Category Archives: literature

Introducing Henri/y Gerbault

I’m just a jealous guy

Henry Gerbault (June 24, 1863– October 19 1930), also spelled Henri Gerbault was a French illustrator and poster artist. He was a student of Henri Gervex. He was the nephew of Sully Prudhomme.

Poster for the Théatre Libre

The Théâtre Libre (French, Free Theater) was a theater founded by André Antoine that operated from 1887 to 1896 in Paris, France. Théâtre Libre was also the name of a European theatrical movement which celebrated Naturalist theatre and defied theatre censorship by founding subscription-based theatres. In London there was the Independent Theatre Society, which debuted the plays of George Bernard Shaw; and Germany had the Freie Bühne. Henrik Ibsen‘s Ghosts was the landmark play for all of these theatres. —Sholem Stein

His œuvre was dedicated to humourist drawings and illustrations. He illustrated authors such as Félicien Champsaur, Charles Perrault and Marcel Prévost.

He worked for numerous illustrated journals of the Belle Époque: La Vie Parisienne, Le Journal amusant, Le Rire, L’Amour, where he was noted for his voluptuous women.

Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam @ 170

On the cover: Cornelis Huyberts (1669-1712), a plate from “Thesaurus Anatomicus” (1702) by Frederik Ruysch. (1638-1731). (Thanks Paul)

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (November 7, 1838 – August 19, 1889) was a French symbolist writer. Villiers’ works, in the decadent/romantic style, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror. Important among them are the drama Axel, the novel Tomorrow’s Eve, and the short-story collection, Sardonic Tales. He popularized the term “Android” (Andréide in French) in Tomorrow’s Eve and cruel tale in the epynomous collection. He is one of the authors featured in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor and is mentioned in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (Symons), The Romantic Agony (Praz), The Book of Fantasy (Borges), Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday (Calvino), The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Todorov), Genealogy of the Cruel Tale (Adair) and the World of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Moore).

Nobrow manifesto #3

A day at De Slegte and I like Stupid Things

French Undressing – Naughty Postcards from 1900 to 1920,

L’age d’or de la carte postale and

Kaarten.

I went to De Slegte and found French Undressing by Paul Hammond, along with the previously acquired L’age d’or de la carte postale and Kaarten, a good start for a bibliography regarding postcards, and certainly naughty postcards.

Paul Hammond is a cultural critic on a pair with Colin Wilson, Ado Kyrou and Greil Marcus, to name but a few. He wrote The Shadow and its Shadow (2000) and Marvellous Méliès (1974).

On the first page of French Undressing Hammond quotes from Rimbaud‘s A Season in Hell (“The Alchemy Of The Word“), possibly the earliest defense of popular culture/mass culture. Such a defense always comes from an intellectual, and thus qualifies as a nobrow manifesto, possibly the first of its kind (see prev. once below). I include it here as Nobrow manifesto #3.

“For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes– and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naïve rhythms of country rimes.” –Translation Paul Schmidt

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWrFUR_CF6c]

Here is a spoken word version of “The Alchemy Of The Word.”

What else did I buy at De Slegte? A silly volume on Baudrillard (pictured below) and an issue of Le Magazine Littéraire dedicated to drug lit, entitled La littérature et la drogue[1] and The Quincunx (I’ve enjoyed this one while on holiday in Malaysia (Tioman Island) twenty years ago).

I did not buy A Humument, Will Self‘s Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Le Fantastique dans l’art Flamand by Paul Fierens, Catalog of Unfindable Objects by Carelman, Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic and Eros du dimanche by Anatole Jakovsky.

P. S. Previous nobrow manifestos included Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination [2] and Fiedler’s “Cross the Border — Close the Gap” [3]

On the nature of guilty pleasures

Mondo Cane (1962) – Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco E. Prosperi

Having recently received comments by Lichanos and o. h. about the validity of guilty pleasure as a separate cultural category I show the film above, Mondo Cane (1962), by Gualtiero Jacopetti and his colleague whose name escapes me at this time.

