Colby Keller Interview - 5-5-2011.mov

Smut Capital of America

Believe it or not, I wish I could get hold of this 15-minute documentary (now being shown at the Tribeca Film Festival) to show in our class April 21 or 28, cause this is just what we're going to be talking about.

Imitation Of Life Part 1/13

You can see Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life on YouTube--in 13 parts. Many consider it the greatest Hollywood melodrama of the sound era.

Imitation of Life (1959) - (Original Trailer)

All That Heaven Allows

"Life's parade at your fingertips." What is sadder than substituting television for passion with Rock Hudson down at the old mill?

All That Heaven Allows

Ron's debut at The Club, featuring the horrible Mona and the revolting Howard. Disaster ensues.

Love was not gentle with these two . . .

The trailer for All That Heaven Allows.

Check This Out

AA Bronson, who was part of an influential artists' collective, General Idea, has been in the headlines recently because he requested that his work be withdrawn from the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibition after David Wojnarowicz's "Fire in My Belly" video was removed. There's been a major retrospective of his work in Paris recently, and his contributions to art were recognized with a knighthood by French culture minister Frederic Mitterand.
Now Bronson has curated a series on Queer Cinema for the Museum of Modern Art, featuring some filmmakers we'll be looking at later in the semester: Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Scott Treleaven (and including Bronson's own film, with one of the greatest titles ever, Shut the Fuck Up). You can see some of it if you're in New York during spring break.

Queer Cinema from the Collection: Today and Yesterday

March 11–17, 2011

View related film screenings

In conjunction with the Museum’s current exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection, AA Bronson, an artist, writer, curator, and member of the artists’ group General Idea, curates a small and idiosyncratic selection of queer cinema and AIDS-related films and videos, drawn from and inspired by the Museum’s collection.

AA Bronson offers these thoughts about the program: “Toronto, February 17, 2011, 7:59 am: I am sitting at my computer, feeling rather jet-lagged, and anticipating my return flight to New York several hours from now. Let’s say I am feeling queer: I have just come from Paris, where a 25-year retrospective of General Idea brought huge lineups to the opening night. That exhibition circulates around ideas of queerness, and especially General Idea’s queerness, the means whereby we queered whatever we touched, including concepts of the artist, the audience, the museum, the media, and the work of art. I am even later than usual in providing this text, and I am not sure exactly what it is I want to say here. I know that I do not know, and that is already a kind of queering. The films and videos that I have chosen represent a loose narrative of my own history; there is a story to go with each one. The story begins in the mid-sixties, when I screened a double bill of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the School of Architecture where I was studying. Both films had been banned, and that was reason enough for me to present them, in a long evening that eventually became rather rowdy, ending in some sort of happening, with wet noodles and nudity. I include Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice for equally personal reasons: in 1970 a friend who was working at a film distribution house stole a copy of this soulful work, so moved was she by its beauty. We played it again and again in our rather cold and barren General Idea loft, stunned into (stoned) silence by its cold blue luminosity. Our loft was situated on the third floor of an old office building in the heart of the financial district of Toronto, and I remember that blue light flickering through the night, reflecting off the sea of desks that presented itself so mesmerizingly in the building facing ours. Each work in this series carries memories for me and perhaps I will be able to tell stories as we proceed. I have included one program of General Idea film and video, because those carry the most memories of all. And I begin with some new and younger talent, because as far as queerness goes, we are only just beginning.” All film descriptions are by AA Bronson.

---

Organized by AA Bronson, with Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Alfred Hitchcock Geek

Found a blog I didn't know before - check the list to the right for a link to Alfred Hitchcock Geek -- where Portland hipster Joel Gunz posts really insightful personal essays on Hitchcock's greatness, usually emphasizing the distinctive, charged atmosphere of sexual repression that makes them unique. Gunz gets it.

The More You Know . . .

Extracurricular Sex Toy Lesson Draws Rebuke at Northwestern
By JACQUES STEINBERG
March 3, 2011

The president of Northwestern University said Thursday that he was “troubled and disappointed” by a psychology professor’s decision to present his students last week with a demonstration outside class that featured a couple engaging in a live sex act using a prop.

The demonstration had been arranged by J. Michael Bailey, whose Human Sexuality class has an enrollment of nearly 600. On Feb. 21, after concluding a lecture at a university auditorium about sexual arousal, Professor Bailey brought onto the stage a man whom he had invited to participate in a discussion of “kinky people,” according to an e-mail the professor later sent to his students that was reprinted by The Daily Northwestern.

On the way to the stage, Professor Bailey wrote, the man, Ken Melvoin-Berg, the co-owner of a business called Weird Chicago Tours, “asked me whether it would be O.K. if one of the women with him demonstrated female ejaculation using equipment they had brought with them.”

After receiving what the professor called “explicit” warnings of what they were about to see, about 100 students watched as the woman was penetrated by the device.

Professor Bailey, who has taught at Northwestern for two decades, said in his e-mail that the presentation was part of an informal series of events — each “entirely optional” and “not covered on exams” — that had previously featured “a transsexual performer, two convicted sex offenders” and “a swinging couple.”

In his statement, Morton Schapiro, the university president, said: “Although the incident took place in an after-class session that students were not required to attend, and students were advised in advance, several times, of the explicit nature of the activity, I feel it represented extremely poor judgment on the part of our faculty member.”

Mr. Schapiro said the university would “investigate fully the specifics of this incident, and also clarify what constitutes appropriate pedagogy, both in this instance and in the future.”

In his e-mail to his class, Professor Bailey expressed no regrets.

“Student feedback for this event,” he said, “was uniformly positive.”

The Kinsey Institute

It would be hard to overestimate the impact of the Kinsey Reports, and the Kinsey Institute, on changes in American sexual morality and behavior in the past 70 years or so. However controversial some shifts of behavior and beliefs may appear to be, Kinsey's fundamental message seems to have prevailed: Sexual behavior is more diverse than is generally acknowledged, and there is some wisdom in considering what people actually do, rather than what they say think they ought to do.

Fortunately, the Kinsey Institute, which is still the target of ideological attacks, maintains a public-information website, where you can look up the specific findings of the Kinsey reports and look for opportunities to participate in ongoing research.

Private Romeo - Official Trailer

Significant--maybe. Way artsy--yeah, looks like. Unspeakably silly--'fraid so.

Happy Valentine's Day, cinema-sex fiends. Hope you found your Romeo or Juliet--in fact, why not try one of each?

"Monkey Nipples"

From today's New York Times: the paper's great film critic Manohla Dargis comments on the disappearance of really good sex from contemporary American films. Well worth reading as context for the whole of this course.

The Closing of the American Erotic

By MANOHLA DARGIS
February 12, 2011


Lenny Bruce used to ask why it was obscene to show sex in American movies but not violence. Fifty years later, our screens remain washed in red, with severed if not necessarily naked body parts. More than half of the mostly American titles that received R ratings last year contained some kind of violence (as in strong, bloody and “grisly bloody violence and torture”) while only a third had sexual content. No NC-17 ratings were handed out, which bar youngsters, the viewers the studios most lust after.

American filmmakers shy away from sex, 
especially the hot, sweaty kind

One film did receive an NC-17 last year, if only fleetingly: “Blue Valentine,” a bruising independent drama about a marriage that goes south starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. The scarlet letters were for what was vaguely described as “explicit sexual content,” words interpreted to mean that the ratings board had freaked out at the realism or perhaps intimacy of the sex, including an instance of oral sex and another scene in which the unhappy couple make uncomfortable, crushingly sad love. The movie’s combative distributor, Harvey Weinstein, successfully appealed the NC-17, and the rating was changed, without cuts, to an R (for its “strong graphic sexual content, language and a beating.”)

