Category Archives: French culture

New Breillat film stars fashion model Naomi Campbell and con artist Christophe Rocancourt

Bad Love (film) by Catherine Breillat

Bad Love by Breillat published bby Léo Scheer

Bad Love (2007) Catherine Breillat

Bad Love is a French film by Catherine Breillat scheduled for 2009, starring fashion model Naomi Campbell and impostor/con artist Christophe Rocancourt, produced by Jean-François Lepetit, based on Breillat’s own novel published by Léo Scheer in 2007.

Bright Lights Film Journal (along with Senses of Cinema[1] and Images Journal[2], the best film site online) has an interview with Jahsonic fave Breillat[3] conducted by Damon Smith.

From Léo Scheer publisher:

“Vivian Parker, une star sublime et hautaine, rencontre Louis lors d’un festival de cinéma. Sans savoir pourquoi, elle lui donne son numéro de téléphone. Commence alors une passion qui réunit deux êtres que tout oppose. Entraînés dans le vertige de leur amour irrationnel, les deux amants vont se découvrir peu à peu, avant de se déchirer. Avec ce roman à deux voix, tour à tour émouvant, sensuel, sombre et cruel, Catherine Breillat met en scène une histoire d’amour tragique, une histoire de dévoration mutuelle.”

So it looks like another story of tainted love, mad love and impossible obsessive love fitting for an entry in Cinema of Obsession: Erotic Obsession and Love Gone Wrong.

Other films expected in 2009:

Jean Rollin @70

Happy 70th birthday Jean Rollin.

Franka Mai and Brigitte Lahaie in Fascination image sourced at imagesjournal [1]. [Apr 2005]

Jean Rollin constitutes a decisive chapter in the book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 and discovering him and his universe (which connects to the world of French “low culture”) has been a delight. But do not expect too much of his films. Seeing Jean Rollin films has been an underwhelming experience for Jahsonic. Silly is the best word for the films I’ve seen. And not enough redeeming elements.

However 0

See prev. posts [2]

However 1

cover picture of Fascination

Rollin is a very interesting documentalist (see his work for Jean-Pierre Bouyxou’s Fascination and Eric Losfeld‘s Midi Minuit Fantastique) and connoisseur of Gaston Leroux and all literature of what he calls « second rayon ».

However 2

Calling Rollin connoisseurs.

I am looking for the title of the following excellent short subject by Rollin:

Filmed from the perspective of a painter. Looking at a model. She is a African woman with long and golden nails?. The background music is contemporary classical music. Estimated date of production: late sixties or early seventies.

Anyone?

P. S. If you are new to Rollin check his Google gallery and make sure SafeSearch is off.

Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly @200

Barbey: catholicism, sadism, mysticism

Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly

Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (portrait by Émile Lévy, ca. 1882)


Saint-Sauveur-le_Vicomte_(Château)_Tombe_Barbey_2

Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly‘s grave.

Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (November 2, 1808 – April 23, 1889), was a French novelist and short story writer. He specialised in a kind of mysterious tale that examines hidden motivation and hinted evil bordering (but never crossing into) the supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Henry James and Proust.

Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) (1874) – Barbey d’Aurevilly [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Frontispiece for ‘Les Diaboliques’ by Barbey d’Aurevilly painted by Félicien Rops in 1886

His best-known collection is The She-Devils, which includes the cult classic Happiness in Crime and is still in print from Dedalus Books. Most recently his Une vieille maîtresse (An Elderly Mistress, 1851) was adapted to cinema by French Jahsonic favorite director Catherine Breillat: its English title is The Last Mistress.

He is variously lumped in with the Late French Romantics, The Decadents and the Symbolists and is included in the Genealogy of the Cruel Tale and The Romantic Agony. He is considered a practitioner of the Fantastique, a catholic and a dandy.

L'Ensorcelé by Barbey

L’ensorcelée (in a Folio edition)

L’Ensorcelée (The Bewitched, 1854) is a tale by French writer Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. It concerns an episode of the royalist rising among the Norman peasants against the first republic.

