Sex-Positif

Amazing! Picked up the special edition of Positif from 1964 in Lyon for two measly euros. This was a FIND, partly because it intersects with NATAN, the film Paul Duane and I made. Bernard Natan has been falsely connected with several pornographic films, and one of the “sources” for this is a short list of early smut films in the back of this magazine. Many of the films are unattributed, but a few have the name “Nathan” attached. The anonymous author probably did mean Natan, since earlier publications like a 1938 edition of Match also attributed some of the same titles to Natan. But repeating the allegations strikes me as dodgy, since the Positif “article” gives no sources, offers no evidence, and getting the guy’s name wrong doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence. (Natan’s name is spelled “Nathan” all over the place — Georges Sadoul does it in his Histoire General du Cinema, despite getting it right elsewhere in the same book. This is odd, since the title Pathe-Natan appeared ahead of all Natan’s thirties films, often with his signature.)

Anyway, the magazine has a few other things of interest, as you’d expect, including the following piquant questionnaire, which I think we can have some fun with.

MR INDIA. Invisible man musical sexiness,

1) What is the most erotic movie you ever saw? Give your reasons.

2) What seems to you to be the perfect example of a non-erotic movie? Limiting yourself, of course, to films that deal with love.

3) Has the cinema had an influence on your erotic life?

4) What situations, scenes, objects or attitudes in the cinema, seem to you to have the greatest erotic significance?

5) Who is the actress (or actor) who, for you, embodies eroticism? Why?

6) Of  those who are supposed to embody eroticism on screen, which actor (or actress) is for you the negation or eroticism? Why?

7) What erotic work would you like you see adapted (or would you like to adapt yourself) to the screen? With who?

Fellini’s last drawing: on the bottom of a model in a magazine.

A few notes on the questions and answers.

I love the “(or actor)” and “(or actress)” which are positioned with a hilarious assumption that most of the respondents will be straight men. In film criticism, has this ever been true? At any rate, they at least allow for exceptions, but they want to make it very clear, via parenthesis, that they ARE exceptions. At any rate, the only women quoted are France Roche (respected screenwriter, still with us at 91) and critic Grace Winter.

The aforementioned Sadoul puts Dovzhenko’s EARTH at the top, which surprised me as I didn’t hear swooning over its sexiness at Pordenone, but maybe I didn’t have my ear to the right patch of ground. And maybe I should see for myself. Sadoul is also very keen on Louise Brooks, who was undergoing rediscovery.

Raymond Durgnat is fascinating, as you’d expect. Lots of top choices for erotic film, including but not limited to BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 42ND STREET, PICKPOCKET, KING KONG, HAXAN and ARTISTS AND MODELS. Polymorphous perversity! But I have to admit, Shirley MacLaine looks cute as Bat Lady.

The little-known PRIVATE PROPERTY (1960, above) appears on Durgnat’s non-erotic list, and on Grace Winter’s erotic list. Makes me want to see it!

Michel Ciment champions QUEEN KELLY (a popular choice), Sternberg and Bunuel. The ideal erotic film, he says, would stand at an equal distance between Stroheim, Sternberg and Bunuel.

Ciment and several people mention BRIEF ENCOUNTER as a film about love without sex appeal. One critic hasn’t even seen it, and says it’s a good thing too.

Roche on unerotic actors: “Cary Grant: old young man with still-young arteries, but dry elsewhere. Rex Harrison: furry slippers and lumbago.” Mean! This question is apt to get VERY mean, so let’s try not to turn into John Simon when we approach it. John Simon is not a good look.

Poor Brigitte Bardot gets cited as an answer to question (5) by several correspondents. Vadim is chosen as an unerotic director, but Gerard Legrand disagrees and puts ET DIEU CREA LA FEMME at the top of his sexiness chart. Clearly, the negative feeling about BB was simply a reaction against the prevailing fashion, as if there’s one thing she is for most people, it’s sexy. It’s perfectly legitimate to disagree, but so many erotic nay-sayers?

Also: those who put Delphine Seyrig or Grace Kelly in their hot spot, are correspondingly apt to dismiss BB and all the busty Italians of the era.

