Harlan Ellison was an American writer known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave and speculative fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyFC_rFobX8
Above: the complete film A Boy and His Dog.
This is the best of opportunities to finally see that film.
Rohm belongs to an age of cinema that died in the 1980s. She was one of the euro girls.
In the picture above you see her kissing Marie Liljedahl in Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, one of Jess Franco’s Marquis de Sade film adaptations, in this case Philosophy in the Bedroom. In that book, Madame Saint-Age, the part played by Rohm, is responsible for the terrible maltreatment of Madame de Mistival.
Here is the trailer to that film.
In the documentary clip below you see how Christopher Lee was tricked into “doing” nude scenes.
Maria Rohm is the blond one.
Here is Rohm’s page from the original Jahsonic site.
I forgot how exactly the film Idiocracy (2006) came to my attention last Saturday. I googled it, it was on archive.org of all places. I watched it.
I enjoyed it immensely, at first unaware that its director also did Beavis and Butt-Head.
The film is a science fiction satire and it reminded me of the similar film The Invention of Lying (2009), another favorite.
The best science fiction stories are satires, just as the novella Flatland was or Voyage to the Moon by Lucian.
The clip above comes from the time machine theme park ride episode which was quite a clever plot element.
Research occasioned by the death of Adam Parfrey (see prev. post) brought to my attention that one of the writers who were often published by Parfrey, Mel Gordon, also recently died.
Mel Gordon was a theatrical historian. He wrote on 1920s Berlin, Grand Guignol, lazzi, Hanussen, Dada, drugs and Expressionism.
From left to right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWvTgf0WIQw
Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1981) is one of the best anti-pornography documents around, better than Perversion for Profit (1965).
I found Not a Love Story while researching my paper and being sidetracked into feminist antiporn rhetoric.
The most blatant variety of this rhetoric is the part where they say that pornography leads to rape, first expressed by Robin Morgan in 1974 when she said “pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice“.
Recent feminists such as Anne W. Eaton have toned down their statements from the once virulent rhetoric of women such as Robin Morgan, but Rae Langton, a well respected source in the current debate, still references Ed Donnerstein in “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts“, her much-cited paper of 1993.
Researching Ed Donnerstein brought this film to my attention. He is interviewed on the effects of violent porn.
New to me was a soundbite uttered by Robin Morgan who states that “the first things that the Nazis did when they moved into Poland was to engineer a huge proliferation of pornography.”
The statement baffled me and I knew right away that I would not be able to find whether this was true or not, the only thing I could hope to discover is who first spread this piece of information.
After some googling I found this information cited in Take Back the Night (1980) by Laura Lederer. Some more googling and I discovered that it can be pinpointed to Pamela Hansford Johnson’s statement “when the Nazis took on the government of Poland, they flooded the Polish bookstalls with pornography” recorded in On Iniquity (1967), an attack on permissive society occasioned by the Moors murders.
I’ve previously mentioned why I like the rhetoric of censors so much but must write more about it, see in praise of censorship. This documentary is up here in its entirety but for how long considering the amount of explicit imagery?
PS 1. There is another explicit video on censorship, which has escaped the YouTube censor, I’ve written on it here and the video is still there.
PS 2. If you know where Pamela Hansford Johnson got her info from, I’d love to hear from you.
Stéphane Audran was a French actress, known for her performances in award-winning movies such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and Babette’s Feast (1987) and in critically acclaimed films like The Big Red One (1980) and Violette Nozière (1978).
A well-known photo of the actress shows her sitting at a dressing table doing her toenails. It is from the film from the film La Femme Infidèle (1968).
Above is the clip of that film with Audran tending to her nails.
André S. Labarthe was a French actor, film producer and director.
He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie and was a celebrated television documentary maker.
He directed the documentary Georges Bataille – À perte de vue (1997) and David Cronenberg: I Have to Make the Word Be Flesh (1999).
Georges Bataille – À perte de vue (1997)
David Cronenberg: I Have to Make the Word Be Flesh (1999)
Dance of the Peacock by Chechen actor/dancer Makhmud Esambayev is a clip[1] which is currently doing the rounds on Facebook.
It intrigued me because of its kitschiness and I decided to investigate.
It did not take long to figure out that the soundtrack to which Esambayev is dancing, is a cover of the theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Sergio Leone. It has a drum break which is not in the original.
It took me more than an hour to find the original film the clip was taken from.
First I found a version with a little bit more footage at the beginning (below).
For a while I thought it came from a children’s movie and I scrubbed through two. These were actually quite nice.
Then, by machine translating the Russian Wikipedia page of Esambayev I found out that the clip comes from a film called Dances of the Peoples of the World (above) in which the Chechen dancer performs a huge number of various dances: “Chaban” (Chechen-Ingush, Uzbek), “Warrior” (Bashkir), “Golden God” (Indian), ritual “Dance of Fire” to the music of de Falla, “La Corrida” (Spanish ) and “Dance with knives” (Tajik)”.
Jóhann Jóhannsson was an Icelandic composer who first came to my attention in 2016 with his soundtrack for the film Arrival (which is one of my World Cinema Classics).
When someone this young dies suddenly, I always think: suicide.
“Flight from the City” (above) is a musical composition by Jóhannsson from the album Orphée (2016).
As I was researching my master thesis and examining the tautology of genre, I stumbled upon Sholem Stein’s list of unusual westerns.
Luck would have it that the first film on the list, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!, is on YouTube, so I watched it.
Did it live up to its expectations?
Not really. It’s a silly film.
Two notes:
It gratuitously features a nude boy, just as El Topo did. But not as nude here and only seen from the back.
And then there are the close-ups, Sergio Leone style, including tiny drops of sweat.