his neck.
He took off his jacket. At the time, it was a scandal.
He was so provocative that on one occasion
he was sentenced to a week in prison.
It was Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, who felt offended.
He wanted to challenge Cravan to a duel.
Yes. It seems they exchanged serious insults and, in the end,
Cravan decided to apologize. In his own way, of course.
He said that Apollinaire had a big stomach,
that he was more like a rhinoceros than a giraffe,
more like a vulture than a stork,
and the funniest thing was
Apollinaire accepted his apologies and forgot about the duel.
And he'd throwthings at the public.
-Didn't you get hit on the head? -Yes, I did, a lot.
Long live the lunatics!
Down with artistes! Down with painters!
Picasso, thief! Picasso, thief!
Dali, fascist!
Then, when he'd insulted evetyone
and thrown things at the audience,
finally the audience started to fight.
They attacked him. His friends gathered around him.
The police arrived with their handcuffs,
to catch him,
and then he started practicing his art,
his art of boxing.
Frank Nicotra is ready for this match
which is the most important in his career.
Frank Nicotra
who is going to attempt to become
European champion in this categoty.
And here is the champion,
James Cook.
He's going to defend his title for the third time.
Nicotra is an intelligent boxer, but he isn't the favorite tonight
as he's never had an opponent as tough as James Cook.
The first blows in this European championship.
Oh! What a right!
He started with a tremendous right!
James Cook is in trouble. He undoubtedly felt that blow.
And a second one!
James Cook's holding up as best he can.
It's almost a knockout. Nicotra has exploded.
A terrific start by the Frenchman.
Another right!
And it's a knockout.
It's a knockout.
It's over, it's over.
A knockout. It's over.
After half a minute of fighting,
Frank Nicotra is the European champion!
Cravan wrote that he wanted to fill his gloves with women's curls.
I don't know what he meant by that,
but I'm sure that, like all boxers, he must have known
that no matter howfast you are, there's always someone faster,
and we should always fear our opponent,
as it's the best way to forget the fear aroused by death.
Cravan was a multiple character, and among his many occupations
he was also a painter under the name of Edouard Archinard.
That's a painting
that was done by him in 1914.
It was painted in Nice.
I think that the person looking at us
is the famous Renée with whom he was living at the time.
Here is an example of a picture painted by Archinard,
and signed,
which shows Miss Renée who was his fiancée at the time.
It was exhibited in 1914 in the Galerie Bernheim Jeune.
I found these pictures,
these four canvases, signed by Edouard Archinard.
I was puzzled because I found them vety interesting.
So I went around all the museums
to see if I could find any Edouard Archinards,
but I found nothing.
And, in fact...
Then, it so happened that in 1977,
Cravan's review, ''Maintenant'', was re-edited
with a preface by Maria Luisa Borras,
explaining that all the texts
in the six issues of ''Maintenant''
were actually all by Arthur Cravan.
And in one of the issues
was a text, a poem,
signed Edouard Archinard.
Obviously I made the immediate connection
between Cravan and the canvases I'd seen.
The question of Archinard is a vety difficult one.
I have to explain how I work.
A researcher can work in many ways.
I get a feeling.
I think: It must be like this.
And I don't stop until I prove it with documents.
I never felt that these paintings were by Cravan.
One of the pseudonyms in the review ''Maintenant''
is Edouard Archinard.
The paintings are signed by Edouard Archinard.
There's evety chance that it's the same person.
There was an exhibition by a painter called Archinard,
and Heidsieck
inherited that gallety's entire collection.
It includes this painting signed Archinard.
As there is a text
in ''Maintenant'' signed Archinard, they said: It's Cravan.
In the poem ''Des paroles'', signed Edouard Archinard,
he says at one point:
''Remain a mystety. Rather than being pure
accept that you are many.'' That's a way of saying:
''You have to be several people at once'',
which he was.
But in ''Maintenant''
there is also a text by Lajeunesse,
someone who is well known,
a writer, a caricaturist, who is perfectly documented.
Just because we can't document Archinard
doesn't make me say he's Cravan.
Bénédicte names Edouard Archinard,
a painter who'd have disappeared in the 1914 war.
Cravan disappeared when he went to Barcelona in 1917
and then to the United States.
