Was Woody Stode ever cast as a cowboy before Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West?
In Ford was he a 'negro'? In Sergeant Routlegde, for instance?
Who was the first white director (i.e. not Oscar Micheaux) to present a 'black' actor as such? Great though Micheaux was, I feel he was too much part of the race cinema of the US in the 1920s, 30s and 40s to see beyond its restrictions.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Thesis work #1
Paola Marrati – Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy (2008)
Paola Marrati’s key idea is that the Cinema books are as concerned with politics as aesthetics. In particular, they introducing new ideas of action and agency that Deleuze would further develop in What is Philosophy? – a book that, significantly, takes up the question and its title from the closing lines of Cinema 2 (x, 89).
Within What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of immanence diverging from that found in earlier works, such as Difference and Repetition. In these, Deleuze had characterised immanence as a marginal tradition, practiced by occasional figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In What is Philosophy? he argues that immanence is in fact more prevalent, but that the historically tendency for it to be subordinated time and again to transcendence has prevented us from seeing this (90-91).
Relating this back to the Cinema books, Marrati emphasises that the idea of immanence is also central to the notion of the time-image advanced in Cinema 2, such that filmmakers in the post-war period were (asymptotically) in advance of their philosopher and political theorist counterparts (xv).
This claim is founded upon a series of distinctions between the movement-image and the time-image, which might be summarised as follows: The movement-image cinema was based upon 19th century understandings that were transcendental and historicist. Filmmakers such as Griffith and Eisenstein believed in a world to come and the effectiveness of human agency, as epitomised by the sensory motor schema of the action-image and the large SAS’ form, to actualise this world. Compared to these common elements the differences between them, of Griffith’s emphasis upon the individual and the US as Christian utopia, and Eisenstein’s emphasis upon the collective and the USSR as Communist utopia, were unimportant:
If Griffith and Eisenstein privilege the active form of montage, it is because they share a faith in human agency and in history. However different their conceptions of history might be, they share the belief that history is made through humans’ actions, and in this respect it matters little whether what triggers the events is the passions of a traitor, the love of a woman, or class struggle. The form of classical cinema – American cinema, doubtless, but not only American – is constructed around the action-image. (51)
Belief in transcendence, historical telos and the efficacy of human action were then shattered by the Second World War, clearing the way for the emergence of the time-image cinema based upon immanence. The breakdown of the action-image and the concomitant emergence of the seer, the long take and other new figures and concepts in the time-image allowed filmmakers to explore new ways of thinking about our place in this world: “The greatness of the filmmakers of time is that they were able to create other livable [sic] configurations of thought in images themselves; this is how they attained a force comparable to the now failing force of the action-image.” (79)
Though Marrati does not specifically mention him, there are possible affinities here with Siegfried Kracauer’s (1960) notion of cinema as the “redemption of physical reality,” albeit taking place within a specifically time-image understanding of ‘reality’.
More important for my purposes, however, is to relate Marrati’s reading of Deleuze to modernity and post-modernity. The issues here is that, like Deleuze, Marrati uses the former term but not the latter. I would contend, however, that her analysis, as it implicates a single meta-narrative within the movement-image followed by a multiplicity of language games within the time-image, can be understood in postmodern terms. What we have, that is, are a ‘classical’ cinema of the movement-image which is (19th century) ‘modern’ insofar as it believes in a transcendent Truth and a ‘modern’ cinema of the time-image which is (post World War II) ‘postmodern’ insofar as it denies this in favour of immanence and localised, performative, contingent truths.
Relating Maretti’s analysis to my filmmakers would seem to have differing implications. Leone,
as an Italian pessimist sceptical about the “American dream,” would seem presents an obvious modern/postmodern/time-image counterpart to the classical/movement-image John Ford, with his optimistic belief in this dream.
While Ford himself admittedly became more questioning of the US utopia in his later films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and Cheyenne Autumn, it is significant that these were the films Leone felt came closer to his own understanding of the west. As Neil Campbell (2008) summarises Leone’s remarks on Once Upon a Time in the West:
My version of the story of the birth of a nation” acted by “the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a businessman, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These “worn-out” figures exit the stage to leave the whore to be transformed and transforming, to symbolize this “birth” of a new nation and the end of another world—“the beginning of a world without balls,” […]The “ancient race” (as the film calls them) of mythic men linked in chains of brutality is “worn-out”
As I will also argue Leone’s ‘America’ trilogy thereby provide different, immanent, alternatives to a faith in a transcendent utopia.