Lotte Eisner has the best choice for work of fiction to be adapted: William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek, under the aegis of Luis Bunuel. Don Luis crops up as preferred adaptor on several lists. The Gothic fiction he really wanted to do was The Monk, of course.

Someone called Debourcieu chooses a science-fiction novel by someone called Pierre Versins, and wants Minnelli, Sinatra, Novak and choreography by Jack Cole.

OK. Harumph. Now, it behooves me to answer the questions myself, and honestly. Rather than just knocking everyone else’s choices. In theory I have an advantage, since I have almost fifty years more cinema to draw upon, and it’s a half-century that’s enjoyed more latitude than the earlier era. On the other hand, I have a disadvantage: shyness.

Evidence: I was just in a room with Dominique Sanda, who meant a lot to me as a youngster and still does. Now, at her age, would she be horrified if I said, as Jonathan Ross did to Britt Ekland, “Thank you for helping me through those difficult teenage years?” I think not. But instead I just gave her a small salute. She saluted back, perhaps slightly bemused.

1) Impossible to pick a single most erotic film: too self-revealing. But

(a) I had my young mind blown by Robbe-Grillet’s TRANS-EUROP EXPRESS. It’s very dodgy, though;

(b) BETTY BLUE, for all its serious problems, did combine explicitness and photogenics, and if the story had some nasty, unexamined retrograde aspects, the sex was good (everyone seemed to enjoy it);

(c) SOME LIKE IT HOT: kissing as hard porn (fleshly, leering, over-extended), and a film which refused to go as far as I wanted it to, but teetered on the brink like an expert tightrope walker;

(d) GIRL WITH A SUITCASE: the power of enforced chastity: the young hero is home alone with Claudia Cardinale, who seems eminently available. It’s like RISKY BUSINESS for the DOLCE VITA generation. But as he’s a realistic teen not a Hollywood concoction, he doesn’t know what the hell to do so nothing happens. For two hours! It’s hell, I tell you.

(I didn’t see La Cardinale in Lyon, though she was apparently there — the encounter could only be disappointing, in the sense that I would be disappointed in myself.)

(e) THE WICKER MAN had a lot of impact on my b&w portable TV in the bedroom, fuzzy signal picked up from Grampian Regional Television, and probably would’ve “worked” even without the nudity — the singing, the drumming, and the torment, plus the extreme duration…

A theme is emerging here in spite of my best efforts: the theme of intense frustration. And yet THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE and the other versions of La Femme et le Pantin don’t do that much for me.

2) Non-erotic movie? I just visited Venice so DON’T LOOK NOW is in my mind. The justly celebrated sex scene is sensitive, intimate, frank, tender, emotional, and beautifully played and rendered. Of course, as a male person I can obviously be stimulated by anything with a naked woman in it as long as she’s not actually Michelle Bachman, but for me what is impressive about the scene is how it doesn’t particularly need the audience to become excited about sex or skin (and as for the age-old “Are they really doing it?” — PUH-LEEZE). It’s beautiful, and not in a vapid way, just not in a way that’s strictly sexual. And it’s one of very, very few films to show married people having sex. With the possible intent of having a child. And the censors still went after it. THAT’S the obscenity.

(See also: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.)

3) Yes, cinema has influenced my erotic life. It has BEEN my erotic life for more of the time than I care to discuss. It seems unfair to blame any kinks or hang-ups on the movies, though — although James B. Harris, at Lyon, stated unequivocally that the theme of his deeply weird SOME CALL IT LOVING is that people get sexually imprinted by their first encounter with sex, in which case BARBARELLA has a lot to answer for and the continuing unavailability of an affordable Excessive Machine is a major problem.

I am trying to master that thing Donald Sutherland does with his arm in DON’T LOOK NOW. Am certain it’ll revolutionize my bedroom existence when I’ve got it down.

I am extremely lucky to be wed to a very impressive Louise Brooks type, and an even more impressive Fiona Watson type, Fiona Watson. Our shared love of movies is part of the bond.

