erotics of film

I have entered a new phase of deep personal inquiry and am reading up a storm and watching films regularly. I am further examining my interests around clothing and the body, why we wear what we wear, how we construct identities and love them out, functions of the body, the leaky body, the feminine body, erotisme and Bataille, sex and death, aging, paradoxes of existence, wreckage, psychic ruin, collapse, slippage, relationship, correspondence, and more.

The following are interesting films that offer me insights and expand these interconnected discourses. We are of course engaged in viewing, seeing, gazing, and staring. I begin with two films today, and will post subsequent writings about others in the coming days.

What is our role as a viewer?

I believe we are passive and also complicit in our watching, our voyeuristic role, the role we are assigned as film viewer, audience, the role we eagerly take up. Our arousal means everything, and in true Bataille fashion, we can be brought to a climax only to have that dashed or degraded by gruesome events or brutal realities that strip the veneer of erotics, love and all of our fantasies. We safely play these (and our own real ones) in our head or mind’s eye, yet, now while watching actors and actresses dress up and pretend, those understandings of love and pleasure are so cruelly abandoned, crushed, and trampled, and we are forced to reckon with how we too, achieve this in our own daily lives. We are enlightened, tickled, sensitized by the drama and its unfoldings; life is undressing before us, and we are mesmerized, even if we have seen or experienced this before; we are somehow prey to repeat views, gluttons for replay; we are not brought to a place of joy or ecstasy, but to an understanding of our humanness in al of its failure, leaks, and decay. Our excess becomes our ruin, our leaps over boundaries we have labeled taboo become traps we fall into.

The relationship between men and women and combinations of those are always flawed; unions become separations, and pairings become splits, like cells that multiply. It is that reproduction that becomes a simultaneous life and death, creation and destruction, which the medium of film embodies. The photograph and moving image are a kind of death and obituary; as soon as the identity is constructed, its twin, the actor or the model is split off, no longer needed and replaced by the gloss of a flat or projected image, whose life is enduring beyond the contaminated and sacred dirt of life’s tomb. There could be a contradiction to that thought. Perhaps, the subject lives beyond, is given a new life, a still, reflective one, where the eyes will never cease to shine, and the skin will always be soft. The subject will live on beyond the vertiginous margins of the image. A pseudo-eternal life is generated in exchange for the one it cancels, perhaps.
 

French film director, Catherine Breillat was recommended to me by a photographer friend. Breillat’s films are remarkable and powerful. Her newest film, her version of Blackbeard, was release last week in NYC, a story she says,  “is a metaphor about the tender and cruel relationship between men and women.”

In “Anatomie D’Enfer”, the lead subject of the film is a woman who challenges a man to “watch me where I am unwatchable" and to " just say what you see”. There are reversals and inversions of power, which merely cancel the sovereignty of either man or woman, neutralizing the potential for a dominant one. The male gaze undermined and celebrated, held up like an animal's severed head, becomes a force of a simultaneous rupture and construction of relationship, a triumph of nothing. A woman randomly picks up a man (or so we are led to believe) and convinces/teases/provokes him with various methods to watch her for a fee. We are confronted with the theme of presence and absence, hide and seek, play and life. He arrives at the predetermined destination of encounter at an an aggravating distance from the city, so both are removed from the eyes of others and society’s watch. Anything is possible, and almost immediately we are thrust into his ennui, and will continuously be exposed to the boredom that inevitably surfaces and replaces the excitement and power of a first look, a peek, or stolen stare.

Most of the story takes place in a stark, unadorned bedroom with simple furniture, bed, chair, dresser, visible bathroom, and a crucifix on the wall, a typical accessory for a European household. Though the man is exhibits an unwillingness, frustration, anger, and disinterest if not disgust, she says she can always hope for more. He makes no bones about feeling sickened by her, by her proposal, and by her body. We encounter Courbet’s image hauntingly gorgeous “The Origin of the World”, where we are at the point of entry and exit. Breillet exaggerates all associations we have gathered around a woman's most intimate nether parts to unfeathered, small birds in a nest, mouths open, wrinkled skin, large eye, randoms hairs that poke out, creatures that attract young boys trample or feed, or both.

Breillat's film launches into nothingness, brutality, and of course we are forced to witness Lacan’s mirroire. We see what we cannot see. Breillat dissects all the hateful and repulsive clichés, jokes, euphemisms, perceptions, visions, fantasies, taboos, and toxic language about women’s anatomy, identity, sexuality, role. She activates our human evolutionary link to primitive lifeforms, frogs, always slick and wet, poisonous to the touch, vulnerable, squishy, and attraction repulsion becomes impossibly paired and inseparable. Breillat observes and instigates Man’s desire to conquer nature, own it, toy with it, cease and seize it, always results in tragedy, thoughtful, gutless death with a smile. Batatille writes with vigor about how our self-loathing incites our self-wounding, and our nausea and laughter are responses to and symptoms of the same. Breillat depicts and studies a simultaneous horror and fascination women/girls may experience about men/boys and vice versa; these irreconcilable feelings are violent and separate and unify us. 

