“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”
That line, spoken in Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh-li’s The Boxer from Shantung (1972), speaks to a common sentiment found in the many kung fu films produced in Hong Kong under the Shaw Brothers. For the humble martial artist, the body isn’t only the means by which they perform their craft, or enact violent comeuppance on local goons, it’s a physical manifestation of their reputation in the wider community. Each practitioner is judged on the basis of the shapes they carve with their corporeal form, every chop and kick a signifier of their internal control, every shrugged off injury a mark of their enviable synchronicity between mind and body. In such a social structure, resilience to pain, the most intrusive and instantaneous clarion call from flesh to nerve to brain, becomes a signifier of both inner peace and technical proficiency.
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Cinema, by nature of its visual immediacy, has always been engaged with the tangible anatomy of the human body. In the case of Shaw Brothers films, the strapping physique of an actor is part of the price of entry, each combatant’s clothes inevitably being torn off or discarded during battle, unveiling rippling muscles and chests slick with sweat. Appearances can always be deceiving, of course—an unassuming older man with a hunched back and a walking stick, for example, or a woman whose prowess is doubted by bawdy men at a local bar—though, in these instances still, it’s the stable bridge between mind and body that enables them to overpower their weaker-minded and covetous rivals. But what about when a schism occurs internally, separating the two? What about when the bubbling, stewing viscera within can no longer be contained?
If unity in body and mind is the realm of the kung fu film, then disunity is most often found in horror movies, notably in the transgressive films of the New French Extremity. As defined by critic James Quandt, these turn-of-the-millennium films represented:
“…a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.”
For Quandt, this protracted description of sputum and spunk was intended to be pejorative, dismissing such an abundance of gore and bodily fluids as merely reactionary, but in doing so he ignored the genre’s many tactile considerations of how the internal informs the external—the contractual sexual exorcisms of Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (2004) or the deadening disease at the heart of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). In his book, Brutal Intimacy (2011), Tim Palmer suggests a more suitable nomenclature: cinéma du corps (literally, cinema of the body). Drawing from the Grand Guignol, a popular theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris during the early 20th century, renowned for its gory special effects and subversive social commentary, cinéma du corps brings the body to the fore, highlighting the discomforting aspects that emerge from the mental being coupled to the physical.
In the disruptive disconnect of Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002), cinéma du corps finds its defining text. Following Parisian marketing professional Esther (de Van herself), In My Skin questions what happens when the subconscious revolts against the quotidian. What starts when Esther severely injures her leg without noticing (her doctor quips, “Are you sure it’s your leg?”) gradually turns into a fascination with self-harm, Esther peeling at the surface layers of her skin in an attempt to find any semblance of the self behind the pores and veins. In contrast with the high-flying acrobatics of the Venom mob or Cheng Pei-pei, Esther has no athletic acumen—indeed her initial injury stems from a clumsy fall over some discarded industrial supplies. Here the body is merely a barrier disguising the true Esther, something to be torn apart and shredded until all that’s left behind is pure. No matter, only mind.
For each of the articles in our new issue, VISCERA, our contributors performed their own autopsies of the body as it exists in the cinematic form. And yet, far from being post-mortems, every dissection reveals the essential liveliness of the human form rendered frame-to-frame, and what such unblinking visions of the body ultimately disclose about each person’s internal machinations.
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It’s November: I attend the excellent Five Flavours Asian film festival in Warsaw. There, I see several films concerned with the moving body. They make immediate impressions: King Hu’s coruscating wuxia movies (Come Drink with Me, 1966; Raining in the Mountain, 1979) gild the fleet-footed martial artist; Mabel Cheung’s slapstick An Autumn’s Tale (1987) celebrates the intrepid duncery of its male lead; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s dissipating Millennium Mambo (2001) etherealises its sylphlike, spellbound heroine. Each of these films feels profoundly attentive to the relationship between embodied movement and physical space. Each shades the connections between bodies and buildings.
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But first, my accommodation. A vinyl leopard wall-print gazes across my room. I’m holed up in the city’s financial district, specifically the 12th floor of an astonishing skyscraper hotel, the NYX, which, according to its own write-up, “oozes a sleek, edgy vibe.” Buildings shouldn’t ooze, I think. From the lobby, the impenetrable lift system proves a monument to white-collar hubris, shuttling me up and down in full sight of the Varso Tower, the tallest building in that brain-melting physical geography, the EU. I watch the people on their computers, partitioned like a grid.
Imagine it: a speck of a man, locked in a glass elevator, rising and plummeting, ascending and decelerating. Imagine him crumpled and pathetic, a creature on display. That’s what the office people see. They are laughing.
The snow is handsome as it tumbles past us, falling faintly and faintly falling, like the descent of its last end, upon all the central European bankers and their trusted corporate friends. Looking out from building to building, I am struck by the idea of a huge balloon that might catch in the ravine beneath the towers. I recall Donald Barthelme’s The Balloon (1968), whose narrator reveals that a floating object, stretching across Manhattan over the story’s run, is in fact “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure […] awaiting some other time of unhappiness” to be inflated again. I envision the bulge that might appear if the balloon were to squeeze itself between the Varso and the NYX.
Two cinemas elsewhere in the capital host the festival programme: the Kinoteka, a mixture of screens housed at the bottom of the gargantuan, art-deco Palace of Culture and Science; and Kino Muranów, a gorgeous, pickled independent near to the old town. The latter encourages you to hang up coats and jackets in the wings of the theatre, a pleasingly functional and communal activity that has me checking my bare pockets with intermittent alarm. Seated and uncertain, I watch as many films by King Hu as I can.
What’s so striking about King Hu’s work is how it privileges evasion and deflection over contact and combat. In Come Drink with Me, the heroes rely on misdirection to hide and then assert their physical prowess. Strength lies in innocuous appearances: Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), the government officer tasked with hunting down a gang of bandits, is slight and diminutive, shrouded in a wide-brimmed hat; her accomplice, Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua), the slovenly beggar followed by a merry band of whistling children, is a kung fu master whose revelatory skill leads to a gory showdown with the crew’s evil leader.
It’s important to note the buildings in and around which the action takes place. Golden Swallow demonstrates superior trickery inside the airless drinking tavern, surrounded and spotlighted by her smirking adversaries, all of whom are inevitably mocked and confounded by her indifferent dodges and weaves, a noticeably nonviolent succession of precise movements that amount to a kind of dance. Later, outside in the hallowed courtyard of the temple, our hero slices through what appears to be a regenerating horde, almost (but not quite) defeating the venal cast of crooks that engulf her. These varying fortunes are dictated by the differences between spaces and the people who occupy them: the tavern provides a coherent layout for resisting the boozy gathering; the courtyard yields a plein-air uncertainty from which waves of attackers can endlessly respawn.
