Monthly Archives: February 2007

Corpo, bellezza, sensualita’

Via Griseldaonline, some high quality scans of erotic art.

Gorgon and the Heroes (1897) – Giulio Aristide Sartorio
Image sourced here.

A Francisco Goya, La maya desnuda, 1789-1805 Madrid Museo del Prado

B Jean Honore Fragonard, I fortunati casi dell’altalena, 1766 Londra Wallace Collection

C Jean Ingres, La grande odalisca, 1814 Parigi Louvre

D Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 Parigi Museo d’Orsay

E Pierre Puvis de Chevannes, Ragazze al mare, 1879 Parigi Museo d’Orsay

F Gustav Klimt, I pesci rossi, 1901-1902 Soleure Museo di Belle Arti

G Henri Matisse, Odalisca con le magnolie, 1924 Coll. privata

2 IL CORPO “ALTRO”

A Caravaggio, Testa di Medusa, 1590-1600 Firenze Galleria degli Uffizi

B Jusepe de Ribera, Lo storpio, 1642 Parigi Louvre

C William Blake, Nabucodonosor, 1795 Londra Tate Gallery

D Francisco Goya, Due vecchi che mangiano, 1820-23 Madrid Museo del Prado

E Joseph W. Turner, La morte su di un cavallo pallido, 1830 Londra Tate Gallery

F Odilon Redon, Il ciclope, 1895-1900 Otterlo Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller

G Giulio Aristide Sartorio, La Gorgone e gli eroi, 1897 Roma Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna

H Alberto Savinio, L’annunciazione, 1932 Coll.privata

3 IL CORPO MISTICO

A Jan Van Eyck, Madonna del cancelliere Rolin, 1439 Parigi Louvre

B Alessandro Botticelli, Paradiso, Canto VI, 1490-95

C Michelangelo Buonarroti, Crocifissione con Maria e San Giovanni, Parigi Louvre

D Stefano Maderno, Santa Cecilia, 1600

E William Blake, Pietà, 1795 Londra Tate Gallery

F Caspar David Friedrich, Monaco in riva al mare, 1810 Berlino Nationalgalerie

G Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1850 Londra Tate Gallery

4 IL CORPO VIOLATO

A Francisco Goya, La fucilazione del 3 maggio 1808, 1814 Madrid Museo del Prado

B Theodore Gericault, La Zattera della medusa, 1819 Parigi Louvre

C Francisco Goya, Saturno, 1820-23 Madrid Museo del Prado

D Amos Nattini, Inferno, Canto III, 1919-30

E Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 Madrid Museo Reina Sofia

5 IL CORPO E L’ANIMA

A Edward Munch, L’urlo, 1893 Oslo Munchmuseet

B Giovanni Segantini, Le cattive madri, 1894 Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum

C Alberto Martini, La finestra di psiche nella casa del poeta, 1952 Oderzo Pinacoteca Civica Alberto Martini

D Hans Bellmer, Donna dalle braccia articolate, 1965 Roma Studio d’arte

E Paul Delvaux, La nascita del giorno, 1937 Venezia Collezione Peggy Guggenheim

F Rene Magritte, Luce polare, 1927 Roma Collezione Ponti Loren

6 IL CORPO DEGLI ANTICHI

A Diadoumenos, Atene Museo Nazionale

B Alessandro Botticelli, Venere, 1482 circa Galleria Sabauda

C Antonio Canova, Psiche rianimata dal bacio di amore, 1793 Parigi Louvre

D Edward Burne Jones, La ruota della fortuna, 1875-83 Parigi Museo d’Orsay

E Gustave Moreau, Galatea, 1880 Parigi Museo Gustave Moreau

The cinematic Losfeld

Anatole Dauman: Argos films : souvenir-écran (1989) – Anatole Dauman, Jacques Gerber
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

One aspect of the history of the art of filmmaking remains largely unwritten. The financial aspects of filmmaking, namely the history of producers and distributors of films. Compared to the book industry, the film industry is infinite times more capital intensive. So while it is easy, almost risk-free and relatively cheap to write a novel that satisfies minority tastes, to produce a film that caters to minority audiences requires much more money and is a much riskier undertaking. Tyler Cowen was the first to point out this rather obvious but often overlooked aspect of filmmaking in his book In Praise of Commercial Culture which deals with the economics of culture production and consumption.

But what is a film producer? A film producer’s job is analogous to that of a publisher in the book industry: he finances the final product, a cultural artifact. But what is a film distributor? A film distributor is someone who buys the rights to a certain film in order to distribute it in his own country or region. Typically, he will have to market the film, provide subtitles for it and find screening opportunities. The analogy in book publishing is the role of a foreign publishing house that translates a book and distributes/markets it in its own territory.

