This smart, amazingly well-researched and groundbreaking study on the literature of sodomy and male love in the 17th Century is written in jargon-free language and is utterly convincing. That's probably because Mr. Hammond doesn't try to overinterpret the evidence he has available (and it is quite alot) but leaves room for doubt and variable readings. This restraint (so rare in gay studies...believe me, I know) makes his book stand out in the field, that and the fact that he has unearthed a treasure trove of literature either unknown or known only to a few specialists. His facts are fascinating, his style engaging. Future research in the history of sexual writing will have to take his work into consideration. Bravo, Mr. Hammond!

Now in a revised and expanded third edition, Paul Hammond's The Shadow And Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings On The Cinema gathers together a fascinating, informative, and challenging collection of writings by Surrealists on their love of, and involvement with, the movies. Here are to be found the writings of Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Salvador Dali, Many Ray and many others. This highly recommended compendium of commentary is a "must" for professional and academic film history, popular culture, and surrealism reading lists.

When 'L'Age D'Or' was released in 1930, the few mainstream cinemas equipped with sound refused to show it. Its exhibition in a small art-house sparked vicious vandalism from right-wing groups; under pressure from the Parisian Chief of Police, the film was withdrawn and remained unseen for 50 years except for poor pirate copies. Raucously erotic, politically satirical and provocatively sacreligious, it is easy to see even today how this Surrealist masterpiece caused so much offence - laced with imagery sublimating onanism, famous scenes include the putrefaction of four bishops on a Mallorcan cliff-top; repeatedly frustrated erotic trysts; the gratuitous kicking of a dog and a blind war veteran; the cold-blooded shooting of a young boy by his father; a restaging of de Sade's infamous novel '120 Days of Sodom', with the murderous libertine Blangis played by Christ; and a crucifix nailed with women's scalps.

Paul Hammond's monograph is an indispensable gloss on this dense, allusive, but hilarious film. Although imbued with a Surrealist aesthetic - with creative input from the movement; cameos by Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and Velentine Penrose; the visual influence of Magritte and the narrative disruptions of Peret - Hammond shows how 'L'Age D'or' fundamentally engages with Bunuel's love for Hollywood, in particular the slapstick of Keaton and Langdon, the social comedies of Lubitsch and Stroheim, and the amour fou melodramas of Borzage, which he reworked, burlesqued and homaged (Bunuel despised the 'avant-garde' or 'art' film). He reinstates the important creative contribution of now-despised co-scenarist Salvador Dali, who provided many of the film's best gags and its running imagery, as well as its 'critical-paranoid' methodology - the pair's aim was to show 'reality's adjustment to the unconscious'. He brilliantly traces the film's equally remarkable production, and how its crises shaped 'L'Age D'Or''s aesthetic (for instance, unusable footage led Bunuel to use stock scientific film for the famous opening 'documentary' scorpion sequence). He explains the political, sexual and Freudian allusions scattered throughout, as well as the many in-jokes - much of the imagery is generated from word-play. His recreation of the amazing cultural milieu of which the film was a part, a Parisian world of intense culture, politics, sexuality, friendship and comically bourgeois family problems.

Although his tracing of the film is linear, Hammond rejects systematic analysis in favour of a 'delire d'interpretation', picking up clues from the imagery, film-making or background and wending many fascinating and original interpretive avenues. The reader should be warned however: Hammond assumes a lot of prior knowledge (you are expected to know who Peret and Brunius were, or what happened at the Saint-Pol-Roux dinner); while sentences such as the following are not uncommon: 'As well as functioning oneirically, 'L'Age D'Or' is a fine example of Shklovskian retardation'; 'In the end he toned down the galimatias, although the diegetic effect remains dyslexic'. Best have a dictionary and google handy!

The murdering performed in L'age D'or is definitely rendered aesthetically in many forms. Among other forms, one could also dispute that L'age D'or attacks Freudian based ideas, which are depicted and utilized in the film with derision

Freudian theories were prominent during the reign of Surrealism. Andre Breton had become a leading student in the field of psychology, soon establishing Freudian ideals in the Surrealist manifesto. Among the psychological symbols presented in L'age D'or are: displacement of a phallus for Apollo's big toe, images of rod shaped objects hitting water, an anal-expulsive scene set in a lover's fantasy, a woman with a bandage on her finger, and a hand recklessly polishing bottles and kitchen utensils.

It is apparent that L'age D'or has represented Luis Bunuel's anti-clerical sentiments. In addition, the film rejects the notion of diplomacy for purposely shocking the viewer and offending those who cherish the concept of class society.