For Argento’s gialli thrillers the obvious point of comparison is Antonioni’s anti-gialli, most notably Blow-Up. The apparent problem here, besides the near-unassailable position of Antonioni as one of the masters of the time-image/postmodernist cinema, is that Argento’s films tend to present a re-engagement with action following a period of becoming seer: Whereas Blow-Up’s Thomas is witness to a murder and proves unable to act, his Deep Red double/virtual image Marcus (both characters being played by the same actor, David Hemmings) resolves to solve the case and as such becomes (something of) an agent again. Argento’s own journalistic criticism of Blow-Up, as Antonioni’s “abandonment” of his “duty” towards the audience, is instructive: The two filmmakers would seem implicated in different language games here. Blow-Up suggests a lack of faith in any truth (there is no body and thus no murder...), Deep Red a faith in a “will to truth” (there was murder, as demonstrated by this body...). The point, of course, is that Antonioni and Argento’s language games can only be judged in their own (performative) terms, of what works best in their particular contexts, not by some universal criteria. What worked for Antonioni’s arthouse audience (along with the mass audience brought in by the promise of a flash of pubic hair, as first for 1967; we must not forget the exploitation cinema and its configurations of "sex and violence") was not necessarily what worked for Argento’s crossover audience in 1975.
Crucially Marrati also suggests that the time-image itself allows for action, so long as it was sufficiently considered, rather than automatic, and geared towards immanence rather than utopia:
It is not out of passivity, powerlessness, or resignation that one is no longer capable of immediately and “appropriately” responding to a given situation or event. It is quite the opposite: the response is suspended because one has become aware that certain actions are powerless. Habits of conduct, patterns of behaviour, are deemed to express weakness or strength, love or contempt, indignation or revolt. Not to engage in the appropriate response, not to express the appropriate affect may seem to imply passivity, or worse. Deleuze’s point, though, is that sometimes, perhaps even often, “acting in the appropriate way” is precisely the lack of response and the refusal to acknowledge our helplessness. (xii)
The issue then becomes that of interpretation, of one filmmaker’s time-image formulation against that of another, alongside the point at which a refusal to act, or the apparent inaction, paradoxically itself constitutes a form of action.
In Leone’s cinema we may think, for example, of Noodles’ refusal to accept the role of assassin-avenger than Max assigns him in Once Upon a Time in America, and of whether this refusal occurs in actuality or virtuality. We might also consider the likes of Dr Villega’s refusal to jump from the explosives-loaded train in Duck You Sucker, despite the forgiving Sean’s imploring that he do so, along with the alternatives of desperately trying to escape versus stoically facing death that are presented to other revolutionaries as they face firing squad. In Questi’s cinema, meanwhile, we might think of the passivity of Tomas Milian’s unnamed protagonist in Django Kill, his refusal to act for gold/dollars or revenge, as would conventionally provide the spaghetti western protagonist, as seen in Leone’s films, amongst others, with ample motivation. (Perhaps Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological, post-modern, existentialism does not provide us with the clear guide to action that Sartre’s ‘no excuses’ phenomenological, modern, existentialism did? The limit situation of facing an executioner, of giving a gaze of defiance or attempting to escape at the likely cost of others’ lives, would presumably represent the test case here.) This combination of classical movement-image generic situation, that Django Kill is a western which should present a clear SAS’ narrative as Milian’s character gets his revenge and/or the gold, followed by a time-image development, as he passively observes, might also help explain the film’s and Questi’s marginality relative to Leone and Argento: As a postmodernist avant la lettre who refused the high/low, art/popular, time-image/movement-image binaries still extant in a structuralist 1960s, Questi made films which confounded audiences on both sides of each binary. Leone and Argento by contrast were less extreme in their images and more adroit at performing a balancing act on these either/or binaries.
Related to this, the problem is perhaps that we cannot use postmodern in brackets: If we say ‘postmodern’, in whatever formulation, we immediately bring into play a set of assumptions about what this ‘postmodern’ is, with these inevitably defined positively or negatively in relation to the ‘modern’. We lack a vocabulary which is both/and or neither/nor, that something may be ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, or neither of these, depending on how we define our terms. In relation to Deleuze’s Cinema theories, this is compounded by his movement-image/time-image distinction, as one which he identifies as being about the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ cinema rather than, for example, the ‘modern’ (1920s) and the ‘neo-modern’ (1960s), as in Orr (1993).
[Let me know if you want more, as I can happily post one or two thousand words a day of this stuff; apart from anything else I would like comments from the ordinary and academic audiences.]
