ESOTIKA EROTICA PSYCHOTICA

POTENTIAL EXPLANATION OF ABSENCE

2011-11-21T22:46:00.000-08:00

I was recently contacted via twitter about a disappointment regarding the complete absence of any esotika activity since basically 2009, even after I announced the potentiality of a periodic web-journal back in July.

Due to the fact that I lack the same capacity I once had to be writing about the films that I wanted to talk about & think about with any regularity whatsoever, I thought the best solution would be to position myself as the sort of curator of a perhaps twice-yearly "journal of film," with each issue dedicated to a director or subject matter that was very much "esotika." The first issue was to be dedicated to Zulawski, due to my absolute obsession with him combined with the fact that there is very little (good) critical or exploratory writing on his work available. The fact that his films are finally being released in glorious editions from Mondo Vision is great, and I feel like all of his masterpieces are no longer (entirely) in the dark to most viewers.

Due to the fact that I'm ultimately selfish, I was intensely picky about the people I solicited to potentially write for the journal, and it took a while for me to come up with a list of people to email (and there is a huge sphere of film writing I'm ignorant of, and I'm sure even more so since I wrote the email). Once I had a decently sized list, I have to be honest that I had a less than spectacular response. I emailed 12 people. Only four people responded with any sort of enthusiasm whatsoever, and while 4 people plus me writing "longer" essays/"whatever"s would have admittedly been enough to fill a modest "journal of film," the project got side-swiped due to how busy my own life is, and how film as a whole has taken the background to other things. Even opening "submissions" on this blog didn't net me a single email.

By this point I'm used to the sort of obnoxious reality that, most of the time, if I want to be reading about something I'm interested in I have to be the one writing about it myself (this is the entire reason that the esotika project, on this blog, ever started). But seeing as I've recently moved across the country & still have no stable job or place to live, combined with all of my other projects (a lit magazine, a micro-press, blogging for a group blog, my own writing & visual art) & the fact that I'm enjoying the social life that an actual city has to offer for the first time, really doesn't leave me with the mental energy to expend on pulling it together.

I still have the same taste in film, and often really wish that I could get it together enough to make it happen, but with how much I already pour my energy into (everything I do I also do for free, which doesn't help me economically unfortunately) I just literally have no room left for this right now.

I do still write about film on the group blog I post at regularly (in fact, apparently I was invited to write there due to my activity over here), but clearly I'm much more heterogeneous in my attention to the arts now. Film is still a major part of my life, and it's influenced so much of what I do that it's not likely I'll ever abandon it entirely. I have vague outlines & notes for a book project on film that I'd like to write one day, much of which I could probably develop by working on the journal, but I really just can't handle taking on another huge undertaking totally independently now.

So, I apologize to everyone who still appreciates what I've done here and hopes that I'll come back to it soon. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, I really can't tell. Maybe esotika will eventually morph into a journal of film, maybe it'll even be a print journal, who knows. That'd be exciting to me, but of course that'd be an even larger undertaking.

Also, for what it's worth, here's the email I sent out to potential contributors to the Esotika Journal Project:

Hello,
I run the website Esotikafilm.com, which was started as, basically, an archive and resource of reviews & information on world-films that I insisted straddled the border between "sex, art, horror & experimentation." A more wide-spread term that seems to tread similar ground has popped up, "post-genre." As you can see from the website, Esotika Film has been virtually inactive since November of '08, and the blog (http://esotika.blogspot.com) has not been updated with original content since September of '09.

For about a year I have been toying with the idea of turning the website into a semiannual (or so) online journal of film, inspired by sites like Rouge.com.au. However, my intention is to remain true to the project's original ideas: I want to remain focused on what, on the current website, I refer to as "esotika films," which could easily be re-aligned as "post-genre" cinema, an expression that China Miéville posits, via Kim Newman, as a "phrase for something which is clearly inflected in a horror way, and clearly emerges out of the generic tradition of horror, but is no longer reducible to it."

I am writing to you because I have encountered either your ideas or your writing on film, and I am specifically interested in soliciting you to write for the project. At the time I can offer no monetary compensation, as the website is of course non-profit, and I am more interested in expanding the realm of discussion and thought regarding often neglected films than I am in profiting from this venture.

The idea I have had is to maintain a consistency within each issue by offering a specific director or idea at the core of each release, in addition to offering less-specific discussions on the idea of something being "post-genre horror" in general, and how one can work with ideas of a 'genre' that positions itself as 'post-genre.' The idea of the post-genre will continue to be the theme of the entire project, while each issue will offer investigations into specific bodies of work.

It is my intention to have the first issue dedicated to Polish director Andrzej Zulawski. This decision comes out of my own, perhaps, obsession with his body as work, as well as with the idea that his oeuvre presents challenges to issues of normal film-making (specifically to ideas of genre) and thus stands as an excellent starting point for the larger project. There has also been a resurgence of interest in his work due to Mondo Vision's recent DVD releases and the dissemination of his films through online, bootlegged sources.

Future possibilities for issue-centers include, but are not limited to: Philippe Grandrieux, Frans Zwartjes & Dutch Experimental film, Paul Sharits, Jess Franco, The films of Kurt Kren & The Vienna Actionists, Thierry Kuntzel, Dore O & Ernie Gehr, Harry Kumel, Renato Polselli & Alberto Cavallone, Roger Watkins & narrative pornography, Jean Rollin, Hisayasu Sato & the shitteno, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Tscherkassky & Dietmar Brehm, and so on.

If you would be interesting in contributing to the project at all, or even becoming a regular contributor (and I hope you are!), please let me know. I'd love to get the first issue live sometime in 2011 if possible. Also, if you know anyone you feel would be both qualified and interested in the project, please pass the information along to them! I'm looking to collect as much quality writing on a mostly obscure 'post-genre' of fantastic cinema.

Thank you,
M Kitchell

UPDATES

2011-07-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm moving across the country and selling most of my DVD collection, along with film books, magazines, and posters. Don't miss your chance to land some rare stuff for awesome prices.

http://www.avmaniacs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48702

In other news, Esotika will be re-launching as a twice-yearly "journal of film" probably around October. First issue will be dedicated to Andrzej Zulawski. If you'd like to submit an article for publication, please contact mike (at) esotikafilm.com

Franco’s Golden Productions

2010-02-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

My article on Jess Franco's Golden Films International productions is now live on the Severin blog.

I'll be posting it on the redesigned Esotika website in the future as well.

Esotika Plans for 2010

2010-01-19T10:48:00.000-08:00

01 - Redo the website. There is a particular problem in the fact that I used frames so when specific articles or reviews are linked you lose the context of the whole site.

02 - Edit all the old reviews. I basically haven't proofread anything that's on here/the website, and it's severely irritating when I revisit things.

03 - Actually start writing about film again. We'll see what happens.

Also, the only thing I've written about film recently, a piece on Jess Franco's Golden Film Productions, should be appearing on the Severin blog at some point in the new future.

RENATO POLSELLI'S MANIA

2009-09-01T18:44:00.001-07:00

In case you haven't had a chance to see it yet, somebody has posted the trailer to Renato Polselli's once-thought-lost film MANIA. Most of us genre fans found out about the film from Adrian Smith's 1999 book Blood and Black Lace--one of the earliest post-DVD books dedicated to Gialli. Needless to say, the film looks excellent, and since it's been found, I hope it makes its way to DVD sometime.

ARREBATO (IVAN ZULUETA, 1979)

2009-06-21T21:50:00.000-07:00

I have had this film for 3 or 4 years now, and really, I should have seen it long ago. I was only missing out. However, thanks to the wonderful film communities that have sprung up stronger since I acquired my initial bootleg, English subtitles now exist for the film. As mesmerizing as its images are, what gives this film its power are the ideas that are present. The images are hypnotic, having what the film itself could potentially describe as "occult rhythms," but without an idea behind the sublimity present in the super 8 film that populates the film, we'd be left with nothing but aesthetics.

There are several ways I would characterize my relationship to film: First and foremost, I am obsessive. Secondly, I find that a story works best (or is most interesting) when rooted primarily in abjection and the uncanny. I think abjection is an important term when considering this film. For me, the loci of abjection and the uncanny in cinema is met when genre film--particularly horror--intersects experimental. This is an allowance of the fantastic with an allowance of materiality, a performative necessity (as in the film itself is performing an act as we, the viewers, are watching), and an insistence that the qualities of film (image music text; movement, narrative) can achieve more than the inherent, assumed qualities of what is considered the classical Hollywood narrative achieve.

