RIP Marc Meulemans

Marc Meulemans [1] (right) died of a heart attack last Friday. He was 50 years old. In the seventies he was member of the punk group De Kommeniste (1000 Titels), later he would become graphic designer for Belgian magazines such as MaoMagazine and Deng as well as sound designer for the theatrical producer Ivo van Hove (left).

When you fall for a boy

Fat Girl/À ma soeur! (2001) – Catherine Breillat

“When you fall for a boy, you try to pin him down too soon. After three days, he wants to kick his way free and get as far away as he can.”

“Oh, yeah? So let’s see who can pick up a decent boy first. Any boy. Even a fat slob like you.”

“That shows how dumb you are. You’re great physically but once they get to know you, they run a mile. They run before even getting to know you!”

“I’m just too young. They’d be scared to sleep with me.”

“But you reek of loose morals.”

“I don’t sleep around.”

“That’s the only thing you don’t do. You have a weird notion of what ‘not sleeping around’ means.”

“That’s what matters, you know.”

“I don’t think so. If I meet a man I love, I’d want to be broken in. He won’t think my first time counts. The first time should be with nobody. I don’t want a guy bragging he had me first. Guys are all sick.”

[….]

Catherine Breillat’s obsession with the dialectical nature of love and violence could not be better articulated than in the haunting last words echoed by Anaïs:

Police officer: She was in the woods. She says he didn’t rape her.

Anaïs: Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.

[…]

New Breillat film coming up

Twitchfilm reports on An Old Mistress [1], a new film by personal favourite Catherine Breillat:

Asia Argento, controversial filmmaker. Catherine Breillat, controversial filmmaker. Put the two together and it isn’t hard to imagine where they’ll likely end up. Argento is starring in Breillat’s latest, Une Vielle Maitresse, and the production company has recently posted the first batch of stills from the film to give a taste of what this will look like.

Here’s Breillat’s 2004 Rotterdam funding pitch for the film:

A costume drama An Old Mistress (Une Vieille Maitresse) adapted from the novel of the same by Barbey d’Aurevilly [The She-Devils (1874)], a book inspired by and covering much of the same ground as Choderlos De Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons. “Une Vieille Maitresse is the parable of an affair that seems to be over and whose force is underestimated because it is thought to have blown itself out,” says Breillat. Breillat discussed the role of the manipulative and ugly old lady with Madonna. “I had a meeting with her, but she did not want to do it. It would have been extremely gratifying if she had. But perhaps if she had it would no longer have been my film. So it may be for the better.”

A version of the apocalypse

K-Punk and Richard on Children of Men, a new dystopian British film from the director of Y tu Mama Tambien (2001) . Screenshot here.

I’ve finally seen Children of Men, on DVD, after missing it at the cinema. Watching it last week I asked myself, why is its rendering of apocalypse so contemporary?

British cinema, for the last thirty years as chronically sterile as the issueless population in Children of Men, has not produced a version of the apocalypse that is even remotely as well realised as this. You would have to turn to television – to the last Quatermass serial or to Threads, almost certainly the most harrowing television programme ever broadcast on British TV – for a vision of British society in collapse that is as compelling. Yet the comparison between Children of Men and these two predecessors points to what is unique about the film; the final Quatermass serial and Threads still belonged to Nuttall’s bomb culture, but the anxieties with which Children of Men deals have nothing to do with nuclear war.

Kris Melis pointed out to me that the plot of Children of Men is similar to that of the 1982 pomo porn film Café Flesh in which humans are divided into Sex Negatives and Sex Positives. The negatives get sick if they have sex so they go to Café Flesh to see positives who are forced to perform on stage for the negatives. If the similarity is superficial, both films belong to the category infertility in fiction in a post-apocalyptic world.

How much death and terror

The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) – Timothy J. Clark [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

How much death and terror can nature contain and still be posited as a value — as a world that human beings reach for, steadying themselves. (p. 174)

Via a review of Bart Verschaffel in De Witte Raaf 125, see also this post at This Space. More on the art critic — and former member of the British SI — here, more on horror in the visual arts here.