Category Archives: culture

Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies

… post in progress …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjPFO-1t5c]

I watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend with my kids and liked it. Probably too lame to be called a sleeper, which is a term that Danny Peary uses to define a future cult film, in his Cult Movie Stars. Although lame, you may enjoy the allegorical representation of early 20th century Western sexual mores. Part of the fun was watching it with my daughters after my eldest (12) had picked it up at our local video rental store. Its interesting connections are movie ratings around the world and issues of contemporary feminism. Be warned though, some of you may find this an incredibly stupid film. To start the discussion, here is an article by Udolpho.com.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend… When I read Slate “reviewer” Dana Stevens’ deranged put-down [this tale of male sexual panic, you breathe a sigh of relief: Thank God we don’t really live there. Or do we?] of My Super Ex-Girlfriend as “grim misogyny“, I knew I would have to see the comedy that inspired her grim diatribe. And yet I also knew that the movie probably wasn’t going to be any good. Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies. —Udolpho.com

Regarding the film certification on its adultness: In the United States the film was rated PG-13 (children under 13 can attend but need special guidance by parent or guardian) but in Germany and the Netherlands is deemed suitable for children aged 6 and above. American mainstream film critic Michael Medved noted that the “PG-13 rating” was inappropriate (due to several sex references and depictions) and that the movie should have had an “R rating” instead.

On its potential cult status (a financial disaster at the box office is a criterium of a future cult hit):

The film has been viewed as a financial disaster according to Box Office Mojo, as the film took in a mere $8.6 million on its opening weekend and has made $22,530,295 domestically, and $54,882,045 worldwide as of November 19, 2006.

As an allegory of early 21st century sexual mores:

portrait of Jenny as a needy, desperate, bitchy and clingy woman
depictions of zero-tolerance policies of sexual correctness at work

P. S. You may have noticed that I finally learned how to insert YouTube films into my pages. Some of you may have had problems with inserting the films (I know I’ve had). Here is the code:

“open square brackets youtube=paste youtube link here close square brackets”.

Erotomaniac and countercultural historian Bouyxou given carte blanche

Unidentified photograph of Bouyxou
Sourced here.

For those of you living in Paris, or visiting Paris, the cinémathèque has given Jean-Pierre Bouyxou carte blanche to run a retrospective of “his kind of cinema“. Bouyxou (born 1946 in Bordeaux) is an erotomaniac and a countercultural historian. Most recently, Mike of Esotika … reviewed his film Satan bouche un coin. I also added some Bouyxou products to my Flickr account here and here as well as a cover of his magazine Sex Star System here. Some other magazines Bouyxou contributed to were Vampirella, Zoom, Métal hurlant, L’Echo des savanes, Penthouse, Lui, Hara-Kiri and Paris Match. He was editor-in-chief of Fascination (thirty issues from 1978 to 1986).

Bouyxou belongs to that European tradition of eroticism which is represented in Italy for example by the people of the Glittering Images publishing house to which Bouyxou is a contributor. For a review of one of the products of this publisher, see this and this blog entry at K. H. Brown’s Giallo Fever.

Thanks to Harry Tuttle of Unspoken Cinema for the notice.

Here is the program:

100% SEXUEL, 100% EXPERIMENTAL… – 2007 – 110’

Vendredi 16 Mars 2007 – 21h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, José Bénazéraf, Yves-Marie Mahé

ANDY MILLIGAN, QUELQUE PART… – ANDY MILLIGAN – 2007 – 85’

Vendredi 30 Mars 2007 – 19h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou

AUTOUR DE W.S. BURROUGHS – 2007

Vendredi 25 Mai 2007 – 19h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou

AVANT-GARDE JAPONAISE – 2007 – 147’

Vendredi 27 Avril 2007 – 21h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou et Sébastien Bondetti

ECCE BOUYXOU – 2007 – 116’

Vendredi 25 Mai 2007 – 21h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou

MARXISME, TENDANCE RAVACHOL – 2007 – 140’

Vendredi 13 Avril 2007 – 21h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou et Tobias Engel

LE PARAPLUIE ET LA MACHINE A COUDRE – 2007 – 140’

Vendredi 13 Avril 2007 – 19h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou et Jean-Jacques Rousseau

L’UNDERGROUND EN FRANCE… – 2007 – 95’

Vendredi 16 Mars 2007 – 19h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Philipe Bordier, Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant, Gérald Lafosse, Marie-France O’Leary

VERTIGES ONIRIQUES – 2007 – 101’

Vendredi 30 Mars 2007 – 21h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou et Stéphane du Mesnildot

VOYAGES AU BOUT DE LA FOLIE – 2007 – 97’

Vendredi 11 Mai 2007 – 21h30 – SALLE GEORGES FRANJU
En présence de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou

To jump-start your thinking

I’ve been thinking about something meaningful to say about the negative stir caused by Camille Paglia’s return to on-line writing at Salon.com. Scott McLemee at Quick Study introduced her comeback with the lines “Is Anybody Out There Eagerly Waiting for Volume Two of “Sexual Personae”? No, I Didn’t Think So….” When I read the actual piece, I found more than 400 comments, more than 90% negative. Today, as I check the backward links to her, I see more than hundred blog entries mentioning her comeback. I haven’t checked the positive/negative in those yet.I was enormously intrigued when I read my first interview with Paglia in Belgian magazine HUMO; I was increasingly intrigued when I read her in techno-utopian Wired magazine; I was rewarded when I finally read Sexual Personae (1990); she introduced me to the Lovecraftian Chthonic, to the Nietzschean Dionysian and Apollonian, she said strange things on date rape, her quotes were funny, she compared Meryl Streep (who I disliked at the time, I’ve since seen Adaptation and changed my mind, which reminds me that I have to re-watch Sophie’s Choice.) to I believe a horse and mentioned her nasal tone. I liked it. I had been raised on a Freudo-Marxist diet and her biased politics were refreshing. In short, I loved her, and I still do; my page on her is even referenced at the Camille Paglia checklist:

“Camille Paglia , another dictionary entry in a network of illustrated cultural references, with quotes illustrating various points Paglia is known to occasionally make.”

Over the last few years, I’ve come to understand what her limits are, that she is indeed often only a provocateur (but what a flattering ToA), this sentiment was best described by Lee Siegel who wrote two years ago:

To invoke two other writers from the past, Paglia used to come on like Byron; now she is like some cynical version of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, trampling on her very own standards, stooping as low as she can go in order to get a second helping of attention from the public that has forgotten her. But bullies always end up being reduced to their inner weakling. It’s called poetic justice. –Lee Siegel in Look at Me [June 13, 2005 ]

So there I was, trying to defend someone and not knowing how. Until today when Scott Mclemee, in a fascinating post paralleling Zizek and McLuhan, provides the vocabulary I was looking for: “to jump start your thinking”. According to the American Heritage Dictionary to jump-start means to “start or reinvigorate (an activity, system, or process).”

Jump-start my thinking is exactly what Paglia did. Philosophers who are quotable. Philosophers who read like poets. Philosophers who write prose poetry. Philosophy as eternal recurrence repackaged in beautiful words.

And now for the Marshall McLuhan / Slavoj Žižek parallel:

By coincidence, I see that Jonathan Goodwin has noticed an interesting parallel that certainly squares with my own impression:

Žižek reminds me much of McLuhan. Facts don’t matter for either. In the space of a few pages, Žižek has claimed that Martin Luther King made a radical anti-capitalist turn in the last few weeks before his death and that the Japanese Army relied on a Zen mantra similar to “the sword that kills is the sword that saves” to justify their actions in Korea and Manchuria. These are not even the kinds of claims that can be checked. As with McLuhan, Žižek just wants to make as many connective gestures as possible. That’s what make both, generally speaking, fun to read but dangerous to the untutored.

This is exactly right. McLuhan liked to refer to some of his writing as “probes” — a very space race-era locution (let’s not even get into the Legmanian implications) meaning, in effect, “I am totally making this up as I go along.” —Scott Mc Lemee via Legman and McLuhan With Zizek Along the Way.

Speaking of Adaptation and eternal return, I caught Eternal Sunshine … on TV, and I was slightly amused but not impressed. In the category experiment in cinematic time it did not strike a chord as much La Jetée or Back to the Future. As Charlie Kaufman script I was more impressed with Adaptation and Being John Malkovitch.

One last word on film, I got to see Destricted, and was only slightly taken by Matthew Barney’s opening vignette, and found the rest of the film quite literally masturbatingly boring. I was especially bored with Noé’s ‘strobed’ entry. Larry Clark had put up an ad for young men to apply to perform with an adult actress. After Clark and his team had chosen the male candidate, the male candidate interviewed the actresses and made his pick. He then proceeded to ‘get it on’. Very sad, just as sad as the Lasse Braun documentary I watched a while back. Final verdict for Destricted: to be avoided, try catching the Matthew Barney ‘s Hoist (and here) at Youtube and you’ve had the best.

Elsewhere

For more of these delightful images, check Casey’s post referenced below, this image from here

gmtPlus9 (-15) plus has a trailer for to a Toei pinky violence Japanese exploitation film, and reports on work by Hans Bellmer life companion Unica Zürn.
Dennis Cooper has a William Gaddis special, I picked this profile of his novel The Recognitions of which Dennis says: “Though neglected for many years, this monumental, eclectic, and intertextually dense masterpiece is now regarded as one of the foundation stones upon which American literary postmodernism is built. ” Also note this beautiful cover image — which has the feel of a Northern Renaissance piece — anyone by whom the painting is?
S. Casey reports on one of his books called Diableries, see image here, here and here. I am very much intrigued by S. Casey, and his C. V. adds to my curiosity.
Both the music blogosphere and the literary blogosphere have articles about ‘the conventional press’ ridiculing bloggers.
1. Woebot reports on “Paul Morley [who] is almost guaranteed to be having a pop at music bloggers. … The latest piece is almost entirely about online music criticism. It’s quite hilarious really.”
2. Conversational Reading quotes Sam Tanenhaus, who says “I find [litblogs] write about us, but I don’t find they write about authors and have that many interesting things to say about literature. Maybe I’m missing them?”

