Category Archives: grotesque

The boing boing effect

Vintage Italian pulp comix cover art

Curt of Groovy Age of horror says:

Thanks to FLOG!, Groovy Age just got its first BoingBoing hit so traffic’s through the roof. If you’re here from one of those links, looking for all those Italian pulp comics covers, HERE THEY ARE (indexed links to the relevant posts). For related sites, check out the “fumetti” links in the sidebar (I can also recommend Arboles muertos y mucha tinta).

Boing Boing’s post said:

Sites like The Groovy Age of Horror showcase a lot of [Italian pulp comics cover art] and link to other galleries of pulp art masterpieces.

Boing Boing, which according to Technorati is the 5th most popular blog in the world (66,490 links from 20,790 blogs), has put Groovy Age of Horror in the spotlight. Its traffic shot up from an average of 250 daily visitors to 1,100. I’ve been a fan of Groovy Age for over a year now. In a kind of mission statement in 2005 Curt described Groovy Age of Horror as follows.

“My real ambition, a large part of what I want to achieve here, […], is the creation of the Groovy Age of Horror as a kind of escapist fantasy world, sort of like the Hammerscape. In a sense, I’d like the story-worlds of all these novels I review to melt into one grand, sleazy, sexy, monster-haunted, cult-ridden, distinctly 1960s–1970s world of groovy horror. And I’d like the images I post–whether paperback covers or fumetti or movie posters or screenshots–to serve as windows on that world. When you come here, I want you to feel like you’re going to that place, and when you click away, I want you to feel like you’ve been somewhere dark, fun, and fascinating. That’s the experience I’d love to evoke.” –Curt via http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/ [Jun 2005]

Groovy Age of Horror is your best point of entry for a very lively internet community (another center of which is the Yahoo! group Euro Trash Paradise) dedicated to 1960s and 1970s pulp culture.

Also watch out for Curt’s upcoming novel.

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.

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?

Missed: Undercover Surrealism

April 1929, first edition of Documents

Undercover Surrealism explores the ’subversive climate’ of the dark undercurrent within Surrealism in the late 1920’s spearheaded by Georges Bataille. The exhibition draws together work by Picasso, Miro, Masson, Giacometti as well as imagery from the magazine Bataille edited from 1929 to 1930 called DOCUMENTS :

“..a shocking and bizarre juxtaposition of art, ethnography, archaeology and popular culture in such a way that overturned conventional notions of ‘primitive’ and ‘ideal’. Bataille described himself as Surrealism’s ‘enemy from within’… ”

The exhibition ran at the Hayward Gallery till the 30th July 2006.

Via Desert and Sea

Lunacy: new Svankmajer

David Hudson at greencine reports on a new film by Jan Švankmajer.

Here is the trailer.

Wikipedia has this:

Lunacy, also known as Sílení is a 2005 film by Jan Švankmajer. The film is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.

And here is a sample of Švankmajer’s sculptural work:

Beethoven by Arcimboldo (1993) – Jan Švankmajer
image sourced here.

Aug 2006 update: The Evening Class has two excellent posts: one with YouTube footage here and one on Lunacy here.

Sherwood Anderson and grotesque fiction

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) – Sherwood Anderson
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In fiction, a character is usually considered a grotesque if he induces both empathy and disgust. (A character that inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque’s positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer his darker side.

In European literature, Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques.

In American literature, one often cites Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection Winesburg, Ohio.

The most recent literary theory on the grotesque has been by two American scholars: Philip Thomson (1972) and David Lavery (a continuing online contribution).

I’ve cleaned up my own pages on the grotesque somewhat and transcribed some lists to Wikipedia. Please follow the links.

A final question, the beautiful cover painting on Anderson’s novel (a larger picture here), is it by Edward Hopper, that architect of American loneliness who recently guided me through chapter two of de Botton’s The Art of Travel?

Blind Beast

Blind Beast (1969) – Yasuzo Masumura

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

 

Dadanoias has a video excerpt of the 1969 film Blind Beast, which I recently had the pleasure of seeing at the Brussels Arenberg cinemas.

I cannot recommend the whole film, but the first 15 minutes are beautiful (the gallery scene, the first scene in the warehouse with the sculptures of the body parts). The entire middle sequence is boring. The final scene is hilariously and grotesquely entertaining. The scene that Dadanoias has found (via El Blog Rarito) is from the end of the first 15 minutes, where the blind sculptor is trying to catch the girl in vain). Note the music by Hikaru Hayashi. The film is based on a novel by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo.