Master of Light:Conversation with Contemporary Bollywood Cinematographer – Rajeev Jain ICS WICA
Master of Light:Conversation with Contemporary Bollywood Cinematographer –Rajeev Jain ICS WICA
Rajiv Jain –Indian Cinematographer / DOP –The Complete Interviews,Vol. I
The Shape of Light –Rajiv Jain Paints with His Camera
Rajeev Jain (Born:1968,Lucknow) started working as a director of photography in 1993,after serving an apprenticeship as camera assistant and camera operator. Since then Rajeev has worked as director of photography with some of India’s most esteemed directors,in some cases establishing a close and intimate association. We met up with Rajeev Jain in India,on the occasion of a five day seminar organized by the Delhi Film Club on The Shape of Light,an event which saw the participation of hundreds of students,filmmakers from across India.
How has cinematography changed in the last fifteen years?
I went to the Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts (Bhartendu Natya Academy) in Lucknow during the period of the new wave. We were witnessing a cinematographic quality which had ‘unchained’itself in many senses in films from the period until the end of the 1980’s. Even the montage was much more liberated,and Cinematographer/ Directors,with Gautam Ghose at the forefront,were searching for greater liberty. Even when it came to shooting,using hand-held cameras,using natural lighting,or lighting in a way which seemed natural,such as through open windows,etc. In other words an absolute freedom whether with camera movement or lighting.
And in our country?
In India there was still a more classical style of photography,and I am making reference such as Subroto Mitra,Sudhendu Roy,who worked with Satyajit Ray up until Agantuk (1991). Meanwhile other new cinematographers with different ideas were also emerging,like Ashok Mehta (36 Chowrangi Lane),especially with black and white. But this black and white image with its own proper aesthetic beauty had a characteristic quality of merging lighting to atmosphere or ambience. Hence from this point on maybe cinematography acquired a more important significance,a complete symbiosis with the film and the narrative.
Can the meeting between director and director of photography influence the career of one or the other?
During the seminar a meeting of a good director of photography and a great poet. With the cinema of Ray,on the other hand,there was without a doubt a decisive turn with the arrival of Pather Panchali (1955) onward.
Which filmmakers have made a particular impression on you?
The rapport with Shyam Benegal on Tota Maina (TV Series) certainly was for me an event which I remember with great emotion until this day. I meet people who confide with me that they decided to become a director of photographer after seeing that serial,or directors who decided to enter cinema thanks to Tota Maina. For example,one day there was a kenyan boy who happened to be at my house that decided to come to India to make Tv seial after seeing Tota Maina. So it has been an important film for many people,and much more for me because I was lucky to work with Shyam babu.
How did you meet?
It was quite by accident. He was looking for a director of photography who was also mentally prepared for this adventure,and through various sources my name came up. A friend of mine who worked as assistant director introduced me to Shyam babu. I remember when he called to tell me that Shyam Benegal wanted to meet me. We met at his office for tea,and at the end of this encounter he takes out a script and offers it to me. I can feel the emotion of that moment right now.
Can you tell us about the TV Series’s ‘dynamic photography’?
Shyam babu used to tell me that TV uses time like a narrative element,while the photography normally remains constant for the duration of a sequence. It is precisely time that the ‘dynamic photography’exploits to render a different consistency to the film. An example is the atmospheric conditions within nature:if during a cloudy day the sun comes out at a certain moment this will modify the condition of the light. In an interior space if someone enters a dark room and turns on the light this will change the condition of the light. However,this is all tied to precise actions. This discourse is amplified in Tota Maina,where in addition to variations in natural light were added variations which correspond to emotional motivation rather than any sense of logic.
During some scenes you also used different shutter speeds,sometimes barely noticeable.
During the filming Shyam Babu would ask for certain precise frames a slight increase in shutter speed,hardly noticeable,and therefore far from the slow motion effect we have been accustomed to seeing in many TV Series. This was solely to have greater suspension,therefore always in the service of a certain atmosphere in the serial. Technically this variation in speed consisted of a slight adjustment of the diaphragm. Shyam babu was very precise and exacting with his choice of photography,and not only myself but the whole troupe was so impressed by his personality that we complied voluntarily with his every request.
In the course of this seminar you have lamented the fact that it always gets more difficult to shoot a film in India with careful attention to the cinematography. For what reason?
Principally because there is a lack of respect for the profession in India. In the few films I have shot with foreign crews and production I actually discovered a greater professional respect. Then certainly there is the lack of preparation,because if films are not well prepared you will end up improvising on the set. Another reason is the understanding of shooting schedules,because if you shoot a film in ten weeks or in five weeks the result will be clearly different. With the advent of digital editing there is also the tendency to pass the complete negative through the telecine and then in AVID,without printing the so called ‘dailies’which I think are very important for controlling possible technical problems. This happened with a film shot abroad,where an entire scene had to be reshot after only discovering an exposure problem during the montage.
Strictly technically speaking,why is it that Indian films are no longer made with the same care as they once were?
Maybe what is missing is an actual love of cinema. The problem is that there are no longer understanding producers who invest in projects they care about. We no longer have the person who loves the film so much that they want it made as fine as it possibly can. The operative now is to make the film only with the budget in mind,sometimes regardless of whether the film is good or not.
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY: Tony Parsons (born 6th November 1953) is a British journalist broadcaster and author. He began his career as a music journalist on the NME,writing about punk music. Later,he wrote for The Daily Telegraph,before going on to write his current column for the Daily Mirror. Parsons was for a time a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show,and still appears infrequently on the successor Newsnight Review;he also briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth. He is the author of the multi-million selling novel,Man and Boy (1999). Parsons had written a number of novels including The Kids (1976),Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983),before he found mainstream success by focussing on the tribulations of thirty-something men. Parsons has since published a series of best-selling novels —One For My Baby (2001),Man and Wife (2003),The Family Way (2004),Stories We Could Tell (2006),My Favourite Wife (2007) and Starting Over (2009). His novels typically deal with relationship problems,emotional dramas and the traumas of men and women in our time. Many believe the content of his work is weak.
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Making of Ras Star –Indian Kenyan Cinematographer Rajiv Jain
RAS STAR IS CURRENTLY FEATURING AT THE INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL.
Raj next job was on a short film,Rasstar,based on the life of Kenyan rapper Nazizi,which was aired on M-Net.
Synopsis: A teenage rapper,Amani,from a staunch Muslim family teams up with her brother Abdosh,an emerging con artist to figure out a way to make money and get her into the talent show finals. As the story unfolds,Amani and her brother get caught up with a local gangster and a stolen phone incident and use her brother’s glib tongue to get them out. Through absolute blind luck they manage to find the money they need only to come to blows with their Uncle Shaka,the family patriarch and Mlandimu,the local gangster who finally saves them.
Rajeev Jain,a well-versed Bollywood Cinematographer and Director of Photography,discusses his new Award-winning film,Ras Star,and the unique camera approach he used specifically for this film about one young woman’s quest for life. With a background as director of photography for features such as Army,Badhaai Ho Badhaai,Carry On Pandu,Kadachit,Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree,Mirabai Not out and Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi,Rajiv has had more than enough experience behind the lens to make the leap to cinema. He also has cinematography credits for the Award winning Kenyan TV Series Heartbeat FM.
Where are you from and how did you become a cinematographer?
[Raj] I am from Lucknow in the North West of India. My first degree is in Science and it took a while to find my way into a more artistic world. After several meanders I ended up at the Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts (Bhartendu Natya Academy) studying drama. I managed to direct a few short plays and did camera for many more. Since then I have enjoyed both documentary and drama camerawork with each informing and advancing the other.
How did you approach the cinematography of Rasstar?
[Raj] Through discussions with Wanuri,finding films we both liked visually. We wanted to find separate looks for each story and a different look for the present day. We found a visual ‘theory’for each section ( for example a deep red and black colour scheme for Amani story,long lenses for Abdosh story and very wide lenses for Mlandimu). The looks had to be able to implement quickly (then aided in the grading) because of the very tight schedule. We then applied the visual theory to a shot list (which we often had to do this the night before due to locations changing or not being found yet)
What was it like working with HD for the first time?
[Raj] With a 35mm camera you are looking directly through a beautiful lens and seeing the scene in colour and can trust your eyes as part of the photographic process. With an HD camera you are looking at a tiny black and white image through the viewfinder so you need a large (ideally 24″) HD monitor to properly judge what you are filming. This is huge and totally impractical with such a small crew and low budget so we managed with a 14″monitor a fair amount of the time but up a mountain or on a remote beach only a small battery monitor is possible. This was very frustrating and led to some things that could have been better.
HD is horrible looking if any area is overexposed. This proved most problematic in outdoor which we chose to shoot on very wide lenses meaning there was a lot of sky in the shot. Unfortunately the skies were particularly flat and overcast but relatively bright white.
The biggest advantage to HD was being able to travel a lot lighter with a couple of zooms up the town for instance and being able to film 2 hours worth of material with no worries ( which would have been roughly 12 huge cans of 1000 feet of film to carry and load). It also meant Wanuri and I could go off at weekends and film city shots and pickups very easily.
Does storytelling matter?
[Raj] Storytelling is a huge part of life from an early age. It’s a way of finding meaning in the world. For a child it’s a way of understanding the world through metaphor –not that a child thinks of it in that way.
If the world blew up and the few stragglers met up it wouldn’t be long before they gathered around a fire and someone started telling tales to make sense of things. Stories entertain,provide an escape or catharsis,stimulate thought and debate and make you laugh.
What was the best thing about making Rasstar?
[Raj] The best thing was being up in such a beautiful part of the world working on a script that used the Kenyan slum as part of the story.
What was the worst thing?
[Raj] The first day of the action sequence in market. The crowd took so long to get onto the location that we on the camera crew were reduced to making beards out of moss and a feature length documentary on clouds (some very fine clouds though).
Can you tell us a couple of interesting/little known/behind the scenes things about the making of Rasstar?
[Raj] Wanuri is certainly one of the hardest working directors I’ve worked with but I think I found her limit one Saturday night. We were filming in pub (climax performance) and pick-up shots and had a choice to go to the local pub where some of the crew were tucking into lamb shank and downing some fine beer or head off. The light looked too tempting though so we headed off towards and thank goodness we did because the light over was astonishing. Deep red light was bouncing off them making them glow against the black background. There were so many midges we had to set the camera running and run around to draw them away from clustering around the camera. We shot for ages and the light was low but still great approaching. I tried to get one last shot with long DJ console in the foreground when Wanuri suggested we had enough and should go,words I never thought she’d say! (The shot was a nice one and made the final film).
Have you worked on anything since Rasstar?
[Raj] Since Rasstar I’ve filmed the film Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree. It was a great experience to film in such a remote and interesting place. Mahableshwar I’ve filmed a half hour comedy for Channel:‘The Smallest Man in Town’and I’ve also filmed and edited a half hour documentary in Dubai about a cleaning lady who works in Dubai. I have recently been Dop on a low budget feature “Carry on Pandu”.
My Cinematography Style | by Rajiv Jain | Indian Bollywood Cinematographer
FIRST OUTLINE:
For some time,I’ve been meaning to put in writing my views on cinematography and my aesthetic style and now,here it is. This doesn’t mean I follow them dogmatically –it’s simply what works for me in broad strokes. As an Indian cinematographer,I should be able to give the director or production whatever look I’m asked. But within the visual and aesthetic constraints of any production –or the occasional lack thereof –an element of me is always there. Rules were meant to be broken –but only when you have a full understanding of the rules. While I can’t claim to know all of them,I’m learning with each production. Here are some of my thoughts…
The aesthetic of a project needs to be established early to the audience. It’s distracting to introduce a new aesthetic or editorial style too late in a story without a proper justification or motivation.
Another area that gets too little attention is on atmospheric shots –those shots that fill the space between scenes. It gives the audience some time to breathe and to think and can be a moment for the music to affect the audience.
I find graduated filters too fake and unnatural. It doesn’t focus our attention and instead,usually calls attention to itself. I don’t think I’ve ever used them and have yet to be criticized for my decision.
Most directors cut too soon both on set and in editorial. On set,wait to say,“Cut”. Sometimes an actor can give a gem of a moment at the end of a scene if you wait. It’s worth it and I’m surprised how often a director will use that moment in the final cut. It’s nice to hold on an actor at the end of certain scenes to allow the audience to take in the moment and reflect.
People change and so do their views. So I’m sure my views are likely to change,too. Till then…
Cooked Art:Cinematography …by Pocket –Sized Indian Cinematographer Rajiv Jain
I love films that are made like artwork;each scene is masterfully photographed for brilliant composition to create lines of action,symmetrical balance,with a fine use of space,texture,colour,and perspective. Here are two movies which I recently saw again,and depict wonderful visual language.