Arrebato itself is at the threshold of genre and experimental cinema. Finding itself with one foot in both worlds, meshed together perfectly, it is a cinema of ideas, a cinema of power. It is a cinema of abjection. We'll start with this.

It's easy to turn to the theoretical construct--developed primarily by Julia Kristeva--of abjection when discussing the horror genre. A primary element of abjection is the idea of "letting go of something we would still like to keep."¹ A dismembered arm, from the perspective of the amputee, is abject. Horror cinema is often a cinema of viscera: "blood, semen, hair and excrement/urine, we recognize these as once being a part of ourselves, thus these forms of the abject are taken out of our system while bits of them remain in our selves."

According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. We encounter other beings daily, and more often than not they are alive. To confront a corpse of one that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same state, our own mortality. This repulsion from death, excrement and rot constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic order.

Arrebato is located in the space of abjection. It's narrative drive is the idea of the "rapture" (the literal translation of "arrebato"), a semi-mystical state of heightened being, a "pause," as Pedro, who is developing the rapture refers to it. When we are first introduced to Pedro, he does nothing but shoot film, an obsession that, we find out, helps him to keep from eating, sleeping, fucking, or shitting for prolonged periods of time. He lives in a state of hysteria, wildly crying as he watches the short fragments of film that he has shot. The only time he can calm down, the only time he can face the reality of humanity, is with the help of "dusty-dust"--heroin.

While Pedro drives the narrative of the film, it is through the world of Jose-- a filmmaker and heroin addict--that this narrative unfolds. Structurally, the narrative of Pedro is embedded within the Narrative of Jose, until the end when the two collapse into each other (almost ontologically). As the film begins Jose is editing a film, a vampire feature that he is visually dissatisfied with. He arrives home from his apartment, after being gone two weeks for a shoot, to find his lover who had formerly left forever, and a parcel from Pedro containing a key, a reel of Super8 film, and an audio cassette.

Eventually Jose sits down to listen to the tape, which retells the story of Jose's interactions with Pedro, as well as the development of Pedro's filmic alchemy. Upon initially meeting Jose, Pedro recognized something special in him, something that isolated Jose as an ally to Pedro's esoteric cause. while Pedro's haunted voice presents the idea that what it is that Pedro can "see" is something mystical, it's obvious to the audience that the only thing that these two men have in common is an utter obsession with the cinema. As Jose remarks early on in the film, “It’s not that I like cinema… it’s cinema that likes me." Jose is presented as akin to real world filmmaker Jess Franco-- despite the fact he doesn't always feel satisfied with what he's done, he has to be making films. Pedro's obsession has already been explained, taking up literally all of his time. For better or worse, both Pedro and Jose are addicted.

This cinematic addiction is paralleled by Jose's relationship with Ana--his ex-lover who formerly left. Their relationship, normal at first, quickly devolved into an intense bond dependent upon heroin to keep it together. The heroin/relationship subplot helps to heighten the intensity of the film, the desperation present, a motivation for the film's denouement: a material example of obsession.

But now we must return to the idea of abjection: "The concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not." Let's consider re-writing this sentence as: What appears on film during cinema exists between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. Film's materiality captures a representation of a physical place, a physical person, an action that is literally happen. But what we see when we watch a film is not the actual physical place, it's not the real person, it's not the actual action: what we see is an image. What we see is neither live nor dead; rather, it's a representation of the image.

And this is what the film is about: Arrebato presupposes that film can be more than a representation--it suggests that film has power, and as Roberto Curti points out in his brilliant article on the film, "the image of an object put on film does not share the same ontological reality as that of the filmed object." Eventually, both Pedro and Jose become nothing but film. They are no longer ontologically present in the physical, material world at the end of the film. Rather, they become pure simulacra--a copy without an original. They are ontologically film. The vampiric nature of the camera, brought to life through Pedro's "occult rhythms," has sucked people out of the real world into "film-world."

It is through this ideological construct that a simple jump-cut removing an actor from the frame becomes terrifying. Obsession leads to men away from the "real" world and into something else. A metaphysical afterlife that can be seen but not felt. Pedro knows that he is going to ostensibly "die" as the red pauses on his developed film become longer and longer, yet he prepares himself for and faces his "escape" with both desperate terror and a severe insistence. There is utter beauty in the desperation, and we can feel it in all of Pedro's footage, the pulsing, rhythmic representations of the world moving at an intense tempo: the moon crossing the sky, a penis erecting with the air of flora in bloom, clouds erasing the blue of the air with a mask of white, people moving through life, etc., etc. These images are cinema's pulse, the bloodstream that keeps it alive.

Arrebato itself echos the ideas that it diegetically presents: the film itself holds power over the viewers, calling upon desperation and rhythmic images, coupled with a compelling storyline, to cull the viewer into an active trance-like state. It is mysterious, enigmatic, and compelling. It is a film.

^{1: All quotions pertaining to abjection come from http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Abjection}

2009-06-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

Hi.
I went through all my old entries to delete all the spam comments I've been noticing and realized that there were about 25 comments that I hadn't seen, some over a year old. I finally figured out how to turn on email notifications for comments, so even if it's on something old I should get notified of it. Sorry for any confusion in the past!

LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (JAMES BENNING, 1986)

2009-06-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Upon initially hearing about this film, I was fascinated by it's combination of structuralist film techniques and a narrative looking into the lives of two very different murderers. I was a bit hesitant to watch the film for a while due to Benning's reputation: from what I understand, he has a tendency to make films full of static shots of landscapes with little to no narrative, films that they tend to be long, considering they seem to be structural experiments (most of Benning's filmography averages the length of a normal cinematic feature, an hour and a half).While organizing some of my movies the other day, I re-encountered my copy of this film and decided to ignore my expectations and watch it.

The film ostensibly examines two murderers: 16 year old Bernadette Protti, who killed a classmate for no discernible reason; and the infamous Ed Gein, who, as any horror fan knows, was the prototype for cinematic manifestations of terror ranging from Norman Bates in Psycho to Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However, it's Benning's techniques, and how he approaches his source material, that make the film something exciting.

The film is fragmented into two segments, the first half "examining" Bernadette Protti, the second Ed Gein. Each half is approached in the same manner, beginning with what I'll call a prolonged "establishing" shot. The shot sets the tone for the landscape that each crime is taking place in. Protti's story begins with six minutes of a woman repeatedly practicing her tennis serve, representative of the useless banality of life in the suburbs. Gein's half begins with an extended static shot of a desolate, Midwestern landscape: an overcast sky, dead plantlife-- an emotional void.

Following each establishing shot, Benning shots more static landscapes of various elements of each subculture that the murders are rooted in: the posh suburbs and the Midwestern heartland. Eventually fragmented information, delivered via voice-over narration, begins to hint at the subject matter that the film encounters. After many of these flat, banal shots, the viewer encounters the "meat" of each segment: an interview with the murderer reconstructed from "actual court transcripts."

It is during these icy scenes that the film acquires a very abject and emotional core. Benning's camera stares directly at the subject as they answer questions posed by an interviewer off-screen. The actors playing the murderers are flat and unemotional: to viewers they are virtually inhuman.

Protti proves to be the more interesting subject, as Gein already has a major media presence. If we, as an audience, can assume that the dialogue that Benning's film presents is drawn from an actual transcription, then the flat, impersonal delivery that the actress playing Protti provides perfectly highlights the confusion of adolescence. Protti stares into the camera unable to articulate any sort of motivation as to why she killed her cheerleader-acquaintance, unable to externalize, with language, anything that she is truly feeling. It's terrifying to watch, as Protti is very confused, and, despite the stoicism of the film, it's clear that she is also fairly terrified (albeit not out of grief, but rather of what exactly is happening in her own life, the fact that she has completely lost control).

Following the interview, in each fragment, Benning provides static and dynamic landscape shots, punctuating the landscape inspired trance-state (which is generally accompanied by what is understood as diegetic sound) by including somewhat ironic, yet still abject and remarkably sad scenes accompanied by pop music (in the first half, a teenage girls talks excitedly on the phone while a song from "Cats" plays, in the second half, a latent 1950s housewife archetype dances by herself to Patsy Cline's "Tennessee Waltz"). I get the impression that the banality of each landscape is suppose to draw some parallel to the murders, but the film reads better when we consider the landscape, as it is shown to us, as tainted by the banality of the murders. Shots that had no emotional impact shown before the interview suddenly resonate, and the prolonged nature of each scene inspired uneasiness instead of boredom. It's almost manipulation in a remarkably non-manipulative manner: the film simply offers an objective circumstance in which the viewer can consider the implication of each crime, and landscape.

2009-03-30T19:33:00.001-07:00

Hi.

It's been a while since I've posted. I will have a BFA in a month. I saw a movie the other night that actually made me want to start writing about film again. Maybe I will.

I'm not making promises, because who knows what'll happen, but let's just say that for the first time in quite a while, I've been thinking about this project. Hopefully this means good things.

Also:
My Photobucket bandwidth was exceeded, so (most) of the images are down for now. I don't currently have the time to switch all the links reference my web server, and I'm not sure when my photobucket "time-limit" restarts. It will hopefully work itself out soon.

WEBSITE UPDATES

2008-11-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

So, for the first time in eight months (seriously? eight months?) I updated the Esotika website. Updates include:

The last two reviews from here added to the archive
A review of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely by Dan Schank
(and the big reveal) A career-spanning overview of the engimatic Mario Mercier-- pretty much the most info you'll find on the man in English. Original article by Frederick Durand and translated into English by Mandy Hoff.

CHECK IT OUT

INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA (STEPHEN & TIMOTHY QUAY, 1995)

2008-11-12T11:30:00.000-08:00

ESOTIKA CLASSICK 02

I've lost any conception of what it is exactly that makes a movie perfect for me. I once thought it was a primary aesthetic reaction: a culmination of images and music, with some sort of hyperbolic, mimetic emotionality. A sense of poetry-- but not the poetry of the Romantics, or anything hegemonically beautiful, rather, a poetry of violence, excess, of desperation--all contained within a narrative.

But then I discovered the world of experimental cinema and video art. In video art, aesthetics are eschewed in favor of the immediacy that the medium of video offers. There is nothing beautiful to look at, and sound is often terribly muffled, recorded in camera. But that's not what video art is about, video art is about a concept, it's about an idea. Vito Acconci was not a filmmaker, he was a conceptual artist who occasionally happened to work with a video camera. So do we dismiss this from our understanding of "motion pictures" ? Just because the medium of moving images is used in a different way, this shouldn't exclude an entire genre. It's different, and it forces the viewer to reconsider his conception of what a "movie" is. Experimental cinema does this as well: often an experimental film is more about structure (or once again concept). Narrative is almost consistently overlooked (at least in most well known examples: Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, etc.). We are now, thanks to Greenbergian modernism, looking at the material qualities of film itself. But some of what was originally contained in perfection shines through. Paul Sharits' repetition and strobing seems awful and obnoxious at first, but further reflection reveals there is a poetry of violence and excess there, and, in a roundabout way, a definite sense of hyperbolic emotionality. The images, though not images you would expect to find in a film, turn out to be beautiful too.

So where does that leave me now? I'm not sure. There is one thing that I am sure of though. Seven years ago I watched the Quay brother's first feature length film, Institute Benjamenta at 5AM before I headed off to a day of my Junior year of high school. I thought it was perfect then. Last night, seeing the film for probably the 10th time, I still think it is.

Has nothing changed? I know that I view film now in an entirely different manner from when I first saw the film. My criteria for what works and what doesn't work is completely different. I don't think I suffer any sort of sentimental attachment to the film either, as I've specifically tried to avoid that throughout multiple viewings: I've never let myself tie the film to a particular part of my life. I know there was something special, exciting about the first time (the first time is always different), but repeated viewings have just shown the film to be better, something new, something better.

When I first saw the film, it was a dream that I wanted to escape in. The film works best when paying careful attention to it's construction of atmosphere. It's oppressive, but in a stunning way. Every single line that Alice Krige mutters as Fraulein Benjamenta is labored, forced out, like she is not sure she should even be speaking, but must. There is a immediacy in her vocal intonation that makes her dialog seem present. Mark Rylance, as Jakob, is completely outside of the film the whole time, which is why Fraulein and Herr Benjamenta gravitate to him, "JAKOB with him one could dare something very Big." He is the clown at the funeral of meaning that the Institute claims to offer.

The set design of the film is what initially made the film so magical to me. The antiquated deer/stag parts decorating every mysterious corridor and doorway, the hyper present texture that everything takes on-- all of this lensed through Nic Knowland's (who got his start shooting John Lennon and Yoko Ono's experimental films) utterly brilliant cinematography, recalling, in a more textured manner, the brilliance of Sascha Vierny.

...

There is an awkward tension throughout the film: Jakob's voice over narration often betrays what is happening on screen. We are told that "the inner chambers contain nothing but a goldfish," while our eyes have already been privy to an entire subterranean level, accessed through awkward doorways located in the center of walls, sometimes created by drawing a concentric circle on a blackboard and walking through it while blindfolded. I don't think that the film suggests that Jakob's imagination is running wild under the domain of repression, rather, I think the world is far more mysterious than Jakob is willing to accept.

A dynamic tension is also constructed via the subversion of narrative. Ostensibly, Institute Benjamenta does have a classical narrative structure: the film begins with Jakob arriving at the institute, the climax occurs with the death of Fraulein Benjamenta, and denoument comes with Jakob and Herr Benjamenta leaving the Institute in the snow. However, these three events are only coincidentally related. The arrival of Jakob does not lead to Fraulein Benjamenta's death (she was already virtually dead), nor does the death lead to the end of the institute (Herr Benjamenta tells Jakob he has closed the institute before). It is arguable that the arrival of Jakob leads to the closure of the institute, but reducing the narrative to an "A, then B" structure is reductive, within the context of the larger film.

As I reach this point, I realize once again that I still don't really know what I'm aiming at here. I suppose, really, that what I'm trying to say, to clarify, is that this is a good film. An amazing one.

2008-10-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody.

I discovered tonight that some e-mail's I've received pertaining to the blog I didn't ever actually see, so if you emailed me about something in the last four months ago and I never replied, this might be why! I might try to go through my email archive and reply to the stuff that is "new" to me, but if there was something extra pertinent you wanted to email me about please send me another email!

Also, new stuff for the site that will probably get put up eventually: An in-depth review of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely by Dan Schank, and Mandy Hoff's long-awaited English translation of Frederick Durand's career overview of Mario Mercier (originally in French from the apparently now defunct Trash Times website). And who knows, maybe I'll even manage to write something new?

LUCIFER RISING (KENNETH ANGER, 1972)

2008-07-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

ESOTIKA CLASSICK 01

Lucifer Rising exists as an intersection between two filmic ideas, and it is within this intersection that the film gains it's power: more than any other film, Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising is about spectacle and hypnosis.

From a level of spectacle the film is pure ritual, literally and figuratively. Juxtaposing mythological images of ancient Egyptian Gods with contemporary Thelemites, Anger delineates the progressive nature of time in order to present to the spectator the necessary elements of the ritualistic form his film is taking. But what makes the ritual appealing to the audience is divorced from this esotericism--it's the nature of the films' aesthetics. Anger's level of artifice is exemplary; hyper-pervasive primary colors permeate every frame, shockingly electrified negative images pop up for brief moments, highlighting both the phenomenon of nature (lightning, volcanic eruptions, the birth of an alligator/lizard) and the exclamation points of banal events (as we tour through the hallway a man absently shuffling a deck of cards suddenly throws them into the air).

Anger's camera--generally static at a fixed angle in all of his films leading up to this one--finally begins to move in the aforementioned hallway scene, which is one of the most enigmatic tracking scenes that I've encountered through all of cinema. As we move through Anger's many tableau with a steady tempo, echoed by the calm score, there is an abject atmosphere of anxiety that arises: the film is telling us that something is going to happen soon, and we don't know what that is, but it's going to be something important.

Bobby Beausoleil's score is another necessary element of the film: composed from his prison cell, Beausoleil's score provides the soundtrack for Anger's film in the only instance where specific music has been produced for the specific film (excluding Jagger's grating drone "composed" for Invocation of My Demon Brother, the rest of Anger's films, as popularly recognized, are simply coupled with 50s and 60s pop music, often to an ironic extent-- there is no irony present in Beausoleil's score for this film). The soundtrack itself is an excellent piece of work, with or without Anger's images married to it. It is a bit psychedelic and ambient, echoing both the naturalistic evocations brought about by Anger's pensive landscape shots, and the internal psychedelia that plays a pivotal role in the film.

