A Monster Observatory: film

Showing posts with label film. Show all posts

Wednesday, 25 September 2013

Critical analysis of Kristeva's use of the Abject

Introduction

Definitions of the Abject

The cast off; the taboo; the unclean; filth

The excrescence: mucus, blood (especially menstrual), nails, urine, excrement, vomit

The uncanny; the corpse

The monstrous mother; the alien

A psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

“On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” (Kristeva)
"To each ego its object, to each superego its abject". (Kristeva)

Cultural Applications:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

Abject Art:

Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Kelly , Genesis P. Orridge, GG Allin, Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee , Kira O' Reilly. Joel Peter Witkin, Andres Serrano.

Whitney Museum of Abject Art (1993).

Outline of the Strengths and weaknesses

of the Kristeva's model of the Abject

Strengths

Appeals to universal sense of disgust when faced with body fluids and waste products

Explains popular cultural narrative of horror and misogyny

Builds on a tradition of psychoanalysis derived from Freud and Lacan

Appeals to the reality of violence against women and links with its psychosocial dimensions.

Relates to common patterns of encoding based on distinctions between clean and unclean

Creates an ambiguous and richly poetic metaphor for the sense limit and liminality

Outlines a conflict in gender between patriarchal signification and the female imaginary

Explains female oppression as an inability to cast off the internalization of the mother

Maps out an aesthetic and political category derived from both from psychoanalytic reading and corporeal differences

Establishes a widely- deployed key term to describe and organize an abject art movement

The Weaknesses

A fuzzy, confused and contradictory category is loosely sketched.

The psycho-analytic foundations have been superseded and discredited.

The psycho-analytic models appeal to an academic and professional cult rather than open enquiry

Tends to re-enforce horror and disgust rather than celebration of the open body (Bakhtin)

The abject category relies on a questionable notion of primary matricide

The explanatory model is grounded primarily in its application to avant-garde art

Rather than being actually or potentially emancipatory, the abject school of enquiry reproduces the script of exclusion and exploitation.‘Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you?’ (Spivak 1992: 62)

The mythological or aestheticizing approach displaces the actuality and singularity of lived bodily experience

It is unclear how affirmative or redemptive forms of the abject upstage and displace negative and destructive modes of abjection

As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks: ‘What are the cultural politics of application of the diagnostic taxonomy of the abject?’ (Spivak 1992: 55)

Dr Ian McCormick is the author of

The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences

(Quibble Academic, 2013)

Friday, 14 June 2013

Night of the Living Dead - Shakespeare and Romero

Night of the Living Dead. The power of the Zombie should not be underestimated. Just when you think they’re dead they’re coming back to life again. (Is the guy on the right a Nazi revivalist?)

Here be Monsters. Here be Money. Grotesque horror and gothic fiction sells because it plays to our deep concerns and insecurities. And, to put it crudely, it’s entertaining.

Since the beginning of modern gothic and horror fiction in the eighteenth-century critics have worried about its quality. For each spectator who wants to indulge in the cannibal feast of laughter there is another who wants to uncover the deeper meanings and ideological significance. The two spectators can seldom be reconciled in their different approaches.

It’s no secret that Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead plays well to the fashionable taste for the bizarre. He said that he was catering to a known taste at the time.

Perhaps an enduring aspect of its appeal was it ability to reflect deeper concerns about the outsider; racism; family relations; cannibalism and taboos; contagion and contamination; the parasitic vampire; the dead weight of the past preying on the present.

The return of the repressed is another formula, from the psychoanalytic field, that supports the re-incarnation of the living dead theme into the present.

Let’s admit that film too, as a technology based on spectres and animation, has always been at the forefront of projecting our unconscious onto gigantic screens. What the ego edits out, the Id-film projects back.

Clearly Night of the Living Dead is well suited to a variety of theoretical and ideological approaches. The notion that the film encapsulates a variety of gothic and grotesque themes which are cross-cultural and recurring across time also helps to explain its continuing appeal to new audiences.

But I often find that there is a resistance to more political interpretations (such as seeing horror films as a replay of grotesque war scenarios displaced onto the home territory – see below). Without speaking about any war in specific terms, the splatter and horror genres zoom in with grotesque effects on human aggression and violence.

With a budget of of $114,000 Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (NLD) went on to make $40m at the box office in 1961 and has since earned $291m. At first ten members of the production crew stumped up $600 each. It demonstrates admirably what a small group can accomplish where there is a will to succeed.