So what the hell is a cinematographer? If you want to get into semantics,it means ‘writing in the movement.’But their job,mainly,is to have control over the camera and lighting crews in a scene,and therefore have a lot of creative input into the final image. Though if you consider the fact that the art director is responsible for the mise en scene,the storyboard artist plans out the shots and what is actually happening,and the director is going to want to have a piece of the action,then it’s no small wonder how films end up looking great. Here are some of the guys that managed to do this (in my little opinion)
What qualification did you study at Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts and when did you finish?
I went straight from high school to Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts and did a 2 year Diploma in Dramatic Arts,majoring in Lighting and graduating in 1985. The courses are run differently now. It is run more like a film school than an art school,which I think is excellent! It allows students to make earlier decisions on their chosen field within film &television,be it a cinematographer,director,producer,editor etc. It also better prepares the students for working in the industry. It is teaching so much more than just how to make films.
What did you think of the facilities you recently saw at Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts (Bhartendu Natya Academy)?
The facilities at Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts are fantastic;I would say world class even. The main production studio is very well equipped. The post production facilities such as the edit suites and sound mixing rooms are just like what is being used in much of the Indian film and television industry.
I am also particularly impressed with the production value of the recent student films at Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts. I think the standard of work is quite high.
I think it is fantastic that the students get to shoot projects Film is the international industry-standard format for feature films,as well most overseas television drama. It is rare for students to get the opportunity to work with film now that the digital formats are becoming more and more prevalent. If you are able to shoot and work with film,then you will be able to work in any format that you come across out there. It doesn’t work the other way around.
What I mean by this is that the principals of filmmaking are the same whichever format you shoot in. However,shooting film requires a different approach,both technically and creatively. These principles can be applied to shooting digital,but shooting film requires a greater understanding of lighting and exposure.
The digital equipment at Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts is of a standard and quality that will enable the graduates to go out into the industry and understand pretty much the workings of any other piece of equipment they will come across. There is no reason why the quality of the student projects can’t match the high quality of professional projects because the equipment they are using is the same.
I am also particularly impressed with the production value of the recent student films at Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts. I think that the standard of work is quite high.
What was the first break or job that was key to setting you on your way in your career?
I have had a number of breaks I guess and many of them lead onto one another. A series of fortunate events you might say,but if I was to think of one particular big break it was one night when I had just finished editing my new cinematography show reel. (A show reel is like a portfolio of work,a cut down of my best cinematography edited to music.)
Just as I had finished,an email came through to me that was forwarded by someone that I barely knew. The email said that a Kenyan production company was looking for an Indian cinematographer to shoot part of an international film that was to screen at the World Expo in Nairobi,Kenya and they wanted to see show reels.
I went to the post office the next morning and sent mine off express mail. I received phone call only days later confirming that I had the job. I was flown to Nairobi and I worked with a full professional crew on what was my first major job.
The people I met on that project liked my work so much that I got a call a month later and they flew me to Darussalam to shoot some commercials. I eventually returned to India with a new and improved show reel. Having international work on the reel raised my profile further and got me bigger and better jobs and an agent and I was away…
A case of the right timing I guess!
What qualities do you think are needed in order to make a career in the creative industries?
The quality that I admire in successful creative professionals is the ability to take pride in one’s own work. Whatever your creative pursuit,I think that if you are doing work that you really enjoy and that you take great pride in,then you is lucky enough to have one of the best jobs in the world.
I also think that challenging oneself by working outside of your comfort zone is important and realising that to succeed you have to be consistent,positive and work really hard.
Whichever creative field you are in,it is going to be a hard slog to get your career underway. With creative careers you are judged on your body of work and your track record. The first thing one need to do is create a portfolio,or in my case a show reel,and then prepare yourself for criticism and knock backs,never giving up and use those knock backs as incentive to work harder and set your standards higher.
I also think it is important to do ‘passion projects’that allow you to experiment with ideas or further your experience. By passion projects,I mean ones that you do for the love of it and not the pay. I shot a lot of ‘freebies’to get my show reel up to scratch and to get experience before I started getting paid for my art.
Also it’s important to work on your network of contacts. You never know when that person you might consider as a rival might actually be the one to pass some work your way or introduce you to new collaborators. The film industry is too small to make enemies. We should be like a support network and learn from each other in order to continually make better projects.
For you,what are the ‘must see’benchmark films in terms of either outstanding or pioneering cinematography?
Well for starters the cinematography on the recent Indian feature films Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree –Yours Dreams Are Just a Touch Away and the soon to be released Carry on Pandu are quite outstanding. Ha!
No,seriously,some of my favourite and most influential films in terms of cinematography are not the ones with the big crane shots or the world’s longest steadicam shot,but the ones that create a real mood and atmosphere. Films that convey emotion to an audience and help to communicate the subtext of a story by saying more about the characters than dialogue alone ever could.
I think the most influential films for me would be anything directed by Satyajit Ray (Aparajito (The Unvanquished),Parash Pathar (The Philosopher’s Stone),Jalsaghar (The Music Room) for his use of mood,atmosphere and cinematic techniques of storytelling.
Also,classics such as Pather Panchali (Song of the Road). It took me a while to realise why it is considered the best film ever made. The use of deep focus in this film is not just a technical achievement,but also a storytelling one.
I also really liked Shakha Proshakha (Branches of a Tree),Agantuk. They are both quite rough and hand held at times,but very beautiful and you really felt like you were ‘inside’the movie.
That is what I was trying to create on the most recent film that I shot,Kalpvriksh –The Wishing Tree.
I want the audience to feel like they were there in Kalpvriksh,with the characters,to feel it,smell it and taste it.
Key lights:Defining moments in cinematography since the Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree
An interview with Rajiv Jain,Indian Cinematographer and owner of Rajiv Jain Films,Cinematography and Grips –Dubai –Mumbai –Nairobi.
Q:What is your job title? Where are you employed?
A:Director’s director of photography,director of photography. I have my own company,Rajiv Jain Films,Cinematography and Grips,and I’ve been doing it for about twenty-five years.
Q:How long have you been a cinematographer?
A:I’ve been doing it for several years,but I started my own company.
Q:What type of training did you have to become a cinematographer?
A:I went to the Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts. I had a two-year diploma degree in theatre arts. That put me into a position to see how the industry has changed a lot. Coming out of college,kids should just start their own company. First,they should decide what they want to do in the industry and then go for it. The sky’s the limit depending on the career path you choose.
Q:What do you like best about your job?
A:Working for myself. Having the freedom to make your own decisions,to make your own path about what you want to do. But you can go for a month without working if you’re on your own,so definitely put yourself on a business path as well as a creative path. Take businesses classes,not just liberal arts. The film industry is a business,just like the music industry. You have to be a self-starter.
Q:Describe your typical day on the job.
A:Which job? Normally when I’m not working,I’m in my office doing paperwork. From your office,you might have to go somewhere on location and that can be anywhere from two days to thirty days. A lot of our stuff is remote locations. Every job is unique. As soon as you think it’s typical,it changes.
Q:What career were you in before becoming a cinematographer? Do you feel that it helped prepare you for becoming a massage therapist?
A:I was doing theatre,photo journalism,working at a local channel and making a decent earning. I found myself incorporating paramount to my words,and when I started taking pictures and filming,I realized this was what I’m most passionate about. But when you have a creative bone in your body,like writing,it’s easier to expand into other aspects of a different creative trade.
Q:What traits do you feel are necessary to be successful as a cinematographer?
A:Everybody takes different paths to be successful. But you have to keep up-to-date. Editing and graphics has changed so much. The whole dynamics has completely changed. You have to be totally flexible and stay with the current trend.
Q:Would you say it’s imperative to have a college education for a career such as this one?
A:I don’t think it’s imperative,but what I got out of college is I networked a lot. I don’t think it’s a hundred percent necessary. But,of course,you should have a good school to teach you what you need. When you’re in college,you need to start working on building a portfolio and college can help with that. If two people went for the same job and they both had impeccable portfolios,but one also carried a four-year degree,you can bet that person’s going to land the job. To be in the industry full-time,not just freelance,means it’s important to get that degree.
Q:Would you recommend this career to someone else?
A:Yeah. I can’t think of anything better to do. I see things that people don’t see. Is it for everybody? I don’t think so. You have to have thick skin. You have to work for months on end. Don’t set your expectations too high. Be realistic. My first recommendation would be to go to college and get that full-time job. Get a feel for what the industry is all about. It’s hard to just have a good portfolio,unless you’re an amazing cinematographer. Doing it without college is extremely hard to do.
Q:What is your next career move,if any?
A:Retire and go village. No,but seriously,I’m going to do more projects. I want complete control of my future projects.
Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree –Yours Dreams Are Just a Touch Away –Rajiv Jain Cinematographer
Two-time Winner Indian Cinematographer Rajiv Jain ICS WICA Creates Special World of Light,Shadows in his recent film Kalpvriksh the Wish Tree Yours Dreams Are Just a Touch Away
Rajiv Jain has a way of seeing that takes an image to its outer limits. In his years as assistant,electrician,grip,and in the past 16 years as director of photography,he has developed a visual sensitivity and expertise.
Rajiv takes his inspiration from directors such as Satyajit Ray (Pather Panchali) and cinematographers Ashok Mehta,ISC (36 Chowrangi Lane) and Binod Pradhan (Parinda) for their use of colour and lights and shadow to amplify the emotional content of stories. I find the ability to allow the characters to operate in shadow is a real art,he says. Ashok Mehta allows his characters to function in darkness. He lights everything so the blacks are really rich –yet you can see everything.
His work in Kalpvriksh,a film by director Manika Sharma exudes a period quality with an edge. Rajiv was especially intrigued by the non-narrative,fragmented script,because it offered a myriad of visual possibilities. Shooting primarily on Kodak to give contrast to the exterior scenes,Rajiv experimented with warm and blue filters to get the look he wanted. The result is a stark,almost surreal journey into the minds and actions of the film’s bizarre characters.
Up-front collaboration on any film is essential,Rajiv emphasizes.
It’s important for me to go through the script scene by scene with the director Manika Sharma,Rajiv says,to try to see what is in her mind. I want to know what the scene is saying,who the most important character is at that moment,and how the characters move through the scene. We also share photographs and movies,which gives us a visual base to work from.
A graduate of Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts in Drama and a beginning still photography,Rajiv took a course in filmmaking. Intrigued by the film medium,he saw the possibilities of combining his interests with film in commercials. Searching for a way to learn camerawork,he offered his assistance (unpaid) to director of photography Subroto Mitra to learn the craft.
He taught me about his SR package,what the lenses were,and how to load magazines,he said. Then he started me by working on Shyam Benegal’s documentary on Nehru.
In 1996,Rajiv got the first opportunity to shoot a film,Army,with Mukul Anand. After eight weeks of stressful shooting –his every move was watched.
After 6 more features,then came Kalpvriksh in 2007,allowed Rajiv to explore a new visual technique to add nuance to the story. The film includes a dreamlike journey that Rajiv wanted to give a dreamlike quality. We tested filters and a bleach bypass process to give that section of the film its own special look,”he says. “Instead we decided to use a swing tilt,a view camera attachment that allows the operator to change the plane of focus. It let us throw different parts of the frame out of focus,which is difficult to do in a wide shot because of increased depth of field.
Rajiv is currently finishing production on Carry on Pandu,a feature being shot in Mumbai,as well as doing Commercials.
Full of Surprises! Rajiv Jain,Indian Cinematographer / DOP,Talks About…KALPVRIKSH (THE WISHING TREE):YOUR DREAMS…ARE JUST A TOUCH AWAY…
Like any artist,Rajiv was born with innate talent burnished by experience and cultural influences. Born in 1968,his first introduction to movie magic came while observing his uncle as a projectionist at Ravindralaya Theatre,Lucknow. “I remember sitting in that little projection room and watching films with my uncle,”the Indian cinematographer recalls. “It was like watching silent movies because you couldn’t hear sound in the booth. I just saw the images and would try to understand the story. My uncle would show us Charlie Chaplin movies,which,of course,were silent. There is no doubt that he put his dream of becoming a cinematographer into my heart.” Originally from India,cinematographer Rajiv Jain ICS WICA studied at the Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts in Lucknow,India.
The day after completing his studies,Rajiv went to work as a trainee on an anamorphic picture. He contributed to ten more movies as assistant director of photography before becoming a DOP. “From that moment on I considered the camera to be like a pen that you use to draw images,”he states. “Operating a camera is mainly about composition and rhythm. I also operated the camera for Bollywood songs. It was very primitive. While we were shooting,someone with a watch was timing every pan and zoom. He would say,‘You have 5 1/2 seconds to do that zoom.’It was a great lesson for me,learning to make each element of a shot work in that amount of time.”