Beausoleil's score also plays a major role in elevating the level of hypnosis present in the film; the pulsing score with it's utter repetition and subtle progressive changes feeds directly into the subconscious, the same way Anger's images work their way through cracks. In The Poetic of Cinema, Raoul Ruiz discusses the idea of hypnotic film in his chapter on Shamanic cinema (a more than apt term for Anger's films, to be sure). He sets forth the idea that when a film has an hypnotic element, the viewer may fall asleep. This is not the result of boredom, in fact this opens up, rather, an expanded film for the viewer: the dream world and the film world begin to mesh into a single unity, allowing the viewer to become an alchemist, colliding the "reality" of the film with the subconscious connections the mind brings forth. Being a Thelemite and follower of Crowley himself, an often ignored part of Anger's cinema is the fact that all of his films are "intended as [...] magickal working[s] on the viewer," with Lucifer Rising intending to open "up a wider field of the sublime effects of nature and ancient history" (which relates to the earlier mentioned delineation of past and "present").¹

Anger's magick remains esoteric, unknowable to the viewer. But one thing that can be read without occult historical knowledge is the simple repetitions and geometric shapes that pop up repeatedly throughout the film. The aforementioned hallway tracking scene demands attention, and that attention is shattered, popped, at certain moments. There is a level of control that the image has over the viewer. Same with the stoic profiles of the Gods in ancient Egypt; the camera demands attention, and despite what could ostensibly be classified as camp costuming, these images attain a significant importance. Whereas Jess Franco using languid tracking shots and repetition for the purpose of an extension of sexual ennui, Anger uses the same techniques for the purpose of hypnosis. It is, however, worth noting that both Franco's sexual ennui and Anger's techniques of hypnosis have an aim of ensnarement, a goal of pulling the voyeur/spectator into the diegetic world of the film.

The only problem with the film is that from what people expect of Anger (from a locus of popular culture), Lucifer Rising is more of less at odds with what has generated Anger's reputation: it, to a large extent, lacks the hyper structural editing that initially put Anger on the map, as well as being totally devoid of the pop music that Anger pioneered the music video with. It is also not necessarily indicative of the homosexual avant-garde that Anger often gets lumped in with. The often ridiculed "campy" costumes are merely ritualistic signifiers. They are just conduits to a larger idea that is inherent within a much larger system, and reading the images as nothing beyond camp is discredited Anger as an artist, as a magician. But these are all surface level details-- further exploration into Anger's oeuvre reveals that Lucifer Rising is more accurately a culmination of everything Anger learned in making films. The obsessive fetishism of objects and sensory details is present, as is the already mentioned religious strain that permeates all of Anger's films, and all of this makes it easy to see that this is Anger's best film.

¹ Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger, edited by Jack Hunter

As both an exercise to get myself back into film writing/watching, as well as a way to make myself come to terms with the way I think about cinema, I'm going to start a series of reviews of 'ESOTIKA CLASSICKS.' Which, instead of writing about the obscure or esoteric films that usually decorate my blog, I will be revisiting more common films that exemplify the Esotika spirit and are a core part of the Esotika canon.

I'M NOT DEAD

2008-06-03T19:33:00.000-07:00

So, it has admittedly been 2 and a 1/2 months since I've updated. I apologize; I'm not dead, I haven't given up on this blog or the accompanying website, and in all honesty, I have no excuses. I've just been keeping myself entertained with things other than watching movies for a while (a shocker to those who know me in real life), and have watched maybe three movies in the last two months (Prehysteria 2, Pierrot le Fou, and I rewatched Sweet Movie to write a paper on it for a class that might end up on here, eventually). But, the translation of the long awaited article on Mario Mercier originally by Frederick Durand has been sent my way and once I do a final edit that'll be up on the website. Plus I plan to actually start watching movies and writing about them again soon. In the meantime, here's a couple of video art pieces I've made in the last few months:

PLACER DE GEMIDOS

Placer De Gemidos, as the title suggests, is a structural deconstruction of Jess Franco's brilliant film Gemidos de Placer (which I reviewed back here). My intention was to retain Franco's oneiricism, but flatten the narrative in a way that allows both "everything all at once" as well as drawing attention to the structural way Franco constructed his original film (which I speak about in my review).

THE BAMBI WOODS ENIGMA

This is an extension/re-imagining of a novella/zine I wrote about a year back, where I offer apocryphal explanations for porn-star Bambi Woods' disappearance (for the record, she has possibly shown up again: Debbie Does Dallas: The Bambi Woods Interview). It's aim is essentially to create a mythology of terror, to some extent. And to give credit where credit is due, the structure of the film owes much to the early shorts of Peter Greenaway.

Anyway, that's just some of what I've been up to lately, hopefully I'll be back with a more relevant update soon!

TRAITEMENT DE CHOC (ALAIN JESSUA, 1973)

2008-03-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

I first read about director Alain Jessua in FAB Press's Eyeball Compendium, in which he's described as the "Orson Welles of French cinema[...] he made a big splash, critically and commercially, with his first two features, but then seemed to lose his way and has never really fulfilled the promise he once showed." However, I of course derive much more pleasure out of Welle's later, less polished, less "canonical" films, so I made a mental note to check some Jessua films out.

Jessua is virtually forgotten in discussion of cinema today, and completely unknown in the US. His only film with a domestic DVD release is the 1984 horror-comedy Frankenstein 90, released by Anchor Bay around 2002, only to find itself once again quickly forgotten.

Traitement de Choc is most notorious (although, that's a relative word in this instance) for the fact that famed French actor Alain Delon appears in a rather extensive full frontal nude scene. That seems to be what it's initial selling point was, even being imported and released in the UK by Anthony Balch as Doctor in the Nude, which, in the context of the film itself, seems rather absurd, but hey, I'm sure it sold a few more tickets that way.

The film itself is a fairly conventional dramatic thriller, but it's moral positioning (done in a not-totally-heavy-handed sort of way) and genre elements make it stand out. The story follows Helene Massan's (Annie Giradot) visit at Dr. Deviler's (Delon) "rejuvenation" facility, a closed community which is three parts spa and one part mad-scientist laboratory. At the clinic, Helene encounters a group of vapid, rich men and women who convince her that after the treatment she will feel infinitely better, and that she will be "one of them." Being "one of them" seems to imply nothing more than lounging around a pool sunbathing, frolicking naked on the beach, and talking about how great it is to look and feel young. Nothing of substance constructs the group's relationship, but that's partly the point.

Eventually Helene begins to question some of the facility's techniques, especially as members of the Portuguese help she grows fond of repeatedly get sick and disappear. She later starts sleeping with Dr. Devilers and soon has access to some of the facility's secrets. However, nobody else seems to care about anything other than how they look.

Parts of the film found me thinking of Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints, as well as Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle, and occasionally Frans Zwartjes' Pentimento. The first two are evoked due to the first half of the film featuring the female protagonist wandering around by herself, interacting more with the architecture of the facility than the other patients. The latter comes from the interiors of the treatment facility: cold, unresponsive metal and international style white decorate the intensely modern buildings.

One of the more interesting elements of the film is Helene's fairly ambiguous moral stance. She's even asked, several times throughout the film, what is is exactly that she's after. She's obviously after some sort of answers, but she's not quite sure why. On one hand, she clearly feels bad that something is happening to the Portugeuse workmen--but on the other, she is insistent on recalling her physical and mental "youngness" (due only to the fact that she was recently dumped, for the first time ever, for a younger woman). The conflicting interests of Helene help to ease what appears to be Jessua's conviction of the bourgeoisie: he is not flat out condemning them in a heavy handed way (as many political genre films tend to do), rather, the protagonist (whom we inherently identify with as viewers) is placed in a position of confusion. By the end it becomes clear that the treatment is "questionable" (to say the least), but we also understand the desire for youth, a desire that undoubtedly exists in some shape or form in all human beings.

Helene's moral positioning is challenged even further as she takes a plane ride with Dr. Devilers, and he flat out tells her that he finds his patients ridiculous. He states that he would prefer to live with "the so-called savages," but his attempts to do just that have failed due to his outsider status: in this context, he is the other. And so he is now dependent on the wealth brought to him by his wealthy clients.

The climax of the film brings all of the sensational elements that one would hope for in a genre film, and Jessua's creativity doesn't disappoint. It's a fairly abrupt ending (in terms of narrativity), but a bizarre coda posits even the police as shallow, vanity obsessed individuals who place the self over the group, ending the film on a fairly depressing note.

Overall, the film isn't perfect, but is still a very worthwhile watch, if only for the fact to understand how you can make a subtle politically charged film that remains compulsively watchable and entertaining.