It’s now a free commons film and rose to be the Internet Archive’s second most downloaded film in 2010, with over 700,000 hits.

Research has show that the film emerged from an horror comedy co-written by John Russo and George A. Romero, with the catchy title Monster Flick. It is also no secret that the film was inspired by a horror/science fiction novel by Richard Matheson called I Am Legend (1954). The ‘vampiric’ novel dealt with a plague situated in a futuristic Los Angeles. In gothic writing there are few originals.

There is evidence that the dialogue was at times unscripted or improvised and that Duane Jones upgraded Ben Huss’s role in the film to make the character better educated like himself.

The final scene in which the black hero becomes an accidental victim is rather like a KKK lynch mob.

The notion that the film is open to political interpretation will always be open to question. That it is a comment on, or influenced by the war in Vietnam may also seem far-fetched. But I was intrigued to come across some interesting comments from Tom Savini, a special effects artist who worked on later Romero films:

"Some people die with one eye open and one eye half-closed, sometimes people die with smiles on their faces because the jaw is always slack. I incorporated the feeling of the stuff I saw in Vietnam into my work."

Savini worked on films such as Deathdream (1972) “in which a Vietnam MIA […] shows up alive on his family’s doorstep as a slowly disintegrating zombie-vampire.” (Skal: 308) and it has also been suggested that the film “oddly echoes Sticks and Bones (1972), in which a blinded soldier returns from Vietnam and ‘sees’ for the first time the monstrousness of his own family.” (Skal: 308-9)

The combination of death and humour “smiles on their faces” brings us to the notion that these films are grotesque, rather than pure horror.

Another recurring feature of the monstrous is the inability to kill it off. It keeps coming back.

Another feature of the monstrous and the grotesque is that it typically combines elements of the life-affirming and the life-denying; blindness and insight; the erotic and the dead (eros and thanatos); flowering and decaying; attraction and repulsion; the joke as frivolity and insecurity.

Is it time, perhaps to celebrate the negotiation of another opposition that plagues us: education and entertainment?

None of that is new, of course, as anyone who has watched Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or King Lear will know. G. Wilson Knight brilliantly explored Shakespeare characteristic use of grotesque comedy.

To deny the comic components in Shakespeare’s tragedies is to miss the point. Yorick was poor, for instance, but he was also, like Hamlet, a clown. Hamlet is a casebook on humour; from biting satire to practical jokes.

When I contemplate the work of the Bard, I’m thinking The Might of the Living Dead. Or, The Night of the Laughing Dead.

Do I see a re-make coming on ...


Titus at The Globe London

References

David J. Skal, (1993/2001) The Monster Show. Faber and Faber.

The Rise of Zombie Studies. Here.

Friday, 7 June 2013

Furry Freakery and Missing Links - Pastrana and Arbus

Hypertrichosis (sometimes popularly called the Ambras or Werewolf syndrome) refers to local or generalised (full body) instances of excessive hair growth

The famous Julia Pastrana was first exhibited in New York at the Gothic Hall on Broadway as ‘The Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman’ in 1854. Promoted and sensationally advertised as a bearded and hairy lady and as a missing link or 'Nonedescript' Julia Pastrana then toured Europe in the 1850s.

Her exploitation is undoubtedly shocking to modern sensibilities, but monstrous deformity of any kind was a means to make money in an era before state support was available. In 1857 she came to Britain from America and was popularly known as the baboon-woman, a kind of Darwinian missing link.

But her public displays did not end with her death; for she was to be mummified by her husband-manager. He continued to exhibit the corpse for several decades after her death.

The broader significance of the representations of Pastrana is discussed by Marlene Tromp and Karyn Valerius in the Introduction to Victorian Freaks The Social Context of Freakery in Britain:

"Where a discomfiting cultural disruption was already taking place—every novel, book of manners, and household guide was engaged in the struggle to define gender—the bearded woman seemed to underscore a radical instability of the norm. The narrator of the poem has no power against her; she is only contained by the uncertain chains. Clearly, her size and strength are metaphors for the danger—as well as the attraction—of boundary transgression. They reveal the allure and drama of the freak that

engaged the culture at large." (The Ohio State University Press, 2008, p.11)

Arthur Munby’s poem ‘Pastrana’is published below.

* * * * * *

For a different modern take on hypertrichosis see Steven Shainberg’s film Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus which features Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus and depicts her relation to the furry werewolf –like neighbour Lionel (recalling Stephan Bibrowsky’s role as ‘Lionel the Lion-faced man.’

The hairy character’s role hints at uninhibited sexual drive and the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming animal.’

Lion Faced Man - Stephan Bibrowski

More recently, Julia Pastrana’s story ‘sparked the imagination

of writer Rosie Garland, whose eventual novel

‘The Beast in All Her Loveliness’

won Mslexia’s competition for undiscovered women novelists.

She joins Jenni [BBC Woman’s Hour] to talk about the novel,

her interest in people on the margins, and about her alter-ego

Rosie Lugosi – the vampire queen cabaret act.’

BBC Recording of the interview.

Arthur Munby’s poem ‘Pastrana’ was published in 1909 in Relicta, his final collection of poems.

‘Pastrana’

’Twas a big black ape from over the sea,

And she sat on a branch of a walnut tree,

And grinn’d and sputter’d and gazed at me

As I stood on the grass below:

She sputter’d and grinn’d in a fearsome way,

And put out her tongue, which was long and grey,

And it hiss’d and curl’d and seem’d to say

‘Why do you stare at me so?’

Who could help staring? I, at least,

Had never set eyes on so strange a beast—

Such a monstrous birth of the teeming East,

Such an awkward ugly breed:

She had large red ears and a bright blue snout,

And her hairy limbs were firm and stout:

Yet still as I look’d I began to doubt

If she were an ape indeed.

Her ears were pointed, her snout was long;

Her yellow fangs were sharp and strong;

Her eyes—but surely I must be wrong,

For I certainly thought I saw

A singular look in those fierce brown eyes:

The look of a creature in disguise;

A look that gave me a strange surmise

And a thrill of shuddering awe.

But the ape still sat on that walnut bough;
And she swung to and fro, I scarce knew how,
First up in the tree, and then down below,
In a languid leisurely dance;
And she pluck’d the green fruit with her finger'd paws
And crush’d it whole in her savage jaws,
And look’d at me, as if for applause,
With a keen enquiring glance;

And she turn'd her head from side to side
With a satisfied air and a flutter of pride,
And gazed at herself, and fondly eyed
Her steel-bright collar and chain:
She seem’d as blithe as a bride full-drest,
While the strong cold steel, in its slight unrest,
Did jingle and gleam on her broad black breast
And under her shaggy mane.

But I must confess I was glad to see
That her chain was made fast to the walnut tree;
So she could not manage to get at me,
Were she ever so much inclined;
For I did not like, I scarce knew why,
That singular look in her bright brown eye;
It meant too much and it reach'd too high
To come of an apelike kind.

Perhaps she guess’d my thoughts and fears;
For she suddenly prick'd her large red ears,
And grinn'd with the grin of one who sneers,
And lifted her long rough arm,
And flung it about with a whirr and a wheel,
And scratch'd herself from head to heel
With a strength and vigour that made me feel
What power she had to harm.

There are very good reasons, we all know well,
Why an ape should claw its hairy fell;
But it seem’d to me I could surely tell,
By the grin on her hideous face,
That she did it to deepen my disgust,
And to make me think that she might and must
Be nothing higher nor more august
Than a brute of the simious race.

And, lest that proof should happen to fail,
She gave a blow like the blow of a flail
With the switchlike length of her muscular tail
To the branch whereon she sat:
The tail curl'd round it and gripp’d it tight:
And she flung herself off with all her might
And hung head downward, swinging as light
As a human acrobat.

So easily sway'd she, so easily swung,
You could see she was healthy and lively and young;
And she toss'd up her head, and her long grey tongue
Shot out, as it did before;
And she caught the bough with her brisk forepaws,
And loosed her tail and tighten'd her claws,
And swung herself up, with her chain in her jaws,
And sat in her place once more.

Oh then, what masterful airs she took!
She gnaw'd her chain with an elfish look,
Till the long links dripp’d and foam'd and shook,
Like the curb of a bridle-rein.
On either side of her rugged lips:
And I shudder'd and thrill'd to my finger tips,
When I saw she had bent and and flatten'd to strips
A piece of the massive chain.

Perhaps she would get at me, after all!
If the links should break, I might well feel small,
Young as I was, and strong and tall,
And blest with a human shape,
To see myself foil’d in that lonely place
By a desperate brute with a monstrous face,
And hugg’d to death in the foul embrace
Of a loathly angry ape.

