Monthly Archives: September 2006

Rationales for movie sex and nudity

Found a good article titled Rationales for movie sex and nudity:

“To avoid the charge of presenting scenes involving “gratuitous sex and nudity,” Hollywood filmmakers often suggest a reason (or at least an occasion) for their stars’ behavior, offering various rationales for movie sex and nudity during each decade of the twentieth century.”

In many ways this phenomenon was also apparent in European art from the Middle Ages until the 1850s. But the rise of modern art and the related rise of realism in the arts in France changed all that. Artists no longer wished to hide behind artistic pretexts to represent nudity and eroticism. An important example of this is Manet’s Olympia.

The boing boing effect

Vintage Italian pulp comix cover art

Curt of Groovy Age of horror says:

Thanks to FLOG!, Groovy Age just got its first BoingBoing hit so traffic’s through the roof. If you’re here from one of those links, looking for all those Italian pulp comics covers, HERE THEY ARE (indexed links to the relevant posts). For related sites, check out the “fumetti” links in the sidebar (I can also recommend Arboles muertos y mucha tinta).

Boing Boing’s post said:

Sites like The Groovy Age of Horror showcase a lot of [Italian pulp comics cover art] and link to other galleries of pulp art masterpieces.

Boing Boing, which according to Technorati is the 5th most popular blog in the world (66,490 links from 20,790 blogs), has put Groovy Age of Horror in the spotlight. Its traffic shot up from an average of 250 daily visitors to 1,100. I’ve been a fan of Groovy Age for over a year now. In a kind of mission statement in 2005 Curt described Groovy Age of Horror as follows.

“My real ambition, a large part of what I want to achieve here, […], is the creation of the Groovy Age of Horror as a kind of escapist fantasy world, sort of like the Hammerscape. In a sense, I’d like the story-worlds of all these novels I review to melt into one grand, sleazy, sexy, monster-haunted, cult-ridden, distinctly 1960s–1970s world of groovy horror. And I’d like the images I post–whether paperback covers or fumetti or movie posters or screenshots–to serve as windows on that world. When you come here, I want you to feel like you’re going to that place, and when you click away, I want you to feel like you’ve been somewhere dark, fun, and fascinating. That’s the experience I’d love to evoke.” –Curt via http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/ [Jun 2005]

Groovy Age of Horror is your best point of entry for a very lively internet community (another center of which is the Yahoo! group Euro Trash Paradise) dedicated to 1960s and 1970s pulp culture.

Also watch out for Curt’s upcoming novel.

Modernist theater

“The theoretical, technological, and social changes that affected the nineteenth-century theatre led to an unprecedented outpouring of dramatic creativity across the continent of Europe. Henrik Ibsen, generally considered the first modern playwright, wrote in Norwegian; August Strindberg, Ibsen’s rival and contemporary, wrote in Swedish. Anton Chekhov, perhaps the most influential of early modern playwrights, wrote in Russian. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of this disparate group of writers, in the aggregate they forged a new theatrical world.” —Contexts and comparisons

See also: Realism in literature – theatre – 1800s literature –

A Blue Book (1907 – 1912) – August Strindberg

“The pupil asked: “What is a woman-hater?” The teacher answered: “I do not know. But the expression is used as a term of reproach by noodles, for those who say what all think. Noodles are those men who cannot come near a woman without losing their heads and becoming faithless. They purchase the woman’s favour by delivering up the heads of their friends on silver chargers; and they absorb so much femininity, that they see with feminine eyes and feel with feminine feelings. There are things which one does not say every day, and one does not tell one’s wife what her sex is composed of. But one has the right to put it on paper sometimes. Schopenhauer has done it the best, Nietzsche not badly, Joséphin Péladan is the master. Thackeray wrote Men’s Wives, but the book was ignored. Balzac unmasked Caroline in Physiologie du Mariage, and Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale; Otto Weininger, having discovered the treachery when he was twenty, did not wait for the revenge but left the scene.” — August Strindberg in A Blue Book (1907 – 1912)

August Strindberg (1849-1912), the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet and painter, wrote A Blue Book towards the end of his life. It came out in four parts, beginning in 1907. Strindberg originally intended it as a kind of universal breviary, with a passage of wisdom for each day of the year. As he wrote the plan changed and the book became a motley collection of thoughts, observations and scientific speculation. Most of the book takes the form of a dialogue between “the Pupil”, Johannes Damascenus, and “the Teacher”. Johannes Damascenus is more or less a pseudonym, in the style of Kierkegaard, for Strindberg and the Teacher appears to be a proxy for Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic and theologian to whom Strindberg dedicated the book. —Consciousness, Literature and the Arts