* (expanded)

 

‘The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate. They pulsate microcosmically: in the images, the camera trembles and flickers so violently that, even within a single, continuous shot, no photogram resembles another. And they pulsate macrocosmically: the soundtrack is constructed globally upon unidentifiable, layered, synthesised, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when all other sounds have disappeared. In the very beginnings and endings of his films, over the credits, there is nothing but this strangely bodily sound.’ — Adrian Martin, Kinoeye

‘There is something profoundly new about Grandrieux’s plastic exploration of violence, but also something very contemporary. His approach is not based on such editing and framing effects one finds and admires in Hitchcock and Ray, nor in an exploration of excess as in Tarantino. He works on the inside of an image, on the special relation between the luminous content and the vibrant and fragmentary representation.’ — Christa Bluminger, Parachute

‘Grandieux’s films carefully try to understand the exact inner-working of one’s psychic, and more especially the part that deals with desire and transformation. How does desire work? What are the elements that this energy-matter is using to expand its empire? What are the social repressions that desire has to face? Unlike Pasolini who is really interested in the way that society is theatrically transforming the ceremony of predating into a show, there is here an experimental cinema; it is true; that is trying to register, thanks to the camera, what humans eyes would never be able to see in order to deconstruct and analyze reality. Grandrieux’s films are analytical films, like a microscope, that give the viewer the possibility to see more accurately what is movement, emotion, sensation, colour, darkness and the emergence of the image (either material or thought). What is the process that enables something to become an image in the dark? Why can this process only be seen as a threat?’ — Jean-Claude Polack

‘In his films, Philippe Grandrieux has revealed his startlingly corporeal vision of a world in which the body and its drives remake cinematic form and content alike. Often compared to the work of Stan Brakhage, Grandrieux’s films similarly reject representational cinema in favor of a mode of filmmaking that, in Brakhage’s famous phrase, realizes “adventures in perception.” In Grandrieux’s case, this approach entails a radical reworking of the frame, offscreen space, lighting and even focus, at times edging the image towards the barely perceptible. No less radical is Grandrieux’s approach to sound, which is often distorted and accentuated, with dialogue kept to a careful minimum and music alternately ambient and blaring. Grandrieux’s is a cinema of vibrations and tremors in which image and sound seem to pulsate with a kind of furious life.

‘The subjects of Grandrieux’s first two features, Sombre and New Life – a serial killer and sex trafficking, respectively – quickly gave him the reputation of being something of an enfant terrible. Yet, while Grandrieux’s vision is very dark – literally and figuratively – it is never gratuitous but rather an extension of the French fascination, from Sade to Bataille to Genet, with the body’s potential to undo subjectivity in the gaps between social order and animality, where the body/corporeality itself becomes radically refigured not as the vehicle for consciousness but as flesh with a life of its own. Even those who, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, have reservations about the sexualized violence of Grandrieux’s first two films will appreciate the originality and gravity of their formal audacity.’ — Harvard Film Society

‘Grandrieux’s reflection belongs to the body’s modernity – the modernity of Sigmund Freud, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to name only a few – and thus returns the anthropological need for representation to a state of immanence. The image is no longer given as a reflection, discourse, or the currency of whatever absolute value; it works to invest immanence, using every type of sensation, drive and affect. To make a film means descending, via the intermittent pathways of neuronal connection, down into the most shadowy depths of our sensory experiences, to the point of confronting the sheer terror of the death drive (Sombre), or the still more immense and bottomless terror of the unconscious, of total opacity (La Vie nouvelle).’ — Nicole Brenez

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Philippe Grandieux Official Website
PG @ IMDb
PG @ Wikipedia
PG interviewed by Nicole Brenez
Magick Mike on PG’s ‘Sombre’ @ EEP
PG’s ‘Un Lac’ reviewed @ Screener
PG @ Facebook
PG @ the Harmony Korine Website Forum
Video: PG interviewed (in French)
PG Torrent Search
PG interviewed @ Rouge
‘Film Comment Selects: Philippe Grandrieux Films’
‘Malgré la nuit’ page @ Facebook
‘PHILIPPE GRANDRIEUX HAPPILY BRINGS HIS DARK VISIONS TO LINCOLN CENTER’
‘La caméra haptique de Philippe Grandrieux’
‘Propos de Philippe Grandrieux’
‘Entretien: Philippe Grandrieux [critikat.com]’
‘Dans une langue étrangère” Un lac de Philippe Grandrieux’
‘ARTIST IN FOCUS: Philippe Grandrieux’

 

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Extras

Philippe Grandrieux / films by / extracts

Alan Vega ‎– ‘Les Amours Perdues’ from Philippe Grandrieux’s “Sombre”

Cápsula 04 – Philippe Grandrieux

Oscuro – Philippe Grandrieux

MARYLIN MANSON / Putting holes in happiness // Directed by Philippe Grandrieux

Tristan und Isolde in de regie van Philippe Grandrieux

 

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Interview

 

I was wondering about the dimension of politics in your work. In former films like SOMBRE or LA VIE NOUVELLE you have political references and now with portraying Masao Adachi, one of the most radical and well known activists and filmmakers in Japanese history, of course you created a very explicit context. Do you consider the film as a political film?

Philippe Grandieux: Well, it’s trivial to say that, but all our acts involve politics. You couldn’t be here without thinking about politics. It is much more than ideology; it’s decision in fact. Politics means making decisions about your own life: How you act in the world and how you want to be. So it’s really something very important. In SOMBRE for instance there wasn’t any morality – no good, no bad. It is a decision, a very political decision to let the audience face their own desire, their own unrest. LA VIE NOUVELLE was more or less the relationship between the chaotic historical post-communism in Bulgaria and the chaotic psychic world. You drive inside of it. So ADACHI is politics but a very sensual movie at the same time, I hope. It’s based on emotion and sensation, as my movies generally are. Making movies, like life, is a path. So you’re following your own path as much as you can. Sometimes you’re weaker and sometimes you feel energized. This is always more or less the same question I’m working on.

I noticed as well that you link, in a very interesting way, the portrait of Adachi itself and the formal strategies of the feature films you did before, for example the dissolution of the images which are mirrored in the landscape of Tokyo that you depict repeatedly. I have the impression that the connection of this real political background with your artistic style gives your work a new layer.

PG: You’re right, yes. It’s true.

Do you intend to further follow this direction?

PG: The movie I’ve just finished now is called WHITE EPILEPSY and it’s supposed to be a kind of a tryptich on the question of unrest. This movie is very particular, because for me it’s a feature film, but it’s done out of a very radical position: the frame is vertical. The question of storytelling also became very important to me, in order to understand how I want to work with it. In WHITE EPILEPSY there are no more questions of characters and the psychological map of the characters throughout the movie, of how the story grows out of these characters – instead the question is more about the event: something happens. Questioning the event is rather in the centre of the movie itself compared to the development of the story. This is something that I really want to work on. I also want to further pursue the relation between sensation and emotion. They are two different issues, but not so far from each other. I try to explore the same possibilities over and over through cinema.

I’ve heard that after Masao Adachi you and Nicole Brenez are planning to portray other radical filmmakers as well? Will you be directing?

