Category Archives: exploitation

United Colors of Benetton

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1fNsjx1R6I&]

One of the few interesting magazines to come out of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was Colors by Benetton. Their first ever issue in 1991 featured an unwashed newborn baby [1] . Here [2] is an overview of the first 60 issues.

Benetton is nowhere as big a brand today as it was in the 1980s and while I was not exactly taken with their clothes, I did like the ads. I don’t see a comparable contemporary brand such as Tommy Hilfiger kicking this century a conscience.

Benetton Priest kissing a Nun

The mood wasn’t always as serious though, witness this playful update of the nunsploitation theme to the 20th century: a priest kissing a nun.

Introducing Les Krims

Les Krims (born August 16, 1942) is a United States conceptual photographer. He is noted for his carefully arranged fabricated photographs (called “fictions”), various candid series, a surreal satirical edge, dark humor, and long-standing criticism of what he describes as leftist twaddle. Works such as Heavy Feminist with Wedding Cake [1] (1970) has been criticized by anti-pornography feminists and feminist photographers as being fetishistic, objectifying, body despising and a misogynist who uses his photography to humiliate predominantly women. Even though Krims does include men (often himself, nude) in his photos, these critics contend that his primary viciousness is reserved for women.

Tip of the hat to [1].

Headlessness, armlessness and dismemberment

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmb34upfAro]

A Night to Dismember is a film by Doris Wishman. The story is about a woman from a “cursed” family who is released from a mental facility, and soon dismembered corpses start turning up.

Excuse the lack of coherence in this post. I wanted to show you the trailer above (which is undoubtedly for a bad film) and shine the light on a Chinese contemporary artist I discovered by way of Lemateurdart. The artist is Liu Jianhua and he makes armless and headless porcelain female bodies in suggestive poses such as this one, this one, and this one. His work reminds of china by Luigi Colani such as this, and the bas relief hors-d’oeuvre plates produced in the seventies (no photo as of yet, check Designing Tomorrow in Car Styling 23, chief editor Akira Fujimoto, published September 1978).

Esotika wants your help

Esotika, the most adventurous film blog on the web, is self-consciously taking the nobrow route [1] :

“I’ve been throwing myself into contemporary critical theory … one of my main goals is to translate the idea of no-brow culture into criticism. What I mean by this is that I want to talk about and discuss the films that I’m writing about in a manner that isn’t obtuse and utterly academic, but I also don’t want to ignore the “academic” elements in the films reviewed, as for me that is part of their major fun.

…

By “academic” I mean to imply the elements of these films that are ostensibly more “intellectual” than a reductive cinema incorporates. Take, for example, the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Traditionally there have been two opposing ways to read his films (and very rarely do these readings overlap). The first way is to ignore the “intellectual” elements of the film and focus on the genre elements; vampirism, eroticism, le fantastique. The second method seems to ignore or pay little attention to the genre elements and their contextual implications, choosing rather to focus solely on ideas of critical theory; narratology, structuralist construction, montage. Alain Robbe-Grillet is probably the most blatant example of this cross-pollination of readings, but obviously there are many other films and directors that fall into this divide.

…

My goal, which has hopefully become clear, is to read the films from BOTH perspectives, allowing the “low-brow” and “high-brow” readings to play off each other in order to create a much stronger way to think about the film. “

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.

Viewing ‘wrong’ films for the right reasons

Muralla by Bofill

The image above is Xanadu in Calpe, Alicante (1969-1983), a surreal structure designed by Ricardo Bofill where the action of Jess Franco‘s 1980 Sade appropriation Eugenie, historia de una perversión is set. Robert Monell remarks that “this labyrinthine structure boggles the eye and teases our sense of perspective. This interior can be seen, shot from a radically different angle, in 1973’s The Perverse Countess.” Bofill’s design for the Catalan resort of Xanadu consists of a seven-story block with cubical living spaces arranged around a central utility core. Franco used this structure several times [1], [2].

Of all the “Euro trash” exploitation directors (I’m not counting Alain Robbe-Grillet, that’s artsploitation), Jess Franco had a knack for finding good interiors and exteriors. One of his films is set in Park Guell of Gaudi, but there are undoubtedly countless other examples to be found.

Of related interest is The Wrong House exhibition, on Hitchcock and architecture, currently showing in Antwerp.

When the trailer is better than the film

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfSdXK5sMM4]

The Night Porter (1974) – Liliana Cavani

The trailer features the bunker-cabaret scene with Greta Keller’s ‘Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte’ [Youtube] played in the background and Charlotte Rampling in a strange striptease. It’s the most memorable scene of the film. Greta Keller’s song is one of soothing melancholy.

Update: SensOtheque elaborates.

World cinema classics #22

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stth1IlAMk8]

Je t’aime… moi non plus (1976) – Serge Gainsbourg

I’m not sure Je t’aime… moi non plus would work if it was made today. I saw at the local art house cinema in my mid twenties. At the time I was as much in love with the yellow truck as with the decadence of the film, the performances of Jane Birkin, and Joe Dallesandro and the cameo by Gérard Depardieu. As a fan of Serge Gainsbourg, I’m glad to showcase it here today. The striptease scene at the beginning is very typical of this film. Towards the end of this Youtube clip, the footage is underlit.

Previous “World Cinema Classics“

Italian white noise and avant-garde exploitation

“In 1951, the first electronic music studio was conceived from scratch at the WDR Radio of Cologne (Germany) to enable the composition of electronic music sounds. Briefly, the concept of studios evolved up to the 1955 design of the Phonology studio in Milan by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. With nine oscillators, various filters and other sophisticated equipment , the presence of a technician/musician (Marino Zuccheri), the studio was the best equipped in the world at that time.” via usoproject

You may also know Bruno Maderna from his work on Death Laid an Egg.

Good night, sleep tight.

La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968) – Giulio Questi