French erotica
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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| He spent time preparing the ''Architecture Civile'', a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]]. Some of them are sexually explicit (''[[Le Dieu Priape]]'' [http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7703791r] (ca. 1779 - 1795) which shows a rather large male [[phallus]] and ''Trois images du sexe féminin'') and are kept in the ''[[Les livres de l'Enfer|Enfer]]'' of the library. Most of these drawings have been reproduced in Duboy's book but can also be found in ''[[Sade / Surreal]]''. | He spent time preparing the ''Architecture Civile'', a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]]. Some of them are sexually explicit (''[[Le Dieu Priape]]'' [http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7703791r] (ca. 1779 - 1795) which shows a rather large male [[phallus]] and ''Trois images du sexe féminin'') and are kept in the ''[[Les livres de l'Enfer|Enfer]]'' of the library. Most of these drawings have been reproduced in Duboy's book but can also be found in ''[[Sade / Surreal]]''. | ||
| + | ==== Félix Vallotton ==== | ||
| + | [[Image:Félix Vallotton 001.jpg|thumb|200px|left|Self portrait, [[1885]], oil on canvas, by Félix Vallotton]] | ||
| + | [[Image:The_Abduction_of_Europe_by_Valloton,_1908.jpg|thumb|right|200px|''[[Abduction]] of [[Europa (mythology)|Europe]]'' ([[1908]]) by [[Félix Vallotton]]]] | ||
| + | [[Image:Felix Vallotton Study of Buttocks.jpg|thumb|right|200px|''[[Study of Buttocks]] (c. [[1884]]) by [[Félix Vallotton]]]] | ||
| == 20th century == | == 20th century == | ||
Revision as of 20:05, 24 April 2009
Anonymous satirical caricature of the Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise (1717-1757); this engraving is a good example of "pornography" as a tool for political subversion during France's ancien régime.
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- world erotica, French popular culture, French striptease, libertine novel, French exploitation, French literature, L'enfer, prostitution in France
No nation has enjoyed a greater reputation for producing and tolerating erotica --from the 17th century libertine novels to the "whore dialogues" to the original Pads edition of Joyce's Ulysses-- than France. Philosophe Denis Diderot penned an 18th-century novel featuring talking body parts, while poet Guillaume Apollinaire spiced up one of his short works with fetishism. And then there's Gay Paree, Marquis de Sade and Brigitte Bardot.
Erotic art
Erotic art covers any artistic work including paintings, sculptures, photographs, music and writings that is intended to evoke erotic arousal or that depicts scenes of love-making.
Due to censorship, artists past and present, have to resort to pretexts for displaying the naked human form. With painters of the past, the depiction of historical, mythological, and religious subjects often provided such pretexts for nudity in art, as in the temptation of saint Anthony, the massacre of the innocents, the battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs), Leda and the Swan, the three graces, and Venus, who has become a byword for the female nude, tout court.
Over time, secular excuses for showing the undraped human form complemented and, later, supplanted these historical, mythological, and religious pretexts, athleticism being one such excuse, as in Edouard Manet’s Olympia. In the traditional arts, nudity has long since become accepted, but the same is not yet true with regard to more recent artistic media, such as film.
Erotic literature
Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts which sexually arouse the reader, whether written with that intention or not. Such erotica takes the form of novels, short stories, poetry, true-life memoirs, and sex manuals. Erotic literature has often been subject to censorship and legal restraints on publication.
Erotic photography
The French pioneered erotic photography, producing nude postcards that became the subject of an officer's letter to President Abraham Lincoln after they were found in the possession of U.S. troops, according to An Underground Education by Richard Zacks. A Brief History of Postcards explains, "A majority of the French nude postcards were called postcards because of the size. They were never meant to be postally sent. It was illegal".
Instead, nudes were marketed in a monthly magazine called "La Beauté" that targeted artists looking for poses. Each issue contained 75 nude images which could be ordered by mail, in the form of postcards, hand-tinted or sepia toned. Street dealers, tobacco shops, and a variety of other vendors bought the photographs for resale to American tourists.
Erotic film
The use of sex in film has been controversial since the earliest use of cinematography and the first portrayals of love scenes and nude scenes. Ever since the silent era of film there have been actors and actresses who have shown parts of their bodies or undergarments, or dressed and behaved in ways considered sexually provocative by contemporary standards. Some films have been criticized and/or banned by various religious groups and governments because of this. The difference with pornographic films is that erotic films are simulated. For further distinctions, see the erotica/pornography pages.
In early 1970s, French viewers had become familiar with stag films shot in the Netherlands, featuring French actresses such as Claudine Beccarie and Sylvia Bourdon. The first genuine French pornographic film Les Baiseuses by Guy Gibert was released in 1975. The first French porn film that met international success was Le Sexe qui parle by Claude Mulot, which was released the same year (followed by a sequel two years later). This film was so successful that it was exported to the US, with the name Pussy Talk.
In 1976, a law that put considerable sanctions on pornographic films in distribution and taxation, known popularly as Code X was imposed, creating a situation that forced pornography develop itself on its own right. Since then, pornography has been a growing economy in France, now existing in various forms from magazines to satellite TV broadcasting.
Etymologies
Erotica
- Erotic (1621)
1621 (implied in erotical), from Fr. érotique, from Gk. erotikos, from eros (gen. erotos) "sexual love".
- Erotica (1854)
from Gk. neut. pl. of erotikos "amatory," from eros; originally a booksellers' catalogue heading.
"one driven mad by passionate love" (sometimes also used in the sense of "nymphomaniac") is from 1858.
- Eroticism (?) --Douglas Harper via http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=erotica&searchmode=none [May 2005]
Pornography
The word derives from the Greek pornographia, which derives from the Greek words porne ("prostitute"), grapho ("to write or record"), and the suffix ia (meaning "state of", "property of", or "place of"), thus meaning "a place to record prostitutes". See also: whore dialogues
The terms pornographer, pornography and porn were not attested before the 1850s in the English language, though it had been used by Restif de la Bretonne in his 1769 Le Pornographe. We will therefore distinguish between avant la lettre and apres la lettre pornography.
12th century
The Letters of Heloise and Abelard is a series of letters between French priest Peter Abelard and his female student Héloïse after their separation and his castration. These letters were also the inspiration for Alexander Pope's poem "Eloisa to Abelard".
These letters are only known by posthumous copies which makes it impossible to ascertain their authenticity, no original copies of these letters exist. Yet even if other authors have been attributed to the letters, the name of Jean de Meung has cropped up, the letters' authenticity remain the most probable thesis.
Eloisa to Abelard is a poem by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) inspired by the 12th-century story of Héloïse's illicit love for, and secret marriage to, her teacher Pierre Abélard, perhaps the most popular teacher and philosopher in Paris, and the brutal vengeance her family exacts when they castrate him, not realizing that the lovers had married.
15th century
Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles
The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles is an anonymous collection of nouvelles supposed to be narrated by various persons at the court of Philippe le Bon, and collected by Antoine de la Sale in the 1456-1457. The work borrowed from Boccaccio's Decameron (1350-1353) and has in fact been subtitled the French Decameron.
The nouvelle as genre is considered the first example of literary prose in French, the first text in this category is generally cited as Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles.
The stories are bawdy, ribald and burlesque, with titles such as The Monk-Doctor, The Armed Cuckold, The Drunkard In Paradise, The Castrated Clerk and the The Husband As Doctor.
François Villon
François Villon (ca. 1431 - after 5 January 1463) was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison. The question "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?", taken from the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis and translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", is one of the most famous lines of translated secular poetry in the English-speaking world.
16th century
The presumed subject of the painting Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses soeurs by an unknown artist (c.1594), is Gabrielle d'Estrées, mistress of King Henry IV of France. In the painting, Gabrielle sits up nude in a bath, holding (assumedly) Henry's coronation ring, whilst her sister sits nude beside her and pinches her right nipple.
The Heptameron is a collection of 72 short stories written in French by Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549). It has the form of a frame narrative and was inspired by the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was originally intended to contain one hundred stories covering ten days just as the Decameron does but at Marguerite’s death it was only completed as far as the second story of the eighth day. Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity and other matters romantic and sexual.
In Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais occasionally speaks explicitly in describing both emetic and erotic subjects, but such references are always humorous.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father (Gargantua) and his son (Pantagruel) and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein. There is much crudity and scatological humor as well as a large amount of violence. Long lists of vulgar insults fill several chapters.
