Strippers, Narcissists, and Clowns

James Stewart in "The Greatest Show on Earth"

Recently I've become aware of a sexy video that someone I know has made of herself. It consists of a series of photos that are frankly sexual in nature, seemingly created for one purpose: to attract sexual attention from men. They are all lingerie photos, except for a couple of nude photos that show what you could show in a lotion ad (hands over breasts, body position hiding crotch). Facial expressions are either confrontational or generically sexy, and some are almost like fashion magazine shots, featuring various floppy hats or boots, with a suitably vacant facial expression. Comments on the videos are mostly of a salacious nature, and the model seems to welcome the responses cheerfully, and to try to deflect them with an "oh my, you're a naughty boy," or an "aw, thanks, you're sweet!" sort of spirit. The model in question is married with children, and has taken on a pseudonym.

Seeing this video has made me confront some of my own issues, and it's been tough. My first response is disgust: "How could she put herself out there like that?" My second response is envy: "But I have to admit that she looks pretty hot." My third response is fear: "What if people think I'm doing something like that with my work?" The questions and go on and on: "Why is she catering to those men and encouraging sexist remarks from them? Am I also catering to men when I show myself in a sexual way in a movie? If she looks hotter than me, does that make her work of higher value, in terms of how a (male) viewer ascribes value to a work? If that's the case, does her single-afternoon photo shoot potentially erase my four years of work on a film? Do other women look at me and see what I see when I look at this video and  hate me for it? Do men see me that way, and judge me only on my hotness or lack thereof?"

Betty Hutton paper dolls

Another question came up as well: "Why do I love looking at vintage pinups, neo-burlesque shows, and certain vintage sex movies, but have so much of a problem with this?" I think it's because what I love is glamour and dress-up, and the fantasies evoked in her video are so mainstream and trashy. It's the female image without a self behind it, in the mode of all contemporary generic sex imagery. The feminine side of me gets excited by gowns, makeup, beautifully done hair, etc. But without elements of glamour, artistic distance, or individuality in a woman's photograph, there is nothing to "turn me on." When I am presented by a starkly sexual image of a woman without that requisite distance, the sole purpose of which is to make a guy's dick hard, I am like most women in that I feel ambivalent. But men of course are different. I once earnestly asked a gay male friend of mine, when we were walking through a video store and stopped at the gay porn section, why all the covers looked the same, and why there wasn't any experimentation with stories or decor. He patiently explained to me that this wasn't about art, it was about getting aroused. All of that paraphernalia, such as sets and costumes and a story you have to follow, gets in the way of simple male arousal. (Of course, how stupid of me)!

Gay Porn DVD cover

The sheer power of male lust can obliterate art in that sense, as art becomes supremely unimportant when men are faced with a beautiful available nude. And if only male lust counts when judging works where females are on display, then the aims of art (especially feminist art) can seem useless and naive. I think that this element of male desire as expressed in pornography causes fear in many people, as if it could destroy civilization itself. And I think some of that fear is founded, especially if it obliterates cultural aesthetics. The person who alerted me about the video's existence asked me, "How does this relate to what you're doing?" I had to insist, "I'm making art, and this is just a girl selling herself on the web," but he didn't seem thoroughly convinced. I was disturbed that he would compare my artwork, which is so carefully contextualized, with simple internet pornography. And the comparison haunted me because I have heard echoes of it everywhere since I first put VIVA out.  It's not that I think what my friend is doing is wrong; it's just that this is the only area of culture or expression where distinctions between  disparate things can be obliterated in this way, due to peoples' highly subjective and emotional responses to female imagery. The attitude of most people in culture, and this includes both feminists and porn consumers, is that a woman's sexualized image means one thing, or that its meaning is always prescribed by others.

Crack Whore Barbie

And yet to escape outside definitions of what one's own image means is one of the goals of feminist practice. In my attempts to create my own image, I've found a lot of pleasure and meaning in the "masquerade," in which I can make myself into anything I want, including a "sexy woman." The mask is there to alleviate the anxiety that would present itself if I would feel that I simply "was" a sexy woman, for that would mean that my meaning as an object in the world had been prescribed by others, and could only be oppressive. I would argue that very few women feel like "women" in the loaded sense generally applied to that term. Joan Riviere, in her essay "Womanliness as Masquerade," went as far as to call the type of otherwise heterosexual woman who dons a mask of femininity to appease male aggression a "homosexual woman."

Marlene Dietrich in "Blonde Venus"

Many feminists seem to accept male to female drag and female to male drag, but female to female drag makes them almost uniformly uncomfortable, as if it's somehow a sign that a woman is trapped in her image. But they ignore the possibilities of self-transformation in the female masquerade, and the fact that girls and women have always been aesthetically interested in costume as a form of pleasure. Self-adornment has been most elaborate in the most civilized societies, such as in seventeenth and eighteenth century French court life, in which aristocrats wore powdered wigs and highly symbolic accessories in order to perform a daily theatrical construction of self. The little girl, likewise, can create a private world of pleasure for herself outside of the world of male aggression, full of fairy princess dresses, pretty mommies, tiaras, ponies with pink manes that can be brushed all day, and ceremonies with miniature tea parties full of genteel conversation.

