Photo unidentified
Photos of the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital by Philippe Leroyer
Louis Althusser, French Marxist philosopher would have been 90 today, infamous for strangling his wife on November 16, 1980 and not being tried for it. Althusser was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility and committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris. Althusser remained there for three years and was then released.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2eVb4CC4XU]
Dream sequence in La Prisonnière (1968) by Henri-Georges Clouzot
I love dream sequences in film. Every Disney film has nearly one. Always psychedelic. Film as a medium is particularly well-suited to impart dream visions, much better than previous visionary literature, which required more narrative realism.
An interesting juxtaposition here is Dante‘s Divine Comedy compared to its first film adaptation[1].
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA3NRe5kgak]
The Divine Comedy exemplifies the conventions of dream-vision literature, though Dante specifically says that his Comedy is not a dream vision.
I guess what this post comes down to is the boring but somehow unavoidably attractive “literature vs. cinema” debate I’ve been engaging in.
The debate is boring when you limit it to either/or, but of interest if you view it from its technical angle, with fiction at the center, and medium-specificity at its perifery.
Notions such as unfilmability provide the best entry point.
But that notion I was not thinking about when going to bed last night. I thought about cinematic effects in literature, a notion first put forward to my knowledge by Lotte H. Eisner in The Haunted Screen.
She writes:
Example of a superimposition in The Last Laugh (1924) – Murnau
She concludes:
La Prisonnière is World Cinema Classic #67, L’Inferno #68.
Of course there is such a thing as female perversion and female crime, but it is rare. Two easy entry-points into this realm are the Papin sisters and closer to the Anglophone world, the Parker-Hulme friends. These cases provide access to the world of the female murderer and the black widow, the relationship between gender and crime and the concept of the folie à deux.
One of the most astonishing facts about the Papin sisters is the defense of their actions by the French intellectuals of their time.
The story:
The Papin sisters brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, on February 2, 1933.
The interpretation:
This incident had a significant influence on French intellectuals Genet, Sartre and Lacan, who sought to understand it and it was thought of as symbolic of class struggle.
“I’ve seen the photos of these two pretty girls, these servants who killed and battered their mistresses. I’ve seen the photos before and after. ‘Before’, their faces hovered like two docile flowers above their lace collars. They radiated clean living and appetizing honesty. A discreet curling iron had crimped their hair in a similar manner. And, even more reassuring than their waved hair, their collars and their air of being on a visit to the photographer, was their resemblance as sisters, the self-righteous resemblance that immediately brought blood ties and the natural roots of the family group to the fore. ‘After’, their faces glowed like a blaze. They had the bare necks of the future beheaded. Wrinkles everywhere, horrible wrinkles of fear and hatred, folds, holes in the flesh as if a clawed beast had roamed round and round on their faces. And those eyes, those same big, dark and bottomless eyes… And yet, they no longer looked alike. Each, in her own way, bore the memory of their common crime…” –“Le Mur” by Sartre
Motives of Paranoiac Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters, a paper by Jacques Lacan brought me to French intellectuals on the Papin sisters. Also to Nosubject.com[1], the Lacan wiki.
“Christine and Léa were genuine Siamese souls. Between them, the two sisters couldn’t even find the distance needed to wound each other…
“Christine must have gone through such torture before the desperate experience of crime tore her from her other self and allowed her, after the first hallucinatory fit in which she thought she saw her sister dead, to cry the words of blatant passion: ‘Yes, say yes!’” –Taken from “Motives of Paranoiac Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters“–Jacques Lacan
To conclude, from the diary of Pauline Parker:
“The day of the happy event” “I felt very excited last night and sort of night-before-Christmas but I did not have pleasant dreams…I feel very keyed up as though I were planning a surprise party. The happy event is to take place tomorrow afternoon. So the next time I write in this diary Mother will be dead.” –from Pauline Parker’s diary.
Gérard Philipe is Julien Sorel in the film adaptation by Claude Autant-Lara
Is self-loathing the key to understanding Julien Sorel, the anti-hero of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black?[1], is the question I asked myself last night.
The American literary critic Hayden Carruth (R.I.P. 10 days ago) seems to confirm my suspicion by comparing him to Antoine Roquentin of Sartre’s Nausea . He wrote in 1959 of the way that “Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters. . . . It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin’s confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish.”
