[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCpyqiee-Z8]
El Topo (1970) – Alejandro Jodorowsky
“El Topo is not a Western, it goes further than any Western … El Topo is not a religious film, it contains all religions … This film is bloody… El Topo is miraculous and terrible … El Topo is monstrous and cruel”
This slightly overrated curio premiered exactly 37 years today at the Elgin, New York.
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XghPOP2b9mw]
But Candy has.
This film only scores 4.9 at IMDb. But judging from the dialogue (Terry Southern), the film can’t be that bad. Enfin, I enjoyed the trailer very much. It’s all I ask for really.
Of all the books I bought in 2007, I’m happiest with Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1968) by Gershon Legman. I’ve reported on the book here and here. Yesterday evening I was reading the jokes on marriage and was alerted to Legman’s use of the term sex-hatred so I googled for it and found a very funny imaginary phonecall between Mr. Gershon Legman and “Fredric Wertham” (Ethan Persoff) partly quoted here:
“Now where was I? Oh, yes. It is no accident that the end of Restoration bawdry coincided precisely with the fullest flowering of literary sadism in England. The Elizabethans had wrung blood in plenty out of sex — in Romeo and Juliet, a ‘love’-play, seven of the characters are carted off dead — but there was no dearth of lust. Times change. The elegant eighteenth-century littérateurs, Johnson and Pope, are famous equally for the sexual purity of their writing, the sadistic cruelty of their speech. Sex being forbidden, violence took its place.”
In the early 1970s, Germaine Greer would elaborate on Legman’s sex-hatred by coining the term cunt-hatred used in such essays such as “Lady love your cunt“. I love Greer.
The 1967 Redrup v. New York case is generally considered the end of American censorship. Robert Redrup was a Times Square newsstand clerk who sold two Greenleaf Classics pulp sex novels, Lust Pool [1] and Shame Agent [2] to plainclothes police. He was tried and convicted in 1965.
In true nobrow fashion Hamling did not believe he was selling “commercialized obscenity,” nor would he admit to “titillating the prurient interests of people with a weakness for such expression.” Hamling felt his books were giving people who would never have the skills to read and enjoy Ulysses or Fanny Hill or Naked Lunch what they wanted.
With financial backing from William Hamling, Redrup appealed his case to the Supreme Court where his conviction is over-turned by 7-2. The court’s final ruling on May 8 in 1967 affirmed that materials that were not pandered, sold to minors, or foisted on unwilling audiences were constitutionally protected.
After this decision, the Supreme Court systematically and summarily reversed, without further opinion, scores of obscenity rulings involving paperback sex books, girlie magazines and peep shows.
Tip of the hat to Patrick J. Kearney and thanks to Earl Kemp.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPyzYcrVU-k]
The Mother and the Whore (French La maman et la putain) is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. It is one the last typical Nouvelle Vague films and an extended essay on male angst, the war of the sexes and the Madonna-whore complex. A typical scene (at the beginning of this clip) is one where Marie comes home, puts a record on the turntable and listens to it in real time.
From the monologue:
…Pour moi il n’y a pas de putes. Pour moi, une fille qui se fait baiser par n’importe qui, qui se fait baiser n’importe comment, n’est pas une pute. Pour moi il n’y a pas de putes, c’est tout. Tu peux sucer n’importe qui, tu peux te faire baiser par n’importe qui, tu n’es pas une pute.
Il n’y a pas de putes sur terre, putain comprends-le. Et tu le comprends certainement.La femme qui est mariée et qui est heureuse et qui rêve de se faire baiser par je ne sais qui, par le patron de son mari, ou par je ne sais quel acteur merdique, ou par son crémier ou par son plombier… Est-ce que c’est une pute? Il n’y a pas de putes. Y a que des cons, y a que des sexes. Qu’est-ce que tu crois. Ce n’est pas triste, hein, c’est super gai.
…Et je me fais baiser par n’importe qui, et on me baise et je prends mon pied.
…Pourquoi est-ce que vous accordez autant d’importance aux histoires de cul?
Le sexe…
Tu me baises bien. Ah! comme je t’aime.
Il n’y a que toi pour me baiser comme ça. Comme les gens peuvent se leurrer. Comme ils peuvent croire. Il n’y a qu’un toi, il n’y a qu’un moi. Il n’y que toi pour me baiser comme ça. Il n’y a que moi pour être baisée comme ça par toi.
…Quelle chose amusante. Quelle chose horrible et sordide. Mais putain, quelle chose sordide et horrible.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpbVIrg-Jwg]
“Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” is a modern variation of Wine, women and song. In the 20th century, particularly in Western usage, the expression “drugs, sex and rock and roll” often is used to signify essentially the same thing. The terms correspond to wine, women and song with edgier and updated vices. The term came to prominence in the sixties as rock and roll music, opulent and intensely public lifestyles, as well as libertine morals championed by hippies, came into the mainstream.