My Little Pony

As these little girls mature into women, glamour and dress-up may continue to form part of their identity separate from the male. But now they have a new problem to deal with, which is being an adult woman whose image is in danger of being seized by the male as material for his own fantasy life. And this is where dress-up and glamour become ruined for many women. For many contemporary women, pleasing a man is tantamount to becoming a doormat, a whore, a loser, a masochist, someone's bitch, or a Stepford Wife. This anxiety of being swallowed up by the male makes many women hate themselves as women and hate other sexy women, denying their own pleasure in themselves out of fear of losing their autonomy. But there are other women who like to play with their images as women, attempting to define themselves in terms of their own pleasure without losing themselves in a man's expectations of them.

Sally Rand, fan dancer

One type of woman who played with her image in this way was the burlesque stripper, who existed roughly between the early 1920s and the late 1960s. These women took off clothing for men, but always left something on. They teased and played with the audience, often burlesquing sex and drawing on old vaudeville routines, and they controlled the pace and dynamics of their performances. They would titillate the men by flashing a breast, or taking off a bra to reveal pasties a moment before the lights went out, or flinging their panties off while concealed behind a velvet curtain. The art was as much about concealment as it was about revealing anything, and the woman's power over the men and her teasing of them was the main spectacle.

Kay Booth in the Ziegfield Follies

Burlesque performers had elaborate wardrobes consisting of elegant gowns and accessories, frills and laces, lingerie, stockings, parasols, hats, and gloves, and these adornments were a big part of the pleasure for both the performer and her audience, which was often gender mixed. Men and women alike could be entranced by frills and laces and perfumes, as this was part of the world of female pleasure that was a naughty and delicious secret to men, just as a female's anatomy was. But this feminine world collapsed with the advent of the sexual revolution, in which audiences demanded spectacles that were ever more graphic, and left less and less to the imagination.

My interest in the phenomenon of the burlesque stripper, and in the shift from the glamorous to the abject, has led me to write a feature script about carnival strippers circa 1960, based on the pulp novel CARNIVAL HONEY (although I think I'm going to shoot THE LOVE WITCH first). The plot concerns this transition from burlesque performance to artless stripping, in which the girls feel pressured to strip all the way nude, in response to financial pressures and changing mores and expectations. In doing research for Carnival Honey, I read some interviews with strippers from Susan Meiselas' documentary photography book Carnival Strippers (1976). In the book, Meiselas photographs carnival girlie shows in black and white, showing the girls, staff and audience in their casual moments as well as in the shows, and the book is full of quotes from the various people involved in that world. Meiselas even tried stripping herself once, to see how it felt and to develop solidarity with the girls. You can see from the photographs that it was a rough world, in which the men were rowdy and crude, the girls were mostly unskilled and poor, and girls let men touch them (including performing oral sex on them) for extra tips. Most of the girls also prostituted themselves to make ends meet.

Still from "Carnival Strippers"

One theme emerged again and again in the interviews, which was the split between a woman's desires when she went into stripping, and the men's desires who consumed the shows. Many girls said to themselves: "What's wrong with it? I don't have a problem dancing in the nude, and if people want to pay to see me, well, all the better!" The woman who started stripping felt in control, self-possessed, was a working woman. Many strippers were addicted to the raw play of power, in which they had a chance every night to tease and torture men, fantasizing about every man out there who lusted after them but couldn't have them. But the men wanted power and control over the girls too, to humiliate them and make them feel like low whores.

All of the strippers whose interviews I read were crushed by the work on some level, even if in some ways they were made stronger by it. But since male violence and misogyny were part of what drove the machine of male desire which paid for these girls to live, the girls adjusted to the abuse and even cultivated it, thinking they were in control of it, but often losing themselves and their self-esteem in the process. Being treated like scum, they eventually believed it was true, and their fantasies of themselves as beautiful queens performing in a show dissolved before the men's drunken laughter, insults, and disrespectful touching.

Still from "Carnival Strippers"

I understand something about this dynamic, because I worked for a time as a drink hostess at a Japanese bar in Honolulu when I was nineteen. I did it out of need, because I was unable to find any other kind of work. All I had to do was talk to the men and be their waitress, and I would get commissions on any drinks they would buy me. I got a little chip for every drink they bought, and at the end of the night I would cash in my chips. Some of the drinks were just tea, but some were watered down white wine. The only way you could make any significant money was with wine, so we pushed for that, and I got drunk every night. Still having to waitress, I'd be stumbling around, forgetting orders, and dropping things. But as getting drunk was part of my job, no one could object. They loved to see you get drunk, that's why they'd spend on the wine. They also loved to shock you with stories about their lurid sexual exploits, and to insult you. Every night something just shitty enough would be said to me that I'd go into the bathroom and cry my heart out. Then I'd fix my makeup and go back out again.

It was a game of musical tables, as we were taught to never let men know that we were working more than one table at a time. So you'd get up to go flirt with men at another table, and you'd have to excuse yourself by saying that you had a food order or had to go to the bathroom. But everyone knew what was going on. It was dark and the booths faced away from each other in such as way so that you could keep your cover pretty well. One liability was customers breaking the rules by touching. Of course if they did that you didn't have to sit with them, but once the hands had performed their violations into intimate areas it was too late, and you had the visceral memory of old men's hands on you to deal with in nightmares and involuntary flashbacks. Another liability was the jealousy of the other girls. If you were good at what you did you would get lots of clients, and then the venom and claws would start to come out. There was no such thing as female solidarity, and often I found girls gossiping meanly about me, whispering and then falling silent when I'd come by.

Jane Russell in "The Revolt of Mamie Stover"

I was the youngest and most popular girl and the bar (mostly because I learned Japanese so I could work both the American and the Japanese tables), so the Mama-san and Papa-san would take me out after hours to cruise the late-night bars and advertise: "This is Koharu-san (my Japanese name). Come see her at Club Subaru." And they'd hand the guy a business card. The first night I worked there, it was a slow night and I had a table with three guys who spent the whole night trying to coerce me into going home with them for money. This happened a lot, but the first time it was a like a little death. Having to be nice and obsequious to men who are treating you like a whore is not an easy thing to do, and it's not as if you feel better about yourself once you've gotten the hang of it.

Marlene Dietrich  in "The Blue Angel"

One strategy I had was to think of myself as a performer, and to look at the whole thing as a movie role, in which I was not really there. I'd fantasize that I was like Jane Russell in "The Revolt of Mamie Stover," or Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel," or like a woman in a pre-code movie. That worked for a time, but then it became more and more difficult to do. When I started out, I was like those strippers who are all hopes and strength. But by the time I left, I had serious trauma. And I wasn't sleeping with them, touching them, letting them touch me, or showing myself to them. All I would do is talk to them, sing for them, and occasionally dance with them. And yet I was unable to maintain a glamorous and powerful self-image in the face of the dominance those men exerted over me, and eventually I became depressed and defeated. To this day, I still can't bear the taste of white wine.

My experiences at that bar expressed different sides of a woman's dilemma who performs a  sexualized role in life or in work: when does the performance stop being for me, and become a service being performed only for the men? Where is the self or identity behind it? Who is benefiting from this performance? Where is my own desire located? Where is the line crossed, in which my feeling of power turns into abject despair? Although it's a taboo subject in many circles, female desire exists, and some of it is narcissistic, masochistic, extravagant, and perverse, just as male sexuality is. It's also part of female identity, and to ignore it, as I've stated before, is to ignore large parts of what make up an individual female consciousness. And I would suggest that denying women pleasure in their femininity is as bad as coercing femininity from them. The burlesque performer of yesteryear knew how to express herself as a woman without sinking into being a "mere" male fantasy, and that was a lot of her power. Whereas most models and strippers today offer up fantasies that have been recycled over and over again and are never new or personal, the talented burlesque dancer was a real performer, who used artifice to enchant, and wit and humor to send up sex even as she flashed her breasts.

Gypsy Rose Lee, "the literary stripper"

Rachel Shteir in her book "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show," compares these strippers to Samuel Beckett's clowns, who consciously combined pathos and humor to fascinate audiences. Men were surprised and pleased to find a real human being with a sense of humor under the frills, gowns, bras, pasties, and net pants, and it made sex less taboo and women less intimidating to them. Gypsy Rose Lee's mother would paint teardrops on her daughter's cheeks to conjure up pathos while her daughter spun stories about herself as a "literary stripper," and many other strippers also played on the split between themselves as sex goddesses, and ordinary girls just earning a living. Jean Cocteau, quoted in Shteir's book, wrote about burlesque dancers in New York: "One star holds the audience quickly spellbound, another works them into a fever. One...freezes the public in a terrible ice-block, another sets light to the tinder, another hurls arrows and daggers. Each has her own line of genius."

It was a time when an artificial feminine presence was adored rather than ridiculed, and it was BETTER FOR WOMEN.

All the Sins of Sodom

Still from "All the Sins of Sodom"

"All the Sins of Sodom" is a striking feature by Joe Sarno that displays to the full extent his skills in high-key black and white lighting, effective mise en scène, and casting and directing actors. The series of models parading in and out of fashion photographer Henning's life and bedroom (in a not so subtle reference to the film BLOW UP), offers the perfect opportunity for a cinematic and erotic exploration of the ideal male fantasy, which is total artistic and sexual command of a stable of beautiful and willing women. The nymph who enters his life, occupies his spare room, and slowly turns his ideal setup upside down is yet another component to this fantasy, at at least for the viewer, as it allows for girl on girl scenes in which the models are further dominated sexually, and in which there is more sexual variety and kinkiness at play. Sarno's use of the female face captures the erotic more fully than many films which are fully graphic, and the psychological components of sexual desire are both varied and realistic.

Indeed, viewing the film made me understand fully what it would be like to be a male with the desire to sexually dominate a series of women, as it presents such a fantasy outside of moral concerns or even social concerns, but purely as a giddy lifestyle of pleasure from which no escape would ever be desired. Oddly enough, this also gives the women, who are otherwise so individual and so uniquely beautiful, an interchangeability that can be chilling to the heart of a romantic. There is a Sadean dimension to the pleasure that erases the importance of the women, even as they are made full subjects in terms of their equal and complicit engagement in the acts which they crave.

The man always remains intact and individual, insofar as he is the only male on screen in a sea of women, and because he is a complete person and an artist in his own right, liking sex but not needing it to complete and define him. The women, on the other hand, have no identity separate from what sex gives them (their inside dimension) or what their appearance offers to the screen and to his camera (their outside dimension). They are eaten up by both cameras and by the male gaze, in such a voracious way that there is nothing left to hide, and in this feat lies Sarno's skill as a director, that he can lay this vulnerability bare and get these actresses to go to places that you normally don't see women go in movies.

