The Scheherazade-style comedy DANTE ISN’T JUST SEVERE (1967) dir. Joaquim Jorda & Jacinto Esteva started off as an anthology project involving five directors but most of the shorts became their own separate projects.
The stories were as follows:
BARCELONA 66 by Antoni de Senillosa Very little is known about this film as Senillosa retired from the project early on.
CARMEN by Pere Portabella This became NO COMPTEU AMB ELS DITS aka DON’T COUNT ON YOUR FINGERS (1967), a series of vignettes: some in live-action, some animated, some in colour, some in black and white.
LAS CINCO CARAS DEL CUBO (The Five Sides of the Cube) by Ricardo Bofill This became CIRCLES (1966), a demonstration of the type of dramatic exercises performed at the Taller de Arquitectura, centering around the interaction of bodies with geometric spaces. Bofill went on to make a feature-length film of a similar nature in ESQUIZO (1970).
LA CENICIENTA. UNA HISTORIA VERTICAL (Cinderella. A Vertical Story) by Jacinto Esteva. This story makes up the first half of DANTE. A playful fancy full of visual puns, haut-couture, and pop culture references. A woman meets her Principe Azul (Prince Charming) who is literally azul (blue).
+ x – by Joaquim Jorda. This story makes up the latter half of DANTE. The two main characters wake up from the dream and go to the beach. They recite chess moves, French poetry, and play with a clock suspended in space. It is implied that their relationship will fail.
DANTE ISN’T JUST SEVERE (1967) is bookended by an opening sequence involving Danish model Susan Holmquist frolicking in the woods and a closing sequence of her getting prepared for eye surgery.
I am thrilled to learn that Vinegar Syndrome is releasing a Blu-ray boxset of Camille Keaton’s Italian films. Keaton is most famous for starring in the rape-and-revenge film Day of the Woman (better known as I Spit on Your Grave). But before that film, she had a brief film career in Italy where she appeared in various strange films.
The first film Keaton acted in was Massimo Dallamano’s giallo What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), where she played the titular character. Her appearance in the film is brief but incredibly haunting and memorable. The film has been widely released around the world on VHS and DVD. A few years ago, Arrow Video released the film on Blu-ray.
The second film Keaton acted in was a medieval sex comedy Decameron II (1972), an unofficial sequel to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron (1970). Keaton plays in one of the stories as a heathen girl, in search of enlightenment, who traverses a desert to find a Christian hermit (really a charlatan) who wants to ‘put his Devil in her Hell’. Very soon after, the girl becomes obsessed with putting the Devil in Hell 24/7. This is a bizarre film with some surreal imagery. For example, when the girl is searching for the hermit, she must follow a trail of dung throughout the desert. I was actually reminded somewhat of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), with the whole premise of a ‘crazy nymphomaniac’ lost in a desolate wasteland. Decameron II is currently only available on a cropped VHS. The copy I saw was dubbed in Italian but apparently there exists an English dub. This film is not included in the upcoming boxset.
Another comedy Camille Keaton acted in was Oscar Brazzi’s Il gatto di Brooklyn aspirante detective (1973) starring Franco Franchi, Luigi Pistilli, Giovanni Petrucci, and Annabella Incontrera. This is sort of like an Italian Scooby-Doo style haunted house movie with slapstick gags and funny faces. Keaton plays a young woman who wants to turn a mansion into an orphanage. However, a group of rich people are against the plan and proceed to stage hauntings at the mansion, which Franchi and Pistilli must investigate. This film is currently only shown on television in Italian.
Tragic Ceremony (1972) is a Gothic horror film directed by Riccardo Freda as an Italian-Spanish co-production. The film had an incredibly limited release in Italy and Spain before disappearing for decades. Eventually, bootlegs of the Venezuelan VHS (which contained the shorter Spanish version) reached the English-speaking world and were highly sought after by Eurocult fans. In 2004, the Italian version was re-discovered and released on DVD by Dark Sky Films a few years later. Reception to this film has been mixed by many Keaton fans adore her appearance in this film. Tragic Ceremony will be included in the upcoming boxset.
