Re-reading ‘Regions of the Great Heresy’, Jerzy Ficowski’s loving preservation of the memory of the great Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, I was struck again by Schulz’s last work – frescos painted under duress, on the wall of a Nazi officer’s home to amuse his children. As a Jew, for a short time, these paintings bought Schulz his life.
Long painted over and thought lost, amazingly they were rediscovered by the director Benjamin Geissler. But they were already emerging, peeping through layers of paint, as if reasserting themselves, as if wanting to be found.
Geissler later reconstructed these rooms and took them on tour – projecting the images onto the walls. He called this project: ‘The Picture Chamber of Bruno Schulz’
Looking at these unusual, rather subversive fairytale images, reminded me of another fairytale ‘chamber’ – Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ – a book that made a great impression on me.
Hers too is a dark and subversive re-telling, this time in prose, of the fairytales we think we all know. In his short but illuminating introduction to the book, Edmund Gordon suggests that this English writer is rather ‘un-English’ in her writing style. Perhaps true, but it is just this stylistic and thematic swimming against the tide, that I love about her!