17th century
Precursors to the libertine writers were Théophile de Viau (1590-1626) and Charles de Saint-Evremond (1610-1703), who were inspired by Epicurus and the publication of Petronius.
Les Vies des Dames galantes
- Les Vies des Dames galantes (1665-1666)
Brantôme's posthumously published mémoirs are biographical sketches of the "gallant" men and women of the European courts. Its best known volume is Les Vies des Dames Galantes which was quoted by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and illustrated by Paul-Emile Bécat.
Académie des dames ou le meursius francais
Académie des dames ou le meursius francais is an early work of erotic fiction written by Nicolas Chorier, first published in Latin in c.1659 as Aloisiae Sigaeae, Toletanae, Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris et Veneris.
The book is written in the form of a series of dialogues with Tullia, a twenty-six year-old Italian woman, the wife of Callias, who is charged with the sexual initiation of her young cousin, Ottavia, to whom she declares, "You mother asked to reveal to you the most mysterious secrets of bridal bed and to teach you what you must be with your husband, which your husband will also be, touching these small things which so strongly inflame men's passion. This night, so that I can indoctrinate you in all of this liberated language, will sleep together in my bed, which I would like to be able to say will have been the softest of Venus's lace."
L'École des filles
L’Escole des Filles ou la Philosophie des dames (a so-called whore dialogue) is an erotic work of fiction first described by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary. It was first published anonymously in Paris in 1655 by an. The presumed authors are Michel Millot and/or Jean L'Ange [or de Lange].
Originally published in 1655, this French text has also been translated as 'The School for Venus,' and despite its initial title (École des filles), should not be confused with The School for Girls (L'École des biches).
Letters of a Portuguese Nun
- Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669)
The Letters of a Portuguese Nun (Fr. Les Lettres portugaises), first published anonymously by Claude Barbin in Paris in 1669, are a work believed by most scholars to be epistolary fiction (comprising five love letters) written by Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne, comte de Guilleragues (1628–1685).
The passionate letters were a European publishing sensation (in part because of their presumed authenticity) and set a precedent for sentimentalism and for the literary genres of the sentimental novel and the epistolary novel into the 18th century. A 2006 book written by Myriam Cyr argues that the letters are in fact authentic.
Vénus dans le Cloître
- Vénus dans le Cloître (1683)
The Nun in her Smock or Venus in the Cloister is the English translation of the French novel Vénus dans le Cloître (1683), ascribed to Abbé du Prat.
In 1724, Edmund Curll published the "pornographic" title that argued that it is the church, and not Christ, that forbids sexual exploration. In 1727 he was convicted under the common law offence of disturbing the peace for its publication. It appears to be the first conviction for obscenity in the United Kingdom, and set a legal precedent for other convictions.
The format of the book is an example of a whore dialogue. In a series of five dramatic conversations between two fictional nuns (sister Agnès and sister Angélique) are related. In these conversations, the elder more experienced woman instructs the younger about sex.
18th century
Literature
The libertine novel was an 18th century literary genre of which the roots lay in the European but mainly French libertine tradition. The genre effectively ended with the French Revolution. Themes of libertine novels were anti-clericalism, anti-establishment and eroticism.
Authors include Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (Le Sopha, conte moral, 1742), Denis Diderot (Les Bijoux indiscrets, 1748), Marquis de Sade (L'Histoire de Juliette, 1797-1801) and Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782).
Other famous titles are Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux (1741) and Thérèse Philosophe (1748).
Precursors to the libertine writers were Théophile de Viau (1590-1626) and Charles de Saint-Evremond (1610-1703), who were inspired by Epicurus and the publication of Petronius.
Enfer is French for hell. L'enfer also refers to the private case of the French national library. It was founded in the 1830s and separated works which were an "outrage aux bonnes mœurs" from the rest of the library collection. The contents of this library were cataloged by Pascal Pia and Guillaume Apollinaire in the 1913 Les livres de l'Enfer, and in 2007 the "Enfer" was opened to the public in an exhibition titled Eros au secret.
Robert Darnton is a cultural historian who has covered this genre extensively.
Histoire de Dom Bougre
Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux is a French libertine novel from 1741 attributed to Gervaise de Latouche. The name Bougre refers to the French term boulgre meaning bugger.
