Category Archives: exploitation

Perhaps in 5 years from now?

Jeanne Goupil in Don’t Deliver Us From Evil

I’ve said this before, the past is a much bigger place than the present, by which I mean that it is easier to find enticing books, films and music of by-gone eras than from the present era. Mike’s Esotika blog, one of the recent film blogs that have caught my eye gives ample attention to the past, and more importantly manages to discover and review films from that same past that are unknown to me (and I’ve done quite some searching over the few years). The latest entry on Mike’s blog is a review of the 1971 French film Don’t Deliver us from Evil. The film is directed by Joël Séria and upon seeing stills such as this, this and this one, I was excited. The first thing I do when a new name pops up is check whether it’s referenced at Jahsonic.com and yes, I was able to find it in the title listing of Amos Vogel’s Film As a Subversive Art. [The plot is revealed in Vogel’s write-up]

What was it that excited me? First of all, the title, any title with the world evil in it attracts me (which reminds me that I still need to document Barbey’s story Le Bonheur dans le crime of his Diaboliques collection). Second, the aforementioned stills and especially this one, in which the girls are reading that classic of transgressive literature Maldoror.

After checking for connections (my motto being: “Wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything”) on my own site, I go out on the net and try to find more. First Wikipedia and IMDb, the French Wikipedia has this, IMDb this (sorted by ratings) and subsequently on the wild wild web. Where we find this: Joël Séria : Filmographie complète d’un obsédé sexuel with these 1, 2 [nsfw].

In an ideal world I would be able to connect to an online video on demand service provider and view the entire oeuvre of Séria. Perhaps in 5 years from now? At present, not even Youtube features clips of Séria’s films.

A teaser of the film:

Anne and Lore are two barely pubescent teens who attend a Catholic Boarding school. While seeming sweet, well behaved, and innocent from all appearances, the two have actually devoted themselves to Satan. While they are at school, the two intentionally ‘sin’ as often as possible without getting caught. They steal clothing and religious reliquaries in order to use in future Satanic rituals, they confess sins which they haven’t committed, they spy on the nuns, and they read transgressive literature under their covers once everybody else is asleep. Their life at the boarding school is a constant joke to them, and they giggle at everybody else’s misfortunes and the fact they are getting away with so much sin. Once summer break comes, their activities begin to get a little more serious.

And a review by Kinocite:

As a whole, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil / Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal comes across as something akin to Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows as Luis Buñuel or Catherine Breillat might have imagined it – no bad thing, especially to those nay-sayers who would deny that European cult cinema of this sort has anything to actually say.

And all this time I was thinking that the film reminded me of another film. And while I suspected that my perceived connection was maybe too far fetched, DVDmaniacs.net confirms that the film was based on the same events that inspired Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures:

Never before released on home video in the United States and making its world premiere on home video in its uncut form for the first time ever, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil is a very loose adaptation of the notorious story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hammond, the two murderous maids who also inspired Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (still arguably his best film…. Hobbits and giant apes be damned). While there are some similarities between the two films, Joël Séria’s take on the story, his feature film debut, is very different in tone, execution, and theme as it manages to bring a far more blasphemous interpretation of the events into play.

Closing remarks: while researching Don’t Deliver I re-stumbled on film producer Antony Balch who was one of the first British entrepreneurs to embrace art, horror and exploitation films with equal enthusiasm, and who appropriately distributed Don’t Deliver in the U. K. .

Unrelated earcandy.

Introducing Esotika Erotica Psychotica

andreyiskanov.jpg

Visions of Suffering (2006) – Andrey Iskanov

ESOTIKA EROTICA PSYCHOTICA is a blog by Mike who decribes it in his own words as a blog about “Sex, art, horror and experimentation in world film.”

Every film includes a review and a generous amount of photos.

The title is inspired by the Italian title of Radley Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet: Esotika Erotika Psicotika.

Previous entries include:

And his blogroll features:

I’m looking forward to reading more, not in the least because I’ve never heard of the films he mentions. It looks like Mike is discovering the cult hits and sleepers of the coming decades.

Schwarze Romantik

“I found the article above on Schwarze Romantik (Eng: black or dark romanticism) at Wikipedia. I was working on my giallo fiction page and thinking about the roots of European exploitation culture. In English, these can easily be traced to the gothic novel (although it is still unclear to me when the term gothic novel was coined). My thesis is that the gothic sensibility can be traced in most European literatures. Every European country also had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir (“black novel”, now primarily used to denote the hardboiled detective genre) and in Germany it was called the Schauerroman (“shudder novel”). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet. In nineteenth century France there also flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened ‘le roman frénétique‘.
Back to Schwarze Romantik. The term can probably be traced to the 1963 German translation of Mario Praz‘s La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. The German title of this translation is Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik.
While I would like to believe that the roots of the gothic novel are rooted in the darker strains of German Romanticism, this cannot be substantiated as of yet. Granted, the term gothic in the 17th and 18th centuries refers to Germany, and writers such as Schiller, Hoffmann and Klingemann seem to predate much of the gothic fiction of the UK, but there is of course a whole range of gothic novels that predate these three German authors, most notably: The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) – Horace Walpole, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) by William Beckford, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1796) – Matthew Lewis. Most probably there was a substantial cross-fertilization between German, French, English and other continental strains of dark romanticism that is dealt with as fantastic literature.
P. S. In France, the Romantic Agony was published in 1966 as La Chair, la mort et le diable, le Romantisme noir.

Greencine and grindhouse cinema

Over the next six weeks Greencine will be serializing Eddie Muller’s 1996 non-fiction book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema.

Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema (1996) – Eddie Muller
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

From the beginning of the book:

Grindhouses have always churned away in a seamy corner of the American psyche. They glowed through the fog on the bad stretch of Market Street in San Francisco. They used dizzying neon to bewitch New Yorkers, even in the bustling depravity of Times Square. From First Avenue in Seattle to Canal Street in New Orleans, if you wanted to see all the sexy stuff that the Purity Patrol kept from the mainstream, a grindhouse always beckoned.

The best online definition of the grindhouse genre is by Brian Camp:

Grindhouse was a term coined and perpetuated by the trade paper, Variety, to describe theaters on big-city downtown movie strips, like New York’s 42nd Street or San Francisco’s Market Street, which ran double (and sometimes triple) features of films continuously, practically around the clock, with little or no time between films (i.e., the films ‘grinded’ up against each other). Such theaters don’t exist anymore. When we talk about ‘grindhouse movies,’ we refer to the types of action and exploitation movies that played at these theaters (blaxploitation, Italian westerns, kung fu, slasher, etc.).” –Brian Camp , 09/28/2003, 08:56:54 via http://www.mhvf.net/forum/general/posts/124245630.html 

See also:

exploitation film – grindhouse cinema – sex film – sexploitation

 

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

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

 

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). 

Exploitation culture by region


Hank Janson pulp cover

American exploitation culture is well-known throughout the world, European exploitation culture less so.

The previous posts on Stewart Home and Richard Allen led me to Hank Janson [Google Gallery] and Reginald Heade [Google gallery], the latter two examples of 1950s British exploitation culture.

Exploitation by region: By region: American exploitation – British exploitation – European exploitation – French exploitation – German exploitation – Italian exploitation – Japanese exploitation

My interest in regional pulp culture is what it tells about the region where it is produced. In search of national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture; regional stereotypes deduced from regional fears and desires (horror and eroticism).