The film's structure is very fragmented but still possesses a linear narrative format. In this manner Bunuel had relinquished previous conventions to filmmaking and doubly attacks structure and the viewers preconceived principles for watching a film.

In L'ge D'or (or simply The Golden Age) Bunuel presents a tale of two lovers whose romantic sentiments and erotic activities are being thwarted by middle-class values and ideologies. In his autobiography, Bunuel described the lovers conflict as a l'amour fou, or an "impossible force that brings two people together and the subsequent impossibility of them ever becoming one."

Subsequently, the two lovers begin to share their emotions in bizarre ways: tumbling on chairs, biting fingers and toes, sucking profusely on inanimate objects.However, the turning point of the film presents the jealousy of the protagonist, when his amorist falls in love with a middle-class conductor. Thus L'age D'or then vociferates a cataclysm of emotions and subconscious imagery.

... Although incomprehensible to a majority, the climax of the film is intentionally ambiguous but metaphorically is another one of Bunuel scathing assault on organized religion.

Salvador Dali has proffered the idea that the images of Surrealism will set an abominable precedent on the ways we view reality. Likened to Dada, Surrealism had attacked the conventions of art by presenting nihilistic ideas to an audience accustomed with Fauvism and Cubist banalities.

Likewise, Surrealist artists have deconstructed the principles of art by exhibiting in their mediums the worlds of absurdism and the unconscious mind. By these aesthetic practices, our judgments of reality have been considerably altered and have now taken a new standpoint.

As a supplement to Dali's statement, Bunuel described Surrealist cinema as "a passionate call to murder." In relation to Bunuel's quotation, it is ostensible that the murdering performed in L'age D'or is directed at the hierocratic doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church and bourgeois values.

Bunuel had expressed his ambivalence for religious conviction by stating "Thank God I'm an atheist." By the same token, the film L'age D'or affirms a deep-seated indifference as well as an utter indignation for Roman Catholic dogma.

During the critical point of the film, Bunuel establishes his protagonist development where after being rejected by his would be lover, the character begins to ravish an immaculately set bedroom belonging to a bourgeois resident. Subsequently, the hero (or antihero) purposely deposits cherished objects out of the window.

Among these items are: an accumulation of pillow feathers, a christmas tree that is set ablaze, a live Roman Catholic bishop in full regalia, and a stuffed giraffe.

Among the aforementioned discarded objects, Bunuel clearly exemplifies his religious opinion most notably with the discarding of the Catholic bishop. In addition, one may argue that what the protagonist is doing is presumably related to Bunuel's own wish: a purging of oppressive theological icons.

In addition, one could say that the film is murdering the audience or viewer by displaying surrealistic pessimism and confounding imagery. Moreover, wide populations of viewers were doubly offended by the film blasphemous and utterly absurd ideas.

During the film's premier, a nationalistic Catholic organization known as The King's Henchman (who belonged to the Action Française of France) proceeded to throw bottles of ink and jars of acid onto the screen. This incident was precipitated due to the fact that L'age D'or presented a sequence where a religious sacrament was juxtaposed with a beautiful woman's leg.

But is this still shocking? Apparently not by today's standards

After leaving the screening, the group bombarded the theater's adjacent gallery and deliberately ruined the paintings of some renowned Surrealist artist, most notably Max Ernst, whose canvas bore huge slashes in it.

By this example, L'age D'or had an utmost affect on its audience, eventually becoming censored in several countries for several years ---even to this day it is rare to see a screening of this film.

In short, a Surrealist film like L'age D'or may shock or appall audiences with its use of absurd and blasphemous sequences and subject matter. Nevertheless, one can also acquire a new perspective on the societal values and class systems presented in the film.

The French classic is preceded by a fine introduction by James Naremore, after which things quickly go downhill. Either the publisher doesn't have any editorial staff or the translator is inexperienced or both. ". . . the subjects pose themselves questions of which the least that can be said is that they are far from being trite . . The absurdity of a derisory destiny--such is the conclusion of this work by John Huston, his first" (The Maltese Falcon). "And this film is a sort of frenetic adieu on the threshold of a ten-year exile, since Sternberg will not direct again until 1951" (The Shanghai Gesture). That's a sample from one page (35). I want my money back.

After all the controversy over the constitution of film noir, it can only be edifying to read the perspective of classic-period French critics. Indeed, it was Gallic mentality that first recognized and recorded the phenomenon, and--if these writers are representative of their ethnic mainstrem--surmised that noir was born of an infusion of angst into the cinematic puritanism of the Anglo nations. While American scholars have often seen noir as a reaction to good times (as comedy is a reaction to bad), the authors site only the related relevance of World War II in its capacity to desensitize audiences to stark screen violence. Furthermore, they label only a handful of films as true noir and assess many other features--such as police and psychological dramas--as merely possessing qualities of noir. The book discusses a myriad of these movies in a colorful but easily comprehended style that avoids becoming parched with pedogogic discourse. A lengthy, up-to-1979 filmography, which also includes non-American films, has been added to the text--and is of particular interest in listing features not commonly called noir, such as cartoons and sci-fi thrillers. (I always knew Soylent Green was black!) Digression aside--for those with amour de noir, this book is de rigueur!

Succinctly translated into English by Paul Hammond, A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 is a remarkable and collaborative work by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton which was originally published in France in 1955. A Panorama Of American Film Noir offers unique insights into the dark surrealism and ambivalent atmosphere of Hollywood's film noir glory days. A brilliant critique of classic movies and the American culture that created them; as well as a film noir chronology and filmography enhance this masterful work which is strongly recommended for personal, professional, and academic Cinematic Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

Whereas once, say around the time of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere was more or less similar in development region to region due to its common background of having been colonized by European powers, there has ever since been an ever-widening gap due to the differing influences of the colonizers of the north contrasted with the south.
The north, primarily colonized by the British and the French, was viewed as place where individual colonists and their families could create a new homeland and work toward self-sufficiency, exporting valuable natural resources back to the home countries in Europe and provide, in return, a market for what Europe could produce. The southern regions, on the other hand, were primarily colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese, who sought only to extract natural and agricultural resources for themselves (they wanted gold, mostly), and pay the native inhabitants back by converting them to their brand of Christianity.
So now that all the countries of the Western Hemisphere are nations independent of Europe, the gap between the north and the south has expanded to its ulimate polarity: the United States and Canada are global economic powerhouses with high standards of living for the majority of their people, whereas in Latin America the people groan under the yoke of their own exploitative governments, an impractical and hypocritical rule of the church, and by imposed agricultural economies that do not, on the whole, raise sustaining food for the people, but superfluous, non-food-items for wealthy nations elsewhere--chocolate, coffee, sugar, rubber, tropical woods, and, the most lucrative of all, coca, that is processed into cocaine.
The country of Columbia (interestingly, one whose name is the closest to "Columbus") is almost archetypal in this concept...coffee, cocaine, and Catholicism (the kind of Catholicism that, for example, continues to forbid contraception in a country where the population has completely overrun its viable economic opportunities), and "Our Lady of the Assassins" is a desperate, but powerfully human cry from deep in the heart of that situation in a country still struggling for survival and meaning.
Fernando Vallejo, in presenting this tragedy, seems to offer no obvious hope of solution out of the misery, but only torturously writhes around and around within it, reporting rampant gang killing after gang killing like the city of Medellin's (idiomatically renamed "Medallo" in reference to a sub-machine gun) own news media in a never-ending cycle of ever-avenging death and despair while eternally on its knees supplicating "Santa Maria Auxiliadora" or whatever other Saint also bled and suffered, unable to really provide much help beyond solace through sympathy and maybe a hope of spiritual liberation after death.
Yet, as long as there is humanity, there still can be hope in THIS world, and where there are tears and laughter, there is humanity. The book is actually very funny in parts, and certainly ironic, as if, better than even crying, all one can do is laugh and attempt to enliven the otherwise-too-horrendous-to-fully-contemplate journey to Only God Knows Where. I found it fascinating that in the prayers requesting a "blessing" of the assassin's bullets, their requests were that the bullets wouldn't miss and in their deaths, the victims WOULDN'T SUFFER...as if even in their killing the assassins retained some germ of love. In fact, in the distortions of their slang, to "be in love with" somebody is to be out to kill them. They're all angels...avenging angels.
Most importantly, this book is a love story, a love story between a youth whose fellow gang members had all been destroyed, and an older man whose family had all died, that in their aloneness and solitude, they found a place for each other in their lives. I cannot fail to see that this, too, is a metaphor for hidden forces on the side of survival, for when the departing elders and the emerging youth love each other, there is a knitting together of life's circle and the wheel will somehow find a way to keep spinning. Vallejo may see that wheel like a Buddhist wheel of karma, where the only hope of escape is to be individually snuffed out into nirvana, or else maybe like an ancient inquistion torture wheel upon which the bones of humanity are broken and put on elevated display to engender a fear of God, but I think in a culture that did not, industriously, invent the wheel, THIS wheel, an engine of love and humanity, will be, instead of industrialism, its strength and ultimate salvation. And the best expression of that is through the arts such as this one, now in translation made accessible to those of us who reside in the northern hemisphere and may have heretofore remained ignorant of just what was going on in the cultures of a people with whom we once shared a common beginning. This is either a dire warning or a prayer for assistance...either way, we can no longer practically or philosophically afford to remain so isolated.