Therefore, the goal of the photographer in this film (to capture something in women that is fully erotic, fully female in the darkest sense), is met successfully by the protagonist's camera, and also by Sarno's camera. Even as the photographer in the film complains that he can't capture on film the expression that his lover has when she is transported by pleasure, Sarno's camera shows us this expression, and tells us at the same time that we are watching something extraordinary.

The big, dirty secret in many 1960s sex films and pulp novels is that many women enjoy sex, and that they have sexual desires and fantasies of their own. Although this is a fact that must have been playing out in bedrooms everywhere for all of human history, it could not, for most of human history, be discussed in society, in literature, or in film. Good writers have always wanted to bring out truth in experience, especially in times when psychological realism is in vogue, as it was post World War II, and this is one part of life that must have seemed to the more serious writers to be frustratingly missing in accounts of natural experience.

One finds a quality in much of this sex literature and film from the 1960s of curtains being ripped off houses and inhibitions ripped off psyches to reveal what's really going on inside of peoples' lives and minds. Sarno was a specialist in this, revealing ordinary people with strong sexual urges and fantasy lives that are frankly expressed, suffering from the restrictions that society places on behavior and expression. What's most striking about this time period is, it's a tiny window of time in which the male and the female unite against society at large in order to rally for sexual freedom. And thus, curiously, it's one of the few times we find the battle of the sexes as expressed in culture actually diminished or put on the back burner.

In contrast to the underground sex movies of the 1960s, mainstream romantic comedies of the time focused, as they do today, on a simple conflict between the male and the female: he wants to get laid, she wants a ring. Even if she agrees to sex, it's never what she's really after - the body of the male, the ecstasy and rapture of being enfolded in his arms, an addiction to his lovemaking. She wants basically to civilize him and tame his desires, and the utopian goal thus achieved is smiled on by the audience, who is relieved to find the demon of sexual desire quelled and replaced by an abstract and flowery romance, and a life in which the disorderly and disruptive facts of sex are politely ignored.

In the film "Pillow Talk" this concept is explained by Rock Hudson, who compares a single man to a tree standing tall and proud in the forest. Once he gets married, that tree's branches are cut off and the tree is chopped up into wood which is used to make a baby crib, a patch for the roof, an extra wing on the house, dinner napkins, etc. The anxiety and even anguish of a male who is subjected to this type of emasculation by his wife was the subject of many postwar comedies and cartoons by humorists such as James Thurber. The wife was seen as the enemy, and the battle was bloody. Men who had fought overseas and had lived dangerous lives, facing death every day and visiting exotic brothels, were not the nice boys they used to be before they left home, and thus the comforting hearth was often seen more as a prison than a haven.

James Thurber cartoon depicting male anxiety of the home

In this atmosphere, a lot of grim novels and plays came out about the human condition, especially regarding the hardships of life. Neo-realism would change the way movies were looked at forever, and the painful, unglamorous truths of life became increasingly more accepted and interesting to casual viewers. Just like the more "serious" writers, pulp novelists and sex filmmakers attempted to earnestly explain things from the male point of view. So instead of films in which women civilize men, we have films in which men teach women how to be sexually wild. Often, the female is grateful to have her carnal side unleashed; at other times, she is upset and can't accept it. But the gamut of female types of experience was explored, in a society in which female desire has never been a topic of interest for most of the population before or since.

Feminists, when confronted with this material, often reject it as material in which women are objectified, male desire is crudely and sometimes violently expressed, and the woman is diminished by being overly sexualized for the male. While all of this is of course partly true, there are other aspects which can be liberating. For one thing, you have a rare moment in which males are honest about their desire, not confining it to the locker room or bar, but expressing it openly, and trying to communicate to women what they truly feel. This in itself should be welcomed by women, who  often find themselves involved with quiet and irritable men who shut them out and refuse to speak to them about their feelings, afraid of the consequences. Men today have closed up, and their sexual fantasies and cultural outlets are off-limits to girls and women, as they form real or imaginary exclusive men's clubs, and express themselves culturally in darker and more misogynistic ways.

Also, you have a genre in which different types of female desire can be expressed and examined. In films such as "All the Sins of Sodom," sexual desire is equated with something dark, sinister, from the devil, but contemporary viewers will see something different. While the photographer is trying to capture "evil" on the face of his model, when he finally captures it all we see is female desire, female abandonment, female ecstasy. He is showing adults something quite natural that they experience in their own bedrooms, and with his characterization of it pointing out the hypocrisy of the censors. The male imaginary, so repressed in the 1950s, thus finally expresses itself openly, and when we see it we realize that it's not that bad.

In looking at those films today that were once thought of as so smutty, you see levels of humanity and egalitarianism that are absent from the most innocuous mainstream romantic comedies today. In their honesty, those films express truths about men and women that have since been buried under fear of censure. The over-politicization of both male and female roles in movies today makes it impossible for a thing like female desire to come into play, as women must be lawyers and jocks and politicians in order to satisfy some status quo. And yet by taking away women's sexuality, they are taking away large chunks of a woman's identity. Sexploitation movies may have limited women's options by insisting they be sexual creatures; but most contemporary movies limit women's freedom by insisting they have no sexuality at all. Even a film such as "The Notorious Bettie Page" refuses to acknowledge a sexual dimension to Bettie's posing, showing Bettie shocked to discover that men are turned on by her posing, and leaving out any psychology related to her work other than a naive and feather-brained insistence that nudity is natural because God created us that way. Views of female sexuality as taboo are thus entrenched, and an opportunity is missed to go into why a woman chooses that line of work, what she gets out of it, and what it means to her.

Mae West publicity still

Female sexuality has long been an "evil" in the eyes of society and of censors at large. Mae West bragged that she was singlehandedly responsible for the enforcement of the Hays Production Code, due to her frank expressions of predatory sexuality. Gypsy Rose Lee also threatened censors with her witty stripteases, which suggested that a woman can be many things at once: stripper, novelist, playwright, society woman, good girl, bad girl, wit and wag, etc. Censors were much less threatened by passive female sexuality, as exemplified by the tableaux that were accepted in revue shows, in which female nudity was okay as long as the girls remained completely motionless like statues. However, in the films of Hollywood's Golden Age, females were able to be sexualized onscreen through glamour, costume and flirting without being threatening (due to the plots always punishing aggressive females), and so ironically they could be more complete women than actresses in films can be today.

Gypsy Rose Lee publicity still

Sarno, by making female desire and its unveiling the subject of his movie, was doing something transgressive at a time in which such expression was the most taboo thing for audiences. While he was clearly not a feminist, the side-effect of his obsession for the female is that we get to see different parts of her that she often doesn't show to the world. This has been the goal of many of the great male fiction writers and filmmakers from Flaubert to Bergman, and in Sarno's case it deserves another look, rather than being tossed into the trash heap of bad sex movies. Far from being a simple male fantasy about available women, it's a realistic examination into sexual excess, sadism, masochism, ambivalence, desire, and pleasure that is rare in the history of cinema.

New Independent Films

Above: Cyd Charisse from "Party Girl"

I recently returned from the Torino Film Festival, a festival which I adore for its dedication to art cinema, where I was engaged as a juror. As my job was to watch competition films, I saw more new films in a week than I normally do in a year, and so I got an instant impression of the themes and styles of new independent work. I must add that my innocence in this regard is much like a time traveler who has recently found themselves in the twenty-first century, as I've spent so much time studying classic films that my viewing of newer independent work has been somewhat lacking.

To begin with, let me say that although the films seemed very disparate on the surface, what was most striking was the similarities between many of the films. If I were to catalogue what seems to be the aim of many of the films, it would seem to be to capture a certain sense of virtuousness through a means of storytelling that leaves out the ordinary parts of stories, and leaves in the parts that are in between. This is in an attempt, I gather, to surprise us by calling our attention to the truth in the minutae of everyday reality.

Indeed, in most of the films, this search for the "truth," coming directly from neo-realist tradition, seemed like a primary concern. Truth in acting is equated with creating unglamorous and inarticulate characters; truth in lighting is achieved by trying to light as little as possible; truth in storytelling is telling the non-dramatic bits of a story; truth in editing is trying not to edit at all, as this pollutes the purity of events as they happen in real time; truth in camerawork is the hand-held camera, without the intervention of storyboards, tripods and cranes; truth in writing is to tell as little as possible, so as not to trample on the viewer's own impressions. Also, incoherence often seemed to be aimed at, I suppose in order to reflect directly the incoherence of experience, and the impossibility of getting at meaning. As well as direct meaning, symbolism seemed to be an element that was avoided (when symbolism, artifice, and self-dramatization were used as devices, they were frowned upon).

The other thing I noticed was that direct pleasure was avoided most of the time, and in its place was the indirect pleasure of self-denial or self-immolation, and the sado-masochistic pleasure in the starkness or ugliness itself. So in the end, this cinema was more striking in terms of what it rejected than in terms of what it embraced: rejection of artifice and all overt devices, rejection of overt pleasure, rejection of meaning. What I was often left with was a cleverness in the filmmaker's ability to seem invisible as a stylist or creator of meaning. So it's a cinema of negation, of what's left when content, form, and desire are taken away.

Looking at all of the films, and at one Nicholas Ray film I caught in between other screenings, which approached cinema from exactly the opposite direction, I felt a pang of grief. I'm so fascinated by older forms of cinema, in which all possibilities were...well, possible. I have literally been told that it's "impossible" to do cinema in a pre-World war II Style, and the reasons why have been explained to me: "because of the way consciousness has been fragmented...because old ways of thinking about identity have been exploded." In Deleuze's books Cinema I and Cinema II, he talks about the postwar shift in cinema, in which the history of cinema can almost be divided into two halves. Deleuze speaks about an older cinema of movement and a newer cinema of time. Neo-realism is discussed, as well as the French new wave, and these forms have remained entrenched in art cinema forever since, seeking new ways to produce glimmers of meaning outside of narrative conventions, always in search of the new. And yet avant-garde practice, up until now, has rejected the previous generation's truth in favor of its own truth, often looking back to much older forms to do so. The newer cinema is almost beyond reproach, as one is seen as a philistine if one questions it, whereas anything else of a more sensuous or direct nature is instantly mistrusted.

Looking at the Nicholas Ray film, "Party Girl," through the eyes of contemporary festival audiences used to this new cinema, I couldn't help but thinking that the Ray film would seem ludicrous, and just WRONG, to them. Full of artificial pleasures, in the form of sets lit with three-point classical lighting, rear-projection in moving cars, the smashingly beautiful and almost otherworldly Cyd Charisse, characters in general that are more glamorous, daring, or attractive than we are, fantastic musical numbers, colorful gangsters, very carefully scripted dialogue and camera work, heavy-handed symbolism, all the dramatic bits left in and everything else left out, a sweeping musical score highlighting the drama, fantastic costumes color-coordinated with the sets, and a strong moral ending.

While I deeply enjoy "serious" art cinema, I am also a hopeless decadent. I refuse to reject entertaining material on the grounds that it's unimportant artistically. I have come around to the other side of art, in which I can find momentous meaning in the choreography of Cyd Charisse's overwhelmingly erotic dance, in much the same way that Apollinaire found more meaning in the lace panties of music hall dancers than in the greatest works of art in museums.

Si J'Etais Blanche!

I just got a new Josephine Baker CD, and I've become obsessed in particular with a song called "Si J'Etais Blanche!" (If I Were White!) that I've transcribed with what I believe are the CORRECT lyrics, or "paroles" (other versions online are a little off), and translated below. It's a fabulous song, and one that I'd be interested in performing in the right setting.

I've always loved Josephine Baker, and French music hall and early jazz shows in general, but listening to her again is revelatory. I hear in her voice, in the orchestrations and playing, and in the general ambiance, the feeling of Paris in the '20s and '30s, of the excitement of the transition between vaudeville and jazz styles, and the playfulness of the entertainment. It's all so sexy, so coded, so full of joie de vivre, and represents all types of new cultural transgressions.

Josephine Baker in particular is able to represent these transgressions, being a black performer who was at once feverishly admired and thought of as singularly "other." She both embraced and rejected stereotypes of herself as a fabulous exotic in the "tumulte noir" which gripped Paris in the '20s, in which Parisians became entranced by all things African and African American. Picasso and Matisse were doing artwork inspired by African sculpture, blacks and whites alike performed in blackface in revues to appreciative audiences, and the bored and decadent white world became suddenly alive to a new frontier of expression, casting off traditional European forms in the pursuit of something more natural and spontaneous.

Josephine Baker represented the sexualized and totally charming female who could bridge black and white cultures, with her ability to both sing like a bird in a quintessentially French style, and to dance with extraordinary expression and agility, in a mix of jazz baby and "native" styles. She was a completely invented creature, with her dark skin and shimmering satin gowns, native Haitian costumes, or black tie and tails, representing nature and culture, American and European, male and female, and even human and animal, with her performing as a bird in a cage, or being constantly compared to a beautiful panther.

The music hall and cabaret were places where transgressive ideas about gender could be expressed - there were many female and male cross-dressers who sang witty and bawdy songs - and also for race-bending. Even the most racist whites in America and Europe could not deny the force of jazz, and of the black performers who burst onto the entertainment scene with so much force and talent that they could not be ignored. But whereas in America the shows were segregated and being black was thought of as a misfortune, in Paris Josephine Baker became a woman to be frankly admired. Her image was everywhere, even promoted through products such as skin-darkening lotion and hair pomade with her picture on them, so that the women of Paris could emulate her.



While Josephine Baker performed in blackface like other black and white performers, she embraced the African stereotype with her own brand of irony, reclaiming it for herself, and also one-upped everyone when she performed "Si J'Etais Blanche!" in white-face and a blonde wig. This song was a challenge to her projected image as an "exotic," and showed that she could create her image as she pleased, like any great white performer.

Although the lyrics speak about a wistful desire to be white, they also proclaim the superiority of having dark skin, and of not having to go out in the sun like Europeans in order to attain a beautiful color. The reason in the end for wanting to be white is so "that I will please you more," and not from any inner sense of inferiority. So it is really a protest against racism, and a plea to have herself be considered on the same level a a white woman.

The lyrics, song, and translation follow:

SI J’ÉTAIS BLANCHE

(Bobby Falk / Leo Lelièvre / Henri Varna)
1932

Je voudrais être blanche
Pour moi quel bonheur
Si mes seins et mes hanches
Changent de couleur

Les Parisiens à Juan-les-Pins
Se faisaient droit
Au soleil d’exposer
Leur amour un peu noir

Moi pour être blanche
J’allais me roulant
Parmi les avalanches
En haut du Mont Blanc

Ce stratagème
Donne un petit rigole
J’avais l’air dans la crème
D’un petit pruneau

Étant petite avec chagrin
J’admirais dans les magasins
La teinte pâle de poupées blanches

J’aurais voulu leur ressembler
Et je disais à l’air accablé
Me croyant toute seule brune au monde

Au soleil c’est par l’extérieur
Que l’on se dore
Moi c’est la flamme de mon cœur
Qui me colore

Faut-il que je sois blanche
Pour vous plaire mieux

Listen to song:


IF I WERE WHITE

I’d love to be white
What a joy for me
If my breasts and my thighs
Changed color suddenly

The Parisians at Juan-Les Pins
Can have their fun
Exposing loves already blackened
To the sun

To make myself white
I went to the Alps
And rolled in the snow there
But it didn’t help

I was no closer
To my little dream
I merely looked like a prune
In a dish of cream

When I was a girl I sadly admired
All the dolls I saw in stores
With skin so pale and white, unlike my own

I would have liked to look like them
And I said with a defeated air
I felt like the only brown girl in the world

It’s in the sun that others
Get a healthy glow
But for me, it’s the flame of my heart
That colors me so

I must be white so I will please you more!