Paola Marrati’s key idea is that the Cinema books are as concerned with politics as aesthetics. In particular, they introducing new ideas of action and agency that Deleuze would further develop in What is Philosophy? – a book that, significantly, takes up the question and its title from the closing lines of Cinema 2 (x, 89).
Within What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of immanence diverging from that found in earlier works, such as Difference and Repetition. In these, Deleuze had characterised immanence as a marginal tradition, practiced by occasional figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In What is Philosophy? he argues that immanence is in fact more prevalent, but that the historically tendency for it to be subordinated time and again to transcendence has prevented us from seeing this (90-91).
Relating this back to the Cinema books, Marrati emphasises that the idea of immanence is also central to the notion of the time-image advanced in Cinema 2, such that filmmakers in the post-war period were (asymptotically) in advance of their philosopher and political theorist counterparts (xv).
This claim is founded upon a series of distinctions between the movement-image and the time-image, which might be summarised as follows: The movement-image cinema was based upon 19th century understandings that were transcendental and historicist. Filmmakers such as Griffith and Eisenstein believed in a world to come and the effectiveness of human agency, as epitomised by the sensory motor schema of the action-image and the large SAS’ form, to actualise this world. Compared to these common elements the differences between them, of Griffith’s emphasis upon the individual and the US as Christian utopia, and Eisenstein’s emphasis upon the collective and the USSR as Communist utopia, were unimportant:
If Griffith and Eisenstein privilege the active form of montage, it is because they share a faith in human agency and in history. However different their conceptions of history might be, they share the belief that history is made through humans’ actions, and in this respect it matters little whether what triggers the events is the passions of a traitor, the love of a woman, or class struggle. The form of classical cinema – American cinema, doubtless, but not only American – is constructed around the action-image. (51)
Belief in transcendence, historical telos and the efficacy of human action were then shattered by the Second World War, clearing the way for the emergence of the time-image cinema based upon immanence. The breakdown of the action-image and the concomitant emergence of the seer, the long take and other new figures and concepts in the time-image allowed filmmakers to explore new ways of thinking about our place in this world: “The greatness of the filmmakers of time is that they were able to create other livable [sic] configurations of thought in images themselves; this is how they attained a force comparable to the now failing force of the action-image.” (79)
Though Marrati does not specifically mention him, there are possible affinities here with Siegfried Kracauer’s (1960) notion of cinema as the “redemption of physical reality,” albeit taking place within a specifically time-image understanding of ‘reality’.
More important for my purposes, however, is to relate Marrati’s reading of Deleuze to modernity and post-modernity. The issues here is that, like Deleuze, Marrati uses the former term but not the latter. I would contend, however, that her analysis, as it implicates a single meta-narrative within the movement-image followed by a multiplicity of language games within the time-image, can be understood in postmodern terms. What we have, that is, are a ‘classical’ cinema of the movement-image which is (19th century) ‘modern’ insofar as it believes in a transcendent Truth and a ‘modern’ cinema of the time-image which is (post World War II) ‘postmodern’ insofar as it denies this in favour of immanence and localised, performative, contingent truths.
Relating Maretti’s analysis to my filmmakers would seem to have differing implications. Leone,
as an Italian pessimist sceptical about the “American dream,” would seem presents an obvious modern/postmodern/time-image counterpart to the classical/movement-image John Ford, with his optimistic belief in this dream.
While Ford himself admittedly became more questioning of the US utopia in his later films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and Cheyenne Autumn, it is significant that these were the films Leone felt came closer to his own understanding of the west. As Neil Campbell (2008) summarises Leone’s remarks on Once Upon a Time in the West:
My version of the story of the birth of a nation” acted by “the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a businessman, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These “worn-out” figures exit the stage to leave the whore to be transformed and transforming, to symbolize this “birth” of a new nation and the end of another world—“the beginning of a world without balls,” […]The “ancient race” (as the film calls them) of mythic men linked in chains of brutality is “worn-out”
As I will also argue Leone’s ‘America’ trilogy thereby provide different, immanent, alternatives to a faith in a transcendent utopia.
