Monthly Archives: July 2007

Wet Dream Film Festivals

Poster for first the Wet Dream Film Festival (1970) in Amsterdam

At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Amsterdam was somewhat of a countercultural capital. It was where Suck, The First European Sex Paper was published. Around this time two Wet Dream Film Festivals were organized. The first took place in the autumn of 1970, It had an international jury consisting of Germaine Greer, Jay Landesman, Richard Neville, Michael Zwerin, Didi Wadidi and Al Goldstein. The first prize went to Bodil Jensen in A Summer Day. The “Blast from the Past” award went to Jean Genet‘s film: Un chant d’amour. The Walt Disney Memorial Award went to Christie Eriksson‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Other prizes were awarded for Peter Flemming, Walter Burns and Falcon Stewart. The Second Wet Dream Film Festival was held in 1971 between October 20 and October 25, again organized by Jim Haynes. Festival jury included Germaine Greer, Al Goldstein, William Holtrop, Didi Wadidi, Anna Beke and Michael Zwerin plus new-comers Mama Cass, Roland Topor, Heathcote Williams, William Burroughs, Carlos Clarens, Tomi Ungerer, Betty Dodson, Marie-France and Miss Angel. Jens Frosen (“Quiet Days in Clichy”) documented the event. Lou Sher, president of Sherpix, who picked up “Adultery For Fun and Profit” at the first festival, put up $1,000 for the first prize this year plus a promise of U.S. theatrical distribution. Organizer Haynes told Variety: “What most people don’t understand about last year’s Wet Dream Festival is that we are not concerned with pornographic aspects primarily, but with the libertarian concept. It is an attack on paternalism because it asks why people can’t see any image they want.”

This post is dedicated to the work of Earl Kemp.

Talking body parts

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPUr94zcsaw]

Timmy and the Talking Body Parts

The Residents present a series of very short videos following the adventures of a 9 year old kid named Timmy. Talking body parts are a trope in the fantastique. Examples include Marquis which features extensive conversations of Sade talking to his genitals (and the genitals talking back to him), other fiction which employs the trope of the talking body parts are Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs and the The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) by Denis Diderot.

Téléchat

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

Téléchat

In 1983 Roland Topor creates with Henri Xhonneux the popular French TV series Téléchat, a parody of news broadcasts featuring puppets of a cat and an ostrich. Henri Xhonneux (1945 – March 1995) was a filmmaker. He used the pseudonym Joseph W. Rental. He is best known for his animation film Marquis and and the surreal television series Téléchat. I’ve mentioned Marquis here.

Connect the dots

An article by Hannah Neumann for The Fed on erotic connect the dots. She mentions Benjamin Stout’s lithographs for The Lustful Turk and Les Flagelants Féminins. I was unable to find more info on Stout.

“Connect-the-dots (contemporarily known as ‘cunny constellations’ or ‘points d’amour’) were conceived as a method of bypassing obscenity laws in eighteenth-century Britain. Although they were commercially successful, the belief that their distributors were immune to arrest and seizure by the police was quickly proven false. As William Lazenby, a contemporary publisher of illegal erotica recalled, “We hadn’t reckoned on the coppers’ numeric acumen. T’was not long ‘fore we’d nary a tuppence earn with the rise in confiscations.” By the mid-1880s, erotic connect-the-dots had been abandoned in favor of less cryptic illustrations.” —Hannah Neumann

Flake, Weiss, Klossowski, de Noailles

Der Marquis de Sade translated by Pierre Klossowski
from Otto Flake’s 1930 German original.

Der Marquis de Sade is said to have been one of the sources on which Peter Weiss based his play Marat/Sade.

Flake thanks Maurice Heine, Sade connoisseur and Vicomte de Noailles, owner of the original manuscript.

Marie-Laure and Charles

Arthur Anne Marie Charles (26 September 1891- 28 April 1981), better known as Vicomte de Noailles married Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim in 1923. They were famous art patrons and owned Villa Noailles built by Robert Mallet-Stevens between 1923 and 1933 in Hyères in the South of France.

Marie-Laure

 Marie-Laure, Vicomtesse de Noailles (31 October, 1902 – 29 January, 1970), was one of the 20th century‘s most daring and influential patrons of the arts, noted for her associations with Salvador Dalí, Balthus, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, Francis Poulenc, Jean-Michel Frank and others as well as her tempestuous life and eccentric personality. She and her husband financed Ray’s film Mystery of the Chateau of Dice (1929), Poulenc’s Aubade (1929), Bunuel and Dali’s film L’Age d’Or (1930), and Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930).

My girls and fashion

Bonnie, Fara, Fee

Today was my introduction to the work of Tim Walker, which is wonderfully theatrical, fantastique and narrative, without seeming far-fetched. The current issue of Stern Fotografie has a special on his work. Here is a preview:

Femina Ridens

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIIHV3f0B2M]

The Frightened Woman

Femina Ridens (Frightened Woman, 1969) is an Italian film by director Piero Schivazappa, displaying a huge vagina dentata from Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Hon” in his set design by (start at 1’10”). The film was distributed by Radley Metzger‘s Audubon Films. The male character, Dotto (Philippe Leroy), invites a young female employee Mary (Dagmar Lassander) to his modish house for a weekend of S&M. The tables slowly turn to the point where Mary becomes the willing master (similar to the dynamic power shift in Losey’s The Servant, 1963). The film is reviewed in Psychopathia Sexualis in Italian Sinema (1968 – 1972).