El diamante de Ang Lee

El diamante de Ang Lee

GUSTAVO MARTÍN GARZO
EL PAÍS - Opinión - 03-02-2008

“El sexo es la raíz, el erotismo es el tallo y el amor es la flor. ¿Y los frutos? Los frutos del amor son intangibles y ése es su verdadero misterio”. Esta frase pertenece a La llama doble, el último libro de Octavio Paz. Tenía más de 80 años cuando lo escribió, y puede considerarse su testamento poético y vital. Es raro que un anciano dedique los últimos momentos de su vida a hablar del amor, aunque lo cierto es que nunca dejamos de hacerlo. No importa la edad ni las historias que se hayan vivido, el amor sigue a nuestro lado, siempre diferente y desconocido, con sus frutos intangibles y su cortejo de titiriteros. Nos enfrenta al misterio de la presencia de las cosas, un misterio muy superior a esos vanos enigmas que alimentan la intriga de los grandes best sellers. Alguien dijo que nos hace ver al otro con los ojos de la divinidad. Pues bien, es de ese sentimiento, y de su hondo poder disruptivo, del que habla la última película de Ang Lee, Deseo, peligro (Lust, caution) del director taiwanés afincado en Hollywood.

Hombres inmaduros

The Entertainment Industry’s Love Affair With Immature Men
By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet
September 13, 2007

You know the guy. He has a monosyllabic retro name like Hal or Earl or Chuck, mildly wacky hair and a death grip on his adolescence. He’s got frat house furniture and dependency issues with his friends, and is hapless or commitment-phobic with women. The Act One diagnosis is usually that he just “needs to grow up.”

No, not Michael Vick. Though the Falcon quarterback’s explanation for dog fighting — “I need to grow up” — does show just how ubiquitous the Peter Pan excuse has become. Male leads in recent popular TV shows and movies are increasingly portrayed as victims of their own immaturity. If only instead of claiming he had found Jesus, Vick had said he’d found some fantastically attractive and accomplished woman, perhaps the viewing audience would’ve gone along. In today’s romantic comedy scripts, the man-child always meets his Wendy. Only through the innate, successful, high-achieving grace of a female may our hero be saved.

Taken one at a time, it’s easy to pass off this trend as a simple, comedic trope. But considering the storyline’s popularity and how it is affecting gender relations at large, this narrative is worthy of closer attention.

Construcción acartonada de la sexualidad masculina

Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality

By CAMILLE PAGLIA

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

 

Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

 

Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press, 2007)

Three provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women’s-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men — or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness.

El amante de Lady Chatterley

Love in the afternoon

There’s no reason to nudge your neighbour or wink over Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley. For the French director has done what no Briton could: she has rehabilitated D.H. Lawrence’s iconic ‘dirty book’, finding, in an earlier version, a young woman’s record of becoming through unfolding passion.

By Geoffrey Macnab

At one stage D.H. Lawrence contemplated Tenderness as a title for the novel he eventually called Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Yet tenderness isn’t what best describes its perception within British culture. Written in 1928, two years before the author’s death, the book was too sexually explicit for its time and so wasn’t published in the UK until 1960, when it was prosecuted and eventually cleared for public consumption under the terms of the new Obscene Publications Act. (”Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?” famously asked the outmoded prosecuting counsel at the landmark trial.) For as Philip Larkin pointed out, times were changing: “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/ (Which was rather late for me) -/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.”

Subsequently Lawrence’s literary reputation, built up after his death by F.R. Leavis among others, declined from free-love-era reverence, through feminist vilification, to a more circumspect view today, summed up by Chris Barwick in The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence as “a symptomatic case study in the psychoanalysis of fetishism”. And Lady Chatterley’s Lover is thought of as among the least impressive of his novels.

Las amargas lágrimas de Petra von Kant

Lágrimas de pasión lésbica

Una compañía de teatro española triunfa en Berlín con la adaptación de la película del cineasta Rainer W. Fassbinder sobre el amor entre mujeres. Ahora estrena en Madrid

BEATRIZ PORTINARI - Madrid
EL PAÍS - 15-08-2007

Dos mujeres se miran fugazmente sobre un escenario y de repente algo estalla entre ellas. No es sólo sexo, sino un juego de dominación que acaba tan violentamente como las relaciones machistas que ambas despreciaban.
La primera vez que el actor y director teatral Miquel Insúa vio la película Las amargas lágrimas de Petra von Kant, de Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Alemania, 1945-1982), le pareció “un aburrimiento”. Aquella historia de atracción entre una exitosa diseñadora de moda y una modelo que finalmente la abandona no tendría mayor misterio si el estreno no fuera en 1972, cuando las imágenes de amor lésbico todavía podían provocar un escándalo.

Hoy, Insúa se mueve entre las butacas del Pequeño Teatro Gran Vía de Madrid para ultimar la novedosa puesta en escena de la compañía los Cráneos de Yorick, que estrena mañana tras su presentación oficial en el Deutsches Theater de Berlín en junio. Hasta ese momento, ninguna compañía española había subido a las tablas de este centro, una de las grandes salas de teatro de la capital alemana, y menos con un autor-mito como Fassbinder en el 25 aniversario de su muerte.

Boys don’t cry: guía didáctica

(Extraído de Edualter, una página sobre recursos educativos para la paz, el desarrollo y la interculturalidad. En particular, la sección de materiales relativos a Los derechos sexuales y reproductivos a través del cine: sexualidad, identidades y relaciones de género. El sitio consta de 20 fichas didácticas sobre esta temática.)

FICHA TÉCNICA

Dirección: Kimberly Peirce
Guión: Kimberly Peirce y Andy Bienen
Producción: Jeffrey Sharp, John Hart, Eva Kolodner y Christine Vachon
Duración: 119 m.
Países: EEUU
Año de producción: 1999
Reparto: Hilary Swank, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Brendan Sexton, Alison Folland

Sinopsis: Basada en un hecho real, la película relata la vida de una persona con una crisis de identidad sexual. Se llama Teena Brandon y tiene cuerpo de mujer, pero se siente y aparenta ser un hombre. Cuando se descubre su situación, la discriminación y la intolerancia desencadenará la tragedia.

FICHA DIDÁCTICA

1. OBJECTIVOS PEDAGÓGICOS

o Reflexionar sobre la diversidad de identidades sexuales y cómo son valoradas socialmente.
o Analizar la construcción de la masculinidad, cómo se aprende a ser lo que tradicionalmente se considera ser hombre.
o Reflexionar sobre el hecho de que la sexualidad puede orientarse de modos distintos a lo largo de la vida de una persona.

Estudiando el porno

Unstable boundaries: sex, academic research and conceptions of normalcy

by Susan Ericsson

Williams, Linda, ed. Porn Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP. 2004.

Church Gibson, Pamela, ed. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute. 2004.

It seems academic tectonics may be moving once again, this time shifting around conceptions of sexuality studies. Just as women’s studies programs around the country began changing their name to gender studies in order to place emphasis on systemic and interrelated aspect of gender relations rather than focusing on a particular group (woman) and reifying notions of (wo)man as a fixed category, so too the scholarly intersections of sexuality may soon be realigning. Several recent scholarly publications are continuing the challenge of how we partition the discourses of sexuality and confront what we think of as normative and non-normative sexual practice.

One such example of realignment comes from Michael Warner in his book The Trouble with Normal (1999) where he argues that queer politics should move away from defining its borders by LGBT issues to include marginalized heterosexual practices that are similarly de-legitimated and regulated by the state, such as sex work and other forms of non-marital, non-monogamous sex. Another example is Laura Kipnis’ Against Love (2003) in which she debunks the myth of heterosexual marital monogamy through a combination of statistical and ideological proofs of sexual dissatisfaction with current socially defined ideals. Together, such works as these push at standard ways that categories of sex have been divvyed up and congealed.

Practices of consuming pornography and the understanding of such behavior are also being further reconceived. As Jane Juffer argues in the anthology More Dirty Looks,

“Pornography consumption, it would seem, is becoming a ‘normal’ practice in the US, an accepted part of home entertainment, a domestic technology” (45).

“Zoo”, Robinson Devor

Stable Boys
A horse is a horse of course, of course—but what is a man who has sex with one?
by Nathan Lee
April 24th, 2007 5:07 PM

In 2005, a Seattle man was anonymously delivered to the Enumclaw Community Hospital and died shortly thereafter. The cause of the death was an internal puncture wound inflicted during anal sex with an Arabian stallion. An investigation led to the discovery of a farm where a community of zoophiles, organized through the Internet, had been gathering for rounds of barnyard lovin’. A salacious media frenzy ensued.

When the Enumclaw Horse Incident broke (in rural Washington, where bestiality was not officially illegal), the outrage centered on animal rights, specifically the horse’s lack of consent and the consequent “cruelty” of the situation. Now this is all very nasty, but I ask: If a huge horse with a gigantic boner is placed in front of a happy human butthole and starts banging away, can we really say there was cruelty involved? Kinkiness, yes. Craziness, perhaps. Flexibility, for sure. As for whether or not the tumescent stallion consented to the act, we can debate but will never definitively know.

