World cinema classics #37

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6WmEoMY2Lo]

The Hitcher (1986) – Robert Harmon

This film introduced me to Jennifer Jason Leigh, it was love at first sight. In one particular scene in The Hitcher Leigh is kidnapped by the villain Rutger Hauer, who ties her between a Mack truck and its trailer, threatening to tear her in half.

In the film, she does not survive, in real life, it is Jennifer’s 46th birthday. Congratulations, you are one of my favorite living actresses and I enjoyed your recent parts in In the Cut and The Machinist.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

The beneficial side-effects of censorship

 

Cover of the 1937 guide book to the Degenerate art exhibition.

Cover of the 1937 guide book to the  Degenerate Art Exhibition.

Nazi Germany disapproved of contemporary German art movements such as Expressionism and Dada and on July 19, 1937 it opened the travelling exhibition in the Haus der Kunst in Munich, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art, to inflame public opinion against modernity and Judaism. The cover the 1937 guide book (illustration top) features a sculpture of unknown origin. It could be Polynesian or any other tribal art work, please help me out here.

The sculpture clearly links modern art with primitivism.

This exhibition is also a perfect illustration of the beneficial side-effects of censorship. Beneficial in the sense that any attempt at banning works of art, books or other cultural artifacts results in an aide to discerning culturati to seek out these artifacts with zeal. Such has been the case with Video Nasties, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Catholic Index) and the Degenerate Art expo mentioned above.

I once again repeat my question to you, dear reader: what is the origin of the statue depicted in the picture above. I thank  you beforehand for a reply.

Eve Babitz and Fiorucci

Fiorucci, the book (1980) Eve Babitz

Like the contemporary Italian design movement Memphis, Italian fashion designer Fiorucci helped postmodernism to percolate to mass culture awareness in the early eighties. Sottsass designed some of their shops and their brand was a visual feast.

Eve Babitz is an American writer who gained notoriety by posing nude with Marcel Duchamp in 1963, at the Pasadena Art Museum[Julian Wasser photograph]. She is the author of Eve’s Hollywood, Slow days, fast company and Fiorucci, the book.

Fiorucci, the book is out of print and has become quite a cult item, ranging in price from 200 to 1,000 USD.

Some more Fiorucci advertisments from the eighties:

unidentified Fiorucci campaign
image sourced here.

[A shot from behind from what appears to be a black young woman, from the waist to the knees. She wears nothing but a short (a cut off Jeans), the short is very short. The jeans is full of holes and is patched with pieces of cloth.]

Campaign for Fiorucci (1974) – Oliviero Toscani
image sourced here.

[A young woman sitting on a chrome barstool, shot from the back. She is wearing a striped T-shirt, jeans and striped socks. Her hair is curly.]

Two lovers minus one

Painting showing spasms in a patient suffering from tetanus by Sir Charles Bell (1809).
Painting by Sir Charles Bell (1809).

“The two lovers are able to experience a feeling of unrestrained and untamed abandonment to one another. It is not necessary for them to pay attention either to what the self is doing or what the partner is doing. All the movements take care of themselves, as if reflexively. The sensations greedily absorbed by the vulva, externally and through deep interior pressure, tell the vaginal cavity how to selfishly pulsate, ripple, quiver, and contract on the penis, in order to release itself in orgasm. Reciprocally, the penis selfishly probes and presses, twists a little, withdraws and tantalizes at the portals, and sinks deeply again, it too greedily building up its own orgasmic pleasure. The two bodies writhe, unheedingly. The two minds drift into the oblivion of attending only to their own feeling, so perfectly synchronized that the ecstasy of the one is preordained to be the reciprocal ecstacy of the other. Two minds, mindlessly lost in one another. This is the perfect orgasmic experience. This is how an orgasm sighs, moans, exclaims, expires, exhausts itself into exultant repose.” —John Money, Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference and Pair-bonding, pp. 118-119. John Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, London) 1980.

World cinema classics #36

I agree “to meet Mr Neville in private and to comply with his requests concerning his pleasure with me.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlEo563RJZI]

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) – Peter Greenaway

The Draughtsman’s Contract is a 1982 British film written and directed by Peter Greenaway. The score was by Michael Nyman and borrows extensively from Henry Purcell, forming a substantial attraction of the film. It was most recently re-used in Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

Icons of erotic art #16

Frontispiece by Fernand Khnopff for Joséphin Péladan’s Istar (1888)

Frontispiece by Fernand Khnopff for Joséphin Péladan’s Istar (1888)

Istar is a novel by Joséphin Péladan first published in 1888 with a frontispiece by Fernand Khnopff, depicting a woman, head thrown back in ecstasy and completely devoid of surrounding except for a phallic tentacled plant that grows toward her pubic area.

Eroticism 4/5, because of its “his hands were all over me” thematics first celebrated in icons #12 and 13.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

Eye candy #6

Pinson, Femme Assise, on the cover of Monsieur Vénus by Rachilde

I had been intrigued by this cover of French decadent author Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus for a while, and I always wondered what the cover was, even asking the blog Morbid Anatomy, which specializes in this kind of material, what it was.

Pinson, Femme Assise

It turns out that this is the origin of the photograph. The anatomical sculpture was produced by André Pierre Pinson (1746-1828), a French ‘medical artist’, who made the sculpture called La Femme assise (the seated woman). Voila. Case closed.

Previously on Eye Candy.

World cinema classics #35

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMI-iQdHJkE&]

Knife in the Water (1962) – Roman Polański

Knife in the Water is a 1962 film directed by Roman Polański. It features only three characters and deals with rivalry and sexual tension. Polanski would return to those themes in the 1966 film Cul-de-sac.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

Know this my son: when grief turns into life, life stops being grief

The Great Sphinx, photo by Maxime Du Camp, 1849,
taken when he traveled in Egypt with Gustave Flaubert.

This image to introduce you in the obliquest of ways to Simon Vinkenoog, a Dutch poet (Welk Masker Zal Ik Dragen) I have taken a liking to.

Yesterday, Vinkenoog introduced me to one of his favorite poems: De Stem van Vincent; which Vinkenoog called on his non-rss blog “one of the most impressive poems in the Dutch language”. It is a poem by Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. I will translate the first sentence:

Know this my son: when grief turns into life

life stops being grief

Some excerpts in Dutch:

“Weet dit, mijn zoon: wanneer leed leven wordt
houdt op het leven leed te zijn”

“Niet het te zijn of niet te zijn is de levensopgaaf,
maar het misterie van het zijn vult alles,
Het eigen zijn. Dat over alles te leggen.”

“En telkens woont
‘t woord onder ons
dat ons bewoont, –
nieuw.
De weg van de Verlosser,
de weg van het leed;
een hoogvlakte van geluk.”

(full text)