For Argento’s gialli thrillers the obvious point of comparison is Antonioni’s anti-gialli, most notably Blow-Up. The apparent problem here, besides the near-unassailable position of Antonioni as one of the masters of the time-image/postmodernist cinema, is that Argento’s films tend to present a re-engagement with action following a period of becoming seer: Whereas Blow-Up’s Thomas is witness to a murder and proves unable to act, his Deep Red double/virtual image Marcus (both characters being played by the same actor, David Hemmings) resolves to solve the case and as such becomes (something of) an agent again. Argento’s own journalistic criticism of Blow-Up, as Antonioni’s “abandonment” of his “duty” towards the audience, is instructive: The two filmmakers would seem implicated in different language games here. Blow-Up suggests a lack of faith in any truth (there is no body and thus no murder...), Deep Red a faith in a “will to truth” (there was murder, as demonstrated by this body...). The point, of course, is that Antonioni and Argento’s language games can only be judged in their own (performative) terms, of what works best in their particular contexts, not by some universal criteria. What worked for Antonioni’s arthouse audience (along with the mass audience brought in by the promise of a flash of pubic hair, as first for 1967; we must not forget the exploitation cinema and its configurations of "sex and violence") was not necessarily what worked for Argento’s crossover audience in 1975.
Crucially Marrati also suggests that the time-image itself allows for action, so long as it was sufficiently considered, rather than automatic, and geared towards immanence rather than utopia:
It is not out of passivity, powerlessness, or resignation that one is no longer capable of immediately and “appropriately” responding to a given situation or event. It is quite the opposite: the response is suspended because one has become aware that certain actions are powerless. Habits of conduct, patterns of behaviour, are deemed to express weakness or strength, love or contempt, indignation or revolt. Not to engage in the appropriate response, not to express the appropriate affect may seem to imply passivity, or worse. Deleuze’s point, though, is that sometimes, perhaps even often, “acting in the appropriate way” is precisely the lack of response and the refusal to acknowledge our helplessness. (xii)
The issue then becomes that of interpretation, of one filmmaker’s time-image formulation against that of another, alongside the point at which a refusal to act, or the apparent inaction, paradoxically itself constitutes a form of action.
In Leone’s cinema we may think, for example, of Noodles’ refusal to accept the role of assassin-avenger than Max assigns him in Once Upon a Time in America, and of whether this refusal occurs in actuality or virtuality. We might also consider the likes of Dr Villega’s refusal to jump from the explosives-loaded train in Duck You Sucker, despite the forgiving Sean’s imploring that he do so, along with the alternatives of desperately trying to escape versus stoically facing death that are presented to other revolutionaries as they face firing squad. In Questi’s cinema, meanwhile, we might think of the passivity of Tomas Milian’s unnamed protagonist in Django Kill, his refusal to act for gold/dollars or revenge, as would conventionally provide the spaghetti western protagonist, as seen in Leone’s films, amongst others, with ample motivation. (Perhaps Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological, post-modern, existentialism does not provide us with the clear guide to action that Sartre’s ‘no excuses’ phenomenological, modern, existentialism did? The limit situation of facing an executioner, of giving a gaze of defiance or attempting to escape at the likely cost of others’ lives, would presumably represent the test case here.) This combination of classical movement-image generic situation, that Django Kill is a western which should present a clear SAS’ narrative as Milian’s character gets his revenge and/or the gold, followed by a time-image development, as he passively observes, might also help explain the film’s and Questi’s marginality relative to Leone and Argento: As a postmodernist avant la lettre who refused the high/low, art/popular, time-image/movement-image binaries still extant in a structuralist 1960s, Questi made films which confounded audiences on both sides of each binary. Leone and Argento by contrast were less extreme in their images and more adroit at performing a balancing act on these either/or binaries.
Related to this, the problem is perhaps that we cannot use postmodern in brackets: If we say ‘postmodern’, in whatever formulation, we immediately bring into play a set of assumptions about what this ‘postmodern’ is, with these inevitably defined positively or negatively in relation to the ‘modern’. We lack a vocabulary which is both/and or neither/nor, that something may be ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, or neither of these, depending on how we define our terms. In relation to Deleuze’s Cinema theories, this is compounded by his movement-image/time-image distinction, as one which he identifies as being about the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ cinema rather than, for example, the ‘modern’ (1920s) and the ‘neo-modern’ (1960s), as in Orr (1993).
[Let me know if you want more, as I can happily post one or two thousand words a day of this stuff; apart from anything else I would like comments from the ordinary and academic audiences.]
Monday, 7 September 2009
Horror Top Trumps
When I was a child one of the things that my friends and I used to play with were Top Trumps. These were themed packs of playing where each of the 32 normal cards in a set had ratings for various different attributes; in the case of the horror ones these were Physical Strength, Fear factor, Killing power and Horror rating, which scored between 45 and 100.
The rules were pretty straightforward, and went something like this: Each player got the same number of cards and drew the top card from their hand. One player then selected an attribute, probably the highest one of the four. Whichever player had the highest number won the cards, and then played their next card. This continued until there was only one player left.
