‘Over the course of the past, say, twenty years, I’ve gradually become more and more aware of the late actress Tina Aumont, who died in 2006. She’s one of the great (albeit largely unknown) beauties of the 60s and 70s, and a sort of gorgeous bad girl “Zelig” figure uniting disparate famous people from old school Hollywood types to the Warhol crowd and 60s and 70s European film notables. Truly she was the junkie underground “Kevin Bacon” game connector of the era, if nearly forgotten today.
‘I first laid eyes on the luminous Aumont in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise, but she was billed there under her married name Tina Maquand. I probably first read her name in Richard Witts’ Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, his 1995 biography of the Velvet Underground chanteuse. The first time I actually saw Aumont onscreen—and had any context for her—was later that same year when she was an interviewee in the Nico: Icon documentary.
‘So my entré to Tina Aumont was being a big Nico freak, which invariably led to an interest in the films of Nico’s paramour, bohemian French film director Philippe Garrel. Aumont was in several of Garrel’s underground films and was the one who first introduced Garrel—then seen as a sort of cinematic Rimbaud—to Nico in 1969, suggesting that her new music (The Marble Index) would be perfect for his Le Lit de la Vierge. (She gifted him with a version of “The Falconeer” heard only in that film, which starred Aumont, with Pierre Clémenti as Jesus.)
‘Aumont was born on Valentine’s Day of 1946 in Hollywood, California and it was at birth that her first Zelig-style cameo took place: Her mother was the ill-fated “Queen of Technicolor” Maria Montez, the exotic star of such films as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Cobra Woman. (Jack Smith’s notoriously perverse Flaming Creatures is an homage to Montez and the word “camp” was practically coined to describe her flamboyant performances. Kenneth Anger has cited Cobra Woman as his favorite film.) Marlene Dietrich is said to have sung baby Tina to sleep and Jean Cocteau wrote a poem for her (“La Fille aux étoiles”) when she was born. An auspicious birth by any definition, but her mother died of a heart attack at the age of 31 when Tina was just five. Her father was the dashing French actor and war hero Jean-Pierre Aumont.
‘By the time she was 17, with the full approval and encouragement of her father, who thought she was a wild child and wanted to see her settle down, Tina married actor Christian Maquand in 1963. Maquand was a heartthrob actor who was in And God Created Woman playing opposite Brigitte Bardot. He also directed the star-studded adaptation of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy. He was 19 years her senior and close friends with director Roger Vadim and Marlon Brando. This is where her social circle really starts to expand. Imagine what a documentary might look like about Tina Aumont, containing as it would film footage and photographs of her at that age alongside of people like Brando, Vadim, Jane Fonda, Roman Polanski and Donald Cammell. The great New York acting teacher Stella Adler. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the Stones inner circle: art dealer Robert Fraser, Stash Klossowski and Marianne Faithfull. Bob Dylan. The Who. You get the picture.
‘In 1966 she shot a western with Dean Martin and Alain Delon called Texas Across The River, but around this time she had a miscarriage that Maquand blamed her for and their three year marriage ended. Within the year she’d moved in with artist Frédéric Pardo in Paris where the friends dropping by their psychedelic apartment included Pierre Clémenti, Zouzou, Anita Pallenberg and Warhol “superstar” Viva. The couple then moved to Rome in 1967 where Aumont hung out with Jimi Hendrix and made films with the likes of Klaus Kinski; appeared in erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass’s oddball underground film The Howl, Philippe Garrel’s poetic Le Lit de la Vierge and played opposite Pierre Clémenti in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Godard-influenced Partner. She also appeared in Playboy magazine, shot by Angelo Frontoni with “Rapunzel” length locks.
‘Tina Aumont had a reputation as a hard drug user, but for several years she managed to keep her behavior on film sets professional. Frédéric Pardo said of Aumont that her mother had left her “a very peculiar will. She revealed in it that she had spent time with the devil, as a voodoo practitioner. Tina quickly followed her onto the slippery self-destructive slope…” Despite this, she was still cast in films with Liza Minnelli, Ingrid Bergman and Catherine Deneuve. Tinto Brass (who called Aumont the most beautiful woman he’d ever worked with) cast her in his kinky Third Reich tale Salon Kitty. In 1975 she was in Roberto Rossellini’s The Messiah and played opposite Donald Sutherland in Fellini’s Casanova the following year.
‘But Aumont’s career took a nosedive when she was arrested in Italy in 1978 and convicted with the illegal importation of 400 grams of opium smuggled in tiny Buddhas from Thailand. Aumont was sentenced to three years imprisonment, reduced on appeal to just nine months, but she was deported from Italy and moved back to France. She worked only sporadically after that. Tina Aumont died in her sleep at the age of 60 in late 2006.’ — Richard Metzger, Dangerous Minds
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Stills
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Further
Tina Aumont tumblr
Tina Aumont Tribute Page
Tina Aumont page
Tina Aumont @ IMDb
Tina Aumont @ blacklodge
Tina Aumont @ infinitetext
TINA AUMONT, NUIT SANS ÉTOILE
Tina Aumont’s grave
Waiting for Tina
“Torso”: Enter If You Dare the Bizarre World of the Psychosexual Mind
Tina Aumont @ MUBI
Fragments d’un dictionnaire amoureux: Tina Aumont
“The Girl with those Eyes”
Tina Aumont @ Sens Critique
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Extras
Tina Aumont (1985) by Gérard Courant
Clips from Frédéric Pardo’s Home Movie, filmed in Morocco 1968 on the set of Philippe Garrel’s Le Lit de la Vierge.
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How I met Tina Aumont
from Romanhattan/KOSMOCHLOR
It was some time around the turn of the millennium. Film producer and actor Ivan Galietti, an Italian friend transplanted in New York, had come to Paris for one of his frequent visits to Tina, who was fifty-four or fifty-five and looked ten years younger.
She was one of the kindest persons I’d ever met. How, I wondered, can this woman be a myth of the twentieth century, and be so easy-going, so approachable, like the girl next door.
The first thing that struck me was her eyes, immense, dark, soulful. Age tarnishes most beauties, but her face, dominated by those incredible eyes, remained unlined. Her youthful looks weren’t the result of the surgeon’s scalpel. Even if she had needed to negotiate with time, which she did not, she couldn’t have afforded the cost.
She could afford pretty much … nothing. After her glory days, her father’s heritage in the hands of her stepmother, an Italian actress, she was reduced to living in a minuscule apartment located in a modest Parisian quarter full of penniless immigrants, and the rent was paid by the city’s social services. Tina’s flamboyant career had taken a downturn in the late seventies, when she was banned from Italy, her country of adoption, for drug possession. Leaving Italy had broken her heart.
Tina worked with great directors like Fellini, scandalous directors like Tinto Brass, who said she was the most beautiful woman with whom he’d ever worked, and many others. Several among the films in which she starred were intellectual and elegant, other fell into the category of B movies. To all her films, she brought her magnetic, compelling presence.
But Tina loved the needle, and little by little her contracts dwindled to nothing. The French television tried to lure her back into acting, but she seldom kept up with the schedule, and when the dressers prepared her for a scene, they could see the needle holes constellating her arms.
The day I met Tina, Ivan, my boyfriend Pierre and I set off with her for a promenade in the forest of Fontainebleau, half an hour or so to the south of Paris. Before leaving, we had a couple of beers in a café. She had water, an entire bottle. At the time, she was already treated for respiratory problems, but she rolled joints in full sight on the café table, and she smoke the first in a taxi, to the driver’s despair. Unabashed, she rolled down the window and puffed on.
The second time I saw her, it was at her funeral in Paris, Cimetière du Montparnasse, on the 18th of November 2006.
Paris had gifted us with one of those wonderful autumn days, sunny and warm. I arrived early, and Ivan was nowhere in sight. Tina’s friends had gathered in front of the entrance. Knowing nobody, I waited on the opposite side of the street. The crowd stared at me, a few heads put together, whispering. What crosses your mind when, during a ceremony, a bunch of strangers can’t pull their gazes off you? I wondered whether I had picked the right clothes for a funeral. I tugged uncomfortably at my black sweater, glanced down at my long skirt, grey with black arabesques, and light-brown leather boots, but could find nothing wrong with my attire, and tossed my grey shawl over my shoulder, to give myself a countenance.
Ivan arrived at last, in time for the crowd to move over to the grave. As these gatherings go, a few friends recounted their memories of the deceased. Ivan read a poem he’d written for Tina.
I remember the anecdote told by Nadine Trintignant (sister of Tina’s first husband, Christian Marquand). In a scene, Tina, standing before the camera, was supposed to start walking to the right. During the first take, she walked off to the left. “Cut!” director Lina Wertmuller ordered. “Tina, you know you should walk to the right.” Tina nodded. “Okay.” The camera rolled, and Tina walked to the left. “To the right, Tina, please!” Tina smiled. “To the right. No problem.” And off to the left she went. Take after take, there was no way to convince her to walk as the script demanded. It’s not that she refused to comply, but some daydream held her in a firm grasp. Finally, one of the grips lay down on the floor, out of the camera’s view, and gently turned Tina’s feet to the right, and she stepped in that direction.
After the funeral, Ivan and I followed Tina’s friends to a bistro. Someone showed me one of her last photographs, taken in the hospital. Despite the oxygen tubes, she hadn’t changed a bit. At sixty, she still looked young.
Now was the moment to enquire about the strange gazes pinned on me when I arrived at the cemetery. So I put the question to the woman sitting next to me.
She answered: “You looked so much like her, we thought Tina had found the way to attend her own funeral. It would have been typical of her.”
“I look nothing like her.” I was going through one of my dark-hair phases, when I dye my reddish-brown hair dark brown or black, with a long fringe (or bangs, my American friends would say), and I’d hidden my eyes behind large sunglasses. But still.
“I can see it now,” the woman said. “But the silhouette and the hair were so similar we really thought her ghost had come to say goodbye.”
Goodbye, Tina. You aren’t forgotten. Walk free, in the direction of your desire. Maybe I’ll see you around Paris, some day.
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17 of Tina Aumont’s 57 roles
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Joseph Losey Modesty Blaise (1966)
‘Tina Aumont began her career by chance in the movie “Modesty Blaise” by Joseph Losey under the name of Tina MARQUAND, her name of wife (she was married from 1963 to 1967 with Christian MARQUAND, the brother of Nadine TRINTIGNANT) before resuming his maiden name after her divorce. Her character is stabbed in the stomach by one of Dirk Bogarde’s henchmen in a marketplace; she dies shortly afterwards with Monica Vitti kneeling by her side.’ — collaged
Trailer
the entire film
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Pierre Clementi Visa de censure n° X (1967)
‘I must have taken LSD without realizing it… It seems Clémenti made a whole portrait about an epoch in this short movie, covered with neon light, symbolism, rituals, esotericism, student movements, friendships, partnerships and many drugs, at the improvisation sound of guitar, trumpet, besides indian music (of course!). Images jump off the screen without having any type of connection among them, they fade into frenzy and apparent confusion of memory… Transmitting us detachment, sensitivity and ‘transcendentalism’ through drugs (something conceptualized by the spirit of that time), brings us to stunning sensations, amidst memories and records of its creator.’ — Luana Pinheiro
Excerpt
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Bernardo Bertolucci Partner (1968)
‘In PARTNER, Bernardo Bertolucci conflated his interests in psychoanalysis, nonlinear narrative, and Godard to create a uniquely avant-garde work unlike anything in his ouevre. The film is loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel THE DOUBLE and concerns an alienated, puckish young man named Jacob (Pierre Clementi) who confronts his own double. Jacob allows his doppelganger to take over his life; the second Jacob commandeers his predecessor’s theater class in the hopes of creating living theater–as a violent act of social revolution. The idea of students wreaking havoc was not an unfamiliar one in 1968, and Bertolucci refuses to take Jacob’s dangerous intellectual posturing lightly. The second Jacob is a handsome killer, the first a handsome weakling who must find the courage to resist his baser self. Bertolucci matches inspired plot points with arresting images, including visual film references and the bright color schemes that would later become his trademark.’ — letterboxd
Excerpt
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Tinto Brass L’Urlo (1968)
‘Drawing its title and a dash of inspiration from Allen Ginsberg’s famous beatnik classic, The Howl (L’urlo) is easily the most freewheeling and unjustly ignored title in the Tinto Brass canon, with plenty of the auteur’s own obsessions and stylistic flourishes congealing into an avant garde snapshot of late ’60s global unrest that still resonates today. Mixing anti-war sentiments with a flurry of rapid-fire pop culture references, atrocity footage, abundant nudity, and even oddball comedy, this oft-censored psychedelic madhouse has never before been seen in English and will blow away anyone ready to groove along with its unique, inspirational rhythms. Tina Aumont stars as Anita, a lovely young woman escaping the oppression of modern-day society in a globe-hopping travelogue that rivals anything by Alejandro Jodorowsky for sheer mind-melting strangeness. Brass himself admits there wasn’t really a script per se, as the film was shot more like a voyage with a vague framework for the actors; thus it’s a real “trip” in the truest movie sense, grabbing the viewer by the throat from the opening frames and never letting up for an hour and a half.’ — mondo-digital.com
Excerpt
the entire film
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Philippe Garrel Le Lit de la Vierge (1969)
‘Filmed in the smoldered ashes of the failed social revolution as Garrel and a community of young artists from Zanzibar film (a film collective of like minded, radicalized artists financed by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas) abandoned the emblematic barricades of domestic protest and retreated to Africa to transfigure their ideological disappointment into subsumed cultural action through the creation of an intrinsically personal, revolutionary cinema, Le Lit de la vierge is, in a sense, the reconstitution of a fevered, post-traumatic creative manifesto – an impassioned, reflexive apologia composed in the fog of a drug-fueled delirium that not only reflected a not yet resigned sentiment of implicit denial over the failure of the revolution, but also served to reinforce the counter-culture generation’s delusive posture as alienated and discarded messianic ideologues who, nevertheless, continue to hold the keys to an ever-receding utopian paradise.’ — strictly film school
Excerpt
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Gian Luigi Polidoro Satyricon (1969)
‘Lusty adventures of two men and a transvestite young man in times of Rome’s Nero.’ — IMDB
the entire film
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Franco Brocani Necropolis (1970)
‘Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.’ — RareFilm
Trailer
Excerpt
Louis Waldon & Tina Aumont Behind the Scenes of Necropolis
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Sergio Martino Torso (1973)
‘Torso (Italian: I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale, lit. ‘The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence’) is an Italian giallo film directed by Sergio Martino. George Anderson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette deemed the film “another display of softcore sex and seamy violence that might better have been kept abroad.” Joe Baltake of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote: “Blood flows freely and limbs detach easily, in Sergio Martino’s Torso, a disagreeable Italian import with—not surprisingly—little to recommend it.” The Los Angeles Times’s Linda Gross wrote that the film was a “lazy suspense movie” with a “disjointed and loose” screenplay.’ — collaged
Trailer
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Alexander Whitelaw Lifespan (1975)
‘Cult icon Klaus Kinski features in this dark and intriguing existential thriller. He plays the mysterious “Swiss Man”, ruthless industrialist Nicolas Ulrich, who is obsessed with a search for the elixier of life. He tricks a young American scientist into joining him on his demonic quest. A quest that ends in suicide, death and madness. The story takes place in the atmospheric European city of Amsterdam. Its winding alleys and ancient canals trap the characters in a labyrinthine maze as they find themselves manipulated like figures on a giant chessboard. The film was controversial in its day for the extended bondage scene featuring female star Tina Aumont. This was cut in many countries, but is complete in this version. The brilliant soundtrack, unavailable for over 30 years, is by avant garde composer Terry Riley.’ — rarehorrordvds.com
Trailer
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Roberto Rossellini Il messia (1975)
‘Virtually unknown outside of Italy, Messiah (Il Messia) is historically important as the last directorial effort of Roberto Rossellini. In retelling the life of Christ, Rosselini harks back to the humanistic style he’d utilized on his many Italian TV projects of the 1960s. The director has no intention of depicting Jesus as being the vessel of divine providence. The Man from Galilee is shown simply as one who is unusually moral and of spotless character — the sort of person who’d be a natural leader no matter who his Father was. Co-scripted by its director, Messiah was completed in 1975, but not given a general release until 1978.’ — Sandra Brennan, Rovi
Excerpt
the entire film
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Francesco Rosi Cadaveri eccellenti (1976)
‘Rosi called Illustrious Corpses “a trip through the monsters and monstrosities of power.” A detective thriller cast in the mold of a political exposé, or vice versa, it is the story of a mysterious killer (or killers) whose victims are judges, public prosecutors, and magistrates. The dogged, Marlowe-like detective who follows this morbid trail uncovers a nest of corruption at every cultural and political turn: every witness—indeed, every institution in Italian society—has a stake in the collapse of the judiciary. Rosi’s most despairing comment on absolute power and corruption is also his most stylistically distinguished. From the famous opening sequence in which the mummified elders stand upright in the catacombs, “Rosi shows such a majestic, ominous spatial sense in this movie that at times it seems to be an architectural fantasy about a country of the dead” (Pauline Kael). Lino Ventura as the melancholy detective is joined by a star cast including Tina Aumont, Fernando Rey, and Max von Sydow.’ — Pacific Film Archive
Excerpt
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Tinto Brass Salon Kitty (1976)
‘Salon Kitty is a 1976 erotic-war-drama film directed by Tinto Brass. The film was coproduced by Italy, France and West Germany. It is based on the novel of the same name by Peter Norden, covering the real life events of the Salon Kitty Incident, where the Sicherheitsdienst took over an expensive brothel in Berlin, had the place wire tapped and all the prostitutes replaced with trained spies in order to gather data on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries. It is considered among the progenitors of Nazisploitation genre. In the U.S., the film was edited to lighten the political overtones for an easier marketing as a sexploitation film and released under the title Madam Kitty with an X rating.’ — collaged
Trailer
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Federico Fellini Casanova (1976)
‘Federico Fellini’s Casanova, which chronicles the life of its eponymous hero from shortly before his imprisonment in the Piombi in Venice to his old age in the service of Count Waldstein in Bohemia, is a remarkable and deeply affecting masterpiece. Filled with lavish, often peculiar, and highly stylized sets, ablaze with the ornate, vibrantly colored costumes worn by the actors, and suffused with a delicious sense of sadness tinged with a cold humor, the movie is consistently mesmerizing both visually and narratively. There is not a moment of his brilliantly realized film to which Fellini has not given a truly intoxicating loveliness. From its opening sequence depicting the celebration of the Doge’s marriage to the sea, in which a colossal statue of Venus is raised up from the waters of a canal amidst fireworks, while hosts of masked onlookers crowd the surrounding bridges and walkways, until its conclusion, in which the protagonist dances with a mechanical woman under a night sky, the director has created a work that is so astonishingly beautiful it is more like a revelation, in quick succession, of a series of paintings done by some great master than it is like most other films.’ — MOVIERAPTURE
Excerpt
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Jacques Richard Rebelote (1984)
‘The tale of a sad delinquent trying to overcome his miserable childhood to find success at love and life. It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, Christophe Bazzini, Olga Georges-Picot, Jacques Robiolles, and Tina Aumont.’ — collaged
Trailer
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Jean Rollin Two Orphan Vampires (1997)
‘Rollin’s entire filmography, more or less, could be summarized as a poetical consideration of death, termination, and unreality, but coming to terms with his own pending death had a way of affecting how he regarded them (the film was undertaken just as he was diagnosed with kidney failure). Something previously conceptual and child-like, nostalgic and precious in Rollin’s work becomes more concrete and dimensional, unflinching and adult. When they commit one violent transgression against their kindly benefactor, the scene’s abrupt and awkward brutality recalls the best of Henri-Georges Clouzot.’ –Fab Press
Trailer
the entire film
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Quelou Parente Marquis de Slime (1997)
‘Phoebe Legere wrote this rock n roll vampire classic. She plays a female wrestler with supernatural powers. The evil A and R vampire is played by Spaghetti Western star Michel Lemoine. Tina Aumont, daughter of Maria Montez appears as a sybilline spook in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.’ — Allo Cine
the entire film
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Roy Stuart Giulia (1999)
‘Giulia is an independent young woman who is prepared to offer her body and her spirit against all the religious taboos. The film was co-written by Joey Simas and Roy Stuart, and stars Laurent Abry, Elisa Ber, Tina Aumont, Tinto Brass, among others.’ — MUBI
Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** Laura, Hi to you! Oh, gosh, I’m happy that I said something that broke your prose open. The gif story was/is cool. I’m a solid audience. I think the gif has gotten relegated to the meme genre mostly, which is sad and disrespectful, but there you go. The only random/weird trip aspect was getting two flights cancelled in Chicago (our stopover) and getting stuck in a weird hotel in the middle of nowhere overnight then having our flight to Iowa City fucked by a disfunctioning plane that we had to exit and finally getting to IC eight hours after I was supposed to do a reading. Otherwise, the trip was pretty organised. I didn’t see your note to the troll guy, and I hope he found it interesting, but I wouldn’t have let him back in to respond if he’d tried. Laggy love back. ** rewritedept, Yeah, I thought you meant the ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ guy. I don’t know McClusky very well at all. The lyrics seem good, but I’m still too brain dead to parse them. I’ll try again tomorrow. I think my email’s the same. Your brain seems to be working very well. ** Adem Berbic, Hey. Oh, I think most of the IC artists’ stuff isn’t all that public yet. I’ll have to check. My brain is toast. Make readings sexy again … ‘again’? What does that mean? Does that mean adding a bunch of media or something? How is that sexy? I think I’m bored with ‘sexy’. I think things should try to be less sexy. I’m so sorry about the cat. But you see these videos on social media where cats come back after a weirdly long time in perfect shape, so I hope they’re not just AI generated shit for your sake. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ is pretty killer. Happy about your football related happiness, man. Onwards and upwards. ** kenley, Hi! Oh, yeah, exciting IC stuff … I’m going to be able to wake up more before my brain can find and pass along those specifics. I’m still very cloudy. But I will. Newfoundland sounds exciting, cool. I’ll go look at your tumblr after I take a nap. Keep enjoying. ** jay, Meerkats are fascinating, yeah. I’ve never seen one in 3D. They seem like penguins for high IQ people or something. Piano! Nice. Yeah, my mom was a concert pianist she was younger, and she made me take piano lessons for quite a while, but I was too klutzy. We had this grand piano in our living room, and, when my mom got drunk and very depressed about giving up her apparently promising concert pianist career, she’d plunk down there and try to play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ over and over for hours, and it was very disturbing. I feel very lucky that the blog only gets a troll once every few years, although I’m probably jinxing that. ** David Cady, David! Whoa, hi! Sure, I’ll write to you today. I’m very jet lagged at the moment so please excuse any haziness. But I will. Amazing to hear from you! I hope all’s really great with you. ** Brendan, You moved to NYC?! Holy moly. That’s big. That sounds good. Where are you living? What are you technically doing there? Wow. ** Steve, Hi. I’m too lagged to be analytical in any kind of interesting way. There’s the fact that IC is an oasis of leftism and braininess in an ultra-red state. That probably helps. Graham Swon … not that I know of. Maybe he was at the screening. There were a lot of people there, and I didn’t get to talk with most of them. It was pretty warm here when I arrived, but now it’s chilly-ish again. ** Carsten, Hi. Lots of trouble at the airport, but not related to ICE. We did see some ICE guys wandering around. Man, that sounds just awful: your malady. So sorry, I hope it’s the kind of thing that dies really young. Unlike Thompson, Reed wasn’t/isn’t a showman. I think that’s part of it. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Early Reed is so great. ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ and ‘The Freelance Pallbearer’ are especially way up there. Exactly about the far more complicated power in Sade. Readers make the things they’re reading, and film viewers just absorb a pre-existing thing and react/adjust. That’s a real challenge in making films. How to try to try to circumvent that. So happy you liked Ed’s book. I don’t think I’ve read ‘Humiliation’ although I really like Koestenbaum. Hm, I’ll get it. Thanks re: my jet lag. Hopefully by Monday I’ll be right as rain as people mysteriously say. ** Uday, Hi, U. Florida, wow. I never imagine people going there except to go to the theme parks. Iowa City was lovely. It itself is very small and quiet and uneventful apart from the university-related artistic outbursts, but I really enjoyed it. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, Oh, no, your enthusiasm helped wake me up. Definitely submit your piece! That’s great! How wonderful to have a teacher who recognises and supports your talent. There were a couple of teachers at my college that did that re: me, and I honestly don’t know whether I would have had the confidence to keep writing if they hadn’t. Yeah, there were technical problems with the Florida screening, so they had to reschedule it. No, we’re not going to that one. All the screenings we’re going to for the next while are in Europe. ** Okay. This weekend you are invited to explore the oeuvre of the wonderful and idiosyncratic French actor Tina Aumont, and I suggest you do. See you hopefully more wakefully on Monday.
Now available in North America 
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ahhh, tina aumont. one of the great beauties of the screen. there’s an actress i like a lot who reminds me of her, but i can’t think of her name offhand. she was in that tarantino movie, death proof. the girl with the gap in her teeth.
as a huge fan, i would say to give mclusky the chance, future of the left and xtian fitness are great too. it’s mostly abrasive power-trio noise rock like unsane or big black/shellac of north america/rapeman. in fact, falco’s lyrics put me in a very albini state of mind, he’s got that same acidic wit, but then he can also write a song like french lessons or flysmoke that just breaks yr heart in two.
my new pinback shirt gets delivered tomorrow, so that’s exciting. i’m very late to the genius of rob crow, so i am catching up as quickly as i can manage. the dude’s almost more prolific than bobby p.
i am currently making a big batch of cannabis tincture. i used to make it with everclear, but am trying to use vegetable glycerin, which is much less burny than using high proof booze and also i can share it with my buddy who can’t drink because it will probably kill him. the problem is that i didn’t know that glycerin absorbs cannabinoids much slower than alcohol, which only needs about two hours to properly infuse. glycerin needs more like twelve-to-twenty-four hours to properly infuse, which i wish i had known before i wasted two ounces last weekend on a bunk batch. all good, though. we live and we learn, right? it goes down really nicely with a couple tabs of high-powered gel LSD pyramids (the stuff i have on the way is dosed at like 140 mics per tab, so it’s potent shit). get that in ya, watch some porno, listen to some music and play with synthesizers: that’s my recipe for a great night. my cat seems to know when i’m tripping because she gets really attentive, or more attentive than normal (butters (my kitty) is an ex-street cat who i basically found in the trash, so she has some major abandonment issues (i’m pretty sure she had owners before me and they abandoned her, for which i hate their guts because she’s the sweetest little cat there ever was, but also if they hadn’t ditched her, i wouldn’t have ended up with her (i woke up one night and she was taking a nap with me on the couch, all curled up under the blanket and purring up a storm))). that cat’s a pain in my ass, but i love her to bits. she’s my little sfogliatelle.
it was a very busy night at work and my brain hurts, so i’m gonna go watch some arrested development and get ready for bed. if you think of any good introductory books on leftism/anarchism, drop ’em to me please. hope yr weekend is filled with superlatives and rest. talk soon. love to yous.
-me.
Hm, eyes on Iowa City then, I guess. And thanks for the cat. Maybe I’m being pessimistic but I really don’t think the odds are good for him. (Also, Laura, thank you too for cat wishes — hopefully ours is also around the corner in sexy solitude or something.) I always have a humming background interest in these ultra-connected people like Aumont, especially when they seem to have burned bright but had no towering work of their own, and especially when they seemed kind of sleazy. E.g. that person who gave Belushi his speedball, and the guy who supposedly killed Nancy Spungen, and who knew Basquiat, Gallo, Jarmusch, etc, etc…
‘Make readings sexy again’ generally means that everyone in attendance is attractive and upper-class and does lots of coke and goes to members’ clubs in Soho. So, as in, ‘envy me’ sexy. Martin Amis seems to be their god-king. Like I said, there are some good writers there, but I don’t find it very pleasant, so I’d like to avoid replicating the sort of exclusionary mechanics I think it’s founded on. Coolness and exclusion and social hierarchies are one of my longstanding obsessions which will probably take tens of thousands of words for me to articulate clearly — I feel sort of lucky in that I think the gay world can often bring those dynamics into extreme, primal focus, so it’s a useful stage for them imaginatively and in writing.
The task for next week will be finding a guest reader who melds thematically and, ideally, has mild name recognition — Charlotte is a maybe but she might be cavorting in Cannes (and is also mulling a move to Paris — the London-to-Paris trickle really is turning into a flood now).
Funny, I was just thinking Aumont had a Jean Rollin face, then I see she was in Two Orphan Vampires, the only of her movies I’ve seen.
The Lee Bul show was good. I like her ideas, though sometimes I’ll look at a piece and there’ll be an implementation detail that really bothered me. Or I’d think a piece (like Souterrain) would be even better if I had helped her with it, haha. But the Sargasso sculptures and the assemblages with the writhing lines and quasi-organic forms are quite inspirational.
Also at the museum is a nice show of prints by Zao Wou-ki, a Chinese artist who moved to Paris in the 50s. A lot of them are huge abstracts, with really vibrant colors and layered textures.
Bill
Tina forever
One of the most beautiful girls ever
Her filmography is so interesting to explore
Arcana is an unknown horror film not featured here very much worth watching!
She is amazing in Torso
Her two films she did in Amsterdam, Modesty Blaise and Lifespan make a very interesting duo of roles for her
Someone said to me we have Same Soul and this is why I wrote a poem with this name so I will always remember this so fondly <3
The paintings Frederic Pardo did of her are very beautiful, this era of her in Paris is inspiring to me like the Amsterdam era
Never seen the Jean Rollin film she is in and I am curious to check it out now
Apart from her filmography is very much worth exploring images of her and I post them often and her style inspired me to find myself balance in my face and do some secret acting tricks 😉
So, I play so much another GbV album since yesterday, the amazing Self Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia. I will extend my GbV discovery era so I don't burn it early but it is for sure high up on my faves list I am going to do in the future!
Smiley's smiling
Smiley's smiling
Hi from Easter Crete with all the comings and goings of that around
Hi Dennis.
I’m gonna respond to your text yesterday because I was too tired from watching M*A*S*H apparently. I didn’t know you disliked Robert Pattinson so much, was it the lighthouse? Or just twilight or whatever? – I’m at my granny’s place and I’ve been overtaken by unproductive boredom and the passing of country life. I might see about heading down to London. Hopefully I can actually work soon on my stuff.
@Thomas ‘Moronic’ Moore: Hey in case you’re out there, I really dug your piece about depression & art. I know all about the dark voice you describe. Once called it the killer parrot on my shoulder. And yes, the strange realization that not everyone around you is saddled with it. But most importantly, art’s capacity to have it all make sense on a deep emotional level that is to me the very definition of transcendence. So I feel you brother.
@DC: What did we learn on DC’s tonight, kids? That Maria Montez’s daughter smuggled 400 grams of opium out of Thailand stashed inside tiny Buddhas. Now that’s a story. But seriously, knew nothing of Ms. Aumont, so this was a treat.
I do feel a lot better today, luckily. It’s day 5 on the antibiotics so I started getting nervous about possibly having become immune to them, but no, it’s looking good. Managed to do some housework today & went for a walk, which I really needed. Bed rest makes me stir crazy.
It’s strange, but I hope it’s a sign of getting wiser with age: I’ve been riding a real jolt of mental energy today. Obviously that’s the relief of feeling better after a week of being bed-ridden. But it’s not that simple. All week my mind was numb. My usually extremely active inner life grinded to a halt. That speaks to the severity of this sinusitis bout of course, but it’s not something I’m used to. Usually my mind’s racing even when ill. It annoyed the fuck out of me all week. What’s new is that I’m not just grateful to be feeling better today, but also weirdly appreciative of the mental sedation I was trapped in before. Coming out of it I can see that there’s a balance to it, that the deeply unpleasant has its own value & meaning. Like an enforced meditation, ego on forced shut-down, just a stark one & one with the meat of the body on idle.
So yeah, on Soderbergh’s “Che”, which I’m surprised I was able to process in my fried state: I had only seen it once before, shortly after it came out almost 20 years ago. This rewatch solidifies it as my favorite fiction feature of the century so far, along with “The Limits of Control” & “White Material”. The construction is ingenious, how the two parts mirror each other in all sorts of thematic but also rhythmic ways. There’s a jazzy sense of harmony to the thing that just builds, relentlessly, where nothing can be taken out of context & the meaning emerges through the sheer phantom pull of events. It’s hard to describe, but I’d call it ritualistic narrative.
Now normally in drama we get two types of narrative: the plot-driven, which just imposes an artificial structure on events, including neat resolutions. That’s the most dishonest form. And then the psychological, which by trying to rationalize & explain the mysterious forces at work in the world goes against everything I hold sacred.
I think it’s my deep engagement with ethnopoetics that taught me about ritualistic narrative, where the beats of the story come with the kind of primal inevitability of natural phenomena. A confrontation with the origin of things, of spirit stamped into action. It’s damn rare to see that in modern art, especially so in a big budget film. Even stranger that Soderbergh’s never done anything like it before or since. Anyway, I could go on, especially on the depiction of Guevara (who’s always fascinated me) but this comment’s long enough. Have a good restful weekend that hopefully leaves that jetlag in the dust.
Thank you so much, Carsten! Very much appreciated.
Tina Aumont certainly did not participated in Fellini Satyricon, and it is not her in the photo of D. Sutherland from Casanova
Torso is a longtime favourite of mine and I’m happy to go deeper into Ms Aumont’s filmography here.
There’s a Welsh artist by the name of Bedwyr Williams who continues to make compelling work. Back in 2010 he showed something called Dromos at the Generator in Dundee and I wrote this rave review for the Skinny at the time. Kind of a hybrid of performance and installation and quite unlike anything anyone here had ever seen at the time. The guy now has a Patreon here where he writes stories about various misfits in a local artist group.
Hi Dennis, hope u had a nice weekend. I realise I never fully confirmed my Paris dates, but I’ll arrive into the city tomorrow night, so if you have time on either Tuesday or Wednesday it would be lovely to meet up! Maybe I’ll send you an email tomorrow at some point. No pressure of course!
Hi Dennis. First time commenting here. I have been engaging with your work through the last few months and love them so far despite being a pretty casual reader, not sure if I fully understand the layers of it tho, there’s just something in these books that grab my attention. Anyway, just watched Room Temperature and thought it was pretty cool, one of my favorites of the year. Can’t wait for your next book/movie. Have a nice week!
hi dennis!!!! ahhh! i love maria montez…now ill have to get into her daughter’s work. that detail of her smoking in the taxi is very fun lol
hope youre resting up!!
Hello lovely !!
Today, Diesel Clementine:
1. Skimread an article on Gluon in a corner shop: apparently it’s true that all the atoms in our bodies are trying to escape one another ! But gluon keeps it together, supposedly.
2. Read some more of Ulysses: which I am verymuch enjoying ! It suits the fact I seem to be reading everything on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I am also reading James Ellroy and Cosmic Trigger and Difference and Repetition and V.
3. Went to a hardcore gig: I fantasised about mosh pits quite some bit when I was a young teen; this was my very first! I was just this morning writing a vignette on electronic music and the impact on how a body relates to the crowd in a club (individualism) –the gabberstomp and fits and kungfu kicks were –obviously– actively antagonistic, but the air of the place were humming with that-there gluon! The thud kinetic shoulders. I would like to be a butterfly in here, and I would like to feel myself a stain to the weightless step of the very beautiful skinhead boy there. I think I do not believe in a God that doesn’t mosh !
Any thoughts on free indirect voice ?
Some gnostics seem to believe that the (fake) material world short circuits if one exhausts all material experience. This is, it seems, the metaphysics of supposed magical qualities to extreme transgression.
Is there, to you, a metaphysics that underpins your understanding of transgression? (In fiction or in the real, and –if these differ– why?)
I am doing very well ! I have written a great deal, and I am beginning a new job soon and I am always very much in love. I hope you are doing well also !
Thanks,
Diesel Clementine
TIL Aumont was Maria Montez’s daughter. Anthology has an Aumont retrospective coming up.
I’ve been dealing with floaters in my eye for the last week, so my vision’s a bit blurry and I haven’t been able to read books, which is frustrating. (I’m in the middle of DEATH ON THE NILE, but I’ve got more 5 library books out.)
How much further will you and Zac travel with ROOM TEMPERATURE on the festival circuit?
Did your jet lag die down enough to enjoy the weekend?
Hey! Hope you’re right as rain now. The changing of the seasons is definitely confusing my body so I’ve been sort of hay fevered up and frazzled.
‘Humiliation’ is so great. It’s criticism, not poetry btw, but a kind of reckless, formally inventive type of criticism I really take a liking to. I should read his poetry, though. There’s this idea of ‘desubjectification’ that he writes about that was basically a perfect find right now in terms of what I’m writing. He links it back to Kristeva’s ‘Powers of Horror’ which I now think I have to read after wanting to for a while.
I’m so glad a lot of people here seem to know and love Tina. I think my introduction to her must have been ‘The Howl’, which I watched on a whim a couple of years ago.
I didn’t know she was in one of Clemmenti’s films. I’ve actually never seen any of the films he made. I’ve never seen Fellini’s ‘Cassanova’ either, but I’ve heard mixed things about it. I do like late era Fellini and how he really took his earlier ideas to an extreme outside of the realms of ‘good taste’.
And I love Maria Montez too. Since Hanuman are re-issuing some of their classics, I’m praying for Jack Smith’s essay on ‘Cobra Woman’.
I have unfortunately had some run-ins with the ‘reading is sexy’ crowd. It’s the age-old thing of writers more interested in being and looking like a writer than doing something interesting.
I’ve never been interested in sex written about sexily. That’s the most obvious way to write it. In the sex-adjacent scenes I’ve written I always want to write it in the same way that someone takes a shit or fulfils some other routine bodily function. Like sex is wasted imagination or something. I’m bored by the harmony of souls, or even excessively kinky sex writing to the point of trying to provoke arousal from the reader. If I wanted that I could go on wattpad or ao3 and read that stuff for free.
Howdy! Its me! I’ve been busy downsizing and then vision boarding then manifestoing and actively manifesting by singing and walking through nature and taking my shoes and socks off and standing on grass thats grounding its super good for you and tons of nice rushing water sounds to clear the mind. I still had some big business in me but now I’m just plotting for the simple life zero Paris Hilton and cameras and fans. Writer obviously and super sexy porn star digital zine runner I’ve been doing that for free for years so why stop now! Heres my latest journal entry to get some insight on that side of things otherwise whats been up and what was for dinner? Hear any good jokes lately keep my updated! Love you and talk soon ttylxoxo.
Love Feelings
“A bit ago I got a lot of clarity on well starting bits of clarity on my relationship with Joey. It honestly happened so subtly I didn’t believe it and sort of breezed past it in said disbelief. A dream I let go of come true so suddenly haha I was beyond grateful and its true love cause we haven’t seen each other in so long and truly that weighs on me more than I care to note. But all the times I have seen him I’ve been in love so the wait is worth it especially since I feel once we get started we wont have to stop going together which has totally reoriented my perspective, goals, and values haha. I love him and its changed me for the better and I’m lonely when I’m far and haven’t seen in but he’s always there so that counts for sure. A dream just starting and a life to be lived.”
What a beautiful, haunting post.
I watched Visa de censure n° X for the first time – thanks for the introduction to this gorgeous film!
Love
Thomas xoxo
hi Dennis!
fddukug Tina Aumont <33 in the same line of vision as Pierre Clementi it was all this bisexual apocalypse lol (might watch Partner tonight or tomorrow)
i hear you say sexiness is overrated tho? and i’m like ok Dennis how. under this post of all posts =D also uh you write sexy, like remarkably! i’d say the stuff is v important but there’s def so much out there that is supposed to be sexy but it’s actually gross (maybe bc any inherent grossness has been censored and w it the beauty?).
man, your trip! so what happened to your reading? ever since i lived in The Netherlands i’ve got this phobia of being late to appointments or whatever, which doesn’t stop me from being late, but i do suffer. hope you’re nothing like this =)
anyway, insane that mfs aren’t making gif art left and right! v disrespectful fr. mostly i don’t get it, it’s so fun, w so many possibilities. Broken Social Scene did go there at least.
raining here and i hope it keeps up all day bc i’m sort of in dark mode rn. just wanna write in peace under the covers and stuff lol
what’s going on over there? hope you’re as shiny as Tina’s eyes!
<3
hey Dennis, 90 percent sure that my last comment was something I typed out while you were posting the blog, so I think it was missed. will copy/paste here and hope I am not cutting it too close timing wise… if i am mistaken then well, uhh sorry you had to read it again!
thank GOD for the Ryan Trecartin post, I-Be Area has been on my radar for YEARS but I always forget the damn name of the movie and the guy that made it… this time it stuck!
I work at a thrift shop and I have to wait 2 days before i can buy an item… many times I have seen shit get swiped before the damn 2 days waiting period is up (usually books or ummmm, autoharps) and the last thing that happened with was… MUMBO JUMBO! So I’ve been really wanting to get my hands on it since… it may be at the library, which I have been using much more lately due to lack of book money and impatience with my own bookshelf…
for the flagship, i guess, zine of our lil mini “Epiphyte Press” thing, we are gonna use the name “Holobiosis” and we have all the texts and drawings gathered for issue 1, just gotta format everything… also just will be nice to have a little unifying umbrella press for if we decide to print up solo zines or any sort of other project… hope other people get psyched. i thrive on collaborations with like, music, but its fun to have a way to do that with prose and poems.
oh I said I was gonna read Marbled Swarm finally, the last of your novels I have to read, but I have taken a side quest to read every book on Throbbing Gristle I can get my hands on, as I am currently obsessed with then like i’m 15 again for some reason… but coming up for me is Marbled Swarm, more Pinget, some lil Perec oddities, never read him… oh also I read “My Life”, which was phenomenal of course… it was validating for me the way it was structured. i have this prose poem im working on about seven people (including me) and each person gets seven sentences, but mine are big long paragraph length sentences interspersed between other paragraphs of everyone elses own sentences, if that makes sense. anyway, with My Life, the playful sort or sentences feel sweet and personal, and the rigid structure is self-imposed in a very personal way too… it just makes for a very vibrant reading experience… and also very invigorated as a writer! great stuff!!!
ok thats the comment from the other day, hope you are rested! i am still beat from two 13 hour work days in a row, but I have one more day off to rest n read and edit and perhaps play a bit of zelda… dont recognize this actress by name, but i may have seen her face… good stuff to dig into. Have a good week!
I thought I left a comment on the Tina Aumont post, but I guess I didn’t actually post it. Luckily, I write down all of these comments in a Google Doc first so I’ll just post it here:
I need to check out some of these movies. I’ve been going through a phase of being very interested in 60’s psychedelic/occult culture. Glad to see the troll problem seems to be resolved for now. Also, I very much agree with you that things should try to be less sexy. Or at least complicate their sexiness with things that are very unsexy. Good to hear that the new script is almost finished.