I thought it was fascinating that film speaks a common language that everyone in the world can understand,”he recalls. “That’s especially true for cinematographers,because we are communicating with the audience non-verbally.”“To me,making a film is like resolving conflicts between light and dark,cold and warmth,blue and orange or other contrasting colours. There should be a sense of energy,or change of movement. A sense that time is going on —light becomes night,which reverts to morning. Life becomes death. Making a film is like documenting a journey and using light in the style that best suits that particular picture…the concept behind it.
The first important decision regarding the visuals was to shoot in anamorphic (2.4:1) format,as they had done on Kalpvriksh –The Wishing Tree. Rajiv explains that Manika likes to manipulate the subjective and objective viewpoints,sometimes in the same frame or even at the same time. In a simple example,a shot will begin on a subject,and then an actor will step into the frame,creating an over-the-shoulder shot,changing it from subjective––in which the viewer sees what the character sees––to objective. “One of my first suggestions was shooting Kalpvriksh –The Wishing Tree in Super 35 format,”Rajiv continues. “I felt that would give the film an edge that you don’t expect to see in Drama. I felt we could use the wider frame to create a claustrophobic feeling in the Shabana’s cave and more interesting composition showing Shabana in the world.”She,director Manika Sharma,designer Mansi and other members of the creative team discussed the possibilities for composing Kalpvriksh –the Wishing Tree in widescreen format,while drawing upon such visual references as another drama with an improbable theme. Though Manika storyboarded scenes,Rajiv utilized the sketches primarily as a communications tool. While shooting,the director remained open to veering from the storyboards to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. “Our production designer Mansi and costume designer gave us rich sets and costumes. Even though pushing two stops in the development sometimes is not as faithful to colours,their collaboration with this technique allowed us (especially in the dinner / fantasy sequences) to have a warm and yellow-looking scene,as if all that was lit was candle light,”he says.
In one dramatically lit scene,the school principal (Mahabano Kotwal) is sitting on the chair,looking out a window at the falling rain. “The whole scene was lit with one hard day light,an ARRI 6K,”says Rajiv. “We brought one light through the window. In order to light the door,we used a 4 by 4 mirror just out of frame to the right. The light is modulated by the rain on the window,and it stretched over to the book. We were ‘gathering chestnuts.’It was serendipitous,and it all worked out with one light.”“For fill light on this movie,we used either very,very little or absolutely none,”he adds. “I find that with the film stocks we were using,if you’re overexposing a little bit,you can read the shadow detail incredibly well. When I saw the picture at Theatre on the 70-foot-wide screen,on the dark side,which is dead black,you can actually see hairs going into actors’heads. I found it very interesting. I hope it works on a subconscious level for the audience.”Even though Rajiv knew that he could not shoot wide open at a T2 or a T2.8––because the Super 35 format chosen has a shallower depth––he still wanted this tool to give the story a greater stage presence. The bigger negative allowed him to push the envelope. And,he knew the grain would still be acceptable,if he stayed within the T2.8 to T4 ranges on interiors. “We could still use real sources and it wouldn’t be hard for our camera crew to follow focus,”he says confidently.
Like many of his colleagues,cinematographer Rajiv Jain has many concerns about changes that can be introduced to imagery during the post process of our electronic age. Such considerations only become intensified when one is dealing with a profusion of visual effects,which was the case with Kalpvriksh –The Wishing Tree. “I tried to make a concerted effort to stay as involved in postproduction as possible –which is sometimes tough because it’s ‘off to the next job’–to work with the digital effects and optical house to ensure that there wouldn’t be any problems with the answer printing process. “You don’t see any lights in the master shot,”he says. “The master shot that we started out with was an impossible shot to light. We were jammed back in the corner with a 35 mm lens and there was a two-way mirror in the background. So we used a technique Rajiv Jain called a ‘driller.’Simply put,you’re normally shooting horizontally across a room,and there are horizontal surfaces,like the tops of mantels and tables. If you come from directly overhead with a light and drill it down onto that surface,it works quite well. It doesn’t seem wrong. If light comes from a place that’s not normal or usual,people seem to accept the element that’s being illuminated without really figuring out what’s going on in terms of a source. Shadows go straight down,so they don’t end up looking strange or calling attention to the source. You see it on the table and then it comes off the table and lights the faces to a degree. It’s interesting because you’re not lighting the people at all. You’re lighting the environment that they’re in.
Anamorphic gives you the space in the frame to do that,”Rajiv says. “Manika has no problem filling an anamorphic frame in a contemporary picture. The story also has an elegiac aspect,so it seemed better to tell it without rock video cutting and frenetic camera movement. With the amazing cast,we knew this film would be about the performances. All those ideas––as well as ‘if it ain’t broke,don’t fix it’––factored into our decision to shoot anamorphic.”To determine a visually appropriate approach for the various moods needed in Kalpvriksh –The Wishing Tree,Manika and Rajiv chose to forego in large part the usual business of viewing other films during prep. “We used a lot of book work,referring to other kinds of artists working in two-dimensional forms,still photography and drawings mainly,”Rajiv relates. “This was a nice and different way to prep. Looking at movies to see how a particular sequence worked is great,but this approach started me on this incredible round of self-education,covering still photography from 1890 up ’til now. Now I can’t stop myself from buying the books. It is amazing how much visual reference source material is out there when you go back to basics. These were great jumping-off points for us.
The cinematographer also had to avoid telltale reflections of camera gear and personnel on the water surface. Along with a disciplined crew,that required careful light placement and camera angle selection. He discovered that putting the plastic at the right distance from the lens for tighter shots from Shawn’s point-of-view rendered slightly distorted images with a hint of grain,which amplified the look that he and director Manika desired. Rajiv also occasionally added reflections of characters and objects on the water’s surface to draw attention to the barrier separating the boy from other people. Sometimes the camera takes a subjective,spectator-like stance while other times the audience seems to share Shawn’s life-in-the-bubble experience. “There was no simple formula for deciding when to put the audience inside the bubble with Shawn. It was a question I asked the director for each shot in every scene. Are we with Shawn inside the bubble,or are we outside looking in?”
I didn’t believe this and obviously neither did neither director Manika Sharma nor producing company Rhombus Films. Another picture shot in an old house in Bollywood required us to actually operate two generators to power all of the lights. By the time we were done,however,I was able to shoot two-thirds of a long sequence by dollying along with the reflections seen in a long fishpond at night (Shabana’s cave). “I think it’s a visual reflection of the fact that one’s position in life can change almost instantaneously,”he says. “It’s extremely effective visually. It seems to work on a number of different levels. Using this different approach seems to freshen up all your overs and reverses. There’s a very interesting scene between Shabana and kid that was staged on an under the tree,and there’s a sense of disquiet and possible aggression. It’s very ambiguous,yet the spatial dynamics really underscore the feeling.”
There is a great advantage in working on location versus a studio. For example,the muslim house I mentioned had real marble floors. An experienced DOP knows how to utilize this reality something he can only simulate in a studio,”mused Rajiv. Reflectors were used extensively throughout the film,usually on the fill side to pick up some ambience or an edge of the keylight,and to redirect some of that light to the fill side. In most cases it was very subtle,however,just reflecting in the shine of the skin. “We used the reflectors as almost more of an eyelight,”Rajiv says. “There is such tension between these three characters. There are a lot of internal emotions beneath the surface of this movie. I felt that the audience needed to have access to the internal life of the characters,so I tried to keep eyelights going,especially when we’d get in close. Often it was done with a small reflector thrown in at the last moment.
One of the most important aspects included previsualizing the character of Shabana herself. “To nail her down,we started off by working on storyboards with an artist,”says Rajiv,“who drew terrific boards and is a brilliant artist as well. We told him our thoughts on how the Shabana looked and he set to work. Manika credits him with creating a good part of the final look,since his drawings were used to communicate to hair,make-up and wardrobe departments what Manika wanted for his look.”Part of Cave ‘guise involved the use of a wig that often obscured the actor’s face –which on occasion made for a less than ideal lighting situation. “During hair and make-up tests,I saw that while Shabana looked amazing,they were going to be difficult to deal with for 2 weeks. She had a big headgear and a huge costume also,so there was a question of whether we were ever going to be able to really see her. I told Manika that at times she was on the verge of becoming a headgear with hair. Being very sensitive to the needs of actors,Manika didn’t want to get the hair out of her face,so we tried not to mess with her and solve it on our own.”
On Kalpvriksh –The Wishing Tree,Rajiv opted for Vision 200T (5274) for everything but night exteriors,explaining that the smooth grain of this non-intrusive emulsion records deep blacks,true colours and a wide tonal range. Rajiv shot day exteriors on Eastman EXR 100T (5248),using an 81 EF filter to half-correct and retain the cool blue of winter. Daylight-balanced 250D (5246) Vision stock was selected for day interiors,while he exploited Vision 500T (5279) on most night interiors and exteriors. Since shooting,the cinematographer did extensive tests with different materials to search for the right thickness and translucency. “It’s the same as using a cheap filter on the lens and we realized that any distortion or loss of focus would be magnified when the lab optically ‘squeezed’the images into the 2.40 aspect ratio. In addition to selecting the right plastic,it was important for us to record a strong negative with properly focused images. We were shooting through filters at least 90 percent of the time.
While shooting forest scenes with the lead actor,Rajiv employed what he calls a Nine-light sandwich. “Others might call it a book light,but in any case,we were bouncing a Nine-light Maxi Brute off a piece of bead board,then letting the light pass through a diffusion frame usually fitted with either 216 or light grid. The resulting soft light striking He had a very beautiful quality,plus some serious pounding of foot-candles. This soft light had enough to punch through Shabana’s hair,and I could control the amount of light just by clicking off various globes. But it also required a lot of flagging and took up much space.”On other occasions,Rajiv illuminated the Forest by directing the light from more extreme angles. “I came in much lower and more frontal with his key than I would have normally,but the approach succeeded in letting her hair fall naturally,so,while it was tough,it worked. It did make me thankful for the scenes when Shabana is dressed up with her hair pulled back,since I could get a nice edge on her through side lighting.”
When kids arrive at tree before the climax,production established the famously setting by filming the actors in front of blue screen and green screen. Those elements were digitally composited with stock background plates culled from Ladakh. Harry and Arjun from Red Chillies’in-house facility supervised the visual effect shots. “I don’t think these scenes could be any more believable if we had travelled to Ladakh to film them live,”marvels Rajiv. “How can you miss when you begin with 70 millimetre background plates? We matched everything to those plates.”
There were a few daylight scenes in there,so we decided that cracks in the cave roof let hard sunlight in,”he continues. “I put some signs of this in on the walls behind the actors and let some light bounce off the floor. For the most part though,the cave scenes are set at night –lit by firelight or lanterns or the imaginary glow coming off,which isn’t plugged into anything. For the Water,I chose to use a slightly blue key light on the actors but didn’t put any flickering movement in because I felt that it was distracting. The only flickering on their faces comes from the actual water. What I did add was a slight flicker effect on the walls,which I found to be more pleasing while lending a bit of realism.
Front-end lab work was done by Gemini,which provided film dailies. “After her experiences in the commercial world where you work on a monitor all the time,Manika loved watching film dailies –it opened up a new world for her,”says Rajiv. “For example,there is a shot of a Shabana delivering a line at the end of a long shot under the tree. When Manika saw it played back on the [video tap] monitor,she didn’t feel good about it. She seemed too small in the shot. She remarked that maybe her line would have to disappear in editing. After some time,Manika saw it projected on a big screen and loved the shot.”When asked if such glad tidings extend to the on-screen drama as well,Rajiv smiles,and says,“Would you be surprised if I said there is a happy ending?”
The cinematographer does not use diffusion on the camera lens,instead preferring to soften his subject as needed by selectively affecting the light source. “I’ve never liked it in films when the overall resolution of the lens changes visibly during cuts in to a close-up during a scene,”he declares. “The whole business of putting heavy diffusion in front of the lens to make [an actress] look ‘better’is just crazy to me. I don’t want to see the cinematographer’s effort to make someone look good. Instead,I want to see the character look well,and I think that happens when the actor is both integrated into the scene properly and lit in a flattering manner. My solution is to soften at the source of illumination,and let the image be as clear as possible. Some people think Primo lenses are too sharp,but I love all that perfection. When you combine years and years of research and development on the film stocks from Kodak,with what has gone into these Arri lenses and the lab work at Gemini,and then put all that into a film being projected properly on screen,the result is such awesome perfection! So I take a lot of pride in delivering a really perfect negative. We may want to mess it up later,and that’s fine,but I believe in starting with something well-exposed and sharp.”
