Category Archives: film

Key texts of paracinema

Key texts of paracinema: Hard Core (1989) – Linda Williams – Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992) – Carol J. Clover – The Monstrous-Feminine – Barbara Creed (1993) – Trashing the Academy (1995) – Jeffrey Sconce – Sleaze Mania (1999) – Joan Hawkins – Cutting Edge (2000) – Joan Hawkins – Porn Studies (2004) – Linda Williams

 

Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to ‘legitimate’ film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.

The term was coined in the early seventies by Ken Jacobs to denote countercultural and underground films of the sixties but re-coined in 1995 by Jeffrey Sconce, an American media scholar, to denote ‘an extremely elastic textual category’ which includes entries from seemingly disparate genres of the non-mainstream fuelled by oppositional taste strategies (see The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (2003)). Major theorists of the 1990s and 2000s paracinematic variety include Linda Williams, Joan Hawkins, Carol J. Clover and Barbara Creed (1993). [Aug 2006]

Off topic: Yesterday was my brother’s birthday party; of the music he played I especially enjoyed a recent album by British psych folk singer Vashti Bunyan and French singer Benjamin Biolay’s 2003 album Négatif.

If you’re the girl of my dreams…

“If you’re the girl of my dreams. then…”, he says. “Then you could be the man of mine.,” she says.

Reconstruction (2003) – Christoffer Boe [Amazon.com]

Watch the trailer

A beautiful film about recognition/forgetting. Lots of old-fashioned clouds of cigarette smoke, lyrical dialogues, interesting soundtrack (Thomas Knak), reminiscent of Gilles Mimouni‘s 1996 L’Appartement.

See wiki entry: Reconstruction

When the paratext is more interesting than the text

Exploitation Poster Art (2005) – Dave Kehr, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Horror Poster Art (2004) – Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Science Fiction Poster Art (2004) – Christopher Frayling, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In Europe, publisher Taschen have teamed up with Nourmand/Marsh, to publish a series of film poster books. Available in Belgium at a price of 13 Euros, they are a bargain. Some of the accompanying text of these lovingly produced coffee table books was written by American film critic Dave Kehr (Exploitation poster art) and British art historian Christopher Frayling (Science-fiction poster art). The posters are masterpieces of visual innuendo, offering, in most cases, far more that the films actually delivered. And that is what I meant in my title about the paratext being more interesting than the text.

Jean Painlevé

Via Invisible Cinema comes this announcement of a special curated by Valeria Mogilevich entitled Nouvelle Vague: Submerged Scientific Films & Firefly Cinema: Somewhere not Here? screened at the Anthology Film Archives. One of the films shown is the one pictured below, which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in a double bill with Georges Franju’s 1949 The Blood of the Beasts at the Antwerp film museum. The 1934 The Sea Horse is scored by French impressionist composer Darius Milhaud, as are some of his others.

The Sea Horse (1934) – Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was the director of more than two hundred science and nature films and an early champion of the genre. Advocating the credo “science is fiction,” Painlevé scandalized the scientific world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify. He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, and fanworms as endowed with human traits – the erotic, the comical, and the savage – and in the process won over the circle of Surrealists and avant-gardists he befriended, among them the filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Vigo, and Luis Buñuel.

Porn symposium

Update: Aug 24: pornography – symposium

Via girish again comes:

Terrific post by Owen Hatherley, part of the Porn Symposium (hey, there’s an idea for a future blog-a-thon): Russ Meyer, Vilgot Sjöman, etc, but mostly Dušan Makavejev.

Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left

Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bacteriagrl and Different Maps. —Owen Hatherley

There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema and into everyday life, and it goes much like this; a combination of American exploitation directors and French arthouse in the early 1970s, through a conjunction of fake orgasms and truck drivers on the one hand and soft focus and cod-philosophy on the other takes what was previously suppressed and places it in the heart of the multiplex. In this narrative the heroes are the hucksters behind Deep Throat or the faux-sophisticates of Emmanuelle, with even dissenting semi-mainstream directors like Russ Meyer considered too original to be relevant. These are two films from which one can trace a line to the frat film, the overlit horrors of most American porn and the ‘another round of whispering on a bed’ (Foucault) that is, the French sex drama, always aiming to reveal some essential truth or other. The confirmation seemingly of the Foucauldian admonition that ‘sex is boring’. —Owen Hatherley

P.S.

[This post forms part of a symposium with bacteriagrl, k-punk, sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy (I still dream of orgonon), infinite thought (the money shot and vintage porn), effay, poetix.] —Different Maps

My two cents:

 

Related: 1971 – European cinema – Freudo-Marxism – Dušan Makavejev – Wilhelm Reich – the sexual revolution in the cinema

The ravishing sex reformer and radical in a provocative pose; composing sex and politics, it also reveals Makavejev’s “aestheticism”; the unexpected rabbit, the strong, two-colored vertical stripes and particularly the inexplicable empty frame. SC via Film As a Subversive Art (1974) – Amos Vogel

Update Aug 23 2006:

As you’ll recall, Ariel Levy snarled about porn studies in the confessional section of Female Chauvinist Pigs. If you are unfamiliar with the evil that is porn studies, you should check out the Porn Symposium going on now! You can see why Ariel Levy felt that this kind of feminism contributed to raunch culture and the gyrations and tough talk of female chauvinist pigs. –via blog.pulpculture.org

The poetics of Fritz Freleng

Girish asks:

“Why is it that acts that would horrify us in real life instead evoke in us shameless, uncontainable joy when encountered in a cartoon?”

