Gustav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) & Ekstase (1933): Cinema’s Earliest Explorations of Women’s Sensuality

in Film | June 3rd, 2015

Czech cinema gained international acclaim in the 1960s with films like Closely Watched Trains (1966) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967) – movies that conflated the political with the sexual in ways that were as innovative as they were subversive. Much of the fuel of this New Wave of Czech film was the utter absurdity of the Communist rule and the horrors inflicted by the Nazis. Yet beneath that, there’s something within Czech culture that seems naturally skeptical of authority. Franz Kafka was a native of Prague, after all. And one of the most beloved books in the Czech language is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), a frequently hilarious satire on the idiocy of war.

The works of Czech filmmaker Gustav Machatý weren’t overtly political yet they were still very subversive. At a time when the battles for universal suffrage was still a recent memory, Machatý had the audacity to show women as sexually autonomous beings.

Born in Prague in 1901, Machatý went to Hollywood at a young age and reportedly apprenticed under D. W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim. When he returned to his home country, he started making movies.

Machatý’s third feature and final silent movie was Erotikon (1929), a story about a country girl seduced by an upper-class cad only to get pregnant and ostracized by her village. The film recalls F.W. Murnau in his emphasis on faces and his expressionistic use of the camera. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the scene above where the girl surrenders to her slick paramour and discovers sexual bliss. The camera spins around as she writhes on the bed. Showing female sexuality frankly was daring at that time. Women in movies by D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin were chaste and pure. They received male appetites, perhaps, but were not subject to animalistic urges themselves.

Four years later, Machatý went even further with his movie Ekstase (1933). Early in the movie, we see the luminously beautiful Hedy Lamarr skinny-dipping in a pond. When her horse runs off with her clothes, she run naked over hill and dale to catch it. A bit later in the movie, in a scene that recalls Erotikon, she has an earth-shattering orgasm thanks to the strapping young worker who finds her horse. Ekstase might not be the first non-pornographic film to have nude scenes but it was certainly one of the first. And it was definitely the first film to clearly show a female orgasm.

The movie was an international sensation. It received raves at the Venice Film Festival only to be denied a prize because the Vatican objected. Worse, it couldn’t get a proper release in the US. First Ekstase was seized by U.S. Customs as pornography. Then, when it finally cleared that hurdle, the movie ran afoul of Hollywood’s self-censoring Hays Code. Ekstase only managed to screen in a handful of independent theaters in 1940, seven years after it first came out.

Nonetheless, the notoriety of the movie turned Hedy Lamarr into a star and soon she was starring opposite Hollywood icons like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable. (And just in case you thought that Lamarr was just a pretty face, she also co-invented and patented technology during WWII that laid the groundwork for things like Wi-Fi.)

Machatý had less success. As the threat of Nazism loomed, he fled back to Hollywood and ended up being an uncredited director for such studio films as The Good Earth and Madame X. He spent the last part of his life teaching film at the Munich Film School before dying in 1963.

You can watch the entirety of Erotikon below:

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

David Bowie Launches His Acting Career in the Avant-Garde Play Pierrot in Turquoise (1967)

in Music, Theatre | June 2nd, 2015

We’ve posted plenty here from David Bowie the singer, which stands to reason, given his prominence in the set of all possible David Bowies. But rock-and-roll’s best-known shapeshifter has worked in other fields as well: a huge number of people love Bowie the singer, of course, but Bowie the actor has also accrued devoted fans of his own. Many continue to discover him through such “cult classic” films as Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Here, we’ve previously featured his turns alongside Ricky Gervais and as Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. Plenty of successful musicians start up high-profile side careers as actors, but Bowie the actor got his break before Bowie the singer did.

“With hindsight, you can see where his career was going,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, “but by 1967, the teenager’s first recording career had come to a halt after the release of his oddment Laughing Gnome after which, Bowie didn’t release a record for another two years.” Having studied under Lindsay Kemp, Bowie placed himself well to appear in the famed English mime’s 1967 production of Pierrot in Turquoise or, The Looking Glass Murders. Bowie didn’t just act in it, but also wrote and performed its music. You can watch several clips of a 1969 production of the show captured by Scottish television, including the songs “Columbine,” “The Mirror,” and “Threepenny Pierrot.” (This Youtube playlist rounds up all the Bowie music from the show available.)

