Watching the film Marquis (1989) for a second time last night, occasioned by the death of Michel Robin, brought the following dictum to my attention:
… qu’importe à sa main créatrice que cette masse de chair conformant aujourd’hui d’un individu bipède, se produise demain sous la forme de mille insectes différents?…”
This appears to be a variation of Sade’s dictum that a “mass of flesh which today constitutes an individual … may be reproduced tomorrow in the form of a thousand insects”.
In my quest to find the origin of this citation (Justine), I stumbled upon Man into Wolf (1951) by Robert Eisler. That book has a good chapter on Marquis de Sade, and, is in the public domain since this year.
In France, the actor Michel Robin died. He turned 90. He played in more than 120 films. Always bit parts. You can recognize him by his bald head and the banal characters he usually had to portray.
Favorites are Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (1971), a film about two beautiful adolescent girls who start indulging in a satanic love for evil. Robin plays the simple gardener whose parakeet is killed by the diabolic duo.
There is L’Invitation (1973) in which Robin plays a simple and clumsy office worker who, after inheriting a fortune, invites his colleagues to his new estate. There, those good bourgeois men and women are intoxicated by a spiked drink at the hands of a rogue bartender. The situation escalates. Cult movie.
And then there is the genius animal head puppet film Marquis (1989) in which Robin voices a certain Ambert, a rat prison guard who is eager to be sodomized by the Marquis de Sade, something Colin, the living and talking phallus of the Marquis does not wish to indulge in.
Buying a copy of a Dutch translation of Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia re-kindled my research stamina in the Marquis.
I found the docu above.
The Marquis de Sade: Pornographer or Prophet? (2001) features Andrea Dworkin, Camille Paglia, Francine du Plessix Gray, Richard Seaver, David Coward, Neil Schaeffer, Neil Cox, Thomas Wynn, Conroy Maddox.
Some of the people in this so-so portrait are already dead. Andrea Dworkin, Francine du Plessix Gray, Richard Seaver and Conroy Maddox are no longer among us.
Dworkin, who while writing her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), read many Sade-biographies, makes a notable appearance saying — predictably — this of Sade:
“My pacifism was first challenged when, working on my book on pornography in the late 1970s, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, I read a half dozen biographies of the Marquis de Sade. A life of rape and sexual violence, including kidnapping and possibly murder, would have been stopped short if his first (known) victim, Jeanne Testard, had killed him.” —Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation
Paglia gives Sade too much praise, as usual, even making him a obligatory reading for feminists and in universities.
The nicest surprise was probably seeing Francine du Plessix Gray, and her well-balanced views.
Another nice aspect of the docu is that footage from some Sade films is shown.
I first heard of this film when it came out, and since then, its director Jo Anne Kaplan (1945-2016) has died.
The film is based on Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and it consists of a Kaplan reading her own paraphrase of that Bataille novel which I bought when visiting Atlanta, Georgia when I worked for Microsoft.
Argentina-born French writer and filmmaker Nelly Kaplan died in Geneva. She turned 89.
She taught, wrote, assisted Abel Gance and directed her own films.
She is best known for a 1969 film, La Fiancée du pirate, “the pirate’s sweetheart”. You can see large parts of that film in a documentary by Zo Anima (they make quite interesting documentaries about film history) that mainly talks about the feminist and witch-like aspects of that film.
But also, it would seem, YouTube has the entire film online:
Kaplan also wrote and directed two film documentaries about artists’ lives, a genre that is barely practiced today. Those artist films are Gustave Moreau (1961) and Rodolphe Bresdin (1962). If I am not mistaken, Moreau has his own museum in Paris, just like Wiertz in Brussels, with whom Moreau bears similarities, Moreau was the better painter.
Gustave Moreau (1961
The opening credits of Gustave Moreau states that quotations from the oeuvre of Breton, Huysmans, Racine, Jarry, Lautréamont and Baudelaire can be expected.
My gaydar was effective, I noticed while watching The Trials of Oscar Wilde that Fraser was gay. It’s good that they cast a gay man for a gay part in 1960.
Fernando Solanas was an Argentine film director and politician, best-known for his film The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), which is a seminal document of the decolonization of the Americas.
Len Barry was an American singer best-known for his composition “1-2-3” which was somewhat of a staple on the Northern Soul scene, state sources such as Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul (1999) by David Nowell.
