Category Archives: film

World Cinema Classic #70

In search of nonspace and unthought thoughts.

Sans Soleil

Sans Soleil

In search of nonspace and unthought thoughts.

I’ve been mulling over French director Chris Marker‘s Sans Soleil for four days now. The key scene for me was the shooting of the giraffe, which gave its origins away as far as genre-theoretics are concerned.

The key phrase was perhaps the “salute to all unposted letters,” but is safe to say that the film is brilliantly written throughout.

I saw the film at MuHKA on last Saturday, introduced by a Belgian scholar (who?). He stated that the film was unclassifiable, because the “film essay is not a genre but a small category”. However, in my opinion, the film fits the mondo film category, and functions as a highbrow counterpart to Mondo Cane. The film also begs a viewing of the masterwork Blood of the Beasts. But Sans Soleil is a different film altogether. It is a philosophical film that raises questions of medium specificity, multimedia, memory and authenticity.

I have a feeling that Sans Soleil can be invoked to clarify Gilles Deleuze‘s any-space-whatever (see B. C. Holmes – “The Deleuzian Memory of Sans Soleil” [1]), but to prove that would need some more studying of Gilles Deleuze on film.

In defense of Michael Jackson

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

“They Don’t Care About Us“

“In recent years a workprint of Spike Lee‘s music video to Michael Jackson‘s “They Don’t Care About Us” has appeared, which is a rough cut of the Prison version. This version contains even more violent footage (the Rodney King beating, Los Angeles riots, the Chinese Tank Man, the Vietnam war) than the released video, which also includes scenes of the Holocaust, dead bodies, gunshot and African famine scenes and a kid throwing around a foot detached from its body.” —Sholem Stein

See art and politics

My tongue would penetrate her eyelids

Claude Nicolas Ledoux has the best public domain eye. The best in the non-public domain area is the eye from Bunuel's An Andalusian Dog.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux has the best public domain eye.

The best in the non-public domain area is the eye from Bunuel’s An Andalusian Dog.

French blog Au carrefour étrange has a post on ocular eroticism.

Story of the Eye invariably comes to mind, but to our subject at hand:

I quote from Au carrefour étrange[1] who quotes from La vie sexuelle de Robinson Crusoe:

« J’ai connu une femme dont j’embrassais l’œil en introduisant ma langue entre ses paupières et son orgasme alors était intarissable » (Michel Gall. p.89)
« I once knew a woman whose eyes I kissed and my tongue would penetrate her eyelids, she would then climax to the point of exhaustion» (Michel Gall. p.89)

I love books or films which start with the sexual life of….

La vie sexuelle de Robinson Crusoe

Examples in this category include The Sexual Life of Catherine M., The Sexual life of the Belgians, The Sexual Life of the Savages and now this The Sexual life of Robinson Crusoe.

Emmanuel Pierrat has called The Sexual life of Robinson Crusoe a small masterpiece. It is not available in an English translation.

Digression:

Here the An Andalusian Dog eye, just before being slashed, with the beautiful Argentinian tango in the background.

I’ve posted the razor scene before, it’s about the last place online where you can still see the still and the film[3]

Here is the tango scene with a nice colorized pre-razor still of the film.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P17OAI5M4tI]

Un Chien Andalou (1929) – Luis Buñuel [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Un Chien Andalou is World Cinema Classic @69

Saint Anthony at the movies

Perhaps the ultimate and most underrated dream vision (underrated because it is not recognized as a dream vision) in the history of Western literature is the The Temptation of St. Anthony, here [1] painted by Domenico Morelli as Le Tentazioni di Sant’Antonio, also the title of an Italian film of 1911 which depicts Flaubert’s version.

Domenico Morelli - Le tentazioni di Sant'Antonio by you.

[1] painted by Domenico Morelli as Le Tentazioni di Sant’Antonio,

Saint Anthony has not been popular among writers nor filmmakers but has been very influential to painters, the dream visions lend themselves perfectly to exploring taboo subject matter.

Temptation of Saint Anthony by Melies with woman on cross by you.

[2]

Only two notable filmmakers had a go at the story, Georges Méliès in 1898 and the aforementioned Italian version of 1911.

Then there is the curious case of The Private Affairs of Bel Ami[3]. For the realisation of this film Loew-Lewin Productions announced a “Temptation of St. Anthony” contest. David Loew and Albert Lewin had persuaded twelve modern artists to paint Anthony’s vision. Each artist was commissioned for $500. Max Ernst was the $3,000 prizewinner.

The work was to be shown in a close-up at a key moment in the film.

max_ernst_anthony by youngmanblues.

[4]

Although Max Ernst‘s rendition (here[5] in a better scan) was the winning work, Salvador Dalí‘s contribution[6] (featuring a parade of spider-legged elephants tormenting the saint) went on the become better-known.

Dream sequences in literature and film

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2eVb4CC4XU]

Dream sequence in La Prisonnière (1968) by Henri-Georges Clouzot

I love dream sequences in film. Every Disney film has nearly one. Always psychedelic. Film as a medium is particularly well-suited to impart dream visions, much better than previous visionary literature, which required more narrative realism.

An interesting juxtaposition here is Dante‘s Divine Comedy compared to its first film adaptation[1].