The thing I really liked about the two sets of horror themed cards, Dracula and Devil Priest, was the garish artwork and inventive monsters, although even at that time I recognised that Dracula was more specifically a Christopher Lee Dracula. Over the years, however, I've come to realise that a lot of the monsters appear to have been inspired / taken from horror films and often just had their names changed:
The Dracula Set
Prince of Darkness – Onibaba
The Mad Magician – London After Midnight
Madman – Doomwatch
The Freak – The Reptile
Lord of Death – The Phantom of the Opera (Julian / Chaney)
Phantom of the Opera – The Abominable Dr Phibes?
Skeleton – The House on Haunted Hill?
The Hangman – The Phantom of the Opera (Julian / Chaney)
Two Headed Monster – The Thing with Two Heads
The Devil Priest Set
Colossus – The Colossus of New York?
Creature from Outer Space – This Island Earth
Fire Demon – Dr Who story The Daemons?
High Priestess of Zoltan – based on Lavinia in The Curse of the Crimson Altar?
The Jailer – Fritz in Frankenstein (Whale / Karloff)
The Living Gargoyle – based on the Martians in Quatermass and the Pit?
Zoltan – the monster in Lady Frankenstein?
Anyone recognise any others, like The Thing? Both sets are at http://www.ultimate-top-trumps.co.uk/dubreq.htm if you need a refresher ;-)
The rules were pretty straightforward, and went something like this: Each player got the same number of cards and drew the top card from their hand. One player then selected an attribute, probably the highest one of the four. Whichever player had the highest number won the cards, and then played their next card. This continued until there was only one player left.
The thing I really liked about the two sets of horror themed cards, Dracula and Devil Priest, was the garish artwork and inventive monsters, although even at that time I recognised that Dracula was more specifically a Christopher Lee Dracula. Over the years, however, I've come to realise that a lot of the monsters appear to have been inspired / taken from horror films and often just had their names changed:
The Dracula Set
Prince of Darkness – Onibaba
The Mad Magician – London After Midnight
Madman – Doomwatch
The Freak – The Reptile
Lord of Death – The Phantom of the Opera (Julian / Chaney)
Phantom of the Opera – The Abominable Dr Phibes?
Skeleton – The House on Haunted Hill?
The Hangman – The Phantom of the Opera (Julian / Chaney)
Two Headed Monster – The Thing with Two Heads
The Devil Priest Set
Colossus – The Colossus of New York?
Creature from Outer Space – This Island Earth
Fire Demon – Dr Who story The Daemons?
High Priestess of Zoltan – based on Lavinia in The Curse of the Crimson Altar?
The Jailer – Fritz in Frankenstein (Whale / Karloff)
The Living Gargoyle – based on the Martians in Quatermass and the Pit?
Zoltan – the monster in Lady Frankenstein?
Anyone recognise any others, like The Thing? Both sets are at http://www.ultimate-top-trumps.co.uk/dubreq.htm if you need a refresher ;-)
Sunday, 6 September 2009
Cinesexuality
What we have here is an encounter between continental philosophy and a selection of often obscure, often extreme horror films, many of Italian origin, that is premised upon the idea of “cinesexuality,” the cinema as a lover whom we entertain in a masochistic way.
As a text which brings into contact the likes of Deleuze and Guattari (both singly and in combination), Blanchot and Irigaray with such films as Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, D’Amato Beyond the Darkness and Margheriti’s The Virgin of Nuremberg, it’s intriguing but daunting.
Most people who are into such philosophy are not going to be into Italian horror, while most people who are into Italian horror are not going to know very much about continental philosophy.
While there are definite connections to be made, as around the role of faciality in The Virgin of Nuremberg, with its Red Skull-like plastination-faced ‘Punisher’, or the fact that the common inspiration for both Fulci’s absurdist horror entries and Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” was Antonin Artaud, the general impression is of two bodies of texts that don’t come together terribly much, where the theoretical texts dominate their film counterparts rather than there being a dialogue between the two and where academic shibboleths are more important than everyday communication:
“The images in The Beyond and City declare war on organizations and organizing principles, of narrative, of causal movement and result and of the organized body. Death results not in Mars’ slaughter of desire and subjects but the Order of Venus. This is a war on war, against the Order of Mars which is the war against creativity and thought as productive imagination, thus it belongs to the Venusian Order: ‘In other words [they resist] a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the Body without Organs, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159) Fulci too has it in for the organization of the organs, (di)splaying flesh in a number of increasingly gruesome ways – spiders chew out eyeballs, crucifixions and acid baths abound, Emily’s throat and ear are ripped out by her guide dog in a more bloody homage to Suspiria. In City brains extrude from scalp, eyeballs bleed, heads have holes through their apex, intestines are spewed up and bodies are punctuated by clusters of writhing maggots.
