Saturday, September 04, 2010

Acidemic 6: Sex and the French / Now online!


"As Americans adrift in a consumerism-gone-wild simulacrum, we're so wrapped up in the chasing and desiring that fuels economic growth that even the 'actuality' of sex itself pales in comparison to the erection of consumerism, an erection which must always be rising and getting stiffer and is never allowed a final end-all release, until finally it collapses and Madoff goes to jail and we realize the erection was never ours, and were just getting f**ked the whole time."
"The idea of the soulmate penetrates the most cynical veneer, and Hollywood plays an essential role in sustaining this idea. More than providing spectators with a sense of social stability and meaning through narrative, Hollywood cinema supplies them with the ideology of romance."
"... a hair grabber that drags you around the muck and pushes your face into its world so far that -- and this is rare with such hard cinema -- you'll experience moments of such bizarre, hideous beauty that you're left significantly moved. "
"Sexual scenes aren't supposed to, on this side of the ocean, attract the audience. They represent a part of the life of the character that it is necessary to represent. They aren't meant to excite. Sexual excitation is linked to imagination..., Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature."
"Gilles Deleuze spoke about the emergence of a new kind of actor in the French New Wave--a mutant who becomes a detached observer rather than an active agent in their own stories...  Both Rivette and Rollin have a fascination for pulp novels, romantic literature, and the pulp serials of Feuillade, yet Rollins films are far less self-conscious. His films merge the intellectual and sensual in a way that the nouvelle vague rarely achieved."
"We associate the color white for virginity and purity, we also use it as as a symbol for absence, a tool of amnesia, so we can forget that red means the alchemical opening up of that purity into the raw bloody violence of procreation, and so be able to move onto what the third color of the French flag, blue, the color of the titular beard, represents: the cooling rescue of death--or rather as symbolized in the 'bloody chamber' where all the previous brides are stored--a suspended animation, a sleeping beauty stasis wherein the enslaving agonies of childbirth and old age are forever kept at bay. In short, the blue represents decadence, pleasure an disruption of the natural enslavement process of patriarchy."
PLUS!

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