PS Afterthoughts on Gender and Medium
It would seem from the commonalities of these five films that this form of necrophilia'' is gendered. All of the objects of necrophilial desire are women all of their morbid lovers, men. And the gender biases of the classical cinema and its preferred objects are overdetermined by cultural and psychic forces. Elisabeth Bronfen has thoroughly analyzed the imbrication of death, femininity, and the aesthetic in modern literature and art. But it must be added that the cinema can and sometimes does...
Dirty Pictures Mud Lust and Abject Desire Myths of Origin and the Cinematic
Couples. We tend to think in couples even when we try very hard not to we revise the concept of the couple, we re-write it, we mediate it in new ways, but couples are very hard to get away from. It's just the way we think in the West, have been trained to think based on the force of the copula, of copulation if. Derrida . . . . For there would appear to exist a seeming historical necessity for the heterosexual woman who wants to create, to write and be read to couple herself, in fact or...
Beauty and the Beast Love and Transcendence
Both Splash and Children ofa Lesser God end with resolution and reconciliation. After escaping her imprisonment, Madison no longer has any choice she must return, forever, to the sea. At the last moment before she is to leave him, Allen, who has come to accept Madison's difference, learns that he may go with her madison I was ready to stay with you forever. allen I know, but now that they know who you are they're never going to leave you alone. madison I can't ever come back to you. allen I...
Dirty Pictures
Artemisia, directed by French director Agn s Merlet, should not be discussed without reference to the controversy that resulted from this film's travesty of historical justice, although it should be recognized that the historical record, like the film itself, is a construct open to analysis. The historical as opposed to Merlet's fictional Artemisia Gentileschi was the gifted daughter of a prominent Roman painter and was known in her time and subsequently not so much for the powerful talent...
The Whole Thing Is Just Too Fucking Mystical for Me
Indeed, for all its similarities, P.S. is no more a mere return, or recycling, of a familiar narrative from the past or a straightforward reversal of its gender structure than is F. Scott, who we learn at the film's climax is really called Fran his entire name is Francis Scott Key Feinstadt , a return, a reincarnation, a revenant, or extension of Louise's dead love. Like Fran, P. S. is alive, and skeptical of such morbid fancies. The film describes the bad fit between the romantic vestures of...
The Barefoot Contessa
It would be off the mark to reproach Mankiewicz for opening up a number of themes without grappling with any of them since his idea was not so much to make a satire about Hollywood although it is the most vicious one ever made , or a film about impotence which is, of course, symbolic , or a guide to the Riviera and its denizens as to paint one of most beautiful portraits of woman ever filmed, in the person of Ava Gardner, Hollywood's most exquisitely beautiful actress. The Barefoot Contessa,...
Murder Has Its Sexual Side Backtracks Hallucinatory Postmodernism
That these new and potentially subversive forms are often associated with women and femininity is part and parcel of the disruption they constitute within a male-dominated industry. Too close for comfort expresses something of the crazy scenario at the center of Hopper's straight to video'' labor of love, Backtrack, a film that in fact takes me back to where I began, at least chronologically. Released in 1989, the same year as Life Lessons, Hopper's scenario is like Scorsese's Goodfellas on...
Driving Mr Softie After Hours Downtown Odyssey
If Hopper's Backtrack, to which I shall return, is the most hallucinatory of these films, Scorsese's black comedy After Hours is the most fertile, especially in the psychoanalytic possibilities afforded by its many symptomatic moments. Written by Joseph Minion, After Hours actually plays like a combination of Homer's Odyssey and MGM's The Wizard of Oz 1939 , adapted by Kafka and directed by Freud. Its protagonist, Paul Hackett Griffin Dunne , a word processor for a generic, midtown-Manhattan...
The Birth Death and Apotheosis of a Hollywood Love Goddess
Ava Gardner as an actress who becomes aware, from one part to the next, of the quasi-divine character she is and assumes is indeed the mostfascinating of all stars in the history of cinema. Enunciating herself rather than merely speaking lines, filming her life and living herfilms, she is the only actress who can with all seriousness be raised to the imperial, imperious, inaccessible level of the three greatest screen actors, namely Charles Spencer Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles....
Abject Desire
The figure of the hard-drinking Jackson Pollock and the big, fierce, muscular action paintings for which he became famous along with latter-day followers, such as the egotistical, macho, neo-expressionist painters of huge ambitious canvases who were dominant in the 1980s e.g., Julien Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, or Anselm Kiefer are prototypes for the character and work of Lionel Dobie, played by Nick Nolte in Martin Scorsese's short but stunning 1989 film, Life Lessons his contribution to the...
I Think Im Uncomfortable Performance Art Radical Narcissism and Legal Eagles
The burgeoning market for art in the 1980s and the high-profile attention to art as a commodity are central thematic concerns of another symptomatic film of the period, Legal Eagles, a convoluted thriller involving murder, arson, art theft, and fraud. Here, too, a sexy blonde artist is a potentially fatal femme. In the film's pre-credit sequence, back story is conveyed via dramatic images of an eight-year-old Chelsea Deardon's birthday party and the fire afterward that shattered her world,...
Survivors of the Shipwreck of Modernity
Maria Vargas thus rejoins Pandora only the Flying Dutchman is missing. This characterfrom another time who will never live again. For the days of myth are gone . . . Hollywood, which no longer knows what love is, can no longer propose its ideal representation. The story is over. jacques siclier, LE MYTHE DE LA FEMME DANS LE CIN MA AM RICAIN Maria morte commence, statufi e, vivre ternellement. claude gauteur, portrait d'ava gardner'' At the end of The Barefoot Contessa we are left standing at...
The Civilized Man The Primitive Woman
The asymmetry of the categories male and female is made manifest in the unilateral form of sexual myths. We sometimes say the sex'' to designate woman she is the flesh, its delights and dangers. The truth that for woman man is sex and carnality has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. In their equivocal posture,...
I Was Just Making Pictures
Photography is the inventory of mortality. The Last Tycoon, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, repeats the theme of uncanny resemblance in the context of a film about the quintessential moviemaker. This offers an opportunity to test and confirm this trope as a metaphor for a component part of the nature of movies themselves. In The Last Tycoon, the resemblance between Kathleen Moore Ingrid Boulting and Minna Davis, a deceased movie star and wife of production executive Monroe...
Mud Lust
Camille Claudel 1988 , another biopic about a woman artist, also uses its story of lust and art to posit a theory of cinematic origins. The film portrays Claudel, her passion for sculpture, her relationship with Auguste Rodin the most important sculptor of his day the turn of the century , its demise, and her ultimate descent into madness. In it, scopophilia, a visual pathology, is compounded by a related, more tactile, one that has in fact been called a madness of mud.''11 The relationship...