With all the many visual treatments necessary to depict the Shabana’s perceptions,Rajiv and Manika needed to settle on parameters early on for the more elaborate manifestations requiring visual effects. “We’re telling a story that is seen in part through the eyes of a crazy person,”offers Rajiv. “She’s an incredibly brilliant crazy person,but crazy nonetheless,so there’s a sense of the fantastic about these visions,but they are not in the tradition of science-fiction movie effects. We had submitted a wish list of visual effects for budgeting,but it came back priced four or five times higher than we hoped. This meant we had to pull back,and that decision ultimately worked better for the film we wound up making. Most of the effects are things we did ourselves,with practical light cues,or as a combination of those cues with digital enhancement.”
I’m glad that this movie’s look seems interesting to the eye,but I’m also pleased that the visuals don’t supersede the story. Early reviews are praising Shabana’s performance as one of the best she’s ever given,so it wouldn’t make sense to do anything that took away from that aspect. Lots of films now seem overwhelmed with effects,but Manika isn’t one to tell that type of story.
When Indian Cinematographer Rajiv Jain,ICS WICA is asked if,he would do anything differently today,the master artiste replies,“Ninety-nine percent of the time when I see my old films I am serene. It was the best I could do at that time of my life with what I had to work with. What’s important is your life and how you evolve as a human being and as an artist.
Q &A with Rajiv Jain,ICS WICA Indian Cinematographer on Film Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree –Your Dreams Are Just a Touch Away
Indian Director of Photography,Rajiv Jain,ICS WICA is a Cinematographer based in Mumbai,India. Rajiv specializes in shooting television commercials in the 35mm motion picture film format as well as HD Digital formats. Rajiv started in the early days of the music video revolution,before venturing into narrative filmmaking. His eclectic body of work includes Army,Badhaai Ho Badhaai,Carry on Pandu,Kadachit,Kalpvriksh –The Wish Tree,Mirabai Notout, Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi and Rasstar .
QUESTION:Where were you born and raised?
RAJIV:I was born in Lucknow,India. There was no seminal event that happened to me as a young person that made me want to be a cinematographer. It certainly wasn’t the quality of the light in Lucknow. I remember it was gray;was stained brown from the traffic and the sky dark. But as I say that,I realize the suppressed palette of the place did affect me emotionally. Saturates leaped out against that neutrals,as in a dream or a post-industrial nightmare.
QUESTION:What did your parents do?
RAJIV:My parents were just ordinary folks. I don’t think they were particularly ambitious for me. Their main concern,I think,was that I wasn’t an embarrassment. We moved to the Etawah and then back to Lucknow,where I completed my education. My degrees were in Theatre Arts.
QUESTION:Did you have a career goal at that point in life?
RAJIV:I wanted to be a writer,but like Mohan Rakesh I thought too much and wrote too little. That is too say I was more a reader then a writer,more academician then poet. I got very interested in semiology and structuralism (the study of how language encodes ideas). Initially I studied how the spoken and written language worked,but then became more interested in how codes worked in other languages,like the language of film. My interest in film language led me in a rather convoluted way to cinematography.
QUESTION:That’s interesting. Can you be a little more specific?
RAJIV:I became very interested in understanding how in altering light,composition,camera angles and camera movement a cinematographer alters an audiences perception of the visual event,and thereby the audience’s emotional response. It is a difficult thing to quantify. I remember specifically thinking back to seeing Pather Panchali when I was a child,and how its images had always remained in my imagination,not only for their pure beauty and sublime scale,but because they affected me emotionally,striking some unconscious but responsive cord. Later I saw Ray’s “The Apu Trilogy”. I had much the same response,but now my understanding was informed by my studies. It would be accurate to say that the cinematographers of these two films,Subroto Mitra,were those who most influenced my decision to become a cinematographer.
QUESTION:How did you make a connection between words and photography?
RAJIV:In writing essays and articles about film. I realized that film images worked very much the way the spoken/written language works. You want to express certain ideas. There are culturally agreed and understood codas. These shapes,which we call letters,have agreed upon pronunciations. These letters form words. These words have agreed meanings. But it is of course arbitrary. The word “cat”has no innate “catness”about it,but on hearing this word the listener forms an idea in their brain. A cat. We can then add adjectives,and qualifiers,to make it a black cat,or an angry black cat. These words are codes,but not universal codes. They are specific to a culture that shares that language. Photography in some respects is a much more complex language system. The denotative (specific) or connotative (symbolic or implied) meaning of an image can be ambiguous,but also complex. Perhaps the best literary analogy is the Haiku poem. The fewer words have greater potential meaning —the more words that are added in longer literary forms,the more specific the meaning. An image offers both specific and non-specific meanings. It can work on many layers,conscious and not.
QUESTION:Did you have any mentors or were you totally self-taught?
RAJIV:I’ve learned a lot from other DP’s. But it’s mainly from studying their work. Ashok Mehta and I talk a lot,and he’s given me a great deal. But I was self-taught. I studied art extensively,particularly early 20th century artists,and late 19th century artists. I learned a lot about light from them. I’ve stolen an idea from every good film I’ve seen,probably. Particularly the work of Subroto Mitra (ISC),Ashok Mehta (ISC),Binod Pradhan,and Santosh Sivan (ISC).
QUESTION:Do you think of yourself as an artist,a technician or both?
RAJIV:I think that’s a very important distinction. I don’t want to sound pretentious,but if you consider the nature of art,it is meant to give us new eyes to see the world. I want audiences to respond viscerally to what our intentions are for a film. I think that cinematography works very much like music in that it is difficult for us to measure or quantify why audiences respond to what we do. So it is an art. And its practitioners must therefore be artists.
QUESTION:Tell us more about your analogy of music and cinematography.
RAJIV:I can sit in dailies and I can see the other people watching the film with me respond physically and emotionally to the images;but it is very difficult quantifying what they are responding to. If you watch people listening to music,they may also respond,but you would hard put to quantify why they are responding.
QUESTION:I’ll borrow a phrase from Subroto Mitra,who said,cinematographers are the authors of the images. But,that isn’t widely recognized.
RAJIV:Part of the problem lies with our collective culture. Films are reviewed as theatre rather than as a unique art form. Critics will talk about scripts and performances. They talk about things they understand,but they understand them because their own cultural antecedents are principally in traditional theatre,though they may not recognize that. In this context,cinematography and music aren’t understood,except to say they were beautiful,because there is not a particular language developed within criticism for their description. Unfortunately,many reviewers don’t recognize how decisions made by the director,cinematographer and composer made a profound impact on the visceral reactions and intellectual responses of audiences. I’m not saying that cinematographers aren’t recognized. We are,at least within the industry,but not in the consumer press. I don’t think I read a single review that mentioned the significance of Subroto Mitra’s (ISC) decision to use 16mm film and other formats in certain scenes in The River,yet that made a profound impact. I consider that a significant artistic decision worthy of comment,in fact,essential to an audiences understanding of the film’s artistic treatment.
QUESTION:The collaboration between directors and cinematographers is unique.
RAJIV:An important thing about that collaboration is that cinematographers have to integrate their vision for a film with the director’s vision.
QUESTION:Do the many music videos you shot influence you today?
RAJIV:Not really. None of my films look like music videos,but the great thing about music videos was that we could experiment with different lighting,film stocks,lenses and filters. We would decide to try putting four filters on the lens,force process the film,or put a negative through a reversal film postproduction process to see how it comes out,and then try it again the other way around. It was a great way to learn.
QUESTION:Are there other cinematographers whose work you follow?
RAJIV:I can mention all the obvious names,but the truth is I learn from all cinematographers. I can watch a television program shot by a 29-year-old cinematographer and find something that he or she did that is quite interesting. I’m constantly learning from other people. I still read every magazine and journal about cinematography and photography that I can lay my hands on. I still study art. I collect books of photographers and paintings. But it’s not just the good work that others do that I learn from. I learn from my own mistakes that I have had ample opportunity to make over these last 20 years. When my son Adam was in the seventh grade,he wrote an essay in which he was required to say who his hero was. He said it was me. “My father is my hero because he messes up all the time,and he lets me see it.”So I feel o.k. about messing up. I think that’s a hugely important lesson to learn. It’s o.k. to mess up,and you will sometimes mess up if you’re willing to push the limits of your craft.
QUESTION:Did any other mentors influence your thinking?
RAJIV:I was a graduate from the University of Lucknow for a short while. That’s where I met Renu Saluja who was a really important mentor. She pointed me down some really interesting avenues as regards film theory.
QUESTION:How do you decide that something is a film you want to do?
RAJIV:Early in my career anything that was offered was a film I wanted to do. Today,two things are likely to affect my decision. One is my first meeting with the director. That relationship is like a marriage only,oddly,much more intense. You have to decide whether you’re going to be able to get along with that person for the long time that you’re going to be together. I think I have gotten along well with over 90 percent of the directors I have worked with,and many have remained friends. The second thing is the photography. I’m always interested in doing new and different things. If the project is very much like what I have done before,and the script is not great,then it is less likely I will be interested. Sometimes a project comes along that is just so interesting it is impossible to resist.
QUESTION:What do you tell students and other young filmmakers when they ask you to share the secret of success? Do you tell them the truth about the odds?
RAJIV:I think you have to be patient,and not let yourself believe that things are going to happen quickly. You need integrity and honesty about who you want to become. That way,even if you fail,you can fail with some dignity. If you compromise and fail,what do you have left?
Quick notes by Indian Cinematographer / DOP Rajiv Jain on Cinematography and aspiring Indian Cinematographers:
A quick “filler post”while I try to get something actually substantial written:
The most hits I get for my blog are from people searching keywords like “Indian Cinematographers”“cinematography career path”and “how to be a great Cinematographer.”I can really only offer my own personal experience.
Rajiv on advice for young,aspiring Indian cinematographers:
An advice
About the Author
Tony Parsons (born 6th November 1953) is a British journalist broadcaster and author. He began his career as a music journalist on the NME,writing about punk music. Later,he wrote for The Daily Telegraph,before going on to write his current column for the Daily Mirror. Parsons was for a time a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show,and still appears infrequently on the successor Newsnight Review;he also briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth. He is the author of the multi-million selling novel,Man and Boy (1999). Parsons had written a number of novels including The Kids (1976),Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983),before he found mainstream success by focussing on the tribulations of thirty-something men. Parsons has since published a series of best-selling novels —One For My Baby (2001),Man and Wife (2003),The Family Way (2004),Stories We Could Tell (2006),My Favourite Wife (2007) and Starting Over (2009). His novels typically deal with relationship problems,emotional dramas and the traumas of men and women in our time. Many believe the content of his work is weak.
Vinci Hair Clinic on BBC Radio
William Blake
Early life
The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in Blake’s work. Here,the demiurgic figure Urizen prays before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife,collectively known as the Continental Prophecies.
William Blake was born in 28 Broad Street,London,England on 28 November 1757,to a middle-class family. He was the third of seven children,two of whom died in infancy. Blake’s father,James,was a hosier. William never attended school,and was educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. The Blakes were Dissenters,and are believed to have belonged to the Moravian Church. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake,and would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life.
Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father,a practice that was then preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael,Michelangelo,Marten Heemskerk and Albrecht Drer. His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school but was instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing. During this period,Blake was also making explorations into poetry;his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.
Apprenticeship to Basire
On 4 August 1772,Blake became apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street,for the term of seven years. At the end of this period,at the age of 21,he was to become a professional engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the period of Blake’s apprenticeship. However,Peter Ackroyd’s biography notes that Blake was later to add Basire’s name to a list of artistic adversariesnd then cross it out. This aside,Basire’s style of engraving was of a kind held to be old-fashioned at the time,and Blake’s instruction in this outmoded form may have been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.
After two years Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London (it is possible that this task was set in order to break up a quarrel between Blake and James Parker,his fellow apprentice),and his experiences in Westminster Abbey contributed to the formation of his artistic style and ideas;the Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour,painted funeral effigies and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that “the most immediate [impression] would have been of faded brightness and colour”. In the long afternoons Blake spent sketching in the Abbey,he was occasionally interrupted by the boys of Westminster School,one of whom “tormented”Blake so much one afternoon that he knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground,“upon which he fell with terrific Violence”. Blake beheld more visions in the Abbey,of a great procession of monks and priests,while he heard “the chant of plain-song and chorale”.
