Butterfly Moanin' (DUKE OF BURGUNDY and Faerie Bower Cinema)

DUKE OF BURGUNDY

(2014) Dir. Peter Strickland

"The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility." - Georges Batailles 

Emerging from its cocoon as a beautiful Shout Factory Blu-ray, Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy is a nod to the 60s erotic reveries of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, only without the vampires and knife-wielding sadists. Snaking forward in a steady hypnotic rhythm, it instead examines the BDSM head games played by a pair of lesbian lepidopterists living in a dream world where it's always autumn, men don't exist, and the Gothic architecture is ever-fecund with overgrowth. The beautiful dusky purples and oranges of the butterflies and lush Victorian interiors match the women's clothes and skin textures as they come and go along their whispered cloistered flight paths, an endless repetition wherein love may be hidden somewhere, but everything else needs a safe word. 

As a throwback to the 'Eurosleaze' genre, only without the sleaze, Duke's dreamlike mood is at once boring and fascinating, eros and thanatos inextricably linked. Like Franco's and Rollin's films, it's best seen while falling half asleep (which its slow pace is guaranteed to help with). It's less a forward marching phallic arc (and its post-orgasmic snooze) and more a repeated lullaby, or the same storybook read over and over to a child in its crib by the giant mommy goddess; the feeling of giant arms and a beaming loving face the size of a large stone idol (relative to our infant height) couple to the terror of being put down, and the lights turned off--but that terror maybe preferable to the suffocating feeling of that giant mom never putting us down at all. Wanting more of mom's love than one gets is as important as having it.

Chanting and ritual create a sense of tranquility by, amongst other things, driving the ego from the microphone of the mind by boring it into surrender. Once it realizes nobody is listening to its alarmist cries, that he's getting nothing from the crowd, like a dying comedian, he finally gives up the mic and vanishing from the room, the way a cigarette snuffs itself out once dropped in an empty bottle. For the ego to deliberately court this annihilation is the secret, spiritual core of masochism, at least on an intellectual / spiritual level! That's why spiritual warriors always accept ask for the most debasing job at the ashram, the one no one else wants. Submersion into 'group' mind, the giddy rush of rioting or delirious dance floor orgies, leads to a kind of open-hearted faith in the power of us vs. them--the trick of all effective cults. The mom's giant arms restored! 

Scarlet Empress, The

That kind of repetition is found best in the films of Josef Von Sternberg with their fetishistic veils, mirrors, and inert momentum; or the ritual hypnotism of Kenneth Anger; or--especially as its so clearly referenced in Strickland's film--the 1963 Stan Brakhage experimental minute-long Mothlight.

I'm a confirmed proponent of the masochistic gaze theory posited by Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro, so I knew what to look for in Darionioni Nuovo tremolare Strickland's Duke. That's good, otherwise I wouldn't have known my boredom was a valid artistic response. I would have just rolled my eyes and said "this sucks" like my poor girlfriend watching with me said. According to his interview in the Blu-ray extra, Pete Tombs (of Mondo Macabro fame), commissioned the film, wanting a remake of Lorna the Exorcist (a very long awaited Jess Franco title, for those who've learned to wait). Me, I've learned the only way to enjoy Franco (for me at least) is while alone at dusk, falling asleep in my easy chair as the sun sets. In all other ways, certainly as narrative, or any kind of genuine erotica, his films are not very good. But in the right half-asleep or nonjudgmental state, the alpha wave receptivity of deep relaxation or illness, they're genius.

Time and again I've found a masterpiece in the same place I found an unwatchable softcore piece of crap only days before. That place - Jess Franco. 

Here's an example: I recently screened Franco's SUCCUBUS (1967) for a bunch of half-asleep kids at a European horror film class. I hadn't realized just how sex-drenched it was until they shifted uncomfortably at their desks. They hated it. So I explained my secret to enjoying it: amnesia. 

The jet-setting European sixties swinger well knew of it, that mix of language and cultural barriers and the memory-damaging effects of booze and too many parties with too many lovers. When someone comes up to you and says hello again, you don't think they're gaslighting you, you think you were probably drunk or stoned and just don't remember them. So you play it cool, take the social cues their behavior offers, don't let them know you don't remember them, that would reflect badly on you, and alienate them. So you roll with it, trying to suss out what anecdotal facts you can.  

This can even extend to a strange woman climbing into your bed in the dead of night. Maybe she's your lover and you just forgot? Can't kick her out now - it would be so rude. After all, it's the 60s.

from Jess Franco's Succubus (1967)

Maybe we're even married! Best to play it cool and act like I know who she is, and am just playing I don't - add some meta layers on it. 

This viewing strategy ties in with the post-war modernist frisson born of French-speaking critics watching liberated Hollywood films sans dubbing or subtitles in the years immediately following the 1945 liberation, in the gap between Hollywood once again releasing films with French, German, Dutch, Italian, and probably Norwegian subtitles. Starved for film of any kind, French intellectuals made a game of not understanding anything that was going on in the plot. It allowed the critics the freedom from language's structuring of the images and sounds, leading to original conception of the phrase mise-en-scène. What is going on in a film when we can't speak its language? How does it still 'talk' to us, using imagery and sound alone?

Anyway, my Succubus exercise worked. The students imagined the character/s had amnesia and now they loved it. They 'got' it this time, the modernist frisson. That's the kind of magic Franco's (and Antonioni's) best films provide. They're meant for an international audience who needs a freedom from conventional semiotics. And within that anecdote lies the paradox of how a boring film can get better with repeat viewings, especially when your ego is shut off due to repetition or sleepiness (or drugs), or not knowing the language being spoken. We can't 'turn off' into hypnotic narrative when we don't know what's going on. We're free of the burden of interpretation, and the judgments that implies. 

That's the key to Franco, and maybe Strickland too. It's cinema aimed at the unconscious mind, the place where plots and dialogue never add up, and no one speaks in their actual voice, they're dubbed in way too many languages to ever do an 'original' language track In the end that's perhaps why Fritz Lang 'got' it, as did Welles, when most critics sneered at or ignored Franco's work, unable to see past the tawdriness and terrible dubbing. Both are valid responses, and indeed, may criss cross.

This was Europe in the 1960s-70s, the time of commercial jet travel opening all borders to well-dressed imports and varying strength X-rated inserts. Western Europe became the Capital of Amnesia and Babalon Working, a time when a producer, actor, and director may easily have no language in common other than that they all found in Antonioni's Blow-Up, and drugs and alcohol were ubiquitous and there was only one rule: don't say no to psychedelics offered at a groovy party and don't ever demand to go the ER if things get too hairy. When you can't remember how you got somewhere, or the walls are bleeding, or you wake up with a stranger in a strange bed, you can't make a big deal about it. If you freak out and go all egoically clutching for the handrails, you might end up in the sanitarium or prison; worse, you might draw attention to yourself as a square, a tourist, a rube, a wally, and get everyone arrested.