Il sesso della strega (1973) is another Gothic horror film featuring Camille Keaton. This time, it takes the form of a sleazy and baffling giallo with a rather nonsensical plot involving inheritances, family curses, castles, and a killer with bizarre perversions. Keaton remembers that even when making the film, she had no idea what the story was about. For a long time, the film was only available on murky VHS tapes but was released on DVD by CineKult a few years ago. The DVD quality was certainly an upgrade over the VHS but suffered from heavy de-noising. Il sesso della strega is also included in the boxset.
The last film Camille Keaton starred in before moving back to the United States was Roberto Mauri’s psychodrama Madeleine: Anatomy of a Nightmare (1974). Keaton plays a young woman who has a series of nightmares brought on by a traumatic miscarriage. In these nightmares, she runs away from witches in a forest. During the day, she has a series of extramarital affairs and falls under psychic influences. Keaton considers this film to be her favourite of her entire filmography. It’s easy to see why as it features one of her most substantial roles and performances. Despite being picked up by Columbia Pictures, Madeleine only played in theatres for a week in Italy before disappearing. Over the years, fuzzy bootlegs of the Italian VHS was the main way to watch Madeleine. The English version remained unseen for 47 years but will finally be made available to watch by Vinegar Syndrome.
When the Camille Keaton in Italy boxset is released, I plan to review each of the three films in more detail. Stay tuned.
“For several days together she wept the sweetest tears in the home of her protectorsand then, so unaccountably that the cause of it was not to be discovered, her mood changed. She became sad, troubled, dreamy. Sometimes she wept in her friends’ company, and could not herself have said what was the reason for her tears. ‘I was not born to be so deliriously happy,’ she would sometimes say to Madame de Lorsange. ‘O dear sister! Such felicity is not made to last!’ Vainly was it put to her that, her tribulations now being over, she now had no further cause for anxiety of any sort. […] Yet she was not to be persuaded. It was as though the poor girl, destined to know nothing but unhappiness and eternally sensing the hand of misfortune poised above her ready to strike, had some intimation of the final blow by which she was to be cut down.” – Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1787) by Marquis de Sade
Justine being struck by lightning in Claude Pierson’s Justine de Sade (1972).
I’ve been watching and cataloguing various films that are adaptations of or are inspired by Marquis de Sade’s Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1787). I realised that Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) is one of those films. I already knew that Von Trier took the name of Kirsten Dunst’s character from de Sade’s novel. But the film can also be seen as an extension of the ideas explored in the novel’s ending where the long-suffering Justine, overwhelmed by bliss and happiness, finds herself inexplicably depressed with a doomed premonition that a calamity will befall her. Inevitably, she is struck by a bolt of lightning and put out of her misery. In Melancholia, the overwhelming bliss takes the form of a lavish wedding and the lightning bolt is an entire rogue planet hurtling towards Earth!
Impending doom…
This observation was written on 19th October 2020. I’ll be posting more of these short-form journal entries to try to revitalise this blog.
I still recall the hype and backlash Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey received when it was released back in 2015. I was familiar with the novel but had trouble finishing it. Colour me surprised when the trailer for the movie came out and it looked visually gorgeous. Unfortunately, I didn’t watch it during its premier, partly due to my self-consciousness but also due to the negative reviews. Recently, I finally got around to watching the film and I actually thought it was pretty fine. For sure, it’s a deeply flawed film with a lot of problematic elements but I could see that Taylor-Johnson was really striving to make something special out of the source material.
The virginal Anastasia Steele is captivated by the Byronic Christian Grey.
In a real life situation, Christian Grey is easily the worst boyfriend you could ever have. He exhibits so many red flags, it’s almost comical. You could make a drinking game out of it and pass out at the 1 hour mark. But this film is clearly supposed to be a fantasy. A fairy tale not unlike Beauty and the Beast or Bluebeard. Even though we know such relationships lead to disaster, it’s a common fantasy to be in love with a mysterious charming man with spiritual wounds. We want to know him. To fix him. To tame him. To unlock his heart etc. Especially if he shows a genuinely tender side and makes you feel special. In that sense, the film shares a lot in common with the psychological thriller Secret Beyond the Door (1947). In both films, a naive ingenue gets into a relationship with an emotionally distant man and becomes determined to unlock his secret despite a sea of bloody red flags.
