Category Archives: art

Exploitation culture by region


Hank Janson pulp cover

American exploitation culture is well-known throughout the world, European exploitation culture less so.

The previous posts on Stewart Home and Richard Allen led me to Hank Janson [Google Gallery] and Reginald Heade [Google gallery], the latter two examples of 1950s British exploitation culture.

Exploitation by region: By region: American exploitation – British exploitation – European exploitation – French exploitation – German exploitation – Italian exploitation – Japanese exploitation

My interest in regional pulp culture is what it tells about the region where it is produced. In search of national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture; regional stereotypes deduced from regional fears and desires (horror and eroticism).

The Assault on Culture (1988) – Stewart Home

The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (1988) – Stewart Home
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Stewart Home (born 1962) is a British fiction writer, subcultural pamphleteer, underground art historian, and activist. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model and hostess who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate. She knew such people as the writer and situationist Alexander Trocchi. Stewart was put up for adoption soon after his birth.

The Assault on Culture, originally written but rejected as a B.A. thesis, is an underground art history sketching Stewart Home’s ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-World War II fringe radical art and political currents, and including – for the first time in a book – a tactically manipulated history of Neoism (including character assassinations of individual Neoist) that was continued in the later book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis. Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at that time at least, been under-documented. Like Home’s other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Home

See also: Lettrism – Situationism – assault – culture – 1988

8 Women (2002) – François Ozon

8 Women (2002) – François Ozon
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I saw this on Belgian TV yesterday evening, for about 20 minutes before I fell asleep (not out of boredom). I liked what I saw (but I like nearly everything by Ozon) and it reminded me of Agatha Christie (see quote below) and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (the clothes and general fifties styling).

As for the influences of the movie, they are numerous. Of course, this film is an adaptation from a play that evokes the Agatha Christie universe but Ozon felt like scattering his movie with all kinds of allusions: Vincente Minelli, Douglas Sirk (the deer in the garden). These allusions are especially linked to French culture: the French TV program “au théâtre ce soir” but also Jacques Demy (the bright colors, the songs) and French cinema before the “new wave”. More than allusions, they are tributes from a director who once said “I don’t care about new-wave”. –dbdumonteil via http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283832/usercomments [Oct 2006]

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_femmes

See also: Ozon – film – 2002 films – French cinema

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) – Chan-wook Park

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) – Chan-wook Park
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I saw this on MTV Europe (an Asian cinema feature) yesterday evening. Impressive, but not as good as for example Alex van Warmerdam. All in all a surreal, film noirish, arty affair.

The previous Korean film I had seen was the 1999 Lies, which I had chosen because of its subject matter (although the respresentation of which disappointed me). What I liked best about Lies was its breaking of the fourth wall: excerpts from interviews with the author and cast are sometimes inserted between scenes and we see a girl filmed after the ‘cut’ signal of a particularly emotional scene (she continues crying).

After having seen these two films it appears to me that these two Korean filmmakers take the art of art film as seriously as European filmmakers did in the sixties.

Wikipedia: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

See also: revenge – film – 2002 – Korea

In search of cinematic realism

While Kracauer and Bazin located cinematic realism in distraction and plotlessness, which they saw as structurally analogous to the unscripted, indeterminate, ‘underplotted’ nature of reality, many recent films dilute even further the modality or intensity of narrative, spatializing time into disconnected and, through editing, treated as parallel narrative strands. This kind of indeterminacy proceeds from overplotting, from an excess of disconnected, reversible (i.e. meaningless) phenomena, events, and characters which acquire a minimal, purely formal kind of significance by virtue of being placed alongside one another: their only ‘meaning’ consists in their allegedly simultaneous existence with other phenomena, events and characters. –Realism in European Film Theory and Cinema (3/1/06; collection) by Trifonova, Temenuga via http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/2006-02/0017.html [Oct 2006]

Theories of Film (1974) – Andrew Tudor
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The next chapter [of Theories of Film, Andrew Tudor.(NY: Viking, Cinema One Series, 1974)] is called “The Aesthetics of Realism: Bazin and Kracauer.” Tudor is sympathetic to Kracauer’s desire to formulate a consistent aesthetic system, but argues that Kracauer is hopelessly confused and in any case perpetually hedging his bets (seesawing on the question of whether “realism” involves being real in a certain sense or only appearing real). Among Kracauer’s assumptions which Tudor cannot accept is one that Kracauer shares with Bazin. An essentialist approach posits that a medium has a “nature”—in film’s case, a photographic nature which determines its “natural affinity” with recording and revealing reality. Tudor cannot accept this non-social aesthetic of the “real.” He sees in both Kracauer and Bazin a combination of positivism and romantic faith in nature, which is in any case ultimately anti-cinematic. –William Rothman via http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC09folder/TheoriesofFilm.html [Oct 2006]