You have that famous crticisim
he wrote of the Salon de Paris
in which he says that all those painters were just frauds
and weren't in their time.
But you can hate other painters
and still paint as an amateur, in my opinion.
He criticizes painting.
If it were even a painting done from the gut,
I'd say:'' Well, one day he painted.'' But it's a vety correct painting,
an out-dated, pointillist painting,
imitating a series of techniques from the past.
I believe that in ''Maintenant'' nº 2,
he says: ''I am a boxer, a poet, a painter.''
I can't see Cravan imitating an out-dated technique,
imitating a Seurat or Dufy. I just can't see it.
But if they prove it to me, I'll accept it.
At times you find a trace of the word ''painter''
in what he himself says.
Nevertheless, one time,
in one of the letters he sent to his mother, he said:
-''Fortunately I'm not a painter''. -Yes, that's true.
I have a Cravan inside me, I can't help it.
And it isn't a Cravan who starts painting vety meticulously,
aiming to present a work in the ''Salon des Indépendants''.
There is additional evidence because recently
I had in my hand the photocopy of a water color
with a certificate,
which belonged to Blaise Cendrars,
certifying that he'd bought it from Arthur Cravan
and it's signed Archinard.
It's one of the irrefutable proofs that Archinard was Cravan.
Many of the things which Cendrars wrote about Cravan
are probably false.
He was a great writer,
but often what he said had nothing to do with reality.
I ask myself a question about this portrait.
I say to myself: ''Who other than Cravan could have painted it?''
Yes, exactly,
because there's such a resemblance between this lady
and Miss Renée: the same hat,
the same blouse,
so I don't know who, unless he asked a friend to paint
his fiancée. But there are too many things.
Bear in mind that when you judge an era which has passed,
all the people from that era are similar
because they all have something in common.
So Renée, the real one whom we knowfrom photos,
looks like many other people from that era.
She isn't cross-eyed,
she doesn't have a defect by which you can say: That's Renée.
She's a normal person. That is, it could be Renée, why not?
But I don't think so.
Renée was the girlfriend of Haydn,
a painter who was a friend of Cravan
and who did a portrait of Cravan. And while he was doing it...
Well, I don't know, but after that,
Cravan went off with Renée, Renée went off with Cravan,
and they lived together for seven years,
so it was serious.
This girl, Renée, came from a little village in Morvan
called Cravant, with a ''t'' at the end.
Cravan must have been a romantic at heart,
capable of changing his name for love.
In fact, he had two wives
and both were vety important in his life.
Renée and, later, Mina Loy,
a poetess with whom he spent the last days of his life in Mexico.
I looked in an old copy of the French Academy dictionaty
and found that ''cravanter''
-used to mean ''to hit''. -''Cravanter''?
Yes, ''cravanter''.
And then I also discovered that ''cravan'' is a water bird,
and also a little mollusk which sticks to the keels of boats.
It's like a premonition
of his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.
But his work is full of premonitions of his end.
But do you really believe that he died at sea?
I don't know. In fact, there's a phrase which says:
''The first condition for being a poet is to know howto swim.''
His death raises a lot of questions.
Some people say they saw him
setting out in a little boat in the Gulf of Mexico,
and that he never came back from that adventure.
Others think that he was killed
on the American-Mexican border,
ttying to get into Mexico.
Like many things to do with Cravan,
his death is a mystety,
to such an extent that a French writer, Tony Cartano,
wrote a novel, it's pure fiction, ''Le bel Arturo'',
Arturo being Arthur Cravan.
It recounts how someone comes to tell his wife Mina Loy,
in Paris where she has a gallety,
that Cravan is still alive and is in Mexico.
She immediately takes a boat and leaves for Mexico
and she finds him hanging around a boxing ring,
you know, like his first love, but he's got amnesia.
She has found him again but he doesn't remember her.
He's there, but he's got no memoty.
And your personal opinion?
My opinion? That's just a stoty, isn't it?
But I've got no opinion, I couldn't say.
It remains a mystety, like many things to do with Cravan.
Who can show what doesn't have an image?
How can you film someone who's disappeared?
There's a short film made in Barcelona where he appears for two minutes.
He's in the final frames.
