Category Archives: European culture

Jean Eustache @70

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXu-8tXKWjU]

Jean Eustache (November 30, 1938 – November 3, 1981) was a French filmmaker best known for his 1973 film The Mother and the Whore and his various short subjects such as Le Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch[1]. Jean Eustache directed just two feature films he would make before committing suicide in 1981.

The Mother and the Whore[2] is one the last typical Nouvelle Vague films and an extended essay on male angst, the war of the sexes and the Madonna-whore complex. Clocking in at over 3½ hours, this film has a style seemingly borrowed from cinéma vérité and it tries to capture real life in post-May 1968 France. A typical scene is one where Marie comes home, puts a record on the turntable and listens to it in real time.

Andrea Palladio @500

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C08pv_YZE70]

Andrea Palladio (November 30, 1508 – August 19, 1580), was an Italian architect. The Palladian style, named after him, adhered to Roman architecture principles and a search for classical perfection. The Palladian villa format was easily adapted for a democratic worldview, as can be seen in Thomas Jefferson‘s commissioned buildings. Palladian motifs made a comeback during the postmodern era, the American architect Philip Johnson frequently used them in his doorways.

Introducing Peter Woditsch

Woman Bitten by a Snake[2],

Peter Woditsch (1953, Germany) is a German-born filmmaker best known for his documentary film on the erotic furniture of Catherine the Great, and for his work on Musées secrets, secret museums, for the art television channel Arte.

Peter Woditsch was born in Stuttgart, Germany, but works and lives in Brussels. He studied philosophy in Paris and Brussels, film and animation in various places in Europe.

His debut feature Hey Stranger stars Hanna Schygulla.

His documentary film Musées secrets is an investigation of secret museums, first published in 2008 on the art television channel Arte.

Woditsch visits the Louvre, Orsay, British Library, the legendary Vatican collection and private collectors such as Gerard Nordmann.

Beata Ludovica Albertoni[1]

In this documentary are the sculptures Beata Ludovica Albertoni[1], a marble by Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Woman Bitten by a Snake[2], a marble by French sculptor Auguste Clésinger, both works show the intimate connection between sex and death.

Claude Lévi-Strauss @100

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjaXikDp5ZI]

Luciano Berio‘s Sinfonia[1] uses text of The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

The following articlette (it such a pity the English language does not have diminutive) on the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss (born November 28, 1908) approaches the work and person of Claude Lévi-Strauss from the angle of structure, anthropologica, trivia and taboo.

structure

The stucture angle leads to structuralism, a French intellectual movement internationally fashionable during the 1960s and 1970s, based on Russian Formalism, Prague school of structuralism and the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure.

That Claude Lévi-Strauss sought to investigate structures became apparent with the publication of his debut work The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). The word structure in its title betrays its conceptual affiliations to what was later to be called structuralism.

In a way, this is a bit facile since structure is a fundamental notion covering the whole of science; from a child’s verbal description of a snowflake, to the detailed scientific analysis of the properties of botany, the concept of structure is an essential foundation of nearly every mode of inquiry and discovery in science, philosophy, and art.

I think the new approach heralded by structuralism was the move a way from dogmatism, great man theory and other subjective “methods” to a more genre theoretic approach in the social sciences.

anthropologica and taboo

My next angle is the angle of anthropologica and taboo. The interest in anthropologica, my neoglogism for sexual anthropology started with Margaret Mead also deserve mention here as well as The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. Strauss’s work The Elementary Structures of Kinship dealt with such notions as alliance theory, the incest taboo and yes, the exchange of women, what we would call swinging or wife swapping in contemporary society. These subjects gave Strauss his place in the awakening sexual revolution.

trivia

Luciano Berio‘s Sinfonia[1] uses text of the The Raw and the Cooked, and the The Raw and the Cooked (1964) is also the title of an album by the Fine Young Cannibals.

Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (1958) reminds me of American social critic and folklorist Gershon Legman‘s Rationale of the Dirty Joke: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor) (1968), a tour de force of erotic folklore and his planned volume the motif-index of erotic humor.

About his memoirs Tristes tropiques (1955) I can say that it is a travelogue that was well-received on its publication. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques was technically non-fiction . Georges Bataille wrote a favourable review (Critique, n°105, février 1956) and Susan Sontag classed it as one of the 20th century‘s ‘great books‘.