What is informe, soft, moist is hell. The horror of nothingness. There is a despair, a loneliness that is all enveloping. All of the tendencies to witness women as false, made up, fictional, alien, inhuman, cruel, unreal, unclean, putrid, lying, s(mothering), deceptive, thief, insatiable, a black hole, a void, a nothing surface and those are thrown back at use, at the man, and at the women. That she abandons the house and the constructed relationship and wanted more, rendered the woman “no longer human” to the man, and perhaps to us; “nothing can be done over again”. The bed becomes a shroud, an empty nest, a foaming sea of nothing, and the drowning ocean of memory where our identities float as endless ghosts of an erotic shipwreck, love’s lost, and only death consoles us.

Fassbinder’s  “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” is the story of a glamorous fashion designer who dominates and abuses her live-in girlfriend/assistant as she works to seduce and trap a younger girl, enliven herself and perhaps deter mortality, the destruction of her beauty by time, by dosing herself with the hormones and surges of blood that accompany an erotic life. She is filled with unrequited passion, longings, and unfulfilled desire. The story unfolds in a windowless claustrophobic one room apartment, where the bed is a stage for eating, sleeping, love, sex, communion, thinking, brooding, ritual, and even death. The bed is a site of tragedy, victory, joy, and dispair. From her bed/throne/pedestal/soapbox, Petra schemes and designs the fabric of her life; strategies become reality and her fantasy is the delicate thread she weaves. She undresses and dresses to try on different personae, working to find one that would attract and be most appealing to the object of her desire, and more beautiful to the eyes of the world who gaze upon her and await her next invention. We are riveted, too.

Bed/erotisme is where life is spawned and taken away, where dreams are had and crushed in one fell swoop. Bed is where we create and destroy ourselves, one another. Bed is where we communicate and dash hopes, stimulate desire and elevate fears; it is the locus of conversation and relationship. It is where we play, have sex, rest, and die. It is the center of the room, the center of our lives. Other objects and furniture such as dresses, shoes, dolls, mannequins, glass, mirrors, bags, tea sets, china, glassware, doors, walls, corners, closets  are active props, life’s furniture and accessories. The objects and our relationships to them form identities and alternate ones we can wear and parade like costumes; they are complicit collaborators, they fulfill the aims of the plot, they give and take, they offer images of life and take it away. “Beautiful things don’t last”, Petra warns. 

Suffering is as much a part of the erotics of our lives as the joy and sensuous contact we make, and people are fickle, they change, and they change again. The urgency of our feelings we encounter for one another are seething in Petra, who is so torn, and so desperate to love and be loved in return. We witness how reciprocity is severed, the claustrophobic nature of love as it quickly dissolves from affection and admiration into horror and rage. The film script admonishes, “You have to learn to love without demanding.” “One is alone with God.” And “You must have courage to believe.” 

The women-girls (Petra, her lover, the new lover, her friend, a second friend, her mother, and her daughter) are seen playing at life, mimicking relationships, fantasizing and writing their own story of life through and with one another; they build a life of the feminine. Men are excluded in the cycling of generations; they are mere conveniences or inconveniences; they are living wallets, names, providers, property owners, status symbols, a social tie or a living noose. The girls-women engage in ritual tea parties, dress up games, teasing one another, quarrelling, fussing, weeping, sobbing, caressing, grooming, drawing, dressing and undressing, typing, telling stories, gossiping, tidying, arranging, preparing something, reading, eating, drinking, sewing, playing records, dancing, chatting on the phone and making plans, and talking to mamma; these girl activities are inverted or upgraded to adult experiences, or shown as infantile and adult at the same time. Play is how we test out life as children and as adults; we practice the self we wish to construct and face the world with. The consequences of play/life are more dangerous, fatal, and flawed as adults, perhaps; meaning is more profound, disruptive, and deadly.

In Fassbinder's beautiful tableaux, a moving painting, photograph, and mirror, we experience and confront the nuances of horror and pleasure, the extremes of the feminine, identity, and aging. We witness the unformed, growing unwieldy virginal body and its queasy-making quasi-innocence of adolescence to the cultivated looks we construct to defy age's wreckage upon our visage, skin, smoothness, moistness, and availability. Fassbinder's long steady focus on the body's energetic shifts which surface as emotion, relationship, and futile ritualized activities we concoct to slow the progress and betrayals our mortality won't allow us to escape. He traps us in the room where we are conceived and die, where Petra conceives herself and dies.  

Dress and psychic adaptation are strategies to create and alter our perpetual human drama. The overlaps and interchangeable parts there are visible and unspoken truths we cannot deny. A women's identity splits and accesses realms beyond her biology; she navigates the murky depths of gender, identity politics, mortality, and her own raw humanity, which does not pair well with what society expects, determines, or promotes. These splits and woundings are prodded, irritated, and exacerbated by an awareness of  contradictions, perceptions, social codes and mores, and undone by the body’s fate which rests in its continuous discontinuity; a cycling of life-death, death-life. Once again the bed/body/ becomes a grave, an empty hole, where the folds reveal nothingness, and departure is freedom, movement, life.