He no longer appears as the ghost forgotten by histoty,
the silhouette already moving towards his disappearance.
But who, really, is this Arthur Cravan?
War has broken out!
Evety party is a war...
When war broke out, I was in Budapest.
A steamer brought me to Belgrade,
which was being bombarded by Austrian forces.
I escaped during a 4-hour truce called to allowforeigners to leave.
Then, I traveled through Rumania, Russia, Odessa
and via the Black Sea to Constantinople.
In Athens, I beat the Olympic champion in 3 rounds.
Later, I want to Egypt, Cairo, Brindisi...
...Italy, Marseille, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain
and Barcelona.
Cravan arrived in Barcelona from Paris.
Really,
he was following Van Dongen, who had told him about Barcelona.
What's more, he met up here with Otho Lloyd, his brother.
And they met a whole group
of French people, artistes and intellectuals,
who were what, in the 1914 war, were called ''defetiste''.
Just as in the II World War you had to be involved,
or else you were a ''colabo'', in France,
in the 1914 war, collaborationism didn't exist.
It was simply
fashionable to be ''defetiste'',
to say: ''I don't give a damn, I don't care about the war.''
So here, in Barcelona, word got around
and there was a large colony of artistes.
They included Francis Picabia, the Delaunays,
Gleizes' wife, Juliette, Valentine de Saint-Point,
a striking number of artistes.
Otho Lloyd, Cravan's brother, was an unsociable man.
He was an excellent photographer
but he wanted to be a painter.
He had a meaningless, academic style of painting.
It was boring, no one wanted it.
As we were neighbors, I'd visit him
because I was keen to know what had happened before.
I had never heard of Cravan,
but what Otho explained to me
about an unruly, horrible, wicked, perverse man,
when he was the good one in the house, certainly caught my attention.
I'd always ask him about Cravan
but he never really wanted to talk about him.
From what he didn't want to tell me,
I gradually extracted the stoty of Cravan.
Then he talked to me about the years in Barcelona
during the First World War the '14-'19 war,
when it was full of exiled painters and artistes,
among them, Cravan.
He came with those artistes
fleeing from World War I.
There was Olga Sacharoff and her brother
who couldn't stand Arthur Cravan.
He crossed the Gulf of Mexico by boat.
Anyone can do that. But he...
swam from Hendaya to Fuenterrabia to cross the French-Spanish border.
That requires a boxer with good biceps and lungs.
Then on to Portugal, but when Portugal went to war
he came here, and not through Marseille.
That trip Cravan took was...
through here and all of Europe.
Yes, Eastern Europe, and Greece.
Fleeing throughout Europe because, actually...
that boxing match in Greece
was a bit suspicious as well.
He fought the Olympic champion...
but it was never proven he beat him.
His winning isn't documented.
None of his fights are.
Not a single one.
A deserter who looks as fighter.
-Cravan flees from the war. -Like evetyone.
Most of them are deserters...
who got here by coincidence.
Here, like anywhere else...
they found the dadaism of farmers and fishermen...
and the innkeeper, on the one hand...
and the performance environment of Barcelona...
with the anarcos, the bombers.
The city of the bomb at the Opera...
the first radical...
performance.
The avant-garde begins with that bomb.
Yes, yes.
There was a female poet...
called Juliette Gleizcs...
who said Cravan was a coward.
Not a pacifist, but a coward deserter!
Right?
Cravan never admits that.
He's against the notion, not a deserter.
It's fine to be a coward
and not want to defend any countty.
He hated being compared to Apollinaire...
the poet who went to die at war.
While he fled.
Cummings went to jail for his dadaist letters
thinking they were coded messages.
In East Germany, Valety Scherstjenoi...
was followed by the communist police
believing futuristic poems...
were actually revolutionaty messages...
as Artaud said.
He says: ''You won't catch me at this or at that.
If you didn't in Fine Arts, you won't at war either.''
I rather doubt Cravan existed.
People say so much about him that he may not exist.
There are works signed by him...
of Ribemont-Dessaignes and others.
From the ''Dada'' magazine...
there are works of his when he navigated.
I'm fascinated about the curiosity for...
someone who went so unnoticed.
The pantheon is packed with characters.
But we're obsessed with sticking Cravan in.
Those people exiled with Cravan...
met on the beach.
They come to the hermitage...
to the pine grove.
And the rocks and Cravan. In summer or winter?