4) I’m not at all sure how I’m supposed to define “erotic significance”. But I could list objects: The Excessive Machine (one wants to call it an Orgasmatron but it’s not); the windscreen in COOL HAND LUKE; the chair in CABARET; Joel Cairo’s cane in THE MALTESE FALCON; the boa and the numbered cards in IL MAGNIFICO CORNUTO; actually, this is harder than I thought — I guess I’m not much of a fetishist.

5) The embodiment of eroticism? My screen harem is too extensive to enumerate (picture Guido’s mental farmhouse in EIGHT AND A HALF but extending for at least a city block). Cardinale and Bardot both drive me berserk for reasons hard to justify on any higher plain. Ann-Margret in her (extensive) prime also. On a subtler note, Grace Kelly was my first love on the big screen. Louise Brooks is an obsession. For some reason, Elsa Martinelli is leaping unbidden to the forefront of my mind, but on another day it might be the Geeson sisters. Clara Bow. Romy Schneider.

Embodiment of male beauty: Horst Buchholtz. My idea of un vrai homme: James Coburn.

6) The opportunity to be mean: the negation of erotica… Bo Derek never did anything for me. Her breasts seemed boring. Sharon Stone too artificial: la Welch a blushing ingenue by comparison. Madonna, always and forever unappealing, though Fincher tried in the videos. I see the glamour of Garbo and Dietrich but not only don’t want to but can’t even imagine engaging in any kind of passionate interaction with them. They are abstract creatures of light and I admire them enormously. Mickey Rourke always seemed disgusting. Tom Cruise never projects any sense of desire or desirability. Most of these people have other good traits though.

7) At one point, Roman Polanski wanted to adapt the porno comics of Milo Manara as an animated feature. This strikes me as the worst combination possible, but Manara’s comics might be a suitable source. The lousy Jean-Louis Richard film of CLICK is quite good, even though it’s totally lousy, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, Manara is a deeply sexist idiot, and there’s a nastiness to his work I’d prefer to avoid — plus his real talent is his drawing, so why adapt him to another medium? His adaptation of unfilmed Fellini scenarios was a better way for him to engage with cinema.

Bertrand Blier and Alain Robbe-Grillet were both masters of the perverse who really get into their fantasies and make even the most obnoxious imaginings photogenic, but can they be trusted? Nic Roeg was more sound, you could even hand him something like The Story if the Eye. Jane Campion has a wonderful erotic imagination which can create powerful effects out of small, seemingly almost innocent things. Given her flair for the Gothic, Geoffrey Lewis’s The Monk?

The glimpses seen of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND suggest that Welles could have been a great director of sexy stuff.

Plans for another version of Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella have stultified for years, and by the way Robert Rodriguez is the wrong man. Incidentally, if you read the original comic, the lines that sound most like Terry Southern scripted them (the best lines) are already there. I’d love to see a BARBARELLA that had to aim for PG-13, so there was something to struggle with and smuggle through, some necessity for restraint. The original’s combo of American star, Italian design and French director was a neat selection, but they had the wrong Frenchman. Clouzot would have been better!

Keanu would have been a great Pygar.

Imagine Von Sternberg’s DRACULA, with Charles Boyer.

John Barrymore as CASANOVA for Cecil B. DeMille.

Now I want to hear from YOU. Regular commenters and people I never heard from before. Shadowplay just became the Kinsey report of the movie blogosphere. Spill it!

The Fleeting Image #1

If you freeze Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST at just the right moment, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s reflection seems to merge with Dominique Sanda’s face to form a Janus-like monstrosity. Just sayin’. The effect lasts just a few frames but I still wouldn’t count on it being accidental.

Stopping the film mid-dissolve is also rewarding here, where “Bert” (as Peter O’Toole called him) mixes from a painting of a seaside scene, to the scene itself. The various objects, particularly the boat, don’t match up perfectly, but I love the way the stylised clouds seem to hover in the actual sky.

“One sin atones for another.”

I think film in general expresses “film.” — Bernardo Bertolucci.

Stefania Sandrelli and her dimpled chin have been on my mind since revisiting Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) last week. Cliche alert — this is one of those films that reveals more on each viewing. As a teenager, a lot of it seemed impossibly obscure, even the basic structure. I was seduced by the surface, though, and it worked the way dazzling formal qualities presumably SHOULD work, making me investigate the film again and again, probing its shadows.