Dom Bougre designated the famous abbé Desfontaines.
The novel was republished in 1778 as Mémoires de Saturnin (Paris, Cazin).
Le Sopha, conte moral
- Le Sopha, conte moral, (1742)
Le Sopha, conte moral is a 1742 libertine novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon.
The story concerns a young courtier whose soul in a previous life was cursed to travel from sofa to sofa as a sofa in search of true love and not to be reincarnated in a human body until a man and a woman sincerely in love with each other had consummated their passion on "his" sofa.
Many of the characters in the novel are satirical portraits of influential and powerful Parisians of Crébillon’s time. For this reason the book was published anonymously and with a false imprint. Nevertheless, Crébillon was discovered to be the author and, as a consequence, he was exiled to a distance of fifty leagues from Paris.
Les Bijoux indiscrets
Les bijoux indiscrets (English title: The Indiscreet Jewels) was Denis Diderot's first novel, published anonymously in 1748. It is an allegory that portrays Louis XV as the sultan Mangogul of the Congo who owns a magic ring that makes women's genitals ("jewels") talk.
A comparable trope that Diderot must have known is found in the ribald fabliau Le Chevalier Qui Fist parler les Cons.
Characters include Zima, Cucufa, Mangogul.
Thérèse Philosophe
- Thérèse philosophe (1748)
Thérèse Philosophe is a 1748 French novel ascribed to Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens.
Thérèse philosophe was devoted to recounting the relationship between highly-publicized trial involving Cathérine Cadière and Jean-Baptiste Girard. This novel was written and published in France, during the Age of Enlightenment. It has been chiefly regarded as a pornographic novel, which accounts for its massive sales in 18th-century France (as pornographic works were the most popular bestsellers of the time, see Darnton). Aside from that however, this novel represents a public conveyance (and arguably perversion) for some ideas of the Philosophes.
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) is a famous French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in 1782.
The book fascinates with its dark undertones. It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two rivals who use sex as a weapon to humiliate and degrade others, all the while enjoying their cruel games. It also depicts the decadence of the French aristocracy shortly before the French Revolution; thus it is seen as a work that exposes the perversions of the so-called Ancien Régime.
The book is an epistolary novel, composed entirely of letters written by the various characters to each other. In particular, the letters between Valmont and the Marquise drive the plot, with those of other characters serving as illustrations to give the story its depth.
The story has been adapted as a film several times—notably in 1988 as Dangerous Liaisons, directed by Stephen Frears, in 1989 as Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman with screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, and in 1999 as Cruel Intentions, written and directed by Roger Kumble.
The novel is often claimed to be the origin of the saying "Revenge is a dish best served cold". However the expression does not actually occur in the original novel.
Marquis de Sade
Numerous writers and artistes, especially those concerned with sexuality, have been both repelled and fascinated by Marquis de Sade.
Simone de Beauvoir (in her essay Must we burn Sade?, published in Les Temps modernes, December 1951 and January 1952) and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding that of existentialism by some 150 years. He has also been seen as a precursor of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis in his focus on sexuality as a motive force. The surrealists admired him as one of their forerunners, and Guillaume Apollinaire famously called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed".
Pierre Klossowski, in his 1947 book Sade mon prochain ("Sade my neighbour"), analyzes Sade's philosophy as a precursor of Nietzsche's nihilism, negating both Christian values and the materialism of the Enlightenment.
One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is titled "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" and interprets the ruthless and calculating behavior of Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment. Similarly, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited in his 1966 essay "Kant avec Sade" that de Sade's ethic was the complementary completion of the categorical imperative originally formulated by Immanuel Kant.
In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist reading of Sade, seeing him as a "moral pornographer" who creates spaces for women. Similarly, Susan Sontag defended both Sade and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye) in her essay, "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither should be censored.
By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw Sade as the exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of Sade. Susie Bright claims that Dworkin's first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be seen as a modern re-telling of Sade's Juliette.
L'Histoire de Juliette
- L'Histoire de Juliette (1797-1801)
Juliette is a novel written by the Marquis de Sade and published 1797–1801, accompanying Sade's Nouvelle Justine. Whilst Justine, Juliette's sister, was a virtuous woman who consequently encountered nothing but despair and abuse, Juliette is an amoral nymphomaniac who ends up successful and happy.