The body in The Beyond and City is only successful in disarray; those bodies that remain organized end up wandering the empty wasteland of the beyond of the title. Fulci’s message is ‘destroy the organized flesh or be relegated to a land of pure nothingness’. Or perhaps nothingness is plethora, and as minoritarian bodies are relegated to nothing in majoritarian culture it may be an attractive option, nothing as everything.” (104-105)
To this I would merely ask and add, isn’t the symbol of the beyond itself neither that for Mars nor Venus but for Saturn?
Author Patricia MacCormack’s response might be to say that I am being overly literal, too concerned with the facts, the truth and other outmoded phallologocentric conceptions that she and Fulci’s films are against.
My rejoinder, assuming I haven’t (de)constructed a straw (wo)man out of her arguments here, is that by making me think about the planetary/astrological symbolism here, she has started me on the road to developing a new truth, as I then consider the contrast between Cronos (Saturn) and Aeon in Deleuze’s Cinema books, to thus relate the logic of Fulci’s films to the time-image; in so doing I’m drawing upon a Deleuzean notion of the truth, where what matters is being productive in a Nietzschean will to power/will to truth type way rather than correspondence with an external object or being logically consistent with the rest of the theory.
But most horror fans aren’t going to want to do this, just as most film academics won’t have any familiarity with these films beyond what MacCormack tells them.
As far as the film specialist is concerned, it is also worth noting that MacCormack doesn’t engage with Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Although she mentions the work of Anna Powell, who has sought to relate concepts from these books to popular horror films, in passing, it is more to signal her difference in approach than build upon it in relation to less familiar films. (Suspiria is an exception, with both authors discussing it in their particular ways.)
Summary dismissal characterizes MacCormack’s approach to the likes of Michael Grant’s reading of The Beyond in relation to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The film, she claims, is not Gothic but Baroque, albeit (re)defined in a particular way that relates more to contemporary continental philosophy than art history. This may help us think differently about The Beyond, but why the need to deny an another alternative and the truth it creates?
Given that the book aspires to be “a pervert’s guide” to cinema, MacCormack’s choice of Italian horror films is also perhaps slightly disappointing: The pleasures of The New York Ripper are absent, along with those of D’Amato’s Dominican Republic films and the Cannibals Holocaust and Ferox.
At issue here, I suspect, is that certain (cine)sexualities, those that involve deriving sadistic pleasure from the non-concensual suffering of Others, remain beyond the pale, even (or especially) within the Queer Interventions series the book forms part of.
Away from film, one thing that’s telling in this regard is McCormack’s contrasting of Slayer’s 213, as a sufficiently genuine song about necrophiliac desire, and Cannibal Corpse’s “Necropedophile, where paedophilia, necrophilia and naughty swear words emphasize the act [of necrophilia] extravasated from desire at all, simply offered as something to shock by hitting sanctified lines of social values”: If Cannibal Corpse gets you off, has a use value for your pleasure, what’s the problem? You/they aren’t hurting anyone, after all. Also, where’s the mention of Slayer’s earlier cod-Satanist shock value Necrophiliac (“I feel the urge, the growing need, to fuck this sinful corpse”) here?
An 'it’ll never happen' imaginary round table idea: MacCormack and Pete Sotos discussing Maladolescenza…
As a text which brings into contact the likes of Deleuze and Guattari (both singly and in combination), Blanchot and Irigaray with such films as Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, D’Amato Beyond the Darkness and Margheriti’s The Virgin of Nuremberg, it’s intriguing but daunting.
Most people who are into such philosophy are not going to be into Italian horror, while most people who are into Italian horror are not going to know very much about continental philosophy.
While there are definite connections to be made, as around the role of faciality in The Virgin of Nuremberg, with its Red Skull-like plastination-faced ‘Punisher’, or the fact that the common inspiration for both Fulci’s absurdist horror entries and Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” was Antonin Artaud, the general impression is of two bodies of texts that don’t come together terribly much, where the theoretical texts dominate their film counterparts rather than there being a dialogue between the two and where academic shibboleths are more important than everyday communication:
“The images in The Beyond and City declare war on organizations and organizing principles, of narrative, of causal movement and result and of the organized body. Death results not in Mars’ slaughter of desire and subjects but the Order of Venus. This is a war on war, against the Order of Mars which is the war against creativity and thought as productive imagination, thus it belongs to the Venusian Order: ‘In other words [they resist] a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the Body without Organs, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159) Fulci too has it in for the organization of the organs, (di)splaying flesh in a number of increasingly gruesome ways – spiders chew out eyeballs, crucifixions and acid baths abound, Emily’s throat and ear are ripped out by her guide dog in a more bloody homage to Suspiria. In City brains extrude from scalp, eyeballs bleed, heads have holes through their apex, intestines are spewed up and bodies are punctuated by clusters of writhing maggots.