Girish’s post is part of the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon by Brian Darr at Hell On Frisco Bay.

The first person to have tried to answer Girish’s question was Aristotle in Poetics when he said (I am providing two alternative translations):

  • Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]
  • for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]

Poetics () – Aristotle

More on Freleng:

Isadore “Friz” Freleng (1906–1995) was an animator, cartoonist, director, and producer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. He introduced and/or developed several of the studio’s biggest stars, including Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the cat, Yosemite Sam (to whom he was said to bear more than a passing resemblance) and Speedy Gonzales. He was a contemporary of the better known Tex Avery.

The theme of this post reminds me of an article at Wikipedia, called cartoon physics and maybe by analogy there is also such a thing as cartoon psychology, in other words the psychological realism (and here and here) of Hollywood?

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) – Rowland V. Lee [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]


In the 2006 film, V for Vendetta, characters V and Evey Hammond watch the 1934 version of The Count of Monte Cristo based a story by Alexandre Dumas which was serialized in the Journal des Débats in eighteen parts. Publication ran from August 28, 1844 through January, 1846. V cites it as his favorite film. [Aug 2006]

Cache (2005) – Michael Haneke

Cache (Hidden) (2005) – Michael Haneke

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

I saw Caché, a 2005 French language film by one of my favourite directors Michael Haneke. In the extras Haneke explains why he made this film. He wanted to work with Daniel Auteuil (Sade), who he hadn’t worked with before. He wanted to write a film where an adult was confronted with something he had done when a child and he wanted to write about the Paris massacre of 1961, when 200 peaceful Algerian demonstrators were killed by the police by being driven into the river Seine.

The level of psychological realism is very high which does not give a very optimistic film, but as Haneke explains: “it is far more enjoyable to work with me than to view a film by me.” That’s why the film has a feelgood factor of about 0/10.

The film does not give any answers, we never know who sent the tapes. Haneke: “I like the audience to finish the film; novels evoke images, cinema steals them, I am constantly looking for ways to give that power back to the spectator.” (transcription mine).

Some films, says Haneke, have had “a profound influence on my mental health and stability.” He mentions Paolini’s Salò (1975) as one such film and explains that some people even speak of cinema in terms of pre- and post-Salò.

He quotes Robert Bresson and Tarkovsky as two directors who have destabilized him in the same way.

What I found most satisfying in the film is the realism and especially the pacing, the film is slow but the rhythm is excellent.

Haneke in the blogosphere:

Girish as quality qualifier: (method used: Google: Girish+Haneke): Girish on Code Unknown, CultureSpace on Code Unknown, LongPauses on Code Unknown, The Evening Class on Code Unknown, Jim Emerson on the opening sequence of Caché.

It would seem that Girish works well as a quality qualifier 😉

One more quote by Jim Emerson:

“It may be a recent film, but I don’t think it’s too early to canonize Michael Haneke’s “Caché” opening shot as one of the greats. Haneke’s first image prepares the viewer for his film’s astounding distortion of the cinematic lens.

A static shot of a house at the end of a Parisian street during early morning seems perfectly banal, as Daniel Auteuil’s character walks over to his car. But then, in voice-over, Binoche and Auteuil begin to discuss the workings of the shot — they didn’t see the camera, so how was this footage created? One of them comments that the shot is too clear to be shot through glass (i.e. hidden in someone’s car).” —Jim Emerson

Using “K-punk” as quality qualifier (method used: Google: Girish+Haneke): gives the following results: Steven Shaviro on Caché

Steven somehow contradicts Haneke’s intention of leaving interpretation up to the viewer saying:

“What’s great about the film is that it produces affective blockage on every level. It doesn’t offer the viewer (or the characters) any way out. The protagonists, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), are intellectual yuppies just like the target audience of the film, just like me.”

Steven’s review leads a political analysis by Armond White, who curiously forgets to add the é in Caché:

” Besides, Caché isn’t exciting anyway. When critics praise it, they’re congratulating their own bland sense of titillation; going along with Haneke’s thesis that mere recognition of the West’s guilt (in this film’s case, France’s lingering self-reproach over the Algerian Occupation from the ‘50s to the ‘60s) is tantamount to intellectual and moral progress.” —Armond White

Update [Aug 21 2006]

On my first viewing I had missed the final scene and somebody at notcoming.org describes it as:

Pierrot and Majid’s son (I don’t believe the film provides him an actual first name) do meet up on the front steps of the school in the final shot. Their inaudible discussion [for which Haneke had provided a dialog, but refused to reveal it in the extras on my version of the DVD] appears to be fairly amicable.

Conclusion:

The question of who sent the tapes is open to interpretation. Majid and his son both deny involvement. There is a cryptic last scene (as the credits roll) of Pierrot and Majid’s son interacting in front of Pierrot’s school. Haneke has said in interviews that he wrote a dialogue for that scene but he will never reveal the contents of that dialogue.

Robert Benayoun

 

Robert Benayoun, photocredit unidentified
Image source here

Érotique du surréalisme (1965|1978) – Robert Benayoun
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Robert Benayoun wrote in the tradition of Ado Kyrou, Eric Losfeld, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, with an absolute disregard for the perceived boundaries between low and high culture. If you follow the source link of the photograph, there is a Spanish article on Benayoun’s work Érotique du surréalisme.

Regarding the publishing house of Eric Losfeld, Éditions Le Terrain Vague, I’ve always wondered if there were German and British equivalents of it. In the United States houses such as Grove Press come to mind, but I know of no equivalents in Germany or the UK.