The Royal Academy
On 8 October 1779,Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House,near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment,he was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There,he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens,championed by the school’s first president,Joshua Reynolds. Over time,Blake came to detest Reynolds’attitude towards art,especially his pursuit of “general truth”and “general beauty”. Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the “disposition to abstractions,to generalizing and classification,is the great glory of the human mind”;Blake responded,in marginalia to his personal copy,that “To Generalize is to be an Idiot;To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit”. Blake also disliked Reynolds’apparent humility,which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds’fashionable oil painting,Blake preferred the Classical precision of his early influences,Michelangelo and Raphael.
Gordon Riots
Blake’s first biographer Alexander Gilchrist records that in June 1780,Blake was walking towards Basire’s shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison in London. They attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes,set the building ablaze,and released the prisoners inside. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during this attack. These riots,in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism,later came to be known as the Gordon Riots. They provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III,as well as the creation of the first police force.
Despite Gilchrist’s insistence that Blake was “forced”to accompany the crowd,some biographers have argued that he accompanied it impulsively,or supported it as a revolutionary act. In contrast,Jerome McGann argues that the riots were reactionary,and that events would have provoked “disgust”in Blake.
Marriage and early career
Oberon,Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786)
In 1782,Blake met John Flaxman,who was to become his patron,and Catherine Boucher,who was to become his wife. At the time,Blake was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents,after which he asked Catherine,“Do you pity me?”When she responded affirmatively,he declared,“Then I love you.”Blake married Catherine who was five years his junior on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary’s Church,Battersea. Illiterate,Catherine signed her wedding contract with an ‘X’. The original wedding certificate may still be viewed at the church,where a commemorative stained-glass window was installed between 1976 and 1982. Later,in addition to teaching Catherine to read and write,Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she would prove an invaluable aid to him,helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.
At this time George Cumberland,one of the founders of the National Gallery,became an admirer of Blake’s work. Blake’s first collection of poems,Poetical Sketches,was published circa 1783 . After his father’s death,William and his brother Robert opened a print shop in 1784,and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson’s house was a meeting-place for some of the leading English intellectual dissidents of the time:theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley,philosopher Richard Price,artist John Henry Fuseli early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and American revolutionary Thomas Paine. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin,Blake had great hopes for the French and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries,but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France. In 1784 Blake also composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.
Blake illustrated Original Stories from Real Life (1788;1791) by Mary Wollstonecraft. They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage,but there is no evidence proving without doubt that they actually met. In 1793′s Visions of the Daughters of Albion,Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.
Relief etching
In 1788,at the age of 31,Blake began to experiment with relief etching,a method he would use to produce most of his books,paintings,pamphlets and,of course,his poems,including his longer ‘prophecies’and his masterpiece the “Bible.”The process is also referred to as illuminated printing,and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes,using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name).
This is a reversal of the normal method of etching,where the lines of the design are exposed to the acid,and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching,which Blake invented,later became an important commercial printing method. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for most of his well-known works,including Songs of Innocence and Experience,The Book of Thel,The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,and Jerusalem.
Engravings
A study in 2005 of Blake’s surviving plates showed that he made frequent use of a technique known as “repoussage”which is a means of obliterating mistakes by hammering them out by hitting the back of the plate. This discovery puts strain on Blake’s own assessment of his abilities as well of those of admirers and may also help to explain why some of Blake’s work took so long to complete.
Later life and career
Blake’s marriage to Catherine remained a close and devoted one until his death. Blake taught Catherine to write,and she helped him to colour his printed poems. Gilchrist refers to “stormy times”in the early years of the marriage. Some biographers have suggested that Blake tried to bring a concubine into the marriage bed in accordance with the beliefs of the Swedenborgian Society,but other scholars have dismissed these theories as conjecture. William and Catherine’s first daughter and last child might be Thel described in The Book of Thel who was conceived as dead.
Felpham
Hecate,1795. Blake’s vision of Hecate,Greek goddess of black magic and the underworld
In 1800,Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex (now West Sussex) to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley,a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake wrote Milton:a Poem (published between 1805 and 1808). The preface to this work includes a poem beginning “And did those feet in ancient time”,which became the words for the anthem,“Jerusalem”. Over time,Blake came to resent his new patron,coming to believe that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry,and preoccupied with “the meer drudgery of business”. Blake’s disenchantment with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced Milton:a Poem,in which Blake wrote that “Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies”(3:26).
Blake’s trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803,when he was involved in a physical altercation with a soldier called John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault,but also with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King. Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed,“Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.”Blake would be cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper,“The invented character of [the evidence] was …so obvious that an acquittal resulted.”Schofield was later depicted wearing “mind forged manacles”in an illustration to Jerusalem.
Return to London
Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) is one of a series of illustrations of Revelation 12.
Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (18041820),his most ambitious work. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,Blake approached the dealer Robert Cromek,with a view to marketing an engraving. Knowing that Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work,Cromek promptly commissioned Thomas Stothard,a friend of Blake’s,to execute the concept. When Blake learned that he had been cheated,he broke off contact with Stothard. He also set up an independent exhibition in his brother’s haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in the Soho district of London. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims),along with other works. As a result he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809),which contains what Anthony Blunt has called a “brilliant analysis”of Chaucer. It is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. It also contained detailed explanations of his other paintings.
The exhibition itself,however,was very poorly attended,selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review,in The Examiner,was hostile.
He was introduced by George Cumberland to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell he met Samuel Palmer,who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. This group shared Blake’s rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age. At the age of 65 Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job. These works were later admired by Ruskin,who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt,and by Vaughan Williams,who based his ballet Job:A Masque for Dancing on a selection of the illustrations.
Later in his life Blake began to sell a great number of his works,particularly his Bible illustrations,to Thomas Butts,a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit;this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.
Dante’s Divine Comedy
The commission for Dante’s Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell,with the ultimate aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake’s death in 1827 would cut short the enterprise,and only a handful of the watercolours were completed,with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form. Even so,they have evoked praise:
‘[T]he Dante watercolours are among Blake’s richest achievements,engaging fully with the problem of illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even higher level than before,and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the three states of being in the poem’.
Blake’s The Lovers’Whirlwind illustrates Hell in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno
Blake’s illustrations of the poem are not merely accompanying works,but rather seem to critically revise,or furnish commentary on,certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.
Because the project was never completed,Blake’s intent may itself be obscured. Some indicators,however,bolster the impression that Blake’s illustrations in their totality would themselves take issue with the text they accompany:In the margin of Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions,Blake notes,“Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All &the Goddess Nature ¬ the Holy Ghost.”Blake seems to dissent from Dante’s admiration of the poetic works of the ancient Greeks,and from the apparent glee with which Dante allots punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the grim humour of the cantos).
At the same time,Blake shared Dante’s distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of power,and clearly relished the opportunity to represent the atmosphere and imagery of Dante’s work pictorially. Even as he seemed to near death,Blake’s central preoccupation was his feverish work on the illustrations to Dante’s Inferno;he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he possessed on a pencil to continue sketching.
Death
Monument near Blake’s unmarked grave in London
On the day of his death,Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually,it is reported,he ceased working and turned to his wife,who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her,Blake is said to have cried,“Stay Kate! Keep just as you are I will draw your portrait for you have ever been an angel to me.”Having completed this portrait (now lost),Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening,after promising his wife that he would be with her always,Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house,present at his expiration,said,“I have been at the death,not of a man,but of a blessed angel.”
George Richmond gives the following account of Blake’s death in a letter to Samuel Palmer:
He died …in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see &expressed Himself Happy,hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.
Catherine paid for Blake’s funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five days after his death on the eve of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary at the Dissenter’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields,where his parents were also interred. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine,Edward Calvert,George Richmond,Frederick Tatham and John Linnell. Following Blake’s death,Catherine moved into Tatham’s house as a housekeeper. During this period,she believed she was regularly visited by Blake’s spirit. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings,but would entertain no business transaction without first “consulting Mr. Blake”. On the day of her own death,in October 1831,she was as calm and cheerful as her husband,and called out to him “as if he were only in the next room,to say she was coming to him,and it would not be long now”.
On her death,Blake’s manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham,who burned several of those which he deemed heretical or too politically radical. Tatham had become an Irvingite,one of the many fundamentalist movements of the 19th century,and was severely opposed to any work that “smacked of blasphemy”. Sexual imagery in a number of Blake’s drawings was also erased by John Linnell.
Since 1965,the exact location of William Blake’s grave had been lost and forgotten,while gravestones were taken away to create a new lawn. Nowadays,Blake grave is commemorated by a stone that reads “Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757-1827 and his wife Catherine Sophia 1762-1831″. This memorial stone is situated approximately 20 metres away from the actual spot of Blake grave,which is not marked. However,members of the group Friends of William Blake have rediscovered the location of Blake’s grave and intend to place a permanent memorial at the site.
Blake is now recognised as a saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial was erected in Westminster Abbey,in memory of him and his wife.
Development of Blake’s Views
Because Blake’s later poetry contains a private mythology with complex symbolism,his late work has been less published than his earlier more accessible work. The recent Vintage anthology of Blake edited by Patti Smith focuses heavily on the earlier work,as do many critical studies such as William Blake by D. G. Gillham.
The earlier work is primarily rebellious in character,and can be seen as a protestation against dogmatic religion. This is especially notable in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which Satan is virtually the hero rebelling against an imposter authoritarian deity. In the later works such as Milton and Jerusalem,Blake carves a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness,while retaining his earlier negative attitude towards the rigid and morbid authoritarianism of traditional religion. Not all readers of Blake agree upon how much continuity exists between Blake’s earlier and later works.
Psychoanalyst June Singer has written that Blake’s late work displayed a development of the ideas that were first introduced in his earlier works,namely,the humanitarian goal of achieving personal wholeness of body and spirit. The final section of the expanded edition of her Blake study The Unholy Bible suggests that the later works are in fact the “Bible of Hell”promised in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Regarding Blake’s final poem “Jerusalem”,she writes:
[T]he promise of the divine in man,made in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,is at last fulfilled.
However,John Middleton Murry notes discontinuity between Marriage and the late works,in that while the early Blake focused on a “sheer negative opposition between Energy and Reason”,the later Blake emphasized the notions of self-sacrifice and forgiveness as the road to interior wholeness. This renunciation of the sharper dualism of Marriage of Heaven and Hell is evidenced in particular by the humanization of the character of Urizen in the later works. Middleton characterizes the later Blake as having found “mutual understanding”and “mutual forgiveness”.
Religious views
Blake’s Ancient of Days. The “Ancient of Days”is described in Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel.
Although Blake’s attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day,his rejection of religiosity was not a rejection of religion per se. His view of orthodoxy is evident in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,a series of texts written in imitation of Biblical prophecy. Therein,Blake lists several Proverbs of Hell,amongst which are the following:
Prisons are built with stones of Law,Brothels with bricks of Religion.
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
In The Everlasting Gospel,Blake does not present Jesus as a philosopher or traditional messianic figure but as a supremely creative being,above dogma,logic and even morality:
If he had been Antichrist,Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us:
Gone sneaking into the Synagogues
And not used the Elders &Priests like Dogs,
But humble as a Lamb or an Ass,
Obey himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself
Jesus,for Blake,symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity:“[A]ll had originally one language and one religion:this was the religion of Jesus,the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.”
Blake designed his own mythology,which appears largely in his prophetic books. Within these Blake describes a number of characters,including ‘Urizen’,‘Enitharmon’,‘Bromion’and ‘Luvah’. This mythology seems to have a basis in the Bible and in Greek mythology,and it accompanies his ideas about the everlasting Gospel.
“I must Create a System,or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason &Compare;my business is to Create.”
Words uttered by Los in Blake’s Jerusalem:The Emanation of the Giant Albion.
One of Blake’s strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy. In A Vision of the Last Judgement,Blake says that:
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed &govern’d their Passions or have No Passions,but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion,but Realities of Intellect,from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory.
One may also note his words concerning religion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz:a Body &a Soul.
2. That Energy,call’d Evil,is alone from the Body,&that Reason,call’d Good,is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses,the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve,c. 1825. Watercolour on wood.
Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a distinct body from the soul,and which must submit to the rule of soul,but rather sees body as an extension of soul derived from the ‘discernment’of the senses. Thus,the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul;elsewhere,he describes Satan as the ‘State of Error’,and as being beyond salvation.
Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain,admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred self-denial,which he associated with religious repression and particularly with sexual repression:“Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not,breeds pestilence.”He saw the concept of ‘sin’as a trap to bind men desires (the briars of Garden of Love),and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life:
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs &flaming hair,
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits &beauty there.
He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord,an entity separate from and superior to mankind;this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ:“He is the only God …and so am I,and so are you.”A telling phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”. This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and equality in society and between the sexes.
