Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 19
Reviews
R
phine’s clever work in particular teeming with snappy meme-like phrases
and textual projections overlayed or cut up with her strange rituals and
embrace of mental ‘illness’ which, in the case of the Gen Z bimbo, seems
inevitable – the first generation unafraid to talk about mental illness and
the schizoid nature of how to be a woman, or gendered at all, in a virtual,
neo-capitalist yet still horrifically patriarchal world. The demand for mediocre regulation of women’s bodies seems the problem, not only because
any extreme is considered unfeminine, but also because the absolute zero
of the perfect balance simply doesn’t exists so women are kept in a constant
state of failure not much different to the virgin/whore options available for
the last 2000 years. Celia Walden’s conservative exclamation in The Telegraph that bimbofication is deluded because
‘it’s the last thing we
need raising daughters’
is demanding obligatory
motherhood for women
and a boot camp in ‘good
girl’ performance which
smacks of a far worse
naturalised version of
what women should be
doing with their lives.
Just as Gen Z are returning atavistically to witchcraft and goddesses such as Hecate and Inanna,
the bimbofied are returning to the feminist icons of cinema and fin de
siècle theatre and literature who knew they were too much and in that
‘disobedience’ that was simultaneously seductive, found a power beyond
the pen, the stage, the screen yet encompassed within our own bodies.
Bimbofication videos
absolutely transgress
the limits of the gaze
E
MONSTERS:
A Fan’s Dilemma
Claire Dederer
273 pages
Sceptre publishing
£20.00 Hardback
MONSTERS is not so much a fans’
dilemma as a confused outpouring
of American white liberal angst
set again a backdrop of #MeToo,
Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the
Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the
authors own personal traumas juggling motherhood with functional
alcoholism. It is also a timely contribution to the debate surrounding
the current cult of attacking and
cancelling artists, both past and
present, whose lifestyle, personality
traits, or perceived or actual links
to slavery, racist opinions or sexual
misdeeds or other taboo violations
are greeted with calls for that
artist and often their entire artistic
output to be reevaluated, and/or
removed from view.
This is a very personal and
analytical rant and Dederer rarely
gives definitive answers to the “is
it OK to love a film, a book, music
or a painting created by someone
who turns out to be a bad person?”
question, rather she debates it with
herself on her terms. Essentially
she lists and analyses writers,
artists, filmmakers and others she
has either admired or ‘loved’ in the
way we love a band, artist or writer
but was then forced to reevaluate
in light of negative revelations. She
covers Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, the composer Wagner and his
daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner
who ran the Bayreuth festival and
who Hitler called Wini, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir
Nabokov, Sylvia Plath and many
others. Their crimes emotionally
picked over, not so much for their
effect on the wider world when
they became known but to their
effect on her as a fan of their work.
Woody Allen’s seminal film
Annie Hall is not just a favourite of
Dederer’s, who was a professional
film critic for many years, but the
personal style of its star, Diane
Keaton, was almost the definition
of female bohemian cool chic,
making Keaton something of a
cultural heroine for the teenage
Dederer. For her Annie Hall is
“the greatest comic film of the
twentieth century” to which she
asks “was I supposed to give it up
just because Woody Allen behaved
like a terrible person”. She doesn’t
say but rather moves on to Roman
Polanski whose sodomising and
statutory rape of a 13-year old girl
is undisputed and which Polanski
dismissed, drolly remarking that
V
I
E
“everyone wants to fuck young
girls” after he’d fled the US to avoid
facing a trial and possibly prison.
Dederer regards Polanski as a
genius and struggles balancing his
crime with his own suffering. His
mother died in Auschwitz and his
pregnant wife Sharon Tate was
murdered by the Manson “family”
in 1969. Unfortunately, there is no
‘right’ answer only angst.
Writers like Ernest Hemingway
and Vladimir Nabokov, the writer
of Lolita and artists like Picasso
are handled well. Dederer shows
how Nabokov’s creation, Humbert
Humbert the nymphet-hunting
monster, is not to be conflated with
Nabokov the writer, describing him
ultimately as “a kind of anti-monster” willing to have the world think
the worst of him in order that we
may know, and feel, “the enormity
of what it is to steal a childhood.”
With Picasso, Dederer sees and
understands that he was possessed
of a brutal masculinity and that for
him art and sex were inseparable.
That this was a man who had sex
with two separate women on the
same day and painted them both
and who said that “nature has to
exist so that we may rape it”. For
Picasso the sex is intrinsically as important as the painting and nothing
contemporary society says is going
to change that.
Later Dederer moves the focus
onto female ‘monsters’ and her own
monstrousness which in all cases
is either women abandoning their
children in order to pursue their
art; Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell
for example, or abandonment by
suicide as in Sylvia Plath’s case or in
her own case, sometimes shutting
the door on her children so she
could be alone to write.
This is a timely but sometimes
confused book mixing as it does
Dederer’s often heartfelt and passionate views on artists whose work
she once loved or still loves with
current mores. This to me is its
strength and weakness as I cannot
help but feel that her struggles with
these artistic miscreants are driven
as much by Dederer’s appeasing of
her peers as it is by her coming to
terms with behaviours now deemed
unacceptable. She is stridently and
politically of the left, a committed
feminist and hates Donald Trump,
which I mention not as a criticism
of her views but rather as a observation that many of the misdeeds she
worries about, seem to be driven
not so much by personal disgust but
by a kind of ideological group-think.
She too must feel the same level
of rage or fear of being ousted by
them in turn.
Nigel Wingrove
Vampire Cinema: The First
One Hundred Years
Christopher Frayling
Reel Art Press, £39.95
Vampires are an archetype that
tapped into Victorian and Edwardian suppressed attitudes about sex.
The vampire permitted the male
of the period to exert excessive
violence and domination over his
‘prey’ in a wholly animal fashion
- the prey invariably being young,
virginal and female.
However, the vampire also
facilitated female agency, the
female vampire can be lesbian, can
W
S
be promiscuous, can have needs
that are uncontrolled just like the
male of the species. In this way, the
female vampire provides a radical
step forward for representations of
women and these themes alongside the more known and familiar
ones, are carefully laid out for the
reader to see within this comprehensive text.
This book is a luscious, highly
considered visual extravaganza
replete with probing, respectful yet
still interrogative text. The scaffolding for the book comprises of ten
highly intelligent probing chapters
that explore and discuss the representation of the vampire through
cinematic history. Each chapter
has a standalone quality. This is not
a vacuous coffee table title, rather
it is designed to make the reader
give a little of their time to the ideas
and analysis that accompany the
stunning visuals.
A standout chapter is ch.6 Desire
With Loathing Strangely Mix’d
which takes a fresh look at chronologising the underlying sexual
elements of Dracula in the cinema,
and which features an image of
Soledad Miranda from Jess Franco’s
Vampyros Lesbos, later Jean Rollin’s La Vampire Nue and Le Frisson
du Vampire are referenced using
the stunning poster illustrations of
Philippe Druillet.
It is a shame though given Rollin’s
extraordinary visual style that the
authors didn’t mimic David Pirie’s
pioneering 1970’s book, also called,
Vampire Cinema, and reproduce
some images from Rollin’s films as
well. The same applies to Jaromil
Jire’s exquisite Valerie and Her
Week of Wonders, which, though
represented by its lovely artwork,
misses an opportunity to stun the
reader with images with a truly
visually mesmerising film. That
said, the quality of the images that
are reproduced is excellent; think of
a film remastered in HD compared
to its previous video release.
The reader is exposed to a
stunning array of vampire imagery
with standout images including the
Collinson Twins being suitably sexy
in Twins of Evil and Sharon Tate
at her loveliest in Polanski’s Dance
of the Vampires, amongst many,
many vampiric images reproduced
throughout. To his credit, Grayling
has a global gaze as he takes us
by the hand through a visual tour
of the genre. So many of these
images beautifully wrought whilst
often produced for cheap passing
advertising consumption. It makes
them intensely marketable now. For
£39.95 the reader gets a high-quality book, textually and visually, this
one’s a keeper!
Anna Maksymluk
Salvation/17