The full title of the novel in the original French is Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, and the English title is "Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded" or "Justine; or Good Conduct Well-Chastised".
Both Justine and Juliette were published anonymously. Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author, and as a result Sade was incarcerated without trial for the last 13 years of his life.
Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome ou l’École du libertinage
The 120 Days of Sodom or the School of Freedoms (Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage) is a book written by the French writer Marquis de Sade in 1784. It relates the story of four wealthy men who enslaved 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually tortured them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes.
The book was not published until 1905. Due to its extreme sexual and violent nature, the book remained banned in many countries for a long time. The film adaptation by Pasolini underwent a similar fate.
Andréa de Nerciat
André Robert de Nerciat (Dijon, 1739 - Naples, 1800) was a French writer of libertine novels and erotic fiction, best known for his novel Le Diable au corps.
Antoine François Prévost
Antoine François Prévost (April 1, 1697 - December 23, 1763), usually known simply as the Abbé Prévost, was a French author and novelist best known for his forbidden sentimental novel Manon Lescaut.
Restif de la Bretonne
Nicolas-Edme Rétif or Nicolas-Edme Restif (October 23, 1734 – February 2, 1806), called Rétif de la Bretonne, was a French novelist, author of fiction works such as The Anti-Justine (1798) and non-fiction Le Pornographe. He was the son of a farmer, and was born at Sacy (Yonne). The term retifism was named after him. The Anti-Justine : or, the Joys of Eros, first published in French in 1798 as L'Anti-Justine. It is an erotic novel by Restif de la Bretonne. It was a reaction to Sade's Justine, using a very similar style to describe a directly opposite political point of view.The English edition is currently published by Creation Books.
- "The Anti-Justine is a pornographic novelization of Restif de la Bretonne's own life and sexual debauches, which the author tried to defend "morally" by declaring his book to be an "antidote" to the supposed poison of de Sade; yet the book is a monumental odyssey of sexual depravity that often rivals de Sade in its relentless explicitness.
- "First published in 1798, this erotic classic is now published in a brand new translation. This novel was de la Breton's attempt to write something even more obscene than the books of his arch-rival de Sade. It is one of the last classic of erotica currently out-of-print and this new edition will restore it to an avid readership. --Creation Books book description
Visual arts
François Boucher
François Boucher (September 29 1703 – May 30 1770) was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative - often erotic - allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, and intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture. He painted several portraits of his illustrious patroness, Madame de Pompadour and is best-known for his depictions of Marie-Louise O'Murphy.
In 1752, at fourteen years of age, O'Murphy posed nude for a memorable and provocative portrait by artist François Boucher. Her beauty caught the eye of Louis XV. He took her as one of his mistresses, and she quickly became a favourite, giving birth to the king's illegitimate daughter, Agathe Louise de Saint-Antoine (1754 – 1774). General de Beaufranchet is also thought to have been her child but conceived legitimately with the comte de Beaufranchet.
Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (April 5, 1732 – August 22, 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the ancien régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawing and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying the atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
The Swing (L'Escarpolette), also known as The Happy Accidents of the Swing (Les Hasards Heureux de l'Escarpolette, the original title), is an 18th century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It is considered as one of the masterpieces of the rococo era. The painting depicts a young man hidden in the bushes, watching a woman on a swing, being pushed by a bishop. As the lady goes high on the swing, she let him take a furtive peep under her dress. As a symbol of loss of virginity, the lady let one of her shoes fly into the air.
Antoine Watteau
Jean-Antoine Watteau (October 10, 1684 – July 18, 1721) was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement (in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens), and revitalized the waning Baroque idiom, which eventually became known as Rococo. He is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes: scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with an air of theatricality. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.
He is known for such paintings as Jupiter and Antiope and La Toilette.
19th century
Before the 1860s, Western artists needed a pretext to depict eroticism and nudity. Mythology or martyrology were the most popular pretexts. This changed after the 1860s with the arrival of realism in modern art. A key painting that illustrates this transition is Manet's Olympia.
Beginning with Manet's Olympia, 1863 and jumping to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, modern art took as its subject matter the urban landscape of the Industrial Revolution, which included such themes as prostitution.
