Poster for Pasolini’s Salo film
Cover by Avedon for French arts magazine Egoïste (very expensive second hand) , for sale at the excellent Arcana Books on the Arts
Extremely good album by Hugh Masekela (1984), check a poorly recorded Youtube rendition here.
Losfeld’s Arcanes catalog 1967
Cover for Eroscore, 1970s mag on erotic cinema
“The Big Swallow” (1901) by James Williamson
“The Big Swallow“ (1901) aka A Photographic Contortion, produced and directed by James Williamson.
The sales catalog of this film describes the film as “A man reading finds a photographer with his head under a cloth, about to take his picture. He orders him off, approaching nearer and nearer until his head fills the picture, and finally his mouth only occupies the screen. He opens it, and first the camera, then the operator disappear inside. He retires munching him up and expressing great satisfaction.”
A terrific piece of early meta-cinema breaking the fourth wall.
This post is inspired by a recent article by Keith Sanborn “Second hand, second person, at a second remove, forms of address in Youtube in historical perspective,” published in Brouillon 4. Keith Sanborn is an American filmmaker, media artist and connoisseur of the cinema of Guy Debord. With Peggy Ahwesh, he made The Dead Man.
Some recent Flickr entries
“Vorkapich hade complete creative freedom in writing, designing, directing and editing his montage sequences for feature films, his work was often reduced to its bones in the released productions. Here is the filmmaker’s original version of one of his outstanding efforts”
Thus reads the Youtube blurb to this wonderful clip; strange that I cannot find reference to this film over at IMDb.
Slavko Vorkapić (March 17 1894 – October 20 1976), was a Serbian–American film director and editor, university professor and painter, one of the most prominent figures of modern cinematography and film art, best-known for The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra.
No-Stop City, Interior Landscape, 1969 by Archizoom Associati
It was American experimental musician Rhys Chatham who first pointed out that the energy of art is always equal (except in periods of extreme hardship such as famine and war, where production tapers off), but has at the same time the tendency to displace itself. In music for example, the energy in the 1950s was in rock and roll, in the 1980s it was to be found in house music and techno.
The energy in international design in the late 1960s and early 1970s was clearly to be found in Italy. Displayed above is No-Stop City, a “radical design” architectural project by Archizoom Associati first introduced to the public in 1969. It is a critique of the ideology of architectural modernism, of which Archizoom felt that it had reached its limits. The artistic discourse of that era was buzzing with the term neo avant-garde, in a period that corresponds with Late Modernism or early postmodern art. The term neo avant-garde was rejected by many, but the term can be interpreted to refer to a second wave of avant-garde art such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus.
If you want to read up on this period, please consult the following excellent volume:
The Hot House (1984) – Andrea Branzi [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Prices in Amazon Europe are around 40€, in America starting from 12USD, a bargain.
Adorable seventies graphic design on the book depicted above.
Of course, the classic illustration of unreason is:
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is a 1799 print by Goya from the Caprichos series. It is the image the sleeping artist surrounded by the winged ghoulies and beasties unleashed by unreason.
Unreason on the whole is a subject of innumerable greater interest than reason. As such, I’ll take the counter-enlightenment over the enlightenment any day. Conceded, there were interesting aspects of the enlightenment, ignored by history, such as the enlightenment of Thérèse Philosophe. See Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.
Consider me: my hands can not cover my breasts, I cling to them tightly to hide my shame. But also consider this: sunlit windows gaze down upon me like undeniable eyes, millions of bronze eyes; and shame turns into pride.
Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme.
Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.
Bxzzines [1], is a French-language blog by an anonymous internet user who goes by the pseudonym of Clifford Brown, indicating a link to Jess Franco (Franco worked under innumerable pseudonyms and was a big fan of jazz music, many of his pseudonyms are taken from famous jazz musicians, such as Clifford Brown and James P. Johnson).
Bxzzines is dedicated to zines and has featured posts on film directors Max Pécas, Michel Lemoine, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Jean-François Davy and 1970s magazines such a Midi-Minuit Fantastique and Sex Stars System.
The illustration shown depicts a part of a promotional insert [2] for the Le Terrain Vague publishing imprint of Eric Losfeld, inserted in Midi-Minuit Fantastique n°15/16 (12/1966). The page depicted above is an advertisement for Charles Fort‘s The Book of the Damned, in its second French translation, translated by Robert Benayoun; with a forward by Tiffany Thayer.
The censored title on the same page is George de Coulteray‘s Sadism in the Movies.
Suddenly Baucis and Philemon each saw the other putting forth leaves. Their skin started to turn into tree bark. They embraced each other and cried, “Farewell!” Baucis was turned into a linden tree and Philemon into an oak, two different but beautiful trees intertwined with one another.
Indeed Rafaela, thanks.
Part of the same trope is:
Apollo and Daphne, Apollo and Daphne by Antonio Pollaiuolo, one tale of transformation in the Metamorphoses—he lusts after her and she escapes him by turning into a bay laurel.
Previously on Eye Candy.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Xgn63o7UU]
Erotissimo is a 1968 French–Italian film directed by Gérard Pirès. Its theme is a satire on the use of sex in advertising and sexual objectification of women. I’ve mentioned this film before and posted a different trailer, but this trailer is superb, good rhythm, extremely funny (sorry French only!), nice score and stunning visuals.
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
