Category Archives: eroticism

Lasse Braun, the sexual revolution came from the cold

Yesterday evening on Arte TV (along with the BBC, one of the best television stations in Europe) there were two documentaries about the sexual revolution in Europe. The first documentary was on Lasse Braun and it was followed by a documentary on the sexual revolution as it happened in Denmark, what I have called the ‘Danish experiment’ before. I fell asleep during this second part, so some notes about the Braun feature:

Worth remembering about Lasse Braun (born 1936) is that he spent some time in Breda, The Netherlands, which was his most fruitful time; that he was/is somewhat of an intellectual/guru type of person (equalling pornography to anarchism (a practice which started in 18th century Europe)) and that he is a sexually dominant who works with women who were/are in love with him.

Sensations (1976) – Lasse Braun

There was an interesting interview with Tuppy Owens (Britain’s leading “pro-sex” (a radical group within the post-feminist camp) writer and activist, comparable to the likes of Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright etc in America). Tuppy Owens appeared in the 1976 film Sensations, Braun’s first feature film and a good illustration of the shift of pre-1970s pornographic film (usually filmed on 8mm and 16mm formats and distributed in brothels and peep show booths) to porn chic films (filmed on professional stock and shown in ‘mainstream’ theatres.)

The end of the documentary saw Lasse Braun in Susan Block’s TV show, a very sad affair indeed.

See also: European pornography– sexual revolution in the cinema


Jess Franco

photo of Jess Franco, credit unidentified

Groovy Age of Horror presents I’m in a Jess Franco state of mind, a blog by Robert Monell on the films of Jess Franco. Robert Monell is a connoisseur of Jess Franco (who I like to call the European Roger Corman) and “Euro trash”  cinema in general. He is part of the vibrant internet community called Euro Trash Paradise, which can be a viewed as a continuation of the magazine Euro Trash cinema.

European Trash Cinema (magazine) issue 16

European trash cinema has als had its share of academic attention, perhaps most notably in the work of Joan Hawkins with titles such as Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art (1999). 

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962 (2006) – Carlo Mollino
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

This came out last August. It concerns the photography of Mollino before his polaroid period. While nowhere near cheap, these Mollino photography anthologies are a good investment. The 2002 polaroid edition now commands prices between 300 and 700 euros (although the Hammilton gallery claims to sell it for 37 British pounds).

Book Description
The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino held photography dear–it was one of his great passions and favorite means of expression, and an excellent way to enjoy another great passion, women. The photographs gathered here were all set in one of Mollino’s private apartments, which he refurbished especially for this purpose. An advocate of retouching, as documented in his treatise The Message from the Dark Room, Mollino also painted on his photos or negatives. Most of what appears here has been revised, most bodies sculpted and reshaped, and visibly so now that time has altered the color of the prints, revealing his handiwork. This portfolio, spanning from 1956 to 1962, ends just before Mollino’s Polaroid work of the 60s. It was made using a Leica and color negative film, and has never been published before.

Digression: also check these Google galleries of the photography of Inez van Lamsweerde, Sze Tsung Leong and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Jeremy Reed

Interviewed by Dee at Fringecore:

Jeremy: My interest in French literature comes from the depth of imagination and the fact that French writers use the image as the predominant constant in their work. Also the decadence that they use so uniquely, the sensuality of the work and the imagination of it, which I don’t find a corresponding equivalent in British literature. I would call myself an aesthete – love of beauty is central to all I do, therefore opulence and the decadence of the 18th/19th century period, appeals to me, and I fuse it with a modern sensibility, so that the cyber world is fused with the decadent world of De Sade’s La Coste – reaching across the centuries. —http://www.fringecore.com/magazine/m6-3.html [Nov 2006]

Excerpts from a review by Cercles of Heartbreak Hotel: A Tribute to the King in Verse by Jeremy Reed, 2002.

I first stumbled across Jeremy Reed in one of the English / American bookshops of the left bank in Paris. The novel was hidden away on the bottom shelf of a dusty bookcase and its title caught my eye; it was called Diamond Nebula (1994). I quickly found this was an author after my own heart: postmodern without being hermetic, with obvious enthusiasm for David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and mostly J.G. Ballard. I don’t mean the regrettably mainstreamed Ballard of recent years, the Ballard of the somewhat banal Empire of the Sun (1984) or the boring Super-Cannes (2000), no, I mean the good old Ballard of such subversive jewels as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) or Crash (1973). […] […] After I’d read Diamond Nebula, I bought some of Reed’s previous books. He is an extraordinarily prolific author; does this man ever get any sleep?

[…] His Sadean erotic novels, such as Sister Midnight (1997) don’t impress me so much, admittedly, but they are not without merits, as such things go.

[…][Marc] Almond and Reed share many passions: David Bowie, the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Georges Bataille, J.G. Ballard, Derek Jarman, Scott Walker, Jacques Brel, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Cocteau, and especially J.K. Huysmans. “What is it like to be a torch singer?”, asks Reed, “Is it so very different from being a poet?” At any rate, this particular poet and this particular torch singer often plunge their readers / listeners into the same sleazy delectable Camp. And incidentally, Almond has also published very acceptable poetry, in addition to a gripping autobiography, Tainted Life (1999). —http://www.cercles.com/review/r5/reed.html [Nov 2006]

Excerpts from Jeremy Reed: The Prizes and the Disappointments by Geoff Stevens

There appear to be some areas of confusion, fans would say mystery, about Jeremy Reed. For instance we are told that he was born in 1952 from one source, and 1954 from another, whereas Andrew Duncan asserts that the true date was 6th March 1951. He was brought up in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where his childhood was “solitary and dark-sided”. He was to go on to Essex University and obtain a BA hons 2 or, if other sources are to be believed, a PhD in Literature.

Icelandic singer Bjork said she found his work “the most beautiful gorgeous outrageously brilliant poetry in the universe”. —http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Stevens%20essay.htm [Nov 2006]

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Book Description
Before Toshio Saeki worked in his current palette of bright colors, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary color. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki’s disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. Early Works also includes the panel-by-panel replication of a Saeki manga story. Japanese Text Only

Please note that Catherine Robbe-Grillet has contributed to this book.

More here and here and more Japanese erotica here.

Story of I (1997) – Jo Anne Kaplan

Story of the Eye is easily one of the most enduring texts of the 20th century, I just discovered this version which was new to me:

GB, 1997, 23 Min.
Jo Anne Kaplan, London

A woman sits alone in a bare, white-tiled bath, reading George Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”. The bizarre events described by the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold, she becomes the “eye” of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, “Story of I” plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside-out. The eye in the vagina, seen through blood, urine and tears, looks at itself in the mirror. —http://www.transmediale.de/97/english/25.htm [Nov 2006]

In a major Hayward Night for the Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition, animate! joins forces with Halloween to present The New Flesh, a visceral evening of musical and cinematic interventions exploring Georges Bataille’s trademark themes of sex and death, and the legacy of his dissident surrealism in popular culture.

The New Flesh provides a rare chance to see the highly explicit and provocative mistress-piece Story of I (1997, UK, 21 mins), Jo Ann Kaplan’s improvisation on Georges Bataille’s infamous Histoire de l’Oeil. The film is a gender-twisting meditation on the erotic extremities of human desire, a highly explicit journey through the sexual foundations of Western visual culture and the intimate terrains of male and female bodies. With a feminine hand, Story of I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina and, seen through the blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror. —animateonline.org [Nov 2006]

See also: Story of the Eye