Having just completed Houellebecq's "Whatever" I'm a bit uncertain what to make of it. To read the blurbs and quotes on the back-cover, one might expect something a bit more comical than what this actually is. The tone of this book, however, is dark, dark, dark...

Houellebecq's narrator/central character is an unhappy man who feels contempt for women, love, society, technology, his job, himself, etc. He has an acerbic wit that, at times, is amusing, but it's a bitter sort of humor. There's nothing light-hearted about it.

As the book progresses, the main character becomes increasingly alienated and miserable, ultimately scheming to convert his co-worker (a loveless, ugly man) to murder. The plan fails, but things continue to get darker and darker until the main character finally enters a mental hospital.

There is a bitter contempt for life/love/humanity that runs through this book and, while it is cleverly written at times, it's not really all that enjoyable experience and I'm not sure what the book really has to say other than "Life sucks." Frankly, I think the same sorts of themes are handled far more eloquently and with far greater insight by Camus' "The Stranger."

Houellebecq is a talented writer but this book just didn't do much for me overall.

Written in a dry, ascerbic tone, WHATEVER follows one man's downward spiral as he feels increasingly less conected with the world and society that surrounds him. The book deals with many questions regarding modern times, picking up the ball, as it were, where writers like Kafka left off. The paradox presented in this book is that with the increase in speed and circulation of information and communication tools, people seem to be overloaded and more isolated. At times the book meanders and one never gets really close to the other characters but it seems appropriate in a novel about the solipsistic nature of our times. A true pessimist, Michel Houellebecq does not allow his character to surrmount his seperation from other (or as Hawthorn would have said his "black veil"). The novel is well worth reading and I'll be interested to to read other works by Houellebecq.

Reminiscent of Miller (Henry) and "the Catcher in the Rye" a bit. Not a timeless book by any means but a very decent period piece. Like Emerson (?) said, every generation must rewrite same books after their own fashion -- and that's just it, a cleverly and imaginatively done relevant, honest, and philosophical tale of "fear and loathing" for our times, a bit like the "Fight Club" only by an order of magnitude more intelligent and subtle. I've read it in one sitting: it's small and strangely bewitching, though like I've said, not perfect, or, to be precise, it's uneven.

I see other reviewers complaining about the translation, well, I thought the English version was OK, though I haven't compared specifically. Except perhaps the title, which perfectly translates into English as "Extension of the Domain of Struggle"--which linkes up with something in the text--but became "Whatever" (which doesn't, and is meaningless). Anyway, who cares about the title.

I also got another Houellebecq book (Elementary Particles), in English too, read just a bit so far, and it's not bad either. Now, here (it's a different translator though) the translation does seem a bit lacking, sort of choppy, awkward, so that tells you why you need to read stuff in the original. Meaning if you can read French, go for the original, don't be lazy, it's worth the effort in this case. Houellebecq's latest book, Plateforme, seems untranslated yet ... so here's a good justification to try the real thing if you can--if you put them side by side you'll see that a translation is always off, even if only in the overall feel... if it's close, it's awkward English, if it's more graceful, then it's not true to the source. Anyway, I'm deviating; what I wanted to say was that "Whatever" is an uncommonly honest and psychological book from a relatively unknown author and is well worth reading: thus my very strict evaluation is go get it.

Between what this book could do and what it does there is a shortfall. It is a useful and indeed detailed survey of a large number of works with either homosexual texts or subtexts. What there is little of, however, is any real sense of either purpose or argument. There is a basic premise that Homosexuality has been codified since time inmemorial, but this does little to give the book any sort of through-line. Individual chapters, particularly that on the renaissance, which alone could fill a small library with books on male-male love in the period, seem to almost pass their subjects by. Either the book should have been much longer or much shorter. it falls between the stools as an over-padded short look at the subject, which is a pity.

I could not make it through the first chapter of this book. I am not an English teacher, but the run-on sentences and atrocious sentence structure drove me crazy! The author tries to provide a political context for the Constellations, both paintings and poetry. However, he jumps from year to year and place to place without transition. I found this extremely confusing and also incomplete. I was also disappointed in the black and white illustrations. I don't think the paintings can be appreciated at all in this book. Don't buy it!