Hu’s treatment of ensemble movement in both the tavern and the temple is established through medium shots that cut fast to instances of comedic and dramatic expression. At the tavern, the antagonists’ weapons are caught in the beams of the ceiling; in the next image, we’re shown Golden Swallow’s unfurled fan as it collects detritus from the falling projectiles. Inside the temple, we see in close-up her wheeling arms make an expansive pose; in the subsequent shot, a cadre of fighters are sent flying from the altar. In each case, the careful cutting between action and reaction sustains a kinetic relationship between our hero, her enemies and their environs. Hu deploys different situations to alter the viewer’s expectations of people and setting: murderous brawls are reserved for holy arenas and among those who plead in pieties. As Jade-Faced Tiger (Chan Hung-lit), whose lurid white-face typifies pure malevolence, remarks: “I don’t think you should spill blood in a place like this.”
I stick around for Hu’s Raining in the Mountain, where the connections between corporeal motion and constructed space are even more pronounced. As the critic David Bordwell notes, in this film, combat forays have been replaced with “zigzag chases, evasions, and hide-and-seek manoeuvres.” Hu reuses the sacred temple locale, pairing his ironic detachment towards its inhabitants with an intimate sense of its configurations, as competing factions try to steal a priceless scroll amid the jostling of monasterial politics. We mock wryly the monastic contingent and their superficial adherence to spiritual matters, as the air of subterfuge inspires both the movement of the characters and their manipulation of the real-world environment, the eighth-century Bulguksa Buddhist site in which the film was shot.
Whereas Come Drink with Me offers a revenge tale spanning multiple locations, Raining in the Mountain is strictly situated within the byzantine layout and complex construction of the abbot’s retreat. On this point, Bordwell writes perceptively that “the geography of the monastery gave [Hu] vast opportunities for booby-trapped compositions. Figures and faces pop in and out of doorways, corridors, and windows.” These visual possibilities are widely afforded to the viewer, who sees everything: monks appearing from behind walls, assassins backflipping over ledges, spies tip-tapping across porches, and intended victims standing alone, prey to others, idling in passages and along walkways. The self-contained area accentuates every small gesture; our eye is drawn less to how characters intervene in the space and more to how they exist within it.
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Extracted from my Hu enclave, I catch other retrospectives. The sprightly yearning of An Autumn’s Tale is carried by its leads: Chow Yun-fat’s jack-in-a-box gait provides the clowning counterpoint to Cherie Chung’s doe-eyed composure. Both play immigrant Hongkongers in New York’s Lower East Side, living in tiered, tumbledown apartments, a background for the pair’s unconsummated affection. Shooting on location, director Mabel Cheung fashions scenes of minor textures framed by major landmarks: the most striking of which has Chow’s hero-schlub, after a failed romantic chase, strolling forlornly down a slip road from Brooklyn Bridge, as a droll procession of taxi cabs hurtle around behind him. Thwarted desire is undercut by concrete matters: the incline of the highway, the flow of traffic, the sad slump of the human form.
This comic scene is brought into relief by the opening sequence of the Taipei-set Millennium Mambo, where the overpass supplies an earnest and exultant demonstration of transient longing. Incandescent, cylindrical lights fixed overhead denote the path the camera follows, dipping behind Vicky (Shu Qi) as she bounces, stretches, and waves to the end of the crossing. Hou Hsiao-hsien tracks his protagonist in slow motion, stylising her movements, glorifying her fluidity, funneling her person (literally) into the narrative.
Mambo is not a clear-cut story of cause and effect, drama and plot. As Esmé Holden suggests, the film presents a string of memories that begin to “lose their precision and chronology.” Through abrupt temporal leaps, we find Vicky’s life at disconnected points and places, a montage of estranged moments captured in slow pans and long takes. Foreshadowing the love affairs that deteriorate inside this woozy, urban maelstrom, Hou first portrays Vicky’s vaulting presence over the footbridge as a diaphanous rumour, as a set of possibilities, as a single limitless threat.
For all this rumination on movies of yesteryear, the tensions between body and building are most suggestively pursued in Lee Jeong-hong’s A Wild Roomer (2022), which wins the festival’s Grand Prix. A slippery portrait of two awkward, atomised South Korean men in premature middle-age, the film navigates wealth, mediocrity, and pallid aspiration, to produce an atonal and seductive mystery. It depicts a desultory carpenter tangled up in the life and house of his landlord, and the pair’s proximity is predicated on both their physical intimacy and their psychological dependence. The goateed tenant, another hero-schlub of distinction, is at the mercy of his slicker (but no less pathetic) proprietor, who solicits him for day-drinking and general hanging out, all the while chipping at the porous barrier that divides owned and rented space.
Which is to say, they can neither escape nor resist each other. The film’s main joke, after all, is about “separation and connection”, the vapid ethos for the home architecture that both men inhabit. This mantra of interior design suggests an insidious social politics: there is no such thing as private experience, scrutiny is guaranteed, and life, in essence, is one long concession to perpetual spectatorship. You should be able to see one another, always. I reflect that my yo-yo impression between the high-rises, while mostly an oscillating exhibition of human folly, illustrates an eternal sentiment: observation is a virtue, and we must not look away. The sum of which transports the affective relationship of body and building into the startling present: what does modern home ownership say about us? And more to the point, what do those tall things in the sky tell us about our feelings?
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Titillation is in peril. The art of rousing emotion through seductive imagery, chasing new forms of stimulation through subtlety, is often now being closely guarded by the social media ‘mod(eration) squad’, a faceless embodiment of the sex-negative internet crowd. A crowd of the terminally online, petrified at the thought of navigating the grey mores of a sexual encounter. Not just within their own lives but also the mental implications of confronting ambiguity that leaves them squirming. Being naked, truly naked, has been stolen from us by a sexless age, one afraid of nudity that doesn’t conform to its transparent agenda. Welcome to the new vanity of digital reflections, a vanity measured in detail over time, filter and airbrush, a vanity that’s malleable but increasingly further from a true form.
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This is why the nudity found in experimental film, which exists to test the limits of creative possibility, still feels so fresh and inviting, a minor thrill in a world of anodyne perfection. Contemporary desire so tamed by a straightlaced vanity and moralism is thrown into a visceral world. Instead of human sculptures cut from marble, we’re presented with shapeless clay. ______
Take the unadorned nudes of R Bruce Elder’s Sweet Love Remembered (1980). Elder is a criminally underrated Canadian academic and experimenteer, who deals in grandiose opuses that speak in advanced cinematic languages, which often feel incomprehensible but are also an almost idiosyncratic codex to exploring his connections to queer love and identity. Sweet Love Remembered was a response to two quotes he heard by Nietzsche, “Eros nowhere makes its intentions more clear than in the desire to make two things one.” And another by Freud, “what must these people have suffered to have become this beautiful?”