Our society allows infinite aggressions

I am sort of reviewing my newly arrived copy of Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke, but thought I’d share the opening lines of the book with you:

“Under the mask of humor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone and against everyone. In the culminating laugh by the listener or observer–whose position is really that of the victim or butt–the teller of the joke betrays his hidden hostility and signals his victory by being, theoretically at least, the one person present who does not laugh. Compulsive storytellers and joke-tellers express almost openly the hostile components of their need, by forcing their jokes upon frankly unwilling audiences among their friends and loved ones, and upon every new person they meet. Often they proffer this openly as their only social grace. the listener’s expected laughter is, therefore, in a most important but unspoken way, a shriving of the teller, a reassurance that he has not been caught, that the listener has partaken with him, willy-nilly, in the hostility or sexuality of the joke, or has even acceded in being its victim or butt.” (Rationale, 1st Series, first page.)

I’ve finished my analysis of the introduction here.

Three immoral tales

A 1833 novel by Petrus Borel: Champavert, contes immoraux

Champavert : Contes immoraux (1833) – Pétrus Borel [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] – more …

A 1974 film by Walerian Borowczyk. Tagline: “You don’t have to go to a museum to see an X-rated Picasso”.

Immoral Tales (1974) – Walerian Borowczyk [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] more …

A 1994 non fiction book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, that won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction. The book covers European Cinema with profiles of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, José Larraz, José Bénazéraf, Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Immoral Tales: Sex And Horror Cinema In Europe 1956-1984 (1994) – Cathal Tohill & Pete Tombs [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] more …

Immorality is poised on the brink of good/evil, psychopathology and morality.

To the creator of films as well as other forms of literature, the dark side of human nature has often proved more rich and interesting than the bright. Films and books on the lives of saints have not been as popular as murder mysteries and works of horror. While we may have no desire to experience them in our own lives, terrible deeds and evil people exert their perverse attraction on our psyches. We who consider ourselves moral and upright are often fascinated by the behavior of the pitiless, merciless, and guiltless psychopath. Like a magnificent black panther: powerful, dangerous, and alien, the psychopathic character can have a dark, perfect beauty that simultaneously attracts and repels us. –Gordon Banks [1]

The last quote by Gordon Banks reminds me very much chapter four in Aristotle’s Poetics which explains our attraction to the horrific when fiction is concerned. Why we like things which are painful.

Depending on the translation Aristotle states:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]

for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]

See also: ambivalence – art horror – representation

It has been restored since

Ancient Greece marks the beginning of Western culture; the dominant cultural form in the modern world which has come to play an influential role on more cultures worldwide than any other culture. For many centuries it was an essentially European culture, but it has now mostly become an American culture. Shown above is a 1872 snapshot of the Partenon located in Athens, Greece. It has been restored since.

Government funding of film

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard

Ever since high school, I have been pondering the uses and disuses of government funding of the arts. With regards to film the different policies in Europe and North America have engendered two types of cinema: European art house films and American blockbusters. A quote by a certain David Carr, a libertarian:

Many years ago, not long after I had graduated from law school, I briefly succumbed to a rather silly conviction that I was a cultural barbarian and this state of affairs could be addressed by becoming an afficianado of European cinema. I should admit that this conviction was in no small measure driven by the belief that being au fait with the work of European film-makers was a surefire way to impress the girlies.

So I started to spend much of my free time ferreting out art-house independent cinemas (of the kind that sold organic brownies in the foyer instead of popcorn) and sat through endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.

These films have all amalgamated in my mind and I cannot remember the name of even a single one. After about six months, I decided that no woman was worth this level of constipation so I threw the towel in and went back to watching simplistic sci-fi blockbusters and gangster movies.

While I find Carr’s position particularly barbaric, I can understand his irritation at some European directors who excel at pompousness, seriousness and pretentiousness. Also, there seems to be no popular European cinema. Dyer and Vincendeau have argued in the early nineties that the only European popular cinema is US cinema. But surely, there has been a European popular cinema in the sixties and seventies?

On different note David Lynch is someone (whose films I like) who seems to be working within this paradigm of European artsiness and I wonder: are his films making money? Where does one find this kind of info. Here?

Also, government funding is tied in with the concept of cultural significance, the rationale being that a government can fund the cultural significant products of tomorrow.

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.

Coffeetablishness

Gilles Néret (1933 – 2005)

In answer to my recently asked question regarding the publishers of 20th century counterculture Taschen came to mind, an international publishing powerhouse with its roots in 1980s Germany. Taschen started out by publishing Benedikt Taschen’s extensive comic book collection and then basically conquered the world with its ‘coffeetablishness’.

Taschen is the best alternative to countless hours of internet browsing and a much better reading experience than the web itself, but buying the books remains more expensive than the internet.

Taschen also illustrates the lack of political subversion in contemporary culture. Countercultural publishers such as Grove in the 1960s also published pamphlet-like tracts. Taschen does not have a politics section; however I like to think that Benedikt and Laure have opinionated views on these matters.

Jahsonic

Aantekeningen uit Dodenstad.