So allow me to pose another question, this time to the righteous spay-and-neuter set: How is chopping off a dog’s balls (for his own good) less cruel than licking them (which is, you must admit, also for his own good)? There isn’t a pet on the planet that has consented to surgery—or, for that matter, being kept in an apartment, fed (poisonous) Alpo, or dressed in funny little sweaters. Let’s not pretend we domesticate animals for anything other than our pleasure (emotional and ethical), and in doing so inflict all manner of unnatural things on them in the name of their health and happiness. Did the Enumclaw zoophiles pervert the nature of their animals any more than some Chihuahua-toting bimbo?

Cine y sexualidad

Por cuarto año, la UAM organiza unas interesantes jornadas de Cine y Sexualidad. “Mujeres miradas/Miradas de mujer” aborda la construcción de la mujer a lo largo de la historia por medio de imágenes. La asistencia es gratuita.

 Copio parte del programa: “Históricamente, las mujeres han sido retratadas e imaginadas por los medios audiovisuales en general y el cine en particular de maneras muy concretas. En el cine clásico aparecen mujeres floreros, perversas amantes o dulces amas de casa, en general objeto de deseo o de perdición para el protagonista. Son guapas, delgadas, blancas, heterosexuales… pero no tienen control de su sexualidad, que aparece siempre en función del hombre que centra la acción.

Hasta unas décadas después, los años sesenta y setenta, no empezaron a aparecer otras mujeres representadas y otras representaciones de mujeres, tal vez a ello contribuyó que fuéramos nosotras las que por fin pudimos ponernos detrás de las cámaras. Poco a poco han ido apareciendo en las pantallas mujeres más complejas con cuerpos y bellezas diferentes, deseos sexuales propios y, ahora sí, apropiados. En estas jornadas queremos partir del modelo clásico para explorar las imágenes de estas mujeres diferentes.”

Para  más información, visitad su página web: http://www.uam.es/otros/aea/

Tiempos cambiantes

Enduring Love

Alan A. Stone

Changing Times
André Téchiné
Gemini Films

Set in Tangiers and starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, André Téchiné’s latest film, Changing Times (Les temps qui changent) is less intense and less autobiographical than the films that earned him an international reputation. Interwoven strands of subplots are never tied down, and much is left unresolved. This is nothing new for Téchiné, who shares with the French existentialists the bleak vision that there is no resolution in this life or the life hereafter. But even without resolution, his earlier films, such as Strayed (Les égarés, 2003) and My Favorite Season (Ma saison préférée, 1993), left his audience deeply moved, troubled, and haunted by what the filmmaker revealed. In Changing Times, Téchiné treats the miracle of love almost wistfully and sentimentally. One leaves the theater asking oneself, does he really mean it?

Katharine Hepburn

The unusual sex life of a screen goddess

26/11/2006

Catherine Shoard reviews

Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn by William J. Mann

 

 

 

That Katharine Hepburn swung both ways is not, on reflection, too big a bombshell. She called herself ‘Jimmy’. She won her first golf tournament aged 16. She spent three decades with someone called Phyllis. ‘I put pants on 50 years ago and declared a sort of middle road,’ she said, aged 70.

 

There were other hints, too – ‘I wouldn’t give you 10 men for any one woman,’ she once insisted. ‘All men are poops.’

 

 

No, the shock of William J. Mann’s jumbo revisionist biography is just how many people round her were similarly inclined. First out of the closet is Katharine’s brother, Tom, just 15 when he killed himself, probably as a result of his sexual confusion. Save from Kate’s short-lived industrialist husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, all her boyfriends were bisexual, including Howard Hughes, John Ford and even Spencer Tracey.

Gabrielle

Cries and whispers

What happens when the foundations of a marriage are split apart? In Patrice Chéreau’s artful reading of a Joseph Conrad novella, it’s the images and silences that do the talking. By Robin Buss

Patrice Chéreau’s latest film opens with the central character, a wealthy Parisian businessman, walking home from the station after a day at work shortly before World War I. As he goes, Jean Hervey recalls a dinner party the previous Thursday at which the discussion turned to the impossibility of truly knowing another person. Both Jean and his wife, settled into a bourgeois marriage of ten years, protest that it is possible: “I know her thoughts,” Jean (Pascal Greggory) says of Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert), while she responds by claiming that he is the only person she really does know, adding that this is enough for her. In this way, the dinner ironically announces what will be the guiding theme of the film, with all that follows offering extended proof of how untrue these two statements are (and so how little the two characters know themselves, let alone each other). Meanwhile, we catch a glimpse of the newspaper editor who will be the third person in the triangle, and hear Jean’s disparaging opinion of him - a well-off businessman’s view of a bohemian type, an editor who also writes poetry.