As much work as the young Bowie took on for Pierrot in Turquoise, he didn’t star in it. The title role of the Commedia dell’Arte’s beloved sad clown went to Kemp himself, though in 1976, Bowie declared himself as playing it in his career as a whole, through all his various personae: “I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre. What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time.” So we perhaps can’t speak of “Bowie the singer” and “Bowie the actor” after all — if they were inseparable back then, surely they’ve always been. And if Ziggy Stardust (in whose concerts Kemp performed) doesn’t count as theatre, what does?

via Dangerous Minds

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch War and Peace: The Splendid, Epic Film Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Novel (1969)

in Film, Literature | June 2nd, 2015

There’s an old axiom that mediocre books make great movies and great books make for lousy movies. Mario Puzo’s bestseller The Godfather is a straightforward potboiler but Francis Ford Coppola spun it into one of the best films ever made. In contrast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has beguiled multiple ambitious, misguided filmmakers into making cinematic duds.

Hollywood’s 1956 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s famously massive tome War and Peace proved that axiom to be true. Director King Vidor, who generally speaking is no slouch when it comes to directing epics, just couldn’t translate the novel’s sweep and depth. Moreover, the film’s leads, Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, just seemed miscast. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther described the movie as “oddly mechanical and emotionally sterile.”

The movie was also an affront to Russian nationalism. After all, Tolstoy’s novel is not just another historical epic; it is a cultural lodestone for what is “Russian-ness.” It is, as Rosemary Edmonds, a translator of the 1963 edition of the book called, the “Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia.” The Soviet film industry couldn’t let some half-baked Hollywood flick end up being the sole cinematic adaptation of the book. Making an adaptation was, as a bunch of Soviet filmmakers wrote in an open letter, “a matter of honor for the Soviet cinema industry.”

After decades of making stolid propaganda pieces that more often than not involved tractors, the Soviet film industry was fired up to make a work that was faithful to Tolstoy and yet have artistic merit as a movie – a tall order. As the director and star of the Russian version of War and Peace, Sergei Bondarchuk, put it: “Our duty is to introduce the future viewer to the origins of sublime art, to make the innermost mysteries of the novel, War and Peace, visually tangible, to inform a feeling of fullness of life, of the joy of human experience.”

The Soviet government marshaled a staggering amount of effort and expense to realize this film. Never underestimate the will of a totalitarian dictatorship with an axe to grind. Production started in 1961 and lasted six years. More than forty different museums contributed costumes and set dressing to the production, including things like chandeliers, silverware and furniture. The Department of Agriculture contributed 900 horses. The Red Army had 12,000 troops play as extras during the climactic Battle of Borodino sequence. Bondarchuk suffered two near-fatal heart attacks during production.

All that money and effort paid off. The resulting movie was one of the most lavish, spectacular films ever made. And at 451 minutes, it’s also one of the longest. (It was released in the USSR as four separate movies.)

Along the way, Bondarchuk pulled off the impossible – the movie is actually good, mirroring the breadth and depth of the novel. War and Peace won all sorts of awards including an Oscar for Best Foreign language movie. As a young Roger Ebert raved back in 1969:

“War and Peace” is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and — yes — splendid movie. Perhaps that’s just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph.

You can watch the film above, thanks to Mosfilm. It comes complete with subtitles.

Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which you can also purchase online, is listed in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Hear Toni Morrison’s Poetic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on the Radical Power of Language (1993)

in Literature | June 2nd, 2015

Since her first novel, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison has dazzled readers with her commanding language—colloquial, magical, magisterial, even fanciful at times, but held firm to the earth by a commitment to history and an unsparing exploration of racism, sexual abuse, and violence. Reading Morrison can be an exhilarating experience, and a harrowing one. We never know where she is going to take us. But the journey for Morrison has never been one of escapism or art for art’s sake. In a 1981 interview, she once said, “the books I wanted to write could not be only, even merely, literary or I would defeat my purposes, defeat my audience.” As she put it then, “my work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why.”

She has sustained such a weighty mission not only with a love of language, but also with a critical understanding of its power—to seduce, to manipulate, confound, wound, twist, and kill. Which brings us to the recorded speech above, delivered in 1993 at her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature. After briefly thanking the Swedish Academy and her audience, she begins, “Fiction has never been entertainment for me.” Winding her speech around a parable of “an old woman, blind but wise,” Morrison illustrates the ways in which “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

Another kind of language takes flight, “surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.” In the folktale at the center of her speech, language is a bird, and the blind seer to whom it is presented gives us a choice: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

Language, she suggests, is in fact our only human power, and our responsibility. The consequences of its misuse we know all too well, and Morrison does not hesitate to name them. But she ends with a challenge for her audience, and for all of us, to take our own meager literary resources and put them to use in healing the damage done. You should listen to, and read, her entire speech, with its maze-like turns and folds. Near its end, the discursiveness flowers into exhortation, and—though she has said she dislikes having her work described thus—poetry. “Make up a story,” she says, “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”

We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly — once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Well-Tempered Clavier: Download an Open Version of J.S. Bach’s Masterpiece

in Music | June 2nd, 2015

<a href="http://music.kimiko-piano.com/album/bach-well-tempered-clavier-book-1">Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 by Kimiko Ishizaka</a>

In 2012, the Japanese-German classical musician Kimiko Ishizaka made available to the world an open version of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations performed on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial piano in Berlin. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the recording was released under a Creative Commons Zero license, which essentially put the music straight into the public domain.

Yesterday we discovered, thanks to one of our readers, Ishizaka’s follow-up to The Open Goldberg Variations — The Open Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Also Kickstarter-funded and released under a Creative Commons license, her new production puts 48 Preludes and Fugues into the commons. Explaining the importance of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Alexandre Prokoudine writes over at Libre Graphics World:

Among classical music connoisseurs, the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 (WTC, or “the 48” for short) is widely regarded as one of the most influential works by J.S. Bach. Here is why.

For a long time instruments used to be tuned in such intervals between notes that transposition (playing a melody in a key different from the originally intended one) usually produced a melody that was clearly out of tune. Finding the right intervals was an interesting mathematical problem to solve, and it was done in the 17th century by Andreas Werckmeister.

So while J.S. Bach didn’t invent well-tempered tuning, the 48 was his major, if not defining contribution to making it popular, as the 48 was pretty much The Music Theory Bible for generations of composers…

Historical value aside, the 48 is simply beautiful and elegantly sophisticated music (with score laid out in up to four voices, yet played by a single musician). If this is the first time you are listening to WTC, I officially envy you, because are about to discover something very special.

You can get the Open Well-Tempered Clavier as a free download here (please read the instructions on the page), or stream it above. You can also support the artist and purchase the download for a fee of your choice, or buy a CD version over on Amazon .

As for what you can expect from Kimiko Ishizaka next, look out for a recording of the Chopin Préludes on a Pleyel piano — the same piano Chopin played himself all those years ago.

The Open Goldberg Variations: J.S. Bach’s Masterpiece Free to Download

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recreate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

in Design, Magazines, Music | June 1st, 2015

Perform an internet search on the phrase “David Bowie Paper Doll” and what do you get? Hint: it’s not a cover of the Mills Brothers hit. David Bowie paper dolls are proliferating in astonishing numbers.

Sharpen your scissors and behold!

The most comprehensive career representation is the Thin White Paper Doll Cutout Heather Collett designed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (above). There’s even a printer friendly version for those who are serious about playing with Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust, Labyrinth’s Goblin King, and other Bowie alter egos.

But wait! There’s more…

Elusive designer Vodka Caramel’s Amazing 70’s Bowie Paper Doll celebrates some of our hero’s most glamorous looks, but saddles him with the crotch of a Ken doll and no fewer than four interchangeable heads! And we thought the Thin White Paper Doll’s crew socks were an indignity.

A Spanish fan observed Bowie’s 65th birthday by updating the abbreviated tighty whities of a notorious 1973 photo shoot to a modest pair of standard issue Y‑fronts. Interestingly, this paper doll’s suspendered Halloween Jack suit arrives with bulge intact.

Points to Serge Baeken above for recognizing the paper doll possibilities in the Pierrot costume Bowie sported in the video for 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes.” (Fun fact: Bowie made his theatrical debut—and wrote the music for—a bizarre 1968 pantomime about Pierrot.… His character’s name was “Cloud”)

Artist Claudia Varosio’s entry in the Bowie paper doll stakes could pass as illustrations for a 1970’s children’s book. Title? Boys Keep Swinging, after a cut from Bowie’s 1979 Lodger album. Chaste young girls would love the t‑shirted, non-threatening Bowie.

