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Nckdictator posted:Earlier today I watched Vincent Price's "Witchfinder General" and absolutely loved the whole rural English horror atmosphere, really reminded me of "The Wicker Man". Can anyone recomend any similar movies with that sort of setting? Any Hammer movie
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Sep 14, 2014 05:46
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You probably won't get anywhere understanding racism if you don't understand that Lincoln and Johnson, for example, were racist in ways which make all but the worst tea partier look like MLK Jr. That didn't stop them from fighting (in the former case literally) for racial equality.
Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 05:51
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Hodgepodge posted:
So how do you feel about Faulkner's character Joe Christmas and Charles Bon?
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Sep 14, 2014 07:32
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I don't think The Shadow over Innsmouth is a racist story in a vacuum, but Lovecraft was undeniably a massive racist and that kinda casts a nasty light on the story.
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Sep 14, 2014 08:10
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Just finished up Wer, eh, I liked it and felt it had a strong start but it really fell apart at the end by becoming an action film. That poo poo sucked.
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Sep 14, 2014 08:19
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Sad Mammal posted:So how do you feel about Faulkner's character Joe Christmas and Charles Bon? Never read Faulkner, but I'd be interested to hear your point. If it's just that a character is not the author, though, that doesn't hold up well when the character is struggling with a fictionalized version of the author's own issues.
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Sep 14, 2014 08:21
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Hodgepodge posted:Never read Faulkner, but I'd be interested to hear your point. Both characters are deeply ashamed of, and are made social pariahs for, their black heritage. Light in August and Absalom, Absalom take a fear of miscegenation and run with it in very similar directions as a Lovecraft story; both Joe Christmas and the Sutpen family's downfall stems directly from their black ancestry. Both stories are not typically regarded as racist, as Lovecraft's stories are. I find it strange that it seems to be Faulkner's shame (or perceived shame) in his Southern roots keeps him separated from Lovecraft despite the fact the two's stories carry highly similar themes.
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Sep 14, 2014 08:45
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From your description, it sounds as if Faulkner portrays having black ancestry as not inherently bad, but as bad due to oppressive social structures. If so, that's a rather large contrast to Lovecraft's literally subhuman fishpeople. The difference would be that Lovecraft ratifies and even magnifies the racism inherent in fear of miscegination. Again, his themes mirror Howard's depiction of civilization as doomed to succumb to its own decadence and subsequently fall to barbaric outsiders- racial purity, like Howard's civilization, is doomed not due to its undesirability, but because the nature of both human weakness and the cosmic order are hostile to its sustainability.
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Sep 14, 2014 09:37
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K. Waste posted:Yeah, it's not simply that Lovecraft is overtly racist, it's that his writings are identifiably contemporaneous with reactionary nativist theories that Western civilization was literally on the brink of being destroyed by miscegenation with non-white Europeans / rape by brutal Black bucks. That's not accurate. It isn't just Delapore who is driven mad; all his companions go mad too.
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Sep 14, 2014 10:50
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So, I'm taking my students camping. That means I will be in the middle of a cabin with twelve children and staying up to about 2 AM to make absolute sure none of them do anything really stupid. So, my question is what horror movie should I have loaded on my iPad?
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Sep 14, 2014 12:43
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Sire Oblivion posted:Just finished up Wer, eh, I liked it and felt it had a strong start but it really fell apart at the end by becoming an action film. That poo poo sucked. You were warned. what did you think of the hospital scene?