For the ape was nearly as tall as a man;
So it seem'd to me the safest plan
To leave her at once, ere her wrath began
To spread from her glowing eyes
To the long sharp nails of her powerful hands;
For the Lex Talionis and its commands
Are just what the creature understands
And just what her passions prize.

But what had I done to rouse her wrath?
I had simply stepp’d from the garden path
On to the soft sweet aftermath
Of the lawnlike woodland green,
And had stood, like a rustic clown, agape
To study and stare at the fearful shape
Of the most uncouth outlandish ape
That ever mine eyes had seen.

Ah, perhaps that was the very thing!
She had never been used to communing
With man, who holds himself as king
Of the animals great and small:
She did not like my scrutiny;
And she meant to know the reason why
A human mortal such as I
Should trouble her state at all.

That was the reason I gave to myself
For the conduct strange of this angry elf.
As I put my doubts and fears on the shelf
And walk'd to my sumptuous inn,
Where I went upstairs and read and wrote.
And then came down to the table d’hôte
With a fresh white rose on my spotless coat.
And an appetite within.

Fifty people were seated there,
Taking their pleasure with solemn air;
Gentles and simples, ladies fair,
And some not fair though fine:
And all of them ate and drank with a will:
For each felt bound to take his fill.
As the long procession of dishes still
Invited them all to dine.

None of the fifty cared for me—
Nor for each other, that I could see:
Each of them felt exceeding free
To live for dinner alone;
And I too only look’d at my plate,
And thank'd my stars I was not too late
For that central portion of good white skate
Which I specially made my own.

But at last, we were weary of knives and forks,
And cloy'd with the popping of Rhinewine corks;
And the Oberkellner and all his works
Were seen with a languid eye;
We raised our heads, and look'd around
To see what guests mere Chance had found
To people our happy feeding ground
With a various company,

Ah, by the powers, a singular sight!
What is that lady opposite,
Sitting alone, with her back to the light,
Who has such wonderful hair?
She is comely and young? I do not know,
For her face shows dark in the evening glow;
But I wonder why she looks at me so,
And with such an elfish stare!

Sure, I remember those bright brown eyes?
And the self-same look that in them lies
I have seen already, with strange surprise,
This very afternoon;
Not in the face of a woman like this,
Who has human features, and lips to kiss.
But in one who can only splutter and hiss—
In the eyes of a grim baboon!

And what is that white metallic thing
That shines on her throat, like the gleam of a ring
Now sparkling out now vanishing
As her shaggy tresses move?
I have had but a pint of Heidenseck—
Yet I think of the collar and chain that deck
The broad black bosom and hairy neck
Of that monster in the grove!

Aye, and they rattle, indeed they do!
I look'd hurriedly round—it was all too true
That the folk were gone, save only two,
That silent dame, and I:
But a third appear’d—was there anything wrong?
For the Oberkellner tall and strong
On the parqueted floor came gliding along
With an air of mystery.

His face was pale, as if from fear;
And he stepp'd so softly, it seem’d quite clear
That the lady was not to see or hear
Whatever he had in charge:
Perhaps he had some sad news to say?
Perhaps her mind had given way,
And it was not safe to leave her all day
Untended and at large?

Whatever it were, with an anxious mind
He reach’d her seat, and stood behind;
While she, still gazing at me, seem'd blind
And deaf to all he did:
He raised his hands, and suddenly shed
Over her shoulders and over her head
A thick grey web, like a shroud for the dead;
And she sat there, closely hid.

She would have sprung to her feet in a trice—
She was no meek victim, bought with a price,
Ready and willing for sacrifice—
She would neither yield nor spare.
But the Oberkellner knew his part;
His grasp was firm, and he had no heart;
He pinion'd her arms, with accurate art,
To the back of her stout broad chair.

What did she do, in that shrouding sheath?
She tried to tear the web with her teeth—
I could see them snatch it from underneath—
And she strove to free her arms;
Then she raised her voice—and I must confess
It was not a voice to soothe and bless,
Nor such an one as is more or less
The best of a woman's charms.

No, ’twas a scream and a roar and a growl;
More like a cry of beasts that howl
Than the shriek of a startled human soul;
And it thrill’d me through and through;
For I thought, If she does contrive to get free,
She will fly at the Oberkellner and me;
And though I am nearly as strong as he,
She may prove a match for two!

