Monthly Archives: October 2007

Batailleana #1 and 2

Ma Mère by Bataille, cover by publisher domaine francais

Ma Mère by Bataille, cover by publisher 10 | 18

#1) 10/18 is a publisher in France (with a sub collection named domaine français). Their series of Georges Bataille novels are illustrated by Hans Bellmer. One of the nicer book illustrations around. I like the overall feel of the design. Can someone tell me more about the graphic designer over at the 10/18 publishing imprint?

Here is the 10/18 cover of Madame Edwarda.

#2) In 1997 André S. Labarthe produced a documentary on Georges Bataille. The focus was Bataille’s extreme, perverse, surreal story ‘Madame Edwarda‘ where the prostitute reveals that she *is* God (‘je suis DIEU’) – perfectly merging the sacred and profane, a key notion for Bataille … in the final section of the clip, the infamous Chinese torture victim is shown … in his last work, the heavily-illustrated ‘Tears of Eros,’ Bataille said this about these photos:

“What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish-but which at the same time delivered me from it-was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.”

posted by hiperf289 (check his other Youtube clips)

Cinematic effects in pre-cinema literature

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Morning (1813) Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Der letzte Mann

The Last Laugh (1924) – Murnau

The link between these two pictures is The Haunted Screen, 1952 a film history book by Lotte H. Eisner, which I acquired over the weekend, and which holds that “it is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique [cinematography] merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.”

A revelation to me were Eisner’s reflections on cinematic effects in pre-cinema literature in such romantic novels as Lucinde, Flegeljahre and Heinrich Von Ofterdingen.

Cherchez la femme #1

Colette Peignot

Unidentified photo of Colette Peignot sourced here.

“I believe in our life together . . . I believe in it the way I believe in everything that brought us together: in the most profound depths of your darkness and of mine. I revealed everything about myself to you. Now that it gives you pleasure to laugh at it, to soil it––this leaves me as far away from anger as it is possible to be. Scatter, spoil, destroy, throw to the dogs all that you want: you will never affect me again. I will never be where you think you find me, where you think you’ve finally caught me in a chokehold that makes you come. . . . As for me I am beyond words, I have seen too much, known too much, experienced too much for appearance to take on form. You can do anything you want, I will not be hurt.” Colette Peignot in a letter to Georges Bataille via Laure: The “True Whore” as Muse by Jason DeBoer

Laure [Colette Peignot] began her affair with Bataille in 1934, and it proved to become one of the more tormented love stories of modern letters. Their correspondence reveals a mutually influential sharing of transgressive ideas: she was the woman of action, and he was the man versed in scholarly knowledge. Her uncompromising, anguished lifestyle proved very inspirational to Bataille, especially Laure’s own infatuation with the sacred and communication, two important ideas in Bataille’s later work. —source

Colette was born 104 years ago today.

Book of the month #3

Over at ArtandPopularCulture book of the month is:

AnthologyOfBlackHumor.jpg
Anthology of Black Humor (1940) – André Breton

While I am antipathetic to André Breton as a person – his misogyny, his homophobia, his arrogance, his misguided tyranny – I have learned to appreciate his work of tracing the literary and artistic antecedents of surrealism. In this book he successfully delineates a corpus of writers that have shaped the sensibilities central to cult fiction.

Happy birthday Enki

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtxBXILSY4M]

Enki Bilal mix (background music ID anyone?)

Enki Bilal belongs to the French/European graphic novel tradition (brought to the U. S. via Heavy Metal magazine in the late 1970s) which also holds Jean Giraud, Jacques Tardi, Guido Crepax, Georges Pichard, Milo Manara and Tanino Liberatore‘s ultra-violent RanXerox.

Bilal turns 56 today.

Happy birthday Laura

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGNvAsImwn8]

The Laura Gemser interview from the Alex Cox documentary “A Hard Look”

What a pleasure to hear Alex “Repo Man” Cox’s voice again. Alex was responsible for a substantial part of my 1980s and 1990s film education with his show Moviedrome. Laura turns 67 today, let’s hear it for Laura. “A Hard Look” is a documentary tv film about the Emmanuelle movies, looking at their making as well as their social and cultural impact. The Emanuelle films‘ primary interest is paratextual: its poster art, the scenery, the OSTs, the odd characters.

World dance music classics #7

Today, on the occasion of Grandmaster Flash‘s 49th birthday:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6e9G-ump3Y]

The Message (1982) – Grandmaster Flash

“The Message” is an old school hip hop song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released in 1982. The song’s lyrics were some of the first in the genre of rap to talk about the struggles and the frustrations of living in the ghetto. The song’s chorus of “Don’t push me ‘cuz I’m close to the edge” has become one of the most well known choruses in rap music history.

See previous entries in this series.

Everything you know is wrong: uncanny Spoerri

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Something Else Press

Perhaps Spoerri‘s fascination with displacing the horizontal with the vertical began when he created the first “tableau-piège” in 1960, “The Resting Place of the Delbeck Family”, by gluing a number of dinner-table objects on a board [1] and then hanging it on a wall. Or it could have begun with “Dylaby” in 1962 [2], in which he turned the orientation of a whole room clockwise. Objects as well as actors were put in a horizontal position whereas the visitors stayed vertically according to gravity. Being the only ones that had this orientation they felt wrong however.