Category Archives: fantastique

Sly as a fox, or, picaros avant la lettre

One more film for Paul Rumsey’s cinematheque: Le Roman de Renard.

The Tale of the Fox, as the film is known in English, was stop-motion animation pioneer Ladislas Starevich‘s first fully-animated feature film. It is based on the tales of Flemish picaro avant-la-lettre Renard the Fox.

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

Le Roman de Renard

Lords, you have heard many tales,
That many tellers have told to you.
How Paris took Helen,
The evil and the pain he felt
Of Tristan that la Chevre
Wrote rather beautifully about;
And fabliaux and epics;
Of the Romance of Yvain and his beast
And many others told in this land
But never have you heard about the war
That was difficult and lengthy
Beween Renart and Ysengrin

Walking on water

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fagd2mC6RAQ]

Bridge by Michael Cross

Bridge is an installation by British contemporary artist Michael Cross currently hosted in Hasselt, Belgium. It gives the impression that one is walking on water.

Every step you makes a floater appear and disappear. It feels like hovering over an abyss. It is mechanically powered. One of the best things I’ve seen in a while.

Principles of an aesthetics of death

Principes d’une esthétique de la mort by Michel Guiomar

And just when you think you’ve seen everything, a book manages to come out of nowhere and amaze you. Today, at the Antwerp book store Demian, I bought Principes d’une esthétique de la mort, les modes de présences, les présences immédiates, le seuil de l’Au-delà, a book essay by French writer Michel Guiomar, published in 1967 by French cult publisher José Corti. The book has not been translated to English, a possible translation of the title is Principles of an aesthetics of death. The book extensively references jahsonic favourite Gaston Bachelard.

On caricatures and character

One could easily be tempted to ascribe common etymological roots to the words caricature and character. In fact their etymologies don’t connect but that does not stop us from associating the two concepts.

Characters Caricaturas (1743) by William Hogarth

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an epigraph by Poe: “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul,” which translates to Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone. It is from Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd,” but Poe had quoted it before, in his earliest tale, “Metzengerstein.” Poe ascribes it to Jean de La Bruyère, who wrote the Caractères (Eng: The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère). Bruyère’s book is an “augmented” translation of Theophrastus‘s (371 – c. 287 BC) The Characters which contains thirty brief, vigorous and trenchant outlines of moral types, which form a valuable picture of the life of his time, and in fact of human nature in general. The genre of the “character sketch” is generally cited as originating in Theophrastus’s typology.

One of the thirty sketches of Theophrastus reads thus:

Of Obscenity, or Ribaldry

“Impurity or beastliness is not hard to be defined. It is a licentious lewd jest. He is impure or flagitious, who meeting with modest women, sheweth that which taketh his name of shame or secrecy. Being at a Play in the Theatre, when all are attentively silent, he in a cross conceit applauds, or claps his hands: and when the Spectators are exceedingly pleased, he hisseth: and when all the company is very attentive in hearing and beholding, he lying alone belcheth or breaketh wind, as if Æolus were bustling in his Cave; forcing the Spectators to look another way …” [1], translation by Joseph Healey

More recent writing inspired by Theophrastus includes George Eliot‘s 1879 book of character sketches, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

Illustration in a 19th century book about physiognomy

What I particularly like about these character sketches are their plotlessness, their roots as inspiration for the psychological novel, there generalizations into stereotypes and stock characters, and finally, their link to caricatures and physiognomy.

Snuff (2008) Chuck Palahniuk

My first exposure to Chuck Palahniuk was the film Fight Club. My second was picking up the novel Haunted and reading the epigraph “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Masque of the Red Death.” My third exposure was Diary, a novel I started to read and stopped reading around page 30 for reasons I forget.

The first and second exposures were enough to canonize Chuck.

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Today, I present you Chuck’s latest novel Snuff, about a porn star on sabbatical, her attempt to break the world record of serial fornication and a portrait of three of the men obliging her in her attempt.