When I saw the original version of “Blue Valentine” at the Sundance Film Festival last year (the film was subsequently trimmed before it was rated), I wasn’t shocked by the sex — after all, it’s about two lovely young people who can’t keep their hands off each other — but I was startled. American characters — heterosexuals! — were having sex in a movie. Even at this pre-eminent independent festival, American filmmakers shy away from sex, especially the hot, sweaty kind. The old production code might have crumbled in the 1960s and couples can now share a bed, but the demure fade to black and the prudish pan — coitus interruptus via a crackling fire and underwear strewn across the floor — endures.

“this genuinely vile and disgusting Swedish meatball is 
pseudo-pornography at its ugliest and least titillating.”

The recent deaths of the actresses Lena Nyman and Maria Schneider were poignant, useful reminders that there was a time when Americans used to troop in droves to go watch serious or serious-enough movies, domestic and imported, in which sex mattered as much if not more than violence. Ms. Nyman, a theater student turned screen siren, starred in the notorious 1969 Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and its less popular sequel released three years later, “I Am Curious (Blue).” Ms. Schneider remains best known for holding her own, sometimes naked, against a more coy Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris,” the Bernardo Bertolucci landmark (and French-Italian coproduction) that forced audiences to regard butter in a new light much as Hitchcock’s “Psycho” had forced them to reconsider the shower.

After being banned and then cleared, “I Am Curious (Yellow)” opened to long lines and blockbuster business, reaping $5 million in six months. (Adjusted for inflation, that figure translates roughly into $35 million in today’s dollars.) The critics, professional and otherwise, staked out their turf: Writing for the defense in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it a “wise, serious, sometimes deadpannedly funny movie about the politics of life.” Opposed, Rex Reed fumed that “this genuinely vile and disgusting Swedish meatball is pseudo-pornography at its ugliest and least titillating.” Norman Mailer said it was “one of the most important pictures I have ever seen in my life.” Judith Crist just found it “pretentious.”

“This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made.” 

“I Am Curious (Yellow),” about a young woman (Ms. Nyman) investigating Swedish social and political mores, sometimes by pushing boundaries and making love al fresco, wasn’t the first sexually explicit movie to shake up American screens. In the 1950s and into the 1960s foreign-language stars like Brigitte Bardot, Hollywood directors like Otto Preminger and avant-garde filmmakers like Jack Smith did their part to ready the audience for the imminent sex-screen revolution. By the time “Last Tango in Paris” first played in New York in 1972, naked breasts and butts if not always penises had jiggled across screens and “porno chic” had turned Linda Lovelace into a household name. Forbidden topics, deeds and blue words had entered the mainstream: “Monkey nipples,” Richard Burton had announced in 1966 in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Seen now, “Last Tango in Paris” — which centers on strangers who become something else after having sex every which way in an empty apartment — scarcely seems the landmark it was heralded as, including by a breathless Pauline Kael: “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made.” What’s striking about the film, beyond that it was an American (X-rated and then R) hit, beyond Brando’s beauty and Ms. Schneider’s too-tender youth, is its blissfully unselfconscious sexism, its celebration of maudlin masculinity and warmed-over crazy chick clichés. If Ms. Schneider holds her own against Brando it’s largely because she’s at times full-frontal naked. This cinematic revolution was, like so much of art, built on the bared backs — among other fetishized body parts — of women.

At last, a film with sex and romance, pretty boys
and no Jennifer Aniston. 

The movies still exploit female bodies, though today American actresses working in the commercial mainstream rarely strip down past their undies. If they tend not to bare it all it isn’t because of feminist progress. Neo-Puritanism and the mainstreaming of pornography have played a role, as have corporate blockbusters aimed at teenage boys, with their sexless superheroes and disposable pretty women smiling on the sidelines. Mind you, there isn’t much for women to smile about when it comes to American film, where for the past few decades, the biggest hits have starred men in stories about and for men. Though every so often there is something for us too; after all, women helped make a success of “Brokeback Mountain” a few years ago. At last, a film with sex and romance, pretty boys and no Jennifer Aniston.