Both a producer and a distributor try to reconcile the art of commerce and taste. In matters of taste I always embrace the heady nobrow cocktail of high art, eroticism, horror, philosophy, experimentalism, counterculture, subversion and avant-garde. This mix is a minority taste, I am well aware of that but some people have tried to cater to people of my (but more importantly their) taste. In publishing, this person is best exemplified by French publisher Eric Losfeld.

So I wonder: who is the Eric Losfeld of cinema?

In search of Losfeld’s cinematic alter ego I want to highlight the careers of film producers and/or distributors such as Anatole Dauman in France; Antony Balch and Richard Gordon in the U. K.; Roger Corman, Ben Barenholtz and Radley Metzger in North America. These entrepreneurs ran businesses that have provided us with films that mix high and low culture or have financed their high art productions with the proceeds of their more commercial and exploitative ventures.

Consider then the entrepeneurs listed above as the beginning of an ongoing quest for the cinematic Losfeld which I hope to continue over the coming months. One name that comes to mind is Germany’s Bernd Eichinger, who has produced cinematical adaptations of literary fiction by well regarded authors such as Süskind, Umberto Eco, Ian Mc Ewan and Houellebecq as well as more exploitative films such as Christiane F. and Resident Evil. Eichinger has also announced he would be making a film about the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF).

Please feel free to comment if you know of distributors/producers who fit the ‘cinematic Losfeld’ description.

Perhaps in 5 years from now?

Jeanne Goupil in Don’t Deliver Us From Evil

I’ve said this before, the past is a much bigger place than the present, by which I mean that it is easier to find enticing books, films and music of by-gone eras than from the present era. Mike’s Esotika blog, one of the recent film blogs that have caught my eye gives ample attention to the past, and more importantly manages to discover and review films from that same past that are unknown to me (and I’ve done quite some searching over the few years). The latest entry on Mike’s blog is a review of the 1971 French film Don’t Deliver us from Evil. The film is directed by Joël Séria and upon seeing stills such as this, this and this one, I was excited. The first thing I do when a new name pops up is check whether it’s referenced at Jahsonic.com and yes, I was able to find it in the title listing of Amos Vogel’s Film As a Subversive Art. [The plot is revealed in Vogel’s write-up]

What was it that excited me? First of all, the title, any title with the world evil in it attracts me (which reminds me that I still need to document Barbey’s story Le Bonheur dans le crime of his Diaboliques collection). Second, the aforementioned stills and especially this one, in which the girls are reading that classic of transgressive literature Maldoror.

After checking for connections (my motto being: “Wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything”) on my own site, I go out on the net and try to find more. First Wikipedia and IMDb, the French Wikipedia has this, IMDb this (sorted by ratings) and subsequently on the wild wild web. Where we find this: Joël Séria : Filmographie complète d’un obsédé sexuel with these 1, 2 [nsfw].

In an ideal world I would be able to connect to an online video on demand service provider and view the entire oeuvre of Séria. Perhaps in 5 years from now? At present, not even Youtube features clips of Séria’s films.

A teaser of the film:

Anne and Lore are two barely pubescent teens who attend a Catholic Boarding school. While seeming sweet, well behaved, and innocent from all appearances, the two have actually devoted themselves to Satan. While they are at school, the two intentionally ‘sin’ as often as possible without getting caught. They steal clothing and religious reliquaries in order to use in future Satanic rituals, they confess sins which they haven’t committed, they spy on the nuns, and they read transgressive literature under their covers once everybody else is asleep. Their life at the boarding school is a constant joke to them, and they giggle at everybody else’s misfortunes and the fact they are getting away with so much sin. Once summer break comes, their activities begin to get a little more serious.

And a review by Kinocite:

As a whole, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil / Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal comes across as something akin to Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows as Luis Buñuel or Catherine Breillat might have imagined it – no bad thing, especially to those nay-sayers who would deny that European cult cinema of this sort has anything to actually say.

And all this time I was thinking that the film reminded me of another film. And while I suspected that my perceived connection was maybe too far fetched, DVDmaniacs.net confirms that the film was based on the same events that inspired Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures:

Never before released on home video in the United States and making its world premiere on home video in its uncut form for the first time ever, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil is a very loose adaptation of the notorious story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hammond, the two murderous maids who also inspired Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (still arguably his best film…. Hobbits and giant apes be damned). While there are some similarities between the two films, Joël Séria’s take on the story, his feature film debut, is very different in tone, execution, and theme as it manages to bring a far more blasphemous interpretation of the events into play.

Closing remarks: while researching Don’t Deliver I re-stumbled on film producer Antony Balch who was one of the first British entrepreneurs to embrace art, horror and exploitation films with equal enthusiasm, and who appropriately distributed Don’t Deliver in the U. K. .

Unrelated earcandy.