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA3NRe5kgak]

L’Inferno

The Divine Comedy exemplifies the conventions of dream-vision literature, though Dante specifically says that his Comedy is not a dream vision.

I guess what this post comes down to is the boring but somehow unavoidably attractive “literature vs. cinema” debate I’ve been engaging in.

The debate is boring when you limit it to either/or, but of interest if you view it from its technical angle, with fiction at the center, and medium-specificity at its perifery.

Notions such as unfilmability provide the best entry point.

But that notion I was not thinking about when going to bed last night. I thought about cinematic effects in literature, a notion first put forward to my knowledge by Lotte H. Eisner in The Haunted Screen.

She writes:

“Romantic authors such as Novalis or Jean Paul, while anticipating the Expressionist notions of visual delirium and of a continual state of effervescence, also seem almost to have foreseen the cinema’s consecutive sequences of images. In the eyes of Schlegel in Lucinde, the loved one’s features become indistinct: ‘very rapidly the outlines changed, returned to their original form, then metamorphosed anew until they disappeared entirely from my exalted eyes.’ And the Jean Paul of the Flegeljahre says: ‘The invisible world wished, like chaos, to give birth to all things together; the flowers became trees, then changed into columns of cloud; and at the tops of the columns flowers and faces grew. In Novalis‘s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen there are even superimpositions.”

Der letzte Mann

Example of a superimposition in The Last Laugh (1924) – Murnau

She concludes:

“It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique [cinematography] merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.”

La Prisonnière is World Cinema Classic #67, L’Inferno #68.

I Am a Madman and WCC #66

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

“I Am a Madman” by Lee Perry in a dub version remixed by Mad Professor, YouTube bricolage by cinemakramp. The regular version of this song can be found on Perry’s album The Battle of Armagideon.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip23Z0zKrP0]

The film used in the Perry clip is Fists of the Double K by John Woo 1973, his first feature film.

What makes Cinekramp’s choice of footage particularly appropriate is Lee Perry’s fascination with spaghetti westerns.

Speaking of martial arts film, Can dialectics break bricks? is WCC #66

P.S. I’ve recently been celebrating my lifelong love affair with Lee Perry’s work. On a general note on his work, it does not take much imagination to view his work as a strain of black surrealism or even surrealism tout court.

Happy 80th birthday Oswalt Kolle

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pE6FA2UwKs]

German documentary on the occasion of his birthday.

Germany’s sexual liberator and educator Oswalt Kolle turns 80 today. He was an equivalent of Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen in the U. S. and Torgny Wickman in Scandinavia. He was pivotal in the 1960s sexual revolution. I wouldn’t known who his other European counterparts were. The cinematic genre he spawned is known by cult film aficionados as white coaters, or in its home country as Aufklärungsfilme. The genre is related to the sex report films.

Kolle’s detractors came from the catholic corner (see sexual repression and Christianity and sexuality) and called him “Schweinehund” in the documentary above.

Kolle broke another taboo in 2000, when he assisted his wife’s euthanasia.

Visuals?

Check these:




Introducing Keith Schofield

1970s porn

Last month, I discovered “Toe Jam,”[1] a song by David Byrne, Dizzee Rascal and Norman Cook, a dance tune with soca and Balkan influences. Its video, directed by Keith Schofield is a humorous take on 1970s porn, using censor bars as devices to produce images and sounds.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_wR22jTyyY]

“Toe Jam”

Three days ago, Schofield released a promotional clip for Diesel, Diesel SFW XXX[2], yet another send-up of film censorship, this time using models to enact “sexual acts,” superimposed by animation bits that hide the action and seemlingly give it an innocent appearance. SFW is an acronym denoting “safe for work,” i.e not NSFW.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vna0HojUUqA&]

“Diesel SFW XXX”

Another use of the censor rectangles

Perversion for Profit (1965)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95O5P4DTOEE]

RIP Henri Pachard and World Cinema Classic #64

Henri Pachard died. Henri who? Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of him either. He was a porn film director, but judging by way of this clip of the 1984 Great Sexpectations[1], one with a sense of humor and an understanding of the film medium, which is rare in the genre,  but successfully displayed in John Byrum‘s Inserts, which to tell you the truth, wasn’t a sex film at all.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0m42FFeyDY&]

I am quite surprised by this clip of Great Sexpectations. I thought that scripted pornography was a thing of the past after the home video revolution, making way for boring wall to wall sex and killing the softcore and porno chic film industry.

Common wisdom has it that:

“by 1982, most pornographic films were being shot on the cheaper and more convenient medium of video tape. Many film directors resisted this shift at first because of the different image quality that video tape produced, however those who did change soon were collecting most of the industry’s profits since consumers overwhelmingly preferred the new format. The technology change happened quickly and completely when directors realised that continuing to shoot on film was no longer a profitable option. This change moved the films out of the theatres and into people’s private homes. This was the end of the age of big budget productions and the mainstreaming of pornography. It soon went back to its earthy roots and expanded to cover every fetish possible since filming was now so inexpensive. Instead of hundreds of pornographic films being made each year, thousands now were, including compilations of just the sex scenes from various videos.”

I haven’t been able whether Sexpectations was made for a theatrical release or was shot for video. Thanks to Joplinfantasy for uploading this.

Inserts (1975) – John Byrum

Inserts is World Cinema Classic #64. Moon in the Gutter did an article[2] on it.