The Sheik (1921) - with Rudolph Valentino

The plot of The Sheik is very different from that of Our Modern Maidens, but the mixed message about women and sexuality is the same.
Lady Diana Mayo (Agnes Ayres) is admired for her independence, high spirit and modern ideas, but when she is kidnapped by an Arab sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan (Rudolph Valentino), she finds herself falling under the spell of his exotic masculinity. In the popular novel on which the film is based, Lady Diana learns to appreciate the sheik only after he takes her by force; in the film, he restrains himself and wins her with his consideration and respect for her. (When the film was re-released during the Code years, a scene of attempted rape had to be cut.)

Even so, the character of the sheik is recast for the film as the child of European parents, adopted by an Arab sheik; anti-miscegenation laws of the time would have precluded scenes suggesting romance and kisses between a European lady and an Arab man. The film was banned in Kansas City all the same.

The Sheik was crucial to Valentino's career as the greatest male sex symbol of the time--and created a huge backlash among American men, who boycotted the film and railed against the "effeminacy" of his screen image. He died at 31 in 1926, setting off a mass outpouring of grief among American women that was a significant moment in the history of Hollywood's power over the public imagination.

Our Modern Maidens - After the wedding

Right after the wedding, Billie discovers Kentucky in tears, and puts it all together: Kentucky is pregnant by Gil! She resolves to free Gil by pretending that she herself is a fallen woman.
Note the gay friend who comes forward, offering to stand by Billie when everyone else spurns her (at the end of this clip). As Vito Russo shows in The Celluloid Closet, such clearly gay characters--especially sympathetically portrayed, as here--virtually disappeared from Hollywood movies under the Code. Now, of course, they're a recognized convention.

Heiress Billie Brown, (Crawford), is engaged to marry her long-time sweetheart, budding diplomat, Gil Jordan, (Fairbanks). When Billie goes to see senior diplomat, Glenn Abbott, (La Rocque), about ensuring that Gil get a favorable assignment, Billie and Glenn are undeniably attracted to one another. Gil is likewise attracted to Kentucky Strafford, (Page), Billie's houseguest, who becomes pregnant by Gil. Gil finds that he loves Kentucky, but marries Billie instead. Once Gil finds that Billie really loves Glenn and Billie finds that Gil loves Kentucky, their marriage is annulled and both are paired up with the people they truly love.
-Wikipedia synopsis.

Our Modern Maidens - Billie and Glenn

When Glenn realizes Billie has been using him, he takes his revenge by pretending to believe she is as "modern" as she says, and then rejecting her. The scene exemplifies the great paradox of sexual innocence and seduction in Hollywood cinema: A woman is insulted if a man attempts to seduce her, and just as insulted if he doesn't want to.

Heiress Billie Brown, (Crawford), is engaged to marry her long-time sweetheart, budding diplomat, Gil Jordan, (Fairbanks). When Billie goes to see senior diplomat, Glenn Abbott, (La Rocque), about ensuring that Gil get a favorable assignment, Billie and Glenn are undeniably attracted to one another. Gil is likewise attracted to Kentucky Strafford, (Page), Billie's houseguest, who becomes pregnant by Gil. Gil finds that he loves Kentucky, but marries Billie instead. Once Gil finds that Billie really loves Glenn and Billie finds that Gil loves Kentucky, their marriage is annulled and both are paired up with the people they truly love.
-Wikipedia synopsis

Our Modern Maidens - The Seven 'Leven

The world depicted in Our Modern Maidens (1929) was collapsing even as the film was completing production--the Depression ended the era of flappers and college hijinks. Audiences soon lost their taste for stories of the carefree rich. And within a year of the introduction of sound in 1927, they would no longer go to silent pictures. (Our Modern Maidens was filmed without sound, music and sound effects being added later.)
The film's treatment of sexuality is typical of the period: The audience is teased with the image of a woman who is daring and "modern," and refuses to be bound by conventional morality. But of course it's a pose. The female lead can't be allowed to be a truly "bad" girl. Still, there are several elements that would never have gotten past the Code a few years later.