In 1877, French artist Edouard Manet exhibited "Nana", a life-size portrayal of an prostitute in undergarments, standing before her fully clothed gentleman caller. The model for it was the popular courtesan Henriette Hauser. Manet was so much taken with the description of the "precociously immoral" Nana in Zola's L'Assommoir that he gave the title "Nana" to his portrait of Henriette Hauser. The painting was rejected by the hanging committee for the Paris Salon of 1877.
Literature
Fiction
Gamiani
Gamiani, ou Deux Nuits d'Excès, is a French novel first published in 1833. Its author is supposed to have been Alfred de Musset, and the eponymous heroine a portrait of his lover, George Sand. It became a bestseller among nineteenth century erotic literature.
Alcide Bonneau's translations
- Alcide Bonneau's translations
Alcide Bonneau (Orléans, 1836, Paris, 1904) was a French intellectual, philologist, literary critic and translator of erotica and curiosa. He is also the author of Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity.
He was lexicographer at the Grand dictionnaire of Pierre Larousse (on Spanish and Italian literature), as well as the Nouveau Larousse illustré.
From 1876 to 1893, he was the principal collaborator of the editor Isidore Liseux (1835-1894), for whom he edited, translated and annotated some fifty works labelled as erotic or simply « curieux » : la On Civility in Children by Erasmus (1877); the Facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini (1878); the Raggionamenti by Aretino (1879-1880); the Dialogues de Luisa Sigea by Nicolas Chorier (1881); the Sonetti lussuriosi by Aretino (1882); the Apophoreta, or De Figuris Veneris, by German scholar Forberg, under the title Manuel d’érotologie classique (1882); La Cazzaria by Antonio Vignali (1882); Poésies complètes by Giorgio Baffo (1884); Raffaella by Piccolomini (1884); the Hecatelegium by Pacifico Massimi (1885); The Mandrake, a comedy by Machiavelli (1887); Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman by Delgado (1887); Hermaphroditus by Beccadelli (1892); etc. All translations were annotated, often running longer that the actual text.
In 1887, he collected a number of these essays and published them as Curiosa: essais critiques de littérature ancienne ignorée ou mal connue, it is said that the later bookselling category curiosa thanks its coinage to this collection.
Charles Carrington
Charles Carrington (November 11, 1867 - October 15, 1921) was a leading British publisher of erotica, including flagellation novels that were illustrated by the illustrator Martin van Maële. Born Paul Harry Ferdinando in Bethnal Green, England, he published in Paris where he also managed a bookshop and for a short period of time moved his activities to Brussels. Carrington also published works of classical literature, including the first English translation of Aristophanes "Comedies," and books by famous authors such as Oscar Wilde and Anatole France, in order to hide his "undercover" erotica publications under a veil of legitimacy. Carrington died at St-Ivry, France.
Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal
Les Fleurs du mal (literal trans. "The Flowers of Evil") is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. The poems represented the near-totality of his poetic output since 1840. First published in 1857, the poems were of influence to the symbolists and modernists. Their subject matter deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. A number of the poems were banned in France following an obscenity trial on August 20, 1857. Ernest Pinard, the magistrate who ruled the case had also been involved in the Madame Bovary trial.
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (August 30, 1811 – October 23, 1872) was a French writer best known today for his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), the novella La Morte amoureuse (1836) and his preface to the 1868 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.
While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert and Oscar Wilde.
He is said to have coined the phrase art for art's sake, was a member of the Bouzingo, a reference in the decadent movement and a member of the Club des Hashischins.
Octave Mirbeau
Octave Mirbeau (February 16, 1848 in Trévières - February 16, 1917) was a French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde. His best-known works are The Torture Garden and The Diary of a Chambermaid.
The Torture Garden ([fr: Le Jardin des supplices) is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau and was first published in 1899, during the Dreyfus Affair. The novel is ironically dedicated : "To the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern men, I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood."
Published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau’s novel is a loosely assembled reworking of texts composed at different eras, featuring different styles, and showcasing different characters. Beginning with material stemming from articles on the 'Law of Murder' discussed in the "Frontispice" ("The Manuscript"), the novel continues with a farcical critique of French politics as seen in "En Mission" ("The Mission") and then moves on to an account of a visit to a Cantonese prison by a narrator accompanied by the sadist/hysteric Clara, who delights in witnessing flayings, crucifixions and explaining the beauty of torture to her companion ("Le Jardin des supplices", "The Garden").
