Monthly Archives: April 2009

“Antichrist,” a horror film by Lars von Trier

Via Tomorrow Museum comes the announcement of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist[1]

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-3mWmLAcsY]

Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist


Antichrist is a 2009 horror film directed and co-written by Lars von Trier. The film is about a couple who, after the death of child, retreat to a cabin in the woods where they encounter strange and terrifying occurrences. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, the film is scheduled for release on August 19, 2009 in France.

Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier, April 30, 1956) is a Danish film director. He is closely associated with the Dogme95 collective, calling for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice and towards technical minimalism, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches. Danish film in the 1990s was dominated by Lars von Trier. His films Europa, Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark received great international attention and were nominated for numerous awards. Von Trier’s 2000s Dogville was a radical departure from the naturalistic rules of Dogme 95, and instead the film invented a completely new style that draws from the theatre but yet remains eminently cinematic.

The antichrist is one under the direct control of the Devil, who will lead the abomination in the end times

Icon of Erotic Art #44

Femme damnée (huile, Louvre) Anonyme attribué à Octave Tassaert (1800-1874) by you.

Femme damnée

Icon of Erotic Art #44 is Femme damnée a painting by Octave Tassaert, or more accurately, ascribed to Tassaert.

Its title, Femmes damnées is also the title of at least two poems by Baudelaire, one from the collection Les Fleurs du mal and the other from Les Épaves. The subject matter of Femmes damnées (« À la pâle clarté ») is the forbidden love which is lesbian in nature. Its subtitle is Delphine and Hippolyte.

It is also the title of a 1885 sculpture by Rodin and a 1897 painting by Carlos Schwabe.

Icon of Erotic Art #43

Three Young White Men and a Black Woman by Dutch painter Christiaen van Couwenbergh

Three Young White Men and a Black Woman (1632) by Christiaen van Couwenbergh

To pronounce the painting above erotic art, is perhaps stretching the concept of eroticism. However after my illustrious predecessor Georges Bataille stated in 1957 “Eroticism … is assenting to life up to the point of death” there is not much stretching to be done. Truly one of the curiosities in the history of painting, here is Icon of Erotic Art #43 Three Young White Men and a Black Woman.

RIP Maurice Druon (1918 – 2009)

RIP Maurice Druon (1918 – 2009)

Tistou les pouces verts is a story by Maurice Druon illustrated by Jacqueline Duhême.

Tistou les pouces verts

Tistou les pouces verts is a story by Maurice Druon illustrated by Jacqueline Duhême. The story was animated by Production I.G.[1]

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAGL-bdIFfU]

Maurice Druon (b.April 23 1918 – d.April 14 2009) was a French novelist and member of Académie française.

Tistou les pouces verts is a story by Maurice Druon illustrated by Jacqueline Duhême.

Tistou les pouces verts

Surnamed “L’imagière des poètes,” Jacqueline Duhême is a French author and illustrator born in Versailles in 1927.

RIP Marilyn Chambers (1952 – 2009)

RIP Marilyn Chambers

Behind the Green Door

Marilyn Chambers (April 22, 1952 – April 12, 2009) was an American pornographic actress, exotic dancer, and vice-presidential candidate. She was best known for her 1972 hardcore debut porno chic title Behind the Green Door. For a brief time, mainstream cinema noticed Chambers, who in 1977 nabbed a major role in David Cronenberg‘s low-budget Canadian-made  body horror film Rabid.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-petXcizF1E]

Rabid

Behind the Green Door (1972) was the first hardcore pornographic movie widely released in the United States. Directed by the Mitchell brothers and starring Marilyn Chambers as Gloria Saunders, the movie depicts her abduction to a sex theater, where she is forced to perform various sexual acts in front of an audience, with characters including nuns and trapeze artists. The Mitchell brothers appear in the film as her kidnappers. In a psychedelic and colorful key sequence, an ejaculation on Chambers’ face is shown with semen flying through the air for seven minutes. Along with Deep Throat, released later in the same year, the movie launched the “porno chic” boom and started what is now referred to as the “Golden Age of Porn“. The production of the movie is dramatized in the movie Rated X[1] starring the brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as Artie and Jim.

Rabid (1977) – David Cronenberg [Amazon.com]

Picture shows Marilyn with orifice under an armpit, within it hidden a phallic stinger

Rabid is a 1977 body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg starring Marilyn Chambers and Robert A. Silverman. The plot is about a critically-injured woman (Chambers) victim of a motorcycle accident is taken to the plastic surgery clinic of Doctor Dan Keloid, where some of her intact tissue is treated to become “morphogenetically neutral” and grafted to fire-damaged areas of her body in the hope that they will differentiate and replace the damaged skin and organs.

Unfortunately, the woman’s body unexpectedly accepts the transplants: she develops an orifice under an armpit, within it hides a phallic stinger. She uses it to feed on the blood of other people, and afterwards wiping their memories of their incidents with her.

It soon is apparent that her every victim transforms to a rabid zombie whose bite spreads the disease, eventually causing the city to fall into chaos before the outbreak can be contained.

The history of American erotica: the Falstaff and Panurge presses.

Curious Books by Panurge Press advertisement from the classic work on American erotica Bookleggers and Smuthounds by you.

Promotional page for Panurge Press, from Bookleggers and Smuthounds

In the history of American erotica there are two private press publishers of curiosa, Falstaff Press[1] and Panurge Press. Both are well-documented in Bookleggers and Smuthounds, both were at the hight of their activity in the 1930s.

Interestingly, both of the presses’ names are derived from male fictional characters, in the case of Falstaff described as “fat, vainglorious, cowardly, jolly knight” and in the case of Panurge as “an exceedingly crafty knave, a libertine, and a coward.”

Both cowards, both anti-heros. Falstaff as much as Panurge, very much in tune with American modernist literature.

Today, following my binge of French erotica, I’ve been busy researching the “also avaible from this publisher” page from The Erotic History of France[2] by by Henry L. Marchand, a Panurge book.

The Sotadic Zone by Sir Richard Burton, published by Panurge Press by you.

The Sotadic Zone by Sir Richard Burton, Panurge Press edition, image courtesy vintagesleaze, the site that lives up to its title.

Other publications of Panurge include The Sotadic Zone by Sir Richard Burton, here with an illustration courtesy of vintagesleaze.com[3].

RIP Corín Tellado (1927 – 2009)

RIP Corín Tellado

María del Socorro Tellado López, known as Corín Tellado (April 25 1927, Viavélez, Asturias, Spain – April 11 2009, Gijón, Spain) was a prolific Spanish writer of romantic novels and photonovels that were best-sellers in several Spanish-language countries. She published more than 4,000 novels and sold more than 400-million books which have been translated into several languages. She is listed in the 1994 Guinness World Records as having sold the most books written in Spanish.

digressions:

the romance novel

A romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and generally has a happy ending.

One of the earliest romance novels was Samuel Richardson’s popular 1740 novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which was revolutionary on two counts: it focused almost entirely on courtship and did so entirely from the perspective of a female protagonist. In the next century, Jane Austen expanded the genre, and her Pride and Prejudice is often considered the epitome of the genre.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, first in 1813, is the most famous romance novel. Its opening is one of the most famous lines in English literature—”It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

On genre vs. literary

No matter how “literary“, all novels also fall within the bounds of one or more genres. Thus Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice is a romance; Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment is a psychological thriller; and James Joyce‘s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a coming-of-age story. These novels would usually be stocked in the general or possibly the classics section of a bookstore. Indeed, many works now regarded as literary classics were originally written as genre novels. —Sholem Stein

A Young Girl Reading (c.1776) by Fragonard

A Young Girl Reading (c.1776) by Fragonard

Literacy: with some exceptions, only a small percentage of the population in many countries was considered literate before the Industrial Revolution. Reading as a means of consuming fiction was at the height of its popularity in the 19th century.

Did women and men have different reading habits? Is there any truth in the claim that women have always read more fiction, women have often been pioneering professional writers and have produced a score of successful authors (Doff, Liala, Delly), yet have been patriarchally excluded from literary histories.

I have many questions regarding the nature of the literary experience. Perhaps I shoul read The Space of Literature?

The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, and translated into English in 1982 is central to the development of Blanchot‘s thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin.