His most controversial works are:

Mythologiques I-IV (trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
- Le Cru et le cuit, 1964, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969
- Du meil aux cendres, 1966, From Honey to Ashes, 1973
- L’Origine des manières de table, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, 1978
- L’Homme nu, 1971, The Naked Man, 1981)

Jacques Mesrine: in the vortex of related events

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

If there is one current film I would like to recommend, it’s Public Enemy Number One (Part 1)[1], a biopic of French criminal Jacques Mesrine with sympathies for the European radical political urban guerrilleros RAF and Red Brigades, who eventually died in the late seventies for craving his 15 minutes of fame somewhat too eagerly. The film was produced by Thomas Langmann.

If you want to know who Mesrine was, watch this YouTumentary [2] set to “Comptines d’un autre été ^{here as The Pian (Life is a song)}” from the Yann Tiersen score of Amelie Poulain. Or better still, this documentary footage[3].

Public Enemy Number One (Part 1) is based on Jacques Mesrine‘s 1977 autobiographical book “L’Instinct de mort” and stars Vincent Cassel (L’Appartement, Irréversible) as Mesrine and costars Gérard Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric and Cécile de France (Haute Tension). A sequel “L’Ennemi public n°1” (“Public Enemy Number One (Part 2)”) was released in French theaters last November.

This is all well-known. Lesser-known and very intriguingly I discovered the film Mesrine, directed by a certain French producer and/or writer of whom not much more than his IMDb filmography. The filmography in case is impressive and noted by a bleak, grim and dark worldview. In fact wholly antithetical to the Amélie score featured above. The man is André Génovès.

André Génovès was born 1941 and is a French film producer noted for working with Claude Chabrol and being involved with Barocco, The Butcher (film), The Unfaithful Wife, A Real Young Girl, This Man Must Die, Mesrine (film), and Les Innocents aux mains sales.

In a perverse way, this film reminds me of police comedy films about bungling police officers who almost lose their job due to the excessive intelligence and dexterity of the criminals.

In 1980 the police comedy film Inspecteur la Bavure[4] with Coluche and Gérard Depardieu has Depardieu’s character, Morzini, directly inspired by Jacques Mesrine.

Bungling police officers are part of the making fun authority figures trope, as seen in Keystone Kops, Inspector Clouseau, Police Academy, Taxi (franchise) and Carry On Constable.

Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Lebovici

Coming back to Mesrine, in the vortex of related events, after Jacques Mesrine’s death, his daughter Sabrina was adopted by Gérard Lebovici, French film producer, editor and patron to Guy Debord. Lebovici was also the manager of Jean-Pierre Cassel, yes the father of Vincent Cassel.

The tale is not finished. This whole history, its thematics and fiction, its personae and actual actors are further interwoven.

“On March 7 1984 Gérard Lebovici was found shot dead in the front seat of his car in the basement of the Avenue Foch carpark in Paris. There was swift confirmation that he had died on 5 March from four bullets fired from behind into the back of the neck. The assassins have never been caught.”

“Whatever happened to Sabrina?” is what Sholem Stein wants to know.

The swarm of spirits came clambering up to her

Bertalda, Assailed by Spirits by Theodore Von Holst

“Bertalda then showed the piece of gold she was given to the goblins below, and they laughed themselves half-dead over it and hissed at her. At last they all pointed at me with their metal-stained fingers, and more and more wildly, and more and more densely, and more and more madly, the swarm of spirits came clambering up to her.” –remix of Undine

Damsel in distress trope in Undine, actually a take on tentacle eroticism of which I am so fond.

Freeing the hand (media theory)

Prints and Visual Communication (1953) – William Ivins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I’ve read ten pages of William M. Ivins, Jr.‘s Prints and Visual Communication and this work is incredible and incredibly neglected. In its first ten pages it presents a full revisionist history of Classical Antiquity vs. The Dark Ages (what the Greeks and Romans didn’t have). (see “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages“, Lynn White, published in Speculum#15, April 1940)

But more remarkable still:

From the blurb:

“The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results–freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist’s prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs.”

With all Ivins’s talk about “freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions” with regards to the invention of the photographic process, I find it very surprising to find no mention of Walter Benjamin‘s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in this book. Benjamin wrote in 1935/1936:

“For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.”

Thomas Cook @200

Thomas Cook @200*

Thomas Cook’s guide books contributed to the concept of the armchair traveler.

Many people still prefer the real thing.

So did our protagonist.

She asks:

“Where are you going?”

He answers:

“To the Great Exhibition in London. I took your copy of The Stones of Venice , I hope that’s alright?”

“I booked a ticket with Cook“

She shouts:

“Don’t leave me now!” – “Where are you going?”

He answers:

“To the Exposition Universelle in Paris. I took your copy of Walt Whitman‘s I Sing the Body Electric, I hope that’s alright?”

*Thomas Cook was a British travel agent, born exactly 200 years ago today. He commodified the Grand Tour and invented tourism as we know it today. He gave you a A Room with a View in Tuscany. His guide books contributed to the concept of the armchair traveler.

René Magritte @110

René Magritte (1898 – 1967) was a Belgian painter, with Paul Delvaux the best-known representative of Belgian Surrealism.

He became well known for a number of witty images and the use of self-referentiality in such works as The Treachery Of Images (This is not a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), the best illustration to the concept of the map is not the territory.

His work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things (see recontextualization). The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.) Mention of This Is Not a Novel by David Markson is also in place here.

All this is conveniently known and one should also point to Magritte predilection for the bowler hat.

Most of the work of Magritte strikes as profoundly unerotic, cerebral and situated to the wrong side (left brain) of the twentieth century art faultline, but appearances deceive.

Attempting the Impossible (1928) [1]

Les Amants / The Lovers. (1928) [2]

Le Viol (1934) – René Magritte [3][4]

Collective Invention (1934) [5]

Les Bijoux Indiscrets (1963) [6]

Many of these works hint at tainted and thwarted love and eroticism, skewed by a desire for paraphilic love and expression. There are hints of pygmalionism, attraction to independent body parts, rape and sensory deprivation. Unlike his contemporary André Masson, Magritte never takes on these subjects head-on, fodder for psychosexual interpretations which would conclude: repressed sexuality.

Alain Robbe-Grillet‘s La Belle captive.

New to me in the 2000s was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic take on the sophistry of Magritte. Grillet managed to eroticize the unspoken eroticism of Magritte in his film La Belle captive.

In 1983 Grillet releases his feature film La Belle captive in a production by Anatole Dauman‘s Argos Films.

The film is named after a painting by René Magritte, and is also the name of a 1975 photonovel of La Belle Captive: A Novel written by Robbe-Grillet and illustrated with Magritte’s paintings. To complicate things still further “La Belle Captive” is an extended series of over a dozen paintings, worked on during four decades, with its primary subject the easel, suggesting art and reality held captive. In the case of the film, Grillet chose to interpret the title of the film literally by playing on the trope of the damsel in distress.

To be disovered remains the 1955 documentary film Magritte by Belgian filmmaker and cultural anthropologist Luc de Heusch.

Tracing the European avant-gardes in intimate detail

“Salopes ou le quart heure de rage au soleil” by Paul Joostens

Part of the fun of having my own wiki is being to able to trace the things I find in intimate detail and thus not only arriving (as in this case) at the Antwerp underground, the Belgian avant-garde and abstract art in Belgium but eventually arriving at a European and even worldwide encyclopedia of the avant-gardes.

What came before.

Three weeks ago I discovered a cover illustration by Paul Joostens entitled Salopes (bitches in French) published by Belgian avant-garde publisher Ca Ira!.

Today I finished my entry on Ca Ira!, a who’s who of the Belgian avant-garde.

Ca Ira! was an Antwerp based Belgian publisher who published Clément Pansaers‘s L’apologie de la paresse [1] in 1922. The title Ça ira comes from a song of the French Revolution (Ah! ça ira, translated as: “We will win!”).

Ca Ira! also published work by Paul Neuhuys, Han Ryner, Paul Colin, Céline Arnauld, Picabia, René Arcos, Wies Moens, Charles Plisnier, Romain Rolland, Theo Van Doesburg, Stendhal, Pascal Pia, Renée Dunan, Frans Masereel, Piet Mondriaan, André Salmon and Jean Cocteau.

Ca Ira! was also the title of a monthly magazine that featured avant-garde art, literature and politics. It was founded by a group of young artists, who came out of the smoking war-wrecked world of 1919 with a new élan. Twenty editions were published between April 1920 and January 1923 under the direction of Maurice van Essche, Paul Neuhuys and Willy Koninckx.

The members (many of whom later achieved great fame and notoriety) included Paul Colin, Theo van Doesburg, the young poet Maurice Van Essche, Abel Lurkin, Paul Neuhuys, Arthur Pétronio, Charles Plisnier, Han Ryner, while very appealing dada and expressionist woodcuts and linotypes were added by Floris Jespers, Paul Joostens, Frans Masereel, Jan Cockx, Jozef Cantré, Karel Maes and Jozef Peeters. One finds incidental contributions by Paul Van Ostaijen, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia, Ezra Pound, Iwan Goll, Blaise Cendrars and Lajos Kassák.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad