The Decadent Handbook
Page 12
The bill for this glorious moment came due a month later. The News of the World may not have known who we were before that weekend, but they certainly did afterwards. The fruits of their plotting burst forth the last Sunday in July: beneath a grainy, out-of-focus shot of a bare-breasted girl, the front-page screamed that she was fifteen years old and that the photograph had been taken at the ‘hippy vice den’ known as UFO. Our normally stoic landlord buckled under police pressure and evicted us.
A good recording may preserve elements of a great musical moment, but bottling the energy of social and cultural forces is impossible. Without realizing it, we had started on a downhill slope that was mirrored in New York and San Francisco. The agape spirit of ’67 evaporated in the heat of ugly drugs, violence, commercialism and police pressure. In Amsterdam, people began stealing and repainting the white bicycles.
Performance
Mick Brown
Performance is a film that, as Marianne Faithfull memorably put it, ‘preserves a whole era under glass,’ freeze-framing London at the tail end of the Sixties: the London of the Rolling Stones and of the Kray twins, of newly found sexual freedom, drug-drenched hedonism and psychopathic violence. Superficially a ‘crime movie about rock and roll’ – which is how the idea of the film was first sold to Warner Bros – Performance is a multi-textured feast for the mind and the senses; a film which simultaneously explores the nature of identity, the relationship between violence and creativity, sex and death, organised crime, amorality, power, drugs and rock and roll. As Turner, the rock-star anti-hero (played by Mick Jagger), says at one point in the film: ‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.’
Even before its opening in Britain in January 1971 the film had acquired its own peculiar mythology. Shot in the summer of 1968, Performance sat on the shelf for more than two years while Warner Bros deliberated on whether or not to release it, so disturbed were they by the film’s treatment of drugs-use and sexuality. And just as Performance is a film that seems, in some curious way, to leave an indelible mark on everyone who sees it, so it is also a film that seems to have forever changed those who were associated with it. James Fox, then a rising star in Britain and Hollywood, was allegedly so disturbed by the events of the film that shortly afterwards he retired from acting altogether and took to Christian evangelism. He did not work again for ten years. Anita Pallenberg left the set of Performance addicted to heroin. Michèle Breton fell into a life of drug addiction, destitution and mental breakdown. Mick Jagger emerged apparently unscathed, but within a year unleashed the demon that was Altamont. For Donald Cammell, Performance’s writer, co-director and presiding alchemist, the film would cast a baleful shadow over his life and career that would come to horrific fruition some thirty years later
‘The film is simply about an idea,’ Donald Cammell told the film critic Derek Malcolm in an interview published in the Guardian in 1970, shortly before the British release of Performance. ‘It’s a movie that goes into an allegorical areas and it moves from a definition of what violence is to an explanation of a way of being. It is an attempt, maybe successful and maybe not, to use film for exploring the nature of violence as seen from the point of view of an artist. It says that this crook leads this fading pop star to realise that violence is a facet of creative art, that his energy is derived from the same sources of those as the crook. And that that energy is always dangerous, sometimes fatal.’
Performance took its spirit from the London milieu of which its director and principal players were all a part: the intersection at which the worlds of rock music, the new aristocracy – and crime – collided. Marianne Faithfull would describe it as: ‘An allegory of libertine Chelsea life in the late Sixties, with its baronial rock stars, wayward jeunesse dorée, drugs, sex and decadence.’ It’s the film’s dazzling integration of themes – shaped by the cultural and sexual obsessions of Donald Cammell and by his prodigious intelligence and imagination – which makes Performance so extraordinary; and it is the circumstances which surrounded the film – the story behind the story – which make it the cult movie nonpareil.
It was a film galvanised by the relationships, both on and off screen, of its principals. Cammell, Fox and Jagger were all close friends. Cammell had lived in ménages à trois, at different times, with both Anita Pallenbergand Michèle Breton. At the time of making the film, Pallenberg was the lover of Keith Richard, Jagger’s fellow Rolling Stone and closest friend. It is this intermingling of relationships that has led to Performance being described, with some justification, as ‘the most expensive home movie ever made.’
The film was sold to Warner Bros on the basis of a skimpy treatment about a chance meeting between a rock star and a gangster. There was no proper script. Cammell hadn’t written one. He began the film not knowing how it would end, and would later claim that even halfway through shooting he had no clear idea who would live and who would die. Cammell had scripted two films before Performance but had no experience as a director. Nor did his co-director, Nic Roeg, although he was an experienced and highly respected cinematographer.
Only after filming had begun did Warner executives begin to express doubts about the film’s volatile contents, their nervousness increasing almost by the day, to the point where filming was actually halted and the fate of the project hung in the balance. When, at last, the film was delivered to the studio it was received with shudders of apprehension. At a test screening in Santa Monica members of the audience walked out of the theatre in protest. Legend has it that the wife of one studio executive actually threw up. Warner Bros refused to release the film without substantial cuts and re-editing, and it was to be two years before it was eventually released for public exhibition. By that time its cult status was already assured.
Performance was given its world premiere in New York on 30 July 1970, heralded by an advertisement in the Village Voice showing pictures of Jagger in rock-star and gangster guise, alongside copy which read: ‘Somewhere in your head there’s a wild electric dream. Come see it in Performance, where underground meets underworld.’
The film was greeted by cries of bewilderment and outrage from critics. John Simon, writing in the New York Times, wondered if it wasn’t ‘the most loathsome film of all,’ while Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice described it as ‘the most deliberately decadent film I have ever seen.’
Extraordinarily, the intervening years have done nothing to diminish the impact of Performance. It remains as dazzling, provocative and thought-provoking now as it did thirty years ago – a film which traps ‘a whole era under glass’ certainly, but which transcends the age in which it was made by virtue of its singularity and its brilliance, and which has continued to exercise a powerful fascination on successive generations as one of the greatest British films, of any kind, of all time.
Footnote: Donald Cammell killed himself on 23rd April 1996 with a gun-shot wound to the top of the head, in an eerie re-enactment of Turner’s fatal shooting in Performance.
Decadent Cinema
Isabelle McNeill
Cinema is arguably the most decadent of art forms. A group of strangers come together in a darkened room, not only to lose themselves in fantasy, but also to indulge in communal sensory stimulation. Then there is the seductive passivity of much cinematic viewing pleasure: we lie back and let images and sounds do things to our minds and bodies. We are moved to tears, we are quiveringly frightened, we are convulsed with laughter and we are turned on – all in a public place. Some would argue that watching films is inherently perverse. Scopophilia, voyeurism, narcissism and masochism have all been used by theorists to try to describe and understand the nature of film spectatorship. Whichever perversion – or neurosis – you opt for however, it is undeniable that cinema creates a strange space in between a public sphere of shared experience and a private realm of inner yearnings. Whether or not we are aware of it, we get a kick out of the cinematic spectacle, and that thrill
taps into our most secret fantasies and desires.
