Category Archives: modernism

Carnal Knowledge (1971) – Mike Nichols

Carnal Knowledge (1971) – Mike Nichols [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

G___ lent me a VHS copy of Carnal Knowledge (1971). It’s a depressing look at the effects of the sexual revolution and free love, one of the first films to depict its negative influences, as such it predates Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). While the film deals with themes related to eroticism, it is unerotic in its depiction thereof, and can best be classified as a kitchen-sink realist drama and a celebration of the modernist cult of ugliness. The film is also reminiscent of Coming Apart (1969) and was a feature in David Schwartz’s retrospective on the sexual revolution in American cinema.

As she stalks through the night …

Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) – Louis Malle
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As she stalks through the night, she is a vision of tortured heartbreak, her woeful eyes and lush, sensuous lips illuminated by neon signs and baleful streetlamps.

I watched Ascenseur pour l’échafaud with G___. This 1958 French film stars Jeanne Moreau and is directed by Louis Malle. The score is by Miles Davis and the film belongs to the film noir category. The film is about a woman who cheats on her husband and persuades her lover to kill him. Like in Fargo, things go horribly wrong. Other comparisons to be made are The Postman Always Rings Twice (lover-husband-murder theme) and Scorsese’s 1985 After Hours (its unity of time is constrained: the action takes place within 24 hours or so). The film is a celebration of fifties modernism with scenes playing in a motel, on a motorway and in a modern office building. Two cars are featured: a Cadillac and a Mercedes 300SL.

Padre Padrone (1977) – Taviani brothers

This is the scene where Gavino is hauled away from school at the age of 7, and wets his pants.

I watched the 1977 Padre Padrone on Canvas last night. This slow and surreal Italian art film is typical of 1970s government-funded cinematic modernism, with its emphasis on alienation, sordidness and loneliness. Although not without its merits the film is an unpleasant viewing experience. Some of the highlights included talking sheep, swelling music, on screen text, boys molesting animals and weird sound effects. For a similar but more enjoyable portrayal of Italian rural backwardness, check Christ Stopped at Eboli.

See also: patronage

Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism

I stumbled on the document excerpted below by researching the 1934 quote by André Breton “Have professed absolute surrealism“, and it got me to modify my page on Surrealism and give more prominence to my perennial favourite and “dissident surrealist” Georges Bataille.

Apparently American modern art criticism as professed by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster has been much influenced by Bataille. Although I should add that it has not only been Bataille who influenced American art and literary criticism; the whole of French theory has had an enormous — and by some much bemoaned — influence on postmodern American theory, much like German theory was influential in post-war France.

When considering Spanish Surrealism, André Breton’s Freudian-based models of automatism and subconscious manifestations predominantly occupy the majority of the attention given. While these frameworks are at least partially relevant within the scope of the early twentieth-century poetry and art, other models that have been overlooked deserve due attention. Namely, the philosophical approximations concerning informe (formlessness), “the excremental,” and “the ethnographic” as developed by the French thinker Georges Bataille–a renegade surrealist–are of great importance and need elucidation. Even though critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster have elaborated on these Bataillean motifs in their examination of contemporary art, the influence of these theories in early twentieth-century Spain has not been extensively examined. The contention here is that Bataille’s ideas of the twenties and thirties amplify our understanding of the literature of the poets of the literary Generation of 1927 in Spain, many of them so-called surrealists. In Michael Richardson’s words, “Bataille’s understanding concentrates on elements [like ethnography and informe] within surrealism that few critics have recognized, and thus gives us a new perspective on what surrealism may mean”.

… This dialogue [between France and Spain] is evident when considering Hispanic avant-gardists such as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alejo Carpentier, and others, who continually cross borders and establish a correspondence between the Parisian, Hispanic, and Catalan artistic ambiences. Of particular interest here is a detailed examination of this rethinking of the surreal (in Bataillean terms) in one of the most disputed works of the period on the Spanish front: Federico García Lorca’s 1929 collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York. –David. F Richter via ~david.f.richter/Informeing%20Lorca2.pdf

“Baudelaire en vers et Flaubert en prose”

“”Baudelaire en vers et Flaubert en prose” said Péladan in 1885: the analogy could not be juster and is today taken for granted. Baudelaire and Flaubert are like the two faces of a Herm planted firmly in the middle of the century, marking the division between Romanticism and Decadence, between the period of the Fatal Man and that of the Fatal Woman, between the period of Delacroix and that of Moreau.” —The Romantic Agony

The Arcades Project arrived in the mail today

Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927 – 1940) arrived in the mail today. See my entry at Jahsonic as well as my previous blog entry.

The first thing to catch my eye was this Coetzee review on the back cover:

“[The Arcades Project] suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And [Benjamin’s] call elsewhere for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime…”What does The Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind’s trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects…and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a ‘magic encyclopedia’…[A] magnificent opus.”
–J. M. Coetzee, The Guardian

More appraisals from Harvard University Press

Serendipity

Searching for kafka+gogol+nose+metamorphosis (inspired by Todorov’s likening of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Gogol’s The Nose) I re-find Alan Gullete. And via Alan I find Danill Kharms whose photograph below is striking to say the least.

Daniil Kharms, photo credit unidentified

Daniil Kharms (1905 – 1942) was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. Kharms lived in debt and hunger for several years until his final arrest on suspicion of treason in the summer of 1941. He was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1. and died in his cell in February, 1942 — most likely, from starvation. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniil_Kharms [Nov 2006]

Via Alan Gullette http://alangullette.com/lit/absurd/ who I’ve mentioned before here. His literary entry page features pages supernatural, surreal, absurd, et al literature.

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd
[Amazon.com]
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Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire’s World provides English – language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet’s work. –from the publisher

Though it is often said Charles Baudelaire published only a single volume of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, this is untrue if you count his published prose poetry such as Spleen de Paris.

See also: Charles Baudelairemodernist poetry

Robots, automatons and modernism

Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (1995) – Harold B. Segel
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“While Carlo Collodi’s internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book’s appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses.”

It has been said that Carolo Lorenzini’s Pinocchio (1881 – 1883) was one of the inspiring themes of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. As in the allegory of the story, Pinocchio eventually went on to lead his own independent life, distinct from that of the author.

See also: robots