Category Archives: European culture

The near-encounter as plot device

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

The Edge of Heaven (2007) Fatih Akın

The near-encounter is a plot device I first spotted in the French film L’Auberge Espagnole but I had already seen elements of it in the romantic comedy Serendipity. The Edge of Heaven, the latest film by Gegen die Wand director Fatih Akın is constructed around this plot device.

The premise of the near-encounter is simple: Two people, who are supposed to meet according to the plot, cross each other without noticing. The audience is aware of the near-encounter, the fictional characters are not. An example from the film L’Auberge Espagnole: a protagonist is tying his shoelaces while another protagonist walks by. Due to the shoe lacing, the “shoe lacer” cannot see the other, and the other cannot see the “shoe lacer” because of his bended position.

The Edge of Heaven is highly recommended.

To Have Done With the Judgment of god

Antonin Artaud’s radiophonic play ‘To Have Done With the Judgment of god‘.

This work was shelved by Wladimir Porché, the director of the French Radio, the day before its scheduled airing on February 2, 1948. The performance was prohibited partially as a result of its scatological, anti-American, and anti-religious references and pronouncements, but also because of its general randomness, with a cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements. While remaining true to his Theater of Cruelty and reducing powerful emotions and expressions into audible sounds, Artaud had utilized various, somewhat alarming cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.

Artaud coined the term body without organs in this radio play.

Two excerpts and the full text here.

“I deny baptism and the mass. There is no human act, on the internal erotic level, more pernicious than the descent of the so-called jesus-christ onto the altars.
No one will believe me and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders but the so-called christ is none other than he who in the presence of the crab louse god consented to live without a body…”
…
All this is very well,
but I didn’t know the Americans were such a warlike people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the
last tons of real morphine they have left and replace it with
substitutes made of smoke,–Artaud via [1]

Gratuitous nudity #4

The Eroticist

Fulci, The Eroticist

The Eroticist (Image sourced here)

The Eroticist is a 1972 Italian film by Lucio Fulci about a government official who suffers from frotteurism. Lucio Fulci (1927 – 1996) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is best known for his directorial work on some of the goriest horror films ever made, although he made films in genres as diverse as erotic films, giallo, western, and comedy. He is also known for his use of enigmatic titles such as Don’t Torture a Duckling.

Previous entries in this series.

Icons of erotic art #6

The work I present today is erotic and sad at the same time. Its eroticism is implied by its transgression, most transgressions are erotic by nature. For its sadness, you only need to look at the facial expressions of Valie, the “toucher” and the bystander.

Valie Export‘s Tapp- und Tast-Kino (“Touch Cinema”) a piece of performance “body art”, was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971.

Valie Export built a tiny “movie theater” around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the “theater”. She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her.

The context of “Touch Cinema” was the bra burning feminism professed by New York Radical Women and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Carnography #3

Terror Blu

The Black Champion

Although Curt’s of Groovy Age is no longer personally digging the crates for transgressive Italian fumetti, his Scandinavian (I assume) correspondent Jaakko has taken over the helm. It is quite impossible to imagine that these Terror Blu comics would be sold today anywhere in the Western world today, except maybe Japan.

Virginia, 1812. Tom the slave is about to be hanged for raping his owner’s daughter, even though Tom swears the girl is lying.

Read the rest of the Black Champion here.

The Kingdom of Tenderness

  La Carte du Tendre

The above is not a somatopos, i.e. an instance of somatopia.

It is a Map of tenderness featured in the first volume of the Madeleine de Scudéry novel Clélie, published in 1654. The map details the distractions and pitfalls—depicted as towns and landmarks—that lovers encounter along their journey from New Friendship (the town at the bottom center of the map) to intimacy in the Kingdom of Tenderness.

At the moment, I am trying to stay clear of the lake of indifference.

Case #1

Unidentified English language edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)
image sourced here.

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) – Richard Von Krafft-Ebing [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Case #1: J. René, always given to indulgence in sensuality and sexual pleasures, but always with regard for decorum, had shown, since his seventy-sixth year, a progressive loss of intelligence and increasing perversion of his moral sense. Previously bright and outwardly moral, he now wasted his property in concourse with prostitutes, frequented brothels only, asked every woman on the street to marry him or allow coitus, and thus became publicly so obnoxious that it was necessary to place him in an asylum. There the sexual excitement increased to a veritable satyriasis, which lasted until he died. He masturbated continuously, even before others; took delight only in obscene ideas; thought the men about him were women, and followed them with indecent proposals (Legrand du Saulle, “La Folie,” p. 533).

Moreover, women previously moral, when affected with senile dementia, may manifest similar conditions of great sexual excitement (nymphomania, furor uterinus).

It may be seen from a reading of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) that, as a result of senile dementia, the abnormally excited and perverse instinct may be directed exclusively to persons of the same sex. Gratification is obtained by passive pederasty, or, as I ascertained in the following case, by mutual masturbation —Psychopathia Sexualis

 

Icons of erotic art #4

Pornokrates (1879) – Félicien Rops

Few things are sexier than a blindfolded woman. I was 20 or 21, I was in Brussels with Ilse and her friends. We were — I think — in the Agora galleries. Suddenly I spotted this painting on a poster on a shop door. I was stunned. The blindfold, the stockings, the shoes, the pig, the gloves. As I mentioned in my previous post, few works of erotic art can be used for masturbatory purposes. Neither can this painting, but its theatricality sets a mood, engenders expectations and hints at hidden desires. Painted 128 years ago, this work set standards which few other paintings will transgress.

Rops in a letter to a friend:

“My Pornocratie is complete. This drawing delights me. I would like to show you this beautiful naked girl, clad only in black shoes and gloves in silk, leather and velvet, her hair styled. Wearing a blindfold she walks on a marble stage, guided by a pig with a “golden tail” across a blue sky. Three loves – ancient loves – vanish in tears (…) I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction”. –Letter from Rops to Henri Liesse, 1879.

Previous entries here, and in a Wiki format here.