Barbey is favorably  mentioned in Against the Grain (the breviary of decadence) by Joris-Karl Huysmans:

“Deux ouvrages de Barbey d’Aurevilly attisaient spécialement des Esseintes, Le Prêtre marié et Les Diaboliques. D’autres, tels que L’ensorcelé, Le chevalier des touches, Une vieille maîtresse, étaient certainement plus pondérés et plus complets, mais ils laissaient plus froid des Esseintes qui ne s’intéressait réellement qu’aux oeuvres mal portantes, minées et irritées par la fièvre. Avec ces volumes presque sains, Barbey d’Aurevilly avait constamment louvoyé entre ces deux fossés de la religion catholique qui arrivent à se joindre: le mysticisme et le sadisme. — À rebours

“Two works in particular of Barbey d’Aurevilly‘s fired Des Esseintes‘ imagination: the Prêtre marié (“Married Priest”) and the Diabolique. Others, such as l’Ensorcelé (“The Bewitched”), the Chevalier des Touches, Une vieille Maîtresse (“An Old Mistress”), were no doubt better balanced and more complete works, but they appealed less warmly to Des Esseintes, who was genuinely interested only in sickly books with health undermined and exasperated by fever. In these comparatively sane volumes Barbey d’Aurévilly was perpetually tacking to and fro between those two channels of Catholicism which eventually run into one,—mysticism and Sadism.” — Against the Grain, translation by Havelock Ellis

A History of Derision, wikified

A History of Derision

A History of Derision

A History of Derision by way of Illusory Confections who wrote on its subject[1]:

“Be still my beating heart, this is practically everything I adore in one tidy 240 page bundle! But it isn’t referenced anywhere online and I couldn’t even find mention of it on the Atlas Press site. So I zipped an email to Atlas inquiring about it, and, sadly, its nonexistence was confirmed. Apparently it was a planned project that fell to the sidelines and “[1]

the website is the accurate source of what is available, the catalogue part bibliography and part fiction, if you like…

Here it is again in a wikified version,

A History of Derision is an aborted project by Arkhive, an Atlas Press imprint.

It builds on André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour, but is more a history of French avant-garde.

French Romantics: Sade, Lassailly, Rabbe, Forneret, Nodier, Fourier

Bouzingos: Borel and O’Neddy

Hydropathes: Goudeau, Cros, Haraucourt, Lafargue, Richepin, Tailhade, Rollinat, Monselet, Sapeck, Allais.

Hirsutes and the Chat Noir: Salis, Moréas, Lorrain, Verlaine, Sarcey, Haraucourt.

Arts Incohérents: : Lévy, Rivière, Allais.

Zutistes: Allais, Cros, Nouveau, Rimbaud, Ajalbert, Haraucourt, Verlaine.

La Nouvelle Rive Gauche : Trézenick, D’Aurevilly, Verlaine.

Lutèce: Rall, Rimbaud, Corbière, Caze, Rachilde, Floupette (Vicaire and Beauclair).

Symbolists : de Gourmont, Jarry, Tailhade, Huysmans, Pawlowski.

Ecole de Paris : Apollinaire, Jacob, Salmon, Albert-Birot, Cami.

Dada : Aragon, Picabia, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Satie, Arp, Rigaut.

Surrealism : Desnos, Prévert, Péret, Topor, Magritte, Scutenaire, Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte.

Situationists : Arnaud and Jorn, Dotremont, Mariën.

Daily Bul & Co: Bury, Béalu, Colinet.

Encyclopédie des FARCES et ATTRAPES et des MYSTIFICATIONS

Farcistes: Encyclopédie des farces et attrapes et des mystifications, François Caradec, Noël Arnaud.[2]

Oulipo.

Louis Althusser @ 90

Althusser by Green Gorilla

Photo unidentified

Sainte Anne, psychiatric hospital (05) - 17Sep06, Paris (France)Sainte Anne, psychiatric hospital (02) - 17Sep06, Paris (France)Sainte Anne, psychiatric hospital (01) - 17Sep06, Paris (France)Sainte Anne, psychiatric hospital (04) - 17Sep06, Paris (France)Sainte Anne, psychiatric hospital (03) - 17Sep06, Paris (France)

Photos of the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital by Philippe Leroyer

Louis Althusser, French Marxist philosopher would have been 90 today, infamous for strangling his wife on November 16, 1980 and not being tried for it. Althusser was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility and committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris. Althusser remained there for three years and was then released.