That's the one rule: if things get weird you can't wimp out. There is no safe word in swinging 1967. Ride the snake. And as the mannequins assemble for the sacrifice, presume that your unbridled arrogance will convince them that you're not the designated victim.

And masochistic cinema is really about that very same modernist frisson, the enslavement to the Other that finds true fulfillment only in dreams.

Dreams that they know will end.

For fans of Franco, or Von Sternberg's Dietrich films, the repetition is what cements the film into a favorite. Seen the first time it may be well unsatisfying, dull, irritating. Seen thirty times, it's the voice of a cherished mommy goddess and her absence, the absence that makes the presence bearable. We can want to see it again because we've seen it already.

I know the drill like the back of my molar. Like the older lady in Strickland's film, I--though no sadist--have been called onto to play one in a romantic tryst, many times, and always, each time it was really the verbal descriptions of what I would do--dictated by my lover in very specific details and then repeated in slight variations each time thereafter--that got them off. Experienced that way one realizes that, for most kinks, it's about the show, the whispered declarations of power vs. humiliation rather than the practice, which seems a trite gaudy and ridiculous (maybe I'm a prude?) But I like the JVS/Dietrich films as thye ascribe to the Gaylyn Studlar masochistic filmgoer theory vs. the Laura Mulvey sadistic proprietary male gaze theory, as Z sums it up:

"Where Mulvey views the female as having no power, in a masochist reading, the woman is powerful due to possessing what the male lacks, so pleasure is not gained by “mastery of the female but submission to her” (1985:782). This is in direct contrast to Mulvey’s view, which centres on voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia being a defense mechanism to castration anxiety." (Z- Mediated Musings)

Strickland understands these confusions of gaze; his film delves inwards to where the segmentation of a pupae abdomen circles into a set of winding fecund autumnal purple steps linking the look with the looked upon. Along with his post-giallo contemporaries, Strickland brings the modernist shiver of experimentalism into a head-on collision with the tenets of conventional narrative, letting their momentum derail each other and making something new from the train wreck, something that's neither formal/classical narrative nor avant garde/experimental, but a hybrid at once both invigorating and stultifying. In what could easily be the story of Mulvey and Studlar forever locked in a death/love staring contest, this wreck of a film shakes every pair bond to the core not through any particular eroticism but through the deconstruction of the kind of hermetic universe a loving couple creates within their shared space, a feeling of magic and second childhood, their honeymoon suite becoming an overgrown forest, a private world free of the constraints of time and outside responsibility. The stultifying comes once the outside has been ignored too long, the overgrowth chokes itself into mulch and dead leaves, leaving the stench of plant decay, what was once felt as protection and safety is now a prison, not through some shift of power, but through its own endless repetition.

In that and other senses of course it mirrors the fragmented masochistic obsessiveness of the films of Josef Von Sternberg (all those long slow meditative takes as Marlene walks around rooms, playing with this doll or that and shooting coy looks over her shoulder--as if stalling perpetually for time)--or even Bergman films like Persona (with the young boy in the experimental opening, trapped in the morgue as if reborn and tracing the blurry projection of Liv Ullman's jaw). And from there of course, The Ring and The Birds , i.e. Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child, i.e. the merging of the screen and the eye, the speakers and the ear, the dialogue between one's unconscious and conscious mind finally becoming audible; recognizing the monstrous absurdity of one's own masochistic sex fantasies once translated into action. (See Taming the Tittering Tourists).

Color coding, From Top: Lips of Blood (Rollin, 75); Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (Gantillon, 71); Cries and Whispers (Bergman, 72)

In short, from my own perspective, I don't see a Mulveyan fear of castration in cine-masochism at all in these Eurorotica time capsules- but rather a longing for it, a longing which underwrites my own theory behind the (straight) male's fascination with an all female or matriarchal world (ala Persona, The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay), one that doesn't 'include' the male figure or allow for even a projection of one's own gender based locus into the narrative. If a male figure somehow gets a toehold into this special universe, it's only as a eunuch servant, a blind man at the door who is not invited in, or an outmaneuvered future blood sacrifice ala Daughters of Darkness, the Blood-Spattered Bride, The Velvet Vampire, Girly and Vampyres.

This woman-centric film universe reflects the opposite of male-orgasm-based pornography, for the typical male sex fantasy doesn't last beyond the point of le petit mort. Men's sexuality, unless they are extraordinarily virile, dissipates immediately and drastically after orgasm; the fulfillment of the phallic hero's journey always ends in symbolic castration. This is why he begs and pleads but then, when there's no more barriers, hesitates; each orgasm is a sort of suicide, and the male knows it - once he's able to attain it, it comes too soon. The lesbian erotic scene, on the other hand, goes on and on, stopping time in its fairy tale tracks. There's no worry about premature ejaculations or flaccid impotence. The fairy bower's chthonic overgrowth ensnares and subdues narrative phallic linearity. It's something men just don't get to (or want to) see --we've already left the bed and headed for the kitchen to find a snack.

And so it is that these films show us a variation of sex we are, as single perspective organisms, forever denied in real life. We get to, in a sense, find out what our moms were like before we were born. It's something we'll just never know in real life, except through keyholes, screens (projections, paintings, pictures) dreams, and rebirth. In these films we finally understand, perhaps, why the patriarchy, the male gaze as per Mulvey, is so terrified of the female orgasm. I don't mean the little 'sneeze' or even the cherished involuntary vaginal contraction versions, but the one eternal female orgasm that comes later, and lasts forever, and increases and increases, feeding its own orgone energy flame until activating the alchemical awakening of the Kali destroyer / creator goddess. A withering force as devastating to the phallic tower as a great flood, is achieved; the male gaze is blinded in the flash, and not even Oedipus' stiff braille guide rope can help him find the door, let alone the keyhole.

Elsie Wright -w/ Cottingley Fairies

Rose Bower (Burne-Jones)

The lesbian fantasias of Franco and Rollin aren’t really meant for the chthonic dead end of fairy bower lesbian stasis, but they do draw on the same chthonic morass torpor, the way Antonioni draws on Monica Vitti’s beauty, or Fellini on circus pageantry or Welles on Welles – as a thing fulfilling in and of itself that precludes or prefigures egoic detachment from the mother. The sexuality of Fellini is--as in his best work-8 ½ and La Dolce Vita--exposed and recognized as infantile narcissism even while it's being indulged; Antonioni’s sexuality is like a dangerous ledge over the abyss and Welles’ balloon of titanic ego is inevitably punctured by the realization he can post-dub anyone in his films but a woman. Theirs are not the orgasm moments, the money shots, theirs are reminders that epiphanies, like male orgasms, are short and cheap and then life grinds on, oblivious. The trick with European reverie cinema is that this egoic puncturing never happens nor needs to. In a Rollin film, if a male character shows up who fancies himself the hunter-rescuer of the scene (as in one of Rollin’s endless string of jewel robbers) he’s peripheral --we’re invited to scorn him even as he tries to organize or tame the matriarchal nonlinear experimentalism of the hermetic female fairy bower. Like the forbidding father at the nursery he tries to shatter the fantasy of our total reunion with the mother, the memory of being an infant surrounded by gigantic adoring women, hearing their conversations as strange enigmatic words we do not understand, formatting the blank hard drive of self via the ebb and flow of mom’s attention. He tries to whip the women into linear order, but they of course devour him, like a phallic sandcastle in an incoming tide.

At this pre-egoic stage, we don’t identify ourselves as separate from mother and are therefore ‘female’ regardless of biological gender. The need to differentiate and establish oneself as male and separate from mom is a traumatizing initiation these films undo. Their drawback is their lack of dramatic arc, their inability to finish the initiation and begin journey. The butterfly motif in Duke is the ultimate irony - the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, flies off and dies (male linearity) but here, with these lesbian lepidopterists, the butterfly stays fixed in time, punned on the board, etherized on the fairy bower table– the life cycle interrupted at its peak moment...

My favorite game to play with babysitters in the 70s

Maybe I'm keen on this subject because as a child I was never very coordinated or confident on the kickball field (and hence always picked last for teams, a daily humiliation). I always just wanted to hang out with the girls; I was in love with girls in general, no real sexual desire had cohered along my polymorphic jouissance ley lines, but girls made me feel electric nonetheless. I despised boys on principle. I had one little brother and no sisters, which might explain some of it. When some girl's evil mom didn't approve of my attention, tried to force me outside into the mud with their wild obnoxious dirty foul-mouthed boys instead of upstairs with the girls it aggravated my delicate nerves. I hated those boys! The girls were pretty and sweet and I was enthralled. I also adored all my female babysitters, like they were giant idols; there were these three cool female cousins who coddled me all through my infancy, and then --boom, they weren't around anymore. Never having had a lot of physical affection from my (Swedish) mother after, say, five, I longed for three giant cute girls (relative to my size) and I didn't feel their protective young girl maternal energy again until stumbling on the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park (see my first film Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey)

Just the right size

As a child in the arms of a girl Alice size, I didn't need to exist, or get affection, or conquer any other phallic arc. I was, in other words, absorbed totally into the state of the passive masochist spectator. Of course this came back to haunt me later as I was often paralyzed when it came to busting the first move, afraid the girls I fancied would flutter away with some spiel about how 'I thought we were just friends.' And also the closer I got to said move the more my knees buckled and I felt I'd pass out. In short, sex and desire were too intense, I wanted to orbit the star, not crash into it - that was for the boys good at kickball.

Duke of Burgundy in a way operates on the same principle. The one hot sex scene is merely spoken, with the mistress struggling to keep her partner supplied with her custom-tailored erotic dom-sub fantasia. But again there's no ego formed, no linear thrust, which is why the film is so boring. But hey, that's part of the masochistic current, the Warholian love of boredom --the result of undoing the need for ego and therefore lacking a narrative arc to guide and hone in our focus the way a child's polymorphous perversity gradually 'settling' in a space beyond the narrative; the love of repetition and ritual (as in the repetitive alchemical rites in Anger's films). The oceanic experience, which the masochistic gaze in cinema mirrors, is the compromise against what the Studlar's theory of masochism admits from the beginning is hopelessly unattainable. To attain the male orgasm, or even to permit the male involvement, would break the spell.

The prince's kiss wakes us up from our dreamy slumber, the opiated medicines of the witch leading us to a sweet stasis which is broken by the kiss that whisks us back into space and time, for better and worse.

The ending is the same either way. Death is just the sign on the door through which the audience exits the theater into the lobby. The only way to avoid going in our out of that door is to become etherized, frozen and pinned to your seat. Either way, the cinema is the same; if you stay for the next show, prepare to be bored. The movie playing never changes. And its that element of inert sameness, the repetition, that works to make Duke of Burgundy both boring and artsy, maybe proves that calling something boring and artsy is redundant, and maybe it even proves that calling a film the realization of the insatiable appetite for repetition is to damn it with high praise, something only fellow post-giallo filmmakers like Helena and Bruno understand (as in the endless variations of the same scene in The Strange Color of your Body's Tears). But who likes it? Almost no one, for longer than 10 minutes at a crack. Still, in this inert symbolic re-death eroticism, Studlar's masochistic gaze is spot-welded to a Crash-style car and sent over a cliff into to the kind of Jungian ego annihilation, liberating the libidinal desires that formulate the structure of the differentiated self, which is really just a nice way of saying it's boring as fuck-all. Don't miss it. Oops you all ready did.

Amnesiac Cinema: THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) and SUCCUBUS (1968)

  "I would have preferred modernity. Here you move and everything squeaks."

The amnesiac occupies an understandably hallowed place in post-war European cinema, where endless language barriers, generation and gender gaps, entangled ancient and modern architecture, passport red tape, culture shock, changing politics (communist insurgencies etc) and class stratification work both for and against a sense of formed identity. In any European metropolis, if a woman wakes up and doesn't remember her own name or what she's supposed to be doing with her life she can still get by fairly easily. As long as she's not too old or young or unattractive, is reasonably cool, sexually casual, happens to be wearing decent clothes and doesn't have a tendency to panic when things get weird, she can spend whole European films comfortably navigating bedrooms and jobs without ever losing her uneasy sense of displacement, or we in the audience--or the character she meets--ever knowing she even has amnesia. Is she just a 'modern' woman? Do these people she's talking even really know her? Are we supposed to know? If we stand up in the theater and announce we're lost in the plot we're liable to be heckled as a petit-bourgeois square. It's the 'not knowing' that opens the way for the 'modernist' response so coveted by the art house cinemagoer. Once a Bazin-ist figures out the plot, he gets up and leaves.

And it's always a woman with this hidden amnesia. Guys would never hide it. They'd grab the whole movie by the lapels and demand it become a detective yarn, grabbing the first pretty girl they find and begging her to let them crash on their couch and be cared for like a broken winged bird. But women if they're hot, don't even need to grab the lapels or tell the guy the truth. What guy would really worry about getting to know her past? He'd just remake her into his mother, or a whore. Why bother finding out the difference? Thus girls are comfortable conveying a nowness, a lack of past we all want to believe is the same thing as 'spontaneity.'

