One Kaplan leading to another, I would like to bring The Story of I (1997) to your attention.
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.
The opening credits of Gustave Moreau states that quotations from the oeuvre of Breton, Huysmans, Racine, Jarry, Lautréamont and Baudelaire can be expected.
RIP Nelly Kaplan.
John Fraser was a Scottish actor known for The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Repulsion (1965).
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.
In Repulsion too, Fraser has that gay, slightly decadent and perverse persona.
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.
Piero Simondo was an Italian artist, famous for the role he played in the Situationist International.
Cándido Camero was a Cuban musician and percussionist.
He is probably best-known for Dancin’ & Prancin’ (1979) which has a trance-like house music sound avant-la-lettre.
Betty Dodson was an American feminist and sex educator.
Unlike Shere Hite, who passed away last September and became known worldwide after her 1976 “Hite Report”, few outside the United States knew the witty Betty Dodson.
Hite became known for assuring women worldwide that penetrative sex is not the way to orgasm for women. Before Hite, many women faked their orgasms. After Hite there was a little less faking. However, it was Dodson who taught American women how to masturbate.
Dodson started out as an artist, she debuted in the late 1960s with drawings of couples making love. That went well. For a second exhibition she decided to invite friends to her studio to masturbate and draw them. That exhibition was a flop and also marked the end of her career as an artist.
Dodson went on to become an orgasm evangelizer, working with the likes of Annie Sprinkle, and writing a number of top-selling books. She looked very young in old age. Perhaps because of all the masturbation she so passionately promoted? She loved the Hitachi Magic Wand, an vibrator called the Rolls-Royce of sex toys. She organized group sessions for ladies to masturbate together. Each with such a Hitachi (I read somewhere that these sessions were sometimes broadcast live on TV). Her dream was to orchestrate a simultaneous group orgasm, but it was precisely in that orchestration role that she saw objections.
Anyone in Europe who was a little curious – and you know what Zappa said about being curious: “the mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground” – saw Betty Dodson in the 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) about the influence of Willem ‘orgasmatron’ Reich (1897-1957) on the hippie world. There she talked about her erotic drawings.
Betty Dodson belongs to a movement within feminism called sex-positive feminism. It is a movement that I became familiar with via the work of Camille Paglia, an American academic who made the world a smarter place in 1990 with her book Sexual Personae.
Sex-positive thinkers have a positive attitude towards, for example, porn, sex work and sexting.
In that sense I am also sex positive.
But.
If you fully agree that sex is a good thing, you can only decide, as some feminists do, that rape is not about sex, for example.
They reason for this is, and I quote, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) by Donald Symons, a fantastic book:
“The notion that rape is not sexually motivated” [may be due to the fact that] “part of the modernization of sex is the belief that sex is a good thing; yet almost everyone agrees that rape is a bad thing, and one way of eliminating the threat of cognitive dissonance is to deny that rape is sex.”
Sex can be a very beautiful thing indeed. But sex can also be very ugly.
Most of all, sex is often a bit disruptive. And having come to this point in a discourse like this, I like to say it with Schopenhauer who famously said that “sex is a malevolent demon.”
Carol Arthur was an American actress and wife of Dom DeLuise (1933-2009). She played bit parts in the films of Mel Brooks. I think I was 12 years old when I insisted on seeing Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976).
Silent Movie. Smart slapstick. A film about film. What’s not to love?
In that film she played an “extremely pregnant woman”. Was it perhaps she who completely tilted Brooks’ sports car nose in the air due to a heavy weight in the back seat? I cannot remember.
Later I saw Brooks Blazing Saddles (1974), the Western parody with the many and loud farts around the campfire. Beans and cowboys, you know how that works out.
In Blazing Saddles, Carol plays a schoolteacher who first speaks very shyly at a city meeting, then is told that she speaks too quietly, and then she announces in a loud and not at all shy voice to the governor that he is the “leading asshole of the state”.
Robert Fisk was an English journalist, writer and Middle East correspondent for over forty years. He spoke Arabic and interviewed Osama bin Laden no less than three times.
His 1993 three-part documentary, From Beirut to Bosnia is fully available on YouTube. In it he tries to answer the question why Muslims hate the West so much. The words Israel and America are, of course, constantly mentioned. The documentary is somewhat in the style of “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990) by Bernard Lewis, but with more sympathy for the Muslims.
The documentary and that article are from before 9/11. The documentary marks the moment when suicide terrorism began on October 23, 1983, when a man carrying two tons of explosives drove into Beirut military barracks and blew two hundred American soldiers into the air. That was in response to the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
At seventeen minutes, Hassan Nasrallah, the man who then led the war against Israel for Hezbollah, whose organization is today referred to as terrorist, explains with a smile with which metaphor an average Westerner can best understand a suicide bomber and martyr:
“Imagine,” he says, “that you are in an extremely hot sauna, in a hammam, for a long time, you get very thirsty and tired and hot, you suffer from the effects of the high temperature, then you get exhausted. Someone tells you that when you open the door, you can go to a quiet comfortable room, where you can drink a nice cocktail, listen to beautiful classical music. Knowing this you will open that door without hesitation, knowing that what you leave behind not a high price to pay… and what awaits you is of much greater value. ”
As I was watching the documentary last night, the lack of meta-perspective bothered me. It all seemed as if Palestinians were beyond reproach and only Israel was to blame. took some thorough searching to find even one voice critical of the documentary.
I found one by a certain Joseph Unger or Ungar, who, writing for PRIMER, says:
“History is tailored, twisted, and selectively excised to support this condemnation of Israel. We see, for example, whole neighborhoods of destroyed buildings in Lebanon, and Robert Fisk, the narrator, states “IT all started with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.” There is no mention of the lengthy civil war between Muslims and Maronite Christians which decimated the countryside. No mention of the Syrian invasion. No mention of the PLO infiltration in 1969 which gradually overcame the Lebanese army and by 1975 had established “Fatahland,” a de facto state extending from West Beirut to the Israeli border. Lebanon had been raped and battered from within.”
Now I do realize that a reporter is not an historian, so maybe the lack of meta-perspective in Fisk is natural. I also suspect that the Unger/Ungar report is biased. But Iike biases from both sides.
RIP Robert Fisk.