I always feel tempted instead of arguing to cite a collection of words and concepts which will tautologically exlain the concept. I will not resist the temptation now. Here they come:

bad taste – camp – kitsch – “low culture” – trash – taboo

I continue:

See also: “body” genres” – bread and circuses – “low” art – lowbrow (American art movement) – working class culture – culture – folk culture – popular culture

Related by connotation: artificial – bad taste – basic instinct – camp – cheap – commercial – conventional – common – derivative – entertaining – ephemera – exploitation – formulaic – low budget – lurid – mass – ordinary – pop – popular – proletariat – prurient – sensationalism – scatology – shocking – stereotype – trash – under-the-counter – underground – vulgar

Contrast: “high” culture

See also: low modernism

In film: B-movies – exploitation films – grindhouse films – paracinema – television – video nasties – violent films

In print: comics – escapist fiction – dime novels – genre fiction – men’s magazines – paraliterature – popular fiction – pulp fiction – yellow journalism

In music: disco – house – music hall – popular music – pop music –

In the visual realm: advertising – applied arts – caricature – decorative arts – design – graffiti – kitsch

In performing arts: burlesque – circus – peepshow – striptease – vaudeville –

By genre: adventure – “body” genres – carnival – comedy – horror – melodrama – pornography – romance

Perhaps one day I will put all of the above words in the right order, divide them into chapters, add adjectives, conjunctions, phrases and clauses and page numbers.

Furthermore, guilty pleasures are marketing categories (see the Foute CD products in the Dutch-speaking region), and marketing categories are the strongest indication of genre identity.

Notice that all links go to Jahsonic.com pages, a project which was from the outset a “guilty pleasure” in nature and purpose.

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

Bad Love (film) by Catherine Breillat

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:

Broken Hugs by Pedro Almodóvar
De helaasheid der dingen, after a novel by Felix van Groeningen.
The Countess by Julie Delpy
Das Weiße Band by Michael Haneke
The Last Days of Emma Blank by Alex van Warmerdam

Thomas Kyd @550

Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy @550

The Spanish tragedy: or, Hieronimo is mad againe: Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Belimperia; with the pitifull death of Hieronimo

Publisher: London : Printed by Augustine Mathewes, for Francis Grove, and are to bee sold at his shoppe, neere the Sarazens Head, upon Snovv-hill, 1633.

When one researches the history of horror [1], one encounters the revenge tragedy in the 16th century, featured because of the genre’s cruelty. In the 1580s, an incredible series of gruesome revenge plays were performed on the stages of England.

An example of the gruesomeness of these plays:

“Enter the empress’s sons with Lavinia, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished.” —stage direction to Shakespeare‘s Titus Andronicus. (Chiron and Demetrius had taken Lavinia away and raped her over her husband’s body. To keep her from revealing what she has seen and endured, they had cut out her tongue and cut off her hands.)

The Spanish Tragedy (d. 1594) by Thomas Kyd is exemplary and one of the earliest items in the history of the revenge play.

The play is also noted for being an early instance of the metatheatre (play-in-play) trope. Aditionally, Thomas Kyd is also an icon in the history of counterculture (he was put on the rack for allegations of heresy).

The history of horror is an interesting subject because of its ontological and temporal issues. It starts with horror fiction and horror art and ends at the commodified terrain of the horror film and gothic fashion.

Most recently the concept of horror was explored by Collapse journal volume 4.

Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly @200

Barbey: catholicism, sadism, mysticism

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

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’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

The gullibility of American audiences

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9VWC8eB9ic]

October 30, 1938 radio broadcast

Orson Welles first gained wide American notoriety 70 years ago today for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells‘ The War of the Worlds. Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, it caused a large number of listeners to panic, now commonly and somewhat euphemistically referred to as mass hysteria. Welles and his biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility or naïveté of American audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War.

World Cinema Classic #70

In search of nonspace and unthought thoughts.

Sans Soleil

In search of nonspace and unthought thoughts.

I’ve been mulling over French director Chris Marker‘s Sans Soleil for four days now. The key scene for me was the shooting of the giraffe, which gave its origins away as far as genre-theoretics are concerned.

The key phrase was perhaps the “salute to all unposted letters,” but is safe to say that the film is brilliantly written throughout.

I saw the film at MuHKA on last Saturday, introduced by a Belgian scholar (who?). He stated that the film was unclassifiable, because the “film essay is not a genre but a small category”. However, in my opinion, the film fits the mondo film category, and functions as a highbrow counterpart to Mondo Cane. The film also begs a viewing of the masterwork Blood of the Beasts. But Sans Soleil is a different film altogether. It is a philosophical film that raises questions of medium specificity, multimedia, memory and authenticity.

I have a feeling that Sans Soleil can be invoked to clarify Gilles Deleuze‘s any-space-whatever (see B. C. Holmes – “The Deleuzian Memory of Sans Soleil” [1]), but to prove that would need some more studying of Gilles Deleuze on film.

A History of Derision, wikified

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]