So... I hate to ask, but is the main character in THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) trying to conceal that she doesn't know who she is or who anyone else is, or is she faking amnesia to avoid having to report possibly running over a child (she bumped her head as she ran over whatever she thinks she may have hit)? No one asks her anything specific as she navigates her way forward through her days; she's able to cruise through her Argentine town on auto-pilot. Everyone--servants, husband, landscapers, patients (she's a doctor)--preparing for her arrival and departure like no matter where she chooses to go she's been expected.
--

Unless it comes with a big forwarding narration or establishing title crawl (i.e. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") or is a sequel, we begin all films as amnesiacs (unless we've seen the movie before), so an amnesiac heroine can just seem... modern. It's also modern for her to actively resist interpretation, or labeling (She's more than just your whore, Charles!); it's as if she wanders into each new scene as if from the movie across the multiplex, and no one dares tell her she's in the wrong place. She resists our using her words and expressions to establish her identity and relationship to those around her. She stays neutral or 'surprising' so as to not admit she doesn't know the correct response to each new challenge. A man keeps bothering her, touching her, and if she doesn't know if its her husband, a lover, a brother, or just a pesky stalker, rather than dare ask she might just start loudly calling for attention, jumping up on a cafe table and trying to get him to sing. She doesn't dare ask who she is, as that would leave her vulnerable to their interpretation.

Anyone coming out of a long night or life of blackout drinking knows just how she feels. Wake up next to someone you don't know once or twice, and you'll 'get' what I mean.  You don't want to ask their names as that confirms you don't know them; it might seem prudish to ask if you had sex, or naive to ask if you used a condom, or dumb to ask where your pants are. Better to just sneak out while they're asleep.

The drawback to being so free of class distinctions here in the U.S. is that you can't just walk up to random people and start conversations and expect them to answer you and judge by your clothes and manner that you can be trusted; nor identify and expect to be taken care of by, a distinct indentured class (like the Argentine native-'Indian' population). Who do you choose to ask for directions when you're lost? What economic/class group are you in and which class are you comfortable exploiting? Can we ever be sure the person who approaches us and seems friendly won't in the end be just some homeless bum asking for money, or a psycho glommer, or a charming serial killer? If they act like our lover, maybe, they think, we're amnesiac enough to believe they are.

In THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the (possible) amnesiac is Veronica (Maria Onetto), a dentist in a small Argentine town. Wherever she goes people know just who she is, or seem to, and someone seems to be cleaning up her past behind her as she goes. Her amnesia begins when she hits her head on the roof of her car after running over... something-- either a dog or a small boy -- she can't trust herself to remember, and as the film goes on, we don't know what her game is. What first looks like a cop digging up bodies on the side of the road turns out to be a plumber digging up a clogged pipe; the droning dissonance of pop songs on the radio seem halfway to being haunting ghost voices in her head, they almost seem to accuse her. In one of the greatest scenes she hides out in a bathroom in the hospital and it takes awhile for her, and us, to realize the nurses barging in and kicking in the stalls are not after her. The only thing we do know: director-writer Lucretia Martel is a friggin' genius.

It helps to understand socialism and the much more enlightened way that doctors and dentists don't automatically get to be rich in places with truly socialized medicine. Argentina's doctors still make house calls and their hospitals have the kind of rundown institutionalized look we usually associate only with public high schools and prisons in this country. Frankly this how it should be, and having been there twice with my ex-wife, once before once after the economic collapse, I can vouch for the casual, physically affectionate way people relate to each other, based almost purely on signifiers of either the young intellectual class, which included doctors and dentists, the noveau riche (which most Argentines refer to simply as "gangsters") and the very poor, the local Indian class who here in the complex mise en scene of THE HEADLESS WOMEN have a kind of mystic spiritual omnipresence.

When looking for comparisons one must go to Russia, a huge cultural influence on the hip socialism of Argentina. Woody Allen's CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS covers similar ground but is a shrill Jerry Lewis face compared to the subtlety of Lucretia Martel, which is born of Chekhov. Argentina has a close relationship to Russia, to the point where many people are given Russian names (1), Russia is certainly a land of an illustrious but strange, violent past and the 'amnesia' of THE HEADLESS WOMAN recalls the mystery of Anastasia,  the black spots in Russia's history thanks to its various purges and Argentina's own 'Reign of Terror.'

To explain, I quote this passage from Suddenness May Happen's Adrian Bregazzi:

On 24th March 1976, a military junta under General Jorge Videla overthrew the Perón government in Argentina. On 19th May, Borges, Ernesto Sabato and other writers met with Videla, expressing their support for the overthrowing of the Perónista terrors, and for Videla's stating that "the development of culture is essential for the development of a Nation."

Between 1976 and 1983 an estimated 30,000 people were 'disappeared' by the Argentinian Dictatorship. On 15th December 1983, writer Sabato became president of the newly-formed National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, the government-established commission empowered to investigate the 'disappearance' of persons in Argentina over the previous 20 years.

In 2007, in his book “Cultural Amnesia”, (the now) Clive James published a personal diatribe against Borges, confiscating his years of creative work and judging him posthumously guilty of silence during the Dirty War of the Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983).

Not to get into the whole mess down there, as Martel's protagonist is so strange we're never quite sure if she even has amnesia. And I don't want to spoil the 'surprise' or lack thereof, let's just say that the openness of interpretation is key, because there are two ways to watch an amnesiac movie, and only one will give you pleasure, the other will make you feel 'left out'. If you assume the woman doesn't have amnesia, for example, the films listed here can seem distended, dull, unfocused, sort of like if you walk into an Antonioni film halfway through with a head full of sugar. If you bear in mind the amnesiac precept, you can get your mind kind of blown thinking about the world, language, cultural and gender barriers that separate us and make it relatively easy for a woman--or a country--to go through life with no sense of the past. And the best of both worlds is to have a protagonist who shares our foreign film culture shock in such a way as we never know which one of us really knows what's going on, and that's what ART is all about!


I first came to this conclusion watching SUCCUBUS (AKA NECRONOMICON), the 'Sensation of 67' a few years ago, who has a similarly amnesiac heroine, this one a nightclub performer who loses touch with reality and can't tell if she really is a sadistic killer or just plays one on stage:

Strange characters come up to her at the various soirees, seemingly thrilled to have found her at last, as if they've been looking and looking for Lorna since they last met. She merely stares at these interlopers blankly, not doubting what they say, but also not caring. In this context, the pick-up line, “Haven’t we met before?” takes on an extra creepy overtone. Anything that happened before the credits of the film--anything that we have not seen on-screen--does not exist for Lorna or for us. Thus relationships between Lorna and her lovers are always in flux. After her first performance, which is the first lengthy scene of the film, Lorna mysteriously appears at Mulligan’s (Jack Taylor) front door. He’s already in his bathrobe and when he answers, and seems to not remember who she is. As viewers, we can’t tell whether she’s just shown up uninvited like a stalker from the club or whether they in fact live together and are just playing a sexy game, or whether this is merely the result of language difficulties. Is he just hungover and doesn't trust his own memory? Is he used to inviting women to "come over later" and then forgetting who they even are? Or is he just, by default, unable to say no to a sure thing?




