Subliminal phalli

The subliminal film still of an erect penis [1, nsfw] in the MTV-style film montage at the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) appears to have been imitated [2, nsfw] in the film Fight Club (1999). The difference is that in Bergman’s Persona the film still is several frames long, clearly visible to the naked eye, whereas in Fight Club it is only one frame long, it can only be consciously seen by pausing the video.

RIP Giulio Questi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqb4Mie7768

RIP Giulio Questi, 90, Italian director and screenwriter, known for Django Kill and La morte ha fatto l’uovo (Death Laid an Egg).

The enigmatic clip above is from La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968) starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin. It appears to be a piece of YouTube bricolage. Perhaps the music in the clip is from the film, music by Bruno Maderna?

I’ve previously mentioned Death Laid an Egg.

Update: the full movie in English:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2tTw0tS86I

Update:

The full soundtrack is online:

The soundtrack is indeed composed, arranged and conducted Bruno Maderna and it appears to be the best thing of the film. However, the high modernism of Maderna in combination with this piece of genre cinema makes the film a perfect example of nobrow artsploitation and had I not been three years old when this film came out, I would have surely wanted to see it.

Thematically, the film reminds me of Pasolini’s Pigsty. That’s probably because in both films a victim is fed as animal food, in Pigsty (“eaten by pigs in the sty”) as pig food, in Death Laid an Egg (“the farm chickens feed on Marco’s ground corpse”) as chicken food. Which reminds me of Soylent Green, the film in which, after euthanasia, dead humans are made into crackers  and fed to living humans.

Coke? The perfect commodity.

http://vimeo.com/105411099

Coke? The perfect commodity. Why?

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology documentary Slavoj Žižek explains.

The documentary is now online in full. (update: the documentary was taken offline a few days after I had posted it.)

Slavoj Žižek is unique in using films to prove philosophical points, see film and philosophy.

The full text of the The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is here[1].

 

Sex: The Revolution (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_43UG3y8uh4

Sex: The Revolution (2008) was a four-part documentary miniseries that chronicled the history of sexual culture in America from the 1950s through the turn of the millenium. Ironically, the version shown on VH1 was pixelated to censor nudity including in discussions of censorship of nudity.

I’m afraid this is that pixelated version.

Nevertheless, they are all here. Follow the links[1][2][3][4].

Previously on this blog: Do Communists Have Better Sex?[5], 2006, a documentary by André Meier

 

“Knee 1” is WMC #915

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIDuZq7RVAM

“Knee 1” is a segment from the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), an opera scored and written by Philip Glass.

The 1978 recording above was released by Columbia Masterworks Records, with an illustration by Milton Glaser. The solo voice is by Iris Hiskey.

“Knee 1” is World Music Classic #915

Publikumsbeschimpfung

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duRdDqWKumI

Saw the play Liefdesverklaring with my students at De Studio, Antwerp by Fabuleus.

Liefdesverklaring  (lit. declaration of love) is based on Offending the Audience (1966, German: Publikumsbeschimpfung) by Peter Handke, an anti-play that breaks the fourth wall.

Publikumsbeschimpfung can be seen in full above.