“The perversity of woman!”

Danielle Darrieux is Mme de Rênal by Jahsonic

Danielle Darrieux is Mme de Rênal

I’m slowly and carefully moving towards the middle of The Red and the Black and am stricken by quotes on “female perversions” (there is no such thing, or is there?) and instances of “happiness in crime”:

“Their joy was thenceforward of a far higher nature, the flame that devoured them was more intense. They underwent transports of utter madness. Their happiness would have seemed great in the eyes of other people. But they never recaptured the delicious serenity, the unclouded happiness, the spontaneous joy of the first days of their love, when Madame de Renal’s one fear was that of not being loved enough by Julien. Their happiness assumed at times the aspect of crime. ” –Chapter 19 in The Red and the Black

“The perversity of woman!” thought Julien. “What pleasure, what instinct leads them to betray us?” –Chapter 21 in The Red and the Black

Is self-loathing the key to understanding Julien Sorel?

Gérard Philipe is Julien Sorel

Gérard Philipe is Julien Sorel in the film adaptation by Claude Autant-Lara

Is self-loathing the key to understanding Julien Sorel, the anti-hero of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black?[1], is the question I asked myself last night.

The American literary critic Hayden Carruth (R.I.P. 10 days ago) seems to confirm my suspicion by comparing him to Antoine Roquentin of Sartre’s Nausea . He wrote in 1959 of the way that “Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters. . . . It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin’s confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish.”

“Certainly, Nausea gives us a few of the clearest and hence most useful images of man in our time that we possess; and this, as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art.” –Hayden Carruth

Gratuitous nudity #11 and Icon of Erotic Art #32

sophie dahl by modelvancouver

Sophie Dahl, i-D, 1997

Sophie Dahl first came to my attention with her Opium (perfume) ad[1].

Today, following a link that started[2] at Trevor Brown‘s blog, which celebrated Takashi Itsuki‘s acrotomophiliac eroticism, which backlinked[3] to the new magazine Coilhouse (amazing new magazine, started as a blog in Aug 2007), I arrived at the photography of Nick Knight. On his SHOWstudio.com site, one finds this image[4] (first published in i-D, 1997), which frankly, leaves me sick with desire. Just what is it that brings on this sickness? It’s the softness of her skin, the presumed quality of her fatty tissue, the pot belly and the pear-shaped breasts. And the nails. Amen.

This is a first for my series, where an image is both an instance of gratuitous nudity and an Icon of Erotic Art.

Jean-François Bizot (1944 – 2007)

Remembering Jean-François Bizot

The Novaplanet.com obituary to Hector Zazou led to my much belated discovery that French tastemaker Jean-François Bizot died one year ago on the same day as Zazou (that’s how I found out). If your new to Bizot, and you have money to spare, go to an online shop and buy the book Underground, l’histoire and the accompanying cd Underground Moderne.

On Zazou, Bizot said:

“In England they have Peter Gabriel, in America they have David Byrne, in France we have Hector Zazou.” See my theory of equivalents and synchronicity.

David Byrne’s obituary of Bizot.

“Later, in the 80s, [Bizot] and some others started Radio Nova. At various periods, it might have been the best radio station in the world. No joke. They played alt-rock before there was such a thing, Raï, African pop music, Chanson, Latin American music, hip hop, and experimental music. We all wanted to hear it, and this was where we could. Finally.”[1]

The Independent‘s obituary.

“Jean-François Bizot had an enormous influence on the cultural life of France over the past 40 years. Between 1970 and 1975, and again between 1979 and 1994, he was at the helm of the counter-culture monthly Actuel. This started out as a French take on the underground press, not too far removed from the Village Voice and the Los Angeles Free Press in the US, or Oz and the International Times in the UK, but eventually evolved into required reading not so much for the hippies as for the hip crowd.”[2]

From the CD Underground Moderne (with YouTube links where available)