Now the story is mostly clear in my head I am even more dazzled than before by its mysterious heart: the way Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant, striking melodramatic poses like that great guy watering his lawn at the start of BLUE VELVET, and grinning coldly at private jokes) seeks to atone for a youthful “murder” by assassinating a left-wing professor in Paris. I always understood his drive for conformity (the title is a big help to dopes like me), the need to belong to the fascist movement in order not to feel different and vulnerable (I must have seen Woody Allen’s ZELIG around the time I first saw this, and it has a similar theme tackled in a rather different way) but the weird logic by which Clerici feels he can wipe away his guilt with a second murder was kind of lost on me. But Bertolucci was into psychoanalysis at this time, and in adapting Moravia’s novel he was keen to move it from a meditation on fate to a psychological study of character-as-destiny.

As I type this, it’s evening and very blue outside, broken only by yellowy lit windows, and I’m reminded of the Paris-at-dusk scenes in this film, shot by Vittorio Storaro (my Edinburgh evening is more of a slate-blue of the kind you find in late Melville, though). The shopping trip is particularly good in this film, though we never go inside the shops. Bertolucci is such a sensualist, he can’t help but celebrate the romance of being in Paris, on honeymoon, and spending your new husband’s money, even though it’s not in keeping with the film’s communist sympathies.

It’s all very Christmassy.

The director’s sensuality is radiantly displayed in his filming of the two leading ladies. Having grooved to Dominique Sanda’s radical lesbian chic as a teenager, this time I had more of an eye on Sandrelli, whose character really is a foul nitwit, but who gets plenty of ravishing moments, like her first appearance in a zig-zagged dress in a zig-zagged room (venetian blind striped shadows, some of them inexplicably moving down the walls as if cast by a time-lapse sunset), or her love-making with Trintignant in front of rear-projected scenery that changes from daylight to sunset to night in the course of moments.

Actually, and I had to keep my eye on the plot structure to confirm this, her very first appearance is in bed with Clerici/Trintignant, her backside exposed as he lifts his hat from it. At first we may think it’s a boy in bed with JLT, and the ambiguity is probably deliberate, although when she moans in her sleep, a second later, doubt is dispelled.

Two minor problems always strike me with the ending: most of the narrative is enclosed by the framing sequences of Clerici and the thuggish Manganiello driving through the dawn light to attempt, without any clear plan, to save Sanda from the assassins lying in wait for her husband. When the flashbacks reach an end and this sequence pays off with the Julius Caesar-style attack on the Professor, the narrative should be at an end: structure demands it. But the leap forward to the fall of Mussolini, while essential to the story, feels structurally disconnected, both due to the time-jump and because it’s not framed by those driving sequences. It’s too long for a coda, too free-standing for a climax.

The final shots also seemed to lack the resonance of Bertolucci’s best endings. The wildly allegorical, surreal finishes of THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM, NOVOCENTO, and THE LAST EMPEROR are not matched by the low-key fade-out here. I can never remember what happens after the stunning scene where Pierre Clementi turns up, and seeing it again I got no definite resonance from the conclusion. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, Bertolucci says, ‘He understands, he achieves prendere coscienza,’ but to me he’s the same damn bastard at the end as at the start, although his elaborately constructed fascist persona has crumbled.

But let’s be clear, these are quibbles. The film is a stunning manifestation of style (drawn from surrealism, Welles, Sternberg, Fellini, maybe even Tati’s PLAYTIME) married to complex subject matter in a way that’s far from straightforwardly illustrative. If we have to struggle to make sense of it all, it’s a struggle that’s never less than enjoyable, like wrestling a monkey for ice cream.

This is a film crammed with fun stuff, perhaps perversely so, given its dark subject matter. One terrific moment that had slipped my mind is when the two couples are sat at a table in the beautiful dance hall (ALL Bertolucci films had to have dances at this time), and Sandrelli remarks that she’s reminded of dining on the train. At which point the camera crabs off along the line of tables, making them seem like a departing locomotive, a sheer flight of fantasy arrested by our arrival at the brooding Manganiello’s table, the imaginary journey halted by the shot’s abrupt transition from poetry to prose.