Via Den of Geek (who also has an excellent post on the role of the corridor in Science Fiction movies) a fabulously wobbly and unconvincing scene from the film Superman. In it a model village is seen being engulfed by water - supposedly from the Hoover Dam but more likely from a leaky tap - while Superman looks on, disgruntled.
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Un-Titanic
Whilst lurking around on YouTube looking for suitably gruesome excerpts from Raise the Titanic (see post below) I came across this, a meticulous model of the model used in the film. This, ahem, raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of fakes, copies and models and the way that they inevitably transform the objects they depict. Models usually miss bits out, fudge the details, change materials and make mistakes. Their wrongness is actually what makes them interesting.
As a fictionalised representation of the ship following its accident the model seen above is completely inaccurate. As Murphy makes clear in the comments to the post below, the Titanic turned completely on end as it sank before breaking clean in two. The two ends of Titanic were found some distance away from each other on the sea bed. None of this was known at the time Raise The Titanic was made so the model depicted here appears - apart from its single discreetly snapped off funnel - improbably intact.
There are other extraneous details of the video too; the TV screen in the background, the white sofa and the odd bareness of the room that testify to a life spent making too many models maybe. Anyway, that is probably enough Titanic related trivia except to add that given the combination of the spectacular nature of the tragedy, its endless repetition through film and books and its cold war connections, the name of the ship's discoverer seems perfectly appropriate.
As a fictionalised representation of the ship following its accident the model seen above is completely inaccurate. As Murphy makes clear in the comments to the post below, the Titanic turned completely on end as it sank before breaking clean in two. The two ends of Titanic were found some distance away from each other on the sea bed. None of this was known at the time Raise The Titanic was made so the model depicted here appears - apart from its single discreetly snapped off funnel - improbably intact.
There are other extraneous details of the video too; the TV screen in the background, the white sofa and the odd bareness of the room that testify to a life spent making too many models maybe. Anyway, that is probably enough Titanic related trivia except to add that given the combination of the spectacular nature of the tragedy, its endless repetition through film and books and its cold war connections, the name of the ship's discoverer seems perfectly appropriate.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Modernism, Historicism and Julie Christie's Eyes
As an oblique follow on from my previous post about 1970's DIY habits, I've been thinking about period dramas. In particular I've been thinking about different periods of period dramas. Even though their setting is historical, such films are often more about the period in which they're made than the one in which they're set.
Take a film made in the late 1960's such as Far From The Madding crowd. It's a great film, but one of the most striking things about it if you watch it today are Julie Christie’s eyes. And Terence Stamp’s sideburns. Neither appear remotely correct for the period. Christie's eyes in particular are smudged with Kohl in an iconically late '60’s manner and her hair is made up in a beehive. Stamp’s sideburns are equally à la mode. These are not so much deliberate anachronisms as evidence of a distinct lack of interest in historical authenticity.
Far from the Madding Crowd is a Victorian period drama in as much as it is based on Hardy’s 1874 novel, but in many other respects it's a 1960’s film. Despite its period setting it looks like a 1960's film. Equally, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor’s 1963 epic Antony and Cleopatra plays fast and loose with historical verisimilitude. The interior sets for this film are completely outlandish, more redolent of a lavishly vulgar Las Vegas hotel than ancient Egypt. The fact that the film's narrative echoes the real life love affair of Burton and Taylor only increases the sense that the setting for the film, for all its self-consciously historic-epic quality, is secondary to the real story.
The muted colours and artfully dishevelled haircuts of 2005's Pride and Prejudice will no doubt become as outlandishly dated in time as Stamp's sideburns. The film's historical authenticity may be just as bogus but it also seems emblematic of a distinctly different sensibility. Pride and Prejudice is overflowing with a reverence for the past. It is as in love with its setting as the characters are with each other, the camera drooling over distressed paintwork and marble statues as if they were the real subject of the film.
Pride and Prejudice (Image source)
Not only that but there is a direct collusion between films like Pride and Prejudice and the heritage industry. The buildings and landscapes associated with such films become objects of increased touristic value as a result. In this sense period dramas form a sort of aesthetic propaganda wing of English Heritage. It's difficult to disassociate the relentless recycling of Austen adaptations from a more general and pervasive historical genuflection.
Is there a connection then between an attitude that had no time for the niceties of 19th century make-up and a lack of reverence for historic architecture? Is there a relationship between a late 1960's building such as Robin Hood Gardens, with its indifference to ideas of contexualism or 'fitting-in', and the equally startling modernity of Julie's Christie's eyes?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Dark Knight/White Heat: The Architecture of Gotham City
Somewhat belated and after the fact but here, in a slightly different form and with added visuals, is my review of The Dark Knight, currently also to be found in the new issue of Icon.
(Gotham City, still from Tim Burton's Batman, 1989. Sets designed by Anton Furst)
Batman’s Gotham City is a dystopian mirror image of New York. In both Frank Miller’s comic book and the earlier films of Tim Burton, Gotham is appropriately Gothic; a steaming, creaking metropolis full of dead- tech. It is a retro-futurist nightmare, an outlandish conflation of Hugh Ferris meets Alien.
So what to make of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which situates Batman explicitly in the contemporary city? The opening shots swoop through Gotham's towers, but they are familiar corporate skyscrapers, less extraordinary than the ones currently going up in the Middle East.
In both The Dark Knight and Nolan's earlier film Batman Begins, there are still elements of the Gothic lurking in Batman's cyber punk style costume or his monstrous Bat Mobile. And, with his cracking and peeling makeup, The Joker looks like a recently dug up version of The Cure’s Robert Smith. But this is where the visual similarities with recent incarnations end.
(Skyline of Gotham City as designed by Lex Luther, DC Comics)
According to DC comics' fictional narrative of Gotham, the city is redesigned at one stage by Superman villain Lex Luther. Luther, showing a Modernist streak when it comes to urban planning, replaced the Art Nouveou and Art Deco skyscrapers with glass and steel ones. It is this Gotham that is evoked in the Dark Knight. In fact, Nolan's Gotham City is a digitally enhanced Chicago and not New York at all.
(Knebworth House, used for exterior shots of Wayne Manor in Batman, 1989.)
Chicago is the city of the mob and of Mies Van Der Rohe, a potent mix of the clean cut and the corrupt. In the Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne lives in a penthouse apartment rather than the gothic Wayne Manor, and there is no Bat Cave. Instead, Batman works out of a fabulous space that with its vast backlit suspended ceiling and concrete walls is a cross between a corporate office and a contemporary art gallery.
(Bruce Wayne's Batcave, from The Dark Knight, 2008)
The architecture throughout is clean-cut and corporate. The city may not be exactly friendly, but it is familiar, no longer anything to be scared of. What does have the capacity to scare us though is that this carefully ordered world might succumb to anarchy. Far from representing the city itself as chaotic, The Dark Knight plays on our fear that chaos could come to visit. And in this sense the film can be seen as either hopelessly reactionary, preaching a Bush era fear of so-called terrorist states, or as something more complex and ambiguous.
(Map of Gotham City, DC Comics)
In The Dark Knight, it is the ordinariness of Gotham City that is meant to terrify us. Here, Gotham represents a well ordered city that could easily be reduced to smouldering rubble. The city in the Dark Knight may look familiar but the gothic darkness hasn't vanished. It is there in the shadows, an endlessly possible flip side to the shiny optimism of Modernity. This doubling occurs throughout the film: in the character of Harvey Dent, Gotham's White Knight and in the brilliant scene where two boats - one full of innocent civilians and one full of criminals - have to choose whether to destroy each other.
The film suggests that it is impossible to design out darkness. It is a product of our own desire, and a nightmare lurking in the same places that also give us comfort. It is not an alternative world so much as the dark side of our affluent lives.
(Still from The Dark Knight, 2008)
So what to make of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which situates Batman explicitly in the contemporary city? The opening shots swoop through Gotham's towers, but they are familiar corporate skyscrapers, less extraordinary than the ones currently going up in the Middle East.
In both The Dark Knight and Nolan's earlier film Batman Begins, there are still elements of the Gothic lurking in Batman's cyber punk style costume or his monstrous Bat Mobile. And, with his cracking and peeling makeup, The Joker looks like a recently dug up version of The Cure’s Robert Smith. But this is where the visual similarities with recent incarnations end.
(Skyline of Gotham City as designed by Lex Luther, DC Comics)
According to DC comics' fictional narrative of Gotham, the city is redesigned at one stage by Superman villain Lex Luther. Luther, showing a Modernist streak when it comes to urban planning, replaced the Art Nouveou and Art Deco skyscrapers with glass and steel ones. It is this Gotham that is evoked in the Dark Knight. In fact, Nolan's Gotham City is a digitally enhanced Chicago and not New York at all.
(Knebworth House, used for exterior shots of Wayne Manor in Batman, 1989.)
Chicago is the city of the mob and of Mies Van Der Rohe, a potent mix of the clean cut and the corrupt. In the Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne lives in a penthouse apartment rather than the gothic Wayne Manor, and there is no Bat Cave. Instead, Batman works out of a fabulous space that with its vast backlit suspended ceiling and concrete walls is a cross between a corporate office and a contemporary art gallery.
(Bruce Wayne's Batcave, from The Dark Knight, 2008)
The architecture throughout is clean-cut and corporate. The city may not be exactly friendly, but it is familiar, no longer anything to be scared of. What does have the capacity to scare us though is that this carefully ordered world might succumb to anarchy. Far from representing the city itself as chaotic, The Dark Knight plays on our fear that chaos could come to visit. And in this sense the film can be seen as either hopelessly reactionary, preaching a Bush era fear of so-called terrorist states, or as something more complex and ambiguous.
(Map of Gotham City, DC Comics)
In The Dark Knight, it is the ordinariness of Gotham City that is meant to terrify us. Here, Gotham represents a well ordered city that could easily be reduced to smouldering rubble. The city in the Dark Knight may look familiar but the gothic darkness hasn't vanished. It is there in the shadows, an endlessly possible flip side to the shiny optimism of Modernity. This doubling occurs throughout the film: in the character of Harvey Dent, Gotham's White Knight and in the brilliant scene where two boats - one full of innocent civilians and one full of criminals - have to choose whether to destroy each other.
The film suggests that it is impossible to design out darkness. It is a product of our own desire, and a nightmare lurking in the same places that also give us comfort. It is not an alternative world so much as the dark side of our affluent lives.
(Still from The Dark Knight, 2008)
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Sleeve Notes To An Imaginary Album
Note: I wrote this some time ago, but forgot about it. It's a review of St. Etienne's screening of their film Finisterre at the Barbican back in 2004. Tacked on the end is a short interview with Bob Stanley from St. Etienne, who was a very nice man.
“Took a tube to Camden Town,
Walked down Parkway, and settled down
In the shade of a willow tree,
Summer hovering over me.”
St. Etienne, London Belongs To Me
Film 1:
A Tweed suited gentleman prods his walking stick into the crumbling plasterwork of a dilapidated old music hall. On closer inspection the gentleman turns out to be James Mason. He proceeds to wander around a drab and surprisingly distant late 1960's London, uncovering bits of soon to be lost Victoriana, decaying slums and shocking dietary habits; the flip-side to the Swinging ‘60’s of popular mythology.
Film 2:
A plummy voiced chap incongruously recounts the joys of all-night clubbing and the pleasures of finding obscure white labels in back street record shops. A series of disembodied voices talk over an image-track of poignantly framed London scenery. Over it all, floats the music of St. Etienne - 60's girl-group harmonies, 80's synths, 90's house, out-of-time folk.
These two films were recently shown together at the Barbican. The first - Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows – depicted a disappearing1960’s London of slums and salvation army hostels and has itself, over the years, become a historical curiosity. The second - Finisterre - is a kind of extended album-long video by the pop band St. Etienne with directors Paul Kelly and Keiran Evans. If The London Nobody Knows is an archaeological fragment in itself, then Finisterre aims for a similar kind of archaeology of the present. It poignantly captures contemporary London Life as it is being lived, and is, like The London Nobody Knows, conscious of it’s desire to record things on the verge of obsolescence. A bit like a hip English Heritage. The Thameslink train, for instance, that crawls into a South London station at the beginning of the film and crawls out again at the end already seems an anachronism although I travelled on one only yesterday.
Finisterre’s journey - Victoria Station, Old Street, Primrose Hill, Soho - describes a day in the life. It shows London as a backdrop, constantly transformed and re-made by experience This, In a way, is what pop music does; celebrates escape from the ordinary and lends poignancy to the everyday. St. Etienne's music in particular can perhaps best be described as a mixture of the glamorous and the commonplace. Or, put another way, it moves between the generic and the intensely personal. Their songs take music that we have almost forgotten about – old bits of house music, English folk – and re-invest them with value. the lyrics also re-invent familiar places with intense personal narratives and invest ordinary areas with a kind of poignancy that Archway or Camden rarely attain.
Like the protagonists in the song London Belongs To Me finding something beautiful about an afternoon in Camden Town, this flitting between the apparent drabness of urban existence and its occasional epiphanies might have something to say about how we currently view urban space. It might also suggest ways we might conceive it counter to both the nihilistic doom-mongers and the sentimental piazza-lovers that dominate urban thinking today. Both lament a perceived loss of a sense of civic-ness and identity in the face of corporate, global space. Marc Auge's book Non-Place and Rem Koolhaas’s notion of ‘Junk-Space’ offer a similar analysis of our contemporary experiences as increasingly that of a homogenised flattened-out culture. This dystopian view might be usefully challenged though by pop music's belief that we continuously re-make the world around us. Although, it's true, our bodies can only inhabit one space at any time, our heads might be in any number of places. In this sense nowhere is really non-space because we inhabit a number of spaces simultaneously: social, cultural, economic, political. To put it another way, no space is inhabited neutrally and no space is the same for two people. It's different to be in DKNY rich than without money, to be in Trafalgar Square holding a banner or on an open-top bus. Equally, to be in love and on that bus is to be somewhere else again.
What both these films suggest is that urbanism is as much about how we look at it as it is about plans and strategic frameworks. Not only that but it is in how we 'read' the city and in the way that we identify with it, that we now regenerate whole areas. The transformation of London's East End is, for better or worse, more an act of will, a triumph of desire and demographics, than anything physical or the product of any strategic planning. In fact, not a whole lot has changed there, just the way we look at it.
In The London Nobody Knows, James Mason describes a London literally disappearing below new plans, suggesting that these lives might simply end, and be replaced by more perfect ones. The brave new tower blocks that spring up at the start of the film have been torn down, blown up, sold for a pound, bought again for a million, re-clad and listed by English Heritage since then. By re-investigating this ‘60's oddity - as out of its time as The Kink's Village Green Preservation Society – St. Etienne attempt to show that the city is both more resistant to change than we think but, also, always ready to be re-made by us everyday.
A conversation with Bob Stanley of St. Etienne.
When did you decide to make a film and why?
The idea came about mid-way into recording the album Finisterre. We’ve always been fascinated by London since moving here in the late ‘80’s. Making the film seemed like a logical extension of that.
In your film you cover similar places to the Geoffrey Fletcher one. Is your film a conscious mirroring of the earlier one?
No. It was an influence but we filmed the places that we know ourselves. We were interested though in the way Geoffrey Fletcher uncovers these weird forgotten bits of London. It’s almost as though he records them just because they’re disappearing, not because they’re even that important.
It’s unusual for pop music to celebrate old things isn’t it? It’s normally associated with being radical and rebellious. In rock mythology, caring about eccentric old tea rooms isn’t very cool.
We’ve never been interested in that classic rock lineage. I mean, even if Exile on Main Street was my favourite album I wouldn’t want to talk about it. What can you say that’s new about it?
Is it a conscious part of your music, this idea of recording or evoking places that aren’t that glamorous like Kentish Town or Archway?
Yeah, although growing up in Surrey, London place names were glamorous for me. I’ve always been fascinated by London. And architecture. I studied town planning but gave it up to be a rock journalist.
Good decision! You said you are fascinated by New Towns, which is the flip-side of rotten old London. Why is that?
It’s the idea of a blank canvas, the thought that you could create a perfect community. The job I wanted most when I was 8 was to be the person who thought of all the road names.
“Took a tube to Camden Town,
Walked down Parkway, and settled down
In the shade of a willow tree,
Summer hovering over me.”