I was a huge Stephen King fan between my twenties and my thirties but if I still would be such an avid reader today, Chuck would replace Stephen. Stephen is a mere horror author while Chuck belongs in the tradition of the fantastique and the grotesque, genres which overlap with horror but which are more of a celebration of the ambiguity and ambivalence of expierence.

Back to the novel.

Since the book industry misses something akin to IMDb.com (although LibraryThing [1] comes close), which allows viewers to rate films, we resort to a randomly picked review [2] by minor writer Lucy Ellmann for the The New York Times who does not like the novel:

“What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.”

Don’t you just love this? Negative criticism which makes you feel like reading the books involved. Lucy Ellman conveniently forgets all of the sensationalist writers from the past.

Introducing Colette Calascione

From various Flickr members.

Colette Calascione (born in 1971) is an American artist. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.

Sometimes her work reeks just a bit too much of the lowbrow art movement on which I am not always too keen (exceptions such as Mark Ryden notwithstanding), but the work above is steeped in art history, yet feels fresh.

This painting (title: Persephone, 2002) constitutes Icon of Erotic Art number 26.

Les téléclitoridiennes

The story of Princess Marie Bonaparte is as least as strange as that of her contemporary, Serge Voronoff who grafted monkey testicle tissue on to the testicles of men while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJG_Qct-mY]

Princesse Marie directed by Benoît Jacquot

Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) was a French psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud’s escape from Nazi Germany.

According to the 2008 book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach, Marie first consulted Sigmund Freud for treatment of what she described as her frigidity, which was later described as a failure to have orgasms during missionary position intercourse. After conducting research on women’s orgasms, she concluded the reason was the distance between clitoris and vagina. She called those, like herself, the “téléclitoridiennes” — “she of the distant clitoris.” She then attempted to “cure” her own failure to orgasm by having her clitoris moved, surgically, closer to her vagina; although the removal worked, the reattachment was not successful. It was to Marie Bonaparte that Sigmund Freud remarked, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”.

Her story of her relationship with Sigmund Freud and how she helped his family escape into exile was made into a television film, released in 2004. Princesse Marie ^YouTube was directed by Benoît Jacquot and starred Catherine Deneuve as Marie Bonaparte, and Heinz Bennent as Sigmund Freud.

His favourite erotic site

Regarding my comment in the previous post to Paul Rumsey, I thought I’d quickly give you a pointer to the work of Glen Baxter, which makes me laugh out loud every time. This particular volume – I’m unaware if it’s one of his better ones – can be yours starting from one dollar cent. In fact, I like his work so much, that I’ve just decided to canonize it. He fits perfectly in the fantastique and also nobrow categories (mixing Karl May-ish explorers and Kafka! [1]).

Trundling Grunts – Glen Baxter [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

My heart is made of asbestos

Madam Satan French poster

Madam Satan American poster

I love apparent antonyms and verbal incongruities combined in one little phrase, tucked close to each other as tiny juxtapoems.

Two examples that come to mind are Madam Satan and Monsieur Vénus.

I’ve mentioned Monsieur Vénus before.

Today, a little about Madam Satan.

The film came first my attention via the French poster depicted at the now offline French site Fantasfilm.com dedicated to “le fantastique” in film. The superb dress was designed by Adrian.

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

Watch out honey, you’ll get burned.

Don’t worry, my heart is made of asbestos.

The Munchers: a Fable (1973) by Art Pierson

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oNf2m1gylQ]

The Munchers: a Fable (1973) by Art Pierson

This clip is somewhat of a mystery. Supposedly directed by Arthur P. Pierson, the film nor the director are listed at imdb. The http://www.afana.org/ showed both films during the 2000s:

Munchers: A Fable’ (1973) 10m, dir. Art Pierson. Clay and polymer tooth puppets bring decay to life.
‘Whazzat?’ (1975) 10m, dir. Art Pierson. Here, nondescript clay figures attempt to identify an elephant.

I cannot track any info on this remarkable little film by Arthur P. Pierson. If you know more, please let me know. A further hint is this description of ‘Whazzat?’.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad