Just started reading Hard to Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography on Screen, edited by Gail Dines and Darren Kerr.
The introductory chapter includes this howler, on Paul Schrader's Hardcore:
"In this film, starring Rod Steiger, a morally upright evangelical preacher pursues his daughter when she runs away to the decadent west coast of the US, only to turn up in a porn movie. The plot takes us on a journey through the LA porn industry, in which all those he encounters are either damaged, or despicable, and wholly deserving of the beatings Steiger’s character dishes out."
But it's not Steiger, rather George C. Scott.
How can academics get away with such basic factual errors?
Then, in discussing the biases of a documentary, Porn Shutdown, about the impact of a HIV outbreak on the LA porn industry:
"That Porn Shutdown, in contrast, simply sidesteps James suggests once more that there is no complexity to men’s involvement in porn, nothing enigmatic – or, for that matter, visually interesting – about the male porn-performer."
Female performer Jessica Dee, one of those who contracted HIV, was not a major figure in this documentary, So was there nothing interesting about the European porn-performer either?
Showing posts with label rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rants. Show all posts
Sunday, 29 December 2013
Monday, 25 February 2013
Rant II
[Rather than reply to the comments replying to the previous rant, thought it better to do a new post.]
The fan/academic relationship is one that I find particularly interesting and problematic. It often seems to me that for the fan empirical data counts more, for the academic theory. I feel that both have their place and can be equally valuable, but it's the accompanying territorial pissings and frequent lack of connection.
In retrospect, the Inglorious Basterds essays were probably especially likely to get me going, simply because a book on that film is such an obvious and lazy thing to do. Or it's an exploitative book, on a mock exploitation movie that I was suckered into getting and which then made me feel exploited?
A study of Eurowar films with chapters on, say, Castellari and Lenzi's contributions just wouldn't have the brand recognition.
It's like those collections on [insert name of contemporary TV series/film] and Philosophy where you sense what basically amounts to a circle jerk between the parties involved. There's no organic relationship, just a text that's ready made for commentary.
An obvious example would be Dr Who: Who gave a fuck about that programme during its 1980s death-throes? But now that it's been rebooted and given the official seal of approval by the cultural taste-makers? Or, there's a big difference between bringing out queer subtexts planted by Russell T. Davies compared to looking at John Nathan Turner era Who and trying to discern if his homosexuality might likewise be found in the programme.
The fan/academic relationship is one that I find particularly interesting and problematic. It often seems to me that for the fan empirical data counts more, for the academic theory. I feel that both have their place and can be equally valuable, but it's the accompanying territorial pissings and frequent lack of connection.
In retrospect, the Inglorious Basterds essays were probably especially likely to get me going, simply because a book on that film is such an obvious and lazy thing to do. Or it's an exploitative book, on a mock exploitation movie that I was suckered into getting and which then made me feel exploited?
A study of Eurowar films with chapters on, say, Castellari and Lenzi's contributions just wouldn't have the brand recognition.
It's like those collections on [insert name of contemporary TV series/film] and Philosophy where you sense what basically amounts to a circle jerk between the parties involved. There's no organic relationship, just a text that's ready made for commentary.
An obvious example would be Dr Who: Who gave a fuck about that programme during its 1980s death-throes? But now that it's been rebooted and given the official seal of approval by the cultural taste-makers? Or, there's a big difference between bringing out queer subtexts planted by Russell T. Davies compared to looking at John Nathan Turner era Who and trying to discern if his homosexuality might likewise be found in the programme.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Adventures of a Taxi Driver
For the critics of the time this 1976 entry was was a sex comedy that was neither sexy nor funny and which had absolutely nothing of interest in form, content or their combination.
Thirty plus years on what’s interesting about in this regard is the way it relates, albeit unconsciously, to some of the major critical debates taking place at the same time.
The opening sequence is a case in point. Taking a pseudo-documentary approach via a stentorian voice-of-god styled voice-off, it introduces the character of the taxi driver in the abstract. However, rather than providing us with a picture of a singular reality it instead emphasises, to comic effect, the contradiction between the official and actual versions of reality. Whereas the official version given in the voice-over presents an idealised vision of the taxi driver, the unofficial version given in the image mocks this ideal.
If we turn to academic film studies we might relate this to debates about the role of realism in cinema and whether it could be used to politically progressive ends.
Significantly the distinction here was not between left and right but rather between different left wing critics associated with different theoretical approaches.
On the one hand there were those critics associated with the journal Screen. They took a structuralist approach. On the other hand there were critics, sometimes associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, who took a culturalist approach.
The Screen theorists were sceptical about the progressive potential of realism. Realism, they argued, relied upon a hierarchy of discourses and was unable to adequately address contradictions. They emphasised a cinema which was radical in both form and content and in which no-one element was privileged above the others as the conveyor of truth.
Despite its left-wing subject matter and the impeccable credentials of director Ken Loach and writer Jim Allen, the 1975 TV series Days of Hope was criticised by Screen theorists for taking a basically realist approach.
Much of the debate around the series ultimately came to focus upon one scene, in which an official report indicating that a workers strike will be resolved peacefully is juxtaposed with images of soldiers about to be sent in to combat the strikers. The problem the structuralists had with this scene was in its form: Sound and image were implicitly placed in a discursive hierarchy with one another, with the latter showing the truth that the former did not.
The structuralists themselves preferred taking an approach inspired by Berthold Brecht, by which the spectator was always to be reminded that he was watching a constructed fiction through the use of various distanciating techniques – here, for instance, audio and visual elements should have been separated out, made independent of one another.
Another of Brecht’s distanciating techniques was to have character directly address the spectator, thus breaking the fourth wall and the illusion that we were simply observing events as they naturally occurred.
My name is Joe North...
Coincidentally this also happens in Adventures of a Taxi Driver. Not only does protagonist Joe North then introduce himself to us immediately after the pseudo-documentary sequence – as a relatively common device – but he also continues these addresses throughout the course of the narrative:
“I've been at it a year or so now. I've got my own cab – well, I will have, as soon as I've finished paying for it.”
“I know what she needs. I can tell whether a bird has had a good seeing to the night before”
“Something tells me this could be my lucky night […] A right little sex bomb this one. You can tell from that voice, can't you – all husky and sexy. I reckon this one will need the smooth, suave, James Bond style chat-up.”
However simply using a distanciating technique does not mean that it will necessarily have a distanciating effect of the type assumed by Brecht and his 1970s acolytes. The primary purpose of these monologues, after all, is clearly to draw the viewer into identifying with Joe and agreeing with rather than challenging or rejecting his world-view.
A Blakey-like role for Stephen Lewis
Here it is true that we may reject this and read Joe's remarks against the grain. This, after all, was the idea encouraged by another of the structuralists' major influences, Barthes.
The problem for the 1970s Screen theorist is that the text in which Barthes most fully developed this idea, The Pleasures of the Text, is also a more post-structuralist work in which he made a number of challenges to their position; this challenge was all the more ironic insofar as he himself had profoundly influenced the Screen position through some of his earlier structuralist writings.
To the post-structuralist Barthes the issue was that those on the left who had eagerly taken up his ideas as a means of challenging the dominant bourgeois doxa were themselves increasingly becoming overly assertive in the absolute rectitude of their own para-doxa.
The issue here is whether we feel that contradiction has an end point. Marxist theory says that all contradictions will be resolved when we reach the final stage of communism. But what if we do not accept this position? Are we to be terrorised into silence for out own good, that as victims of false consciousness we do not know our own interests? Should we be prevented from seeing Adventures of a Window Cleaner? Should we be denied its pleasures and, indeed, displeasures?
Geeson as the bait, Anna Bergman as the switch?
For audiences at the time, displeasure likely manifest for those drawn in by the presence of Judy Geeson as a stripper who somehow manages never to show actually show any boobs, bums or bush, unlike the rest of the female cast; it should however also be pointed out that the film is more of an equal opportunities exploitationer than most others, inasmuch as we do get to see Barry Evans's bits.
The Jacey
Pinball wizard
For today's trash cinema fan the pleasures of the film text may well include such incidentals as the shots of 1970s Soho at night in an episode involving one of Joe's regular fares, a prostitute, who performs oral sex on her respectable middle-class pick-up with amusingly nasty consequences when Joe stops his cab suddenly.
Much like the episode in which Joe fails to realise that his fare is a female impersonator and the gay / transgendered impersonator misreads Joe's remarks about his friend Tom as indicating his own homosexuality, here we also see pleasure and unpleasure mixed up more directly.
The point, I would argue, is that trash cinema is far more complex than most criticism cares to acknowledge. The pity is that by keeping such films at arms length, the political potential of genuinely engaging with the popular audience and its preferred choice of culture remained unfulfilled. And when we consider that the film was more successful than Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver at the UK box-office, that has to be seen as something of a loss.
Antonio Gramsci and Birmingham School 1, Louis Althusser and Screen 0?
Thirty plus years on what’s interesting about in this regard is the way it relates, albeit unconsciously, to some of the major critical debates taking place at the same time.
The opening sequence is a case in point. Taking a pseudo-documentary approach via a stentorian voice-of-god styled voice-off, it introduces the character of the taxi driver in the abstract. However, rather than providing us with a picture of a singular reality it instead emphasises, to comic effect, the contradiction between the official and actual versions of reality. Whereas the official version given in the voice-over presents an idealised vision of the taxi driver, the unofficial version given in the image mocks this ideal.
If we turn to academic film studies we might relate this to debates about the role of realism in cinema and whether it could be used to politically progressive ends.
Significantly the distinction here was not between left and right but rather between different left wing critics associated with different theoretical approaches.
On the one hand there were those critics associated with the journal Screen. They took a structuralist approach. On the other hand there were critics, sometimes associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, who took a culturalist approach.
The Screen theorists were sceptical about the progressive potential of realism. Realism, they argued, relied upon a hierarchy of discourses and was unable to adequately address contradictions. They emphasised a cinema which was radical in both form and content and in which no-one element was privileged above the others as the conveyor of truth.
Despite its left-wing subject matter and the impeccable credentials of director Ken Loach and writer Jim Allen, the 1975 TV series Days of Hope was criticised by Screen theorists for taking a basically realist approach.
Much of the debate around the series ultimately came to focus upon one scene, in which an official report indicating that a workers strike will be resolved peacefully is juxtaposed with images of soldiers about to be sent in to combat the strikers. The problem the structuralists had with this scene was in its form: Sound and image were implicitly placed in a discursive hierarchy with one another, with the latter showing the truth that the former did not.
The structuralists themselves preferred taking an approach inspired by Berthold Brecht, by which the spectator was always to be reminded that he was watching a constructed fiction through the use of various distanciating techniques – here, for instance, audio and visual elements should have been separated out, made independent of one another.
Another of Brecht’s distanciating techniques was to have character directly address the spectator, thus breaking the fourth wall and the illusion that we were simply observing events as they naturally occurred.
My name is Joe North...
Coincidentally this also happens in Adventures of a Taxi Driver. Not only does protagonist Joe North then introduce himself to us immediately after the pseudo-documentary sequence – as a relatively common device – but he also continues these addresses throughout the course of the narrative:
“I've been at it a year or so now. I've got my own cab – well, I will have, as soon as I've finished paying for it.”
“I know what she needs. I can tell whether a bird has had a good seeing to the night before”
“Something tells me this could be my lucky night […] A right little sex bomb this one. You can tell from that voice, can't you – all husky and sexy. I reckon this one will need the smooth, suave, James Bond style chat-up.”
However simply using a distanciating technique does not mean that it will necessarily have a distanciating effect of the type assumed by Brecht and his 1970s acolytes. The primary purpose of these monologues, after all, is clearly to draw the viewer into identifying with Joe and agreeing with rather than challenging or rejecting his world-view.
A Blakey-like role for Stephen Lewis
Here it is true that we may reject this and read Joe's remarks against the grain. This, after all, was the idea encouraged by another of the structuralists' major influences, Barthes.
The problem for the 1970s Screen theorist is that the text in which Barthes most fully developed this idea, The Pleasures of the Text, is also a more post-structuralist work in which he made a number of challenges to their position; this challenge was all the more ironic insofar as he himself had profoundly influenced the Screen position through some of his earlier structuralist writings.
To the post-structuralist Barthes the issue was that those on the left who had eagerly taken up his ideas as a means of challenging the dominant bourgeois doxa were themselves increasingly becoming overly assertive in the absolute rectitude of their own para-doxa.
The issue here is whether we feel that contradiction has an end point. Marxist theory says that all contradictions will be resolved when we reach the final stage of communism. But what if we do not accept this position? Are we to be terrorised into silence for out own good, that as victims of false consciousness we do not know our own interests? Should we be prevented from seeing Adventures of a Window Cleaner? Should we be denied its pleasures and, indeed, displeasures?
Geeson as the bait, Anna Bergman as the switch?
For audiences at the time, displeasure likely manifest for those drawn in by the presence of Judy Geeson as a stripper who somehow manages never to show actually show any boobs, bums or bush, unlike the rest of the female cast; it should however also be pointed out that the film is more of an equal opportunities exploitationer than most others, inasmuch as we do get to see Barry Evans's bits.
The Jacey
Pinball wizard
For today's trash cinema fan the pleasures of the film text may well include such incidentals as the shots of 1970s Soho at night in an episode involving one of Joe's regular fares, a prostitute, who performs oral sex on her respectable middle-class pick-up with amusingly nasty consequences when Joe stops his cab suddenly.
Much like the episode in which Joe fails to realise that his fare is a female impersonator and the gay / transgendered impersonator misreads Joe's remarks about his friend Tom as indicating his own homosexuality, here we also see pleasure and unpleasure mixed up more directly.
The point, I would argue, is that trash cinema is far more complex than most criticism cares to acknowledge. The pity is that by keeping such films at arms length, the political potential of genuinely engaging with the popular audience and its preferred choice of culture remained unfulfilled. And when we consider that the film was more successful than Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver at the UK box-office, that has to be seen as something of a loss.
Antonio Gramsci and Birmingham School 1, Louis Althusser and Screen 0?
Thursday, 11 February 2010
An all too typical example
"The films discussed here were not, of course, the French productions actually watched by most French people during the period under discussion. That distinction went to Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974), most notorious of the soft-porn features that followed the disappearance of censorship, and Gerard Oury's Les Aventures du Rabbi Jacob (1973). Oury had enjoyed even greater success in 1966 with La Grande Vadrouille, like Les Aventures du Rabbi Jacob starring two of France's best loved screen comedians of the time, Bourvil and Louis de Funes."
Or, the films that audiences see and the films that academics discuss are too often different; that this passage appears in "A Student's Guide" its subject only serves to show how the system renews itself: We will teach you about these films and about this film history, the implication being that they are all you really need to know about. What about popular (or vernacular) cinema as a better barometer of a country's 'real' film culture?
Or, the films that audiences see and the films that academics discuss are too often different; that this passage appears in "A Student's Guide" its subject only serves to show how the system renews itself: We will teach you about these films and about this film history, the implication being that they are all you really need to know about. What about popular (or vernacular) cinema as a better barometer of a country's 'real' film culture?
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