In the face of danger, the heroine of Secret Beyond the Door (1947) strives to solve her homicidal husband’s past.
It has to be said, however, that films with 2010’s aesthetics don’t really convey fairy tales or Gothic romances particularly well due to everything being too slick, modern, and minimalist. High-rise buildings, white collars, smartphones, and IKEA furniture are a bane to classical taste. Despite this, the scenes in Christian Grey’s mansion still have a certain opulence. In this setting, the virginal Anastasia Steele resembles a lost bird captured by the handsome and dangerous hunter. The way in which the ‘Playroom’ is introduced classically recalls Bluebeard’s chamber of horrors. From Grey’s warnings to the key unlocking the room. The S&M equipment are like medieval torture devices. The red wallpaper like the blood of Bluebeard’s previous wives.
Bluebeard’s chamber of horrors.
Fifty Shades is certainly highly romanticized. The cinematography is sumptuous throughout and there’s a parade of tasteful (if rather vanilla) sex scenes with pop music playing over them. There are even a few larger than life sequences. For example, the scene where Christian takes Anastasia out on an aircraft excursion is positively exhilarating to watch. It is easy to see why many people have issues with the film romanticizing abusive relationships. However, I was surprised to see how Anastasia still held on to a sense of agency throughout the film. Every interaction had a certain playfulness and knowing wink. She purposely delays signing the contract at every turn, she makes light-hearted quips towards Christian, and she didn’t come across as pathetic as in the novel.
An exhilarating excursion that serves to remind us that this film is all a fantasy.
And that’s not to say that the film shies away from its darker moments, either. The issue of personal boundaries is constantly focused on. At first, Anastasia doesn’t mind being showered with lavish gifts and surprises. At times, she enjoys the attention she receives but it soon becomes a major concern as the relationship becomes serious, peaking when Christian follows her all the way to Georgia. It’s not just Christian’s possessiveness that bothers Ana, either. It’s his emotional distance, his constant need to punish her. When it’s no longer a game, she turns the mirror onto Christian and forces him to acknowledge his own deep-seated misogyny.
In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised by Fifty Shades of Grey. I do feel that it’s a compromised vision due to E. L. James’s vice grip on the IP and because of the high-budget production (a double-edged sword that makes the film technically gorgeous but creatively tame). Considering that contemporary films that examine sex such as Nymphomaniac and Shame have already set the bar high, Fifty Shades just feels disappointingly quaint in comparison. Surely a kinky billionaire could afford to wear assless chaps and a leather jock instead of a pair of boring old jeans! But the film was still surprisingly witty at times and perfectly watchable overall.
Ricardo Bofill is primarily known today as one of Spain’s most renowned architects. His most famous buildings include the Xanadu and La Muralla Roja (Jess Franco fans will recognise these two buildings in many of Franco’s films). Lesser known are his contributions to the Escuela de Barcelona. He wrote the dialogue for Vicente Aranda’s Brillante porvenir (1965), appeared as an actor in BiBiCi Story (1969) and the wacky home-made short Barcelona (1967), and directed two films: the short film Circles (1966) and Esquizo, his sole feature.
Ricardo Bofill and Serena Vergano on the set of Circles (1966).
The Escuela de Barcelona was a cinematic movement that occurred in Spain (more specifically, Catalonia) during the 1960’s, when the country was under a dictatorship by the Franco regime. It was inspired by the popular French Nouvelle Vague and shared many similar characteristics such as an emphasis on political commentary and redefinition of filmmaking. The Barcelona films vary in terms of genre, subject matter, and techniques. Many of the films are highly political in nature, such as Carlos Duran’s futurist dystopian thriller Liberxina 90 (1970) and Pere Portabella’s Nocturno 29 (1968).1 Other films focus on relatively mundane subject matter shot with a low-budget such as Jorge Grau’s neorealist drama Una historia de amor (1967). Then there are the Barcelona films that are primarily abstract. Bofill’s Esquizo (1970) is an example of the latter.
Serena Vergano as the protagonist of Esquizo (1970).