But Fritz the waiter had heard that sound;
And he straight rush’d in with a spring and a bound,
And lifted my lady off the ground
With the aid of his artful chief;
She might roar and howl or scream and scold,
But he and the Oberkellner bold
Stuck to her chair, and kept fast hold,
To my very great relief.

As they carried her off, a cold damp sweat
Seized me all over; and yet, and yet,
I order'd my coffee and cigarette
As usual, in the hall;
And I did not even ask of Fritz
Whether the lady were subject to fits,
Or had gone quite mad and out of her wits:
I ask’d him nothing at all.

For in fact I dreaded to hear her tale;
That very word made me turn quite pale,
When I call’d to mind her long wild wail
Of anger and despair;
And my thoughts went back to the walnut tree,
And the creature who sat there and look'd at me
So fiercely, strangely, eagerly,
From under her shaggy hair.

The very next morning, I went away;
And I heard the Oberkellner say
(He had taken his tip, and wish’d me Good-day,
And he thought I could not hear)
I heard him say to that stern old Klaus,
Who keeps the keys of the garden-house,
‘Lassen Sie es nicht gehen hinaus—
Das schlechte schwarze Thier!’

Jan Bondeson devotes a chapter of his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities to the life story of Julia Pastrana.

Dr Ian McCormick is the author of The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences
(Quibble Academic, 2013)

Tuesday, 2 August 2011

The Two Jokers

The Joker takes many forms and shapes. Evil is a slippery business.

Let's briefly consider two jokers. The first is familiar from Batman and might be described as

the Clown Prince of Crime (or Chaos),
the Harlequin of Hate (Havoc),the Ace of Knaves

In combat he deploys poisons and explosives as well as comic weapons such as bladed playing cards. In many cases his victims die laughing, as a result of his Joker Venom

"a deadly poison that infects his victims with a ghoulish rictus grin as they die while laughing uncontrollably."

(The risus sardonicus is a sustained involuntary facial grin possibly caused by tetanus or strychnine.)

The other joker, and origin for the one familiar from Batman, is L'homme Qui Rit
(The Man Who Laughs, 1869) a novel by Victor Hugo, and a film of 1928.

The monster protagonist Gwynplaine has been disfigured in infancy by the comprachicos (child buyers/traders)

Let's end the blog with an image from the book and a quotation describing Gwynplaine

L'Homme Qui Rit.

BOOK THE SECOND. CHAPTER I.

WHEREIN WE SEE THE FACE OF HIM OF WHOM WE HAVE HITHERTO SEEN ONLY THE ACTS.

Nature had been prodigal of her kindness to Gwynplaine. She had bestowed on him a mouth opening to his ears, ears folding over to his eyes, a shapeless nose to support the spectacles of the grimace maker, and a face that no one could look upon without laughing.

We have just said that nature had loaded Gwynplaine with her gifts. But was it nature? Had she not been assisted?

Two slits for eyes, a hiatus for a mouth, a snub protuberance with two holes for nostrils, a flattened face, all having for the result an appearance of laughter; it is certain that nature never produces such perfection single-handed.

But is laughter a synonym of joy?

If, in the presence of this mountebank—for he was one—the first impression of gaiety wore off, and the man were observed with attention, traces of art were to be recognised. Such a face could never have been created by chance, it must have resulted from intention. Such perfect completeness is not in nature. Man can do nothing to create beauty, but everything to produce ugliness. A Hottentot profile cannot be changed into a Roman outline, but out of a Grecian nose you may make a Calmuck's. It only requires to obliterate the root of the nose, and to flatten the nostrils. The dog Latin of the middle ages had a reason for its creation of the verb denasare. Had Gwynplaine when a child been so worthy of attention that his face had been subjected to transmutation? Why not? Needed there a greater motive than the speculation of his future exhibition? According to all appearance, industrious manipulators of children had worked upon t his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious and probably occult science, which was to surgery what alchemy was to chemistry had chiseled his flesh, evidently at a very tender age, and manufactured his countenance with premeditation. That science, clever with the knife, skilled in obtusions and ligatures, had enlarged the mouth, cut away the lips, laid bare the gums, distended the ears, cut the cartilages, displaced the eyelids and the cheeks, enlarged the zygomatic muscle, pressed the scars and cicatrices to a level, turned back the skin over the lesions whilst the face was thus stretched, from all which resulted that powerful and profound piece of sculpture, the mask, Gwynplaine.

Ian McCormick's Blog No. 23

Dr Ian McCormick is the author of The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences
(Quibble Academic, 2013)