Blake and Enlightenment Philosophy
Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Due to his visionary religious beliefs,Blake opposed the Newtonian view of the universe. This mindset is reflected in an excerpt from Blake’s Jerusalem:
Blake’s Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the “single-vision”of scientific materialism:Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27,an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll which seems to project from his own head.
I turn my eyes to the Schools &Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation;cruel Works Of many Wheels I view,wheel without wheel,with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other:not as those in Eden:which Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony &peace.
Blake also believed that the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds,which depict the naturalistic fall of light upon objects,were products entirely of the “vegetative eye”,and he saw Locke and Newton as “the true progenitors of Sir Joshua Reynolds’aesthetic”. The popular taste in the England of that time for such paintings was satisfied with mezzotints,prints produced by a process that created an image from thousands of tiny dots upon the page. Blake saw an analogy between this and Newton’s particle theory of light. Accordingly,Blake never used the technique,opting rather to develop a method of engraving purely in fluid line,insisting that
a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its
Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself &Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job.
Despite his opposition to Enlightenment principles,Blake thus arrived at a linear aesthetic that was in many ways more similar to the Neoclassical engravings of John Flaxman than to the works of the Romantics,with whom he is often classified.
Therefore Blake has also been viewed as an enlightenment poet and artist,in the sense that he was in accord with that movement’s rejection of received ideas,systems,authorities and traditions. On the other hand,he was critical of what he perceived as the elevation of reason to the status of an oppressive authority. In his criticism of reason,law and uniformity Blake has been taken to be opposed to the enlightenment,but it has also been argued that,in a dialectical sense,he used the enlightenment spirit of rejection of external authority to criticize narrow conceptions of the enlightenment.
Assessment
Creative mindset
Northrop Frye,commenting on Blake’s consistency in strongly held views,notes that Blake “himself says that his notes on [Joshua] Reynolds,written at fifty,are ‘exactly Similar’to those on Locke and Bacon,written when he was ‘very Young’. Even phrases and lines of verse will reappear as much as forty years later. Consistency in maintaining what he believed to be true was itself one of his leading principles …Consistency,then,foolish or otherwise,is one of Blake’s chief preoccupations,just as ‘self-contradiction’is always one of his most contemptuous comments”.
Blake’s “A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows”,an illustration to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative,of a Five Years’Expedition,against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).
Blake abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity:“As all men are alike (tho’infinitely various)”. In one poem,narrated by a black child,white and black bodies alike are described as shaded groves or clouds,which exist only until one learns “to bear the beams of love”:
When I from black,and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him,and he will then love me.
In one poem,The Book of Thel,Blake questioned the necessity of life which is believed to be an elegy to his dead newborn daughter.
‘O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the spring,born but to smile &fall?
Blake retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life,and social and political statements are often present in his mystical symbolism. His views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the Church. His spiritual beliefs are evidenced in Songs of Experience (1794),in which he distinguishes between the Old Testament God,whose restrictions he rejected,and the New Testament God (Jesus Christ in Trinitarianism),whom he saw as a positive influence.
Visions
From a young age,William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The first of these visions may have occurred as early as the age of four when,according to one anecdote,the young artist “saw God”when God “put his head to the window”,causing Blake to break into screaming. At the age of eight or ten in Peckham Rye,London,Blake claimed to have seen “a tree filled with angels,bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”According to Blake’s Victorian biographer Gilchrist,he returned home and reported this vision,and he only escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a lie through the intervention of his mother. Though all evidence suggests that his parents were largely supportive,his mother seems to have been especially so,and several of Blake’s early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber. On another occasion,Blake watched haymakers at work,and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them.
The Ghost of a Flea,1819-1820. Having informed painter-astrologer John Varley of his visions of apparitions,Blake was subsequently persuaded to paint one of them. Varley’s anecdote of Blake and his vision of the flea’s ghost became well-known.
Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery,and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly,religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake’s works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual centre of his writings,from which he drew inspiration. In addition,Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works,which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels. In a letter to William Hayley,dated May 6,1800,Blake writes:
I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother,and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit,and see him in my remembrance,in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice,and even now write from his dictate.
In a letter to John Flaxman,dated September 21,1800,Blake writes:
[The town of] Felpham is a sweet place for Study,because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates;her windows are not obstructed by vapours;voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard,&their forms more distinctly seen;&my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses. My Wife &Sister are both well,courting Neptune for an embrace…I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies &Chambers filled with books &pictures of old,which I wrote &painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life;&those works are the delight &Study of Archangels.
In a letter to Thomas Butts,dated April 25,1803,Blake writes:
Now I may say to you,what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else:That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d,&that I may converse with my friends in Eternity,See Visions,Dream Dreams &prophecy &speak Parables unobserv’d &at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals;perhaps Doubts proceeding from Kindness,but Doubts are always pernicious,Especially when we Doubt our Friends.
In A Vision of the Last Judgement Blake writes:
Error is Created. Truth is Eternal. Error,or Creation,will be Burned up,&then,¬ till Then,Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation &that to me it is hindrance ¬ Action;it is as the Dirt upon my feet,No part of Me. “What,”it will be Question’d,“When the Sun rises,do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?”Oh no,no,I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying,‘Holy,Holy,Holy,is the Lord God Almighty.’I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning Sight. I look thro’it ¬ with it.
William Wordsworth remarked,“There was no doubt that this poor man was mad,but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”
D.C.Williams (1899-1983) said that Blake was a romantic with a critical view on the world,he maintained that Blake’s Songs of Innocence were made as a view of an ideal,somewhat Utopian view whereas he used the Songs of Experience in order to show the suffering and loss posed by the nature of society and the world of his time.
General cultural influence
Main article:William Blake in popular culture
Blake’s work was neglected for almost a century after his death,but his reputation gained momentum in the 20th century,both from being rehabilitated by critics such as John Middleton Murry and Northrop Frye,but also due to an increasing number of classical composers such as Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams adapting his works.
Many such as June Singer have argued that Blake’s thoughts on human nature greatly anticipate and parallel the thinking of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung,although Jung dismissed Blake’s works as “an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes.”
Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s,frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg and songwriter Bob Dylan. Much of the central ideas from Phillip Pullman’s famous fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials are rooted in the world of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In wider culture Blake’s poetry has been set to music by popular composers. It has been especially popular with musicians since the 1960s. Blake’s engravings have also had significant influence on the modern graphic novel.
Bibliography
Illuminated books
William Blake’s portrait in profile,from Songs of Innocence and Experience,published 1794
c.1788:All Religions Are One
There Is No Natural Religion
1789:Songs of Innocence and of Experience
The Book of Thel
17901793:The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
1793-1795:Continental prophecies
1793:Visions of the Daughters of Albion
America a Prophecy
1794:Europe a Prophecy
The First Book of Urizen
Songs of Experience
1795:The Book of Los
The Song of Los
The Book of Ahania
c.1804.1811:Milton a Poem
18041820:Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion
Non-Illuminated
1783:Poetical Sketches
1784-5:An Island in the Moon
1789:Tiriel
1791:The French Revolution
1797:The Four Zoas
Illustrated by Blake
1791:Mary Wollstonecraft,Original Stories from Real Life
1797:Edward Young,Night Thoughts
1805-1808:Robert Blair,The Grave
1808:John Milton,Paradise Lost
1819-1820:John Varley,Visionary Heads
1821:R.J. Thornton,Virgil
1823-1826:The Book of Job
1825-1827:Dante,The Divine Comedy (Blake died in 1827 with these watercolours still unfinished)
On Blake
Peter Ackroyd (1995). Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 1-85619-278-4.
Donald Ault (1974). Visionary Physics:Blake’s Response to Newton. University of Chicago. ISBN 0-226-03225-6.
(1987). Narrative Unbound:Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas. Station Hill Press. ISBN 1886449759.
G.E. Bentley Jr. (2001). The Stranger From Paradise:A Biography of William Blake. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08939-2.
Harold Bloom (1963). Blake Apocalypse. Doubleday.
Jacob Bronowski (1972). William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Routledge and K. Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7277-5 (hardcover) ISBN 0-7100-7278-3 (pbk.)
(1967). William Blake,1757-1827;a man without a mask. Haskell House Publishers.
G. K. Chesterton (1920s). William Blake. House of Stratus ISBN 0-7551-0032-8.
S. Foster Damon (1979). A Blake Dictionary. Shambhala. ISBN 0-394-73688-5.
David V. Erdman (1977). Blake:Prophet Against Empire:A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-486-26719-9.
Irving Fiske (1951). “Bernard Shaw’s Debt to William Blake.”(Shaw Society)
Northrop Frye (1947). Fearful Symmetry. Princeton Univ Press. ISBN 0-691-06165-3.
Alexander Gilchrist,Life and Works of William Blake,(second edition,London,1880) (reissued by Cambridge University Press,2009. ISBN 9781108013697)
James King (1991). William Blake:His Life. St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 0-312-07572-3.
Benjamin Heath Malkin (1806). A Father’s Memoirs of his Child.
Peter Marshall (1988). William Blake:Visionary Anarchist ISBN 0-900384-77-8
Blake,William,William Blake’s Works in Conventional Typography,ed. by G. E. Bentley,Jr.,1984. Facsimile ed.,Scholars’Facsimiles &Reprints,ISBN 9780820113883.
W.J.T. Mitchell (1978). Blake’s Composite Art:A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-691-01402-7.
Victor N. Paananen (1996). William Blake. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7053-4.
George Anthony Rosso Jr. (1993). Blake’s Prophetic Workshop:A Study of The Four Zoas. Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8387-5240-3.
G. R. Sabri-Tabrizi (1973). The eaven and ell of William Blake,(New York,International Publishers)
June Singer,The Unholy Bible:Blake,Jung,and the Collective Unconscious (SIGO Press,1986)
Sheila A. Spector (2001). “Wonders Divine”:the development of Blake’s Kabbalistic myth,(Bucknell UP)
Algernon Charles Swinburne,William Blake:A Critical Essay,(London,1868)
E.P. Thompson (1993). Witness Against the Beast. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22515-9.
W. M. Rossetti (editor),The Poetical Works of William Blake,(London,1874)
A. G. B. Russell (1912). Engravings of William Blake.
Basil de Slincourt,William Blake,(London,1909)
Joseph Viscomi (1993). Blake and the Idea of the Book,(Princeton UP). ISBN 0-691-06962-X.
David Weir (2003). Brahma in the West:William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance,(SUNY Press)
Jason Whittaker (1999). William Blake and the Myths of Britain,(Macmillan)
William Butler Yeats (1903). Ideas of Good and Evil. Contains essays.
References
^ Frye,Northrop and Denham,Robert D. Collected Works of Northrop Frye. 2006,pp 11-12.
^ Jones,Jonathan (2005-04-25). “Blake’s heaven”. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,1469584,00.html.
^ Thomas,Edward. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917,p. 3.
^ Yeats,W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. 2007,p. 85.
^ Wilson,Mona. The Life of William Blake. The Nonesuch Press,1927. p.167.
^ The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge. 2004,p. 351.
^ Blake,William. Blake’s “America,a Prophecy” ;And,“Europe,a Prophecy”. 1984,p. 2.
^ Kazin,Alfred (1997). “An Introduction to William Blake”. http://www.multimedialibrary.com/Articles/kazin/alfredblake.asp. Retrieved 2006-09-23.
^ Blake,William and Rossetti,William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake:Lyrical and Miscellaneous. 1890,p. xi.
^ Blake,William and Rossetti,William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake:Lyrical and Miscellaneous. 1890,p. xiii.
^ Marshall,Peter (January 1,1994). William Blake:Visionary Anarchist (Revised Edition ed.). Freedom Press. ISBN 0900384778.
^ poets.org/William Blake,retrieved online June 13,2008
^ a b c Bentley,Gerald Eades and Bentley Jr.,G. William Blake:The Critical Heritage. 1995,page 34-5.
^ a b Raine,Kathleen (1970). World of Art:William Blake. Thames &Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20107-2.
^ 43,Blake,Peter Ackroyd,Sinclair-Stevenson,1995
^ Blake,William. The Poems of William Blake. 1893,page xix.
^ 44,Blake,Ackroyd
^ Blake,William and Tatham,Frederick. The Letters of William Blake:Together with a Life. 1906,page 7.
^ Erdman,David V. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (2nd edition ed.). p. 641. ISBN 0-385-15213-2.
