Monthly Archives: November 2006

New issues at Senses of Cinema and Bright Lights Film Journal

An unfortunate collusion of diversions and duties precludes the usual thorough reading (notice I didn’t type “in depth”; simply “thorough”) of new issues of two of the most important online publications on film out there, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema. —Greencine

Of these two Bright Lights has always been my favourite because of their queer sensibility which I find somewhat lacking at Senses of Cinema (although I must credit their Jack Sargeant article on Je t’aime moi non plus). Bright Lights features an interview with Camille Paglia and a special on cult films centered around Barbara Steele (my fave cult actress.)

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962 (2006) – Carlo Mollino
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

This came out last August. It concerns the photography of Mollino before his polaroid period. While nowhere near cheap, these Mollino photography anthologies are a good investment. The 2002 polaroid edition now commands prices between 300 and 700 euros (although the Hammilton gallery claims to sell it for 37 British pounds).

Book Description
The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino held photography dear–it was one of his great passions and favorite means of expression, and an excellent way to enjoy another great passion, women. The photographs gathered here were all set in one of Mollino’s private apartments, which he refurbished especially for this purpose. An advocate of retouching, as documented in his treatise The Message from the Dark Room, Mollino also painted on his photos or negatives. Most of what appears here has been revised, most bodies sculpted and reshaped, and visibly so now that time has altered the color of the prints, revealing his handiwork. This portfolio, spanning from 1956 to 1962, ends just before Mollino’s Polaroid work of the 60s. It was made using a Leica and color negative film, and has never been published before.

Digression: also check these Google galleries of the photography of Inez van Lamsweerde, Sze Tsung Leong and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Robots, automatons and modernism

Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (1995) – Harold B. Segel
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“While Carlo Collodi’s internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book’s appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses.”

It has been said that Carolo Lorenzini’s Pinocchio (1881 – 1883) was one of the inspiring themes of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. As in the allegory of the story, Pinocchio eventually went on to lead his own independent life, distinct from that of the author.

See also: robots

Notes on modernism

Literary Modernism and Photography: (2002) – Paul Hansom
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See also Sara Danius book on how modernism was influenced by new media in general.

Review
“Although literary modernism is famously associated with probing interiority while photography is two dimensional , the two moved into prominence concurrently, intersecting in ways that these essays explore. The volume considers documentary uses of the image; the relation between photographers’ aesthetics and their deployment of images; photography as a literary trope; and the transition into postmodernism.”–American Literature

Book Description
The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of Literary Modernism and Photography melds literary, cultural, and photographic theories to offer a challenging literary framework for this period. The essays address the problems surrounding the photograph’s ostensible “factuality”-its presumed ability to represent the real world-and suggest the difficulties inherent in aestheticizing the real into fictive forms, while also examining how the photograph shaped and reflected the new, modern artistic self-consciousness of figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Vanessa Bell, and Willa Cather. If literary modernism heralded a re-visioning of the world, then the photograph was the concrete rendering of this new vision.

A positive review of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses

WHEN IT IS published in the United States, John Carey’s polemic The Intellectuals and the Masses will probably startle reviewers. It certainly caused a flap when the British edition came out in the summer of 1992. Though an Oxford professor, Carey is a blunt literary populist: he argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement in literature was a corrosive fear and loathing of the masses. Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, T S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Graham Greene all strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, bestial, machinelike, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food. The intellectuals had to create this caricature to maintain social distinctions in an increasingly democratic and educated society. Many of these writers ultimately disposed of the masses through fantasies of wholesale extermination, usually rationalized on eugenic grounds. –Jonathan Rose quoted in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), this copy sourced http://www.autodidactproject.org

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

An article on postcards in relation to modernism:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gaugin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

Appreciative criticism

I completely agree with Steven Shaviro and the Reading Experience to”only write about books [and films etc…] I like, letting the ones I don’t be passed over in silence.”

One of the earliest people to defend this was André Bazin:

André Bazin is known as a proponent of appreciative criticism, wherein only critics who like a film can write a review of it, thus encouraging constructive criticism.