Whatever the real truth might be, the not-knowing works to both excite and disconcert. As the pair move playfully into the bedroom, we begin to think that maybe Lorna herself isn’t sure why she came there. Anyone who has ever tried to hide the fact that they don’t remember someone who knows them will relate. Is she taking advantage of his amnesia, or is he taking advantage of hers? Or is Franco's sporadically amateurish direction and the bad dubbing (2). In the cat and mouse game of who remembers what, it’s the being in the moment that counts, and Franco’s sense of the moment, and the erotic by extension, is very advanced—and perfectly suited to the world of jetsetting, booze-swilling, partner swapping glitterati of swingin’ ’67!

From there the film just keeps rolling back and forth through a haze of flashbacks, dreams and different countries. Lorna feels her way through events by the impulses coming from her unconscious, be they to seduce, kill or spout poetic monologues. She bears her amnesia close to the vest and in this way she is a perfect stand-in for the viewer, the "art film" viewer in particular, who may be forever wondering what's going on in the narrative themselves. We've all walked into the middle of a movie before, and had to instantly guess what was going on and who was what to who, people sshhh-ing us if we asked what was going on. So wither la Succubus? Is Franco a bad director with no vision, or is he a genius whose films improve on repeat viewings?” To paraphrase the stilted English dialog in the film: “What good would it do to freak out about amnesia when not knowing can be so pleasurable?”

(...) And of course, with the ancient architecture of Europe backing her up, Lorna’s amnesia stretches back far longer than her American counterparts: the amnesiacs in Memento and Mulholland Drive can only regress a little ways in their young, gaudy, pre-fab countrysides. Vertigo’s Carlotta Vance has to come from the pre-U.S., version of California, requiring long drives in Scottie’s car out to nationally preserved landmarks. Lorna’s European location allows for so much ancient architecture all around her that her amnesia can slide back through several centuries without much effort.





(More here: Time Travel for Amnesiacs: Succubus and the Moebius Love Strip)
 NOTES:
1. My Argentine ex-wife was given the Russian name Natacha, for example, and strangely enough, she looks a lot like the girl in the upper right of the top picture. 
2. Inevitably these 'international' productions are filmed MOS or with actors all speaking in their own languages, then for the dubbing the actors contribute to the language track of their native tongue, so Jack Taylor might contribute to the English track but not the French, while a French actress vice versa, etc.

Great Women of Horror: An Acidemic Top Ten

So many of the top horror film bloggers are women it's not even fair to just say 'it's your month, baby.' Because they rule! You got Tenebrous Kate, Stacie Ponder of Final Girl, the original as far as I'm concerned (she was my introduction to the world of blogging back in 2006), Jinx from Totally Jinxed, and the immortal Day of the Woman's BJ-C.  and others... but hey, Acidemic is always down to celebrate badass horror chicks! The below list doesn't include the more obvious choices I've already covered, such as Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn in SPIDER BABY (here) and Natasha Henstridge in SPECIES (read my big SPECIES / GHOSTS OF MARS piece here) or THE RING (here):

Nastassja Kinski in

CAT PEOPLE

1982 - Dir. Paul Schrader

A movie for the sweaty palmed thrill of waiting to meet what may be a new lover: the danger--heady and intoxicating--taking over and trumping all other states in the electoral college of the Electric Self. The sense of incredible longing coupled to intense anxiety about the hazards involved is one most teenagers get to know all too well, and I was worse than most, unaware that my relentless longing was not sexy to behold... How great then, a movie that champions sexual stasis? Nastassja Kinski is afraid to surrender because she knows she'll turn into a panther if she gets too excited, and won't turn back again until she kills someone. The touchingly open ending hints at the dawn of an inter-species love affair with the mix of sacral chakra-moving low synth beds and "See these eyes so blue / I could stare for a thousand years" from Bowie all letter perfect. I hummed that Bowie song all the way through the rest of high school. You can argue Lewton's 1942 original is better, but why bother? I've seen them both dozens of times and Kinski is so perfectly cast I swoon just thinking about it. Look at her up there, like the love child of Ingrid Bergman and a leopard, which is nearly true. Meanwhile Annette O'Toole is her perfect foil in the Jane Randolph spot: all-American, busty, good with animals, and sexually available as all hell to John Heard, who may not be perfect but is better in every way than dopey Kent Smith in the original. Jeeze, when Annette O'Toole is your back-up booty call, you know you're in clover. (see also - Blank like a Panther - Blu-ray Review)

2. tie -Alison Hayes / Dorothy Neumann

in THE UNDEAD

1957 Dir. Roger Corman

My favorite Corman movie. For sheer ballsy Halloween lunacy, nothing beats THE UNDEAD. The whole film feels like it was shot in sequence over one long night in a single empty soundstage full of black toxic mist (and it was!). Pamela Duncan is hypnotized to travel through the sea of time to her past lives, but she ends up derailing the scheme of things when she's able to whisper advice to her about-to-be-beheaded for witchcraft Middle Ages incarnation. Her prior self escapes the axe, and while her loyal suitor and the palace guards give chase, the hypnotist joins her in the past to try and correct the matter. I saw this when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment, Neumann the definitive witch (see photo top of post). She's a good witch, despite her crooked nose (putting to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly"), and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon.  Alison Hayes is awesome as the va-va-Voom-level hot 'real bad' witch with eyes on Pamela's man. And then the devil shows up! Sign the book, brother, and put this on real DVD... now!!! Do you hear?.... now.... now... now...

