Garden in Shoreham (1820s or early 1830s) – Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer (1805 – 1881) was largely forgotten after his death. In 1909, large amounts of his Shoreham work were destroyed by his surviving son Herbert Palmer, who burnt “a great quantity of father’s handiwork … Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate”. The destruction “included sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and lasted for days”.
Detail of the The Birth of Venus (also known as Aphrodite) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879.
In Plato’s Symposium the speech of Pausanias distinguishes two manifestations of Aphrodite, represented by the two stories: Aphrodite Ourania (“heavenly” Aphrodite), and Aphrodite Pandemos (“Common” Aphrodite). These two manifestations represented her role in homosexuality and heterosexuality, respectively. –via Aphrodite’s Wikipedia page [Aug 2006]
In his own time, Bouguereau was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world. In 1900, his contemporaries Degas and Monet reportedly named him as most likely to be remembered as the greatest 19th century French painter by the year 2000. Although with Degas’ famous trenchant wit, and the aesthetic tendencies of the two Impressionists, it is possible the statement was meant as an ironic comment on the taste of the future public.
Via the laughingbone:
One of the authors that I used to seriously collect was Colin Wilson. At one point in my life, his books – especially the Outsider Series – were like maps, guiding me through unknown territories. I eagerly hunted down everything in and out of print. And in those dark pre-Amazon days, it was a real triumph of discovery to find a copy of the long out-of-print Beyond the Outsider, signed by Wilson, on the dusty lower shelf in an old bookstore. —the laughingbone
Via Michael Blowhard:
Here’s a great tale: the electrifying rise and almost instant fall of the British writer Colin (“The Outsider”) Wilson. Acclaimed as a brilliant talent while still in his early 20s, he became rich and famous very fast. But he was critically eviscerated within a couple of years and has been ignored (and/or treated like an embarassment) ever since.
Exploitation Poster Art (2005) – Dave Kehr, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Horror Poster Art (2004) – Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Science Fiction Poster Art (2004) – Christopher Frayling, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
In Europe, publisher Taschen have teamed up with Nourmand/Marsh, to publish a series of film poster books. Available in Belgium at a price of 13 Euros, they are a bargain. Some of the accompanying text of these lovingly produced coffee table books was written by American film critic Dave Kehr (Exploitation poster art) and British art historian Christopher Frayling (Science-fiction poster art). The posters are masterpieces of visual innuendo, offering, in most cases, far more that the films actually delivered. And that is what I meant in my title about the paratext being more interesting than the text.
Via Invisible Cinema comes this announcement of a special curated by Valeria Mogilevich entitled Nouvelle Vague: Submerged Scientific Films & Firefly Cinema: Somewhere not Here? screened at the Anthology Film Archives. One of the films shown is the one pictured below, which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in a double bill with Georges Franju’s 1949 The Blood of the Beasts at the Antwerp film museum. The 1934 The Sea Horse is scored by French impressionist composer Darius Milhaud, as are some of his others.
The Sea Horse (1934) – Jean Painlevé
Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was the director of more than two hundred science and nature films and an early champion of the genre. Advocating the credo “science is fiction,” Painlevé scandalized the scientific world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify. He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, and fanworms as endowed with human traits – the erotic, the comical, and the savage – and in the process won over the circle of Surrealists and avant-gardists he befriended, among them the filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Vigo, and Luis Buñuel.
A blog-a-thon is a recent phenomenon in the blogosphere. It consists of a number of bloggers writing posts on a certain subject. According to girish the word was coined by Darren of longpauses.com (although I couldn’t find the post). Girish conducted a blog-a-thon on avant-garde cinema early August. The earliest post I was able to trace featuring the term blog-a-thon is this one.
Since I am a fan of Wikipedia, I wish that the participants to blog-a-thons would share their knowledge with the entire world by contributing the results of their efforts to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia equivalent of blog-a-thons are called Wikipedia Collaborations or WikiProjects. One possible future trend could be blikis, a combination of blogs with a wiki system. I first came across the concept of the bliki two years ago in this post by Belgian blogger forret.
Update: Aug 24: pornography – symposium
Via girish again comes:
Terrific post by Owen Hatherley, part of the Porn Symposium (hey, there’s an idea for a future blog-a-thon): Russ Meyer, Vilgot Sjöman, etc, but mostly Dušan Makavejev.
Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left
Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bacteriagrl and Different Maps. —Owen Hatherley
There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema and into everyday life, and it goes much like this; a combination of American exploitation directors and French arthouse in the early 1970s, through a conjunction of fake orgasms and truck drivers on the one hand and soft focus and cod-philosophy on the other takes what was previously suppressed and places it in the heart of the multiplex. In this narrative the heroes are the hucksters behind Deep Throat or the faux-sophisticates of Emmanuelle, with even dissenting semi-mainstream directors like Russ Meyer considered too original to be relevant. These are two films from which one can trace a line to the frat film, the overlit horrors of most American porn and the ‘another round of whispering on a bed’ (Foucault) that is, the French sex drama, always aiming to reveal some essential truth or other. The confirmation seemingly of the Foucauldian admonition that ‘sex is boring’. —Owen Hatherley
P.S.
[This post forms part of a symposium with bacteriagrl, k-punk, sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy (I still dream of orgonon), infinite thought (the money shot and vintage porn), effay, poetix.] —Different Maps
My two cents:
Related: 1971 – European cinema – Freudo-Marxism – Dušan Makavejev – Wilhelm Reich – the sexual revolution in the cinema
The ravishing sex reformer and radical in a provocative pose; composing sex and politics, it also reveals Makavejev’s “aestheticism”; the unexpected rabbit, the strong, two-colored vertical stripes and particularly the inexplicable empty frame. SC via Film As a Subversive Art (1974) – Amos Vogel
Update Aug 23 2006:
As you’ll recall, Ariel Levy snarled about porn studies in the confessional section of Female Chauvinist Pigs. If you are unfamiliar with the evil that is porn studies, you should check out the Porn Symposium going on now! You can see why Ariel Levy felt that this kind of feminism contributed to raunch culture and the gyrations and tough talk of female chauvinist pigs. –via blog.pulpculture.org
“You cried for night” is an Australian literary blog, found via the comments on The Reading Experience’s piece on psychological realism. From its header:
” You cried for night – it falls. Now cry in darkness.” (Sam Beckett). How quickly will these colours date in the service of Australian literature and other bookish matters? It’s the content that matters…And the dots.
In one of the comments on Freud, the novel and the New York Times Anne remarks:
Wonderful post: one thing blogging surely is good for is puncturing the gaseousness of other bloggers. You’ve done a lovely job here.
Girish asks:
“Why is it that acts that would horrify us in real life instead evoke in us shameless, uncontainable joy when encountered in a cartoon?”
Girish’s post is part of the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon by Brian Darr at Hell On Frisco Bay.
The first person to have tried to answer Girish’s question was Aristotle in Poetics when he said (I am providing two alternative translations):
More on Freleng:
Isadore “Friz” Freleng (1906–1995) was an animator, cartoonist, director, and producer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. He introduced and/or developed several of the studio’s biggest stars, including Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the cat, Yosemite Sam (to whom he was said to bear more than a passing resemblance) and Speedy Gonzales. He was a contemporary of the better known Tex Avery.
The theme of this post reminds me of an article at Wikipedia, called cartoon physics and maybe by analogy there is also such a thing as cartoon psychology, in other words the psychological realism (and here and here) of Hollywood?