^ Gilchrist,A,The Life of William Blake,London,1842,p. 30
^ Erdman,David,Prophet Against Empire,p. 9
^ McGann,J. “Did Blake Betray the French Revolution”,Presenting Poetry:Composition,Publication,Reception,Cambridge University Press,1995,p.128
^ “St. Mary’s Church Parish website”. http://home.clara.net/pkennington/VirtualTour/windows_modern.htm#Blake. “St Mary’s Modern Stained Glass”
^ Reproduction of 1783 edition:Tate Publishing,London,ISBN 978 185437 768 5
^ Biographies of William Blake and Henry Fuseli,retrieved on May 31st 2007.
^ Kennedy,Mave,Art historian dents image of William Blake,engraver –2005-4-18. Retrieved 2009-7-6.
^ Bentley,G. E,Blake Records,p 341
^ Gilchrist,Life of William Blake,1863,p. 316
^ Schuchard,MK,Why Mrs Blake Cried,Century,2006,p. 3
^ Ackroyd,Peter,Blake,Sinclair-Stevenson,1995,p. 82
^ Damon,Samuel Foster (1988). A Blake Dictionary
^ a b Blake,William. Milton a Poem,and the Final Illuminated Works. 1998,page 14-5.
^ Wright,Thomas. Life of William Blake. 2003,page 131.
^ The Gothic Life of William Blake:1757-1827
^ Lucas,E.V. (1904). Highways and byways in Sussex. Macmillan. ASIN B-0008-5GBS-C.
^ Peterfreund,Stuart,The Din of the City in Blake’s Prophetic Books,ELH –Volume 64,Number 1,Spring 1997,pp. 99-130
^ Blunt,Anthony,The Art of William Blake,p 77
^ Peter Ackroyd,“Genius spurned:Blake’s doomed exhibition is back”,The Times Saturday Review,4 April 2009
^ Bindman,David. “Blake as a Painter”in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake,Morris Eaves (ed.),Cambridge,2003,p. 106
^ Blake Records,p. 341
^ Ackroyd,Blake,389
^ Gilchrist,The Life of William Blake,London,1863,405
^ Grigson,Samuel Palmer,p. 38
^ Ackroyd,Blake,390
^ Blake Records,p. 410
^ Ackroyd,Blake,p. 391
^ Marsha Keith Schuchard,Why Mrs Blake Cried:Swedenborg,Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision,pp. 1-20
^ “Friends of Blake homepage”. Friends of Blake. http://www.friendsofblake.org/home.htm. Retrieved 2008-07-31.
^ “Coming up –William Blake”. BBC Inside Out. 2007-02-09. http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/london/series11/week5_healthy_living_working.shtml. Retrieved 2008-08-01.
^ Tate UK. “William Blake’s London”. http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/learnonline/blakeinteractive/lambeth/london_05.html. Retrieved 2006-08-26.
^ The Unholy Bible,June Singer,p. 229.
^ William Blake,Murry,p. 168.
^ “a personal mythology parallel to the Old Testament and Greek mythology”;Bonnefoy,Yves. Roman and European Mythologies. 1992,page 265.
^ Damon,Samuel Foster (1988). A Blake Dictionary (Revised Edition). Brown University Press. p. 358. ISBN 0874514363.
^ Makdisi,Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. 2003,page 226-7.
^ Altizer,Thomas J.J. The New Apocalypse:The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. 2000,page 18.
^ Blake,William. Proverbs of Hell,via The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. 1982,page 35.
^ Blake,Gerald Eades Bentley (1975). William Blake:The Critical Heritage. London:Routledge &K. Paul. p. 30. ISBN 0710082347.
^ Baker-Smith,Dominic. Between Dream and Nature:Essays on Utopia and Dystopia. 1987,page 163.
^ Kaiser,Christopher B. Creational Theology and the History of Physical Science. 1997,page 328.
^ Jerusalem Plate 15,lines 14-20 Complete Works of William Blake Online
^ *Ackroyd,Peter (1995). Blake. London:Sinclair-Stevenson. p. 285. ISBN 1-85619-278-4.
^ Essick,Robert N. (1980). William Blake,Printmaker. Princeton,N.J.:Princeton University Press. p. 248.
^ Letter to George Cumberland,12 April 1827 Complete Works of William Blake Online Blake is referring to his Illustrations of the Book of Job,often considered his artistic masterpiece.
^ Colebrook,C. Blake 1:The Enlightenment William Blake Retrieved on October 1st 2008
^ Northrop Frye,Fearful Symmetry:A Study of William Blake,1947,Princeton University Press
^ Blake,William and Rossetti,William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake:Lyrical and Miscellaneous. 1890,page 81-2.
^ A Blake Dictionary,Samuel Foster Damon
^ a b c Bentley,Gerald Eades and Bentley Jr.,G. William Blake:The Critical Heritage. 1995,page 36-7.
^ a b Langridge,Irene. William Blake:A Study of His Life and Art Work. 1904,page 48-9.
^ Blake,William. Complete Writings with Variant Readings. 1969,page 617.
^ John Ezard (2004-07-06). “Blake’s vision on show”. The Guardian. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1254856,00.html#article_continue. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
^ Letter to Nanavutty,11 Nov 1948,quoted by Hiles,David. Jung,William Blake and our answer to Job 2001. http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/pdf’s/Microsoft Word –Jung paper.web.pdf,retrieved 13 December 2009
Secondary sources
External links
Poems by William Blake at Poetry Archive
William Blake on BBC Poetry Season
Works by or about William Blake in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Works by William Blake at Project Gutenberg
An Archive of an Exhibit of his Work at the National Gallery of Victoria
Ch’an Buddhism and the Prophetic Poems of William Blake
Contents,The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake edited by David V. Erdman
See Blake’s notebook online using the British Library’s Turning the Pages system (requires Shockwave).
Tate’s online resource on William Blake with notes for teachers
The recent re-discovery of the location of William Blake’s grave
www.William-Blake.org 128 works by William Blake
The William Blake Archive,a hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The William Blake Archive’s searchable edition of Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
William Blake and Visual Culture:A special issue of the journal ImageText
William Blake Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Free scores by William Blake in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
Index entry for William Blake at Poet’s Corner
Archive of William Blake exhibit,National Gallery of Victoria,Melbourne,Australia
v d e
Romanticism
Culture
Bohemianism Ossian Romantic nationalism Wallenrodism
Literature
Almeida Garrett Andersen Blake Bryant Burns Byron Chateaubriand Coleridge Cooper Eichendorff Espronceda Foscolo Goethe Grimm Brothers Hawthorne Heine Hoffmann Hlderlin Hugo Irving Jean Paul Keats Kleist Krasiski Lamartine Larra Leopardi Lermontov Malczewski Manzoni Mickiewicz Musset Nerval Norwid Novalis Oehlenschlger Poe Pushkin Schiller Scott M. Shelley P.B. Shelley Shevchenko Sowacki Madame de Stal Stendhal Tieck Wordsworth Zhukovsky Zorilla
Music
Alkan Auber Beethoven Bellini Berlioz Berwald Chopin Flicien David Ferdinand David Donizetti Field Franck Glinka Halvy Kalkbrenner Liszt Loewe Marschner Mhul Mendelssohn Meyerbeer Moscheles Paganini Rossini Schubert Schumann Thalberg Verdi Wagner Weber
Philosophy and aesthetics
Coleridge Feuerbach Fichte Goethe Mller Schiller A. Schlegel F. Schlegel Schleiermacher Tieck Wackenroder
Art
Blake Briullov Constable Corot Dahl Delacroix Dsseldorf School Friedrich Fuseli Gricault Goya Hudson River School Leutze Martin Michaowski Nazarene movement Palmer Runge Turner Ward Wiertz
Architecture
Gothic Revival National Romantic style
Age of Enlightenment
Realism
v d e
William Blake
Literary works
Early writings
Poetical Sketches An Island in the Moon
Songs of Innocence
and Experience
Unique to
Songs of Innocence
Introduction The Shepherd The Ecchoing Green The Little Black Boy The Blossom Laughing Song A Cradle Song Night Spring A Dream On Anothers Sorrow
Unique to
Songs of Experience
Introduction Earth’s Answer The Clod and the Pebble The Sick Rose The Fly The Angel My Pretty Rose Tree Ah! Sun-Flower The Lilly The Garden of Love The Little Vagabond London A Poison Tree A Little Girl Lost To Tirzah The School Boy The Voice of the Ancient Bard
Paired poems
Nurse’s Song Infant Joy The Lamb Holy Thursday Holy Thursday The Chimney Sweeper The Little Boy lost The Little Boy Found The Divine Image The Little Girl Lost The Little Girl Found The Tyger The Human Abstract Infant Sorrow
Prophetic
Books
The continental
prophecies
Europe a Prophecy America a Prophecy The Song of Los
Other
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell The Book of Thel The Book of Ahania The Book of Urizen Jerusalem:The Emanation of the Giant Albion Milton a Poem The Book of Los The Four Zoas Visions of the Daughters of Albion The French Revolution
The Pickering
Manuscript
Auguries of Innocence The Mental Traveler The Crystal Cabinet
Mythology
Ahania Albion Bromion Enion Enitharmon Fuzon Grodna Har Hela Leutha Los Luvah Orc Spectre Tharmas Thiriel Tiriel Urizen Urthona Utha Vala
Art
Paintings and prints
Relief etching Nebuchadnezzar Descriptive Catalogue The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne The Ghost of a Flea The Great Red Dragon Paintings Illustrations of Paradise Lost Illustrations of the Book of Job Illustrations of The Divine Comedy The Wood of the Self-Murderers:The Harpies and the Suicides Illustrations of On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity A Vision of the Last Judgment Newton Original Stories from Real Life The Ancient of Days
The Ancients
Samuel Palmer Edward Calvert Frederick Tatham George Richmond John Linnell
Criticism and scholarship
Scholars and critics
Peter Ackroyd Donald Ault Harold Bloom S. Foster Damon David V. Erdman Northrop Frye Alexander Gilchrist Geoffrey Keynes E. P. Thompson
Scholarly works
Life of William Blake Fearful Symmetry Blake:Prophet Against Empire Witness Against the Beast
Wikimedia
Blake at Wiktionary Blake at Wikibooks Blake at Wikiquote Blake at Wikisource Blake at Commons Blake at Wikinews
Persondata
NAME
Blake,William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION
Poet,Painter,Printmaker
DATE OF BIRTH
28 November 1757
PLACE OF BIRTH
London,England
DATE OF DEATH
12 August 1827
PLACE OF DEATH
London,England
Categories:William Blake | 1757 births | 1827 deaths | Artist authors | British vegetarians | English anarchists | English painters | English poets | English printmakers | English Swedenborgians | Christian mystics | Mythopoeic writers | People from Soho | Prophets | Romantic artists | Romantic poets | Writers who illustrated their own writing | English DissentersHidden categories:Wikipedia semi-protected pages | Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature
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The Top Ten Stories about Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was in the public eye from a young age as a part of the Jackson 5,and like him the stories also started very early on.
Michael Joseph Jackson was born August 29,1958 He had started performing at the age of 5 and by the age of 8 he was touring the Midwest extensively with the Jackson 5. He finally made his debut on the major music scene in 1968 as a member of the Jackson 5 at the age of 10.
Story Number 1:Childhood
It was in the first television interview that Michael Jackson had given since 1979 that he first spoke of the stories of his alleged childhood abuse. Michael Jackson admitted that he had often felt lonely as a child and cried as a result of this and of his fathers abuse. He revealed that he was physically and emotionally abused by his father in several different ways;enduring incessant rehearsals,beatings and verbal abuse. Marlon Jackson,Michael’s brother supposedly once stated that their father had “pummeled him over and over again with his hand,hitting him on his back and buttocks”.
Not only this but on one occasion,Joseph Jackson,the children’s father had apparently climbed into Michael’s room wearing a scary mask and had proceeded to scream and shout. Their father’s reasoning for this behavior is that he wanted to teach his children not to leave their windows open whilst they were sleeping. This kind of behavior quite obviously did more to damage Michael than teach him a simple lesson as Michael revealed in an interview that this incident have resulted in nightmares centered around kidnapping for years after.
In an interview with Martin Bashir,which was released in 2003,Michael said:“i didn’t have it that hard,he used me as the example,“do it like michael”…he practiced us with a belt in his hand and if you missed a step then expect to be hit…he would tear you up if you missed…really get you”. Although Michael did admit he had been abused by his father,in extra footage he suggested that ‘he hurt me with his love,be he is a genius,the man is a genius”.
Story Number 2:Thriller
On November 30,1982 Jackson released his sixth studio album produced by Epic Records;Thriller. Thriller was the follow up album to ‘Off the Wall’,9 of the tracks were written by MJ himself and it explored several different genres including funk,disco,soul,soft rock,R&B and pop.