The body in The Beyond and City is only successful in disarray; those bodies that remain organized end up wandering the empty wasteland of the beyond of the title. Fulci’s message is ‘destroy the organized flesh or be relegated to a land of pure nothingness’. Or perhaps nothingness is plethora, and as minoritarian bodies are relegated to nothing in majoritarian culture it may be an attractive option, nothing as everything.” (104-105)
To this I would merely ask and add, isn’t the symbol of the beyond itself neither that for Mars nor Venus but for Saturn?
Author Patricia MacCormack’s response might be to say that I am being overly literal, too concerned with the facts, the truth and other outmoded phallologocentric conceptions that she and Fulci’s films are against.
My rejoinder, assuming I haven’t (de)constructed a straw (wo)man out of her arguments here, is that by making me think about the planetary/astrological symbolism here, she has started me on the road to developing a new truth, as I then consider the contrast between Cronos (Saturn) and Aeon in Deleuze’s Cinema books, to thus relate the logic of Fulci’s films to the time-image; in so doing I’m drawing upon a Deleuzean notion of the truth, where what matters is being productive in a Nietzschean will to power/will to truth type way rather than correspondence with an external object or being logically consistent with the rest of the theory.
But most horror fans aren’t going to want to do this, just as most film academics won’t have any familiarity with these films beyond what MacCormack tells them.
As far as the film specialist is concerned, it is also worth noting that MacCormack doesn’t engage with Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Although she mentions the work of Anna Powell, who has sought to relate concepts from these books to popular horror films, in passing, it is more to signal her difference in approach than build upon it in relation to less familiar films. (Suspiria is an exception, with both authors discussing it in their particular ways.)
Summary dismissal characterizes MacCormack’s approach to the likes of Michael Grant’s reading of The Beyond in relation to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The film, she claims, is not Gothic but Baroque, albeit (re)defined in a particular way that relates more to contemporary continental philosophy than art history. This may help us think differently about The Beyond, but why the need to deny an another alternative and the truth it creates?
Given that the book aspires to be “a pervert’s guide” to cinema, MacCormack’s choice of Italian horror films is also perhaps slightly disappointing: The pleasures of The New York Ripper are absent, along with those of D’Amato’s Dominican Republic films and the Cannibals Holocaust and Ferox.
At issue here, I suspect, is that certain (cine)sexualities, those that involve deriving sadistic pleasure from the non-concensual suffering of Others, remain beyond the pale, even (or especially) within the Queer Interventions series the book forms part of.
Away from film, one thing that’s telling in this regard is McCormack’s contrasting of Slayer’s 213, as a sufficiently genuine song about necrophiliac desire, and Cannibal Corpse’s “Necropedophile, where paedophilia, necrophilia and naughty swear words emphasize the act [of necrophilia] extravasated from desire at all, simply offered as something to shock by hitting sanctified lines of social values”: If Cannibal Corpse gets you off, has a use value for your pleasure, what’s the problem? You/they aren’t hurting anyone, after all. Also, where’s the mention of Slayer’s earlier cod-Satanist shock value Necrophiliac (“I feel the urge, the growing need, to fuck this sinful corpse”) here?
An 'it’ll never happen' imaginary round table idea: MacCormack and Pete Sotos discussing Maladolescenza…
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR
[Yet another paracinema post, rather than Eurotrash]
With Dave Thompson’s book (not to be confused with David Thompson who is sufficiently mainstream not to do this), yet another hitherto marginalised, forgotten area of cinema goes under the microscope.
This is the “stag” film, or the clandestinely produced, distributed and consumed sexually explicit one-reel short film, as it existed from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. At that point the hardcore loop, for private peep show booth viewing, and the hardcore feature, for consumption with a theatrical audience, took over.
The title is slightly misleading, insofar that the VCR’s privatisation of the sex film is hardly addressed. Likewise, while the emergence of amateur porn in the 1980s and beyond, with cheap video cameras and latterly digital cameras, is addressed, this is only in the conclusion. This also means that the late 80s/early 90s emergence of “gonzo” porn, with little or no pretence of a plot to string together the sex scenes, is downplayed.