I've always been fascinated with early jazz examples where race is highlighted, because the worst thing about being on an "other" race is your invisibility culturally. And since the '30s is my favorite cultural and aesthetic era, I'm always excited by images, for instance, of sexy non-white females such as Lena Horne in Cabin in the Sky, or Anna Mae Wong in Shanghai Express. Strangely enough, I even like it when white women play sexualized "orientals," such as Ruby Keeler playing the Chinese courtesan Shanghai Lil in Footlight Parade, because the depiction represents a white fantasy or longing to be like the other.

I suppose the interest in performers such as Josephine Baker came directly from the interest in American jazz culture, and by the same token the interest in Anna Mae Wong and other Chinese things in the '30s came from art-deco, which has may Chinese motifs. There is a Noel Coward song that interests me called "Half-Caste Woman," all about a half-Asian woman in a "shimmering gown." One of the lines is "Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes waiting and hoping to see?"

I remember watching Vaginal Davis perform with the Velvet Hammer a few years ago in blackface doing a vaudeville number, and I will never forget the power of that performance. There was such a sense of reclaiming the minstrel show for himself as a vehicle for expression, and there was so much anger, humor, and energy in the show that very powerful feelings were stirred up. I imagine some of the early blackface jazz shows to have been like this, with both blacks and whites trying to sort out stereotypes and differences through entertainment, love, hate, and discomfort. They are too often seen much too simply as direct attempts at defining the other in a racist way, but it's much more complicated than that.

I've included here a link to a number Josephine Baker did in Princesse Tam-Tam, that shows the Parisians' simultaneous fascination, envy, and revulsion for a totally "natural" and spontaneous creature, that offends their sense of propriety, but that they can't peel their eyes away from. Far from being a race-related transgression, Baker's transgression in this scene is totally sex-related: she is simply too frankly sexual for high-society Paris to deal with. And of course, as everyone knows, in the movies anyway, sex appeal is a very GOOD thing! Of course her spontaneity does come partly form being "natural," but this was after all the first sexual revolution in America and Europe, the sexual revolution of the roaring '20s.



I'm shocked to realize that I haven't write a blog in long, but in the meantime I've finished my feature script for THE LOVE WITCH, and I'm designing the production now through sketches. I'm also planning on shooting a short film or two on Super 8mm or 16mm, just to get myself back into production in a gentle way. I'll write more about all of this soon!

Hardly Working

I just saw the Jerry Lewis movie “Hardly Working.” I must saw, I was completely floored. I was instantly reminded of Chaplin’s “Limelight.” Some would say this is an outrageous comparison, but I don’t think so. They are both films wherein great aging clowns take a bitter and poignant look at themselves, and at their lives spent as clowns in the midst of a changing audience and landscape.

Lewis’ film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.

But the genius in the film comes from its “serious” parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis’ occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It’s all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.

In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he’s dating (“You’re happy to see HIM??”) to his sister’s husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.



When he finally quits his job at the post office (it’s the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, “no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to”), it’s because he has been asked to “take care of” some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.

In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendant. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more “serious” moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.



The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It’s as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, “All right, the farce is over now. I’m really a professional clown, I’m Jerry Lewis, I’m a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to.” It’s like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup—the clown he’s playing in the film, which is a “non-clown” who’s a regular person—and putting on another kind of makeup, his “literal” clown makeup, in which he can finally be himself—Jerry Lewis!

So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that’s the genius of the movie. It’s an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move “Limelight,” the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.



Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis’ comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Stockholm, Gijon, Torino
Jared and I just returned from a European tour which consisted of Stockholm, Gijon (Spain), and Torino. Quite extraordinary all around. Highlights were meeting Tinto Brass in Torino and talking shop (we may share a distributor, and I told him about how my life was changed by seeing Caligula as a child), the Asturian cider house (and actually everything about Spain and the Spanish), the Italian hyper-intellectual audiences (and of course the food), and the serious (Bergman-fed) Swedes and their formal dinners. We met a lot of interesting and charming people on this trip, including filmmakers, press, sexologists, and cinephiles.

Gijon and Torino honored me with retrospectives, and I was followed around by photographers, who took glamour shots all over, including some in a vintage Mercedes (see below). The Gijon catalogue stated (and I quoted to a shocked audience on opening night), that whereas the character is Peeping Tom used his camera as an aggressive phallus, Anna Biller uses her camera like a "playful, extroverted clit.” {more}



On this tour I found that I am capturing more women. Women in Italy especially loved the movie. I think it’s partly because in Italy there is not a stigma attached to the idea of a glamorous woman. Italy still attaches a spiritual and maternal significance to women's beauty, from the Madonnas in the churches to Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. But older intellectual men in beautiful suits were also nodding appreciatively when I spoke about gender, and everyone clapped when I said that I don’t think strong women should be like men. The Italian audience was the most educated and intellectual audience I’ve ever played to. I bought a number of erotic comic books and “Diabolik” pulps there, which I will write about the next time.

In Sweden we ate at a restaurant that was in a 17th century mansion. The lead actress of “Fanny and Alexander” was there, along with Paul Schrader, a lot of other directors, some writers, and some Swedish dignitaries. We ate herring, reindeer, etc. It was all very formal and old-fashioned. We also went to an ice bar, where you had to be fitted with a special parka before entering in order to not perish of cold. At my screening, the audience was very sad. They were almost pleading with me, “But does it have to be that way for Barbi?” The women especially seemed distressed. Later, the programmer told me that Swedish audiences are sad “because of Bergman.”