Poster for first the Wet Dream Film Festival (1970) in Amsterdam
At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Amsterdam was somewhat of a countercultural capital. It was where Suck, The First European Sex Paper was published. Around this time two Wet Dream Film Festivals were organized. The first took place in the autumn of 1970, It had an international jury consisting of Germaine Greer, Jay Landesman, Richard Neville, Michael Zwerin, Didi Wadidi and Al Goldstein. The first prize went to Bodil Jensen in A Summer Day. The “Blast from the Past” award went to Jean Genet‘s film: Un chant d’amour. The Walt Disney Memorial Award went to Christie Eriksson‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Other prizes were awarded for Peter Flemming, Walter Burns and Falcon Stewart. The Second Wet Dream Film Festival was held in 1971 between October 20 and October 25, again organized by Jim Haynes. Festival jury included Germaine Greer, Al Goldstein, William Holtrop, Didi Wadidi, Anna Beke and Michael Zwerin plus new-comers Mama Cass, Roland Topor, Heathcote Williams, William Burroughs, Carlos Clarens, Tomi Ungerer, Betty Dodson, Marie-France and Miss Angel. Jens Frosen (“Quiet Days in Clichy”) documented the event. Lou Sher, president of Sherpix, who picked up “Adultery For Fun and Profit” at the first festival, put up $1,000 for the first prize this year plus a promise of U.S. theatrical distribution. Organizer Haynes told Variety: “What most people don’t understand about last year’s Wet Dream Festival is that we are not concerned with pornographic aspects primarily, but with the libertarian concept. It is an attack on paternalism because it asks why people can’t see any image they want.”
This post is dedicated to the work of Earl Kemp.
… post in progress …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjPFO-1t5c]
I watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend with my kids and liked it. Probably too lame to be called a sleeper, which is a term that Danny Peary uses to define a future cult film, in his Cult Movie Stars. Although lame, you may enjoy the allegorical representation of early 20th century Western sexual mores. Part of the fun was watching it with my daughters after my eldest (12) had picked it up at our local video rental store. Its interesting connections are movie ratings around the world and issues of contemporary feminism. Be warned though, some of you may find this an incredibly stupid film. To start the discussion, here is an article by Udolpho.com.
My Super Ex-Girlfriend… When I read Slate “reviewer” Dana Stevens’ deranged put-down [this tale of male sexual panic, you breathe a sigh of relief: Thank God we don’t really live there. Or do we?] of My Super Ex-Girlfriend as “grim misogyny“, I knew I would have to see the comedy that inspired her grim diatribe. And yet I also knew that the movie probably wasn’t going to be any good. Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies. —Udolpho.com
Regarding the film certification on its adultness: In the United States the film was rated PG-13 (children under 13 can attend but need special guidance by parent or guardian) but in Germany and the Netherlands is deemed suitable for children aged 6 and above. American mainstream film critic Michael Medved noted that the “PG-13 rating” was inappropriate (due to several sex references and depictions) and that the movie should have had an “R rating” instead.
On its potential cult status (a financial disaster at the box office is a criterium of a future cult hit):
The film has been viewed as a financial disaster according to Box Office Mojo, as the film took in a mere $8.6 million on its opening weekend and has made $22,530,295 domestically, and $54,882,045 worldwide as of November 19, 2006.
As an allegory of early 21st century sexual mores:
P. S. You may have noticed that I finally learned how to insert YouTube films into my pages. Some of you may have had problems with inserting the films (I know I’ve had). Here is the code:
“open square brackets youtube=paste youtube link here close square brackets”.
Unidentified photograph of Bouyxou
Sourced here.
For those of you living in Paris, or visiting Paris, the cinémathèque has given Jean-Pierre Bouyxou carte blanche to run a retrospective of “his kind of cinema“. Bouyxou (born 1946 in Bordeaux) is an erotomaniac and a countercultural historian. Most recently, Mike of Esotika … reviewed his film Satan bouche un coin. I also added some Bouyxou products to my Flickr account here and here as well as a cover of his magazine Sex Star System here. Some other magazines Bouyxou contributed to were Vampirella, Zoom, Métal hurlant, L’Echo des savanes, Penthouse, Lui, Hara-Kiri and Paris Match. He was editor-in-chief of Fascination (thirty issues from 1978 to 1986).
Bouyxou belongs to that European tradition of eroticism which is represented in Italy for example by the people of the Glittering Images publishing house to which Bouyxou is a contributor. For a review of one of the products of this publisher, see this and this blog entry at K. H. Brown’s Giallo Fever.
Thanks to Harry Tuttle of Unspoken Cinema for the notice.
Here is the program:
Perversion for Profit (1965)
“Through this material, today’s youth can be stimulated to sexual activity for which he has no legitimate outlet. He is even enticed to enter the world of homosexuals, lesbians, sadists, masochists and other sex deviants.”
Perversion for Profit is a 1965 American propaganda film. A vehement diatribe against pornography, the film attempts to link explicit portrayals of human sexuality to a Communist conspiracy and the subversion of American civilization.
Video:
Perversion for Profit Part I and II at Google video. And check the YouTube clip which also has a segment on drugs. Parts of the propaganda film were also featured in a ‘Sims’ bootleg version of Justin Timberlake’s 2006 clip ‘Sexy Back’. Here is a cutup/détournement version of that same propaganda film.
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