From Greek statues to athletes in the Olympics, the human body is more often than not represented in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing in form and flawless in functionality. But what if it is less than perfect? What was it like before it was tamed by language and etiquette?
Body Song, the latest installment in the POP Cinema (國民戲院) program, takes these questions as the starting point in its observation of the body, which is both the eternal motif in our aesthetics-obsessed society, while also subject to censure, taboo and suppression.
In Balkan Baroque and Orlan: Carnal Art, the body’s ugliness and imperfection is manifested through the disturbing arts of Orlan and Marina Abramovic, two heirs of the Vienna Actionism, a short movement in the 1960s best known for its bodily transgression and violence. Abramovic self-mutilates with needles and knives in Balkan Baroque, and in Orlan: Carnal Art, Orlan uses her body as the raw material of her art as she undergoes a series of physical alterations through plastic surgery.
Treated as something grotesque that needs to be concealed and quarantined, the diseased body is the focal point in Trying to Kiss the Moon, an autobiographical film by experimental and feature filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin composed of home videos, unfinished works and edit-outs. Having been wheelchair-bound since a bout with polio rendered him paralyzed at age 7, Dwoskin takes the abnormal body as the subject of his film, with each zoom expressing an extension of his desire toward women.
“In Dwoskin’s film we see a desire to watch, but this is always interrupted and suspended. This is why his works were used by Laura Mulvey for her study on the male gaze,” festival curator Wang Pai-chang (王派章) said.
The compilation of video works by Donigan Cumming takes an intimate look at the body that is aged, unsightly and deteriorated, as opposed to the youthful and lithesome body worshiped by the mainstream society. The often intrusive and manipulative approach Cumming adopts to documenting ailing and elderly men and women raises questions about the ethics of documentary filmmaking, yet it is exactly through the director’s intimacy with the people he documents that audiences can come closer to a realm so private and real that it is rarely seen by the outside world.
The body is an ambiguous subject in mainstream cinema. It’s taboo and desired at the same time. To curator Wang, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Lolita by Stanley Kubrick are not about the erotic but the corporeal, a longing for a flawless carnal form to which we, with a civilized and tamed body, can never return.
Like Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small, Freaks presents an unfamiliar world of the dwarf, Siamese twins and other circus freaks. A popular genre director in Hollywood, Tod Browning had wanted to mark another high point in his career with this film, but the candid display of the deformed bodies in Freak caused such controversy on its release that it was subsequently banned in the UK for 30 years.
In Fernando Arrabal’s Long Live Death and Carmelo Bene’s Our Lady of the Turks, the narrative is carried forward through the language of the body rather than that of words. A leading Spanish surrealist, Arrabal abandons narrative conventions and chooses to tell the story through what the body represses and repels in his debut feature centered on the themes of youth, sex, crime and punishment.
A heavyweight in the contemporary theater in Italy, director Bene again forsakes words in Our Lady of the Turks to create a world where people scream, twitch and moan, where the body is a vehicle of emotions and thoughts, and absolute liberation is made possible through a body that is twisted, deformed and out of control.
Commissioned by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain, Military Court and Prison (軍法局) by Taiwanese contemporary artist Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁) is a 35mm film about the ghosts that linger in political prisons. Festival curator Wang says the film is Chen’s most abstract exposition on the body, a recurrent motif in his art, where reality, memory, senses and emotions mingle.
“To me, Chen’s works are something that artists in the West can never make. They (Chen’s films) are directed inwards, taking the spectator into a state of hypnosis in which we see what we think, not the thing we ‘really’ see on the screen,” Wang said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located