St. Etienne, London Belongs To Me
Film 1:
A Tweed suited gentleman prods his walking stick into the crumbling plasterwork of a dilapidated old music hall. On closer inspection the gentleman turns out to be James Mason. He proceeds to wander around a drab and surprisingly distant late 1960's London, uncovering bits of soon to be lost Victoriana, decaying slums and shocking dietary habits; the flip-side to the Swinging ‘60’s of popular mythology.
Film 2:
A plummy voiced chap incongruously recounts the joys of all-night clubbing and the pleasures of finding obscure white labels in back street record shops. A series of disembodied voices talk over an image-track of poignantly framed London scenery. Over it all, floats the music of St. Etienne - 60's girl-group harmonies, 80's synths, 90's house, out-of-time folk.
These two films were recently shown together at the Barbican. The first - Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows – depicted a disappearing1960’s London of slums and salvation army hostels and has itself, over the years, become a historical curiosity. The second - Finisterre - is a kind of extended album-long video by the pop band St. Etienne with directors Paul Kelly and Keiran Evans. If The London Nobody Knows is an archaeological fragment in itself, then Finisterre aims for a similar kind of archaeology of the present. It poignantly captures contemporary London Life as it is being lived, and is, like The London Nobody Knows, conscious of it’s desire to record things on the verge of obsolescence. A bit like a hip English Heritage. The Thameslink train, for instance, that crawls into a South London station at the beginning of the film and crawls out again at the end already seems an anachronism although I travelled on one only yesterday.
Finisterre’s journey - Victoria Station, Old Street, Primrose Hill, Soho - describes a day in the life. It shows London as a backdrop, constantly transformed and re-made by experience This, In a way, is what pop music does; celebrates escape from the ordinary and lends poignancy to the everyday. St. Etienne's music in particular can perhaps best be described as a mixture of the glamorous and the commonplace. Or, put another way, it moves between the generic and the intensely personal. Their songs take music that we have almost forgotten about – old bits of house music, English folk – and re-invest them with value. the lyrics also re-invent familiar places with intense personal narratives and invest ordinary areas with a kind of poignancy that Archway or Camden rarely attain.
Like the protagonists in the song London Belongs To Me finding something beautiful about an afternoon in Camden Town, this flitting between the apparent drabness of urban existence and its occasional epiphanies might have something to say about how we currently view urban space. It might also suggest ways we might conceive it counter to both the nihilistic doom-mongers and the sentimental piazza-lovers that dominate urban thinking today. Both lament a perceived loss of a sense of civic-ness and identity in the face of corporate, global space. Marc Auge's book Non-Place and Rem Koolhaas’s notion of ‘Junk-Space’ offer a similar analysis of our contemporary experiences as increasingly that of a homogenised flattened-out culture. This dystopian view might be usefully challenged though by pop music's belief that we continuously re-make the world around us. Although, it's true, our bodies can only inhabit one space at any time, our heads might be in any number of places. In this sense nowhere is really non-space because we inhabit a number of spaces simultaneously: social, cultural, economic, political. To put it another way, no space is inhabited neutrally and no space is the same for two people. It's different to be in DKNY rich than without money, to be in Trafalgar Square holding a banner or on an open-top bus. Equally, to be in love and on that bus is to be somewhere else again.
What both these films suggest is that urbanism is as much about how we look at it as it is about plans and strategic frameworks. Not only that but it is in how we 'read' the city and in the way that we identify with it, that we now regenerate whole areas. The transformation of London's East End is, for better or worse, more an act of will, a triumph of desire and demographics, than anything physical or the product of any strategic planning. In fact, not a whole lot has changed there, just the way we look at it.
In The London Nobody Knows, James Mason describes a London literally disappearing below new plans, suggesting that these lives might simply end, and be replaced by more perfect ones. The brave new tower blocks that spring up at the start of the film have been torn down, blown up, sold for a pound, bought again for a million, re-clad and listed by English Heritage since then. By re-investigating this ‘60's oddity - as out of its time as The Kink's Village Green Preservation Society – St. Etienne attempt to show that the city is both more resistant to change than we think but, also, always ready to be re-made by us everyday.
A conversation with Bob Stanley of St. Etienne.
When did you decide to make a film and why?
The idea came about mid-way into recording the album Finisterre. We’ve always been fascinated by London since moving here in the late ‘80’s. Making the film seemed like a logical extension of that.
In your film you cover similar places to the Geoffrey Fletcher one. Is your film a conscious mirroring of the earlier one?
No. It was an influence but we filmed the places that we know ourselves. We were interested though in the way Geoffrey Fletcher uncovers these weird forgotten bits of London. It’s almost as though he records them just because they’re disappearing, not because they’re even that important.
It’s unusual for pop music to celebrate old things isn’t it? It’s normally associated with being radical and rebellious. In rock mythology, caring about eccentric old tea rooms isn’t very cool.
We’ve never been interested in that classic rock lineage. I mean, even if Exile on Main Street was my favourite album I wouldn’t want to talk about it. What can you say that’s new about it?
Is it a conscious part of your music, this idea of recording or evoking places that aren’t that glamorous like Kentish Town or Archway?
Yeah, although growing up in Surrey, London place names were glamorous for me. I’ve always been fascinated by London. And architecture. I studied town planning but gave it up to be a rock journalist.
Good decision! You said you are fascinated by New Towns, which is the flip-side of rotten old London. Why is that?
It’s the idea of a blank canvas, the thought that you could create a perfect community. The job I wanted most when I was 8 was to be the person who thought of all the road names.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
I Never Thought The Reviews I Read Were True Until...
Review: The Playboy Archives, Proud Gallery, Camden.
I’m starting to regret this now. I’m sitting in the pub explaining to a friend why I am reviewing the Playboy archives and it’s all sounding a little…..sleazy. “It’s about design” I say none too convincingly. I give up asking anyone if they want to come see the show with me and end up going alone, furtively shuffling ‘round the exhibition with a notebook like a teenager with a Pamela Anderson obsession. Having said that, once inside, the Playboy Archives is considerably less revealing than you might imagine. It consists of a collection of covers from 1953 onwards, some stand-alone photographs of famous Playmates of the Month (including, bizarrely, Katarina Witt) and some framed interviews with famous men. There are also various pictures of founder Hugh Hefner in the exhibition, usually shown wandering the near mythic Playboy mansion wearing silk pyjamas.
Playboy is generally regarded as upmarket soft pornography. In fact it is read by the sort of people who might baulk at the term pornography preferring euphemisms such as ‘gentlemen’s entertainment’ or, worse, ‘erotica’. In this, it aspires both to be something other than a humble porn mag, and to elevate the porn element to a civilised hobby on a par with pipe smoking and vintage motor-cars. For a start it has writing in it, and not just of the “I never thought the stories in your magazine were true until…” variety. It carries interviews with famous men (not women) and fiction from serious writers. It also though, unarguably, has lots of pictures of naked women in it. These pictures are either, depending on your constitution, rather tame or more explicit than you imagined. It’s not Razzle but it’s not The Lady either.
Time has given the 1950’s and ‘60’s Playmates an inevitable period charm – today they seem as de-sexualised as a bit of What the Butler Saw Edwardian saucy-ness. The period hairdos, moustaches (on the men, mostly) and clothes draw attention away from what was originally the point. In fact, hair is a key component in porn: at least of the pubic variety. In the 50’s and 60’s it was generally not seen at all. By the ‘70’s it is there in all its glory. In fact, given today’s tastes for depilation, it is perversely the hair that tends to shock most. The ‘70’s were also an excellent period for unusual props. Horses were a favourite, with naked women shown leading them through lens flare improved countryside like a porno Sandy Denny. By the 80’s, the bodies had become harder and, of course, more hairless. They also started to be designed for the job, leading to the purpose built caricatures of Pamela Anderson, Carmen Elektra and Jordan. The ‘80’s also saw the rise of various famous photographers including Mike Figgis and Helmut Newton, both shown in this exhibition. Here, porn brushes up against art, but in a fundamentally rather naff way. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, if pornography has claims to art, then it is more through its potential for transgression than through arty composition or ‘classy’ imagery.