Heiress Billie Brown, (Joan Crawford), is engaged to marry her long-time sweetheart, budding diplomat, Gil Jordan, (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). When Billie goes to see senior diplomat, Glenn Abbott, (Rod La Rocque), about ensuring that Gil get a favorable assignment, Billie and Glenn are undeniably attracted to one another. Gil is likewise attracted to Kentucky Strafford, (Anita Page), Billie's houseguest, who becomes pregnant by Gil. Gil finds that he loves Kentucky, but marries Billie instead. Once Gil finds that Billie really loves Glenn and Billie finds that Gil loves Kentucky, their marriage is annulled and both are paired up with the people they truly love.
-Wikipedia synopsis

In this early scene, Billie sets out to fascinate Glenn because she believes he can advance her fiance Gil's diplomatic career.

Old Wives for New - Cecil B. DeMille, 1918

DeMille became famous making slightly provocative films about beautiful women and "modern" love affairs. In Old Wives for New, Charles Murdock feels trapped in an unhappy marriage. His wife Sophy has "let herself go" and takes no interest in the world beyond her home. On a camping trip he meets the fascinating Juliet Raeburn, a beautiful young self-made woman he feels is his true soulmate. When rumors circulate that Charles has found a lover, he throws suspicion upon a less reputable woman who has pursued him in order to spare Juliet from social disgrace.

A Kiss in the Tunnel - G. A. Smith, 1899

A Kiss in the Tunnel was made in Britain, not the US, but films circulated very widely internationally before the introduction of sound, and especially in the very early years, when French, British, Danish and Italian film-making practices strongly influence Americans. What's notable about this film is that it appears to be the first instance of using edits to give the viewer the sense of seeing into a private, hidden space--a technique that conveys obvious sexual metaphors.

Sandow - Edison Studio, 1894

Another early film displays the male form. Eugen Sandow is said to have been the first body-builder.

The Kiss - Edison Studio, 1896

One of the first short films to create a sensation. "The Kiss" allowed viewers across the country to view the climactic moment that had electrified audiences on the New York stage.

The Big Heat (1953)

Another film noir classic from Fritz Lang. In The Big Heat, Gloria Grahame is not a temptress--well, only a little, anyway. Instead, she's the gangster's girl with her own moral code. When she steps outside the gangster's influence, she's punished with shocking violence.

Scarlet Street (1945)

Another pairing of Fritz Lang as director with Edward G. Robinson as the "little man" who turns murderous under the influence of a temptress. Scarlet Street was considered so dark and sordid that it was actually banned in several American states and cities, despite passing the Code board.

Film Noir: The Woman in the Window

The German director Fritz Lang was a very direct link between the German expressionist films of the '20s and film noir. Lang claimed that he fled Germany immediately after Joseph Goebbels invited him to become the head of a nationalized film industry under Nazism. In the US, he directed some of the classics of noir. It's possible that the genre reflects the disillusionment of German refugees like Lang and Billy Wilder when they discovered the same struggles for power in the promised land of America that corrupted their native European world.
  In The Woman in the Window, a mild-mannered professor falls under a woman's spell and finds himself enmeshed in a web of criminality, deception, and homicide. (The professor is our friend Edward G. Robinson, Keyes in Double Indemnity.) Lang got around some of the strictures of the Code by framing the main action as a dream.
  (You can find the rest of the film on YouTube following this initial excerpt.)

More Film Noir - Maltese Falcon trailer

Come closer . . . I'm going to tell you an astounding story . . .

The Maltese Falcon is, like Double Indemnity, one of the sources and pillars of film noir as style and genre. Even in the trailer you can see another of the hallmarks of film noir: Deception, duplicity, lies, and deceit. The typical film noir not only appears cynical and "dark," it unravels a complex plot in which nothing is as it first appears. (This may be another reason why retrospective narration is common in film noir.)

At the heart of the mystery, spinning out webs of deceit, there always seems to be a woman.
Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaugnessy is one of the great deceitful femmes fatales of noir.

Sam: Was there any truth at all in that whole story?
Brigid: Some . . . not very much.