Maurice Girodias @90

Maurice Girodias @90

Tropic of Cancer, first edition published by Maurice Girodias's father. Cover drawing by Girodias himself. by you.

In 1934, at the age of 15, Girodias drew the disturbing crab picture seen on the original cover of Tropic of Cancer.

The cover states: “Ne doit pas etre exposé en étalage ou en vitrine,” in English that is: “Cannot be displayed in show window.”

Ah … the good old “sous le manteau” days

“I remember a very funny story told to me by Maurice. He once had to take the train to Belgium, where he needed to bring a great deal of money. He had hidden the money bills in his shorts. Once on the train, he was overcome by diarrhea and forgot to remove the money from his shorts when he went to the toilet with the unfortunate result of soiling this small fortune. He cleaned the money as best as he could and afterwards reserved those bills to use as — quite literally — dirty money.” —Sholem Stein

Maurice Girodias (12 April 19193 July 1990), was the founder of the The Olympia Press. At one time he was the owner of his father’s Obelisk Press, and spent most of his productive years in Paris.

Girodias’s involvement with his father’s business started early. In 1934, at the age of 15, Girodias drew the disturbing crab picture seen on the original cover of Tropic of Cancer. After his father’s early death in 1939, Girodias took over publishing duties, and at the age of 20 managed to survive Paris, World War II, Occupation and paper shortages.

The Affaire Miller ended with Girodias out of jail, but bankrupt and no longer in control of his company.

Olympia Press

Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebadged version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic novels and avant-garde literary works, and is best known for the first print of Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita.

Most, if not all, Olympia Press publications were promoted and packaged as “Traveller’s Companion” books, usually with simple text-only covers, and each book in the series was numbered.

Olympia Press was also the first publisher willing to print the controversial William S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch. Other notable works included J. P. Donleavy‘s The Ginger Man; the French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille and Story of O by Pauline Réage.

English-language presses in Paris

The Enlish-language literary expatriates depended on the presence in Paris of a substantial number of English-language presses, periodicals, and bookstores. These small presses included such famous names as the Contact Press (of American poet Robert McAlmon), the Three Mountains Press (of Bill Bird), the Hours Press (of Nancy Cunard), the Black Sun Press (of Harry and Caresse Crosby), the Obelisk Press (of Jack Kahane), and the Olympia Press (of Maurice Girodias, son of Kahane).

Landru @140

Henri Désiré Landru (born April 12, 1869 in Paris, France – executed February 25, 1922 in Versailles, France) was a notorious French serial killer and real-life Bluebeard. Landru was the inspiration for Charlie Chaplin‘s film Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

Landru by you.

Henri Désiré Landru (born April 12, 1869 in Paris, France – executed February 25, 1922 in Versailles, France) was a notorious French serial killer and real-life Bluebeard who was guillotined for at least 11 murdered women. Landru was the inspiration for Charlie Chaplin‘s film Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The method of lonely hearts killing was also used by the real-life couple portrayed in The Honeymoon Killers.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72B8SAe8Pk4&]

I was surprised to find in that film, Verdoux, references to Schopenhauer. When Verdoux is told that he appears to dislike women, he protests: “On the contrary, I love women, but I don’t admire them. He goes on with a chthonic trope and adds “Women are of the earth, realistic, dominated by physical facts.”

Last time I heard [an implied]  Schopenhauer mentioned in a film was Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Verdoux thus becomes World Cinema Classics #95.

P.S. There is a pretty good YouTumentary on the guillotine here[1] with an incredible soundtrack, “Élégie” by Igor Stravinsky.

Bernd Eichinger @60

Bernd Eichinger @60

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG6sXLQwlJU&]

Christiane F. (1982, directed by Uli Edel)

To the sound of “Heroes” by Bowie

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyCi4cObmI]

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008, directed by Uli Edel)

Bernd Eichinger (born April 11, 1949 in Neuburg an der Donau) is a German film producer and director. He attended film school in the 1970s, and bought a stake in the fledgling studio company Constantin Film but continues to produce some films independently (for example The Downfall). He has only directed two movies himself. Eichinger’s latest film is about the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF) based on the book Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (“The Baader-Meinhof Complex“) by Stefan Aust. He debuted as producer with The Wrong Move by Wim Wenders.

Some well-known films produced by Eichinger include: