First film screening/projection of the year, here, at Catapult house:
Chaplin- City Lights 87 minutes.
Ebert description: If only one of Charles Chaplin's films could be preserved, ``City Lights'' (1931) would come the closest to representing all the different notes of his genius. It contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp--the character said, at one time, to be the most famous image on earth.
Then next Sunday, 9/6: Jules and Jim
VHS description:
Jules and Jim is the ultimate menage-a-trois, and certainly one of the most poetic films of the French New Wave. The film tells the story of a friendship between two artists- one Austrian (Oskar Werner), the other French (Henry Serre)- and their mutual love for the same woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Spanning two decades, this pure love affair between Jules, Jim and Catherine is temporarily interrupted by the Great War, but continues on into the 1930s when it ends suddenly and tragically.
Movies I Watched this Summer, the further up on the list, the more recommended, although they’re all good
Children of Paradise Modern Times House of Games Peeping Tom Danielson: A Family movie Rules of the Game Grand Illusion Small Change Double Indemnity Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Trouble in Paradise Bruno The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise Belle de Jour Fitzcarraldo The Exterminating Angel Chop Shop Blow-Up The Spanish Prisoner Up The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp The Red Shoes Open City Touch of Evil Platoon
London is teeming with lovely Swedish girls, each one manning a post at some bogus internship while riding on their own nation’s largesse.
The jobs, which consist of sitting around in some minimally furnished office at a gallery or agency, require only that they act very continental and look trendy.By day they capitalize on their phlegmatic Nordic drawl.By night they prowl the putrid clubs of the city and mechanically gyrate with their anemic English counterparts.The Swedish government foots the bill for the girls’ adventures abroad.
Swedish girls are the most sought-after of all girls, not because of their supposed beauty and blondness but because of the maternal nature of their nation’s welfare state.This has an enormous psychic impact on infantilized modern man’s desire for security which, due to barren self-awareness, is displaced as imagined carnal longing.
Their country’s neutrality and its wealth also makes them very hot.And their nonchalance about sex, born of Lutheran frigidity combined with an early immersion in clinical pornography, makes them seem non-threatening.
The Swedish girls in London’s free labor pool create a snare for other Europeans looking for Swedish girls.A domino effect has resulted in a city lousy with the most licentious scam artists Europe can vomit forth, making it a vibrant capitalist locus.The Swedish girls have made London the indisputable center of Europe, with former contenders Rome, Berlin, and Paris left far behind.
The aforementioned counterfeit jobs aren’t the reason for London’s allure, of course.Each Swedish girl is actually there in hopes of snaring an English boy: a Damon Albarn or Jarvis Cocker of her very own.The Swedish girls’ self-perceived northern isolation has given them an inferiority complex that makes them feel positively provincial.Therefore they are obsessed with being chic.Since all of the continent is transfixed by the newest machination of the English fashion/pop factory, the English boyfriend like any other chic accouterment, is a must have.
The manhood of England, immersed in pools of Swedish flesh, must be beholden to their cunning music press which has facilitated the myth of their interminable swinging modernity.They need only get a bowl hairdo or some fey contemporary equivalent and they’re awash in nubile Nords, thanks to a savvy and deceitful media organ.
The Beatles are ultimately responsible, for without them and their psychedelic phenomenon, the country would be revealed as a chilly version of Portugal- a conservative backwater left only with distant memories of imperial glory.
Indeed, before the Fab Four, England was drab and bowler-hatted; their parliament wore wigs, the food was bad, and the morality stultifying.No Swedish girl would have set foot on its soil.In the innocent days preceding “Beatle mania,” Anita Ekberg and Ingrid Bergman were in Italy, almost certainly making love to their respective directors.
This, because Fellini’s Rome had been the great city of Europe, with its convertibles, scooters, scarves, and cigarette holders.Paris was a close second with art and Sartre and existentialist superstars.
The English were only an aberrant, half-Teutonic curiosity without any major contribution to painting, cinema, ballet, opera, or symphony.And they were conservative: the art movements that transformed aesthetics through Modernism, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Cubism, et a., didn’t include any notable Englishmen.When revolution swept the continent in 1830, 1848, 1870, and 11918, England was placid.Only the Futurists approved.In Marnetti’s 1910 “Speech of the English” he upbraided his audience for closeting their homosexuality but lauded their capacity for killing on the high seas.
With The Beatles, the Englishman was, for the first time ever, desirable.He displaced the “Latin Lover” who had been the mainstay of Western feminine romantic fantasy since the high middle ages when the French and Italians had compiled the Roman de la Rose and the Art of Courtly Love and proposed the modern concept of love.The Beatles also sparked interest in English fashion and film, and very soon Richard Lester was a bigger name than Rosselini, Bunuel, or Truffaut.
The British music trade papers capitalized on this windfall with a cunningly crafted political regime, transforming a theretofore teeny-bop world of pop into a mop-top court of Versailles.Ever since, they’ve held the continent transfixed with the lateast wind change, folly or foible.The soap opera they created (Beatles vs. Stones, Clash vs. Jam, Judas Priest vs. Queen, etc.) endures to this day.
The Englishman’s newfound attractiveness was simultaneously buoyed by their film industry which fomented their snobbish ideal internationally.Through the stereotype effete mannered ruling-class toffee nose exists now only in the Merchant Ivory films which are sold to Americans, the effect of this proliferated archetype had been enormous in persuading the globe of the Britisher’s inherent dashing and “cricket” moral compass.
Due to this nefarious propaganda, the English-man has enjoyed a position of sexual dominance for forty years now.
This sexual dominance has resulted in the ultimate reward by the standards of Western sexual commerce today:Swedish girls.The Englishman reaps the dual prize of erotic liberalism and maternal Euro-Communism.However, the Swedish girls would do well to remember that their prized, pouty Englishman may seem to swing and represent all things chic but, in reality, he is the gouty father of the ugly American.
Indeed, this modern culture of awful food, industrial blight, and soft-core imperialism which the Europeans love to decay traces its ancestry directly to Old Blighty.The Americans merely took the baton from their lime-gnawing spiritual matters.It could be argued even that the oft-mentioned “American hegemony” is an Ameri-English once: US dominance on the world stage began at Great Britain’s behest with their imperial contraction at the end of World War I.US policies are really US-UK ones, drawing mutual orders from Trans-Atlantic corporations.Their perpetual alliance in wars like Iraq and the Falklands are carried over into diplomacy, with both nations working to undermine the EU, the UN, and the Euro currency.
England, because of the enduring myth of charm and chivalry born of its artistic export, is excused from a history of genocidal crimes, despite offenses that rival Nixon, Himmler, and Tarlamane.Its troops marched every indigenous inhabitant of Tasmania into the ocean, for example.The reason for Europe’s pathetic general complaisance with Hitler during WWII?A nearly unanimous hatred of England.Quisling was, for example, first and foremost an Anglophobe.
This antagonism was a result of English dominance of the world via trade and sea power. “Control the sea and you control the world” was the Englishman’s boast at the time, a conceit at the heart of modern US strategy.Belgium was an English invention, created to castrate French naval power after Napoleon.Belgium became (like Poland later) an English “protectorate” giving Britain the right to enter into continental politics at will.Israel is the modern analogy, a state that was initially sponsored by England in order to maintain access to the highly strategic Holy Land.All the contrived states in the Middle East are likewise English Frankensteins, gerrymandered by Churchill to ensure their future economic and/or military helplessness (e.g., Kuwait).
How did the English pull off these fiendish stunts?With the race of violent chauvinists who roam their still.
The English pub on a Monday afternoon is scarier than a Detroit drug war or a Mississippi cross burning, and its tribal rituals more bizarre.The “Chelsea smile,” inflicted by Chelsea FC fans on their randomly chosen foes, consists of knifing the sides of the victim’s mouth into a grotesque, oversized “grin.”The Britons throw darts and bricks at their athletes during football matches, sometimes hitting them in their eyes, causing public prostration and misery.Meanwhile, gangs of feral youth conduct their “war on the terraces” with office knives and other awful, ordinary implements.And then there are the English “skinheads” who, for entertainment, “put in the boot.”The English sports enthusiast is feared and reviled the world over for his primitive, unreconstructed behavior.
Their nightclubs are little better.When the “lad” spies the “bird” he desired to “shag,” he need only bark five words: “grab your coat; you’re pulled.”She obediently complies.Is this the world you’re prepared for, Swedish girls?I hear your protest now: about the Englishman’s innate bravery and the chivalry of the Round Table with its noble Hobbits, and Jarvis heroically kicking “Jacko” at the awards ceremony.Well, perhaps that was funny, but Michael Jackson is just a demure child molester with a magnetic nose, hardly the Black Knight.
Of course, it’s true that the aesthetic presented by the great English music groups (Kinks, Beatles, Stones, Clash, Smiths, etc.) was not necessarily chauvinist or hooligan… but the key to this paradox was gay management.All the aforementioned groups were simple yobs that had theater connected modish homosexuals pulling the strings and informing the work.These managers whispered conceptual tidbits into the ears of their dashing young pupils, who would have otherwise been exposed as crazed brutalists.And a gay rock manager may not make an ideal boyfriend.
Perhaps the answer would be if this character would be convinced to manage their relationship.The guy will look good with the hair and anemia while the manager, on his way to constructing the perfect art-school rock combo, will suppress the Swedish girls’ man’s ultra-violence by teaching him about Bunuel.
The affair could have the aplomb and pretense of the Who, the “mania” and “love” ideology of The Beatles, the dialectic tension of The Class, etc.
Unfortunately, a manger is expensive… Swedish girls: you’ll have to give up 20% of your boyfriend.I suppose the Swedish Government could fit the bill…
