Buying a copy of a Dutch translation of Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia re-kindled my research stamina in the Marquis.
I found the docu above.
The Marquis de Sade: Pornographer or Prophet? (2001) features Andrea Dworkin, Camille Paglia, Francine du Plessix Gray, Richard Seaver, David Coward, Neil Schaeffer, Neil Cox, Thomas Wynn, Conroy Maddox.
Some of the people in this so-so portrait are already dead. Andrea Dworkin, Francine du Plessix Gray, Richard Seaver and Conroy Maddox are no longer among us.
Dworkin, who while writing her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), read many Sade-biographies, makes a notable appearance saying — predictably — this of Sade:
“My pacifism was first challenged when, working on my book on pornography in the late 1970s, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, I read a half dozen biographies of the Marquis de Sade. A life of rape and sexual violence, including kidnapping and possibly murder, would have been stopped short if his first (known) victim, Jeanne Testard, had killed him.” —Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation
Paglia gives Sade too much praise, as usual, even making him a obligatory reading for feminists and in universities.
The nicest surprise was probably seeing Francine du Plessix Gray, and her well-balanced views.
Another nice aspect of the docu is that footage from some Sade films is shown.
I first heard of this film when it came out, and since then, its director Jo Anne Kaplan (1945-2016) has died.
The film is based on Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and it consists of a Kaplan reading her own paraphrase of that Bataille novel which I bought when visiting Atlanta, Georgia when I worked for Microsoft.
Argentina-born French writer and filmmaker Nelly Kaplan died in Geneva. She turned 89.
She taught, wrote, assisted Abel Gance and directed her own films.
She is best known for a 1969 film, La Fiancée du pirate, “the pirate’s sweetheart”. You can see large parts of that film in a documentary by Zo Anima (they make quite interesting documentaries about film history) that mainly talks about the feminist and witch-like aspects of that film.
But also, it would seem, YouTube has the entire film online:
Kaplan also wrote and directed two film documentaries about artists’ lives, a genre that is barely practiced today. Those artist films are Gustave Moreau (1961) and Rodolphe Bresdin (1962). If I am not mistaken, Moreau has his own museum in Paris, just like Wiertz in Brussels, with whom Moreau bears similarities, Moreau was the better painter.
Gustave Moreau (1961
The opening credits of Gustave Moreau states that quotations from the oeuvre of Breton, Huysmans, Racine, Jarry, Lautréamont and Baudelaire can be expected.
My gaydar was effective, I noticed while watching The Trials of Oscar Wilde that Fraser was gay. It’s good that they cast a gay man for a gay part in 1960.
Fernando Solanas was an Argentine film director and politician, best-known for his film The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), which is a seminal document of the decolonization of the Americas.
Len Barry was an American singer best-known for his composition “1-2-3” which was somewhat of a staple on the Northern Soul scene, state sources such as Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul (1999) by David Nowell.
Betty Dodson was an American feminist and sex educator.
Unlike Shere Hite, who passed away last September and became known worldwide after her 1976 “Hite Report”, few outside the United States knew the witty Betty Dodson.
Hite became known for assuring women worldwide that penetrative sex is not the way to orgasm for women. Before Hite, many women faked their orgasms. After Hite there was a little less faking. However, it was Dodson who taught American women how to masturbate.
Dodson started out as an artist, she debuted in the late 1960s with drawings of couples making love. That went well. For a second exhibition she decided to invite friends to her studio to masturbate and draw them. That exhibition was a flop and also marked the end of her career as an artist.
Dodson went on to become an orgasm evangelizer, working with the likes of Annie Sprinkle, and writing a number of top-selling books. She looked very young in old age. Perhaps because of all the masturbation she so passionately promoted? She loved the Hitachi Magic Wand, an vibrator called the Rolls-Royce of sex toys. She organized group sessions for ladies to masturbate together. Each with such a Hitachi (I read somewhere that these sessions were sometimes broadcast live on TV). Her dream was to orchestrate a simultaneous group orgasm, but it was precisely in that orchestration role that she saw objections.
Anyone in Europe who was a little curious – and you know what Zappa said about being curious: “the mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground” – saw Betty Dodson in the 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) about the influence of Willem ‘orgasmatron’ Reich (1897-1957) on the hippie world. There she talked about her erotic drawings.
Betty Dodson belongs to a movement within feminism called sex-positive feminism. It is a movement that I became familiar with via the work of Camille Paglia, an American academic who made the world a smarter place in 1990 with her book Sexual Personae.
Sex-positive thinkers have a positive attitude towards, for example, porn, sex work and sexting.
In that sense I am also sex positive.
But.
If you fully agree that sex is a good thing, you can only decide, as some feminists do, that rape is not about sex, for example.
They reason for this is, and I quote, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) by Donald Symons, a fantastic book:
“The notion that rape is not sexually motivated” [may be due to the fact that] “part of the modernization of sex is the belief that sex is a good thing; yet almost everyone agrees that rape is a bad thing, and one way of eliminating the threat of cognitive dissonance is to deny that rape is sex.”
Sex can be a very beautiful thing indeed. But sex can also be very ugly.
Most of all, sex is often a bit disruptive. And having come to this point in a discourse like this, I like to say it with Schopenhauer who famously said that “sex is a malevolent demon.”
Carol Arthur was an American actress and wife of Dom DeLuise (1933-2009). She played bit parts in the films of Mel Brooks. I think I was 12 years old when I insisted on seeing Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976).
Silent Movie. Smart slapstick. A film about film. What’s not to love?
In that film she played an “extremely pregnant woman”. Was it perhaps she who completely tilted Brooks’ sports car nose in the air due to a heavy weight in the back seat? I cannot remember.
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Later I saw Brooks Blazing Saddles (1974), the Western parody with the many and loud farts around the campfire. Beans and cowboys, you know how that works out.
In Blazing Saddles, Carol plays a schoolteacher who first speaks very shyly at a city meeting, then is told that she speaks too quietly, and then she announces in a loud and not at all shy voice to the governor that he is the “leading asshole of the state”.