Jean Duvignaud on the nouveau roman

I had speculated before on the filmic qualities of the nouveau roman and see it confirmed here:

Thus, contemporary literature is moving towards a representation of man based on the event, where the action described is more important than any commentary, and the instantaneous revelation of reality is more important than its description. Such an attempt must end with turning the novel into a screenplay for a film which will never be made and the cinema into an unfolding of an event which never actually occurs. —The Sociology of Art, 1967

See also: sociology – art – visual arts

Edgar Morin on film

The Stars (1957) – Edgar Morin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Who can tell me who the lovely lady on the cover is? Barabara Steele?

I discovered this book via the excellent Midnight Movies (1983) by Jeffrey Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Book Description
Worshipped as heroes, treated as gods, movie stars are more than objects of admiration. A star’s influence touches on every aspect of ordinary life, dictating taste in fashion, lifestyle, and desire. Edgar Morin’s remarkable investigation into the cultural and social significance of the star system traces its evolution from the earliest days of the cinema – when stars like Chaplin, Garbo, and Valentino lived at a distance from their fans, far beyond all mortals, to the postwar era in which stars like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe became familiar and familial, less unapproachable but more moving, and concludes with an analysis of the furious religious adulation surrounding the life and death of James Dean. Ultimately, Morin finds, stars are more than just creations of the movie studios; they serve as intermediaries between the real and the imaginary. Today, with the cult of fame more pervasive and influential than ever, The Stars remains a vibrant, vital, and surprising work.

About the Author
Edgar Morin is director of studies emeritus at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and president of the Association pour la Pensee Complexe. He is the author of over thirty books and numerous articles on topics ranging from scientific method and anthropology to politics and popular culture.

Richard Howard, poet and critic, teaches at the School of Arts at Columbia University. He has translated many books of French criticism, including works by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Tzvetan Todorov. His most recent translations include Absinthe: A Novel and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist who was born in Paris on July 8, 1921 under his original name Edgar Nahoum. He is of Judeo-Spanish origin (Sefardi). He is known for the transdisciplinarity of his works, in that he covers a wide range of interests and dismisses the conventional boundaries between academic disciplines. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin [Nov 2006]

See also: 1957 – cult of personality – cult movie stars – movie stars – film – sociology

The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (1956) – Edgar Morin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Book Description
When The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man first appeared in 1956, the movies and the moviegoing experience were generally not regarded as worthy of serious scholarly consideration. Yet, French critic and social theorist Edgar Morin perceived in the cinema a complex phenomenon capable of illuminating fundamental truths about thought, imagination, and human nature – which allowed him to connect the mythic universe of gods and spirits present within the most primitive societies to the hyperreality emanating from the images projected on the screen. Now making its English-language debut, this audacious, provocative work draws on insights from poets, filmmakers, anthropologists, and philosophers to restore to the cinema the sense of magic first enjoyed at the dawn of the medium. Morin’s inquiry follows two veins of investigation. The first focuses on the cinematic image as the nexus between the real and the imaginary; the second examines the cinema’s re-creation of the archaic universe of doubles and ghosts and its power to possess, to bewitch, to nourish dreams, desires, and aspirations. “We experience the cinema in a state of double consciousness,” Morin writes, “an astonishing phenomenon where the illusion of reality is inseparable from the awareness that it is really an illusion.”

See also: 1956 – illusion – imagination – fantasy – film – sociology

Borat (2006)

Just saw Borat with my daughters (the youngest of which is 7 (quite surprisingly Belgium is the only country in Europe which rated the film ‘suitable for all ages’)). My girls loved it and so did I. Satire at its best, the joke is on the U.S.. Borat goes after Pamela Anderson but finds his true love. Hilarious. Every time Borat thinks of Pamela we get hear “Ederlezi” (and a live version here) of Time of the Gypsies, one of my fave tracks.

In search of a precedent for the Borat character we arrive at Paul Kaye’s Dennis Pennis, of whomI was a huge fan in the mid nineties. I remember one of Pennis’s line in an interview with Pierce Brosnan. “When I went to see GoldenEye, I was glued to my seat…….otherwise I would have left.”

Some Dennis at Youtube.