Spain was fabulous in every way. The filmmakers, festival people, and press were always in a great mood, ready to drink, play, and talk excitedly in all languages (I spoke mostly French). We ate dinner at 11:00 and were out at nightclubs until 4:00 or 5:00. They were taking pictures like crazy, and I was treated like the movie queen of the festival, which was fun. I am finding that they like to treat people like celebrities in Europe. After all, for all they know I could be quite famous in America! It's the opposite of Los Angeles, where even the biggest celebrities are treated like regular people. Someone in Sweden actually chased after Jared as he was getting into a car to get his autograph!

Moscow
In the summer we showed VIVA in competition at the Moscow Film Festival, which was quite an honor. Moscow is a place where the people are very real, very fierce, very smart, and speak their minds freely. It is a transitional culture, full of generational and aesthetic clashes, and with a large class and economic gap. The women were the best dressed I have seen in any city. They all wear makeup, do their hair, and wear sexy, fitted dresses, skirts, heels, and stockings. The food is fresh, exotic, organic, exciting. Restaurants are the privilege of the rich and of foreigners. The mix of Soviet, capitalist, and antique architecture is breathtaking and surreal. And of course, there’s the famous subway, with its monumental art treasures, bronze statues, art nouveau lighting, and large expanses of marble.

We created a near riot in Moscow with VIVA, which some hailed as a Fellini-like masterpiece, and which one newspaper claimed was a disgrace to the festival and to the nation itself. I think some people there were missing the irony, especially as they never had a sexual revolution. But some people, especially young people, were filled with joy at the the colors and the sexiness of it. (They do love color in Russia)! They do everything big in Moscow: the longest red carpet I have ever seen, lavish parties, all like something out of a 60s movie about rich people. They took thousands of pictures of us, but I don’t have a single one! And we were offered distribution by a Russian distributor (more news on that later).

One day we took a tour of the film studio there, Mosfilm, where all the great Russian classics were shot. We went in a bus with a group of people and saw some wonderful props, costumes, headdresses, sketches, stills, soundstages, automobiles, etc. At the end of it all we were led out to a wooded area where there was music playing and they were roasting a pig and a lamb on spits, and served us lots of salads, wine, etc. It was quite fabulous.

We've also been to Melbourne and Montreal this year, which were both great. The Fantasia Festival in Montreal lead to Canadian distribution, and we will open in various cities in Canada February with different burlesque troupes, including Skin TIght Outta Sight, which will be quite something! In addition, we are opening in Antwerp this month, and I will present VIVA at Brown University and at the George Eastman House in April of next year. See the screenings page for more information.

Melodrama

Almost all movies nowadays are about men and their tasks. Some movies are about women and romance, but those movies tend not to be complex or honest, and they very often leave out the question of the female as a sexual creature with her own primal needs. She is just like a man, only sappier and less in control of her feelings. She is often mediocre and scared, and she needs a man to “fill” her in the worst way. She is not a creature of power and creativity.

If one were to make a study of great moments in film that were satisfying to women, one would have to look no further than the 1940s or 1950s melodrama. This form reached its zenith around 1960, then quickly withered away after that. These movies form a complex picture of women’s psychological needs and fears, and cover such preoccupations as aging, beauty, motherhood, betrayed love, dangerous love, money and sex, women who will do anything for a man, women gone bad for men, women used by men for profit, women who are bad seeds, nymphomaniacs, adultery, shame; basically, all of the most basic emotional concerns of women.

Some of the most interesting from my point of view are those that pose philosophic questions about aging or beauty, such as Mr. Skeffington, A Woman’s Face, Torch Song, Sunset Boulevard, Female on the Beach; those that are about a woman’s ability to be destroyed by wanting love, such as Madame X, Vertigo, Duel in the Sun, Letter to an Unknown Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Red Shoes; those that are about woman’s own destructive or otherwise transformative sexual power, such as The Strange Woman, Double Indemnity, Niagara, Gilda, The Killing, The Birds; those that have to do with a woman’s lot in life, such as Aventurera, Madame Bovary, Mildred Pierce, The Hard Way, The Postman Always Rings Twice; and comedies that paint a positive picture of the power of female sexuality, such as all musicals and “comic blonde” farces.

The powerhouses of women’s cinema—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyk, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Haviland, Jennifer Jones, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Irene Dunne, Vivienne Leigh, Myrna Loy, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Jean Simmons, and a whole host of others too numerous to name—were required to play a double standard in all of their roles which was first of all intended to be powerfully sexy, and second, virtuous. Any painted lady, however crass, was required to have a heart of gold if she was to survive the narrative. Actresses had replaced the holy virgin in Hollywood’s new pantheon of cinema gods and goddesses, and they needed to have that touch of the wholesome to drive men mad with desire and also to produce strong identification in women. The result was a cinema world populated by impossibly sexy, beautiful, well-dressed, glamorous, and internally virtuous women, with dulcet voices, the posture and movements of a dancer, and always with the right thing to say.

How I long for those glamorous screen sirens today, looming in shimmering nitrate silver or Technicolor in hand-beaded gowns. I also long for their problems, for the way in which those problems are rooted in social reality, and for the seemingly universal concern that people had for their problems. Their sexuality was of a powerful and seething nature, and they were always fascinating. The screenwriters, directors, producers, the whole Hollywood machine, knew how to maximize a woman’s luring power to the utmost, so much so that if nudity were added to it, it would have been an unbearable cocktail. One only has to try to imagine Duel in the Sun with a nude Jennifer Jones to understand what I mean by that.