In the pre-Code Hollywood era, between 1929 and 1934, women in American cinema took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers, and, in general, acted the way many think women only acted after 1968.
Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties-sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along: Greta Garbo, who turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale; and Norma Shearer, who succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. In their wake came a deluge of other complicated women-Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Mae West, to name a few. Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later.
Synthetic Pleasures (1995) is an exhilarating and disturbing exploration into the ways that human beings are using technology, from body piercing to bionics, to transform our environments, bodies and minds in search of pleasure that raises issues nobody today can afford to abort / retry / ignore.
'The Weimar Republic!' The 'divine decadence', cabaret scene, sexualization and 'the outsider as insider' of Germany 1919-1933 gave birth to some of fashion's most immediate signifiers. So WILKOMMEN to this Ultimate Fashion History special.
Paolo Pasolini´s Salo 120 Giornate di Sodoma is based on the book The 120 Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade. The story is in four segments, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood.
Director John Waters said "Salo is a beautiful film...it uses obscenity in an intelligent way...and it's about the pornography of power." The film was trying to present fascism in visionary terms rather than
as the logical or historical consequence of Sade. The viewer becomes complicit in the objectification of the human through the visual regime of the film. For this reason it is an anti-fascist film.
The tone of Pasolini polemic is “apocalyptic, not merely critical of Western society’s immorality, using sex in Salo as a metaphor for power relationships, after having taken the opposite position a few years before in his cinematic adaptations of The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974), where he depicts sexuality as a space of transgression and a vital rejoinder to every act of domination.
In conversation with University of Washington Professor of Sociology and relationship expert Dr. Pepper Schwartz, Emily Witt discusses her experience researching and writing the book Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love, about the complexities of romance, sex, and intimacy in the digital age.
Future Sex is an important work not as a futurist project, but as evidence of the contemporary changing roles of sexuality and (sub)socially sanctioned relationships. Witt connects these roles to the ubiquity of digital media and access to communities, representations and spaces of individual freedom, even if these are often pursued and participated in under paradigms of marketing, consumption, Information Technology, Power and more general definitions of emerging bourgeois self-identity.
What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation. Banned upon its release in the director’s homeland, the art-house smash WR is both whimsical and bold in its blending of politics and sexuality.
"A religious text written in stone"
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho, a town in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, located in Chhatarpur District, about 620 kilometres (385 mi) southeast of New Delhi, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. Khajuraho has the largest group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples, famous for their erotic sculptures.
The name Khajuraho, ancient "Kharjuravāhaka", is derived from the Sanskrit words kharjura = date palm and vāhaka = "one who carries". Locals living in the Khajuraho village always knew about and kept up the temples as best as they could. They were pointed out to the English in the late 19th century when the jungles had taken a toll on the monuments.In the 19th century, British engineer T.S. Burt arrived in the area, followed by General Alexander Cunningham. Cunningham put Khajuraho on the world map when he explored the site on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of India and described what he found in glowing terms. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is considered to be one of the "seven wonders" of India.
This 25 minute long film is about the mid-1970s British rubber fetish scene. It features a short clip of Sex Pistols Manager and clothing entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren. The film is made by John Samson. John Samson (1946 - 2004) was an extraordinary British filmmaker. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, as a teenager Samson moved to Paisley just outside of Glasgow where he remained for the formative years of his life. Resistant to the constraints of formal education, at 16 Samson left school and took on an apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards learning precision tool making in an engineering firm. Samson quickly became involved as a spokesperson in the first Glasgow apprentices' strike, helping organise visits by Glasgow apprentices to other shipyards in England in order to demonstrate solidarity across the British Isles.
Around this time Samson began to engage with the Anarchist movement, joining the Committee of 100 and participating in a number of Nuclear Disarmament protests including Holy Loch in 1961 where he was arrested with 350 others for demonstrating against the presence of a US nuclear submarine. In 1963, upon meeting his wife Linda who was studying painting at Glasgow School of Art at the time, Samson gave up his apprenticeship and fell in with a bohemian circle that included artists, writers and musicians. He taught himself guitar, took up stills photography and by the early 70s began to make films.
These experiences - Samson's working class roots, his passionate interest in radical politics and bohemia - fuelled what would turn out to be a life-long fascination with individuals and groups operating at the margins of society. If it is possible to pick up such a thing as a singular thematic or narrative running throughout Samson's films, then it is exactly this: his subjects are outsiders, people with unusual lives and obsessions, liminal figures who fail to square neatly with the normative models for identity and behaviour propagated by contemporary culture.
Evident from his very first film Charlie (1973), a 10 minute short film on the merit of which he was awarded a scholarship to the National Film School, Samson was an extremely compassionate filmmaker who never sought to exploit his unusual subjects. Instead he would immerse himself in their strange worlds; his keen eye teasing out motivations while never lacking a dry yet gentle good humour which helped him, above all, to make sense of each and every extraordinary existence he encountered.
Here the subject of fetishism in clothing - rubber, latex, leather - is explored. The film features Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols at the time at SEX, the boutique he ran with Vivien Westwood on the Kings Road. Central to the film is a magnificent studio set constructed mainly by Samson himself in the shape of the fetishist magazine Atomage with actual turning pages all populated by these amazing characters, dressed in thigh length leather boots and chains. The film was banned at the time by London Weekend Television, and has become one of those rare films more quoted than seen. Again, using revealing interviews on the motivation behind the protagonists' choices, Dressing for Pleasure won Outstanding Film Award at the London Film Festival that year. Recently it has toured the world as part of the Vivienne Westwood exhibition and has been an inspiration for many other films including Julian Temple's The Filth and the Fury (2000).
Dressing for Pleasure is an intimate, candid film about people with a rubber fetish. An interview with John Sutcliffe, the legendary clothing designer who also founded AtomAge, ‘a magazine for vinyl wearers’, is woven through the film, while blown-up pages from the magazine are used as a backdrop to the carefully composed scenes of participants parading their costumes. An interview with a shop assistant at Sex, the King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, one of the few places that openly sold latex and rubber wear, links fetish wear to the equally scandalous punk scene. There’s nothing deliberately sensational in Dressing for Pleasure, and what emerges is not a film about people into S&M, but a portrait of an alternative lifestyle that embraces pleasure without shame.
A Story of Pleasure and Promise is a joyful and surprising film, with colorful characters, exploring science, sexual liberation, ideological conflicts, and of course ... pleasure.
How, in 2011, can there still exist myths around female sexuality? How can an erotic region mysteriously identified as the “G spot” be known to all yet... only a few know its location, its physiology or the story of its discovery? How can the mere mention of this erogenous zone provoke such argument, doubt, and salacious laughter? This is an investigation into the heart of the fascinating world of scientific sexology, a close-up of the “G” zone.