Film Noir

All Hollywood genres are significantly defined by their treatment of sexual themes and imagery. Musicals are traditionally built on fairy-tale romances and the display of women's bodies; the western often personifies the opposition between nature and culture as a complex heterosexual love story, troubled by an undercurrent of homosexual attraction.
   But film noir is an especially provocative case. Film noir plots are defined by their cynical view of corrupted heterosexual love, and by seductive female figures who betray male heroes--and arouse unsettling, ambivalent feelings in the audience. The dialogue in film noir is allusive and elliptical, and often comes across as more dirty-minded than any explicit depiction could be. The lighting characteristically suggests obscure forces lurking in the shadows. The world of film noir is steeped in fetishism: nothing is what it appears to be, and more importantly, nothing is as it should be. The prevailing moral order is both threatened and challenged by the eruption of desires that are usually repressed and unacknowledged. It's not a sunny picture.
   For our purposes, perhaps the most interesting aspect of film noir is that it constitutes a counter-tradition within Hollywood film: a self-conscious subversion of the image of American life that the studios generally sought to present. Central to that image is an abiding faith that men and women can find their deepest needs satisfied in romance, courtship and lasting marriage. Film noir proposes instead that sexuality is dangerous, unpredictable and often destructive.

A pretty good introduction to film noir can be found in the Wikipedia article on the topic.
A more extended treatment can be found at John and Stephanie Blaser's Film Noir Studies.

"There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff . . ."

Restrictions on what could be said in a Hollywood movie inspired dialogue dense with verbal irony--they know what they're talking about, we know what they're talking about -- but nobody's going to come out and say it. This creates a partnership between the characters that's subversive by its nature--and we collude in it.
(Billy Wilder wrote the script with the mystery writer Raymond Chandler--adapted from the extraordinary novel by James M. Cain.)

From silent-screen sirens to contemporary bromance, the movies have not only reflected Americans’ sexual mores, but also taught the public what to believe, denounce, and accept. This course examines the historical capacity of American cinema both to represent sexual norms and to subvert the idea of the normal, with particular emphasis on the profound historical and cultural influence of the Hollywood Production Code. Examples for study include representative works from genres such as melodrama, farce, film noir, horror and the western, as well as experimental, independent and adult film.

Course Objectives:

§     To identify and investigate the historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic issues in the representation of sex and sexuality in the American popular film tradition.

§     To develop skills in the critical analysis of cinema as art, formulating and exchanging original responses to cinematic works based on identification and consideration of significant cultural and aesthetic issues.

§     To develop appreciation of the key questions in critical approaches to mass art, especially the genre approach to cinema.

The topic of sex in cinema is not only controversial but often confusing, in ways that may reveal the perplexing relation of sexuality to the life of our culture. It signifies at least three things:

1)     The representation in cinema of all aspects of sexual life—from rituals of courtship to actual sexual practices—and the pleasures and anxieties society finds in these depictions.

2)     The place of cinema as a social institution in the social and cultural history of sex—for example, the status of film stars as role models and ideals; cinema as a factor in the history of adolescent sexuality; and the immense influence of the adult film industry.

3)     The special theses of depth psychology, especially the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, on the relation between cinema as fantasized experience and the libido in individuals—i.e., an understanding of cinema as a cultural institution built on a biological endowment of sexual instincts and a psychological foundation of sexual drives.

The particular areas of study and investigation in this course--aside from the pleasure of critically examining some great movies--are:

§     The social, historical, and economic factors in the development of the codes of representation in cinema, governing what may and may not be represented, and how it is to be interpreted.

§     Film genres as a crucial means by which cinema conveys ideas about sex, with special attention to the stock situations, settings, characters, and iconography associated with film genres.

§     The role of sexuality in a prominent but often despised mode of popular narrative and especially of American commercial film: melodrama.

§     And especially: the capacity of popular cinema (and media generally) to represent sexual norms—or more precisely, “the normal”—and just as characteristically and meaningfully, the subversion of the normal.

There is no official view of sex and sexuality in this course. All perspectives are welcome, and all minds should try to stay open.