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Sep 14, 2014 13:05
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Hodgepodge posted:The Borderlands, perhaps? Thank you, glad you've enjoyed it. My problem with The Rectum scenes. Which, to describe for those who haven't seen the film are: a random patron of the gay s&m club getting his face smashed in whilst anonymous club patrons masturbate watching, the verbal suggestion that the main character is going to be anally raped after he is beaten up, the camera spinning wildly to signify a recognition of the hysteria/fear/hideousness of the scene, the soundtrack being an audio drone designed to make people feel fear - no joke, it is designed to make people leave the cinema. First of all, I don't think gay culture is being represented in it's entirety in Irreversible, at most Noe is talking about the 'seedy' aspect (which, as has been mentioned here, and by Wood, is far from accurate). Second I explicitly want to say that a reading like Noe's, that wants to condemn misogyny/patriarchy but does so by having the rapist be gay/bi, setting the most violent scenes in a gay nightclub and then having the camera as completely participatory in the beating of this guy (whereas later it is static and disconnected in regards to the second act of brutality) is creating a rather sick caricature, no? Why not set it in a straight swingers club? Lovecraft is interesting because imagine how more powerful the sense of horror, the fear of this unknown unworldly dread would be without his leaden miscegenation points, in this case the expression of horror is actually let down by the overt racism. Again, the voice being used isn't just the characters but the voice of the author itself so we can't deny (unless we've not read critical theory since the 70's or dropped it at at Barthes) that there is still an authorial voice here directing things. Also Sad Mammal, as much as I can appreciate the fear of art being labelled and condemned, it is still a product of society and therefore this is going to happen anyway. You wanting to disconnect 'art' from politics is a political stance itself. You think Irreversible doesn't contain homophobic elements. I do. I also think that it's an interesting film that needs deeper analysis, I think Wood thinks this too - hence his detailed article. Notice that both Wood and myself point out elements of the film that are homophobic, not some blanket condemnation. There is very much an aspect of art that is ambiguous and denies a direct reading, but in this case I think it's been carried out naively and with zero understanding of the scene its attempting to depict. harpomarxist fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 14:05
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, I'm taking my students camping. That means I will be in the middle of a cabin with twelve children and staying up to about 2 AM to make absolute sure none of them do anything really stupid. So, my question is what horror movie should I have loaded on my iPad? The (motherfucking) Thing, of course. Carpenter version. Or original Evil Dead. How old are the kids?
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Sep 14, 2014 14:37
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Well, identifying the camera with the assailant makes sense in that we're supposed to be in his head. That extends somewhat to how the club itself is portrayed. I'm a little leery of the fact that he's threatened with anal rape- obviously it's a continuation of his own perception of the club through the lens of straight patriachical anxiety and part of his ironic failure to embody its ideals, but it also dehumanizes his victim unnecessarily. Also, if we take the idea that we're in his head in that scene and that he's being swallowed by patriachical violence seriously, then of course the scene would be homophobic- we're seeing what goes on in the head of a homophobe committing a hate crime. The solution, then, would be to show the club through a sane lens "later," ie before the rape. That would emphasize that the club itself has been transformed by systematic violence. Also, while humanizing La Tenia is probably unfilmable (and as an avatar of violence he is as poor a choice for humanization as would be The Judge from Blood Meridian), the actual murder victim is a different character and should really not be objectified or dehumanized outside of the perspective of Marcus and Peirre. Then again, I haven't seen the film. I guess now I should; rape-revenge isn't normally my thing even when it's subverted. E: substituting "black" for "gay" and modifying the dehumanizing tropes appropriately as a thought experiment kind of makes me think the scene is just homophobic. If you showed Marcus and Pierre lynching a black man for the rape without even bothering to make sure they had the right man, you would want to carefully demarcate the unreliability of the characters' perception of the black people around him as bestial and savage. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 14:46
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Horrific music chat was ages ago, but a piece of music that will always be close to my heart in a bad way is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp3BlFZWJNA Made doubly bad, because the first time I heard it was in a music class in highschool, in which we were instructed to follow along with the sheet music. I can't find any complete examples, but the impression is:   They're instructions for the 52 four-stringed instruments, and they don't mean anything in musical notation. But you can hear them. edit: And because it's 2014 and of course they have, someone's animated a score on Youtube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HilGthRhwP8 The Peccadillo fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 15:29
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Hodgepodge posted:Well, identifying the camera with the assailant makes sense in that we're supposed to be in his head. That extends somewhat to how the club itself is portrayed. I'm a little leery of the fact that he's threatened with anal rape- obviously it's a continuation of his own perception of the club through the lens of straight patriachical anxiety and part of his ironic failure to embody its ideals, but it also dehumanizes his victim unnecessarily. Sure sure, and i'm not questioning the intent of 'getting in the headspace', just that Noe doesn't then continue this for a later scene of a woman being raped, instead he deliberately makes his camera static, he places it at her eye level, it's about her pain and its as disconnected as it could be. If he's capable of reflecting this in his movie, why doesn't he do this in the gay nightclub scenes? harpomarxist fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 15:57
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In the opening chapters of the movie everything is pretty vulgar and ugly, not just the scenes in the Rectum or its patrons. As far as the headspace of Marcus, I think what we see in the Rectum is exaggerated/altered by his rage. It would also make sense as to why the opening act of brutality is filmed the way it is, its personal and its caught in the chaos of rage. What do you guys thing of the relationship between Marcus and Pierre? I think its interesting that Marcus had pretty much been goading and emasculating Pierre the whole night prior to the scene in the Rectum, where eventually his taunts and commands result in Pierre commiting a heavily phallic-imagery laced murder. I'm really interested in how you guys view these characters cause you're all very good at this analysis stuff.
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Sep 14, 2014 16:35
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If Irreversible is a film that, for the most part, takes place within the head of someone who desires revenge, then I think it's best to see Pierre and Marcus as two unique aspects of the same psyche who, once enveloped in the Rectum, become one force that is both abject and brutal. The exchanging of roles is significant, because it actually turns out to be Marcus who becomes the 'damsel/pussy in distress,' and the intellectual Pierre takes on this savage, sadistic, and even kind of sociopathic identity that Noe deliberately establishes no future precedence for. Pierre is the arm-chair intellectual, and this carries over into the later half of the film when the phallic rage has subsided and we move into Alex being the protagonist and the subject becoming not the abjection of men but the veneration of the woman. Pierre passively pontificates about sensuality and intimacy, but what he actually represents is the opposite problem of Marcus, who sees sexuality as fundamentally power-driven. Pierre doesn't own up to the fact that power is a part of sexuality, and, thus, his actions at the film's beginning can be read as the explosion of repressed, misogynistic/homophobic aggression. His ineffectual subservience is just as limiting and unappealing to Alex as Marcus's unapologetic vulgarity becomes. It should be emphasized further that this concept of Pierre and Marcus representing the duality of patriarchy - that which tears the feminine identity between two contradictory but equally limiting viewpoints - is presaged by the opening of the film, which takes place in an apartment above the Rectum between the Butcher and an unnamed male partner. This apartment, above and looking back upon the Rectum is a vivid 'head space,' and the dark irony of this is that while these men are consumed with the memory of a incestuous rape that they have distorted as a consensual act persecuted by society's 'repression,' they are literally not cognizant that there is an 'anal rape' taking place behind and below them. This is sexuality totally divorced from any kind of intellectual or intimate consciousness, but at the same time it's overtly created by the Butcher's fantasy of an intimate relationship, his need to paint his rape victim as complicit in the act. The film is all about Pierre exchanging roles with Marcus, and it begins with the 'head space' above the Rectum.
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Sep 14, 2014 17:13
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, I'm taking my students camping. That means I will be in the middle of a cabin with twelve children and staying up to about 2 AM to make absolute sure none of them do anything really stupid. So, my question is what horror movie should I have loaded on my iPad? Well, John Carpenter's The Fog starts out with a campfire tale...
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Sep 14, 2014 18:11
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harpomarxist posted:Lovecraft is interesting because imagine how more powerful the sense of horror, the fear of this unknown unworldly dread would be without his leaden miscegenation points, in this case the expression of horror is actually let down by the overt racism. Again, the voice being used isn't just the characters but the voice of the author itself so we can't deny (unless we've not read critical theory since the 70's or dropped it at at Barthes) that there is still an authorial voice here directing things. John Carpenter is basically Lovecraft without the racism and with actual talent in his chosen medium. All of his films that I've seen are equally obsessed with a perspective portrayed as both desirable and vulnerable, with protagonists who make a brave stand against chaos but can never be sure they don't contain the seed of it themselves; the difference being that movies have more to do with rationality and masculinity than race.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:John Carpenter is basically Lovecraft without the racism and with actual talent in his chosen medium. meow. How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? harpomarxist posted:Again, the voice being used isn't just the characters but the voice of the author itself so we can't deny (unless we've not read critical theory since the 70's or dropped it at at Barthes) that there is still an authorial voice here directing things. Theory's actually been moving AWAY from authorial intention since Barthes. Derrida and Fish question if even READER intention exists, for example. Sad Mammal fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 20:37
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Sad Mammal posted:meow. How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? By watching Prince of Darkness and ITMOM, for a start. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Hvp7Uw3UE
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Sep 14, 2014 21:25
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Sad Mammal posted:How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? In the audio commentary for Cannibal Holocaust Ruggero Deodato describes Mondo Cane as "a beautiful film" and says the opening credits were directly inspired by those films. His movie is about a group of documentary filmmakers who burn indigenous villages, desecrate their rituals, and rape their women. You can be heavily inspired by and even explicitly admire an artist while notably improving upon/satirizing what they did. Carpenter, not unlike Tarantino after him, is heavily influenced by filmmakers whose works he nonetheless explicitly subverts. Like, Assault on Precinct 13 is a remake of Rio Bravo, but the opening of the film is meant to get you to sympathize with the 'Indian' marauders as victims of white supremacy and are taking sympathetic revenge. (The storyboards and original script are even more explicit about this.)
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Sep 14, 2014 21:32
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Sad Mammal posted:meow. How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? I don't really follow. I'm saying Carpenter is a talented guy who's surpassed his inspirations; that sentence only makes sense if Lovecraft is one of his inspirations.
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Sep 14, 2014 21:34
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, I'm taking my students camping. That means I will be in the middle of a cabin with twelve children and staying up to about 2 AM to make absolute sure none of them do anything really stupid. So, my question is what horror movie should I have loaded on my iPad? Willow Creek.
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Sep 14, 2014 21:35
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I don't really follow. I'm saying Carpenter is a talented guy who's surpassed his inspirations; that sentence only makes sense if Lovecraft is one of his inspirations. If Carpenter, a guy you cite as being very talented, likes Lovecraft, and quite a few other artists (like Del Toro for one) cite Lovecraft as an inspiration, then I think it's probably safer to go with "Lovecraft isn't my cup of tea" as opposed to "Lovecraft has no talent". Sad Mammal fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 21:41
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K. Waste posted:You can be heavily inspired by and even explicitly admire an artist while notably improving upon/satirizing what they did. Going in a different direction with given subject matter is only an improvement if you think art should promote "good" moral values. Since I'm starting to feel like I'm becoming just a talking head on art-politik, in horror movie-related bits I finally watched Angst. This was my takeaway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rWK63VM9LE Sad Mammal fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 21:48
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Sad Mammal posted:If Carpenter, a guy you cite as being very talented, likes Lovecraft, and quite a few other artists (like Del Toro for one) cite Lovecraft as an inspiration, then I think it's probably safer to go with "Lovecraft isn't my cup of tea" as opposed to "Lovecraft has no talent". There's no value to softballing everything. It comes up constantly on this forum but do we really need to append 'in my opinion' to every negative comment? Your argument is also totally fallacious - there is no reason that talent should necessarily correspond to good taste.
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Sep 14, 2014 21:58
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DeimosRising posted:There's no value to softballing everything. It comes up constantly on this forum but do we really need to append 'in my opinion' to every negative comment? I never said it was, my "meow" comment refers to the catty method in which the opinion was stated.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:01
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Sad Mammal posted:Going in a different direction with given subject matter is only an improvement if you think art should promote "good" moral values. Not really. You don't need to actively promote a certain viewpoint in order to take an ethical stance, or for that ethical stance to be reflected in a work. Carpenter's sympathizing with the monstrous is definitely an improvement on Lovecraft's racist cynicism. Don't get me wrong, Lovecraft - as much as his works explicitly reflected a grotesque fear and hatred of the lower-class and 'unrefined' - was an important populist artist, and the explicit racism of his works ironically probably helped a lot of readers to work through their own similar ambivalence about changing social and cultural norms. Hell, his works still have that power. I wouldn't dismiss him any sooner than I would dismiss D. W. Griffith (who actually did make at least one surprisingly anti-racist film, Broken Blossoms), or even Mark Twain and Tex Avery. But if we're going to comment on the influences that del Toro and Carpenter and the like draw from Lovecraft, eventually we have to address the issue that Lovecraft's literature almost always operated from the standpoint that the dissolution of white Western supremacy was tantamount to the dissolution of all order, and that this is not only stripped away by Carpenter and del Toro, but not incidentally, both of these filmmakers seems to find hope in the dissolution of established order. None of these artists are actually promoting moral values, but one of them writes a frequently long, verbose (and not particularly cogently detailed), and turgid oeuvre that obsessively veers into the same cynical subject even when it's not narratively relevant; while the others challenge the spectator to view this same subject in ways that aren't immediately obvious and might even be counter to expectation. I don't see the goal of art to promote "good" moral values; I see it as to reveal unknown truths, and I just happen to think that Carpenter is better at this than a lot of the artists who inspired him.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:18
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Sad Mammal posted:meow. How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? Son, I got my decades wrong - choosing the heyday rather than it's dismissal (the 90's). But it can't really be denied that postmodern fiction reinvigorated the idea of 'the author' - whether that's precise or not
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Sep 14, 2014 22:24
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K. Waste posted:I don't see the goal of art to promote "good" moral values; I see it as to reveal unknown truths, and I just happen to think that Carpenter is better at this than a lot of the artists who inspired him. K, that's a fair statement to make, but K. Waste posted:Carpenter's sympathizing with the monstrous is definitely an improvement on Lovecraft's racist cynicism. is still baffling to me. How does sympathizing with the monstrous reveal more truth than reviling the monstrous?