From the start of the short, we’re not immediately pushed into how we should feel; no sex is actually occurring; we only witness the small touches. We’re not even aware that it’s two women who are being depicted until halfway through the short. But through its visual flourishes, we’re progressively drawn deeper into exploring past love psychically through the emotion of touch. Eschewing the usual softcore colours of heavy red or purple neon, the nudity is lit through natural sunlight coming through blinds, giving a sense of realism and intimacy but also nostalgia on the glowing skin. With the sunlight constantly moving and waning, a sense of unease builds that memory is fading with the light.
The computer music we hear throughout (composed by Elder himself) reinforces the alienness of the touch, not cold but ethereal. By avoiding the convention of nostalgia pop and fast cuts, we are able to focus on bodies like our own that seem unknown but are still open to contact. The uniqueness of the nudity comes through Elder’s sense of pace; he never lingers for too long, as the memory remembers the touch but not the other person’s reaction to it. The contrasting elements of the glacial music become disorientating with double exposures, the recollection weighing heavily as it comes to climax. Elder’s absence of a traditional narrative structure allows for a deeper sense of personal reverie, lost in the nostalgia.
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Another take on truth in nudity is Pipilotti Rist’s Pickelporno (1992), a short paralleling the stages of female orgasm, centred on a couple’s exploration of each other’s bodies. Her work has been mostly made with a gallery setting in mind, allowing the Swiss artist a higher sense of free expression and the ability to delve deeper into more singular and personal themes like escapism and personal satisfaction. Rist often places her own nude body into the works, such as her first film I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) where her dress is exposed while the titular Beatles line loops in the background.
Rist’s work has been a study in cultivating an intensely colourful visual world to process internal struggles and desires. Building on Elder’s sense of metaphorical nudity, Rist hones in on the instant feeling of touch, rolling through the body by the use of the roving eye of the camera. Whereas Elder was stuck in reverie, Rist is more concerned with the intangible instant.
Throughout, we hear the sound of birdsong and upright bass, heightening the innate sensuality of the natural touch. This is then undercut with more jagged synths, chanting and breath. The use of breath over surrealistic imagery within the world of the orgasm is important as it establishes aural momentum and builds a deeper connection to the cause and effect of each moment of pleasure.
Lit plainly at first, the nudity is augmented through a superimposed green screen effect. Nourished by a kaleidoscope of imaginative images. The visuals are playful, with superimposed flowers and lava elevating the euphoria. The sensual joy is made visceral by using imagery with immediate recognition. Our understanding of it is instinctual, speaking faster than words. Rist constantly rolls around these visuals, not satisfied with cutting between the couple, she superimposes coloured shapes over hands and feet, layering the images to dazzling effect.
Put simply, Pickelporno is visual foreplay, focussed on the body parts usually left outside the sexual spotlight. We still see lips, tongues and genitals, but there’s also the tips of fingers and the folds of an elbow playfully caressed. Rist goes beyond Laura Mulvey’s ‘Renaissance’ mindset regarding the fragmented body, harnessing the power of film to go beyond how the eye processes information for a more granular experience that titillates the senses.
Shooting sex can be a hostile act. As screening it is, in effect, sex being visually forced upon the viewer. It’s jarring being confronted with someone else’s desires. In a world tailored to personal satisfaction, it can incur emotional paralysis when held in gaze for too long. Pickelporno eschews this by transforming the participant’s conventional eye-to-eye into an omniscient spectator, rolling around gleefully from man to woman until they merge visually.
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Experimental cinema is a safe haven for these depictions of sex; free from judgement, the body is allowed to simply be. Perhaps this is because most experimental film exists within a cultural safety net, whilst mainstream cinema walks the tightrope of commerce. This attracts directors and audiences willing to explore ideas more than ideals, intrigued by personal visions of vulnerability that would be pulverised by an audience demanding palliative entertainment to endure the death spiral of life. Looking at the two films discussed, Elder has spent much of his life in academia and Rist is an art gallery darling; these sorts of institutes, while not perfect, do allow for a greater outlet of personal creative introspection than conventional theatrical screenings.
We often see nudity in modern media but not real nakedness, not real emotions escaping the body. The author RS Benedict talked of bodies becoming investments and that they ceased to be “the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure”. Delving further, it’s crucial to ask “in pursuit of aesthetic standards,what do we give back to ourselves?”
Without a space to mirror simple pleasures, we become islands within ourselves, constrained and dulled. Real nakedness is being able to express pleasure freely and can be found in the captured intimacies of diary filmmaking or the raw, unrestrained performances actors can unleash when freed from expectation.
This experimental creativity is found in the visceral, the physical, the nude. Giving us an honesty honed through expression without artifice. Nudity is the freedom to be ourselves, alone but also with others. Through memory and sensation, we exercise this freedom.
For without it, we are basically dead.
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‘She clogged the mother toilet when she was slayed.’
Mr Kuleshov is a very powerful man, whose effect on audiences is unparalleled. His suggestion that the camera can create a psychological association by cutting from an object to a character’s reaction, is the foundation for much of the cinematic form. He should be carved into Mt. Rushmore. But he never met a character like Lise. In Identikit, the 1974 adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novella The Driver’s Seat (1970), Elizabeth Taylor plays a character who defies reaction. On the search through Italy for a man who’s ‘just her type’ (that is, someone to kill her), her behaviours defy reasoned response, putting the viewer in an alienated space where questions of female and narrative agency go hand in hand. With the modern reaction video format eroding the line between visceral reactions and performative bluster, something about this film, which is often met with bemusement and claims of the maudit, seems keyed into the way that contemporary visual art is received.
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The reaction shot is a key element of film grammar, which variably instructs or suggests to viewers how to think or feel about a given character’s behaviours through the responses of others. Spark is a writer whose clipped, authoritative, narrative voice behaves as its own Kuleshov effect, a constant back and forth of action and reaction. Hers is an inherently 20th century voice through its embrace of cinematic technique. So visual as to be ambiguous, as this first description of Lise shows, ‘Her lips are slightly parted; she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapproval of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for months of illness, since she was eighteen.’ Spark takes us from the present of the parted lips to the continuous past of office drudgery, to these initial references to illness. Spark’s technique has been called the ‘voice of God’, the sound/image mix of her prose presenting a single tableau over time, like Bazin’s melting vision of cinema.
Following the Cleopatra (1963) debacle, Elizabeth Taylor had searched for herself. Escaping bloated budgets and outsized financial expectations (if not tabloid interest), she embarked on a decade-plus cycle of projects for the kind of directors Andrew Sarris would categorise as short of the pantheon, the likes of Joseph ‘Far Side of Paradise’ Losey (Secret Ceremony, 1968), and John ‘Less Than Meets The Eye’ Huston (Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967). Many of these co-starred her then-husband Richard Burton, who dragged her to Europe and the self-consciously arty film industry that came with it. Mere days after their first divorce, Taylor would begin filming Identikit for that Italian purveyor of esoteric transgression, Guiseppe Patroni Griffi, whose crude sex-Dramas such as Love Circle (1969) were filled with sensory splashes of colour and body that waft off the screen like bad perfume.Though it’s seen as a curio in Taylor’s filmography, It is the project that most fully grants her and her audience total exegesis of the star persona.
Taylor is twitchy, as though a poise applied offscreen, and taken for granted by the viewer, is due to crack whenever the camera is trained upon her. In Identikit, she takes this to a maximum expression of her persona by attempting a staging of extremis: the look is more extraordinary than ever, but the body is blank. ‘I haven’t broken down like that for years’ she says on the phone, as she excuses her sudden absconding from daily life.
This figure functions as a cinematic expression of Spark’s prose because it asks the viewer, how do we read this? This is not the beautiful-made-ugly misogy-horror of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1964), something haunted through age. Instead, Lise is presented as too much. Too much beauty, too much makeup, too much costume, too big hair. ‘Off to join the circus?’ Her landlady laughs, gesturing at the carnivalesque spectre before her. Then there are the lurid pulp books she loudly chooses for a stranger. These reactions to Lise range from disgust to disregard to the fascination shown by an English Lord (Andy Warhol). Warhol is arguably the original reaction video maker whose screen tests provide an unblinking, surveillance cam-like dedication to their subject. He had printed Taylor numerous times in the Cleopatra period, perhaps most famously in 1964 as ‘Liz’. His bored presence adds one of several meta-textual flourishes that begs the audience to react to Lise not as a character but as a figural apparition of Taylor herself. ‘How do you know he’s not my type?’ Lise repeats to many people she meets, as if the only thing worse than to be perceived, is to have that perception mediated through an aesthetic matchmaking with any of the leering men that she meets.
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In Dr Cute (2019), a 5 minute film made as part of her Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery exhibition Too Cute, Rachel Maclean explores the cuteness industrial complex. Taking a Sparkian approach to revolution against the film’s gaze, it has the form of a recorded lecture by an ‘off-brand Care Bear Professor of Sweet and Sinister Studies’ (Maclean, in a costume that’s better seen than described). As with all her work, the setting is some potentially online realm, a CGI-pink back projected space dotted with floating hearts, bow ties, and other darling signifiers. This cute aggression — a psychological compulsion to squeeze, crush, and kill — is the engine of Cinema, stroking our eyeballs with soft production design, with a catchy score, with Elizabeth Taylor. Dr Cute’s climax mirrors Identikit, as the Doc makes an effort to escape the confines of the frame, ‘Adults are becoming children while children are becoming adults. It’s a cuteness invasion!’
Indeed, cute is the main currency that drives viewing spans in the attention economy. Reaction videos are a key example of this. In their sanding down of everyday existence, the form provides an adornment, an ironic distance through which to experience narrative. The reaction video is often truncated. You can participate in Saltburn (2023) in just 10 minutes, with a drooling zoomer cracking zingers at the cum-guzzling or period fingering. This is presumably an easier way to watch and understand Emerald Fennell’s version of transgressive cinema than to sit through its full 127 minutes. But it isn’t a true, real-time rendering of the experience. Reaction videos are also often false. Titles like ‘College Students hear Steely Dan for the first time’, ‘Seniors try Elfbar’, or ‘British people react to Moneyball’ are plentiful, usually accompanied by a thumbnail image of the Band/Film/disposable vape in question, beside an outrageously OTT headshot of the reactor with their brows raised and mouth formed in a giant O (commonly referred to as ‘soyface’). Often it is clear that the participant has seen the subject in question before, and is performing a version of their initial reaction. They might play it up for the camera, but they can also play it down. Anthony Paul D’Aliesio and Luca Guerini, hosts of the NFR Podcast were roundly mocked on Reddit, Twitter, and their own comment sections for their reaction to Travis Scott’s album Utopia (2023). Their exaggerated head banging, gurning excitement at some commercial trap seen as goofily playing up to the camera. This was clearly taken on board when they reacted to a Playboi Carti track some weeks later: the nods were visibly more subdued, the facial expressions more composed and thoughtful than the sheer exuberant (if corny) pleasure of their earlier video. The demands of the genre’s desperate beg for attention shows participants whose very bodies are held down by the camera’s glare.
Decades earlier, Griffi’s mise-en-scene in Identikit accentuates this problem at each turn. When Lise buys her outfit, the empty store is dotted with mannequin faces covered by foil, like Magritte’s lovers. The camera tracks past Lise’s breasts imprisoned in a bra, revealed with gossip rag titillation and squashed by the camera movement’s reaction to its own luridness. And then admired again, because it can’t help itself. Griffi gleefully leans into Spark’s ironically dehumanising gaze. Taylor the star and Lise the character fight back against this approach, the former through her shrieking anti-sexuality, and the latter by her essential search for someone to kill her and break the control of the narrator/filmmaker.
‘I can’t stand being touched!’ Lise screams when checked over at airport security, moments before claiming her handbag is a bomb. This encroachment of a real political conflict into her reality, specifically a suggestively bubbling undercurrent of Middle Eastern conflict, is often accompanied by Lise’s most vicious outbursts. In one of the film’s wildest scenes, her stroll beside the River Tiber is interrupted when someone flings a grenade into a passing car carrying an unidentified Sheik. She runs — seemingly in escape, but — Kuleshov again! — the camera pans right to left as though towards the inferno. The next thing we know, she is writhing on the ground, arm outstretched towards the flames. Screaming, crying, throwing up. Then an Italian man swoops in to rescue her. Foiled again, by narrative justice.
The Driver’s Seat makes a spiritual and literal appearance in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect too Much From The End of the World (2023). Facing us towards the driver’s seat in the Iranian style, Jude’s film is something of an extended reaction shot wherein the viewer is exposed to the daily indignities of late capitalism in Romania, in this case, through the dangerously long hours mandated by the film industry, in something like real time. Of course, Angela’s (Ilinca Manolache) 18+ hour shift isn’t depicted in totality, but through extended sequences on the job (Dazid Eastman’s The Plains (2022) attempts the same in a more single-minded fashion, by never giving the viewer the trick catharsis of the reverse shot). In one scene, Angela picks up a copy of Spark’s novel and pledges to read it. But when will she find the time?
I find that patronising reactions to festival films from oppressed countries or former dictatorships share these same tendencies. Jude might receive plaudits from trade publications, or win the Golden Bear at Berlinale, who in the last weeks threatened legal action against staff for posting content that criticized the festival’s alignment with German government support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. All in a day’s work. Radu Jude’s comedy resists pity, but our reaction creates the ironic distance which in turn forces the refined Western cinephile audience reaction to create the Verfremdungseffekt. In Identikit, the unidentified Middle Eastern conflict that plays out in the film’s background raises similar notions of representation, both cinematic and transnational.
Do Not Expect too Much From The End of the World’s outbursts take the form of Bobitza, an Andrew Tate parody that Angela uses as a funnel for the ambient hatred and crushing social violence that is enacted around her, from harassment, to undermining, to the part she inadvertently plays in covering up corporate malfeasance. Bobitza is a scream into the void. Does Lise even have a void? With each juddering convulsion, each outburst, and as she inevitably, painfully, finds her type in a deranged murderer who releases her from life in the exact way she demands, it becomes clearer to the audience that this is a whodunnit where the answer is the narrator.
Angela suggests that the YouTubers can find their own Spark moment and fight against their narrator. Jude’s bravura filmmaking presents us with one potential, by spinning our reality into an unflinching fantasia of modernity that exposes in painful detail the exploitative structure of the film industry. In our current reality, in which interactions are mediated by cameras and we are our own content creators, Identikit is a warning shot. For it ends with Lise not just martyred for her agency, but her body defiled, Griffi having the last laugh as the ultimate author of her destiny. You never know how someone will react to you, after all.
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In November 2023, the legendary Benidorm sex performer Sticky Vicky passed away. Known for her ability to produce a wild plethora of objects from her pussy, Sticky Vicky’s career emerged from the post-Francoist liberalisation of sexual entertainment. Concurrently, the Catalan film director Bigas Luna was putting together an unofficial trilogy of films brimming with tits that taste like ham and looming Benidorm buildings shaped like cocks. The trilogy is what’s come to be known as Luna’s ‘Iberian Trilogy’, commencing with Jamón Jamón (1992) which introduced Penélope Cruz to the world, then Huevos de oro (1993), and finishing with the lesser known La teta y la luna (The Tit and the Moon, 1994). His work in both Jamón jamón and La teta as it relates to sex, food, wealth and class processes Spanish identity through the bodies of his characters in contradictory terms—tender, combative, gustatory, repulsive. All three films contend with the macho ibérico,a stereotype of Spanish masculinity first established through the gaudy films starring Alfredo Landa that came out in the late Francoist era. What distinguishes Luna’s trilogy is how the use of food and edifices contorts sexuality and sensuality beyond the melodramatic into a humorously surreal portrait of modern Spain.
The first and last of the Iberian Trilogy are of particular interest when it comes to the intersection of food and sex. Jamón jamón is a romance that leans on traditional themes of a tragic love triangle in the vein of Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1932), but which Luna twists into more of a love hexagon involving both mothers of the central couple. The initial triangle is formed when Javier Bardem’s Raúl, an aspiring bullfighter, is employed by the wife of a local men’s underwear mogul, Conchita (Stefania Sandrelli), to break the betrothal between Silvia (Penélope Cruz), a seamstress at the underwear factory, and Conchita’s son José Luis (Jordi Mollà). In La teta y la luna, a young boy called Tete develops a fathomless obsession with breasts after his mother gives birth to a new brother, making a wish to the moon that it bring him one perfect breast full of milk. His wish is granted when a beautiful dancer named Estrellita arrives in town, with her perfect breasts in tow.
Jamón jamón begins with arch symbolism, a zoom out from the dusty industrial highway of 1990s Aragon revealing that the view is framed beneath the hanging bollock of an Osborne Bull, the silhouette of which has come to exemplify Spain in a thousand and one tourist tchotchkes. Luna moves from this centralised image to Javier Bardem as Raúl, bullfighting naked in the moonlight on a local farm he has trespassed in order to practise. This ritual dance, considered innate to Spanish identity all bound up in the national zeitgeist of having cojones (or huevos?)—absurd bravery in pursuit of machismo conquest. From the very beginning Luna is outlining a masculinised ‘Spanishness’ in the starkest of terms, ones that are knowing of touristic stereotypes; and who better to employ these terms than Javier Bardem?
Food in this story is everything. It is desire, it is industry, it is ambition. Silvia and her mother achieve financial independence through her never-ending production line of tortillas. Raúl’s day job is delivering legs of ham for the local ham processing plant Conquistador. The allusions to food as it relates to sex err towards the obscure. The taste of Silvia’s breasts are compared to that of ham, of tortilla with onion. Raúl crunches whole cloves of raw garlic to help with his circulation during workouts, which Conchita ultimately finds unrestrainedly alluring. In the denouement food ultimately takes the form of primal power as Raúl and José Luis battle to the death using the Conquistador ham legs. While cinema as a medium cannot directly stimulate the senses of taste, smell, or feel, this film’s script being heavy with food-related wordplay conjures a mouthfeel of its own. The title is a reference to a children’s game where saying “jamon, jamon, jamon…” in quick succession soon sounds like monja, the Spanish word for nun. Raúl is credited as El Chorizo, a slang term for a small-time swindler. He enjoys calling Silvia una jamona, slang for an alluring, curvy girl (also associated with promiscuity). By aligning the desirable bodies of its main stars with traditional Spanish cuisine, Jamón jamón treats food as both a source of national identity regained, and as a vehicle for a desire not previously permitted in Spanish media for the better part of a century. As with other 20th century fascist dictatorships, sexual morality was heavily censored in both international and national cinema during the Franco era. Even Code-era Hollywood cinema that depicted divorce or adultery would be censored or edited, often clumsily. It is as though this film itself is a banquet, and Luna invites a Spanish audience to sit down and feast, having been starved for generations.
At the business end of the trilogy, La teta y la luna similarly creates a bizarrely sexual relationship between sex and food. As told from a child’s point of view, the line between fantasy and reality is consistently blurred. The women in the local shop blithely flash their tits for Tete, and when he confides to Estrellita that he wants the milk he believes lies in her breast, she gamely takes one out to fire a glorious fountain of it directly into his mouth. Whereas in Jamón jamón Penelope Cruz’s tits are savoury, here Tete is certain Estrellita’s taste better than the two creme caramels he eyes in a local shop, later moving their plate to achieve a desired jiggle, evidential of the infantilism at play in this story. Being a story of a child as told by an adult therefore creates an unnerving tension between a child’s want and a more advanced sexual desire. Tete’s obsession stems from two events: when he observes his mother breastfeeding his baby brother, and when his parents have sex while the baby cries in the corner, his mother begging his father to “fill me with your milk”. Semen and breast milk become interchangeable as fluids of sustenance and desire, and as a young boy Tete is not able to contemplate the difference.