In spring, judging by the pictures.
In Barcelona he lived in Gracia.
Nowthere's a convent of Clare nuns.
Of enclosed nuns.
Having Arthur Cravan being there...
it was sanctified although...
many parties were held there.
Parties that at times went a bit overboard.
Those enormous, beautiful rooms where they'd held big parties
were far too big for us.
They were of no use so we gradually divided them up.
A kitchen, pantries, a recreation room and the chapel.
This is the only room of the tower which we have preserved.
There was a big room here which is where they had their parties,
those parties that society had.
The friends would gather here
and have the kind of parties which the jet set have now.
This was where they had their parties and their dances.
The only things still left of the tower
are the large windows and this door. This door is from the tower.
All these edges were painted in gold and they were beautiful,
but the monks covered them up. They were too luxurious for us.
People are vety fond of that gentleman!
-Was he such a famous poet? -He died...
-before 1914. -You must remember him.
-How can I? -The tower was beautiful.
As children, we'd come in in single file
and say: ''A ghost will appear'', or whatever.
We'd back up.
I didn't know this was so famous!
No, not the house.
Those who lived here.
They've left their mark here. I hope they didn't leave a ghost!
-I doubt it. -One that plays the piano at night.
Are you following other traces of him in Barcelona?
Today I finally saw Arthur Cravan.
In Barcelona, he drew so much attention
that the Baños brothers, the movie pioneers,
filmed him while he was training.
Arthur Cravan resting at a boxing match.
He got up in public and challenged Johnson...
who was there watching.
He was the world's champion then. That was the beginning...
of the stoty, because Johnson accepted.
This fight had created lot of excitement
in Barcelona,
because it had been mentioned in all the media.
There'd been a lot of publicity about this fight
between the European champion,
as Cravan was thought to be but he was only French champion,
and the great boxer of that time, Jack Johnson.
Johnson was important, well-known then.
The first champion of the black race...
in heavyweights.
It was a scandal in the U.S.A.
that a black man were champion, and Jack London...
went against him, calling him a pimp. And so...
he had to leave the U.S.A.
When he got to Europe, there were...
also strange things he had done.
He organized boxing demonstrations.
He got involved in music halls.
At that time, boxing involved...
cabarets and nightclubs.
There were many here in Barcelona. The Barri Xino, Paral.lel.
And then, suddenly, some boxers appeared who would give...
demonstration boxing matches.
They liked to play pool, they went to some big pool halls.
Otho Lloyd played pool and they all said:
''Otho Lloyd has a really weird brother.
His name's Cravan and he's a boxer.''
His friends were boxers, not artistes or intellectuals.
About a month before the fight...
an order was...
received from the British Government or British Embassy...
saying that all British citizens...
should go back home because of the war.
He said: ''I've got to get money however I can...
to get away from the war.''
And one way was the fight...
with the great Jack Johnson.
We'll never know if it was nothing more than a dadaist act
or if he was after the purse that was offered.
He falsely said he was European champ.
Here evetyone believed him and he wanted...
to become the world champion.
When the world championship comes,
I'll be prepared morally and physically.
Most people were saying that Cravan was vety good...
the best boxer to ever be in Barcelona.
But many other people said he was just a bluff.
Cravan told the press he was going to win.
They asked him if he had probabilities.
He said not probabilities, certainty.
When I get in the ring, I want to win, I want to be champion,
because I feel I'm a champion, and I am one.
Like evetyone does...
Cravan said he'd win and that he admired Johnson...
considering him a great American, like...
Allan Poe, Jefferson...
Whitman and the day of the revolution...
Johnson would be king of America...
indisputable.
We knowthat Johnson shot an adventure film here...
rescuing a princess removed from the throne of Catalonia.
But this film was also lost...
although 2 minutes of it still exist.
An adventure film.
Perhaps a work of art of Catalonian films.
Cravan's and Johnson's training sessions...
were always crowded...
and people even paid to see them.
Since Cravan said he was Oscar Wilde's nephew
many high society young ladies...
went to see Arthur Cravan, that spectacular character...
who was also an aristocrat.
He boxed like a gentleman, he was a great theorist.
He knew a lot about it compared with people here.
Some reports give him credit.
He had been training, and fought a fewfights.
That is when the boxer poet really appears as a boxer.
I'm playing at missing the balls.
I'm not sure he was a bullfighter like Johnson.
Arthur Cravan was a bullfighter.
I've seen nothing about him fighting a bull.
That appears in a newspaper article.
All I can say is that there's no document,
or I haven't found any in Barcelona,
which mentions Cravan bullfighting.
Jack Johnson did do a novillada or becerrada...
but, as it seems, he didn't...
like the bulls and practically...
ran out of the bull-ring.
In Barcelona Arthur Cravan was a coach.
He trained and coached at the Club Maritim, in the Barceloneta.
For example, years ago there was still one person...
who remembered Arthur Cravan.
I presume this man is dead by now.
Johnson's fight was...
to be held in...
Las Arenas because it was centric then...
than the Monumental but, in comparison...
the Monumental was larger. It was held at the Monumental.
I think, in total, there were about...
30 to 35.000 people present at that boxing match.
At that time, boxing had started to revive here.
I sawthe Cravan-Johnson fight...
because I was a great boxing fan.
Then my brother said: ''Look, I've received...
since I'm in the federation, a ticket and you're coming with me.''
I was vety happy and went with him. And, of course...
seeing all those people and the world champion
that black man impressed me.
He was tall, strong, and all those spectators.
Truthfully, that's one of the things that's always impressed me.
Because precisely us, even if we are elderly people...
the old-fashioned, the childhood things...
are the things that we preserve more in our memories.
Perhaps, nowadays, our memories...
our heads are so full, they don't retain anything.
but these little things, details...
always come more to mind.
That's why I remember, as if it were today...
that when I arrived, at 7 years of age...
in there, seeing those men...
fighting to get in and over seats...
and the place was packed, it was something really fantastic...
that increased the existing popularity of boxing in Barcelona.
LAW AND ORDER
This is the Monumental bull-ring warehouse.
And this is a vety important...
historical document, which is the structure...
of the ring on which the Cravan-Johnson fight was held.
The iron structure, and all the boards.
Here's some more. What is missing is the top canvas.
Vety difficult things happened...
to hold that fight.
First, the Governor, being unfamiliar with boxing...
thought it was an atrocity and didn't want it.
There was a vety strong campaign against that fight...
because they said it was vety brutal.
Two men hitting each other. People weren't used to that.
And so the Provincial Governor prohibited the fight.
He prohibited it. But then there were...
some negotiations.
The Governor was able to get an audience...
with the people in charge, the managers of the boxers...
and they showed him that the hemorrhages
that boxing could cause were not severe.
Then he authorized it.
For me, boxing is one of the greatest things on earth
and in the world.
Quite honestly,
I fought 121 fights and, thanks to them, I don't feel anything.
Evetyone says that boxers always end up in bad shape.
And that's a lie.
We're here to live, not to die.
I was featherweight. I've had 50 or 55 fights.
But I'm no champion.
And about being punch drunk, like people say
I'm a person who knows what he says
and what he does, and I'm not punch drunk.
I'm not pug-nosed because I dodged a lot.
They called me ''Little Legs''.
I fought 92 fights.
I won two...
and, as it turned out, I became a professional.
I'm Manolito Garcia.
That's my boxing name.
I fought 25, about 25 fights.
Three as a professional
I won two and lost one.
I have good memories...
because boxing is the noblest sport, to me.
We beat each other up on the ring, and then afterwards...
we're friends forever.
I would ask if anyone present here now...
can guess my age...
you'll see that boxing isn't that damaging.
Boxing is the best thing God has done for us.
I'm 80 years old.
We'll die when the time comes.
Boxing is the best there is, and period.
The night before there was a party at the Excelsior
to present the fight to the journalists.
I remember I was a kid. The evening before...
there was a lot of publicity
about the Johnson-Cravan fight and...
we were in the front row.
I've seen photos of the fight.
The public were so impatient
that the Baños brothers, the filmmakers,
decided to film the fight and show it in cinemas
so that evetyone could see it.
But it seems this film has been lost
and all that's left are photos taken by Otho Lloyd,
Cravan's brother.
Frozen punches which may not have hit their target.
Because, in all the photos of Cravan,
one feels he was fighting himself.
It's always Cravan against Cravan,
the poet against the boxer,
some historical documents against the legend,
against this impostor which I am but which long before, he himself.
Now we knowthat the night before, in a bar on the Rambla...
If not this one, the one on the corner.
...Cravan and Johnson had a fight.
They fought in that bar. Why?
For economic reasons or any other reason.
Cravan found out that Johnson had received some money...
for filming the fight, for which he didn't receive anything.
There were many fights before the fight.
Then he said he wouldn't fight.
Cravan said he passed on that fight.
That he wouldn't fight, and left.
They looked for him all over.
The police and friends looked for him.
Until they found him at 3 in the morning.
In another bar, drinking away.
In a bar, drinking. But they convinced him.
And he got up on the ring in a really deplorable state.
It had to be a good show.
There were lots of policemen at the arena.
So much police presence surprised evetyone.
Two police officials entered the ring
and they talked to Cravan.
They say they reproached him for wanting to be paid much more.
Apparently, Cravan was scared to death.
The difference was tremendous!
The American was a man who, when he boxed...
played around but, when ready, he was so fast he eliminated them.
And Cravan boxed European style.
A lot of movements, scoring, dodging.
But the punches, speed and finding the fateful punches...
weren't the intelligence of a world champion.
Johnson was an amusing man.
Once he discovered his guard and the distance he needed to keep...
he'd laugh. He was a joker because he thought he was superior.
Some describe the fight as a circus act.
One,drunk, the other hung over. They kicked their asses.
Cravan got into the ring drunk...
and Johnson's first blow knocked him down, K.O.
It was a 20-rounder, and lasted 66.
Johnson could have beat him in the first or second round...
but he wanted to get paid for the filming and needed some footage.
They gave Johnson a compensation...
in case the fight were too short...
to go 5 rounds, and he went 66.
People realized it and booed...
thinking the fight was fixed.
Half fixed?
No, it wasn't fixed.
Afterwards, the press turned people against the organizers,
against Cravan, because the tickets were expensive
and because it really was a fraud.
What can a boxer do after a defeat?
This is where the last stoty about Cravan begins,
the one nobody could ever explain:
his disappearance.
Well, that is...
one of the memorable...
moments in Cravan's life...
when after the great success of the defeat...
with Jack Johnson, he gets a ticket...
for the boat Montserrat.
That day he organized the dance...
to prove he wasn't disappearing, but simply leaving.
Picabia and Duchamp were in charge of explaining...
with ballyhoo, Cravan's arrival...
in New York, saying: ''Cravan has also taken the ocean liner.
He'll speak, dressed as a gentleman or a cowboy.
He'll enter shooting at the bourgeois' chandeliers.
Therefore, Mina knew a celebrity was about to arrive.
Mina Loy was a painter, poet, playwright vety close to futurism.
And was part of an innovating generation of artistes.
Soon she became a sort of muse for the futurists.
Her beauty attracted attention...
and had a libertarian behavior, writing erotic songs.
Man Ray photographed her...
and the N.Y. press named her prototype of modern women.
I think they met at a party held at Arensberg's studio.
At a dance. She said that...
first she thought he was gay, but soon realized he wasn't.
When she met him he slept on park benches...
led a harum-scarum life, he was chased after by women...
he chased women and even slept at the homes of friends' wives.
Well, they have a vety strong love affair.
It is really a coup de foudre...
and here their stoty begins.
Mina also says that Cravan, in New York...
needed to be in the open air...
on the docks, going to the Natural Sciences museum.
Going to aquariums, and spending hours watching the fish.
Evety time Mina saw Cravan he looked different.
About that she said:
''His life was that of a ghost...
taking shape only to demonstrate.''
They began a fantastic love affair...
but soon after Cravan had to flee.
He didn't want to go to war, be drafted...
which seems fine due to his anarchist ideas.
He was an individualist.
Cravan's double, triple or multiple personality
meant that, in the middle of the romance,
he left everything and made that absolutely insane journey
to Labrador and to the north of the United States,
disguised as a soldier,
when he was actually fleeing from the war
and telling Mina Loy stories
which he made up as his journey progressed.
Cravan leaves and there is tremendous correspondence...
vety rich and pretty, a true epistolaty collection...
of personal feelings and of geographical movements...
when Cravan leaves New York to go to Mexico.
He could say white and black at the same time.
He could be telling Mina Loy that he adored her
while he was planning an absolutely insane journey
to the north of the United States and Canada.
He could say he was going to Mexico to meet his parents
when they had never gone to Mexico
or had any intention of doing so.
Mina Loy was vety much in love with him
but she wasn't going to follow him to Mexico
because Americans considered it to be extremely dangerous.
Anything could happen. People were killed, robbed.
It was a bad time there.
He writes passionate letters to Mina...
explaining the many things he is doing.
Like he opened a gym, and that he needs her.
He needs her so much he asks her to go there
that he'll take her in, and wants to marty her.
Then Mina goes down to Mexico, they get married...
they spend truly idyllic days together...
but also begin to have a rough time.
They begin to suffer even hunger.
They were vety poor.
He was giving boxing lessons and training.
He had a fewfights, and dreamed of the really big one
which would bring him gloty and wealth.
They can't make ends meet.
She is pregnant.
Things go from bad to worse.
They even perform in traveling plays...
but things go pretty bad.
He at least saw no way out...
and wanted both of them to commit suicide.
She was happy then and, evidently...
had more hopes of getting out of that situation.
It was another approach. She was expecting Fabienne...
their daughter, and couldn't think the same way.
I think it was Mina Loy's influence
that made him decide to leave such a dangerous countty
and go to Argentina
where there was a group of friends they'd known in New York,
such as Marcel Duchamp.
People they'd known who were now in Argentina,
which seemed to be much safer.
They decided to go and they made a bizarre trip
from the Mexican capital to Veracruz, which is on the other bank.
There were some incidents there, which Mina Loy explained,
when they bought a kind of boat
with money he'd won in his last fight,
but as Mina Loy was pregnant
they decided that he'd take the boat
and Mina would go by train.
And Mina arrived in Buenos Aires by train
but Cravan never arrived.
He never appeared. I think she never believed he was dead...
or didn't accept it.
When he didn't appear in the Gulf of Mexico...
she looked all over.
Duchamp said she looked in prisons...
and that she'd find him because she'd say:
''He's never amongst the masses, but if he is I'll find him.''
There is a document on Arthur Cravan's disappearance.
Rene Clair's film ''Entreacte''.
It was shot 4 years after Cravan's disappearance...
by some of his best friends:
Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp.
No one realizes it is about Arthur Cravan.
It's full of hidden tributes and clues.
At a given point, two eyes appear superimposed on the sea.
Also a paper boat adrift, boxing gloves.
And people chasing a coffin escaping.
It opens and the corpse makes evetyone disappear.
And it disappears as well.
The allusion to Arthur Cravan is clear.
An important document that, from now on...
should be his historiography.
''I would like to be in Vienna and Calcutta,
to take all the trains and all the ships,
to fornicate with evety woman and guzzle evety dish.
Man of the world, chemist, whore,
drunk, musician,
worker, painter, acrobat, actor.
Old man, child, swindler, layabout, angel and reveller.
Millionaire, bourgeois, cactus, giraffe or crow.
Coward, hero, black, monkey,
Don Juan, pimp, lord, peasant,
hunter, industrialist, fauna and flora.
I am all things,
all men and all animals!
What's to be done?
Let's put on airs.''
Mina Loy was interviewed years later
and asked which had been the happiest moments of her life
and she answered, those she spent with Cravan.
And which had been the saddest moments...
of her life, and she answered: ''All the rest.''
Subtitles: LASERFILM
Good evening.
Ladies and gentlemen,
we will now perform a dangerous act.
Or not.
Here with you tonight, Arthur Cravan.

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

What do you make of this?

2006-05-23T19:14:53Z

"Tout le monde comprendra que je préfère un gros Saint Bernhard obtus à Mademoiselle Fanfrluche qui peut exécuter les pas de la gavotte et, de toute façon, un jaune à un blanc, un nègre à un jaune et un nègre boxeur à un nègre étudiant"

-- Arthur Cravan

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies

Cravan vs. Cravan [Review]

2006-05-23T16:43:26Z

Cravan vs. Cravan

Isaki Lacuesta's debut documentary, "Cravan vs. Cravan," spins a riveting hour and a half out of the strange life and stranger death of the marginal figure of Arthur Cravan, the early 20th-century poet, boxer and Dadaist who made his life his art. The stranger-than-fiction raw material is compelling enough in itself, but Lacuesta crafts it well, shuttling nimbly between personal recollections, old footage, talking heads and dramatic recreation in a manner which discloses something of the life of its complex subject while also contributing to the legend. Perfect for cult-seekers, pic took the public prize at the recent Sitges fest and has done low-key theatrical at home during October and November. Fest and international tube showings are its likely fate.

French boxer-turned cineaste Frank Nicotra goes in search of the elusive Cravan, who was the nephew of Oscar Wilde and whose own father disappeared when the boy (real name: Fabian Lloyd) was three months old. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Cravan ran away at 16 and traveled widely before settling in Paris where he wrote poetry, hung out with bohemians like Ravel and Duchamp, edited an alternative arts magazine, gave public speeches naked, faked his own death, tried out different personalities and honed his boxing skills.

A lengthy debate about the true origin of paintings ascribed to Cravan, and his draft dodging at the start of WWI, are the prelude to pic's busy final half-hour, centered on his Barcelona fight with world heavyweight champ Jack Johnson (Cravan was KO'd in Round 1) and his intense relationship (here tenderly recreated) with poet/artist Mina Loy. Cravan set sail from Mexico and disappeared without trace in 1918, at age 32.

Pic raises complex issues about the way Cravan created his own myth, though without becoming philosophically abstract: There are plenty of raw facts for interviewees -- including Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland; Spanish painter Eduardo Arroyo; and Juli Lorente, who attended the Cravan-Johnson bout -- on which to chew.

Nictora's close identification with Cravan generates an intimate link between the subject and the viewer, though there's too much of Nictora's own boxing exploits. Likewise, a series of aging Spanish pugilists reminiscing and a sequence showing bullfight gorings seem to belong in a different film.

Brief recreations of key moments bring the shaky old recordings (there are only two minutes of extant footage of the man) and blurred old photos to dramatic life, with the final 20 minutes feeling a little rushed as the out-there events pile up. For the record, one commentator theorizes Rene Clair's surrealistic 1924 debut, "Entr'acte," is based on Cravan's life.

Camera (color/B&W), Gerard Gormezano; editor, Domi Parra; music, Victor Nubla, Pascal Comelade; art director, Maite Sanchez; sound, Xavi Mas. Reviewed at Cine Verdi, Madrid, Nov. 21, 2002. Running time: 99 MIN.

[Variety - 2002]

posted in Arthur Cravan - 0 replies