At its best the album was selling a million copies a weed,worldwide and in just over a year it became,and still remains,the best selling album of all time and has risen to number one again after the singers death. It is estimated that the album sold an excess of 60 million copies around the globe. Seven of the songs were released as singles and all reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The album broke records winning eight Grammy Awards in 1984 in three different genres –pop,R&B and rock. It was Thriller that sent Jackson soaring into superstardom and cemented him as one of the predominant pop stars of the late 20th Century.
Thriller was one of the first albums and Michael one of the first artists to use videos as such a massive and successful promotional tool –the three main videos to be played on MTW were Thriller,Billie Jeans and Beat It.
The album ranked number 20 in the Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest albums of all time in 2003 and was also listen by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers at number three in their ‘Definitive 200 Albums of All Time’.
Story Number 3:The Moonwalk
The Moonwalk or backslide is a dance technique that presents the illusion that the dancer is stepping forward while actually moving backward. It gives the appearance of a person moving along a conveyor belt. Michael Jackson’s first ever public moonwalk was supposedly in 1983 at the Motown 25th Anniversary whilst performing “Billie Jean”. Jackson was not the first person to perform the moonwalk and older stars have claimed that they taught him the move,but there is no doubt that he popularized the moonwalk and the robot dance moves and made them his own;the dance gained worldwide popularity after Michael Jackson performed it and soon to become considered his signature move. The moonwalk has since become one of the best known dance moves in the world.
Story Number 4:Bad
In his autobiography Jackson said that the song was about the street. A kid from a bad neighborhood who gets to go away to a private school. He comes back to the old neighborhood when he’s on a break from school and the kids from the neighborhood start giving him trouble. He sings “Im bad,you’re bad,who’s bad…etc”He’s saying when you’re strong and good then you are bad. Bad remained in the top spot for two consecutive weeks from October 24th 1987.
Michael Jackson’s album ‘Bad’was released on 31st August 1987 followed closely by the single ‘Bad’which was released on September 7 1987,which was MJ’s seventh number one hit single over all. Twenty years after the album was released it had sold over 30 million copies worldwide and shipped 8 million units in the United States. It was the first and currently only album ever to feature five songs in the Billboard Hot 100 number 1 singles. In the late 80′s the album one two Grammy’s,one for Best Music Video for Leave Me Alone and one for Best Engineered Album. Bad was also ranked number 43 in the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time of the MTV Generation in 2009 listed by VH1. It was ranked number 202 on the Rolling Stone magazine 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Bad became the first of Jackson’s albums to debut at number-one on the Billboard 200 where it remained for the next six consecutive weeks. It sold 8 million copies in the US alone. In the UK the album sold 500,000 copies in just five days and is currently certified 13x platinum,for sales of 3.9 million making it Jackson’s biggest-selling album in the UK. Globally,it is Jackson’s overall third best-selling recording,behind Thriller and Dangerous,with 30 million copies sold. From this album 5 of the songs hit number one –record. Bad was the 9th best selling album in British History this was announced in 2006.
Despite how successful the record was in a poll in Rolling Stone magazine US citizens voted Bad worst album and worst single.
Story Number 5:Bubbles and Pets
Bubbles is the name of the chimpanzee that became associated with Michael Jackson. MJ rescued the chimp from a Cancer research clinic in Texas in 1985. Michael Jackson was reportedly quite close to the chimp but the media mocked this friendship,as they mocked many aspects of his life. The media portrayed the relationship as weird and Jackson as a ‘bizarre eccentric’,obsessed with recapturing his lost childhood and it was this incident that lead MJ to be named Wacko Jacko. Bubbles sat in with Jackson when he recorded one his most famous albums,Bad and was obviously a big part of his life for a while;Bubbles even made a cameo appearance in “Liberian Girl”a track from the album bad. The chimp was moved to the Neverland ranch with ‘Jacko’in 1988,he slept in a crib in MJ’s bedroom. Sometimes the Chimp wore a diaper and on other occasions he was allowed to use Michael Jackson’s private toilet –something which the star was again scrutinized for.
Robert Thompson,a professor of popular culture supposedly suggested that “this is when the weirdness reached epic proportions”–the media produced many false stories about the pair suggesting that Bubbles was one of a series of apes that Jackson had owned or owned. The two did a lot together,went for walks and spent a lot of time with one another. Jackson has been reported as once said “My chimp bubbles is a constant delight.”Kenny Rogers once said of Bubbles:“..[he] was so human it was almost frightening. He would take Christopher [Rogers' son] by the hand,walk over to the refrigerator,open it,take out a banana,and hand it to him. Christopher was amazed…we all were.”
Bubbles is reported to still be alive today after he was removed to an animal century because there were fears he may attack Jackson’s newborn son,Prince Michael II.
Story Number 6:Neverland
Neverland Valley Ranch,is situated in Santa Barbara County,California and was the home of Michael Jackson from 1988-2005. Neverland was named so after the make-believe land in Peter Pan,the children’s story book about a boy who never grows up –a figure or idea that Michael was thought to have idolized. The property is over 2,800 acres in size and today is made up of vineyards.
When it was owned by Michael Jackson after he bought it in 1988 for a massive $30 million,he turned it into his home and a massive private amusement park. Within the amusement park there was a zoo,theme park,two railroads,a ferris wheel,carousel,zipper,spider,sea dragon,wave swinger,super slide,dragon wagon kiddie roller coaster and bumper cars. Having seen footage of the inside of Neverland it truly was a childhood land,a fantasy home constructed using Jackson’s ideas and visions.
Michael Jackson’s Neverland,it was initally reported,would be turned into “Foreverland”a permanent memorial to the King of Pop –a bit like Presley’s Graceland –so that fans and tourists from all over the world could travel to see the singers former home and a glimpse into his life. It was also thought that there were plans to bury Michael Jackson in Neverland and that there may be a public or private viewing –however,the family of Michael Jackson have confirmed that there will be no such viewing.
Story Number 7:The changes faces of Michael Jackson (plastic surgery)
The story of Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery is no secret,it has been incredibly well documented and the focus of the media on many occasions. However,any plastic surgery,other than on his nose,was fervently denied by Michael Jackson in his interview with Martin Bashir.
Initially,because Jackson had been in the public eye from such a young age,his changing appearance was put down to puberty and adolescence,but eventually the press cottoned onto the idea that it was more than natural growth that was changing the way that he looked.
By the mid-1980′s it was noticeable that Jackson’s skin was gradually getting lighter (some sources suggested that Michael was bleaching his skin) his nose and his chin were changing and his body had changed due to weight loss. Some professionals suggest that Michael suffered from ‘body dysmorphic disorder’(a condition whereby the sufferer does not realize how they are perceived by others) as a result of the verbal ‘bullying’and abuse that he had suffered at the hands of his father during childhood. Later changes to his nose are thought by some to be down to the fact that his father used to call him such names as “big nose”and “ugly”.
In 1986 Jackson was reportedly diagnosed with Vitiligo and Lupus;skin diseases which cause depigmentation of the skin. It has been suggested by Jackson’s make-up artist in a televised interview that initially Jackson tried to cover the lighter patches of his skin with make-up but eventually the condition became too extensive and therefor the make-up too difficult to apply. Eventually as a result of the treatment that Michael was using for his conditions his skin lightened even further until eventually he looked almost porcelain white.
However,it was not only Michael’s skin that appeared to be changing,it was also the shape of his face. Apparently,by 1990 sources close to the singer suggested that he had had 10 operations on his face in total. Michael had his first rhinoplasty (nose work) in 1979 after damaging his nose in a dance routine,when his hair caught fire. As has been suggested,this surgery,was not a success and so by his request was referred to another doctor as he was worried he would not be able to sing properly due to breathing difficulties caused by the previous operations. In his Biography MJ suggested that he had had two bits of plastic surgery on his nose and surgery on his chin to give him a small cleft. Any other changes to his face Michael has insisted are due to adolescence,change of diet,weight loss,a change of hair style and performance lighting that is used and not extensive surgery.
It is possible that some of the changes to the shape of Michael Jackson’s face are due to weight loss as he did suffer from this due to stress. He first started to become slimmer in the early 1980′s following his desire to have a,as he put it ‘dancers body’. Furthermore,after the accusations of child abuse in 1993 MJ stopped eating and started to lose even more weight. In ’95 he was rushed to hospital during rehearsals and in 2005 the BBC reported,after further trials,he seemed to have undergone severe weight loss.
Story 8:Earth Song
Earthsong was the third single from the album HIStory and it was released on November 27,1995. Although Jackson had written other songs that dealt with different issues this was the first that overtly dealt with the environment and animal welfare- which is what made is such an interesting record. It supported Jackson’s work as a humanitarian which was first noticed with the release of “We are the World”with Lionel Richie in 1985 and with the initiation of the “Heal the World Foundation”in 1992. He received the Genesis award for the song in 1995 which was an award given each year for animal sensitivity.
The song received a Grammy nomination in 1997 and was a top five hit in most European countries,while in the UK it still remains Jackson’s best selling single,having sold over 1 million copies. It debuted at number one where it stayed for six weeks in December 1995.
Story 9:Child Abuse Allegations
1993 was the first time that Michael Jackson was accused of child abuse by the rather of a 13-year-old Jordan Chandler. Evan Chandler,Jordan’s father had supposedly administered Jordan with a powerful sedative after his son and Michael had become friends,and under this influence his son reportedly admitted that the star and he had engaged in acts of kissing,masturbation and oral sex. Experts later said,that the drug used (sodium amytal) makes patients highly susceptible to suggestion. Jordan’s mother told the police that she did not believe Jackson had molested her son and further investigations into his home,Neverland ranch,found no evidence to support a criminal filing. Finally,Jordan refused to testify against Jackson after he had received an out of court settlement of £22 million,Michael had justified the pay out saying “I didn’t want to do a long drawn-out thing”.
Reportedly,Jackson was again accused of child abuse later in 2005 after the Martin Bashir documentary “Living with Michael Jackson”by Gavin Arvizo,a 13-year-old cancer survivor who himself and his family had become close friends of Jackson. In the documentary both Michael and Gavin had spoken about sharing a room and bed which Michael had described as a “beautiful,charming and sweet thing”.
MJ was branded a ‘serial child molester’during the 16 week trial in 2005 and some sources suggested that he used his Neverland ranch to prepare the children for a ‘completely different environment’altogether. Jackson was accused of four counts of molestation including molesting a minor,intoxicating a minor,abduction and kidnapping. Gavin’s younger brother Star apparently admitted to having seen Jackson fondling his elder brother while he slept.
Further allegations were then brought up by Neverland employees who proposed that Jackson had been groping five other young boys in the early 1990′s including the Home Alone child star Macaulay Culkin. However,Culkin defended Jackson on the stand denying all charges that were held against him.
The verdict of the case found Michael Jackson to be not guilty on all charges;after assessment the jurors had thought the brothers stories to ‘not add up’.
Story 10:Death
On June 25 2009 at 2:26pm Michael Joseph Jackson was pronounced dead,after he was found in a coma at his Bel-Air mansion.
Exactly how Michael Jackson died and the circumstances in which he did are still unclear. Reportedly homicide investigations are being made into his death,although it is thought that at present there is no evidence of criminal wrong doing.
Several media sources have reported that Propofol,a powerful anesthesia,was found in Jackson’s house after he died. Apparently the drug is a prescription drug,only used in hospitals and administered by IV to send people to sleep before surgery. It is thought that several medical experts have suggested there was no reason for Jackson to have had this drug in his home;although he reportedly begged for such drugs to help him sleep having suffered chronic insomnia before his death.
Supposedly,a coroners report suggested that MJ was actually in surprisingly good health and despite scarring on his face,several injection sites all over his body and bruises on his chest (where someone had obviously been trying to revive him) there seemed to be no signs of a heart attack but it looked more likely that drugs had caused the heart to stop beating or the lungs to stop breathing. However,reportedly,the coroners office has ordered more tests to determine the Jackson’s Cause of Death. The office won’t rule on his death until toxicology and other additional testing has been completed. Authorities have found no evidence of external trauma or foul play. Prescription medication was present but they don’t know whether these were the cause of Jackson’s death.
Sources suggest that a memorial service will be held for Michael Jackson on Tuesday at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles where he had been rehearsing for his O2 London concerts.
End:
There is no doubt that Michael Jackson was the King of Pop despite his controversial lifestyle and person. He,his music and performances will undoubtedly be remembered forever.
About the Author
Charlie is an expert Research and Travel consultant. Her current interests are in Gatwick Parking,Heathrow Parking and Manchester Airport Parking.
Vinci Hair Clinic on BBC Radio