MAJOR UPDATES AT ESOTIKAFILM.COM

2008-03-14T01:14:00.000-07:00

Major updates over at the Esotika website:

-Three new reviews (two by me and one by Eric Cotenas)
-My choice of the Top Ten DVD Releases of 2007
-The Library section is now up
-I've started to put up the People section; though the only entry there so far is on Alain Robbe-Grillet (including--I think--the most complete filmography and English-language bibliography on the internet, as well as poster images from ALL of his films except for N. Took the Dice

Also, I have a couple of questions for readers of this blog:

1.
Has anybody had a chance to see Rollin's latest, La Nuit des horloges yet? I know it's played at a couple festivals. If anybody has seen it and would like to write a review of it for the Esotika website, please let me know, as I'd love to have a review of it up there. Same goes for Robbe-Grillet's latest, Gradiva.

2.
Does anybody have a copy of Midi-Minuit Fantastique #13 (November, 1965)? There's a still in it from a "lost" Mario Mercier film that I'd love to include with the Mercier article that will be published soon at the site; if you have a copy and could scan that image for me I would be eternally grateful.

3.
If you have a film blog that talks about films that deal with Esotika themes, please leave a link for me here, as I'm going to update the blog links on the website (and on here) in the next few days.

And finally, an anonymous individual made an RSS feed of this blog for Livejournal. It is available here:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/esotika/profile
There is also an Atom XML feed available here:
http://esotika.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I will be linking these from the sidebar in the future as well.

LOFT (KIYOSHI KUROSAWA, 2005)

2008-03-14T01:13:00.000-07:00

"I had to do something that was a horror films, but at the same time I wanted to destroy horror films."

-Kiyoshi Kurosawa, taken from a talk given after a screening of Loft at Yale University

Loft is a very peculiar movie. It maintains Kurosawa's trademark eye for atmosphere and horror, yet, as occasionally happens, it feels like a very disjointed film. I don't necessarily find this to be a bad thing, but when sitting down to write about a disjointed film, I find it more difficult to organize my thoughts into something coherent. And coherency, well, that's what one hopes to accomplish with a review. Coherency is also something the movie itself wants to accomplish, and surprisingly, it does.

At least, in a very indirect way. The movie is an odd hodgepodge of terror, atmosphere, melodrama, and subtle comedy. In some ways, the movie is a response to the current state of the Japanese horror film--at least, the Japanese horror film as viewed by the Westerner. A couple of weeks before watching Loft, I had the pleasure of viewing Sion Sono's Exte: Hair Extensions, which maintains a totally different tone from Kurosawa's film, but also subtly ridicules the array of omnipresent cliches that abound in contemporary J-Horror. While I think Sono's film succeeds more in calling attention to the sorry state of J-Horror while still delivering an intelligent and entertaining film, Kurosawa's film works better divorced from the satire. It's there, and it's done fairly well, but if the satire is the only thing the viewer fixates on in the film, he or she is missing out on a lot.

Before I segue away from the satire; it is worth discussing. Most of Kurosawa's satire in the film isn't so much straight up satire in the vein of Month Python or popular television, rather, it's more a subversion of the archetypes that permeate J-Horror, revealing why exactly it is that these cliches are lacking. The long haired ghost, which exists as the most present archetype known to Western audiences, is present in the film. But the "ghost" doesn't move jerkily, is rather just another character on screen, and Kurosawa allows the ghost to remain present uncomfortably long once she has been revealed. By allowing the (expected) source of terror to remain on screen, the terror is diffused and any emotional response the character/signifier would elicit is crushed.

As Jerry White points out in the chapter on Loft in The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Master of Fear, Kurosawa also subverts archetypes by allowing his female protagonist (his first since 1992's Guard from the Underground) to, through a lack of anchored identity, take on all the roles generally offered to females in J-Horror: the victim, the monster, and the hero. These roles are ostensibly established by three characters (Reiko: the hero, the mummy: the monster, and the ghost: the victim), but all there characters have overlapping personalities-they are essentially three parts of the same whole. By collapsing all of these archetypes into a single character (who, let's face it, in the scope of the movie is an empty shell, a simple signifier for Kurosawa's ideas) he reveals the lack in depending upon the archetypes.

But aside from the subversion of cliches, the film is also a narrative. The story finds Reiko struggling to churn out a pop-romance novel to satisfy her publisher. She moves into a house in the middle of the country to get some peace and quiet. She discovers her neighbor is a scientist working on a mummy. Her publisher goes nuts and tries to kill her. She falls in love. A dead girl pops up. All this implies, of course, is that there is a narrative in the film, the narrative is far from straight-forward.

As usual in a Kurosawa film, the progression relies on the creation and sustenance of atmosphere. Atmosphere, which Kurosawa is always wildly successful at building out of location, is what propels the film forward. There is no central conflict (well, we think there is at first, but that central conflict is utterly abandoned half-way through) to carry the narrative, so we have to give ourselves over to ideas and aesthetics. Also as usual in a Kurosawa movie, it is the atmosphere that makes the movie worth while: sound and image work together so well in the film that it's impossible to not be totally absorbed into the locations on display. Several abject "jump shock" scenes make perfect use of the natural light and old house that Reiko is living in, and the heavy atmosphere manages to approach a climax without plummeting immediately afterwards. The intense atmosphere is sustained throughout the entire first hour and a half of the film.

And that's when things change.

Out of nowhere, Reiko and Yoshioka begin speaking to each other as if they're living in a Douglas Sirk melodrama: music swells, and the two run to each others arms professing their love for one another. An empty grave lies in the background. It's jarring: in the same way "jump shocks" work within the realm of generic J-Horror, this change is constructed to be surprising. From this point on, Reiko is no longer the films center; she's thrown to the background and Kurosawa's camera starts to linger on Yoshioka instead. An attack mars their brief foray into the land of emotions, and soon everyone is back to their apathetic and empty selves.

But, it is the fact that these characters are completely empty and apathetic that allows this melodramatic interlude to occur without distorting the film into something incoherent: when you have nothing, the first chance to attach yourself, fill yourself, achieves a sense of epic proportions. The overly dramatic scene really fits perfectly with the rest of the subtle, understated, and almost silent film. Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis. Kurosawa's realization of that is wonderful, and the cinematic approach to his revelation is even more impressive.

If there's anything that needs to be said about the film it's this: in an interview Kurosawa mentioned the film being an "experiment in terror." And for that, I applaud. Loft doesn't get tied up trying to maintain itself in an overdone, unnecessary plot. One of the primary perks of making films is the ability to both establish emotions and inspire emotions in fairly straightforward way (when done well)--and that is what Kurosawa does here. It's an experiment in atmosphere, and experiment in applying theory to practice, and overall it's a stunning aestheticized experiment. A fulfilling one, at that.

I WAS A TEENAGE ZABBADOING (CARL ANDERSEN, 1988)

2008-03-06T21:12:00.001-08:00

aka Vampiros Sexos

While the Cinema of Transgression movement had peaked in the mid-1980s with the work of Richard Kern and Beth B., across the Atlantic, director Carl Andersen began making films clearly in the same vein in the late 1980s. His debut film, I Was a Teenage Zabbadoing... (full title: "I Was A Teenage Zabbadoing And The Incredible Lusty Dust-Whip From Outer Space Conquers The Earth Versus The 3 Psychedelic Stooges Of Dr. Fun Helsing And Fighting Against Surf-Vampires And Sex-Nazis And Have Troubles With This Endless Titillation Title") is clearly situated within this movement, combining Vampire archetypes with hardcore sex all set to a soundtrack of post-punk and no-wave music.

In this hour long, starkly lit black and wide feature, plot takes a sidestep to the depiction of angsty counterculture, fights, obsessive sex, and lusty vampires. What little plot is found follows, apparently, "A female vampire from the planet Arus [who] tries to vampirize the descendants of Dr. Fun Helsing."¹ The vampire infects her first victim by way of "infected" olive oil (?!), and then the vampire virus spreads itself via sex and biting. This all takes place among 20 something kids clad in black and leather, who hang out at a bar (The Video Teque) and don't really do too much with their lives other than fuck.

For being what could be considered an ostensibly empty plot, the film moves at a rapidly entertaining pace, with occasional bouts of humor (as two characters are driving along the street on their hunt for the vampires, they keep passing couples fighting for no apparent reason). Parts of the film also are tailor made to fit the excellent music that's decorating the scenery, but the film plays these "music video" scenes in a way similar to the aforementioned Cinema of Transgression, never delving into something that seems out of place (in the way quite a few contemporary straight to video horror flicks do).

It's remarkably trashy but stylish; a perfect visual accompaniment to the no-wave music scene that prevailed in America (and to some extent, Europe)--far more fitting, in my opinion, than many of the films of Nick Zedd (who authored the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto).

