Category Archives: grotesque

Fassbinder and Ozon

Water Drops On Burning Rocks (2000) – François Ozon
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French director François Ozon directed this film based on Fassbinder’s play. Ozon’s work is very reminiscent of Fassbinder’s. Incidentally Ozon and Fassbinder share an appraisal of the work of American director Douglas Sirk.

Most memorable line (I paraphrase) “and you know how difficult it is for me to find pleasure,” said reproachfully by the older man (pictured right) to his submissive young male partner (pictured left).

Rating: Psychological realism 8/10, feelgood factor 3/10, oddity value 7/10. Recommended.

Digression: In the back of the photograph, you can see American actress Anna Thomson (one more picture here, who was the lead in one of the more interesting American productions of the 2000s: Fast Food Fast Women (2000).

RIP Rémy Belvaux


C’est Arrivé Pres de Chez Vous/Man Bites Dog (1992) – Rémy Belvaux André Bonzel, … [Amazon.com]

Photo still of the film, this is Poelvoorde, not Belvaux, who has a photo of Belvaux?

Writer/director Rémy Belvaux – most famous for Man Bites Dog, died unexpectedly yesterday evening. He was only 38 years old. –via stevienixed

Man Bites Dog caused a sensation when it was released in Belgium, I haven’t seen it since but I’m sure it has stood the test of time. I remember the story as one about a reporter who makes news rather than reporting it. (If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own!)

Ian McEwan (1948 – )

I’m still reading 1001 Books and when one arrives in the 1970s one finds Ian McEwan and he looks just like my kind of writer. I knew of the film The Cement Garden (starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg) but did not know it was written by Mc Ewan. I’ll probably start by seeing the filmed version of The Comfort of Strangers (Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren) directed by Paul Schrader who is also a purveyor of dark culture and who likes Bresson (so do Michael Haneke, Girish Shambu and Dennis Cooper). Below are some pointers to Ian Mc Ewan, definitely an artist of the grotesque.

The Cement Garden (1978) – Ian McEwan
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In The Cement Garden, the father of four children dies. His death is followed by the death of the children’s mother. In order to avoid being taken into custody, the children hide their mother’s death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, descend into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son starts to experiment with transvestism. [Sept 2006]

The Comfort of Strangers (1981) – Ian McEwan
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A story of sexual predation and entrapment set in Venice (like Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now) featuring Colin and Mary (an innocent couple that reminds of Bitter Moon’s innocent couple) and Robert and the invalid Caroline (the evil couple). Caroline’s invalidity is the result of Robert’s sadistic sexual violence. The theme of male dominance and brutality toward women is re-examined when it is revealed that the object of Robert’s desire is Colin.

The Comfort of Strangers (1990) – Paul Schrader
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Like many of Paul Schrader’s films, The Comfort of Strangers is a mournful examination of decaying innocence and sexual transgression.

Based on a creepy Ian McEwan novel, this Paul Schrader film stars Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett as a married couple who find their marriage sliding into a morass of tedium. To reignite it, they visit Venice, where they fall under the spell of an urbane older couple, played by Christopher Walken (in one of his most chillingly insinuating roles) and Helen Mirren (who seems to be more his crippled acolyte than his wife). British reserve forces the younger couple to be polite to these strange birds, but increased exposure to them through coincidental meetings gradually pulls them into their deadly orbit. Adapted by Harold Pinter, it’s a slightly arid but still goose-fleshy film in which nothing is what it seems to be and, what’s worse, nothing familiar looks familiar anymore. –Marshall Fine for Amazon.com

Ian McEwan CBE, (born June 21, 1948), is a British novelist (sometimes nicknamed “Ian Macabre” because of the nature of his early work).–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian McEwan

See also: 1948 – British literature – macabre

Bataille day

American author Dennis Cooper is a prolific blogger and he dedicates today to Georges Bataille with 11 posts:

Georges Bataille’s ‘inner experience’

Litlove’s wonderful post on Bataille via Random Thoughts’s blog.

For instance, [Bataille] became particularly entranced by the photographic image of a Chinese man undergoing torture. By concentrating on this photo to the point of being almost hypnotised by it (much as a mystic would concentrate on biblical scripture), Bataille felt he could actually share this man’s pain, and such an act of communion he termed ‘inner experience’. Bataille wanted to claim a political dimension to this act, an ethical form of engagement that I think reveals to some extent his awful guilt at not being able to fight in two world wars because of ill-health. But it’s also part of the French understanding of politics as comprising an extremely important conceptual dimension; revolution only comes about by changing how people think, not just how people act. But let’s turn this around once again: Bataille’s act, however compassionate and politically motivated it may be, can do nothing for the man who actually suffered, in fact, it could seem almost parasitic upon his pain. There’s a complicated web of interpretations to be spun around this kind of mental engagement, and at the heart of it a difficult, unwieldy truth that Bataille wants us to acknowledge. Inner experience of this nature – intense, excessive, debilitating, overwhelming, is completely resistant for Bataille to significance.