Alongside the excesses of today’s so-called Gonzo porn, Playboy seems relatively harmless: very much the product of a boy’s imagination that thinks new gadgets, well tailored suits, sexist jokes and, of course, lots of naked ladies, are the accoutrements of sophistication. All, of course, unthreatened by anything as troubling as sexual politics, female desire or un-airbrushed flesh. The spin-off from this veneer of sophistication was that there was a certain subtlety and inventiveness that went into the presentation. But, just as the bodies have become more designed the magazine has become less so. Whilst the covers of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s were often graphically striking in their own right, the latest ones merely list the magazine’s contents around yet another famous face. And, as the bodies themselves have become more ruthlessly exposed to the light, they have had to work that much harder to retain our attention: shaved, taped, pumped up and, finally, photo-shopped into a kind of freaky perfection,
See, it was about design. So, I return to the pub, suitably unembarrassed, but not before I have picked up some new silk pyjamas on the way.
I’m starting to regret this now. I’m sitting in the pub explaining to a friend why I am reviewing the Playboy archives and it’s all sounding a little…..sleazy. “It’s about design” I say none too convincingly. I give up asking anyone if they want to come see the show with me and end up going alone, furtively shuffling ‘round the exhibition with a notebook like a teenager with a Pamela Anderson obsession. Having said that, once inside, the Playboy Archives is considerably less revealing than you might imagine. It consists of a collection of covers from 1953 onwards, some stand-alone photographs of famous Playmates of the Month (including, bizarrely, Katarina Witt) and some framed interviews with famous men. There are also various pictures of founder Hugh Hefner in the exhibition, usually shown wandering the near mythic Playboy mansion wearing silk pyjamas.
Playboy is generally regarded as upmarket soft pornography. In fact it is read by the sort of people who might baulk at the term pornography preferring euphemisms such as ‘gentlemen’s entertainment’ or, worse, ‘erotica’. In this, it aspires both to be something other than a humble porn mag, and to elevate the porn element to a civilised hobby on a par with pipe smoking and vintage motor-cars. For a start it has writing in it, and not just of the “I never thought the stories in your magazine were true until…” variety. It carries interviews with famous men (not women) and fiction from serious writers. It also though, unarguably, has lots of pictures of naked women in it. These pictures are either, depending on your constitution, rather tame or more explicit than you imagined. It’s not Razzle but it’s not The Lady either.
Time has given the 1950’s and ‘60’s Playmates an inevitable period charm – today they seem as de-sexualised as a bit of What the Butler Saw Edwardian saucy-ness. The period hairdos, moustaches (on the men, mostly) and clothes draw attention away from what was originally the point. In fact, hair is a key component in porn: at least of the pubic variety. In the 50’s and 60’s it was generally not seen at all. By the ‘70’s it is there in all its glory. In fact, given today’s tastes for depilation, it is perversely the hair that tends to shock most. The ‘70’s were also an excellent period for unusual props. Horses were a favourite, with naked women shown leading them through lens flare improved countryside like a porno Sandy Denny. By the 80’s, the bodies had become harder and, of course, more hairless. They also started to be designed for the job, leading to the purpose built caricatures of Pamela Anderson, Carmen Elektra and Jordan. The ‘80’s also saw the rise of various famous photographers including Mike Figgis and Helmut Newton, both shown in this exhibition. Here, porn brushes up against art, but in a fundamentally rather naff way. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, if pornography has claims to art, then it is more through its potential for transgression than through arty composition or ‘classy’ imagery.
Alongside the excesses of today’s so-called Gonzo porn, Playboy seems relatively harmless: very much the product of a boy’s imagination that thinks new gadgets, well tailored suits, sexist jokes and, of course, lots of naked ladies, are the accoutrements of sophistication. All, of course, unthreatened by anything as troubling as sexual politics, female desire or un-airbrushed flesh. The spin-off from this veneer of sophistication was that there was a certain subtlety and inventiveness that went into the presentation. But, just as the bodies have become more designed the magazine has become less so. Whilst the covers of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s were often graphically striking in their own right, the latest ones merely list the magazine’s contents around yet another famous face. And, as the bodies themselves have become more ruthlessly exposed to the light, they have had to work that much harder to retain our attention: shaved, taped, pumped up and, finally, photo-shopped into a kind of freaky perfection,
See, it was about design. So, I return to the pub, suitably unembarrassed, but not before I have picked up some new silk pyjamas on the way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)