Category Archives: grotesque

Greencine and grindhouse cinema

Over the next six weeks Greencine will be serializing Eddie Muller’s 1996 non-fiction book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema.

Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema (1996) – Eddie Muller
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From the beginning of the book:

Grindhouses have always churned away in a seamy corner of the American psyche. They glowed through the fog on the bad stretch of Market Street in San Francisco. They used dizzying neon to bewitch New Yorkers, even in the bustling depravity of Times Square. From First Avenue in Seattle to Canal Street in New Orleans, if you wanted to see all the sexy stuff that the Purity Patrol kept from the mainstream, a grindhouse always beckoned.

The best online definition of the grindhouse genre is by Brian Camp:

Grindhouse was a term coined and perpetuated by the trade paper, Variety, to describe theaters on big-city downtown movie strips, like New York’s 42nd Street or San Francisco’s Market Street, which ran double (and sometimes triple) features of films continuously, practically around the clock, with little or no time between films (i.e., the films ‘grinded’ up against each other). Such theaters don’t exist anymore. When we talk about ‘grindhouse movies,’ we refer to the types of action and exploitation movies that played at these theaters (blaxploitation, Italian westerns, kung fu, slasher, etc.).” –Brian Camp , 09/28/2003, 08:56:54 via http://www.mhvf.net/forum/general/posts/124245630.html 

See also:

exploitation film – grindhouse cinema – sex film – sexploitation

 

Nabokov on “La Nausée”

Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, “La Nausée” was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters – Barbusse, Céline and so forth. Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst, and still farther back there is old Eugène Sue, to whom the melodramatic Russian owed so much. –Nabokov, Sunday, April 24, 1949 in The New York Times Book Review

Nabokov states that La Nausée “belongs to that tense-looking … type of writing”. If, as we may suppose, this type of writing did not end with the publication of La Nausée, who are its descendants? Bret Easton Ellis for example?

Although Nabokov derides two of my favorite authors (Céline and Dostoevsky), he shares my dislike for Sartre. From the same review:

Sartre’s name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called “existentialist” one finds quite a few “suctorialists” (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre’s first novel. La Nausée (published in Paris in 1938) should enjoy some success.

Peter Lubin on suctorialism:

Suctorialist was first and last used (by Nabokov) in an April 24, 1949, review of a French novel for one who “reads and admires such remarkably silly nonsense as the ‘existentialists’ rig up.” An ugly word, an ugly idea, and we may leave it, along with that novel, back in 1949.

Some unrelated eyecandy:

In Consultation (1924) – Joseph Schippers

Death of Orpheus (1866) – Emile Lévy

The “cult of beauty” vs. the “cult of ugliness”

Frontispice des Amours jaunes, dessin par Tristan Corbière
image sourced here.

In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist, Pound discusses two types of art; The “cult of beauty” and the “cult of ugliness”. He compares the former with medical cure and the latter with medical diagnosis, and goes on to write “Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis.” – “beauty is difficult”: Cantos LXXIV, LXXX

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

I watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events with the girls yesterday evening and loved it. Loved Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep and even Dustin Hoffman’s cameo appearance.

The film is based on this series of comic books.

On its steampunk qualities:

Although the books can be classed as ‘steampunk‘, in that they involve young people struggling against great odds in an anachronistic setting, the addition, in later books, of the mysterious organization known as V.F.D. have begun to push the story into the new genre of post-steampunk (in the same way that later additions to the cyberpunk genre are now classed as postcyberpunk). –wikipedia

On its macabre and black comedy qualities:

The books can also be classified as absurdist fiction, due to their eccentric characters, quirky writing style and generally improbable storylines. Some might argue that these books could also be classified as black comedy, because of the mix of humorous and macabre elements.

In the words of my favorite Amazon critic Jeff Shannon and one of my favorite film critics tout court:

If you spliced Charles Addams, Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, Edward Gorey, and Roald Dahl into a Tim Burtonesque landscape, you’d surely come up with something like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many critics (in mostly mixed reviews) wondered why Tim Burton didn’t direct this comically morbid adaptation … but there’s still plenty to recommend the playfully bleak scenario, … a variety of fantastical hazards and mysterious clues, some of which remain unresolved. Given endless wonders of art direction, costume design, and cinematography… –Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

One more thing: loved the self referentiality of the intrusive narrator of the film (such as is commonly displayed in 18th and 19th century literature.)

The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo

The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo
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Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs is a horror story of a young aristocrat kidnapped and disfigured by his captors to display a permanent grin.

In the novel, Hugo gives his own account of the work of the Comprachicos:

“In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.”