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Sep 14, 2014 22:25
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schwenz posted:You were warned. I thought it was well done, they did a good job making him look strong as poo poo and just being able to crush people's frames with ease. From there though it was all downhill. 
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Sep 14, 2014 22:28
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harpomarxist posted:Son, I got my decades wrong - choosing the heyday rather than it's dismissal (the 90's). But it can't really be denied that postmodern fiction reinvigorated the idea of 'the author' - whether that's precise or not I've never read too spirited a rebuttal against Barthes saying "the author can INTEND all he likes, but that means gently caress-all to a reader's experience". My perspective of art during my road to my degree was that meaning slid from something inherent to something applied. I'd argue that PoMo stuff dug into a lot of bag of tricks to try to gently caress with the audience, with varying degrees of sincerity. Authorial intention was one of them. American Psycho, for example, plants you firmly in the shoes of a racist, misogynist serial killer but no one feels obligated to like Patrick Batemen just because Bret Easton Ellis seemingly has his head on straight. So I don't understand why Lovecraft's stories are somehow "understood" to be racist because the protagonist reflects the point of view of a racist dickbag. I enjoy quite a few Lovecraft stories and I feel sweeping these stories under a "racist literature" rug is a disservice to me and everyone else who's gotten enjoyment or purpose out them.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:32
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Sad Mammal posted:meow. How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? Son, I got my decades wrong - choosing the heyday rather than it's dismissal (the 90's). But it can't really be denied that postmodern fiction reinvigorated the idea of 'the author' even vis a vis Derrida and his imprint on literature. Postmodernism in fiction is authorial intention returning front and centre, no? BS Johnson, Safran Foer, Calvino, Eco - they're authorial voices that hold sway over the stories they tell.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:36
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harpomarxist posted:Son, I got my decades wrong - choosing the heyday rather than it's dismissal (the 90's). But it can't really be denied that postmodern fiction reinvigorated the idea of 'the author' even vis a vis Derrida and his imprint on literature. Postmodernism in fiction is authorial intention returning front and centre, no? BS Johnson, Safran Foer, Calvino, Eco - they're authorial voices that hold sway over the stories they tell. How are you defining "sway"? I can find a story much easier to relate to if the author's a nice person, but that doesn't necessarily mean a story has to have my sympathy or even my respect to interest me.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:39
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Sad Mammal posted:How are you defining "sway"? I can find a story much easier to relate to if the author's a nice person, but that doesn't necessarily mean a story has to have my sympathy or even my respect to interest me. Read them please. its about an author injecting themselves into the story. Which yes, can still be rejected as a tactic but it would be to ignore a very prominent trend
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Sep 14, 2014 22:52
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But I'm still not grasping what you mean by "sway". Are you trying to argue an influence that art has on the audience?
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Sep 14, 2014 22:59
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The self-referential aspects of post-modernism are an admission that the author is part of the text, but that the text exceeds them. Inserting oneself explicitly into the text makes explicit that the position of author is no more privileged than any other element of the text- to take the most obvious example, by being a character in a story one has written, an author highlights that he or she has no more interpretive authority than any other character. That is diametrically opposed to the idea of the author which Barthes "killed," which derived its power from the claim that the author occupies a position outside of the text from which it is possible to objectively and absolutely determine its meaning. e: In this sense, it is correct to say that Lovecraft being a racist cannot make his work racist. However, it is possible to establish that his work contains themes that reflect both his preoccupation with race and the racist ideology through which he understood the concept. A work whose major themes include race from a racist perspective can usefully be called racist. To do otherwise is an untenable position, because doing so would require a claim an interpretive position which is naive to both our own understanding of racism as part of our own life and/or political experience, and our knowledge of the historical position of the text. Likewise, with regards to the debate over Irreversible, it is possible to conclude that the film is homophobic without concluding that Noe is homophobic. Certainly the scene at the beginning seems to be indisputably homophobic, because it is arranged to reflect the internal experience of someone who is violently homophobic. But that no more makes the film homophobic than having a homophobic character does. The question is whether the film as a whole ratifies, intensifies; or conversely, challenges or complicates that homophobic perspective. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 23:49
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It's not like anyone's saying the work doesn't have merit because it's racist.
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