Pleasures of the Senses
One of the reasons that cinema is so exciting is that it is a multi-sensory experience. Although it only acts directly upon two of the senses, it can evoke others. The sound made by skin touching skin or the smacking of lips around a tasty morsel, a close-up of fingers moving across a textured surface – such visual and sonic clues connote taste and touch in very powerful ways. There is a deeply indulgent pleasure to be had in films that revel in sensation. Many filmmakers have exploited this, from Jean Renoir lingering on the slippery silkiness of water in Partie de Campagne (1936) to cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s luminous fabrics, shiny surfaces and glowing light in films such as Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004). Few however have devoted such obsessive and perverse attention to the tactile as Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk. Recurrent in his work is a fetishistic displacement of the sexual act onto the sensual experience of other things in the world, with the result that the erotic seeps into unusual places. A close-up image of a white-skinned foot pawing wet mud on a shiny, black rubber boot in ‘La Marée’ (the first segment of Contes Immoraux, Immoral Tales, 1974) is unexpectedly arousing, and after gazing at repeated shots of large yellow snails sucking like salivating mouths over all kinds of surfaces in La Bête (The Beast, 1975), you will never again see gastropods in quite the same light (or at least not until you watch Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts, 1985). Borowczyk’s oddest exploration of the eroticism of objects is perhaps the rare short Une Collection Particulière (1973). First shown as part of a ‘work-in-progress’ screening of Contes Immoraux in 1973, this collector’s cabinet curiosity puts on display an assortment of sexual objects, toys and images. Borowczyk presents the collection (which he himself owned) with lavish attention to touch and rhythm, suggesting an appealing tactility in spite of the often humorous and crude nature of the curios. The creaking and ticking of vintage mechanical toys and old records generates a rhythm that echoes thrusting of a more carnal kind, as well as the movement of film itself (perhaps the ultimate fetish-object for a cinephile). At the same time the camera lingers on the textures of wood, cloth, paper and engravings, from the silk and lace clothing of a masturbating doll, to the ultra-soft velvet case of a smooth ivory dildo. The sense of touch is heightened by the presence, in close-up, of fingertips touching and holding these erotic relics, stimulating our tactile desires as we watch.
Excess
Sensuous cinema can target any erogenous zone, but oral pleasures can be especially debauched in their mingling of touch and taste, sex and food, each indulgence augmenting the other. Perhaps the definitive exploration of decadent devouring is La Grande Bouffe (Blow Out, Marco Ferreri, 1973), which depicts the suicidal gastronomic orgy of four disillusioned friends. Holed up in an opulent villa with plenty of expensive ingredients, they embark upon a culinary extravaganza with the express aim of dying in the most luxuriously gourmand manner imaginable. The randy (but impotent) Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) wants to add sex to the menu, but the skinny prostitutes he sends for are soon sickened by the endless consumption of succulent meats, creamy purees and rich puddings. Enter local schoolmistress Andrea (Andréa Ferréol): a voluptuous redhead with pannacotta skin and insatiable appetites, she seems happy to ease their woes as they gorge themselves to death. The grotesque abundance of food finds a luscious counterpart in her ample body and the two are increasingly intermingled. Her bottom forms the mould for chef Ugo’s last supper, while Philippe’s final mouthful is of pink blancmange breasts Andrea has concocted for him. The real decadence of this film is in its mise-en-scène, feeding the viewer a veritable binge of richly sumptuous colours and elaborate décor. But even if you are drawn to the characters’ decadently nihilistic philosophy, you will probably want to eschew overeating as a suicide method.
Ferreri’s film shows that in the lascivious excesses of decadent cinema the forces of eros and thanatos are never far apart. This idea permeates the work of Peter Greenaway, whose explorations of corporeal decadence also privilege mise-enscène, combining the attention to detail and warm milky light of Vermeer paintings with a wealth of luxurious food, fabric and flesh. Greenaway never shirks from probing the absurdity of bodies programmed for sex and death. Perhaps the most violently gastronomic of his films is The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), which whips up an impressive grande bouffe of its own, its action unfolding among the kitchens, toilets and groaning tables of a gourmet restaurant. The suspense is almost unbearable as the eponymous thief, a brutal thug, catches on to his wife’s fervent affair with a quietly bookish lover. But the narrative dwindles before the outrageous and disturbing set pieces, the frame crammed with comestibles and rampant or mortified flesh. Stomach-turning in the extreme, and seen as an allegory for Thatcherism, the film reveals the chaos of unbridled appetites, be they for power, sex or cuisine.