“Certainly, Nausea gives us a few of the clearest and hence most useful images of man in our time that we possess; and this, as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art.” –Hayden Carruth
Tape editing: Bruno Maderna (left) and Luciano Berio (right)
Simon Reynolds published the director’s cut of an article[1] he wrote at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was founded in 1958 on an unknown date. Similar radio services were started at the various public radios in Europe, all of influence to the emerging fields of electronic music and acousmatic music. Paris had the Groupe de Recherches Musicales which developed musique concrète, Cologne had Studio für elektronische Musik which nurtured the talent of Stockhausen, Italy had Studio di Fonologia Musicale with Bruno Maderna.
I’m probably generalizing, mixing studios with projects and radio with art projects. However, all of these projects share common characteristics: they are state funded (this is post-war, Marshall plan funded Europe), they involve electronic music and are centered around tape editing and thus the development of non-linearity in music recording.
So far the history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was probably the biggest, as well as the other scenes mentioned above have been best documented. However, such studios and projects must have existed all over Europe. It would be interesting to get your feedback of the scene of your country. Scandinavia, Spain, Austria, the Balkan, everywhere, let’s hear it from you. I’m especially looking for cross-pollinations such as BBC Radiophonic Workshop/Doctor Who and Studio di Fonologia Musicale/Death Laid an Egg.
I’m collecting the notes for this project at European public radio and experimental music.
Dutch translation cover
French original cover
Yesterday, I went to Tuf Tuf, a not-so-reputed second hand book store on the South of Antwerp, my neighbourhood. It’s a real drag to hunt for books there: not enough space, books not arranged alphabetially, battered copies. But sometimes gems are to be found, I picked up a copy of Midnight Movies there once. Aside from this, they specialize in erotica. I spotted two Georges Pichard books yesterday priced at €86 each. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the canonical Pichard here before, his work is super-relevant today, as the good people at Kink.com have brought his ultra-pornographic vision to life.
Back to the subject at hand, me at Tuf Tuf yesterday. I bought Moderne Liefde, an anthology of short stories which previously appeared in Playboy Magazine (with a story by Borges, whose only hint at eroticism I’ve yet seen has been in his story Ulrica), Striptease en Erotiek[1] (a Dutch language translation of Strip-tease et érotisme[2]), De Leidraad (Le Lien) by Vanessa Duriès, and Erotiek by Francesco Alberoni.
Above, I’ve shown you the covers (above the translation I bought, below its original) of Strip-tease et érotisme, the actual object of this post.
Histoire et philosophie du strip-tease : Essai sur l’ érotisme au music-hall, as its full title reads, was written by François des Aulnoyes, to my knowledge one of the very few books he’s written. The book deals with striptease, what makes it interesting is that it was published in 1957, strictly speaking a couple of years before the sexual revolution. The text is hogwash and very briefly invokes Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Émile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto and Freud, these are the only sources mentioned. Its historic overview also mentions Janine Jan and Anne Bruneau as 19th century predecessors to French striptease.
What makes the book interesting are the photographs by Roland Carré, see the cover shot of Huguette Delorme above. Like I said, the pre-sexual revolution mode, with all reference for example to pubic hair airbrushed away (this was the pre-Photoshop-age).
Following models are featured: Melody Bubbles, Clara Saint-Honoré, Sheiba Scott (very sexy), Vera Bell, Japanese model Yoko Tani, Flora Balmoral, Ketty Rogers, Luce Aubertin, Rita Renoir, Tony Teaser, Lola Stromboli, Sidonie Patin, Dodo d’Hambourg, Dora Bell, Magda (of the Concert Mayol), Kitty Tam-Tam, and Rita Cadillac.
Who was Roland Carré? The only person I know who can answer that question is Au carrefour étrange.
Penguin Classics cover: from which painting?
I started reading The Red and the Black by Stendhal. Chapter 7 is entitled Les affinités électives, possibly a reference to Elective Affinities, published by Goethe 21 years earlier. This passage perfectly illustrates life imitating art:
“À Paris, la position de Julien envers Mme de Rênal eût été bien vite simplifiée ; mais à Paris, l’amour est fils des romans. Le jeune précepteur et sa timide maîtresse auraient retrouvé dans trois ou quatre romans et jusque dans les couplets du Gymnase, l’éclaircissement de leur position. Les romans leur auraient tracé le rôle à jouer, montré le modèle à imiter ; et ce modèle, tôt ou tard, et quoique sans nul plaisir, et peut-être en rechignant, la vanité eût forcé Julien à le suivre.”[1]
“In Paris, Julien’s position with regard to Madame de Renal would very soon have been simplified; but in Paris love is the child of the novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would have found in three or four novels, and even in the lyrics of the Gymnase*, a clear statement of their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the part to be played, shown them the model to copy; and this model, sooner or later, albeit without the slightest pleasure, and perhaps with reluctance, vanity would have compelled Julien to follow.” –translation by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (1889–1930)
The first literary example of life imitating art was Don Quixote in which Alonso Quixano has been driven crazy by reading too many mediaeval knight-errantry romances such Amadis of Gaul, the pulp fiction of the day.
The Red and the Black is an exceedingly accomplished novel.
*My excellent Dutch translation by Hans van Pinxteren (Pandora Pockets, Uitgeverij Contact, p.45) translates Gymnase as cabaret (liedjes in het cabaret). Gymnase probably refers to the Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell, rather than a gymnasium.
Bad Boy (1981) by Eric Fischl
Today is Icon of Erotic Art #33 day. Remember this series is handmade, I’m not pulling this out of a list. So it was with great pleasure that I was reminded Eric Fischl‘s Bad Boy painting[1].
Bad Boy (1981) depicts a young boy looking at and older woman shown in a provocative masturbatory (a beaver shot to be precise) pose on a bed, while the subject is surreptitiously slipping his hand into the woman’s purse and presumedly stealing its contents.
The painting unites eroticism and crime, between the two is a very strong link first explored by Sade and verbally juxtaposed by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly in Happiness in Crime, a short story first published in the 1874 collection Les Diaboliques. I hope to explore this connection later.
Bad Boy is a painting which provokes the imagination, an equal amount of events seem to be in the painting as outside of it.
I imagine the neighborhood outside the room depicted suburbian. I imagine her husband (she is married and sexually neglected) watering the garden in a David Hockney painting manner. Maybe her husband is taking a A Bigger Splash[2] in their pool. Or the same husband is entertaining his gay lover in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)[3].
Since all figurative painting involving the human figure is narrative painting a number of questions can be raised:
What is the relationship between the older woman and the boy? Is he her son? Or is she barren? Is he a neighborhood boy who entered her house without her knowing? Is the woman aware that she is being stolen from and spied upon at the same time? Is it a game they play regularly and is the boy rewarded the money afterwards? Who is to tell?
In search of computer love.
“In 1959, Texas Instruments’ Jack Kilby files the first patent for an integrated circuit. (Texas racists later run him out of town, crying “segregation forever!”)”
Today, 2008 September 2, is the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit, and invention that lead to electronic music, Japanese music machines, personal computers, the internet, bitpop and YouTube, to name but a disparate yet connected few.
Much of what we now call the origins of postmodernity coincides with the “microchip revolution or digital revolution,” aptly described by techno-utopian writer Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) .
With “Computer Love” (1981), Kraftwerk became the first German musical ensemble to hit No. 1 on the U.K. music charts and the first band to reach an audience with a love song to the computer.
Zapp and Roger also professed their love for man’s best friend in “Computer Love”[3] (1985).
Computer love can lead to computer addiction. By the mid eighties most traditional orchestration was replaced by “Japanese music machines” in Western music. Marvin Gaye’s single “Sexual Healing” lead the way.
An outright celebration of the electronic aesthetic came with electronic disco (“I Feel Love,” “Do You Wanna Funk”), electro funk (“Planet Rock”), techno (“Techno City”) and house music(“Your Love”); while previously non-electronic genres such as reggae also took up the aesthetic (Sleng Teng), but nowhere was this man/machine love affair so strong as in acid house (“I Got a Big Dick”).
Several of these compositions are WMCs.
See also: The Electronic Revolution.
Do Ya Wanna Funk (1982) Sylvester [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Gay icon Sylvester James would have turned 60 today if he had not died from AIDS 20 years ago.
“Over and Over[1],” released in 1977 on Fantasy Records is WMC#75.
From a set-theoretical point of view, the Venn diagram of “Over and Over“intersects via whatlinkshere with the following compilations:
- François Kevorkian‘s Choice: A Collection of Classics
- Dave Lee‘s Jumpin’ series
- Brian Chin‘s Club Classics & House Foundations series
- Norman Jay‘s Good Times series
—Sholem Stein, musicologist, dance music connoisseur and genre theorist
What S. Stein means in the above quote is that “Over and Over” is featured on the mentioned albums.
Sylvester was firmly planted in the American disco scene but was popular too in Europe at the time and the rest of the jet set world.
His best-known songs are the Hi-NRG classics “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)“[2] (a previous WMC) and “Do You Wanna Funk,” songs of simultaneously gay liberation in the United States and Saint-Tropez chic in Europe.
“Do You Wanna Funk“[3] is World Music Classic #76.
![[1]](http://www.artchive.com/artchive/f/fischl/bad_boy.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/splash/hockney.splash.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/hockney.pool-2-figures.jpg){kind=link}