Esquizo (1970) takes place in a psychiatric hospital. A mental patient (Serena Vergano) is escorted into an operation theatre, where electrodes are hooked onto her scalp. Doctors dissect her brain and we enter the brain with a loud, jarring shriek. In this space detached from reality, a group of actors (Vergano, José Luis Argüello, Modesto Fernández, Jesús Sastre) perform elaborate interpretive dances. They leap about, land on top of each other, place their hands on their bodies, and form various shapes. All the while, an incoherent voice-over repeats syllables and reminds the patient that she is ill. The imagery interchanges between footage of mental patients in a dark room babbling incoherently, a game of dollar bill poker played in the sand, animal carcasses falling into a shredding machine, and the dancers performing aggressive gestures towards the camera. At the end of the film, we exit the brain. The patient returns to her cell. A lengthy text appears on the screen talking about how, with the frequent advances in technology, Man has become the new God.
Describing itself in a subtitle as “a fictitious report on the architecture of the brain”, Esquizo (1970) is largely incomprehensible when viewed without context. While described by Catalan Films as a “psychodrama in which characters stage anguish and collective desire”,2 the average viewer is likely to see this film more as a plotless mish-mash of nonsensical imagery, perhaps justified as a mental patient’s schizoid thoughts by the framing device and title. In Daniel Kasman’s coverage of the film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016, he analysed the context in which the film was made, more specifically, the expression of Catalonian independence during Spain’s Franco regime. Kasman connects the incomprehensible dialogue to the population’s inability to express themselves under the regime, and how the institutions that control the population were unable to understand their suffering.3
According to an interview with Bofill, Esquizo was a ‘notebook’ on the relationship between one’s genius and madness, how talent is essentially a controlled madness and how the boundary between the two can easily blur.4 The film was made during a personal crisis, “when [he] saw that the world was very hostile, that [he] could not move forward, that it was very difficult, that there were economic, financial, legal problems and that there was a kind fighting against a barrier of the impossible”.5 Little is known about the film’s distribution at the time but apparently, an English version had been prepared for international release.6
Theatrical poster for Esquizo.
Over the years, the elusive Esquizo (1970) has occasionally been screened at certain film festivals. Depending on who you talk to, the film is either a genius example of experimental cinema or a severe endurance test. Admittedly, when I saw this film back in 2016, I did not know what to make of it and, unable to find a tangible narrative to grasp onto, there were moments where I contemplated walking out. Indeed, during that screening, at least 50% of the audience walked out. Some left because they got impatient while others left because they were taken aback by some of the imagery. My problem with the film was that it didn’t need to be feature-length. It could have been a 25 minute short and the impact would have been the same if not greater. But at over an hour in length, many scenes went on for too long. However, considering Bofill’s intention of portraying inner madness, it is possible the editing was deliberately loose and ‘uncontrolled’ to convey this.
Despite my misgivings, Esquizo has a special place in my heart, partly due to its status as a film festival rarity, but mostly due to it being the first retrospective screening I ever attended. It is certainly one of the strangest films I have ever seen.
(Post Script: I first wrote this review back in 2017 for Robert Monell’s blog I’M IN A JESS FRANCO STATE OF MIND. After doing more research on the film, I have thoroughly revised it to provide more context and understanding.)
Further Reading: Esquizo, with its motif of interpretive dance and movement, was aptly featured on the cover of Bodybuilding, a recent book that explores the relationship between live performance and architecture. https://www.archdaily.com/930036/bodybuilding
“There exists an uninhabited island near Istanbul, where lie the ruins of an old palace. Old legends say that in that house, there lived a foreign Princess condemned to Hell and damnation by her husband, a great Sultan.
Locked in a golden cage surrounded by female slaves, the beautiful prisoner was expected to die slowly from starvation. But it was the slaves that were slowly fading and dying away, while the Princess maintained her beautiful appearance. The doctors said that the blood from the slaves’ bodies had been completely drained off.
One day, Princess Nadia Oskudar disappeared without a trace and in her cage, there was left an inscription in blood: “Korvec Nier Trekatsch“… The old people of the region, with strong beliefs in the supernatural, say that the Princess is still alive, and is still feeding off the blood of her victims.
This is the story of a young foreigner who believed in those legends…”
The Glass Cellar 