Perversión en el cine

Sex scenes: In the realm of the senses…

What makes a genuinely erotic film? Liz Hoggard goes in search of the secrets of great screen sex

10 November 2006

What makes a film truly erotic? Unrequited longing, transgression, voyeurism? Can men and women ever agree? And why are film polls on the subject always so disappointing? Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Sexy Moments was a prime example. The Top 10 ended up a mix of soft-core classics (Basic Instinct, Emmanuelle, Nine 1/2 Weeks) and films that treat sex as slapstick (American Pie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). There was very little grown-up discussion of the co-ordinates of desire.

Which is why director Sophie Fiennes’ latest project, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which is showing at selected screenings around the country, is so refreshing. In her trilogy, the cult philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek takes us on a brilliant and unhinged road-trip through some of the greatest movies ever - from Hitchcock’s romantic epic Vertigo, to the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, delving into the hidden language of cinema, and uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. Key to The Pervert’s Guide is an exploration of the relationship between desire and fantasy in film.

Festival porno de Berlín

THE BERLIN PORN FESTIVAL

Alternative Smut for the Silver Screen

By Alex Bakst

Ever get the feeling that traditional hardcore is just plain boring? Then alt porn may be the genre for you. Goths, punks and skaters have emerged out of the Internet and into the cinema in Berlin’s first ever porn film festival.

It’s 10 p.m. on a Thursday, and at first glance there is nothing unusual about the scene on Kantstrasse 54 in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district. A group of young Americans stands outside the Kant Kino, an art-house cinema just around the corner from a busy shopping area. One girl has a pierced eyebrow, another sports a purple Mohawk. A mother passes by pushing her baby carriage.

A normal Thursday night. Except for what comes next. The audience inside the cinema has gathered to watch the two girls’ latest work on the silver screen — feature-length, down-and-dirty, hardcore pornography.

This is Vivid-Alt porn night at Berlin’s First Porn Film Festival. Eon McKai and his motley crew of directors and actresses — his “girls” — are here to show off their talents. McKai, a California film school graduate and avowed Internet geek, has come to Berlin as the poster boy of alternative pornography — a new-century genre for all those who find mainstream porn passé.

Shortbus

October 4, 2006

Movie Review | ‘Shortbus’

Naughty and Nice in a Carnal Carnival

By MANOHLA DARGIS

As utopian visions go, it doesn’t get much better than “Shortbus,” a film in which all you need is love — and sex, lots and lots of mutually, sometimes collectively, pleasurable sex. John Cameron Mitchell wrote and directed, though orchestrated might be the better word for a carnivalesque romp in which men and women engage in sex in a multitude of creative combinations. An ode to the joy and sweet release of sex, the film manages to be a sincere, modest political venture that finds humor where you might least expect it, notably in a ménage à trois featuring a cheeky rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

“Seis cuentos morales” de Rohmer

Nozone - The moral maze

DVD Review: Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales

The subtleties of Eric Rohmer are brought to vivid life by a fine new box-set. By Tim Lucas.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau/Suzanne’s Career/La Collectionneuse/My Night at Maud’s/Claire’s Knee/Love in the Afternoon

The six films comprising this series offer different sketches of the same dilemma. A man falls in love with a woman, thereby forming a commitment, either in fact or in principle, and then must navigate safe passage through sexual temptation by relying on (and sometimes discovering) his moral code, proving himself worthy of that love. Rohmer’s brand of morality is subjective and non-judgemental; his characters include students and petits bourgeois and the idle rich, Catholics and atheists, singles and marrieds-with-children, and their standards vary. The point is “to thine own self be true” as the series depicts the ways in which thoughtful people can meet themselves in the mazes of their own stratagems, and how their true selves are sometimes at odds with the people they think they are or aspire to be. These films have been available on DVD before, but only in stale-looking, no-frills editions. The DVD label Criterion has come to Rohmer’s rescue at last with one of its most welcome and ambitious box sets, one to rival its splendid ‘Adventures of Antoine Doinel’ François Truffaut set. Each of the films has been meticulously remastered in high bit-rate transfers supervised by Rohmer himself, in his preferred ratio of 1.33:1. Not only are the new transfers exquisite, they offer persuasive validation of the now unfashionable 1.33:1 ratio. The latter two films in the series were composed to allow for 1.66:1 projection; they may look more enveloping when zoom-boxed on a 1.78:1 widescreen set, but they lose much more than they gain - including most of the optional English subtitling.