Tete, like the doomed lovers of Jamón Jamón, is allegorical ofa new Spain, wide-eyed in a presently free world, but also hesitant of how to explore desire outside fascist social restraints. The roots of Tete’s obsession indicate a conflict between a more free form of sexuality and the utilitarianism of the Franco regime, which prioritised women as reproductive cogs, and little else. This is evident when Luna interjects a homely vision of maternal bliss as his mother breastfeeds with intense closeups of Tete worrying monstrously at the teat of the baby’s bottle. A closeup on the baby feeding lasts an uncomfortably long time and is interjected with closeup reaction shots of Tete looking unsure and envious. If Tete’s mother is Old Spain, then the alluring French dancer Estrellita is a glimpse of possibility from the outside world. Just as in the 1970s, when thousands of Spaniards crossed the border into Perpignan to watch the banned Last Tango in Paris (1972), the film’s Catalonian setting is tantalisingly close to the jutting, mammillary Pyrenees. Estrellita is exotic yet hopefully attainable by the men (including Tete) who want her.
Food and the body as tools of industry is a present theme in Jamón jamón in so far as sex work and food catering are both featured careers, but in La teta the two are more harmoniously combined in the pursuit of work. Estrellita’s first appearance finds her washing cauliflowers under a hose. These are necessary for the upkeep of her husband’s bankable flatulence, as he is “Fartman Maurice” a touring French entertainer and motorcyclist who can fire darts with the force of his devil wind, and Estrellita is his glamorous ballerina assistant. His main act involves firing a dart that pops Estrellita’s dress strap to expose her left tit. The humour is heightened by the editing and sound coordinating into brilliant punctuation, cutting quickly to a close up of the tit popping out right on cue with the fart sound. Luna is more than happy to combine body humour and titillation, to not take sex too seriously. After all, as Tete’s grandfather says: “People think farting is gross, but there are worse things. Death, war, banks, aeroplane noise, traffic,” and, of course, dictatorship. When Sticky Vicky spoke in a post-retirement interview about her career, she mentioned that the extremity of post-Francoist liberalisation initially hurt the careers of dancers such as herself. Nevertheless it is what led to her inhabiting her creative cabaret act— “In Barcelona they had seen a lot of porn but they weren’t used to seeing something like that.”
La Teta is also bookended by bodies—bodies in a crowd, and bodies piled together in a traditional castell, a revered Catalan tradition where people come together to create a human tower. Tete is the enxaneta, the young boy whose scaling of the tower completes the mission. His father shouts encouragement from the crowd to climb, to show he has the “cojones”. Wide shots show masses of spectators, arms linked in spider webs of communality to create the tower. They fall at one point, scrambled like ants in the dirt, but begin again. After Franco’s death, castells experienced a resurgence as a symbol of Catalonian independence, especially as public spaces were once again opened up for street parties and public gatherings. In the opening scene, Tete is unable to scale the tower, but his nemesis can. Here at the end, once again with the castell, an apparition of Estrellita spurs him on with a flash of one gorgeous boob, and lo, Tete scales the human tower, rewarded afterwards with a suckle at both Estrellita’s tit and his mother’s. Here then, New Spain has achieved a harmony where it can still happily partake of the old mother country’s bounty, while still looking outward to a new world of sexy international relations.
The first and last films in the Iberian Trilogy are a lodestone of creative passion in Spanish cinema, which have come to symbolise the emancipation of a nation’s sexual identity. Though not as internationally famous as the works of Almodóvar, Luna’s work is remembered in Spain as an important contribution to rebuilding the nation. One little confirmation of this can be found on Google Maps, where the Osborne Bull on the outskirts of Peñalba is no longer associated with the mass-marketing of a sherry company, but instead is known as “Toro película Jamón Jamón”.
“It feels weird driving with these,” says Batou (Pilou Asbæk), a man with cybernetically enhanced eyes staring down a street with neon adverts and constantly shifting hologram road signs reflecting in the windscreen. Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) sits in the passenger seat and injects herself via the bio-digital ports in the back of her neck. As she bluntly explains, “It keeps my brain from rejecting this body.” A clear distinction is made: the brain is ‘my’ but the body is separate – a neutral ‘this’. This line embodies the central tension between the subject and their body; the ghost and the shell. This theme can be mapped onto Johansson’s career in a struggle between her star image and her selfhood.
This scene is from Rupert Sanders’ 2017 live-action adaptation of the Japanese Ghost in the Shell (GITS) franchise, first a manga that was adapted into the seminal 1995 anime film and several popular anime TV series. As an American adaptation of a beloved Japanese IP, GITS 2017 was primed for hostility as soon as it was announced. Following a whitewashing controversy regarding Johansson’s casting GITS suffered at the box office and was relegated to the dustbin of obscurity. But this is not the first time Scarlett Johansson has played a character who explores the dissonance felt between their interior soul and their physical form. Viewed amongst these other roles, GITS warrants a closer look.
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Following the commercial success of The Avengers (2012) Johansson levied her increasing commercial power to star in a diverse range of sci-fi films. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she plays Samantha, an Operating System who falls in love with the lonely Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix). As an OS we never see her onscreen; she is only a voice. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) Johansson plays ‘The Female’, an alien donning a human form who rarely speaks and uses her appearance to seduce and harvest men. In both, she portrays a non-human operative who gains humanity through experience. In the title role of Luc Besson’s Lucy, an accidental overdose of a drug allows her brain to access its full capacity, giving her superhuman powers. Here Johansson’s character feels that she is losing her humanity as her intellect grows and she gains command of space, time and eventually transcends the physical world. Finally, there is GITS with Johansson embodying Major, a cyborg with a human brain in a synthetic body working as an agent in Section 9, a government organisation and wrestling with her humanity. Each of these films dissect and emphasise different elements of her persona: her voice, her appearance and her intellect. If you take the star as auteur, what is it that attracts Johansson to these roles?
It is a widely accepted Hollywood narrative that stars are not born but made: young people are chosen and molded for stardom. At its most cynical interpretation they are manufactured as products to be sold to audiences. This story is echoed in each of these sci-fi films. In Her, Theodore answers a series of increasingly intimate questions so the AI can build a compatible OS for him. Under the Skin begins with the construction of a human body, we hear and see The Female as she learns to speak and dresses in the stolen clothes of a human woman. The novel the film is based on goes into more detail about the drastic surgery the character has undertaken for her job. In GITS we see surgical arms meticulously build Major’s body as her makers discuss what she really is: Dr. Oulet (Juliette Binoche) describes her as a miracle, an autonomous human. Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), the one funding her construction, sees her as a weapon, a product and the future of his company.
Time and again we see a Scarlett Johansson built-for-purpose, and in each of these films we see her challenge her creator and the parameters of her shell; moving from someone else’s object to her own being. Major, Samantha and The Female fight against the limits of their object status to become humanised subjects, echoing Johansson’s own journey as a star. In these roles you see an artist, a woman, exploring the painful parameters of objectification and searching for her own autonomy within and beyond them.
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The filmmakers of GITS were accused of whitewashing the role of Motoko by casting Johansson. But even if this casting came from the (racist) perceived necessity of a white American lead in a major Hollywood movie, it is integrated into the narrative in a thoughtful way. It is revealed that Major is a cyborg whose brain was forcibly taken from a Japanese runaway named Motoko Kusanagi. She is whitewashed and objectified and can only rediscover her humanity by learning about her past and racial origins.
Throughout the film Major is grappling with her identity. As a cyborg she is part-human, part-robot but not fully either. She exists in a liminal space between the two, feeling distant from other humans and uneasy in her identification with other robots. A connection is made between Major and Red Robed Geisha (Rila Fukushima), a companion-bot introduced at the beginning of the film serving clients in a luxury restaurant. Red Robed Geisha suffers double subjugation when she is hacked to kill one of her customers. Major feels guilty when she kills the hostile robot as she identifies with a humanoid machine being used in service to humans. Batou notices this and insists on their difference, but Major is unconvinced.
Major frequently passes for human, but when Section 9’s investigation brings them to a Yakuza club, the suspects clock her as a cyborg and threaten her to make her dance like the other female android sex workers in the club. Major fights back saying “I’m not built to dance”. In this case, it is Major not Batou who draws the line between Major and other androids.
In both instances the robots that Major is compared to are Japanese women who are racialized fetish objects, primarily built to serve men. She relates to their robotic status but perhaps deep down her repressed identity of Motoko recognises them as fellow dehumanised Japanese women. Accidentally or intentionally, GITS 2017 uses sci-fi metaphor to make a commentary on racialized sexism through the depiction of a privileged Japanese woman who is disturbed by the dehumanisation of the less privileged Japanese women around her.
Building on this is Major’s connection to the antagonist Kuze (Michael Pitt), who like Major, was a Japanese teen runaway that was abducted, experimented on and whitewashed. Unlike Major, Kuze was discarded when his cyborg was deemed a failure, setting him on the path for revenge. The use of Michael Pitt is incisive meta-casting. When Dr. Oulet attributes the failure of Kuze to his ‘violent, unstable mind’ you can’t help but think of the rumours of Pitt’s unruly behaviour that contributed to his diminishing on-screen appearances. Building on the themes of globalisation from the 1995 anime, in an unnamed city, in an unnamed country with an international, accented cast that includes Danish Pilou Asbæk, Japanese screen legend Takeshi Kitano as well as French, Romanian, Singaporean and British actors with mixed racial heritage. Despite its overwhelming global dominance American culture is stereotyped as superficial and when the only Americans in the film are deeply troubled whitewashed subjects a disparaging critique of Hollywood whitewashing emerges. This echoes Johansson’s own objectification for the way her personhood is flattened to a superficial image by the industry. When GITS 2017 raises such provocative themes, the questions become: does making it part of the narrative justify whitewashing? Is it enough to suggest these themes, or do they need more exploration to justify their existence?
GITS 2017 concludes with a monologue by Major in which she asserts that her identity is not based on her memories or her complicated heritage, but on her actions. She is neither Mira nor Motoko, but Major: her role and her rank – the proof of her competence. Similarly, Johansson has asserted that her identity is not based on the industry’s limited perception of her. She has taken action to work on films that add nuance to her star image as her characters fight against their initial purpose. To take further control of her career, Johansson founded a production company whose slate includes reteaming with GITS director Rupert Sanders for Rub & Tug a true-crime film in which she would star as a trans man. Even her enormous star power was not enough to overcome this casting controversy and the project was shelved, but it shows a continued desire to explore her on-screen physical presence. Perhaps it’s better to stick to science fiction, where she can explore her physicality and identity via metaphor, which she may do so again in Bride, in which she is set to produce and star as the titular, purpose-built perfect ‘Bride’. In the proposed genre-bending fantasy, Bride escapes her creator to find her own humanity. It’s clear that Johansson is frustrated as ‘Scarlett the Bombshell’ so she strives to become Scarlett the Producer, in an effort to tell this story in new forms. Bride was announced in 2020 and over 3 years later there are no updates. While these various projects remain unmade, one hopes that Johansson can once again explore the tension between the self that inhabits the shell.
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Australian film has teetered between good and bad taste ever since the flourishing of the 1970s, a time when the industry became reborn again after the previous zenith in the 1920s. Often, good taste has been associated with the realm of the cerebral, and bad taste with the fleshy or the visceral. For example, Peter Weir championed exploitation aesthetics with his 1973 film The Cars That Ate Paris before the statesmanlike formalism of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). The early revitalisation of the film industry in Australia was marred by the indecisiveness of where it should head – in the direction of the avant-garde and experimental, or in a more commercially palatable direction. This debate continued throughout the 1970s, but ultimately sexploitation films, which burgeoned in the early epoch, lost out. The Australian film industry didn’t know if sex would sell over the more cerebral endeavours of the petit bourgeois. Perhaps, if Australia had finessed the sexploitation film, we’d enjoy a more avant-garde national cinema fifty years later. After all, Picnic at Hanging Rock is just overrated art-cinema.
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Australian cinema coincided with the birth of the medium as a whole and produced seminal works like Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Tait’s film was one of the first known examples of a feature film about Irish bushranger Ned Kelly. Longford’s film is about Bill (Arthur Tauchert) who lives in Sydney and is down-on-his luck. He falls in love with a woman named Doreen (Australia’s early cinema heartthrob Lottie Lyell) but appears more interested in the cultured Stror ‘at Coot (Harry Young). Bill’s uncouth behaviour and the underlying love story that permeates Longford’s film would inform later Australian films, albeit less traditionally. However, by 1923 American cinema dominated Australian screens, comprising 94% of all exhibited films. With the introduction of vertical integration, the production, distribution and exhibition of films in cinemas were dominated by America’s big five studios (MGM, Warner, Paramount, RKO and Universal) making it almost impossible for Australian products to compete. A long silence drew upon Australian film production, bar the occasional film courtesy of Charles Chauvel or some expatriate. This limited production stemmed from an inferiority complex – tied to wider notions of the cultural cringe – that other anglophone countries could make better films. Arthur Phillips defined the phrase cultural cringe in 1950 in the pages of Meanjin, a magazine devoted to left-leaning cultural criticism, stating, “the Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?’” This quote illustrates the way in which cultural inferiority historically shaped Australians’ perception of our own cultural output. Thus, Australian film production slipped into the darkness.
The 1970s sought to change this destiny and reinstate the libido of a once strong and rich film culture. The sexual revolution finally swept across our shores as the left-leaning, and much divisive, 21st Prime Minister Gough Whitlam introduced policies for women including introducing contraception and the establishment of paid parental leave, as well as de-escalating Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war after immense protest. However, the most topical debate within Australian film culture during this decade was between the visceral and the intellectual because film financiers were uncertain what direction the renascent film industry should head.
By 1968, Australian film was at a crossroads. Australia had produced a dozen or so films in the 1960s (including the renowned Pom Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob [1966]and Age of Consent [1969]) and the cultural imperialism of other anglophone countries like the United Kingdom and the United States reigned supreme. Due to this severe imbalance, several politicians had sought to remedy the situation but failed – until the 19th Prime Minister of Australia, a Liberal (conservative) named John Gorton successfully established the Australian Council for the Arts (ACA) in 1968, appointing Herbert Cole “Nugget” Coombs as the chairman (a distinguished economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia). A year later, Nugget created a film advisory committee to tackle Australia’s inadequate film industry. The panel consisted of quiz master Barry Jones (a future cabinet minister under Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke), advertising maverick Phillip Adams (future film financier of sex comedies The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972]and The Naked Bunyip [1970]), Peter Coleman (a right-wing Tory) and two others. The panel aimed to reinvigorate an otherwise dormant film industry so that Australia could tell its own stories, in its own vernacular, for its own people.
However, once the money was secured it wasn’t certain which direction the newly formed Australian Film Development Commission (AFDC) should syphon it. On the one hand there was a battle between the intellectual appeal of European art cinema and the more visceral elements of the body like exploitation cinema and schlock. This discourse played out between experimental and avant-garde directors like Albie Thoms and his Ubu films (later transformed into the Sydney Filmmakers Co-Operative) who thought it would be a hoot to make surrealist cinema courtesy of a heavily subsidised government. Alas, Nugget and the Interim Council decided that making gaudy films that were uncouth in nature was the best way to capitalise on the imminent state funding. The AFDC’s initial budget was $1 million, the amount recommended by the interim committee of the film and TV board, a quarter of which would go towards Bruce Beresford’s sex comedy Barry McKenzie. This demonstrates the notion that sex sells more easily and the bastions of commerce and art are inextricable in film.
The council also developed a three-pronged attack to combat the wallowing film industry in Australia; grants for independent film production; a film commission for commercial features; and a film school to ensure ‘disciplined’ filmmaking. In contrast, the high-profile biographer and Brit-at-large Charles Higham, who moved to Australia in 1954, felt that supporting avant-garde film production was the way to go. Suffice to say, Australia was confused which direction this newly formed industry should go.
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Australia was obsessed with flesh and nudity in the 1970s. It adorned the screens of drive-ins, repertory theatres and in mainstream cinemas. A remarkable number of softcore pornos, including The Alvin Purple films (Alvin Purple [1973] and Alvin Rides Again [1974]) and the Barry McKenzie series (The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972] and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own [1974]) were made. Alvin Purple was the creation of Tim Burstall, a hippie from the north-eastern wedge of Melbourne in Warrandyte, whose 1969 feature film 2,000 Weeks completely flopped but was an unprecedented example of independent filmmaking due to the dearth of films being produced at the time. The Melbourne film critic Colin Bennett, an early adoptee of auteurism headlined his review of the film with, “banality lets down our great film hope,” signifying the backlash that faced independent filmmakers down under. Tits reign supreme in Burstall’s Alvin series as the eponymous character struggles with the attention of every woman wanting to have sex with him against his control. This demonstrates that the bastions of commerce and art are inextricable in film.
Burstall’s short-lived production company Hexagon also made the sex comedy Petersen (1974) and the Mondo documentary about Australian underground sex clubs, Australia After Dark (1975). Later, in 1977, films were made like Fantasm Comes Again (a sequel to Fantasm [1976], concerning characters in taboo vignettes like a gym teacher fawning over his student) pseudonymously credited to the director Eric Ram, more famously known as the genre director Colin Eggleston, who made Long Weekend (1978) and Cassandra (1987). Whilst the sexploitation film never died per se, the appeal of art films – by directors like Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong – outweighed the fleshier films. This transition arguably began to occur from 1975, a watershed year for Australian film when Sunday, Too Far Away, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Man From Hong Kong graced our screens. It was also the year in which the state-funding body known as the AFDC transitioned into the Australian Film Commission (AFC). This marked a symbolic shift from the scheme of the AFDC which was funding more risque films to the art-house era of the AFC which championed everything from Mad Dog Morgan (1976) to The Devil’s Playground (1976).
Nowhere was this ideological shift better exemplified than in Barry Crocker’s character Barry Mckenzie from The Adventures of Barry Mckenzie and its sequel Barry McKenzie Holds His Own – a Barry Humphrey and Bruce Beresford creation; about an ocker Aussie bloke who desperately seeks sheilas in swinging London but fails miserably. Barry is loud and obnoxious, a stereotype of Australians who end up in backpacker hostels drinking themselves to oblivion. But the McKenzie films were directed by none other than Bruce Beresford, who had returned from a job as a cameraman for the BBC in Swinging London to participate in the revitalised film scene here. As the future director of Tender Mercies (1983), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and Double Jeopardy (1999) it’s fair to say he disowned his earlier films. In fact, so ashamed by his involvement in the films, Beresford refused to be interviewed when Umbrella Entertainment redistributed The Adventures of Barry McKenzie on DVD, leaving it to Barry Humphries to answer questions in character as Dame Edna (Barry McKenzie’s aunt in the films).
Australian cinema lay dormant for decades until the 1970s. Under the watchful eye of several prime ministers there was a movement to revitalise film production in Australia, culminating in the birth of the AFDC, the Australian Film and Television School and the Experimental Film and Television Fund (EFTF). The spark that brought these components together lay in early discussions between the Australian Council of the Arts’ Film Advisory Committee which debated the best way to spend the money. At first Australia championed ‘bad taste’ films and the visceral components of flesh, sex, nudity, schlock and horror, before realising the most palatable cinema to export is that of art cinema. After the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 the government introduced policies that favoured narrative cinema and relegated experimental or underground film further to the sidelines. This can be seen in the transfer of the film, radio and television board from the Australia Council to the Australian Film Commission in 1976. In its annual report of that year the Commission stated it would seek to combine, “both the film-as-a-business and film-as-an-art sections of the film industry,” illustrating the film funding bodies ambitions. Furthermore, the emergence of the Creative Development Fund (CDF) in 1978 meant that narrative and the intellect was taking precedence as our national export. The CDF took over the role of the EFTF and provided money for independent filmmakers. The sexploitation film lost out. Australia has grappled with the dichotomy between the intellect and the visceral for decades. It continues to haunt our cinemas today as Robert Connelly releases a state-funded sequel to his tepid Eric Bana-driven franchise The Dry (2020), likely to succeed enough at the box office to warrant a third or maybe fourth film. We don’t make sex comedies any more. The intellect has prevailed.
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CINEMA YEAR ZERO 