But, these criticisms aside, Black and White and Blue is an impressive piece of work, as Thompson, aided by several unfortunately but understandably anonymous or pseudonymous informants, digs deep into the history of the form as it existed in the US, UK, France, Germany, Mexico and elsewhere.
These are films whose provenance is difficult to establish. While hairstyles and other incidental details provide clues, these merely point to the earliest point at which a film could have been made, with the delay between the metropolis and the small town frequently suggesting anywhere within a decade or two, or epoch. But they were also often localised in the US context, that what was shocking in one state could be normal in others. (Or, with the limited circulation of stags, that each state developed and reflected its own morality.)
Where Thompson is most astute here – and where his work also gains value for social historians, to the extend he hasn’t drawn from them, as he likely has – is in charting the demotic, that, for example, “eel skin” meant condom in the 1920s, whereas “fish skin” only emerged in the 1930s.
He also charts the prevalence of various sexual practices over the period in the US. There’s a normal and the pathological, or a normalisation and pathologisation, here, that oral sex was gradually normalised by the stags whilst male homosexuality (as distinct from female pseudo lesbianism), mixed race relationships, anal sex, watersports, bestiality and other ‘perversions’/perversions were not.
A fascinating read...
With Dave Thompson’s book (not to be confused with David Thompson who is sufficiently mainstream not to do this), yet another hitherto marginalised, forgotten area of cinema goes under the microscope.
This is the “stag” film, or the clandestinely produced, distributed and consumed sexually explicit one-reel short film, as it existed from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. At that point the hardcore loop, for private peep show booth viewing, and the hardcore feature, for consumption with a theatrical audience, took over.
The title is slightly misleading, insofar that the VCR’s privatisation of the sex film is hardly addressed. Likewise, while the emergence of amateur porn in the 1980s and beyond, with cheap video cameras and latterly digital cameras, is addressed, this is only in the conclusion. This also means that the late 80s/early 90s emergence of “gonzo” porn, with little or no pretence of a plot to string together the sex scenes, is downplayed.
But, these criticisms aside, Black and White and Blue is an impressive piece of work, as Thompson, aided by several unfortunately but understandably anonymous or pseudonymous informants, digs deep into the history of the form as it existed in the US, UK, France, Germany, Mexico and elsewhere.
These are films whose provenance is difficult to establish. While hairstyles and other incidental details provide clues, these merely point to the earliest point at which a film could have been made, with the delay between the metropolis and the small town frequently suggesting anywhere within a decade or two, or epoch. But they were also often localised in the US context, that what was shocking in one state could be normal in others. (Or, with the limited circulation of stags, that each state developed and reflected its own morality.)
Where Thompson is most astute here – and where his work also gains value for social historians, to the extend he hasn’t drawn from them, as he likely has – is in charting the demotic, that, for example, “eel skin” meant condom in the 1920s, whereas “fish skin” only emerged in the 1930s.
He also charts the prevalence of various sexual practices over the period in the US. There’s a normal and the pathological, or a normalisation and pathologisation, here, that oral sex was gradually normalised by the stags whilst male homosexuality (as distinct from female pseudo lesbianism), mixed race relationships, anal sex, watersports, bestiality and other ‘perversions’/perversions were not.
A fascinating read...
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Art / porn?
The Paris cinematheque and porn?
I am reading Dave Thompson's Black and White and Blue, a discussion of adult cinema from the 1890s to the 1980s.
As part of this, he deals with the shadowy history of the silent era and 1930s sex film in France. His discussion is largely in terms of beneath the radar, unofficial, research.
But, going further, did Langlois's Cinematheque screen these films, and were Bazin and the future nouvelle vague aware of them, as part of the whole of cinema, especially as porn = realism, sort of?
I am reading Dave Thompson's Black and White and Blue, a discussion of adult cinema from the 1890s to the 1980s.
As part of this, he deals with the shadowy history of the silent era and 1930s sex film in France. His discussion is largely in terms of beneath the radar, unofficial, research.
But, going further, did Langlois's Cinematheque screen these films, and were Bazin and the future nouvelle vague aware of them, as part of the whole of cinema, especially as porn = realism, sort of?
Heroes #1
"Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn
Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?
The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
They watched their Rome burn
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
No more heroes any more
No more heroes any more"
- The Stranglers, No More Heroes
One of mine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jesnor_Lindsay
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn
Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?
The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
They watched their Rome burn
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
No more heroes any more
No more heroes any more"
- The Stranglers, No More Heroes
One of mine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jesnor_Lindsay
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