There are, however, two particularly interesting elements of the film that merit mention. The first is a particularly potent twenty second scene where two of the main vampires get into a brief fight as one of their soon to be victims plays an acoustic song with lyrics about dancing in the background. It's bizarrely poetic in a very low-rent sort of way that totally fits the tone of the film. The second interesting element comes by way of what the vampires are weak against: instead of garlic and crucifix's, the vampires cannot cross the border of--wait for it-- Tarkovsky films! It's a bizarre jab that once again fits the punk spirit that pervades the rest of the film.

My main point of interest to the films of Carl Andersen, aside from the fact that they're delightfully entertaining and earnest in a way that most cinema has forgotten about, comes from the fact that ever since seeing Andersen's most notorious film, 1990's Mondo Weirdo, I've been a bit obsessed with the band that does the soundtracks for what appears to be his entire oeuvre, Model D'oo. There's a track that I absolutely love from Mondo Weirdo that also appears in this film, albeit in a stripped down version. Regardless, liking the music of the soundtrack significantly helps to enjoy the film.

¹The intertitles of the film are in German (I think), so the "details" provided in this sentence come via the Vampyres-Online website.

March Update: Another Entry Without Pictures

2008-03-06T20:22:00.001-08:00

Once again I'm sitting in front of my computer posting yet another update about how it's been "a bit quiet" around here lately. I could blame this on the fact that I've been busy with schoolwork (which is ostensibly a truth), but in reality I've hardly watched any movies that would qualify as something that I'd want to write about for a while. The reason? It's a bit embarrassing, but I got sucked into prime-time TV show Lost.

I should clarify that while I obviously own a TV and make use of it regularly to watch flicks, we don't have cable at my house, and I don't even have an antenna on my TV so I get literally zero channels; hence, it's not a fallacy when I proclaim that "I don't have TV." This is for a number of reasons, the main being that it's very rare that I watch TV, so it would be utterly superfluous to pay for cable, despite the fact that a few of my roommates wouldn't mind being able to tune in and tune out ever so often.

But, I do occasionally "watch TV" via DVD rentals, streaming episodes, and online downloads. For some reason, at the beginning of February, something convinced me to start watching Lost. And then, since February 9th, I've watched the entire first three seasons, plus the five episodes of season four that have aired so far. This amounts to 76 45 minute episodes. That's about 3420 minutes. Which, presupposing that a majority of the movies I watch are around 90 minutes, comes out to be 38 movies. Which, in retrospect, is fairly depressing.

It's not a bad show, it's fairly entertaining, and, all things considered, it's relatively smart. But, while reading Raoul Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema this last week I encountered an explanation for why I was finding it so hard to do anything but what a relatively empty show. In the first chapter of Poetics of Cinema, Ruiz discusses Central Conflict Theory, and, in a round about way, his aversion to it. Central Conflict Theory ostensibly posits an A vs. B position, and generally manipulates the audience into siding with one side over the other. This central conflict is the only thing driving not only the show, but the audience's desire to see the show: the audience wants nothing more than to see how conflicts resolve. Here's what Ruiz says in his own words:

Let us return to films that are not boring. Films provoked by the noonday demon. Central conflict theory manufactures athletic fiction and offers to take us on a journey. Prisoner of the protagonist's will, we are subjected to the various stages making up a conflict of which he, the protagonist, is at once guardian and captive. In the end we are released and given back to ourselves, a little sadder than before. There is only one notion in our heads, which is to go [on] another journey as soon as we can.

(It's worth noting that Ruiz is using "films that are no boring" a bit ironically; he has a preference for what, viewed with the core idea of Central Conflict Theory, are boring; he quotes Ozu, Snow, et. al. as examples of "boring" film.)

This awareness frustrates me but is also fairly enlightening; and these emotions arise from the fact that it's an utterly accurate observation. I was never reflecting on events from the show (which has quite a vaguely interesting mythology built up around it to be honest), I was just voracious ready to devour solutions to my athlete's problems. It also made me more aware of the fact that most of the films I tend to prefer and applaud are (mostly) lacking Central Conflict, or at least feature a decentralized plot.

The perks of watching a Robbe-Grillet film are not cause and effect; it's not really important who you side with or even what happens to the characters--rather, it's the context that the plot is playing out in and the ideas that are coming forth via the character-signifiers. Etc., etc., I could probably elaborate with a long list of my favorite films and directors, but I wouldn't have any more work done that I did to begin with.

However, as I said, I'm now completely caught up. Despite my still naive desire/necessity to see whether team A or team B wins, there are no more episodes for me to satiate the empty hunger with, at least until next week. But, that means I can finally get things done!

As of tonight I am officially on my Spring Break, and I've already begun working on content for the Esotika website. I have a new review that will be up later tonight once I resize the screencaps, I've begun working on the Library section of the website (which is actually a much smaller undertaking than I anticipated), I have 80% of my "Best DVDs of 2007" list written, and I will be helping my friend/translator do the final edit on the Mario Mercier article on Wednesday. So, it's update time!

I've also finally gotten around to updating my monthly screening log (linked from the right panel), adding December, January, and February.

Also, I'd like to thank Jeremy from over at Moon in the Gutter for pointing out the
Wikio Top Film Blogs list which I was delighted to find my own humble blog at #37. I'm not sure how it works, but I just wanted to take the opportunity to once again thank all the readers of this blog!

JEANNE'S JOURNAL (MARIO MERCIER)

2008-02-25T00:41:00.000-08:00

"My dear Éric,

Among the books that you have recently sent me, I thank you most particularly for the work of Mario Mercier. I don’t know who this author is, but his invention, in the fascinating world of the fantastique that is so dear to us, is a prodigious wealth. Pushed so far, with such a disposition towards unrealism, insanity becomes a simple value [...] Without waiting for Mario Mercier to become nationally recognized [...], I would like you to know that I admire him. "
-A letter to Eric Losfield from Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues¹

Tonight, lying on my bed in the hours after I returned from my banal part-time job in retail, I finished reading Mario Mercier's incomparable novel, Jeanne's Journal. To my knowledge (any digging reveals no further details), it is the only novel of Mercier's that has ever been translated into English, and at that the book is long out of print and often fetches prices of at least 100 USD on used book sites. I lucked out and managed to track a copy down through my university's interlibrary loan system, and I'm very grateful that I was able to.

The book is one of the most fanciful forays into the erotic realm of the fantastique that I've ever encountered--in any medium. At time the book reads like a bizarre sci-fi novel tainted with an optimistic idealism that was prominent during the mid-20th centuries; other times it hearkens Sadean excess, staying strongly full force until the readers imagination is so permeated with impossible excess that the reality of the physical space the reader undoubtedly exists in simply disappears.

The story exists solely within the realm of spectacle, nothing is too fanciful or far-fetched to escape Mercier's transcendent realm; erotically charged throughout, it's a world where dream and reality are equally leveled, neither is easier to swallow. The book tells the tale of the titular Jeanne, who eventually ends up on a quest to rescue her friend Louise from the grips of an evil Baron; Louise being held hostage due to the fact that she humiliated the Baron's wife at a party.

Among the many highlights of the book, I was particularly awed by Mercier's description of the Baron's metaphysical kingdom, which brought to my mind an amalgamation of Verner Panton colors and luminance, viscous fluids floating in the air via a Jordan Belson film, human debasement recalling and overwhelming everything from Andre Pieyre de Mandiargue's Portrait of an Englishman in His Chateau to Bernard Noel's Castle of Communion, all culminating in pseudo-scientific explanation that, bizarrely, have more in common with the magical elevator in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than anything formerly mentioned. An excerpt will help my point:

"We entered a large, circular room containing many pipes of various diameters and running in different directions. A ventilation whir came from a series of small grilles opening in the floor. I looked up and, to my surprise, I saw a number of vividly coloured condensations silhouetting the shape of pieces of furniture.

"Let's go up," the Baron said.

"But there are no stairs," I could not help pointing out.

He began to laugh and, pulling on my leash, proceeded up an imaginary staircase. With amazement, I felt myself rise into the air.

I then realised that this stair case, as well as the floor, was made of concentrated layers of stabilised air, spatially maintained by invisible field forces[...]"²

And from that point on, the spectacle continues, unabated, until the book ends on a remarkably sublime note that perfectly encapsulates the tone and fantasticism of the rest of the book, while allowing a cathartic sense of conclusion, and utter satisfaction.