3. Susan Cabot in

THE WASP WOMAN

1959 - Dir. Roger Corman

I reviewed the entire Corman canon for Muze search engine back in '01 and as a result fell madly in love with Susan Cabot. WASP was her tour de force, but she was also featured in Corman's MACHINE GUN KELLY, VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA SERPENT, SORORITY GIRL and CARNIVAL ROCK. She's good in every damn one, but nowhere is she is awesome as when she's half-wasp half aging cosmetics line CEO, putting male chauvinist pig executives in their place by day, and by night injecting herself with a radically experimental wasp enzyme in order to restore her fading youth and save her company from going broke. Never before has vanity and heroism gone so well together and so wrong in results. Eccentric scientist Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark) first tries the serum on a cat, but when it later sprouts wings (hilarious knitted little puffs) and attacks him, Zinthrop realizes that hmmm, the formula might not be market ready. Unfortunately, he winds up hit by a car and struck with amnesia before he's able to warn Starlin of the ghastly side effects. Soon she's buzzing around the building at night, attacking and devouring her enemies and janitorial staff. Maybe her mask is the usual cheap ass Corman affair but it has a certain art nouveau parasol-eyed fabulousness, Corman's firing cylinders like all wick candles lit from the middle and ends at the same time; the film never lags - I like that it rarely leaves the office / lab, as if it's her hive, the queen working woman's field of battle and harvest, except for a trip to the emergency room (with a young Corman in a rare cameo as the doctor) which looks the same as everywhere else (the window overlooking the city is a photo that doesn't even bother trying to look real, which is awesome). What's admirably feminist about the film is how Starlin is portrayed as intelligent, powerful, and sympathetic and really comes alive when she's suddenly young, and the way her secretary (Corman regular Barbara Mourris) has a kind of maternal concern --Starlin never snaps at her or backstabs, they have all the tender rapport and chemistry, while the men are all condescending buffoons.

 

4. Lilyan Tashman in

MURDER BY THE CLOCK

1931

I'll defer to Amy Jeanne's sublime and trenchant vintage fashion blog, It'll Take the Snap out of your Garter, where I found the above picture:

Murder By The Clock (1931) is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. It was fantastically creepy in every way possible. Irving Pichel (a Harvard Graduate, no less!) plays a disturbingly deranged young man who gets 3 murders pinned on him. His mother refuses to leave him the family fortune and instead leaves it to her nephew, whose wife is the wonderful Lilyan Tashman! Lilyan was a complete evil BITCH in this movie and I loved every minute of it. She masterminds three murders including her husband and her lover. She also flirts shamelessly with the detective on the case and the deranged Irving.

Damn why ain't this on a decent DVD?

Anna May Wong in

THE DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON

1931

Wong is delectably beautiful, haunted and tormented as the late Fu Manchu's daughter, torn between loyalty to his dying demand for vengeance and her own wish to just be a fabulous dancer at posh clubs. Too bad her fate is pre-ordained. Fah Lo Suee would later be hit out of the park by Myrna Loy in MGM's THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1933). DAUGHTER is a much cheaper, lower key take on the character., but since I've already written about my love for Loy's sadistic rendition, I thought I'd cover the seductive and sensational Wong.  Naturally, despite her lack of experience, she takes to murder and torture as it's in her blood, and this includes acid in the face! Meanwhile it's delightful to watch some dumb, lovestruck Asian detective bend every rule on her behalf and ultimately get nowhere, conjuring complex racism. Alas, none of her plans goes off in time, and odious little Bramwell Fletcher escapes unharmed since she grows to .... ew! love him? That little pischer? Alas, there is no justice... for mighty Fu.

Kate Jackson in

SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

1973

Hey, whatever man. We all have our weaknesses, things we love because they hit a certain nostalgic longing, like our first tele-crush. For me, it's the booksmart sexy of Kate Jackson, and no film was as out of reach for my longing ten year-old brain than SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, which was always only shown in late-night reruns, before VCRs existed, so I could just read the blurb in TV Guide and feel my prepubescent mystique-ridden polymorphous jouissance entwine inwards in pre-sexual sexual frustration. Anyway, what fantasies I conjured up from that title! Cut from the same Aaron Spelling mold as Charlie's Angels (Cheryl Ladd's in the film too!), the same dry dirt bike L.A. exteriors, makeup trailers doubling as mansions, flat lighting, glistening teeth, 70's encounter group fad mentality, terrible taffeta scarfs and delectable hip-hugger jeans. I would not change it. If only there was a decent DVD dupe - but the terrible 16mm emulsion damage is I guess part of the charm.

Valerie Leon in

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

(1971) ****

The first time I saw this I fell madly in love with Valerie Leon. It also helped that I'd just read Bram Stoker's novella--The Jewel of the Seven Stars-- not knowing the film was actually based on said novella until about half-way through, and since the story is all deja vu and murderous spirits embodying beautiful women rising from the ashes to kill those who dared desecrate her tomb, et al, it was a perfect meta moment for me - what are the odds after all, that I'd read a super obscure Stoker story right before seeing this relatively obscure Hammer film? Could I in fact be the reincarnated Bram Stoker?

Anyway, it's not great, but what helps the rough stretches is that Leon's mod fashion choices are spot-on. I'm a sucker for the pale skin, black hair, black velvet choker look, which she rocks. I love her assured gutsy diction and voice (and the sly way she underplays recklessly in a double role, with that uniquely British sense sexy imperiousness (ala Diana Rigg) when she pretends to be or is Queen Tara; I love her weird rapport with James Villers as her evil archeologist confidante, and I love her sleepy bedroom eyes. Just look at that awesomely haughty ambivalence in her eyes above! In short, this movie was made for me, by Hammer, when I was just four years old. It was waiting all this time, like a long buried scroll, for the right writer (me) at the right age (now) to do it justice. It's like Leon even knows me, knows I'll be watching this film over and over over and over and over. Just as she "happens" to be given the Jewel of the Seven Stars on her birthday, when her body is ready to be inhabited by the ancient mummy who just happens to look identical to her, so too do I live and grow older just to bask in her rock and roll-meets-Emma Peel swagger, to savor the way her mere mod presence so intimidates and terrorizes a legion of B-list British character actors that they cease fumbling through old age postures, and die of fright or phantom animal attacks. "It was her--as large as life! She who has no name."

And what a gay bestie she has in James Villers, a swaggering wag who'd be right at home blackmailing Oscar Wilde after hooking him up with fancy boys at tea parties where the porcelain cups are just right. "I have guided these people towards my tomb," notes She who cannot be named -ah that makes sense. She knew even before Margaret Fuchs was born she was to be the "one" to re-inhabit. And even if that same decade would see this story remade dozens of times, in honor of lapsed copyright status of the Victorian Age, it all fits, like Leon's insanely perfect black nightgown (and a later pink one too - divine). Occupying the only two woman roles in the cast (aside from a museum or asylum assistant here and there with barely a line) she terrifies middle-aged British actors of no small talent or stature, the way no woman did before or since (until Mathilda May in LIFEFORCE). Ripping into the material that's still as fresh as it was a century ago, the ancient beautiful 'beyond good and evil' force swelling within her is so spot-on that even if she's dubbed by another actress (a not uncommon Hammer practice) it's a stand-up-and-cheer goddess that Ursula Andress could never pull off in SHE. 