This example clearly displays all of the most common elements of the legend: first, association with outsiders (the Chinese); second, the victim being a young child; and third, assertions of the methodology that stretch the limits of credibility but seem to remain within the domain of the possible. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprachicos [Dec 2006]

Les Mémoires du diable (1838) – Frédéric Soulié

Les Mémoires du diable (1838) – Frédéric Soulié
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Frédéric Soulié is another writer of the roman frénétique. In his time he was as well known as Balzac or Eugène Sue. His Les Mémoires du diable (1838) is mentioned in Colin Wilson’s Misfits and the Romantic Agony.

Who knows who did the painting on the Robert Laffont edition shown above? It looks like something done by Daumier.

The French frenetic school of the 1820s/1830s

Cover to Janin’s Dead Donkey

Inspired by The Romantic Agony, I bring you some 19th century cult fiction by the likes of Jules Janin and Charles Nodier of the “frenetic school”.

“The Dead Donkey” & “The Guillotined Woman” by Jules Janin, Honore de Balzac, Terry Hale (Editor), Tony Johannot (Illustrator)
Paperback – 168 pages

This story features probably the most nauseating narrator in the entire history of literature.

In nineteenth century France there flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened ‘the frenetique school’.

The frenetique was at its peak in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Of this short-lived literary movement Jules Janin’s The Dead Donkey and he Guillotined Woman is one of the finest and certainly one of the most unpleasant examples. Jules Janin is supposed to have begun the tale as a spoof of the fashionable frenetique style. However, with its wealth of horrible incident and its sinister and claustrophobic atmosphere, it seems likely that the author actually fell in love with his subject. The bizarre duality of the novel is one of its most striking qualities.

This edition comes with Balzac’s extraordinary spoof sequel, Chapter XXX, published in an all-English edition for the first time. Masterly in-depth commentary by Terry Hale, and the celebrated illustrations by Tony Johannot. —http://www.theadamsresidence.co.uk/gothsoc/gothsoc.html [Nov 2006

Notes:

‘The frenetique school’: frenetic means fast, frantic, harried, or frenzied

In the category of “la littérature frénétique”, most frequently cited are Jules Janin, Charles Lassailly, Charles Nodier (Smarra, or the Demons of the Night (1821)) and Pétrus Borel. Its peak was the late 1820s and early 1830s.

La France frénétique de 1830: Choix de textes (1978) – Jean-Luc Steinmetz
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Some French language notes:

A côté du romantisme officiel qui occupe le devant de la scène existe un autre courant, encore marginal mais porteur d’avenir. Influencée par le roman gothique et ses images de caveaux humides, fantômes blafards et cul-de-basse-fosse ensanglantés, une certaine tendance friande d’horreur et de frissons s’épanouit en France, la littérature “frénétique”. Elle se teinte d’ailleurs assez vite d’aspects parodiques (Jules Janin, Charles Lassailly), ou alors accentue son côté sombre et pervers accompagné d’un humour très noir (Pétrus Borel “le lycanthrope”, 1809-1859). —http://gallica.bnf.fr/themes/LitXVIIIIk.htm

Every European country had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir (“black novel”, now primarily used to denote the hardboiled detective genre) and in Germany it was called the Schauerroman (“shudder novel”). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet.

Dedalus European Classics, who’ve also lovingly published works by Rachilde has Smarra by Nodier in print in what I think is a lovely painting by Gustave Moreau:

Smarra & Trilby (1821, 1822) – Charles Nodier
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Three Gothic Novels

Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto; Vathek; Frankenstein (1968) – Various
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The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and exotic settings. This volume presents three of the most celebrated Gothic novels: “The Castle of Otranto“, published pseudonymously in 1765; “Vathek” (1786); and the story of “Frankenstein” (1818). Introduction by Mario Praz. The cover image of this Penguin edition illustrates one of the main tropes of gothic fiction: the isolated and haunted castle.

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony arrived Thursday, with an introduction by Frank Kermode and the famous Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c.1485) by Memling on the cover. At times it reads as the gossip pages from the Decadents. Here is a quote on the supposed impotence of Baudelaire:

“[The] case of Baudelaire’s exotic exclusiveness will be understood, and of his strange conduct towards Madame Sabatier, and it can be why so many people give credit to the rumour reported by Nadar. (Baudelair’s impotence, generally admitted in this case, is denied by Flottes.)” pages 153 and 187 of The Romantic Agony.

It seems that I was wrong about Praz’s ‘panning’ of the decadence of late romantic literature. In his introduction Praz that it is his aim to describe the what-is-ness of this sensibility (morbidity and perversion) in romantic literature.