I can't recommend the enough book, and hope that sometime in the future I am either fluent enough in French myself to read the rest of Mercier's oeuvre, or more of his work becomes available in English. Though I'm assuming I will have to rely on the former.

The book itself encountered trouble with the censors upon it's initial publication in 1969, but Eric Losfields staunch defense of the book meant that eventually it found publication for an unsuspecting public. Mercier went on to write several more books (La cuvée de singes, Le Necrophile) and eventually he directed two feature films.

Though still mostly unknown, Pete Tombs brought some slight attention to the man with his and Cathal Tohill's quintessential Immoral Tales, which had a dedicated review of Mercier's first feature film, La Goulve (which is frequently bootlegged with the English title Erotic Witchcraft). Mercier's second film, La Papesse, has fortunately been released on a rather lackluster DVD by Pathfinder entertainment. Unfortunately the subtitles on the DVD barely match any of the dialogue on screen, so the viewing experience is compromised.

With now having experienced one of Mercier's novel in addition to one of his films, I can firmly declare that the man is remarkably interesting, and I will continue to hope for the opportunity to experience more of his work in the future.

¹ Unless noted, all quotes and background information comes from an article on Mario Mercier written by Frederick Durand. A full translation of the article (which Frederick assures me has the most info on Mercier in any language) is forthcoming on the Esotika site, once the wonderful Mandy Hoff finishes the translation and I work with her to clean it up.

² English translation by Arlette Ryvers, 1972

Alain Robbe-Grillet: August 1922 - February 2008

2008-02-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

Despite the turmoil of events that have occurred around me recently (as I've mentioned before, I attend Northern Illinois University which was recently the site of a school shooting on Valentines day) I find myself most affected (in a totally selfish way) by the death of filmmaker and author (among other things), Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I discovered Alain Robbe-Grillet on a whim after seeing Last Year at Marienbad six or seven years ago. After watching more Alain Resnais films I came to the realization that it wasn't Resnais' work that had hit me so hard about the film, but rather Robbe-Grillet's script. This eventually led to me seeking out his novels and films, which I devoured and loved.

I have a lot to say about the man, as his films and books have been a constant source of both awe and inspiration over the years, but I just wanted to drop a quick note expressing my, well, sadness (though that word doesn't contextually seem to be the best fit) over his death. He had recently completely a novel (A Sentimental Novel) that had been a source of controversy in France, and hasn't seen an English translation yet (which is no suprise, considering there are still large chunks of his oeuvre that have yet to see the light of day in English accessible options; namely, most of his filmography as director, 2/3s of his "autobiographical" written trilogy, his collaboration with Irina Ionesco [the text of which was admittedly worked into some of his intertextual novels], and more), but I look forward to reading it whenever I get the opportunity.

His work has forced me to think about narrative in a way that I undoubtedly would have taken a longer time to come across; and his visual-textual collaborations have been particularly pertinent to the development of my own work.

Though I suppose it sounds trite to say, maybe every cloud does have a silver lining, and the death of a great artist will bring enough attention that hopefully more of his work (his films especially) will become available for a larger audience so more people can understand what it is that I personally find so utterly amazing.

UPDATE

2008-01-22T22:22:00.000-08:00

Okay, so obviously even with launching the website I've been pretty quiet over here. I just wanted to comment to say that I'm not abandoning this blog in favor of the website. I think (I haven't decided 100% yet) that what I'll be doing is still be posting my reviews as I write them here, and then I'll do weekly updates on the website.

But, aside from just films reviews as normal, I think I'll be expanding what I blog about on here- the Esotika website will be dedicated exclusively to film, but I will probably expand the blog to discussion of books, music, and art as well. All new articles will go exclusively to the website, as will content from contributors (reviews, articles, and etc.), so make sure you check that regularly as well.

Just wanted to pop in and say "Hi!" again-- didn't want to appear MIA!

VENUS IN FURS (JESS FRANCO, 1969)

2008-01-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

The first time I saw Venus in Furs was four years ago; Blue Underground's stunning DVD presentation had yet to be released, and with only six Franco films under belt, I was still a Franco novice. I had been working through the few films of his that I could find, and before Venus in Furs the only one that had stood out to be was Virgin Among the Living Dead-- but Venus in Furs was different. Venus in Furs was the first Franco film that I got truly excited about. After my first viewing on a crummy VHS dub I immediately rewound the ending credits and watched Barbara McNair's wailing voice called out: "Venus in furs will be smiiiiiling-- when that moment arrives..."

Watching the film (for the fourth time) now is a totally different experience. The film has changed-- well, perhaps the film hasn't change, but the way I watch Franco films have. In fact, my entire method of watching films has changed. If there's anything that writing about film has taught me, it's the importance of being an active film viewer. And often with a Franco flick, being an active film viewer requires you to look at the film in context- specifically the context of the Franco canon.

But I'll touch on that later, as I'm also a staunch supporter of the idea that a piece of art, if it can be labeled "objectively good," should be able to stand on it's own--and Venus in Furs certainly does. Franco has--throughout his many taped interviews that delightfully complement DVD releases of his films--shown him self to be a jazz fanatic; the music inspires everything he does. In the case of Venus in Furs this inspiration is obvious--the story follows trumpet player Jimmy Logan (James Darren- whose character [and most of the plot of the film itself] was based off of musician Chet Baker) as he falls in love with Wanda Reed (Maria Rohm), a woman who he saw killed over a year ago. Jimmy is also in love with Rita (Barbara McNair), a crooning in the nightclub he plays trumpet in. Uptempo and almost psychedelic, courtesy of Manfred Mann decorates the film; there is more music on display here than dialogue, something that works to Franco's advantage.

Opening on a sunlit beach (featuring a fence that shares more than a passing resemblance to the infamous fence that populates a majority of the films in director Jean Rollin's oeuvre), the viewer is immediately introduced to a theme that pops up again and again in the "Franco canon"-- the idea of the sea, of water, as the beginning and the end. This is a motif that pops up, as I've said, in many of Franco's films: at the end of Female Vampire, as Countess Irina drowns in her bathtub, Sexual Story of O where Mario carries the murdered Odile into the eternally looming sea, in Vampyros Lesbos with Countess Nadine drowned face up in her swimming pool, Antonio at the end of Gemidos de Placer, the list is unending! And it was at this point, upon my fourth viewing of Venus in Furs, that I realized why it worked so well.

I think it works so well--and holds the highest priority among casual Franco fans-- because of the fact that it is both a microcosm of the Franco universe and an excellent example of European Genre Cinema (Euro-Cult, Eurotrash, whatever term you prefer). And there's a reason for this- the productions that Jess Franco made with Harry Alan Towers were international coproductions; and because of this, there were a lot of cinematic elements that Franco lost control over. But, Harry Alan Towers wasn't incompetent, so the combination between the two was fairly strong, and while they may not be "pure Franco" films, they are certainly good films.*

"Time is like the ocean-- you can't hold on to it..." musing Jimmy as he tries to take reign over the events in his life- the total chaos that is causing him such emotional distress. And this distortion of time is hyper-present in the film, in an early scene, introducing the murder of Wanda at the hands of three perverts, a party is filled to the brim with people, but nobody within the frame moves except our pivotal characters, the extras decorating the lavish room frozen still, echoing scenes from Alain Resnais' brilliantly elliptical Last Year At Marienbad-- except in a completely different context. Scenes cut back and forth between the past and the present, even occasionally jumping into what we can only assume is the future. Nothing is making sense to Jimmy as he wanders through the carnival in Rio, and the narrative structure of the film serves to hide the truth (at least, whatever truth there is to be told in a work of fiction) from the audience. We never know more than Jimmy.

The exploration of time and memory, played out via an occasionally melodramatic love story, calls to mind a quote from Jacques Derrida in Ken McMullen's 1983 film Ghost Dance:

"Ghosts don’t just appear, they come back. In French we talk of them ‘returning.’Now that presupposes a memory of the past, that has never taken the form of the present. [The] theory of ghosts is based on a theory of mourning. In normal mourning, Freud says, one internalizes the dead, one takes the dead into oneself, and assimilates them. This internalization is an idealization, it accepts the dead. Whereas in mourning, which doesn’t develop naturally–-that is to say, in mourning, that goes wrong–-there is no true internalization. There is [...] ‘incorporation,’ the dead are taken into us but don’t become a part of us. They just occupy a particular place in our bodies. They can speak for themselves. They can haunt our body and ventriloquise our speech, so the ghost is enclosed in a crypt, which is our body. We become a sort of graveyard for ghosts. A ghost can be not only our unconscious, but more precisely, someone else’s unconscious. The other’s unconscious speaks in our place. It is not our unconscious, it is the unconscious of the other which plays tricks on us. It can be terrifying, but that’s when things start to happen."