Performance and Spectacle
If décor has so much potential for decadence in cinema, it is in part because of the fantastical possibilities created by setting a scene. From Marlene Dietrich’s glittering sequins and top hat in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, Sternberg, 1930) to the elaborate masks in Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999), theatrical props provide liberation from our everyday identities as well as the vicarious thrill of exhibitionism. Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) brings the theme into its title and enacts the dizzying possibilities of role-play in its narrative. Chas (James Fox) is a violent gangster who takes refuge in a room belonging to the charismatic Mr. Turner (Mick Jagger), a former rock star in need of new excitement. The two men seem poles apart but Chas becomes drawn into Turner’s drug-fuelled, chaotic world and in experimenting with the androgynous wigs and blouses of rock ‘n’ roll style his sense of self begins to waver. Forget the explicit sex scenes with Anita Pallenberg, the climactic moment of audio-visual pleasure for the viewer is the performance of Memo from Turner, which combines a fabulously cool rock song with the dreamlike – or nightmarish – blurring of the two men’s identities.
Dressing up is not only about freedom from the self, it can also be relished as sheer spectacle. Nowhere is decadence more spectacularly explored than in Max Ophüls’ 1955 film Lola Montès. Forced by circumstances and a mercenary ringmaster to act out the scandalous and titillating tale of her life as dancer and courtesan, Lola endures the lecherous gaze of the audience as she bares her soul in a lavish acrobatic show, complete with horses, colourful tableaux and a final death-defying leap. As the ringmaster’s narration melts into Lola’s own flashbacks, we lose track of the distinction between circus performance and life, poignantly revealing her whole existence as an exotic masquerade leading to an inevitable decline. The overbearing CinemaScope frame and vibrant colours are breathtaking, while the sadomasochistic overtones lend a dark twist: the sadistic image of the ringmaster cracking his whip to incite the faltering Lola to continue her tale aligns us uncomfortably with the salivating circus audience, for we cannot deny that we too are enjoying the spectacle of her descent.
Unbridled Desire
There is something irresistibly erotic about uncovering shameful secrets. The virtuous ice-maiden suspected of harbouring a wild and disruptive desire beneath the cool surface has been a powerful fantasy since well before Freud – think of the jaded Valmont tormented by lust for pious, prudish Mme de Tourvel. Coldness and detachment leave a void that cries out to be filled with fantasy. Hence the wicked appeal of Catherine Deneuve, a more decadent star than Monroe or Bardot precisely because of her butter-wouldn’t-melt appearance. In films from Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) where she plays an uptight young lady driven to murderous deed by repressed desire to François Ozon’s kitsch musical 8 Femmes (8 Women, 2002), where a catfight with Fanny Ardant turns into one of cinema’s sexiest kisses, Deneuve embodies the well-groomed blonde with a tempestuous inner life. The most iconic example is Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), in which Deneuve plays Severine, a reserved married woman obsessed wi
th masochistic fantasies, who takes up daytime prostitution to satisfy her cravings and curiosity. Buñuel wisely uses pared-down luxury rather than excess in his mise-en-scène, recognising that fantasy scenes in which Severine is brutally horsewhipped or pelted with mud are all the more pleasurable for their violation of a restrained and orderly world.
Like other surrealists, Buñuel realised that letting repressed desire burst forth on screen made for exciting art, as in the infamous scene where a woman sucks a giant statue’s toe in L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age, Buñuel and Dalí, 1930). But shocking surreality is not the only way for cinema to lead us into uncharted sexual territories. The documentary-style cinema of Monika Treut takes us into the backrooms and bars that other cameras ignore, delighting in the widest possible panoply of sexual proclivities. In Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine, 1988), a young journalist sets out to research an article on romantic love. Reaching a dead end in Hamburg, she moves to San Francisco where she discovers a thriving queer scene and undreamt of erotic pleasures. Once again it is a performance that provides the most absorbing moment of the film. We watch Dorothee (Ina Blum) watching the mesmerising Ramona perform a strip-tease in drag, mimicking a dirty machismo that culminates in an unforgettable masturbation mime with a beer bottle. Of course following a character’s sexual awakening will always be ripe with potential for decadent pleasures (see also Anaïs Nin’s sensual journey of discovery in Henry and June, Kaufman, 1990), but a supplementary gratification in Die Jungfrauenmaschine is a purely cinematic one: the delight of watching the ghosts of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich reappear in Blum’s languidly expressive face, rendered in dreamily luxurious monochrome by cinematographer Elfi Mikesch.