Vanessa Howard is

GIRLY

(1970) Dir. Freddie Francis

Rocking the scoiopathic jailbait look, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil, her eyes alight in unholy mischief, in this horror comedy. Her legs are lovely, and always on display in mod skirts, including a beech-skin cowboy costume. Her straight blonde hair demarcates a princess and her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial dim fog of the green, brown, and all-grey English countryside.  She bites into her character with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin, though she'd assuredly bite off at least half your tongue..." (more here)

Ingrd Pitt in

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS

1970

The year 1970 was a very good year for horror movie women in England as it was a time of relaxed censorship standards, but not yet just softcore Maxim-style boredom. In other words, there was still the sizzle, and some of the steak too, with a high level of proper adhesion to narrative and atmosphere in addition to the sapphic nudity. The relaxed vibe of the sex fits Pitt's drowsy old European manner to a T-- her lapsing into jealous piques, her possessive European simplicity vs. the more refined Brit chicks she seduces - it's all of a piece. In the land of the repressed the libidinal hottie is queen.

Mabel Karr and Estella Blaine  in

DIABOLICAL DR. Z

1966 - Dir. Jess Franco

One is the daughter of a mad scientist, the other her robotic killer henchmen in a sexy see-through spiderweb bodysuit. When her dad dies of grief-- after receiving a dissing at the medical conference for his wild theories about turning criminals into robots--daughter Karr goes on a spree of revenge against those small-minded scientific sneerers. First she scars her face and burns a same-weight hitchhiker up in her car, to fake her own death. Don't ask why, either. I won't go into the nasty things she does to fake her own death, but let's just say she's not fucking around. A hot girl (Blaine) she first spied doing a web-dance seduction of a mannequin is then mind-melded using dad's technique into being a poison fingernail-wielding sexual assassin.  In other words, yes, it's typical Jess Franco 'storyline' torn from some lurid pulp magazine cover, but all Franco fans and detractors alike agree it's one of his most focused and inventive works, made back before he became a softcore quantity-over-quality art/hack. There's even a few actual tracking shots as opposed to his usual lazy zooms! And both women are luscious and stone cold creepy at the same time. As Michael Weldon would say: Essential viewing. Some unpleasant scenes of animals in tiny cages, and a lot of annoying beeping and buzzing in the brain burning scenes might keep it from being a hangover cure, but it's all just so damn weird you got to throw it a pass for any transgressions.

The Sorrows of Softcore are the Joys of Art: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER (1975, Andrzej ZulawskI)

The French love their neuromantic triangles. What's up with that? Well, I dated a Swiss-French lady and I can tell you; they love what they call a cinq à sept (like Cleo, it means from 5-7): a pre-set tryst with one's lover on the way between work and home for dinner. Participating in this convenient and marvelous alternative to a conventional relationship can ruin you for all other kinds, specifically the "I can't understand why you don't like my friends" American variety. The 5-7 is very, very French and variations can be seen in everything from Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu (1939) to Le Mepris (1968) up through to Last Tango in Paris (1970). Andrzej Zulawksi's third feature, the 1975 romantic tragedy, L'important c'est d'aimer ("The Important thing is to Love")  carries this torch of Gallic perversity with knowing references to all three of those aforementioned films, right up to having Georges Delerue do a kind of sequel to his unforgettable orchestral Le Mepris score. That's to say nothing of the film's intertextually ill-fated production of Richard III that centers the action, and off-the-cuff references to Miriam Hopkins (see: 'la reine de Menage a Trois').

In a career-capping self-reflexive performance along the lines of Norma Desmond's in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972), French actress Romy Schneider plays Nadine, a B-list French actress, hanging on by her nails in softcore (?) sex films. She can still look stunning in the right make-up and lighting, but Zulawski keeps her aging face ravaged by strange, pale, orange glows; we can see the lines of anguish in the corners of her eyes; gravity and the ravages of unfeeling exploitation film crews drag on her cheeks. Further, she's burdened by the knowledge that she'd still be neck-deep in a world of prostitution and smack addiction if not for the "Zorro-like" rescue of her otherwise ineffectual husband, Jacques, an autograph collecting cinephile played with intentionally irritating impishness-cum-starry-eyed self-loathing by sometimes-chanson singer Jacques Dutronc.

Joe Gillis en verso: Jacques rescued Nadine from the garage sale of aging female fallen idols, cleaned her up, and now stores her in amidst all his stacks of LPS, stills, and film books. The walls around his bright studio apartment are garish with Hollywood movie posters. It's the kind of pad that DVD collectors may recognize as approximate to their own, but in Zulawski's vision it carries a stale, empty, even claustrophobic ennui. It's the den of a consumer, not a creator. Reflected within the sad disconnect on Schneider's face and her husband's oblivious oppression, the posters become like prison walls; the gaze expanded into some approximate escapist aesthetic arrest is still male.

We see all this through the depth-focused eyes of handsome, ever-so-tortured photographer Servais (Fabio Testi), who falls for Nadine after he sneaks into her Eurosleaze film shoot on his way to shoot gay porn for his deceptively dapper smutmeister uncle, Mazelli (Claude Dauphin).

But Mazelli is the corrupt one, the purveyor, not the noble Servais, who's just paying off dad's gambling debts. Each a slave to desire on one side of the camera or the other, Servais and Nadine fall in love through the pain and emptiness they find in each others' eyes; they're bonded by their moral disgust and sense of self-degradation. They are two prudes inextricably immersed in the sleaze business, so they spend most of the film circling each other, bound by fidelity to their spouses -- a fidelity that is so un-French it needs special reasons to exist (Servias stole his current wife from another man who's since been drinking himself to death, etc.). Meanwhile Delerue throbs on the soundtrack like Contempt's kinkier younger brother, egging them on to the inevitable hook up.

Let us take a moment to remember that Paris (and Rome, as per The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone) has always been more cultured in the ways of non-marital, financially-rewarding love than America, and the figure of a houseboy/stud who depends on his looks and weak scruples for drug money needn't carry the same repellent currency it has in the States, where pretty rent boys are expected to suffer more operatically even than Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8. William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to name but three examples, all feel the need to censor their enjoyment of their special situation. They take the cash of their rich sponsors and no doubt provide certain services but the censors don't let us know what those services specifically are, and either way they aren't allowed to enjoy their positions and keep our sympathy. They have to squirm like every dollar hurts their pocket. Mon dieu! Les hypocrites!

Zulawski seems to be sending up this kind of self-loathing and torment with d'amier, albeit in a post-Sirkian way ala Almodovar or Fassbinder. There are also echoes of Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck in Servais in that both are pretty, relatively unspoiled punks clinging to the delusion that they can call the shots without any cash to back said shots up. Adrift in a midnight world of sordid desire, in love with the sadness he catches in the newer porn performer's faces, Servais would like to forget that he borrowed big bucks from Mazelli to co-finance a a performance of Richard III just so that Nadine can play Lady Anne. Ever the noble, he insists the producers not let her know he put up the money. Yawn-ement! But luckily for us, that's where Klaus Kinski enters, and cuts through la merde del martyr like a knife through water.

As with the other Zulawski films that have recently appeared in beautiful editions from Mondo Vision, L'important c'est d'aimer's style is form-fitted to the subtexts: voyeurism, cinema, the insanity that true art both requires and instills, and the spiritual purity of over-acting to the point of surrealism. The camera moves in an around actors, leering over their shoulders like a pesky reporter. Often, the actors seem to be trying to get away from Zulawski's camera, just to breathe. They don't really acknowledge the camera directly, but they feel it watching, like a starlet on set might ignore a leering gaffer. Who knows if this is what's happening? Is Zulawski deliberately annoying his actors to the point they're always about to storm out of the room? He'd still chase them.

Escape is futile.

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it for future generations, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving. Rabid foaming mouth hungry ghost insanity is yours no matter how much you eat. And that is why, for Zulawski, the image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed, and reversed back and forth atop, until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of these images, we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as smut make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of already dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the gritty, ugly, muddy soil and the leering gaffers who pat it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (on this rocklessness, structuralism doth build its church). Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get an orgy going!

The importance of Kinski has still yet to be fully gauged, there is yet no meter with which to measure it. So when he hears that the RICHARD III will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf. "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" That sounds like Franco, all right. Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only too numerous to measure (he was in Nymphocula too, whether it exists or not) but intrinsic to the genre. He's the crucified, screaming scarecrow at the crossroads between genius and insanity, art and exploitation, raving anger, and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair intellectual aesthete, half wild orangutan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde swirled together like soft serve. Somehow, when he does these low-rent high art 'man on a wire' flicks, his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage.

The sane, however, to judge by Zulawski's moping protagonists at any rate, remain permanently traumatized. They wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in Eurosleaze; they're despondent about their failure but Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare.

The key Richard III meta-scene is in act 1, scene 2, wherein Richard woos Lady Anne as she mourns by Edward's coffin. Romy's not putting it over too well, so the director asks her husband (Dutronc) to lie in the coffin, hoping Nadine will perhaps get some extra emotional punch from seeing him in there. Tellingly, Jacques comments during the five-minute break: "I thought I did pretty well, no?" And of course, he will do even better--and help Nadine even more--very soon, for real this time, as his cheerful disregard for the druggy emotional nakedness of real theater heralds his own 'real' death. His flippancy here is a punch-in-the-gut reminder to us viewers that we are standing on the sideline, watching other people act or sing and quietly judging them. We like to think we're secret kings who could do this all super well if we bothered to try. We hate to be reminded that we're just watchers in this world, already dead, looking up from our coffins at the faces weeping down on us. Cue Delerue!

It's that sense of sacrifice and death that makes up a woman's picture in the classic pre-code Hollywood version of the term: fantasias of women running up and down the pole of financial success via a series of men they've manipulated and ruined. Or they slavishly throw it all away on some handsome bounder with no bread. Or they fall from grace and sleep with everyone in sight, except the man they truly love -- he, this one man, alone, must stay a perfect memory, untouched by her corrosive caresses. On his side, however, that's crap. Why should he stay a virgin because she hates herself?

Thus, the ideal lover for such a weepy self-righteous martyr is dead and so can't cheat or steal or grow tired of said martyr's incessant sobbing. The dead lover is a lover whom no amount of licentious rubbing can denature. You can pine for him and think he was "the one" and hopefully, for your sake, he's not going to come groveling back from Hollywood in two years with gray hairs and gambling debts, wanting a "mommy" to make it right. And you, dolefully glancing at your one true love in the shadows, would probably take him back, because of your wedding vow.

Any less than three people in a marriage is a mockery of the Trinity.

Where Zulawski takes a self-reflexive step back from all this is with Jacques' possessive insecurity taking on a horrifically babyish form: he's being forced to admit he never learned to fight back or to "care" enough about the living, the people he knows (photos and film memorabilia are a different story). Take it from me, it's very difficult to know what to do, how to be graceful, when one is being cuckolded, or cuckolding, or breaking up a home. I've played all the parts once or twice over my romantic lifetime, and that's what Jacques doesn't quite realize --it's an act. I played the parts - the jealous old lover, the tactful new one, and the two-timer trying to oil the hinge between them - but they are interchangeable in the end. Nothing is real. Resorting to violence is pointless for any sensible or educated man, no matter how badly cuckolded, so all he can do is make snarky comments, bitter veiled threats, and--as I used to do -- spill wine on the other guy's stupid hippie sandals "accidentally."

Another thing you can do is just dig that it's about post-modern Baudrillard simulacrum deconstruction -- i.e. romance inside a mirror --but that doesn't make it any less painful.

In the end, Jacques offers a quietly unflattering portrait of a fan who hides behind images and record albums as if a mother's skirt, afraid to look life in the eye. Servais, on the other hand, is a photographer and Nadine a model; they actually create the images that Jacques worships. They feel validated by the act of leaving their mark for better or worse on eternity, superior to the consumers of the images they make, even if their destiny hangs by such abstract threads as an early morning edition theater review in the local paper. The critics! baisez tous les critiques stupides!

Meta-riches are to be found in this film's DVD packaging, which invites you to luxuriate in fine design and cultivate your inner collecteur as you watch a film that savages the collecteur instinct. Consider the image above, wherein Jacques waxes ecstatic over an old glossy of Miriam Hopkins while his ex-movie star wife languishes stoically next to him, leaving her left flank exposed to the sympathetic gaze of Servais on the right. Her hair pulled back to resemble Hopkins' in the photo, Nadine is radiating a docile calm which Jacques entirely misses, instead talking aloud as if to a rapt audience, announcing of the photo: "This one is going in the safe," indicating his preferred treatment (isolation) for all his pretty prizes. Poor Jacques!

But not poor Erich! I still have my memories and now, thanks to Mondo, a very cool DVD for the top row of my bookshelf--right next to Godard, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Romero, Argento y Fulci? N'cest pas? Do you feel my self-loathing? Ach, wohin ist Klaus Kinski!!! Klaus, kommen Sie hier, bitte! Wir verrotten in der Hölle ohne Ihre Verrücktheit!  

PS. 3/13/16-- Romy's name just turned up in a WWII documentary I was watching. As a kid she played with the high ranking Nazi's children as her mother was a big German star under the Goebbels-managed German cinema! I went back over this to figure out how to slide that bit in like I knew it all the time, but non. It's too perfect as is... though knowing this makes her defeated calm extra resonant