And the world will come from your mouth

Dennis Cooper celebrates Alexandro Jodorowsky day.

As always, Dennis spends a considerate amount of time on the artists he celebrates. Here is a list of subtopics:

Jodorowsky is primarily know for directing the midnight movie and cult classic El Topo (1970), a kind of spaghetti western with Buñuelian overtones. Through the Panic Movement he was connected to two other cult figures: Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal. Most recently Jodorowsky made headlines news by officiating the non-denominational marriage ceremony of rock singer friend Marilyn Manson and burlesque performer Dita Von Teese.

El Topo (1970) – Alexandro Jodorowsky [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Jodorowsky:

“And I imagine…with great pleasure…all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I’ll see you trembling, and you’ll go into convulsions and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we’ll begin to live.” — A. Jodorowsky, 1971.

Sir Stephen gave her his consent

L’Histoire d’O / Story of O (1954) – Pauline Reage [Amazon.com]

I’d never paid attention to it, but Pauline Réage’s 1954 novel Story of O betrays its ‘literary fiction’ (as opposed to genre fiction) antecedents by a metafictional streak; the novel has two alternative beginnings and endings. Postmodernism avant la lettre.

After the novel is two pages underway the narrator steps in and announces:

“Another version of the same beginning was simpler and more direct: the young woman, dressed in the same way [as in the first opening of the story], was driven by her lover and an unknown friend.”

Likewise, the author provides an alternative ending which is rather macabre:

“In a final chapter, which has been suppressed, O returned to Roissy, where she was abandoned by Sir Stephen.

There exists a second ending to the story of O, according to which O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave her his consent.”

Notice the secretive “a final chapter, which has been suppressed”. Very Borgesian.

P. S. I am currently reading the Dutch translation by Adriaan Morriën who adds an interesting afterword to his translation of this classic, which was written before the true identity of the writer of O was known. He notes that the women in Story of O are not slaves without rights but that their permission and consent is sought for everything they undergo. He also notes that apart from the first 10 pages the narrator steps out of the way to give an account seen through the point of view of O herself. The novel, he says “does not provide a philosophy nor a way of life but rather a description of human relations that are conceivable.” But this reminds me very much of what Poe said in 1850: “The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.” Aury could not have written this novel without living the story first.

Sort of off-topic: staying with the subject of sadomasochism in fiction, Il Giornale Nuovo has a nice post on the graphic work of Bruno Schulz, a man primarily known for his modernist fiction. This image tells most of the story.

There is more ‘art’ in your typical Corman piece

Continuing my Godard thread, I came across a very amusing and irreverent reading of Godard’s Breathless by a certain Dan Schneider who first excuses himself (and I concur) by saying that “the historic importance of such a film is indisputable”

[Breathless] would still be a bad film because it is so self-conscious, so poorly written, and so poorly acted that while watching it I thought I was actually watching a Roger Corman cheapo horror flick.

Now, let me add that there is more ‘art’ in your typical Corman piece from that era, say, The Last Woman on Earth, than in Breathless because Corman’s commentary on the state of filmmaking and art was more subtle (and often unintentional). Godard, by contrast, is so garishly dying to show his audience how hip and intellectual he is that he somehow failed to put any of that hipness or intellect — or any substance, for that matter– into his film.

Godard attempts to capture ‘reality’ on film without realizing that anything filmed becomes unreal — or irreal. In fact, any form of art can never be real. To convey reality most aptly, art needs to be most affected. By shooting his film with a handheld camera while Parisians gawk at the filming-in-process, Godard ends up making the most artificial of films while trying to show the most boring aspects of life. He thus focuses on the two worst aspects of film — the artificiality of cinéma vérité and the reality of tedium — rather than the two best ones: the ‘reality’ of film as artifice and the ‘artifice’ of poetically chosen reality.

On the origins of the jarring jump cut

Mention of the jump cut in my previous post on Godard inspired this post by Murdermystery Mike.

I was trying to think of earlier examples than 1960 [release of Godard’s Breathless] of the jump cut used jarringly, discontinuous, or emphasizing a gap in action. I’m fairly sure that if I keep on this I could find something eventually… the first thing that came to mind was both Kenneth Anger and Russ Meyer, but neither of them began using the jump cut in the way they’re known for now until around 64/65 (the opening montage of Faster Pussycat!… and the entirity of Scorpio Rising [as a note, I can’t much remember the editing in Fireworks as it’s been a while since I’ve seen it and I haven’t been able to afford the DVD yet…]). I’m sure there have to be examples dating from the same time or earlier than Breathless in avant-garde cinema (could you consider the editing of Un Chien Andalou contemporary [in the way Godard’s editing is being referred to as “contemporary”]?), but my mind is blank.

Addition 5/2/07: Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godard’s Breathless:

Somewhat related to Autant-Lara’s explanation, and no more flattering, are the comments made by Robert Benayoun. While Autant-Lara claimed that Godard’s intention was to ruin the film in order to get even with the producer, Benayoun suggested that Godard’s jump cuts were made as a devious attempt to save a film that would otherwise have been a critical disaster.

Government funding of film

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard

Ever since high school, I have been pondering the uses and disuses of government funding of the arts. With regards to film the different policies in Europe and North America have engendered two types of cinema: European art house films and American blockbusters. A quote by a certain David Carr, a libertarian:

Many years ago, not long after I had graduated from law school, I briefly succumbed to a rather silly conviction that I was a cultural barbarian and this state of affairs could be addressed by becoming an afficianado of European cinema. I should admit that this conviction was in no small measure driven by the belief that being au fait with the work of European film-makers was a surefire way to impress the girlies.

So I started to spend much of my free time ferreting out art-house independent cinemas (of the kind that sold organic brownies in the foyer instead of popcorn) and sat through endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.

These films have all amalgamated in my mind and I cannot remember the name of even a single one. After about six months, I decided that no woman was worth this level of constipation so I threw the towel in and went back to watching simplistic sci-fi blockbusters and gangster movies.

While I find Carr’s position particularly barbaric, I can understand his irritation at some European directors who excel at pompousness, seriousness and pretentiousness. Also, there seems to be no popular European cinema. Dyer and Vincendeau have argued in the early nineties that the only European popular cinema is US cinema. But surely, there has been a European popular cinema in the sixties and seventies?

On different note David Lynch is someone (whose films I like) who seems to be working within this paradigm of European artsiness and I wonder: are his films making money? Where does one find this kind of info. Here?

Also, government funding is tied in with the concept of cultural significance, the rationale being that a government can fund the cultural significant products of tomorrow.

Very short summaries: the cinema of Lynch

Lynch’s oeuvre in 10 tropes:

the eternal dwarf – dreams and lesbian fantasies – doubles and alter egos – film/theatre within film – red curtains – unusual (long pause) conversations – sound effects – bizarre characters – kinky sex – mysterious titles

INLAND EMPIRE, the new Lynch that runs almost three hours, in a Belgian cinema starting Wednesday. Speaking of Belgian cinema, I’m quite enjoying the film writing of Dave Mestdach in Focus Knack (and Focus Knack in general).

A middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema

Matthew of Esoteric Rabbit and Zach of Elusive Lucidity have been watching some of the films from Godard’s ‘revolutionary’ period. I’ve never been impressed by the films of Godard (not Breathless, not Pierrot, not Week End) except for Contempt (I guess due to my predilection for the prose of Moravia) and although I’ve never watched Godard’s political cinema, I suspect that I will like them in the way that I enjoyed William Klein’s Mr. Freedom. Also, here is an interesting post by Darren of Long Pauses on Godard’s 66-67 period.

Some notes on Godard’s films (and especially Le Gai savoir) and a critique by Guy Debord followed by some Godard quotes:

In the ‘revolutionary’ 1969 Le Gai Savoir Jean-Luc Godard liberates himself from all narrative requirements, and emerges as a pure cinematic essayist. Godard writes essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, he films it.

Le Gai savoir (Eng:The Joy of Knowledge) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard, started before the events of May 68 and finished shortly afterwards. Coproduced by the O.R.T.F., the film was upon completion rejected by French national television, then released in the cinema where it was subsequently banned by the French government. The title references Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. [1]

Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his films are automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Godard produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a concierge educated by the mass media. Godard’s “critiques” never go beyond the innocuous humor typical of nightclub comedians or Mad magazine. His flaunted culture is largely the same as that of his audience, which has read exactly the same pages in the same drugstore paperbacks. –Situationist International, 1966

… it is harldy surprising that Godard was dismissed as an imbecile by many of those from the avant-garde milieus connected to lettrism. The ardour of Guy Debord and his associates on the subject of Godard stems directly from the fact that Jean-Luc was providing the bourgeoisie with a middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema. Indeed, the invocation of the penal code during the discussion of prostitution in Vivre sa vie recalls Debord’s similar use of material on the soundtrack of his 1953 feature length anti-classic Screams in Favour of de Sade. —Summer of Love: psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 1960s

Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard’s ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized. [1]

British Sounds (1970) is an experimental film by Jean-Luc Godard, there is a scene with an extended close-up of a woman’s pubis.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. –Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. –Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard

I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of ‘Cahiers du Cinema.’ The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated. –Jean-Luc Godard

Corpo, bellezza, sensualita’

Via Griseldaonline, some high quality scans of erotic art.

Gorgon and the Heroes (1897) – Giulio Aristide Sartorio
Image sourced here.

A Francisco Goya, La maya desnuda, 1789-1805 Madrid Museo del Prado

B Jean Honore Fragonard, I fortunati casi dell’altalena, 1766 Londra Wallace Collection

C Jean Ingres, La grande odalisca, 1814 Parigi Louvre

D Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 Parigi Museo d’Orsay

E Pierre Puvis de Chevannes, Ragazze al mare, 1879 Parigi Museo d’Orsay

F Gustav Klimt, I pesci rossi, 1901-1902 Soleure Museo di Belle Arti

G Henri Matisse, Odalisca con le magnolie, 1924 Coll. privata

2 IL CORPO “ALTRO”

A Caravaggio, Testa di Medusa, 1590-1600 Firenze Galleria degli Uffizi

B Jusepe de Ribera, Lo storpio, 1642 Parigi Louvre

C William Blake, Nabucodonosor, 1795 Londra Tate Gallery

D Francisco Goya, Due vecchi che mangiano, 1820-23 Madrid Museo del Prado

E Joseph W. Turner, La morte su di un cavallo pallido, 1830 Londra Tate Gallery

F Odilon Redon, Il ciclope, 1895-1900 Otterlo Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller

G Giulio Aristide Sartorio, La Gorgone e gli eroi, 1897 Roma Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna

H Alberto Savinio, L’annunciazione, 1932 Coll.privata

3 IL CORPO MISTICO

A Jan Van Eyck, Madonna del cancelliere Rolin, 1439 Parigi Louvre

B Alessandro Botticelli, Paradiso, Canto VI, 1490-95

C Michelangelo Buonarroti, Crocifissione con Maria e San Giovanni, Parigi Louvre

D Stefano Maderno, Santa Cecilia, 1600

E William Blake, Pietà, 1795 Londra Tate Gallery

F Caspar David Friedrich, Monaco in riva al mare, 1810 Berlino Nationalgalerie

G Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1850 Londra Tate Gallery

4 IL CORPO VIOLATO

A Francisco Goya, La fucilazione del 3 maggio 1808, 1814 Madrid Museo del Prado

B Theodore Gericault, La Zattera della medusa, 1819 Parigi Louvre

C Francisco Goya, Saturno, 1820-23 Madrid Museo del Prado

D Amos Nattini, Inferno, Canto III, 1919-30

E Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 Madrid Museo Reina Sofia

5 IL CORPO E L’ANIMA

A Edward Munch, L’urlo, 1893 Oslo Munchmuseet

B Giovanni Segantini, Le cattive madri, 1894 Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum

C Alberto Martini, La finestra di psiche nella casa del poeta, 1952 Oderzo Pinacoteca Civica Alberto Martini

D Hans Bellmer, Donna dalle braccia articolate, 1965 Roma Studio d’arte

E Paul Delvaux, La nascita del giorno, 1937 Venezia Collezione Peggy Guggenheim

F Rene Magritte, Luce polare, 1927 Roma Collezione Ponti Loren

6 IL CORPO DEGLI ANTICHI

A Diadoumenos, Atene Museo Nazionale

B Alessandro Botticelli, Venere, 1482 circa Galleria Sabauda

C Antonio Canova, Psiche rianimata dal bacio di amore, 1793 Parigi Louvre

D Edward Burne Jones, La ruota della fortuna, 1875-83 Parigi Museo d’Orsay

E Gustave Moreau, Galatea, 1880 Parigi Museo Gustave Moreau

The cinematic Losfeld

Anatole Dauman: Argos films : souvenir-écran (1989) – Anatole Dauman, Jacques Gerber
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

One aspect of the history of the art of filmmaking remains largely unwritten. The financial aspects of filmmaking, namely the history of producers and distributors of films. Compared to the book industry, the film industry is infinite times more capital intensive. So while it is easy, almost risk-free and relatively cheap to write a novel that satisfies minority tastes, to produce a film that caters to minority audiences requires much more money and is a much riskier undertaking. Tyler Cowen was the first to point out this rather obvious but often overlooked aspect of filmmaking in his book In Praise of Commercial Culture which deals with the economics of culture production and consumption.

But what is a film producer? A film producer’s job is analogous to that of a publisher in the book industry: he finances the final product, a cultural artifact. But what is a film distributor? A film distributor is someone who buys the rights to a certain film in order to distribute it in his own country or region. Typically, he will have to market the film, provide subtitles for it and find screening opportunities. The analogy in book publishing is the role of a foreign publishing house that translates a book and distributes/markets it in its own territory.

Both a producer and a distributor try to reconcile the art of commerce and taste. In matters of taste I always embrace the heady nobrow cocktail of high art, eroticism, horror, philosophy, experimentalism, counterculture, subversion and avant-garde. This mix is a minority taste, I am well aware of that but some people have tried to cater to people of my (but more importantly their) taste. In publishing, this person is best exemplified by French publisher Eric Losfeld.

So I wonder: who is the Eric Losfeld of cinema?

In search of Losfeld’s cinematic alter ego I want to highlight the careers of film producers and/or distributors such as Anatole Dauman in France; Antony Balch and Richard Gordon in the U. K.; Roger Corman, Ben Barenholtz and Radley Metzger in North America. These entrepreneurs ran businesses that have provided us with films that mix high and low culture or have financed their high art productions with the proceeds of their more commercial and exploitative ventures.

Consider then the entrepeneurs listed above as the beginning of an ongoing quest for the cinematic Losfeld which I hope to continue over the coming months. One name that comes to mind is Germany’s Bernd Eichinger, who has produced cinematical adaptations of literary fiction by well regarded authors such as Süskind, Umberto Eco, Ian Mc Ewan and Houellebecq as well as more exploitative films such as Christiane F. and Resident Evil. Eichinger has also announced he would be making a film about the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF).

Please feel free to comment if you know of distributors/producers who fit the ‘cinematic Losfeld’ description.

Perhaps in 5 years from now?

Jeanne Goupil in Don’t Deliver Us From Evil

I’ve said this before, the past is a much bigger place than the present, by which I mean that it is easier to find enticing books, films and music of by-gone eras than from the present era. Mike’s Esotika blog, one of the recent film blogs that have caught my eye gives ample attention to the past, and more importantly manages to discover and review films from that same past that are unknown to me (and I’ve done quite some searching over the few years). The latest entry on Mike’s blog is a review of the 1971 French film Don’t Deliver us from Evil. The film is directed by Joël Séria and upon seeing stills such as this, this and this one, I was excited. The first thing I do when a new name pops up is check whether it’s referenced at Jahsonic.com and yes, I was able to find it in the title listing of Amos Vogel’s Film As a Subversive Art. [The plot is revealed in Vogel’s write-up]

What was it that excited me? First of all, the title, any title with the world evil in it attracts me (which reminds me that I still need to document Barbey’s story Le Bonheur dans le crime of his Diaboliques collection). Second, the aforementioned stills and especially this one, in which the girls are reading that classic of transgressive literature Maldoror.

After checking for connections (my motto being: “Wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything”) on my own site, I go out on the net and try to find more. First Wikipedia and IMDb, the French Wikipedia has this, IMDb this (sorted by ratings) and subsequently on the wild wild web. Where we find this: Joël Séria : Filmographie complète d’un obsédé sexuel with these 1, 2 [nsfw].

In an ideal world I would be able to connect to an online video on demand service provider and view the entire oeuvre of Séria. Perhaps in 5 years from now? At present, not even Youtube features clips of Séria’s films.

A teaser of the film:

Anne and Lore are two barely pubescent teens who attend a Catholic Boarding school. While seeming sweet, well behaved, and innocent from all appearances, the two have actually devoted themselves to Satan. While they are at school, the two intentionally ‘sin’ as often as possible without getting caught. They steal clothing and religious reliquaries in order to use in future Satanic rituals, they confess sins which they haven’t committed, they spy on the nuns, and they read transgressive literature under their covers once everybody else is asleep. Their life at the boarding school is a constant joke to them, and they giggle at everybody else’s misfortunes and the fact they are getting away with so much sin. Once summer break comes, their activities begin to get a little more serious.

And a review by Kinocite:

As a whole, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil / Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal comes across as something akin to Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows as Luis Buñuel or Catherine Breillat might have imagined it – no bad thing, especially to those nay-sayers who would deny that European cult cinema of this sort has anything to actually say.

And all this time I was thinking that the film reminded me of another film. And while I suspected that my perceived connection was maybe too far fetched, DVDmaniacs.net confirms that the film was based on the same events that inspired Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures:

Never before released on home video in the United States and making its world premiere on home video in its uncut form for the first time ever, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil is a very loose adaptation of the notorious story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hammond, the two murderous maids who also inspired Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (still arguably his best film…. Hobbits and giant apes be damned). While there are some similarities between the two films, Joël Séria’s take on the story, his feature film debut, is very different in tone, execution, and theme as it manages to bring a far more blasphemous interpretation of the events into play.

Closing remarks: while researching Don’t Deliver I re-stumbled on film producer Antony Balch who was one of the first British entrepreneurs to embrace art, horror and exploitation films with equal enthusiasm, and who appropriately distributed Don’t Deliver in the U. K. .

Unrelated earcandy.