See Georges Bataille and Death by a thousand cuts.

Digression: See also Litlove’s post on plotness (plot-driven) vs plotless (character-driven) American novels.

“My understanding of plot comes from a particular source: a very good (American) critic by the name of Peter Brooks, who wrote a very good book called Reading for the Plot. Now if anyone out there is critically-minded, Brooks’s works are a real treat: big ideas that enliven any kind of reading and all written in an admirably clear and accessible style. Brooks suggests that what we understand by plot is the initial moment in a narrative when a fundamental enigma or problem is posed to the reader, and we recognize that the remainder of the story will be put to elucidating the enigma or solving the problem. It’s easiest to see this happening in a detective story, where the first corpse sets the machinery of narrative in motion. Hence, I imagine, humanity’s fascination with stories, for they seek to provide solutions to all kind of problems, and to return order and meaning to situations that have become confused and chaotic. “

And via the book Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (John Xiros Cooper, 2004, see entry on low modernism) comes this:

“Brooks sees Flaubert [Madame Bovary] as marking a turning point in the history of the novel. He writes that “any discussion of plot … needs to confront Flaubert, since his relation to traditional uses of plot can only be described as perverse. His mature work is indeed carefully structured by a systematic perversion of plot as a central system of narrative organization and meaning” (Reading, 171) “

See plot

The Driver’s Seat (1970) – Muriel Spark

In search of Muriel Spark

The Driver’s Seat (1970) – Muriel Spark
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Very early on in her 1970 novel The Driver’s Seat, Muriel Spark lets us know that the heroine, Lise, an office worker on vacation somewhere in Southern Europe, is going to die.

The Driver’s Seat (1974) – Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
[Amazon.com]

Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol… . This film is based on the best-selling Muriel Spark novel. Elizabeth Taylor, in one of her least-known performances, stars as a deranged, psychotic spinster looking for a man to whom she can give herself – completely (see above). Set in Italy’s romantic and tragedy-filled Rome, she embarks on a series of chilling adventures as she seeks to keep a date with a mystery lover…but when she finds him, she demands much more than love… She demands murder. (for similar storylines about a character who demands to be murdered see Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Martin Amis’s London Fields)

See also: Italian cinema – 1974 film – Andy Warhol

The Breast (1972) – Philip Roth

In search of grotesque fiction

The Breast (1972) – Philip Roth
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The Breast (1972) is a novel by Philip Roth, in which the main character, David Kepesh, becomes a 155-pound breast. Throughout the book we see Kepesh fighting with himself. Part of him wishes to give into bodily wishes, while the other part of him wants to be reasonable. In many ways this book has a lot in common with Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breast [Sept 2006]

See also: independent body parts in fiction – breast – 1972 – American literature

Le Monstre (1903) – Georges Méliès

Via gmtplus9:

Georges Méliès… Le Monstre (The Monster, 1903, .mpg video 02:55). “…Set against an exotic backdrop of pyramids, the Nile, and a great the Sphinx, Georges Méliès’ The Monster (Le Monstre) seems, at first glance, to be a typical Méliès magic film in which a bearded magician demonstrates a series of tricks with an animated skeleton in front of a single well-dressed spectator. The effects are similar to those used in Méliès films ranging from The Vanishing Lady (1896) to The Infernal Cauldron (1903), and in many ways this is a rare instance of a Méliès film in which the magic tricks are actually upstaged by the elaborate scenic backdrop.” From Georges Méliès Digital Video Files.

The Valley (1989) – Burroughs/Haring

Via American author Dennis Cooper’s blog, comes:

“”The Valley” is a group of etchings by Keith Haring with text by William S. Burroughs. The portfolio consists of sixteen etchings drawn by the artist in April of 1989, in his New York studio. ” –Dennis Cooper

“There is no way in or out of the Valley, which is ringed by sheer cliffs with an overhanging ledge. How did the people of the Valley get in there in the first place? No one remembers. They have been there for many years. Children have been born, grown up and died in the valley, but not many children. Food is scarce. A stream runs through the Valley, and they have dammed up a large pond to raise fish. There is an area along the stream where they raise corn. Sometimes they will kill birds, a few lizards and snakes. So most children must be killed at birth. Just an allotted number to continue the line.” –William Burroughs

The installments can be found here, here and here.

Tip of the hat to Georges Bataille.

Update:

From the Dennis Cooper website:

“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” – William Burroughs

“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe… This is high risk literature”
– The New York Times

James Cain (1892 – 1977)

Lifespan: 1892 – 1977

Related: hardboiled – crime fiction – 1900s literature – American literature

Jealous Woman (1950) – James M. Cain
Corgi Edition published 1966
Image sourced here.
See also: jealousy

The seminal American writer in the noir fiction mode was James M. Cain—regarded as the third major figure of the early hardboiled scene, he debuted as a crime novelist in 1934, right between Hammett and Chandler.