Category Archives: eroticism

Russ Meyer documentary

Supervixens (1975)

The British Channel Five produced documentary about legendary Sexploitation master and lover of unfeasibly large breasts, Russ Meyer, is now available in six parts on YouTube. Enjoy… part 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6
via Retrofap via PCL.

In his early career, Russ Meyer was a director of nudie films. His films were always more more ribaldry than pornography, and seem unusually focused on women with large breasts. His later films are almost entirely devoted to this vision; his discoveries include Kitten Natividad and Uschi Digard. He co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with film critic Roger Ebert. Faster, Pussycat. . . Kill! Kill! is usually considered to be his greatest, or at least his most idiosyncratic, picture.

Interesting about the documentary are the people interviewed: John Landis, Dita Von Teese, the founder of Troma Films, Richard Kern, film critic and cultural historian Jack Sargeant, Kim Newman, Jim Morton (who contributed to Incredibly Strange Films (1986)) etc …

Update: I just watched the six part documentary and it was fun but well travelled territory. And everyone is going on how erotic his films are, and fun at the same time. I’ve found them strange … and decidedly unerotic.

No, what I am waiting for is a documentary based on Pete Tombs’s 1994 book Immoral Tales: Sex And Horror Cinema In Europe 1956-1984 which covers European exploitation cinema of the this era with profiles of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, José Larraz, José Bénazéraf, Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Striptease

Dear reader,

Inspired by Kathy Acker’s career as an erotic dancer I give you these two pictures. Click for more info.

Danza Macabre (1964) – Antonio Margheriti

Succubus (1968) – Jess Franco

 

Carnal Knowledge (1971) – Mike Nichols

Carnal Knowledge (1971) – Mike Nichols [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

G___ lent me a VHS copy of Carnal Knowledge (1971). It’s a depressing look at the effects of the sexual revolution and free love, one of the first films to depict its negative influences, as such it predates Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). While the film deals with themes related to eroticism, it is unerotic in its depiction thereof, and can best be classified as a kitchen-sink realist drama and a celebration of the modernist cult of ugliness. The film is also reminiscent of Coming Apart (1969) and was a feature in David Schwartz’s retrospective on the sexual revolution in American cinema.

Rochegrosse (1859–1938)

The Booty (pre-1893) – Georges Rochegrosse
Etched by Eugene-Andre Champollion, sourced here

Rochegrosse (1859–1938) is above all else the painter of Flaubert’s Salammbô, which he illustrated in great detail with absolute accuracy but a complete lack of understanding. The antique pictures which the artists of the fin de siècle offer us are more often than not laborious reconstructions and pretexts to depict nudes. Dreamers of Decadence, Philippe Jullian, page 140.

Robert Monell on Alain Robbe-Grillet

Anicée Alvina in Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974)

Alain Robbe-Grillet‘s 1974 Glissements progressifs du plaisir… breaks numerous aesthetic and cultural boundaries and is not an easy film to watch as I found out during a mid 1970’s screening in Manhattan, with Robbe-Grillet in attendance, where I suddenly found myself so repulsed by the film’s transgressive imagery and atmosphere that I had to suddenly bolt the theater for fresh air. In the lobby I found myself faced with Robbe-Grillet himself, who was awaiting the post-movie discussion. He smiled as our eyes met for a second. I wanted to apologize or explain, but I didn’t say anything. He seemed to understand and proved to be a very modest and witty commentator on his own work. —Robert Monell

Anicée Alvina died last November. She was 52.

Anicée Alvina est morte le vendredi 10 novembre 2006, à l’âge de cinquante-deux ans, a-t-on appris hier. Comédienne par passion, plus caméléon que carriériste, « plutôt du genre rock’n’roll », selon ses propres termes, Anicée Alvina, l’égérie d’Alain Robbe-Grillet et de Gérard Blain, avait réussi à mener un parcours exigeant et multiple, passant même un moment à la chanson et à la scène au sein du groupe de rock Ici Paris. –via Le coin du cinéphage

Staying with Alain Robbe-Grillet, I just found a very interesting interview with him:

A.R.-G. Quand on [Alain and Catherine] s’est mariés j’étais pour la fidélité conjugale et c’est elle, tout de suite, qui m’a expliqué que c’était une idée assez sotte et probablement peu viable, que les messieurs avaient besoin de chair fraîche, et les dames aussi. Que ce qu’il fallait, c’était s’entendre bien. Le premier livre de Catherine, L’Image, écrit en 1957 peu avant notre mariage, endossait mes fantasmes sado-érotiques de la même façon que le livre de Dominique Aury, Histoire d’O, décrit, en réalité, ceux de Jean Paulhan. Peu à peu, Catherine a découvert qu’elle aimait inverser le fantasme et même, maintenant, se spécialiser dans la domination. Elle est une dominatrice passionnelle, le contraire d’une professionnelle, il n’est jamais question d’argent et comme c’est assez rare, sa cour est très étendue. —lire.fr

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony arrived Thursday, with an introduction by Frank Kermode and the famous Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c.1485) by Memling on the cover. At times it reads as the gossip pages from the Decadents. Here is a quote on the supposed impotence of Baudelaire:

“[The] case of Baudelaire’s exotic exclusiveness will be understood, and of his strange conduct towards Madame Sabatier, and it can be why so many people give credit to the rumour reported by Nadar. (Baudelair’s impotence, generally admitted in this case, is denied by Flottes.)” pages 153 and 187 of The Romantic Agony.

It seems that I was wrong about Praz’s ‘panning’ of the decadence of late romantic literature. In his introduction Praz that it is his aim to describe the what-is-ness of this sensibility (morbidity and perversion) in romantic literature.

Interwar and post-war American erotica

598 Seventh Ave., circa late 1960s. This was originally the Liberty Book Shop, later named Forsythe Books.
Photo courtesy Guy Gonzales, New York City.
Sourced here.

After cleaning up my American erotica and American exploitation pages, I stumbled upon this quote from http://beautyindarkness.blog.ca/, on which Jay Gertzman himself comments with a link to American Fetish – a forthcoming book by Robert V. Bienvenu II, Ph.D.

There was a certain odd gap in my research. I had plenty of material on the Victorian era: Munby and Cullwick, Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing and My Secret Life, just to name a few things. After WWII there’s Willie, Stanton and Bilbrew, the biker/leatherman culture, L’Histoire de O, the Profumo scandal and so on.

But what happened in kink in the Interwar period? There’s the Weimar Republic of Germany, as documented by Mel Gordon’s [correction mine] Voluptuous Panic. I also want to work in William Charles Moulton and his creation, Wonder Woman. And what else?

Furthermore, what happened in America all those years before the 40s? Why was the US apparently so vanilla compared to Europe?

Jay A. Gertzman’s Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The trade in erotica, 1920-1940 (University of Pennsylvania, 2002) helps a lot. It covers a strange era in US history when Americans grappled with the issue of what is permissible in print, which Europeans had dealt with generations before. The main axis of conflict is between immigrant pornographer and “pariah capitalist” Samuel Roth, and John Saxon Sumner, the more polite and reflective successor to the great American censor, Anthony Comstock.

Gertzman’s divides the erotic book trade into five categories: gallantiana, sex pulps (set in the here and now), erotology and sexology, “bibles” and “readers” (cheap paperbacks), and classical and modern books “judged to be rankly indecent.” (Pg. 61)

Gallantiana, a term coined by Gershon Legman, is “those marginal elements of unexpurgated literature such as jest-books and balladry, works on (and against) women and love, facetious treatises in prose and in verse, and the hinterland of scatologica.” (Pg.62) This included Beardsley’s Under the Hill, Venus in Furs and other works that had, or tried to have, a certain upper-class grace. —Peter Tupper via
http://beautyindarkness.blog.ca/2006/08/09/bookleggers_and_smuthounds~1025167