PG: No. We try to provide the possibility for making other movies but I’m not going to do the other ones myself. Other filmmakers will. We have a project on René Vautier, a french filmmaker. A very strong guy: at 15 he was a part of “La Résistance” in France, after which he fought against the colonization, in Algeria too. Now he’s old, maybe 80-82, but he is an incredibly strong filmmaker. We also plan a project on newsreels in America. Well, we’ll see, because for this series we haven’t got any money yet. We don’t want to write things to get money so we try to keep it very, very free. Because I think this is very important. This movie – ADACHI – as I went to Tokyo, I was facing the possibility that there might have been no movie at all in the end. So it was not necessary to finish something. This gives you a lot of freedom.

Since you were mentioning the money aspect: This is of course closely linked to the fact that depending on your work it is not easy to reach an audience. I have the impression that you’re a filmmaker who seeks to address people through cinema and move something in their way of perceiving the world. Being fairly well known now, is it easy for you nowadays to reach new audiences? Are you actively trying to reach out?

PG: I would like to try to expand the possibilities of cinema with my next feature film. It’s not necessary to reach huge audiences. Maybe the audience will be more important than the other movies had, but I can’t think in terms of that. I really try to follow my own steps.
I’m very interested in actors, stars. I think it could be very interesting to make a movie with no money at all but with very well known actors. Because this is also a part of what ‘cinema’ is. It’s about political problems, agents, lawyers, distributors and sellers. About these very well formed industrial systems and I think they offer a huge possibility for working. I would like to try something alike next.

I’m interested in the relationship between emotion, sensation and intellectualization. How has it changed over the years in your personal view and in the reception of others, in their approach of others towards your work?

PG: I think it depends on where you are, because when you are making movies – as Adachi says at the end of the movie – there is an intellectual aspect, but in the end it must be about the sensation itself. Because sensation is life in a way: something you couldn’t control, that you couldn’t put inside any kind of system. Even if the systems are very, very clever and very powerful. Think of Leibnitz or Kant – even with all these very strong philosophers we couldn’t reach the real point of knowing what life is. Maybe ‘odd’ is a possibility. Maybe it’s the only one. Sometimes I think like this, when I am in a positive mood.

To answer your question: When you do a movie, you organize things, you write, you scout, you cast, you think a lot, you take notes, you write the script, you prepare everything, it’s a very intellectual process. But when you shoot it’s something else. It’s really back to sensation, pure sensation, pure feelings, and pure intuition. A beautiful aspect is that time is an editing process, an intellectual process. You cut things and put them together, and after a while sense appears. But sensation is something else. It’s intuition, pure duration. It’s not any more the time that you can cut into discrete seconds; it’s an eternity inside of yourself. It’s a big question. Maybe the same question as: If you are thinking too much in terms of intellectuality and sense, you’re thinking in terms of immortality. If you’re thinking in terms of duration you’re thinking in terms of eternity. It’s two different ways to be and to me art is really part of these eternity feelings, which are a part of us.

What about the reception that comes from the outside, from theorists or critics? Do you still find something useful, when they interpret your work in a highly intellectual way?

PG: Well, it’s not helpful at all to make movies. It’s helpful for me to be inside of the world. I mean to be with my… I don’t know what to say. It’s helpful, because you see that what you are trying to do is not just ‘nowhere’. Of course it’s important. But after a movie is done, one can write a thousand pages. It’s strange; it’s really something completely different.

And what about beauty? Is this something you are searching for? Have you got a concept of beauty or is it pure instinct? For example Bruno Dumont says that he tries to avoid beautiful images, but that is something I can’t believe.

PG: It’s not beauty at this level; it is not the question of beautiful images. The beauty is something much stronger. When Dostojewski says that the beauty saves the world, the question is not about doing beautiful things. Beauty is a political decision in a way. It’s to be alive with your own self, strongly alive. I mean not under submissions. Beauty is the possibility to feel ‘la force’, the strength of the things, the reality and the real. So beauty is very important of course, but it’s not at all about beautiful pictures.

What about melancholy? When I saw UN LAC it seemed to me that for the first time in your work appeared a very strong sense of sadness. Do you think sadness is a proper way to react to this world?

PG: I think it’s impossible to be untouched by melancholy. We are dealing with time, memories and our childhood. We can’t escape from this and I think these melancholic dimensions are very important. It’s also in terms of politics: All the organizations are transforming more and more into paranoid systems in which you fit in. You fit in via computer, cell phone or Facebook – it’s a paranoid organization of our feelings. Melancholy is something else. Melancholy could be dangerous too, as a tendency you may incline towards. But it’s very important.

Maybe it’s kind of subversive to be melancholic.

PG: I think so, yes. You know these systems to control the streets? If somebody stops walking, after two or three minutes, the computers signal that somebody stopped walking. Something happened. Someone stopped in the middle of the street, but the person shouldn’t be immobile. This is a very interesting conception of your destiny [laughs].

You mentioned that you try to dive further into this field of pure sensation. Now you did WHITE EPILEPSY. I heard it is very focused on bodies. I wonder if it is very important for you to find a certain body. Would you cancel a project if you couldn’t manage to find a certain professional or non-professional?

PG: Absolutely. For this project I worked with a dancer, Hélène Rocheteau. We worked together on what we can call choreography, although I’m not a choreographer. It was a piece of twelve minutes; it was shown in Metz in France and was very interesting. It was a cycle and featured a loop of Joy Division music: a ceremony. We worked on insect movements, on the way insects are completely limited to their instinct. For them there is no possibility to escape their instincts at all. There are very few needs, but these needs are accordingly intense, there is no doubt. We tried to work on these kinds of movements and I was very impressed by her body, how she can move each muscle with such intense possibilities, like Butoh dancers. An when I was thinking about WHITE EPILEPSY I had this idea of this naked body, that I can be with her in this kind of very, very strong relation: very strange way of movement, human but not completely human.

Being a critic and writing about film, I’m more and more doubting that people take out a lot with them, when they leave the cinema. I’m a bit pessimistic about film and the way that it fails to activate something in audiences. Many seem to use these two hours in order to separate themselves from their lives. I would love to contribute to them connecting more to film and I’m trying to do my part through writing. Since we talked about bodies, do you think that using the body and its physicality expands the possibility of cinema to reach people more intensely?

PG: That’s an interesting point of view, the question how cinema is moving inside of us. We never know; it’s strange. Maybe cinema is less powerful than years ago. But I couldn’t really think in those terms, because I don’t like glorifying the past. We are here, just here and now, and we are dealing with our reality. This is nice and it’s strong and I like it. I have no regrets about anything – no regret about the 35mm, no regret at all. I like numeric cameras and if tomorrow there are no more cameras, ok. Then there are no more cameras; who cares. But the question you rose, how the movies are inside of us, or what we can call movies today, I think this is very important. Because I’m sure it is still operating, it is still strong. I mean you are still undergoing a certain experience when you go see a movie. If it’s pure entertainment, you get a good moment with your friends, you have a beer and that’s it. Why not? We shouldn’t be dogmatic in this aspect of the things. But you know, there are some kinds of movies that move you very deeply and sometimes even influence all of your live. Of course, this is what I would like to try to catch with my work. I don’t know if I have success. I would like to put one human being in front of these pictures, inside of this sound, inside of this world to get the possibility to feel something within itself. No words, just the feeling of being alive and of the complexity this situation achieves.

 

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10 of Philippe Grandrieux’s 13 films

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Sombre (1998)
‘Philippe Grandrieux’s first full length cinema film has unleashed a storm of controversy since its showing at the Locarno initernational film festival in 1998. It had critics solidly divided into two camps – those who regard it as an obscene, unwatchable mess, and others who rate it as a sublime masterpiece of the psychosexual thriller genre. It is clearly a film which is acceptable only to certain tastes, and many will find the film very hard to stomach. Certainly, Grandrieux’s extremely minimalist photography, much of which involves jerky camera movements and hazy out-of-focus images shot in virtual pitch-blackness, makes few concessions to traditional cinema audiences. To his credit, this unusual – and frankly disorientating – cinematography serves the film well, heightening the menace in the killer and the brutality of his murders by showing little and prompting us to imagine much more than we see. The idea presumably is to show the world as the obsessed killer sees it, through a darkened filter with periodic loss of focus.’ — James Travers, filmsdefrance

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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La vie nouvelle (2002)
‘Since its premiere screenings in late 2002, Philippe Grandrieux’s second feature La Vie nouvelle (The New Life) has been a cause célèbre. On its theatrical release in France, it was savaged by a large number of prominent newspaper and magazine reviewers. But the film has many passionate defenders. Grandrieux’s work plunges us into every kind of obscurity: moral ambiguity, narrative enigma, literal darkness. La Vie Nouvelle presents four characters in a severely depressed Sarajevo who are caught in a mysterious, death-driven web: the feckless American Seymour (Zach Knighton), his mysterious companion (lover? friend? brother? father?) Roscoe (Marc Barbé), the demonic Mafioso Boyan (Zsolt Nagy), and the prostitute-showgirl who is the exchange-token in all their relationships, Mélania (Anna Mouglalis). Eric Vuillard’s poetically conceived script takes us to the very heart of this darkness where sex, violence, betrayal and obsession mingle and decay. Grandrieux feels freer than ever to explore the radical extremes of film form: in his lighting and compositions and impulsive camera movements; in the bold mix of speech, noise and techno/ambient music (by the celebrated experimental group Etant Donnés); and in the frame-by-frame onslaught of sensations and affects.’ — Adrian Martin, Kinoeye

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

Philippe Grandrieux, à propos de La Vie Nouvelle

 

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Un lac (2008)
‘How to sum up Un Lac? It’s no easier than with Sombre or La Vie nouvelle, the two last films by Philippe Grandrieux. Suffice to say that Grandrieux has been hotly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as one of Europe’s most innovative and uncompromising filmmakers, his visionary films testing the very limits of screen language. This minimalist new work is at once Grandrieux’s most accessible film and his most abstract. The vestigial narrative takes place in a frosty Northern landscape of forests and mountains, where young woodchopper Alexis lives with his sister, their blind mother and a younger brother. Then one day a younger man arrives on the scene… Grandrieux doesn’t make events easy for us to follow, often shooting in near-darkness, with sparse dialogue sometimes pitched barely above a whisper. But narrative apart, the film is distinctive for the unique, self-enclosed world that Grandrieux creates with a palette reduced almost to monochrome: a world of stillness and near-silence, of forbidding yet alluring landscapes whose affinities are as much with the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, as with the cinematic ilk of Alexandr Sokurov, Bela Tarr and Fred Kelemen.’ — Jonathan Romney

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

Making of Un lac

 

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Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Avachi (2011)
‘This tribute to the radical Japanese writer-director Masao Adachi is the first in a series of documentaries that Philippe Grandrieux wants to dedicate to deeply political filmmakers. For decades, the eccentric Adachi was a member of the extremist Japanese Red Army. French director Philippe Grandrieux (Sombre, 1999; A Lake, 2009) wants to make a series of portraits of politically committed filmmakers. His film about Japanese avant-gardist Masao Adachi (1939) is the first in this series. In the 1960s and 1970s, Adachi was a prominent film critic and underground filmmaker, with experimental films such as Sain (1963) to his name. He often collaborated with his contemporary and ally Nagisa Oshima, wrote scripts for Koji Wakamatsu and made films in the pink genre. Disappointment with the political direction of Japan made him join the the extreme left-wing Japanese Red Army in the early 1970s and he started making films in Beirut. Grandieux engages in sometimes cryptic conversations with him about film, art and politics and films him in his characteristic style: sometimes out of focus, sometimes under or over- exposed. With a few clips from Adachi’s work, such as The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War from 1971.’ — IFFR

the entire film

 

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White Epilepsy (2012)
‘Philippe Grandrieux’s work has often invoked the world of Francis Bacon, but in this almost purely experimental piece it is even more pronounced, as he takes Bacon’s fascination with the triptych and the body and insists on utilising only the middle section of the frame. Here are bodies in primordial states, fully formed as muscle and flesh, but as if unformed in the nature of their desires and subsequently somehow closer to nature. Utilising a dense soundtrack that both suggests the internal organs (lungs, larynx and heart) and the extended sounds of the forest, Grandrieux has made a film that isn’t easy to watch but equally not easy to forget. It is a strategy that has worked wonderfully well for him in the past with moments from Sombre (for example, the Punch and Judy contest), La vie nouvelle (the scenes filmed with a thermo camera) and the misty lake in Un Lac all examples of the cinematically unforgettable. Perhaps the images here are too abstract and sculptural to fascinate us fully, without that soupçon of story that can make Grandrieux’s work maddeningly suggestive, but this is is still a film by a modern master.’ — List Film

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

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Meurtrière (2015)
‘The film opens on the body of a naked woman, lying on her back. Only her flesh, muscles, curves and hollows are thrown into relief against the surrounding darkness. Her face remains invisible. Slowly, to a rhythmic soundtrack of muffled, raspy breathing, other bodies appear, their faces also masked and their nudity on full display. In slow motion, arms, legs, bellies and breasts intertwine, collide, latch together, submit or hold still in a resolutely static and vertical frame. As each scene flows into the next, throbbing and relentless, the atmosphere grows threatening and disquieting. Cinema in its most stripped-down form becomes a pure sensory experience, the stock-in-trade of French director Philippe Grandrieux (Un lac). The second movement of his performance triptych Unrest after White Epilepsy, Grandrieux’s exploration of worry, Meurtrière is a striking tableau vivant reminiscent of Goya and Francis Bacon and populated by the bodies of four dancers: Émilia Giudicelli, Vilma Pitrinaite, Hélène Rocheteau and Francesca Ziviani. Graceful yet ruthless, obscene yet mystical, monstrous yet sublime, the film fascinates by virtue of its hypnotic, unsettling tone.’ — Festival du nouveau cinéma

Trailer

 

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Malgré la nuit (2015)
‘Early in Philippe Grandrieux’s Malgré la Nuit, Lenz (Kristian Marr) encounters a friend (Lola Norda) in a dark, abstract space illuminated only by a faint copper-toned light as smoke billows around them. They call each other out in diaphanous whispers enhanced by the absence of any diegetic noise, until their hands touch. She asks him what he’s doing back in Paris, to which he plaintively responds, “I’m searching for Madeleine,” crystallizing the film’s axis of conflict: the regaining of a lost love. It’s an unusual start coming from a filmmaker who routinely eschews anything that so much as resembles plot markers or sentimentality. Then again, no one accustomed to Grandrieux’s penchant for disruption should be too surprised by this. Since his startling debut feature, Sombre, Grandrieux has become one of cinema’s most audacious chroniclers of society’s underbelly, maybe even its best articulator of heightened sensations; despair and ecstasy erupt from the fabric of his films with a blistering, almost physical intensity. While Grandrieux’s fourth fiction feature continues his usual investigation into the limits of experience and range of cinematic possibilities, there’s also a strong willingness here to work along a more traditional narrative scheme. Not that Grandrieux has totally softened up. Malgré la Nuit still plays out like a sordid nightmare straight out of Georges Bataille’s imagination.’ — Film Comment

Trailer

Excerpt

Critics’ Talk: Philippe Grandrieux (Malgré la nuit)

 

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Unrest (2017)
‘In a career spanning more than 40 years, Grandrieux has interrogated the power of images and presented us with every possible permutation of love, violence and life itself, often in its most extreme forms. His latest short film ‘Unrest’ is the final part of a 10 year project, a triptych of short works (with ‘White Epilepsy’ and ‘Meurtriere’) grouped together under the collective title ‘Unrest’. Here Grandrieux strips back his vision to its most minimal form yet to present us with a vision of bare life that evades enclosure within fixed form and meaning. As Grandrieux has written, ‘No narrative link unites the three parts of the triptych, what we have is rather three stages of bodily presence, three affective intensities, three events that we are able to access only via what they make us experience inside of us, our own disquiet’.’ — QAGOMA

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

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‎The Scream (2019)
‘Split-screen of three identical scenes (the middle offset by 3 seconds and the right by 5) of “cathartic performances” of naked women screaming, laughing, singing, writhing around, banging the walls and floors, allows Grandrieux a more emotive response to his bodily works, even if their derivative form makes predecessors like Meurtrière superior in their quiet resolutions. The Scream probably works better as an installation as it appears to be, so I won’t deride it much for its repetitive nature; however, the distinct lack of slow-motion or ambient noise is disappointing given their effective use in all of Grandrieux’s other works.’ — sky3088

Watch the film here

 

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w/ Lav Diaz, Manuela de Laborde, Óscar Enríquez Liminal (2020)
‘A FICUNAM commission for four directors, Liminal seeks to play with poetic affinities between film and music. Moving across aesthetic and generational differences, the film-makers explore this relationship through four distinct stories as to context and imaginary. Grandrieux’s opening short “La Lumière la Lumière” is the standout. It covers the investigation on the relationship between body and light that Grandrieux has becoming even more interested during the past decade and does so in exciting miniature fashion. It helps that Grandrieux project fits perfectly with the “poetic relationship between cinema and music” thst the movie synopsis claim links the four shorts, so he was very well suited for the commission, while everybody else mostly struggle to fit ideas into it.’ — Filipe Furtado

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I originally thought I’d only be in Paris for about six months so it was a little easier to think about. Hm, strange choice but maybe I’d like to see ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for the first time for some reason. Not sure why. You: same question? So I’ll see you next time as a Vienna person. A Vienner? Is there a name for it like Parisian or Los Angeleno? Safest, swiftest drive today if you see this before you split, and love slipping ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’ into your car’s sound system, G. ** Guy, Hi. Oh, I don’t know. I’m actually of the opinion that there’s a ton of really interesting, daring fiction coming out right now, but you have to do your searching in the smaller indie presses. The big presses are largely deserts on that front. Let me have a think as to who as I’m in rushes these current days re: the p.s. because of marathon daily film editing sessions, but there’s a lot of exciting fiction being sprung upon the unsuspecting right now, I swear. I never thought about a career, I just thought of what it would take to pay the bills whilst I did what I really wanted to do the rest of time which, in my case, was write. Any ideas at all? I go to bed at about 10:30 every night and wake up at 6-ish, so I feel you on the all nighter stuff. ** Florian S. Fauna, Hi, Florian! Lovely to see you! We shot in Flamingo Heights, which you probably know is a kind of section of Yucca Valley, but of course we were in Joshua Tree a bunch getting supplies and eating and stuff. I have to say I’m very happy not to be there anymore, ha ha. I’ve been to Salton Sea, trippy, but not Bombay Beach. I’ll look for pix. How are you? ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool that you’re a big Zurn fan. She’s amazing. I haven’t read ‘The Man of Jasmine’. I’ll get it. Thanks, Ben. ** Steve Erickson, That’s curious, apparently there was a big outage in LA yesterday as well according to my friends there. Sounds like a great plan re: the music-only laptop. As far as an initial rough cut, I think we’ll likely have that in about a week, but then there’ll be many weeks of revising and fiddling. ** jack_henry, Hi, jack. Well, I don’t know her personally, but it’s true that I can’t stand her work. The reasons seem obvious to me, but … ha ha. Why do you ask? ** Bill, Awesome, interesting that she’s a big one for you. I would so love to see a show of her drawings. There was a museum in Vienna that had a lot of her work, but my trip was too time-tight to get there. Huh, I’ve never heard of ‘Virtue’. How curious it looks. I’ve never heard of Camera Obscura either. Wow, on the hunt for more about that. Nice. I feel like I should be excited about the Apple VR thing, but I just can’t get it up. ** Darbz 🐦, Hi. Paper writing rules. I always used to write my novels on paper by hand, but then I decided I should write ‘The Sluts’ on a computer since it’s set on a computer, and then I got spoiled, drat. If you need meds, for sure take them. Whatever it takes to feel right. Can you not restart them easily? Yes, I like Tim Buckley a lot too. Deep and adventuring. Yeah, great. Hanging out with friends sounds like a perfect plan, so I hope that goes well, and I’m here pretty much always awaiting any check ins you feel like making. xo. ** Kettering, Thank you for writing all of that. Hugs. ** Right. I decided to restore and expand the blog’s very old and out of date Philippe Grandrieux post. Know his films? Pretty amazing. A good peruse on your parts is highly recommended. See you tomorrow.

 

‘One of the things that always troubled me about the fascination with madness and the intertwined eroticism and death that always pervaded the Romantic and Surrealistic sensibilities was that they were almost always expressed by people who seemed to be celebrating those things without having known their cost in personal suffering. I’m not trying to apply some kind of politically-correct standard to the appreciation of such works, just pointing out that while some were idolizing the dark underbelly of the human psyche, others were helpless to it, and found nothing remotely romantic about the experience.

‘Unica Zürn seems to have been one of the victims. From 1953 until her death in 1970 she was close to one of the most important Surrealists, Hans Bellmer, living with him in Paris and posing for some of his notoriously disturbing pictures. She came to become dependent on him, and not long after he was hospitalized for a stroke and broke off their relationship (he believed he could no longer care for her in his condition), she threw herself out of the window of the sixth-story apartment they shared. She had been suffering from her own decline for some time: not long after meeting fellow artist Henri Michaux in 1957, she began to experience one shattering episode of mental upset after another that culminated in her self-destruction.

‘Michaux himself played a central part in these breakdowns: there was something about him which reminded her of a childhood fantasy that she had entertained, and his presence fueled the writing of two works: The Man of Jasmine, most explicitly about the Michaux-image, and Dark Spring. The latter has been described as a kind of erotic autobiography: a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and also a young corpse. Zürn killed herself not long after writing it, and in a manner so strongly redolent of the death of the girl within it that it became hard to see the story as little more than a kind of fictionalized suicide note. And yet at the same time it is more than that: it can be read entirely outside of the context of her life, and it has a stark power that stays with you even when removed from that context.

‘What makes it work, oddly enough, is that it is a remarkably short and compact story — barely 115 pages of large type — but the details that make up the story are so sharp and well-chosen that there scarcely seems to be anything more to add. It presents us with the life, and death, of a young girl — barely pubescent but with an erotic haze suffusing everything in her life, including her obsessive devotion to her father. Her mother is insufferable; her brother subjects her to various sexual torments and eventually rapes her; gradually, she recedes inwards and finds greater satisfaction in fantasy worlds than in her daily life. The fantasies themselves reek of depravity and torment — but at least a kind of depravity and torment that are of her own creation.

When she finally does turn her erotic obsessions back outwards, they fixate on a handsome young man — an adult, where she is still really only a child to the rest of the world — whom she encounters at a public swimming pool. There is nothing outwardly sinister about him, but again, he is an adult, and she is not, and from that comes a wall that she finds impossible to surmount. And from that rebuff her thoughts turn inwards once again, to find what consummation she can in fantasies of enacting her death for real. The last scene in the book has been widely compared to Zürn’s own suicide, although she seemed less to be “rehearsing” anything than admitting she was helpless in the face of what was, in her mind, a foregone conclusion about her life.

‘If the book is so relentlessly bleak and ends on such a phenomenally closed-ended and nihilistic note, why read it at all? For one, the compactness of the story alone makes it into quite an achievement: it’s a little exhilarating to see Zürn pack so much about her character into so few words, to make one sentence do the work of a paragraph, and to evoke this girl so sharply without needing more space than she does. The other reason is more general than that: we might want to read such things for the same reasons that people are compelled to write them — because places like this do exist within us, and if someone can not only talk about them but do justice to them, then the results are aesthetically exhilarating even if they imply ghastly things. That was after all a large component of what the Surrealist mission was: to dive into the unconscious, rescue the things that might normally be thrown away by the waking mind, and make them into the substance of their art. What makes Dark Spring so hard to put out of mind is that it shows Zürn diving into her dreamworld and coming up with nothing less than her own cenotaph.’ — Serdar

 

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Hans Bellmer’s photographs of Unica Zürn

‘Perhaps the best-known collaborations between the artist Hans Bellmer and Zürn are the works where he tied her up tight so that her body greatly resembled a scored piece of meat, also resembling his dolls’ appendages. She was also the star of several pornographic photographs, many that made their way into Geoges Batatille’s illustrated version of Story of the Eye.

‘In true Surrealist fashion, she is treated as an object and not as a woman, a headless body readied for manipulation. Her pleasure from this, though, speaks to her being very free, even feminist in the face of a movement and a time where that was rare and criticized. The fact she writes about these things makes her even more of a trailblazer, a forerunner of the movement actually doing what many of the male Surrealists could only inflict.’ — DOLL WORK

 

 

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Further

‘A STONE FOR UNICA ZURN’, by Gary Indiana
‘The Hallucinatory Terror of Unica Zürn’, by Blake Butler
The Chimeras of Unica Zurn
TWO HALVES: UNICA ZÜRN
Unica Zürn, Bellmer et Perec
UNICA ZÜRN: “HERE IS THE DOLL …”
Bound: HANS BELLMER and UNICA ZÜRN
Unica Zurn, Solfege and Spectacle
Unica Zürn: Nine Anagrammatic Poems
Unica Zürn @ goodreads
Book: ‘Unica Zurn: Art, Writing and Post-War Surrealism’
Audio: À la recherche d’Unica Zurn
The automatic drawings of Unica Zurn. (1916-1970)
The Semiotics of Schizophrenia: Unica Zürn’s Artistry and Illness
An Interview with the Lovely, Yet Deceased, Unica Zürn
MAD WOMEN: Hedda Gabler, Unica Zürn and Leonora Carrington
French Surrealist Unica Zürn’s The Trumpets of Jericho is a powerful tale of maternity and depression
Fragmentos de la vida y obra de Unica Zürn
The Syntax of Anxiety: Unica Zürn’s Novella
About what: Unica Zurn
Buy ‘Dark Spring’

 

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Extras

Unica Zürn by theakky04movies

A MOVIE FOR UNICA ZÜRN

UNICA ZURN

UNICA ZÜRN – ICH WEISS NICHT, WIE MAN DIE LIEBE MACHT

 

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Last Notes

 

“The last “notes” of German author and painter Unica Zurn, written in 1970 some months before her suicide, confront the “family curse.” Already in childhood she seemed to know that she too would end her life like her mad uncle Fallada and her adored stepmother Orla Holm. Writing, in “The Whiteness with the Red Spot” (1958), “This life has not become my life,” she formulated a motif of both her drawing and writing. Her autobiographical texts are never written in the first person, but always in the third. Like a camera, she takes a picture of her actions, writes about herself as though about some nameless, enigmatic, other woman. Always loyal to the inner difference between “I” and “she,” Zurn never attempted to smooth over her strange, singular distance regarding herself and her life. “Impressions From a Mental Illness,” an account of her illness and sojourns in psychiatric hospitals published in 1967, is recorded in the tone of a distanced witness. At the same time, she claimed not to have written one sentence that did not correspond to her life. In the end, in 1970, she wrote: “How poor has her life become”. At this point, after the separation from Hans Bellmer, her companion since 1953, and after she decided to separate from a life that had become resolutely aimless, she nevertheless seemed to catch a glimpse of the possibility of a final breakthrough. Faced with a self-imposed deadline of several months, she succeeded in producing a narrative that broke with her former concept and proceeded to follow another order, one born of poverty. She goes back to untold coordinates in a language that documents her ever-beckoning erasure. The last notes, which leave off with her voluntary death, before extension and interweaving could take over, reveal memory to be a seldom functioning machine that, faced with a deadline, wants to tell the untold in the form of intransitive images. These images seek to cross over into oblivion or toward the prospect of yet being experienced in the future.

Zurn’s body of work opens up the interior of a perceptual system of madness. The texts are located at an intersection, a point of transfer. Madness becomes the supplier of literature, literature transports madness. Both drawings and texts show the “image processes” (Zurn) or hallucinations haunting her. “I’m haunted as though I were the only home for something unknown”. It is not she who writes or draws, as images “stream in” or “arise”. A dictation she feels compelled to take down circumvents “sublimated elaboration” (Kristeva). For Zurn, some thing or other–what Lacan calls extimacy (“extimite,” a foreign body, composed of what is intimate)–seems to take charge in the missing place of authorship and sublimation. She is remote-controlled and the rote observer of a delirium that runs on ahead like a movie. She writes down what can be caught. The notes resist, as pure record, the inaccessibility of madness.

There can be no doubt, however, that madness has a method. Even the smallest task becomes cryptography.

‘She asks the daughter to get the box with the money
and to count the money; she herself is not able. One
looks at her in amazement. In the meantime the nurse
comes back and she goes into the kitchen and looks at
the enormous, fat leeks rising up from a casserole
dish that’s too small, in which there is only a little
water. This meal will never be ready and she feels herself
incapable of cutting the vegetable into pieces. This problem
grows so monstrous and is so unsolvable that she, overwhelmed
by vertigo, goes back to the bedroom, starts to stagger and falls
to the ground.’

In other words, changes of dimension foreground inconspicuous things. The world of things spreads out. Proportions distort themselves in a surreal way. The transformation of material reality serves to close the narrator off from her surroundings.

The texts preceding her last notes move along the edge of a psychotic discourse, and can be described, following Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreurs (1980), as speech based on foreclosure, the virulence of which dislocates the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious. “The unconscious contents remain locked out here but in a bizarre manner: not radical enough to allow a solid differentiation between subject and object and not with sufficient selectivity for the unfolding of a position of defense, refusal, but also sublimating elaboration. The contents, which are normally unconscious for the neurotic, become explicit now.”

Madness constantly deciphers itself within a realm of unintelligibility. Although Zurn’s writing and drawing border conceptually on automatic writing and drawing, she nevertheless also developed a certain competence for selection. Cutouts of inner images are edited from a continuum we will never get to know. A natural metonymy is replaced with an artificial montage. With the montage, there appears attribution of meanings. But no pure, immediate mimesis results, but rather a simulation and translation of inner “image processes.” Zurn’s alleged female “non-authorship”–the conversation of another agency through her, the dictation of her illness–is also a rhetorical trick that is supposed to withhold from the reader the difference between madness and literature. Madness is neither told from the perspective of rationalism nor does it speak with its own voice. As the manuscripts show, there are decisions made in advance, revisions, deletions, several versions, as well as a general orientation toward the program of surrealism. Regarding the best pages, one gets the impression of an unfolding signifying chain, a mad externalization of memory, without any obstacle getting in the way.

In contrast to Zurn’s best-known texts from the 1950s and ’60s (The Witches’ Texts, the “Anagrams,” and The Man of Jasmine), the last notes perform a realization of separation. Zurn seems in the end to break with the surrealist concept of a blending of boundaries between madness and reality. The prospect of their amalgamation has been withdrawn. The posthumously published leftovers bear the marks of a violent erasure that will not be ignored. Whatever is able to grab us as hallucination, promise, fiction, has vanished. With the separation from Bellmer, her “other” or “symptom,” and with the decision at the same time to end her life, the (Lacanian) real as the nothing of the other becomes manifest, one of whose signs is the separation of tenses and times. Present, past, and future, which were once used interchangeably in the world of hallucination, are assigned different places. It is this process of separating out that distinguishes the last notes from all preceding texts. Now the emptiness can be represented, not sublimated. The former delusion of signification, which functioned to screen this emptiness, leaves off. What is registered now is what was missing before: the empty reality that is no longer modulated by any fiction or alienation. But in Zurn’s late, nearly dispassionate narrative style, which departs both from the art of interpretation and from madness, there remains a kind of consolation.

They smoke – the smoke becomes thicker and thicker around them. The surroundings disappear, only their two pale, tired faces are still visible. Suddenly they are the only two remaining in this world of pain. Nobody is there – the house, the world – everything is emptied out, gone are the living and the dead. An endless solitude and probably an eternal night without a morning to follow. They are silent and smoke. It is deathly still in the house, in the world. What sadness life – what solitude – death.

She has left the space of madness and accepted instead the place of the dead.

In the process she comes up with divisions that she had previously rejected. She cuts her life into pieces–her time in Paris, her time in Berlin, her encounter with Bellmer – and attempts to maintain a simple verbal construction of life and time. She resists the dictation of madness, the hallucinations and paralysis, and permits herself access to individual memories, which, once again but from a different standpoint, refer back to the origins of her system of madness.

The last fragments return to particular situations in her life that signified an original break. A few untold memory-images detach themselves from the emptiness that encloses the memories. With the deadline, tightening condensation sets in. “At the end of one’s life”–as Benjamin writes in “The Storyteller” (1936)–“a sequence of pictures is set into motion, unfolding views of oneself, in which one has, without knowing it, encountered oneself.” Benjamin conceived the emergence of memory-images as a form of “self-encounter.” “To the highest degree, it bears the stamp of the critical, dangerous moment”.

Without question, the memory of the sight of a five-month-old “embryo” is this image of horror. In the early 1960s, after a series of failed attempts to abort the far too developed fetus, a physician in Berlin gives her “a box of quinine.”

‘At the climax of pain, she goes to the toilet and gives birth at this sad place to a big embryo. No blood flows. She holds with horror and at the same time with admiration this unfinished being in her hand that looks like a very old, nearly Aztecan object. Horrible picture how this solemn and strange-looking being sinks into the darkness of stinking, subterranean canals.’

What is nearly impossible for her to narrate – the unnamable violence against bodies–comes to be told in one of the last possible moments. The dynamics of the writing process is, in the end, a “retouching” of irreversible separations, here in sight of the “incomplete,” “solemn and foreign-looking being.” In the end she seems to cease merely receiving dictation and works with her own suffering, grants it discourse. No longer in an autoerotic or self-enclosed way as during the phases of recording hallucinations, her discourse reaches another type of image, another psychic layer. It seizes a moment of crisis and emphasizes the separating line as a leftover set aside for writing.

For Zurn, there is one motif that always returns. It refers back to the origin of her system of delusion in her most fundamental operation: the splitting apart of face and body. In the context of her individual mythology, she dates or mystifies the “beginning” of her system of madness back to the fixation on the “solemn and foreign-looking,” yet beautiful face of a man. She calls this apparition the “man of jasmine.” The first time she sees him, in a “vision,” she is six years old, and she will go on encountering him again and again, now in a movie (Jean-Louis Barrault in the 1945 film Les enfants du paradis), now in reality: it is the face of Bellmer, the face she follows to Paris. As she remarks, she has grown ever more like this face herself. In Dark Spring (1967), Zurn relates how she, as a twelve-year-old girl, eats the photograph of a young man to keep the grownups from discovering it.

‘She puts the photograph in her mouth, chews it up carefully and swallows it’.

She incorporates the man as her imaginary double image. Bellmer followed this curve:

‘She carries the picture of Hans in her eyes, ears, hair, and in her body and in her soul: he was omnipresent to her – she was under his spell – wherever she walked’

In Paris, she meets the mystery man also in the incarnation of Henri Michaux:

‘Later she experiences the first miracle of her life: in a room in Paris, she faced the man of jasmine. The shock of this meeting was so powerful that she could not recover from it. From that day on, she begins ever so slowly to lose her mind’.

It is a face associated with something inscrutable, an image with a staying power that can’t be exhausted. As Benjamin once put it, “For everyone there exists an image over which the whole world disappears… for how many does it arise out of an old box of toys?”. The evocation of many images gives way to their condensation in one inscrutable image that replaces all the others and lets them go. The mystery of the face in Zurn’s poetic system–twice identified as a “Chinese face” -signals the narrator’s preferred mode of love: adoration, love at a distance, that of the bodiless kind. The man of jasmine is paralyzed; he sits in a wheelchair. His image always arises in a specific constellation that repeats itself in a nearly somnambulist manner. The mask of the esoteric love is a screen image, a screen memory, which points to something behind it or invisibly connected to it. “Object” and “abject” are inextricably entwined. On the first page of The Man of Jasmine, the narrator, immediately before mentioning the “vision,” recounts a dream involving a well-known surrealist motif: the dreaming woman walks through a mirror on the wall. She passes through and finally stands in front of a table. On the table is a small white card. “As she picks up the card to read the name on it, she wakes up”. The dreamer knows that there is a name written on the card, but this name, this attribute, stays inaccessible to her. The decipherment fails. Shortly afterwards, we read:

‘Filled this morning with an inexplicable loneliness, she enters her mother’s room in order to get into her bed and return, if possible, to the place where she came from–so as to see nothing more. Suddenly, a mountain of lukewarm flesh, enclosing this woman’s impure spirit, rolls over on the horrified child, and she flees forever from the mother, the woman, the spider! She is deeply
wounded. ‘

The next sentence:

‘Then her vision appears to her for the first time: the man of jasmine! Never-ending consolation! Sighing with relief, she sits down opposite him and studies him. He is paralyzed. What luck! He never leaves his seat in the garden where the jasmine blooms even in wintertime.’

The violation of boundaries identified with the mother immediately precedes the first appearance of the hallucination. From this point onward, the “screen” with the face of the other will always be called up whenever an unbinding of affects breaks through the protective layers. The visual sense protects against the memory of the body and the affects it holds in store. The “face” occupies the threshold between image space and body space, and splits them apart. The screen solution is activated whenever there is a repetition of the sense of being overwhelmed. Although the two scenes always follow one another, the gap between them and their necessary connection is suspended, disassociated. There is no passage to the zero degree of meaning. Through the symbol of the face, the text gains a figure, a facade–and hides a radical moment of loss, the eclipse of signification.

One of Zurn’s psychiatrists, Rabain, who worked at St. Anne in Paris, remarks likewise: “Violent breaking into a body, which is under attack by a bizarre object, invested with intolerable emotions – an obscene and dangerous object like the mother tongue.” The transgression, traced by the protagonist to her sixth year, destroys and contaminates the body’s frontiers – at the level of incest – and becomes the catalyst for biography, work, and the system of delusion. One will never know if this scene is the “origin” of schizophrenia or already part of the system of madness (as an inner image). Traumatization is often missing its origin in time. One finds oneself constantly before or after the beginning. What happens, or is said to, can also always be a consequence, and again a consequence of consequences, until the chain loses itself in the horizon of the “too early.” Even if the violation, as reported in the text, took place “in the sixth year,” it is already mediatized in passing through the memory. And so the question remains: how could this event take on such importance, such doggedness?

For her, there remains the saving clause of a distant father, who travels a great deal. The adoration of an inscrutable face remains in her imagination, like the body bound to a wheelchair, unchangeably situated in the same place, in white jasmine. A delegate of the father without a body, someone whose face counts for her – who cannot leave her, dependent as he is, like herself, on assistance–becomes the model of love she holds up to the diffuse body of the mother, a model that won’t permit the regression. This image is always called forth whenever a return to the merger with the mother’s body, which has never completely broken away, takes place. The advantage of this inner splitting is that another solution doesn’t have to take place: the slow, step-by-step separation from the mother. The connection as well as the break with her couldn’t be integrated; the mother survives, internalized, as an overpowering, contaminated being, as the one who dictates. The logic of this traumatic “break-in” determines the quality of Zurn’s psychiatric institutionalizations. In the hospitals she is surrounded by the polymorphous-perverse female bodies she always described in her texts about her hospital stays, and which she drew (with Chinese ink) as overlapping, interchangeable bodies. The hospitals connect her atmospherically with the unconscious image of the mother. The corridors are lined with the openings of a memory-less memory. In one of the last letters to Herta Hausmann, she writes from Chesnailles: “Weather fine – [in French] as for me, the melancholy resulting from that dismal sojourn in the belly of Helene Helly-Zurn, my mother, still remains …”. She spends her last ten years divided between two places or scenes, the contour-less, regressive place of the mother (Wittenau, St. Anne, Maison Blanche, Chesnailles) and Bellmer’s Parisian apartment, home to one of the many bearers of the “Chinese face.”

The singular image of this face would seem to be without history. That would be its protective function. But the texts show that the timelessness of the face is marked from the beginning by withdrawal. It is the discrete sign of the destruction and of the wish for destruction that has inscribed itself in Zurn’s body. Overwhelming, excessive, overlapping, never graspable by the one thus seized, the body is disturbed or destroyed at its borders, which never seem functional or protective. To the very end, Unica Zurn’s memoirs (for which she contrived the neologism “Memorien”) represent a solitary attempt to re-inscribe her own bodily contours with repetition, narration, and drawing–but the countervailing forces were so much stronger.” — Rike Felka

 

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2 manuscript pages

 

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Book

Unica Zürn Dark Spring
Exact Change

‘Dark Spring is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel that reads more like an exorcism than a memoir. In it author Unica Zurn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the “impure” mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described “the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood.” Dark Spring is the story of a young girl’s simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the “mad love” so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists. Unica Zurn (1916-1970) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970–an act foretold in this, her last completed work.’ — Exact Change

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Excerpt

Each time, she finds herself tormented by her terrible fear of the rattling skeleton of a huge gorilla, which she believes inhabits the house at night. The sole purpose of his existence is to strangle her to death. In passing, she looks, as she does every night, at the large Rubens painting depicting “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” These two naked, rotund women remind her of her mother and fill her with loathing. But she adores the two dark, handsome robbers, who lift the women onto their rearing horses. She implores them to protect her from the gorilla. She idolizes a whole series of fictional heroes who return her gaze from the old, dark paintings that hang throughout the house. One of them reminds her of Douglas Fairbanks, whom she adored as a pirate and as the “Thief of Baghdad” in the movie theater at school. She is sorry she must be a girl. She wants to be a man, in his prime, with a black beard and flaming black eyes. But she is only a little girl whose body is bathed in sweat from fear of discovering the terrible gorilla in her room, under her bed. She is tortured by fears of the invisible.

Who knows whether or not the skeleton will crawl up the twines of ivy that grow on the wall below her window, and then slip into her room. His mass of hard and pointed bones will simply crush her inside her bed. Her fear turns into a catastrophe when she accidentally bumps into the sabers, which fall off the wall with a clatter in the dark. She runs to her room as fast as she can and slams the door shut behind her. She turns the key and bolts the door. One again, she has come out of this alive. Who knows what will happen tomorrow night? . . .

Sometimes, when Franz visits, he makes her laugh so hard that she ends up wetting her panties. The smell of it attracts the dog, who puts his head between her legs. This gives her an idea. She goes down to the basement and over to the dog pen, where she lies down on the cold cement floor with her legs spread apart. The dog starts to lick in between her legs. The cold only increases her sense of pleasure. Feeling the ecstasy, she arches her belly towards this patient tongue. Her back hurts from the hard stone. She loves to be in pain while enduring her pleasure. She is greatly aroused, even more so because of the possibility that, at any given moment, someone might come to watch her. Through the door she can hear the sound of her father’s secretary typing. While she yields to the dog’s tongue for hours, her brother discovers something new upstairs. Sitting at his mother’s dressing table, he busies himself with the electric vibrator their mother uses for her beauty care. This vibrator stimulates whichever part of the body it is applied to. The mother massages her face with it; the son puts it into his open pants. When she comes upstairs from the basement, weakened and dizzy, she sees her brother lose his semen, his head thrust back and his eyes closed. The sky has darkened. There is the threat of a thunderstorm and the atmosphere is tense. The adults pay no attention to the two children, who have nothing better to do than to keep experiencing, over and over again, this indescribably powerful feeling.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I remember what it was like when I was preparing to relocate to Paris. An intense combination of exciting and very stressful. We’re extremely happy with the editing so far, yes. It’s early on, but I really think the film is going to be amazing. I’d read love’s bio just to figure out what the hell that title means. Love making time not only fly but caw like a crow, G. ** Misanthrope, Any fun water cooler stuff yesterday? ** Mildred, Hi. Oh, your friend must have met her at the ‘PGL’ screening in LA where she did a concert to close out the event. She’d like being thought of as a witch, I’m sure. Most of my LA friends are going to Dodger games all the time right now. I miss that. I haven’t heard ‘Venus In Leo’ but I’ll get on that. Ah, gotcha, just remodelled, okay. That’s weird enough. Cool that you’re hard into the work on the album. I can totally relate, what with the film assemblage. So sparkly. I really like the lyrics, thank you. I can’t wait to hear their score and voice of God. ** Darbz 🐘🎪, HI! I should have figured about the poor little elephant. Motherfuckers. The clip totally sent and, yeah, it’s gorgeous. I’m going to watch it on repeat when I get back from editing today. Petr Pevlesnky, yeah, he did some intense performance in Paris a few years ago, but I can’t remember what it entailed. When performance art is great, which is rare, it’s kind of the best form. I do want to read something you wrote, of course! You’ll have to be patient with me at first though because I’m editing the film from morning to night every day, and I am either doing that or kind of zombified, But, yes, I do! Lovely! ** Nick., Hi! Up? I’m just film film film right now. That’s both my up and my down. Psychobabble from whence? I always loved writing since I was a little kid, but I didn’t necessarily understand that that could be my life at first. When I was 10, 11 years old I wanted to be an actor. My parents even got me an agent who turned out to be a scam artist, and I took acting lessons and stuff. But I figured out I was not an actor pretty quickly. And then writing swallowed me up. I think you sound naturally custom-made to be an artist, dude. All those qualities are the essentials. What kind of artist would be your ideal? You can be an artist and love dudes, etc. That’s the great thing about being an artist. Your time is your own. Thank you for being my friend too, it’s a real boon. I’m a person who generally thinks of food as fuel, and I’m vegetarian/vegan, so I just shove a bunch of tofu and seitan and stuff in the microwave then wrap it in a tortilla and eat it. I did have a superb pizza last week at this place called Sette in the 10th arr. Highly recommended if you ever come over here. Do you eat breakfast? If so, what? I don’t. I just drink coffee. See you soon. ** Bill, Oh, wow, that’s so interesting to discover that you’re a carnivorous plant farmer in addition to your other wonderments. Thank you a lot for the links! I’m rushing to get out the door to start the day’s film editing but I’ll peruse the goods when I get home. Awesome, thank you so much! ** Mark, Wow! I have to tell you I am so impressed that you designed theme park rides. That is perhaps my ultimate dream profession. Yes, I know IAAPA. I’ve been to one or two of them. I’m a theme park obsessive. I’ve met Kristian Hoffman a few times, but I don’t really know him well. I like his music, and he’s very funny. Ah, best of luck to Yony on his new film, and I’ll obviously be curious to see that. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha, I used to play Game of Life all the time when I was kid. Memories. I think it must have been pretty good fun. And maybe torturous. I do like torturous things. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi! I’m good. Busyness is good. I’m very busy myself right now. I adore roller coasters, but I’ve never played Roller Coaster Tycoon either. Weird. Thanks for reminding me that I really want to see ‘The Amusement Park’. I keep forgetting to watch it. I love ‘Martin’ too. I’m going to have to think about underrated queer films because I think there are probably many, many, and I’m having to rush out the door in a minute. ‘Pornography’ is my favorite Cure album by miles. ‘Strange Day’: so great. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Um, not revelations per se, but we’re kind of nose-to-grindstone constructing a solid first draft so we’re pushing forward mostly. I think it’s working even better than I had imagined it would, but once we have a whole cut we’ll go back and watch it, and then I’ll know. I was wondering how one could do a Bookworm book considering the insane amount of great interviews. But that thematic sounds good, solid. The 17th/18th should work, yeah. Let me know on your end. Hm, I’ve had Ashley in posts, but I … don’t think I’ve done a whole post about him, or maybe many years ago? It’s a great idea. ‘Perfect Lives’ is my favorite of his works. Nice. ** Guy, Hi, Guy! I’m good, how are you? I’m sorry about the huge posts. Well, actually, I’m not sorry at all, ha ha. Err, no, I can’t think of how to recreate that thrill. Go find a more exciting writer? It’s certainly very possible. Thank you for saying that. What’s happening with you? ** bruno msmsmsm, Hi! How did you do on the exam? Or when will you know? My weekend was just kind of chilling to take a break from the otherwise non-stop film editing days. Nothing too exciting to report. Yeah, I’ve been co-making films for about, uh, ten or more years, I guess. I love it. I’m glad the post matched up with your hate. Lovely to see you! ** myneighbourjohnturturro, Hi! Yeah, I’m kind of relentless in my search for new things to make. Oops, I hope the new bf sees reading the Cycle as a further enrichment of their adoration of you. Haven’t heard the Model/Actriz, but I’ll definitely get it. I like the new Lana Del Rabies too. Her best, I think. I have a piece of it in the next gig post. I will at least look for a photo of Harsh Symmetry, ha ha. Have a superb … what is it … Tuesday! ** Okay. I thought I would direct the blog’s spotlight onto Unica Zurn’s amazing novel ‘Dark Spring’. What do you think? See you tomorrow.