what are you reading now?

[jenks]

La Bas is pretty much the definition of ‘pornographic godlessness’
If you’re interested in that period of French art then Barnes’ Man in the Red Coat is a great primer. The picture’s subject is Pozzi - a pioneering gynaecologist who was a friend to Montisquiou - supposedly the model for both the ‘hero’ of A Rebours and one of the models for Proust’s Charlus.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah, it's something I've sort of dipped my toe into with little bits of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautremont, some of the surrealists. Enjoying Valery and interested in finding out more about Mallarmé, but they seem a bit different from the above.

Poetry-wise, I actually think the Spanish took up surrealism and ran with it and ended up producing better,more beautiful work than the French innovators, maybe cos they mixed it more with a more traditional approach - thinking of Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda in Spain, as well as a load of latinoamericano writers like Neruda etc But that might be just down to bias on my part cos I can read them in the originals and my french is GCSE level.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Like, for all his innovation and influence did Breton actually write any decent poems? Maybe he did, but I'm not so sure.

 

[version]

I dunno about godlessness bothering me, but there is a certain queasiness to some French stuff. The intellectual and aesthetic treatment of violence and sexual violence can be repulsive. There's a bit in A Thousand Plateaus where D&G talk about a man having his scrotum sewn to his thighs and his ass sewn shut by his mistress that's very much in that vein.

That's something that stands out about Hellraiser, actually. It's an English film made by an English writer/director, but the way it handles the subject matter reminds of that French stuff more than it does English. Our depictions of violence tend to be "gritty".

In the fourth one, although it's no longer Barker in control, there's a whole thing about some perverted French aristocrat who commissions the box in the first place.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Urgh, sounds like the marquis de sade.

I dunno, I have a feeling that godlessness must have something to with it, the French Revolution and all that. Wish I was more knowledgeable on the subject, but like I say it's all a bit off putting.

 

[version]

There's a strain of it in French cinema too:

The term 'new French extremity' was first coined by critic James Quandt in 2004 in a deeply critical piece complaining about the violent turn that French filmmaking appeared to have taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While few people have taken Quandt's hyperbolic pronouncements about new extreme films seriously, his bombastic eminently-quotable article has become the first reference for talking about these films: "Bava as much as Bataille, Salò no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement."

New Extremity - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

FLESH & BLOOD: SEX AND VIOLENCE IN RECENT FRENCH CINEMA

THE CONVULSIVE VIOLENCE OF BRUNO DUMONT’S NEW FILM Twentynine Palms (2003)—a truck ramming and a savage male rape, a descent into madness followed by a frenzied knifing and suicide, all…

www.artforum.com

 

[Benny Bunter]

Something about this obsession with "breaking taboos" just for the hell of it leads a culture down the wrong path I reckon

 

[Benny Bunter]

All of those taboos have been broken many times over anyway by now, it's just been reduced to wallowing in filth

 

[Benny Bunter]

I can understand the teenage fascination with this sort of thing but then you should grow out of it, but some people evidently never do.

 

[version]

For all this talk, that hasn't been my impression of A Rebours thus far. I suppose Des Esseintes' love of objects and surfaces, to the point of fatally bejeweling a tortoise, is arguably grotesque in itself, but there's been nothing particularly graphic or revolting; visceral descriptions of Latin as a rotting, pus-dripping carcass and a toe-curling scene involving the removal of a tooth aside.

 

[IdleRich]

In the fourth one, although it's no longer Barker in control, there's a whole thing about some perverted French aristocrat who commissions the box in the first place.

Sounds like payback for the English aristocrats that turn out to be the ultimate pervs in all the French horror porn eg The Story of The Eye.

 

[IdleRich]

"Bava as much as Bataille, Salò no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement."

Like @Benny B says though, what taboos?
Seems they've retitled New French Extremity as simply New Extremity, I suppose it makes sense cos they can include A Serbian Film and others, plus several of those French films were Belgian.

 

[version]

Like @Benny B says though, what taboos?

This is the next part of that quote and gives you more of an idea of Quandt's angle:

"Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn—gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore—proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Clouzot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly)."

 

[Benny Bunter]

For all this talk, that hasn't been my impression of A Rebours thus far.

I know, I didn't mean to say that a rebours was that extreme last night. I really loved that book when I read it, but that was probably about 20 years ago now. Tempted to read it again cos I still have a copy in the house.

And I was probably being far too harsh on the French (they're not the only ones) but it's just a disturbing undercurrent that I reckon has deep roots going way back that's ultimately lead to stuff like the extreme cinema you mentioned. They've been consistently innovative artistically, but they did a deal with the devil at some point, and the Revolution seems like the most likely explanation.

 

[version]

"... the French can never abandon their tendency to aestheticize even when aiming to appall ... "

 

[Benny Bunter]

Just dug my copy out, its the Robert Baldrick translation on Penguin, is that the one you've got @version ?

 

[Benny Bunter]

From the introduction in my copy -

"Huysmans' style, which Bloy described as 'continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax', is one of the strangest literary idioms in existence, packed with purple passages, intricate sentences, weird metaphors, unexpected tense changes, and a vocabulary rich in slang and technical terms...best taken in small doses."

 

[version]

Just dug my copy out, its the Robert Baldrick translation on Penguin, is that the one you've got @version ?

Yeah, that's it.

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[IdleRich]

PThis is the next part of that quote and gives you more of an idea of Quandt's angle:

"Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn—gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking an fisting, sluices of cum and gore—proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Clouzot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly)."

Yeah I get it. Not sure though if I buy the argument that when you watch (say) A Serbian Film there is some sense in which you experience taboos being busted for the first time; even if you've seen the exact same thing depicted on screen before, that didn't count because - to paraphrase it slightly - it will have been in a nasty, low film for ill-educated peasants that certainly doesn't meet his arbitrary and unknown criteria which a film must meet to be a pure and beautiful art house shocker suitable for minds which operate in the same rarefied atmosphere as his own.