I must mention a final slender point of disagreement. By including Murnau and Dreyer as realists Bazin is falling into the same trap that Siegfried Kracauer does when he accepts certain fantastical/formalistic scenes when they are in the proper “realist” context, such as a dream or a specific point of view (Tudor 94). Bazin is on shaky ground when he removes Nosferatu and The Passion of Joan of Arc from the expressionistic mode on the frail basis of Nosferatu‘s on-location photography and Dreyer’s refrain from the use of make-up for his actors (Bazin, What is Cinema Vol.1 109-110). What then becomes of Nosferatu‘s sinister shadows, fast motion and negative photography, and expressionistic acting, and The Passion of Joan of Arc‘s abstraction of space and extreme reliance on close-ups? In neither case do the slim realist tendencies compensate for the overwhelming artistic intervention, as does Welles’ spatial realism for example. Both films fail to completely qualify for either of Bazin’s realistic camps –the documentary- like “pure” realism or the spatial realism. Although one can argue that Nosferatu is ‘more realist’ than other expressionist films of the time, and that The Passion of Joan of Arc is so unique and iconoclastic in style, that the affect on the spectator is one of realism. –Donato Totaro via http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/bazin_intro.html [Oct 2006]

Coldness and seriousness in Kubrick’s films

Stanley Kubrick – A Life in Pictures (2001) – Jan Harlan
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Saturday evening the Belgian TV station Canvas aired Stanley Kubrick – A Life in Pictures, a 2001 documentary film by Jan Harlan (Kubrick’s executive producer and brother-in-law) on the life of Stanley Kubrick. The documentary made me realize why I like Kubrick only moderately.

Stanley Kubrick is a universally acclaimed director. His filmography includes Eyes Wide Shut (1999), The Shining (1980), Barry Lyndon (1975), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Lolita (1962). Of these my favourites are A Clockwork Orange (because of the subject matter), The Shining (because it’s a horror film), Eyes Wide Shut (because its slowness teased me and because of its erotic subject matter) and Barry Lyndon (I don’t know why, I saw it when I was in my teens and I have fond memories of it since). Kubrick liked classical music. A lot. He used works from composers such as Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian, Beethoven, Shostakovich and many others.

Are Kubrick’s films cold and unemotional?

“This is perhaps the most often-stated criticism of Kubrick’s work. … While, ironically, Kubrick’s films abound with scenes of emotional extremity and “outrageous” performances, such as: Jack Nicholson in The Shining; George C. Scott in Dr Strangelove; Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange, etc. it’s much more common for critics to cite Kubrick’s “icy distance” from his “cold, unemotional characters” as the defining characteristic of his work.” —http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index4.html [Oct 2006]

Are Kubrick’s films playful or serious?

Serious, dead serious. And that and their coldness and unemotionalism are the two main reasons that I like Kubrick only a moderately. He is just as serious and unemotional as most high modernists. If I compare his work to two other directors born in 1928, the other two win: Nicolas Roeg and Marco Ferreri; although I must say that towards the end of the documentary I grew increasingly curious about who Kubrick actually was, what made him choose the subjects he chose, why this interest in human sordidness and why did he abhor the feelgood feeling we all sometimes enjoy in film.

Stanley Kubrick eschews sentimentalism and the “feelgood”. He favors image over discourse or narrative, and his images have the immediacy and crispness and autonomy one associates with an Imagist aesthetic. —http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0092.html [Oct 2006]

It was mentioned in the documentary that Kubrick made films about things (machines, bombs, space ships, etc…) not about humans.

It was also mentioned that Kubrick had the final cut or director’s cut to the extent that he was able to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from distribution after a wave of copycat crimes. No other director had that control over his films.

Metamorphoses

Unknown engraving of Heliades turning into trees

Metamorphoses of any kind have always interested me because of their uncanniness. I recently re-viewed The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) by Roger Corman in which a plant becomes a carnivore, and after it has eaten a number of people, the last buds of the plant open and reveal the faces of the people it has eaten. Voilà, man is crossed with a flower –> metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis is a frightening and intriguing concept which can take many forms: crosses between humans and plants, objects and humans, etc…

A particular variety of metamorphosis is people turning into furniture. So I found two stories in which humans transform into chairs: the French libertine novel Le Sopha, conte moral (1742) by Crébillon fils and Japanese short story The Human Chair (1925) by Edogawa Rampo. In both stories a man becomes a sofa, in the former quite literally so (by a curse), in the latter, a man hides in sofa to feel the persons who sit in him.