And things do indeed happen for Jimmy as he's haunted by the memory of the dead Wanda- a memory so strong with love and lust that he manages to somehow manifest her, and she becomes the catalyst for the events in the film. There is, of course, a delightfully handled revenge subplot that plays out amidst the romantic haunting, but it's hardly relevant. What it does serve to do, however, is necessary to the success of the film. It is within this subplot that a strong portrayal of European Genre Cinema tropes comes to the surface, it is this subplot which balances out the "non -Franco" elements of the film, creating the dichotomy of the personal film (Franco's general method-- at least when he has full control) and the public film (the idea of the "exploitation" film). But it's not just a generic subplot to pad the runtime and sell to international markets, rather, this subplot remains an oneiric exploration of revenge, still fitting into the idea of memory, ghosts, and regret. Wanda comes back to kill those who killed her, and it is no surprise when she discovers that all three of her soon-to-be-victims are still in love with her memory.

To further elaborate on the idea of the film as a microcosm of the Franco universe, one need look no further than the casting. Primary roles in the film are played by Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski, and Dennis Price, all actors who pop up again and again throughout the Franco filmography. Part of Franco's brilliant intertextuality involves not only the repeated use of his favorite actors (in the way that many directors; Fassbinder and Herzog for instance), but the repeated use of the same actors as the same (or similar) characters. This repeated use of the character/actor combination helps to point out that idea that to truly enjoy see on of Jess Franco's films, you need to see all of them. It is the intertextuality that highlights each and every film, poking and prodding them into a more coherent product.

But I digress-- as I mentioned before, this is one of the few films from Franco's filmography that doesn't hold a total reliance on context to be a great film. Aside from the literal content of the film, much of the greatness of the film comes from it's aesthetics; specifically it's visuals and it's soundtrack. As I've already mentioned, Franco uses Manfred Mann's music more than dialogue, his tight, trippy, psychedelic jazz stylings providing a route for the fractured narrative to follow-- this music is passion. And of course, what good would a European Genre Film be without striking visuals? It was 1969 and the peak of modern interiors are on display here, including a couple scenes shot inside Carlo Ponti's styled-up-to-the-minute house! Many of the party scenes wouldn't look particularly out of place in a Radley Metzger film, something rare for Franco seeing as his interiors are generally far more sparse.

There are a few bits of post-production that provide temporary "surrealistic" touches to the film in particularly pivotal moments of the film. In decided how potent these effects are, it's best to examine the film, once again, from both the personal and public points of view: If viewed strictly as a Franco film, these surrealistic events violate the fractured realism that seems to be driving the narrative (as Franco himself points out in an interview), however, viewing the film in the context of a "public" film (as an example of European Genre Cinema), it works fine, and is handled subtly even. The special effects are not heavy handed, serving only to highlight the intensity of the moments on display.

In conclusion, Venus in Furs remains a brilliant film, whether taken as a microcosmic view into the wild world of director Jess Franco or as a prime example of European Genre Cinema, exploding with creativity and style.

The Website is Up!

2008-01-12T16:08:00.001-08:00

So, I have to head off to work shortly so I will add more details to this later, but for now all that needs to be said is:

To explain my month-long almost-absence:

THE ESOTIKA WEBSITE IS UP!

LOST IN NEW YORK (JEAN ROLLIN, 1989)

2007-12-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

Jean Rollin was always after the idea of a personal cinema, but circumstance most often forced him into the confines of genre cinema. Luckily for Rollin, most genre tropes were congruent with his ideas about cinema, being utterly influence by le fantastique and the serial films of Louis Feuillade. He is primarily known as a director of "erotic vampire films," and it is under this title that a majority of his films continue to be sold as.

The problem with this route, and the problem with the requirements Rollin often had to meet for his producers, is that Jean Rollin films are really not just "erotic vampire films." They are tried and true examples of the "personal, poetic" cinema that is rarely encountered outside of the film poems of the avant-garde from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. After a series of failures in attempting to get new projects off the ground in the mid-80s, Rollin made one of his most personal films yet, and, as Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill argue in Immoral Tales, "a final salute to his twenty five year struggle to find a place of his own inside the commercial film world."

The film came about when a producer asked Rollin to shoot some street scenes of New York for a film he was working on. Rollin agreed to go, and ended up shooting a small amount of footage with two actresses for a film of his own. The film it self is structured with these New York scenes at the core, within the frame of an elderly woman relating her tale of encountering a mysterious young girl as a child, the two of them escaping into the dream world of New York by way of a magical moon goddess statue and their love of each other.

The film is really remarkably sentimental, in a way that is both compulsively entertaining and remarkably honest. When the two girls first meet they end up in the rafters of an old barn, clutching the moon goddess and pouring over images in a book, their imaginations transporting themselves into the images. In a remarkable sequence, as the camera lingers over a vast array of images from the covers of old fantastique serial novels, the two girls throw themselves into both the images on screen, and, as the narrator tells us, into a veritable history of cinema itself, including everything from specific scenes in Citizen Kane to the empty unseen off screen areas of Rollin's own films. It's a remarkably intertextual and self-referential scene, the universe of the film exists both in the real world (signified by the declaration that these girls are finding themselves inside of FILMS), but also in the cinematic world (as they are actually in these filmic constructions); the reality of the two merge into one fantastic universe that is ripe for exploration.

Within the scenes shot in New York, Rollin reveals an utterly exploratory eye, the camera lingering up and down the tall city-scapes, the girls wandering through the classically adventurous locations of New York, skylines, China town, piers. This is yet another example of Rollin clashing the real world with the cinematic world into a single construct, the archetypal nature of Chinatown, with it's "lingering shadows of Fu Manchu" is nothing but a fictional construct, but the construct is forced into the literal location that the camera depicts.

The girls, the narration tells us, are playing a game of hide and seek in New York, spending their time searching for each other and encountering the spirits of the night, including a rather comatose vampire who one of the girls gladly opens her neckline to. Even the soundtrack helps to permeate the oneiric atmosphere, the heavy use of Casio keyboard voices both planting the film firmly in the late 80s while also perfectly emphasizing the sentimentality of the two girls.

The film is really built upon series of juxtapositions; Rollin's ever-beloved beach with the streets of New York, the cinematic world with the real world, timelessness and memory with a specific sense of time and longing, the young girls of the film's adventures and the two old women who reunite on the beach. It's a film that bears Jean Rollin's unmistakable mark, and it becomes clear, as he reveals himself through revisiting the themes that have come up again and again throughout his filmography, that this sentimentality that has always perked through the larger narratives of his career is really what's driving him. And his honesty is beautiful.

I have to wonder, however, how the film would be received by a viewer unfamiliar with the rest of Rollin's works. It's a point of discussion that I've had to encounter over the years as I become further and further engrossed into the filmographies of many of the directors that I hold dear to my heart (specifically Rollin, who we are discussing here, and Jess Franco, as well as many other directors that exemplify the Esotika "genre"). Like with the films of Jess Franco, a Rollin film becomes more and more accessible and understandable the more familiar you are with the director's entire body of work. Many of Rollin's themes that he addresses over and over again remain fairly obtuse and sometimes obscure without special attention paid, and the sentimentality is something that would undoubtedly seem remarkably out of place to a first time viewer.

It could possibly be argued that this reliance on context lessens the film, but to ignore the context of anything is a dangerous manner. I would argue that it is more responsible to view the films of both Jean Rollin and Jess Franco as part of a larger whole, their entire careers adding up to a single film experience that spans many decades. Of course, while it is obvious that the individual films become better within the context of the entire body of work, I still believe that films stand strong on their own; they are giddy, oneiric, personal films, and the resistance towards an easy, commercial reading makes the films far more worthwhile than a stereotypical piece of genre cinema.

A couple of notes:

1) I only have a VHS copy of Lost in New York, which is why there is only a single image in this post, and it's one I just snagged from the internet at that. I won't be able to pick up the Redemption DVD for a while, but if anybody would be so kind as to maybe take five or six screenshots for me to accompany the review I would really appreciate it.

2) Bob Monell was kind enough to send me a segment of Rollin's La Griffe d'Horus along with the film reviewed above. The segment is about five minutes long, and it has opening credits, but it ends abruptly after Harry Dickson shoots at the creature on the steps. Is the full 22 minute pilot circulating at all or are the five minutes that I've got the only thing that it's possible to track down?