And now look - Weekend - Kommersant

And now look - Weekend - Kommersant



What does auteur cinema do with pornography? Deprives her of naivety and unambiguity. In the best films of great directors, pornographic episodes exist not to excite the audience, but for anything else: to tire the viewer, to talk philosophy with him, to show him the essence of violence, to make him laugh. What does pornography do to auteur cinema? She makes him feel good.

Text: Xenia Rozhdestvenskaya

Salo, or 120 days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy-France, 1975

A film in which pornographic scenes are a way to show the mechanics of violence. This is a free adaptation of the Marquis de Sade, a film about what the authorities do to people, and about how people obey the authorities, how violence becomes a routine, how the condemned smiles at the executioner. Four representatives of the authorities gather 18 young men and women in a closed residence to have fun with them, then torture and kill them. All of this is detailed and unbearable. Outside the walls of the residence - Mussolini's regime, inside - meaningless hope, submission, death. Pasolini - who was killed before the film was released - admitted that he made a movie about the relationship of power and man, not only about fascism, but about capitalism in general. Years from now, Lard will be reflected in the strangest mirror imaginable: John Waters, author of the cult porno camp comedy Pink Flamingos, will say that this movie “about power pornography” is the only movie he wants to make.

"Shortbus Club"

John Cameron Mitchell, USA, 2006

A porno romantic comedy, a film about self-love and sex - with a happy ending, autofellatio, sex toys, and a sex club called Shortbus, where you can even meet the former mayor of New York. A dominatrix with a disarming smile and a name that is unbelievable, a gay couple who has some problems in their relationship, a sex therapist who is physically unsatisfied - in general, all possible combinations of bodies in search of an orgasm. Director John Cameron Mitchell deliberately made a film "in which sex is not boring", moreover - he considered his "Shortbus" "an act of resistance to Bush and the America in which we live." Mitchell takes the excitement out of pornography, leaving only the good mood, a good way to resist fear and hate.

"Sex, Lies and Videos"

Steven Soderbergh, USA, 1989

A story about thirty-year-old Americans, each of whom solves the problem of sex in his own way: one is cheating on his wife, the other knows how to listen and shoots female confessions on a video camera. Maintaining distance, truth and a video camera are the slogan of a new round of auteur cinema. The debut of Steven Soderbergh, filmed for very little money, received Cannes gold and returned to cinema interest in sex and, most importantly, faith in smart cinema. Years from now, Soderbergh will once again reshape Hollywood's view of pornography with a powerful, chill drama almost devoid of eroticism, starring porn star Sasha Grey.

"Last woman"

Marco Ferreri, Italy, 1976

All the films of the Italian Marco Ferreri, even those where people just eat, are on the verge of pornography - he shows the moment in the life of his characters when they are ready to change their position, because they no longer get pleasure in the previous one. There is a lot of naked body and its reciprocating movements in The Last Woman. Here Depardieu, who walks around naked for most of the film, is the very essence of a man: he keeps fiddling with himself, playing with knives, mechanically touching all kinds of phallic objects and does not understand what to do with a woman if she suddenly does not need his penis. He is no less infantile than his one-year-old son. Ferreri, whom in the 1970s one of the critics called Rabelais the masochist, spreads over time, and sometimes across his various films, sex, arousal and the impossibility / unwillingness to finish; in The Last Woman, sex is one of the arguments in the debate about feminism. The argument at first glance seems to be convincing, but in reality - tear it off and throw it away.

"Caligula"

(not quite) Tinto Brass, Italy, 1979

Pornopeplum, which turned out to be a mockery of both peplum and porn. "Caligula" - with its rampant unsimulated sex, anal fisting, incest, scenes of violence, the wild look of Malcolm McDowell, who played the Roman emperor, and the somewhat bewildered Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud - could only have appeared in the 1970s, but and then caused a scandal. The film was produced by Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, who also removed director Tinto Brass from the filming, filmed six minutes of real porn and edited them into the film. It's the perfect primer on "what's the difference between porn and art": Guccione approached historical events as a setting for copulation, something along the lines of "then the emperor came and asked if the copper pipes should be blown out." Tinto Brass never considered this film his own and sued Guccione, as did the author of the original script, Gore Vidal. And film critic Roger Ebert not only called this movie "shameful trash", but also said that it was bad art, bad cinema and bad pornography.

"Idiots"

Lars von Trier, Denmark, 1998

Von Trier always shoots a kind of "torture porn" - his characters slowly and painfully self-destruct, and neither the "golden heart" nor the golden rain can stop them. Idiots is the director's only film that follows the rules of the Dogma 95 manifesto (the authors who signed this manifesto refused to accept the illusion in cinema and wanted to "squeeze the truth" out of the characters and circumstances). In The Idiots, unfeigned group sex between people trying to "discover the idiot in themselves" causes exactly the same awkwardness as the musical numbers in Dancer in the Dark or the conversations in Melancholia: a small stop on the road to hell. Trier admitted that he "flirted a bit with porn" in Idiots. To continue the analogy, in "Antichrist" Trier and porn had a little affair, and in "Nymphomaniac" they came together and got a cat.

"Empire of the Senses" ("Corrida of Love")

Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1976

Rare in strength and persuasiveness is an exploration of love and sex as mutual subordination and the desire for unlimited power. Oshima has always been interested in liberation, emancipation - political, personal, sexual. In "Corrida of Love" he watches how emancipation turns into pathology. The characters have an uncontrollable attraction to each other. They try to isolate themselves from the outside world, its militarization and tight control, and go further and further in their sexual games. In the end, a woman accidentally kills a man, after which she cuts off his penis and walks the streets with him (a true story). In many countries, the film was banned and in Japan itself it was never shown without censorship. Oshima explained that "obscenity is what is hidden." If we can see everything, the very concept of obscene disappears. He argued that after watching "Corrida of Love" it is impossible to perceive it as a porn film, because nothing is hidden, and therefore "obscene", remains in it.

"And your mom too"

Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2001

Two seventeen-year-old Mexican slackers and a distant relative of one of them, an almost thirty-year-old woman who had just been dumped by her husband, in a road movie about what you can’t see when you only feel desire. Talking about sex, around sex, during sex, the film is filled with desire, which led some critics to consider it an example of soft porn. Actually, Cuarón was filming a story about Mexican self-identity, and sex here is just a way of growing up, like a car is a way of moving from one place to another. The heroes do not pay attention to what flickers outside the windows, but the viewer manages to see everything and understand something about the time and the country.

"Car Crash"

David Cronenberg, Canada, 1996

Cronenberg, the singer of transformations, here pushes cars and bodies together, his heroes have a stronger attraction to death than an attraction to another person, car accidents become a fetish, they are treated with almost religious ecstasy. The film is impeccable in its perversity - not in the sense of sex, although there is a lot of it and it is infinitely diverse, but in the sense of the interpenetration of machine and man, iron and flesh. Cronenberg then stated that humanity has come to such a turn in history when it is necessary to reinvent sex - because for the first time it is not needed for procreation. He also reinvents pornography, forcing the viewer, for example, to perceive photos of car accidents as completely obscene pictures. A quarter of a century later, this love of the car and violence was taken to the extreme by Frenchwoman Julie Ducourneau in the body horror Titan (2021).

"Anatomy of Hell" ("Pornocracy")

Catherine Breillat, France, 2004

Screen adaptation of Breuil's novel "Pornocracy", which explores female sexuality. In a gay club, a lady decides to commit suicide, one of the club's guests saves her, she asks him to spend a few nights with her and "look" at her. Breya is shocking and a philosopher, and in Anatomy of Hell shocking and philosophy are equal parts. The more standard philosophical constructions, the more unexpected things the characters do on the screen. Porn star Rocco Siffredi, who once said: “My penis is my gift and my curse,” talks about the bumpiness of women, Amira Kazar (and her stunt double, who starred in porn scenes) exchanges all kinds of bodily secretions with him, pitchforks sticking out of the vagina. Some of the critics called the "Anatomy of Hell" an example of "feminist existential porn": hell is others, the anatomy of others is some kind of hell.

"Entrance to the Void"

Gaspard Noe, France, 2009

A post-mortem (and pre-life) trip by a young drug dealer, a porn adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which the Void Club replaces the Rectum Club from Irreversible, and all kinds of sex fade before the last episode, in which the viewer is with the camera dives into the vagina and impregnates the heroine. One of the most radical audience trips in the history of cinema, which half of the critics consider empty, the other half - an ode to love and beauty. But with the narcissist Gaspard Noe, it's always like that. He believes that in modern cinema there is too little physicality, and in modern pornography there is too little feeling. More, more of both! - this is how his "Entrance to the Void" and the no less radical "Love" (2015) appeared.

"Turkish Delights"

Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands, 1973

Turkish delight of Soviet film distribution, a film that immediately after the release was called semi-pornographic, a drama about nonconformism. Young Rutger Hauer is blatantly free here, as is the great director Paul Verhoeven. Later, after moving to Hollywood, Verhoeven directed Strippers and Basic Instinct—two important films in the history of both mainstream porn and satire of the American way of life—but nothing sexier, funnier, and more charming has ever appeared in his filmography. than Hauer cataloging his ladies in an attempt to forget about his ex-wife.

"X"

Ty West, USA, 2022

A slasher about filming a porn movie, a homage to the 1970s era: both the grindhouse and the golden age of slashers, and the time when pornography looked into the territory of auteur cinema. Young people dream of becoming famous - in the late 1970s, the easiest way to do this was to shoot copyright porn. But at the ranch where the shooting takes place, something is clearly not right. A real ode to cinema - and first of all to the masterpiece of Paul Thomas Anderson "Boogie Nights", which also tells about the formation of the porn industry. Actually, "X" begins with a direct quote from the PTA movie - and then it drowns in blood.


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