The comparatively conservative, full-faced Bowie above comes to us via Swedish family magazine Året Runt. I may never learn another word of Swedish, but thanks to David Bowie, I can now say paper doll (klippdockor). In appreciation, allow me to share another example of David Bowie klippdockor…

If it all starts seeming a bit rote, mix things up by having artist Mel Elliot’s paper doll Bowie swap duds with fellow pop star / style icon paper dolls, Beyonce, Debbie Harry, and Rihanna.

(image by Electric Sorbet)

There is only one David Bowie, but there can never be too many David Bowie paper dolls. Make your own today!

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Download the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

in Music | June 1st, 2015

“The best proof we have that life is good is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach,” writes J.M. Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year. “It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free.” While the respected novelist voiced that thought, as he often does, through a highly opinionated protagonist, I can’t help but suspect that author and character to some extent agree on this. Some of us discover Bach right away, in childhood; others do it much later. And whether or not we’ve earned or merited his music, it now comes to us more freely than ever.

Take, for example, Bach’s complete organ works, which you can download at no cost from Block M Records. Performing them all, we have University of Michigan’s Dr. James Kibbie — “on original baroque organs in Germany,” no less.

They’ve organized the collections, released under a Creative Commons license, into a complete catalog (that you can also search)—with downloadable groups (from trio sonatas and concerti to the Schübler Chorales and the Orgelbüchlein), as well as a list of evergreen familiar masterworks (such as the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and the Passacaglia in C Minor). They’ve made it easy to access and enjoy an important part of Bach’s wide, hugely influential, and endlessly enduring body of work. The question of whether life is ultimately good you’ll have to settle for yourself, but you can easily start gathering the evidence right here.

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebastian Bach (1962)

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explicit Poem “Please Master” and Loses His Job

in Current Affairs, Education, Poetry | June 1st, 2015

Image by Michiel Hendryckx.

Although the boundaries of what should pass for free speech in high school English classrooms will be forever in debate, most everyone would agree some boundaries must exist. But what of the speech of famous authors? Of towering figures of 20th century poetry? Should their speech be subject to review? What of an English teacher who allows the most risqué Beat poem you’ve ever heard to be read aloud in class by the poet himself, Allen Ginsberg, via an online video (perhaps this one)? Award-winning English teacher David Olio, a beloved 19-year veteran, did just that when a student asked to share Ginsberg’s ecstatic, and very explicit, poem “Please Master” with the class.

After complaints from several students, the school administration suspended Olio, then forced him to resign. Whether or not this decision was just is a debate that extends beyond the scope of this post. The variables are many, as Slate’s sympathetic Mark Joseph Stern admits, including the fact that Olio did not exactly prepare his students for what was to come, nor give them the opportunity to opt out. The high school seniors—on the threshold of adulthood and some already with one foot in college—may not have had their “emotional health” endangered, as Olio’s termination letter alleged, but it’s little wonder some of them found the material shocking.

Ginsberg’s poem, which you can hear him read above, describes a “fantasized sexual encounter between Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.” It is graphic, writes Stern, but “not obscene.” Instead—in its allusions to St. Teresa’s angelic visitation in a “profane description of anal sex as a nearly divine act”—Ginsberg’s poem is “dangerous because it juxtaposes tenderness with masochism; dangerous because it rapturously celebrates a vision of same-sex intimacy we are only supposed to whisper about.” Read the poem, listen to Ginsberg read it, and judge for yourself.

Of course, this is hardly the first time Ginsberg’s work has caused controversy. His Beat epic “Howl” (1955), with its sexually charged lines, irked the U.S. government, who seized copies of the poem and put its publisher, poet and City Lights’ bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on trial for obscenity. Well over sixty years later, Ferlinghetti has written in defense of David Olio. We can safely assume that Ginsberg, who died in 1997, also would approve. And while we have every right to be shocked by Ginsberg’s poem, or not, and find the decision to fire Olio warranted, or not, I tend to agree with Stern when he writes “if every English teacher were that enthusiastic about his subject, America would be a much more literate, educated and interesting place.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Gustav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) & Ekstase (1933): Cinema’s Earliest Explorations of Women’s Sensuality

David Bowie Launches His Acting Career in the Avant-Garde Play Pierrot in Turquoise (1967)

Watch War and Peace: The Splendid, Epic Film Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Novel (1969)

Hear Toni Morrison’s Poetic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on the Radical Power of Language (1993)

The Well-Tempered Clavier: Download an Open Version of J.S. Bach’s Masterpiece

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recreate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

Download the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explicit Poem “Please Master” and Loses His Job

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