There is an allegory about the hypocrisy of European 'civilisation' and about the 'Law of Murder'. There is also a denunciation of bloody French and English colonialism and a ferocious attack on what Mirbeau saw as the corrupt morality of bourgeois capitalist society and the state, which are based on murder.
But Mirbeau’s multiple transgressions of the rules of verisimilitude, his disregard for novelistic convention problematize the issue of the novel’s genre affiliation and leave open the question of the author’s moral message, leaving the readers of today in a state of wonderment, perplexity, and shock.
Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset, (December 11, 1810 – May 2, 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist, best-known for Les Caprices de Marianne, an 1833 play which served as the basis for Jean Renoir's 1939 film, The Rules of the Game; and his series of poems Les Nuits. The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand, which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, Confession d'un enfant du siècle, and from her point of view in her Elle et lui.
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (November 2, 1808 – April 23, 1889), was a French novelist and short story writer. He specialised in a kind of mysterious tale that examines hidden motivation and hinted evil bordering (but never crossing into) the supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James and Proust. His best-known collection is The She-Devils, which includes the cult classic Happiness in Crime and is still in print from Dedalus Books. Most recently his Une vieille maîtresse (An Elderly Mistress, 1851) was adapted to cinema by French director Catherine Breillat: its English title is The Last Mistress.
He is variously lumped in with the Late French Romantics, The Decadents, Symbolists and is included in the Genealogy of the Cruel Tale and The Romantic Agony. He is considered a practitioner of the Fantastique and a dandy.
Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs (December 10, 1870, Ghent - June 6, 1925, Paris) was a Belgian bibliophile, erotomaniac, poet and novelist, noted for his lesbian themed erotica. His best known works are the literary mystification Songs of Bilitis (1894) which was the inspiration for Bilitis (1977), a softcore film by David Hamilton; and Woman and Puppet (1898), adapted for film by Josef von Sternberg as The Devil is a Woman (1935) and as That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) by Luis Buñuel.
Pierre Louÿs is better known nowadays for his friendships rather than his own poetry: he was one of the composer Claude Debussy's closest friends, he travelled with André Gide, he attended Mallarmé's soirees, and campaigned for Oscar Wilde's release from prison.
Georges Pichard adapted several works of Louÿs to graphic novel format, including The She-devils (1926).
The Songs of Bilitis (Les Chansons de Bilitis; Paris, 1894) is a collection of erotic poetry by Pierre Louÿs with strong lesbian themes.
The book's sensual poems are in the manner of Sappho; the introduction claims they were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, written by a woman of Ancient Greece called Bilitis, a courtesan and contemporary of Sappho, to whose 'life' Louÿs dedicated a small section of his book. On publication, the volume deceived even the most expert of scholars. However, the poems were actually clever fabulations, authored by Louÿs himself, but are still considered important literature.
In 1977, a French film titled Bilitis was released, directed by David Hamilton. It had little connection with Pierre Louÿs' original, being concerned with a twentieth century girl and her sexual awakening.
Trois Filles de leurs mères (The She-Devils, literally Three girls and their mother) is a French erotic novel by Pierre Louÿs written in 1910 and published clandestinely in 1926. Susan Sontag in her essay the Pornographic Imagination describes it as one of the few works of erotic literature to deserve true literary status. It was adapted for film by José Bénazéraf [1] and as a graphic novel by Georges Pichard. André Pieyre de Mandiargues described it as Pierre Louÿs's masterpiece.
From the publisher Creation Books:
- A mother and her three daughters...sharing their inexhaustible sexual favours between the same young man, each other, and anyone else who enters their web of depravity. From a chance encounter on the stairway with a voluptuous young girl, the narrator is drawn to become the plaything of four rapacious females, experiencing them all in various combinations of increasingly wild debauchery, until they one day vanish as mysteriously as they had appeared.
Kathleen Murphy remarks about the novel that it "remains Pierre Louys's most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity."
Inspired by the relationship Louÿs had with José María de Heredia and her three daughters (with one of whom (the youngest) he had been married) known for their loose morals, the author presents us with a man « X*** », who is visited by a 36-year-old prostitute, Teresa, and her three daughters, Mauricette, Lili and Charlotte.
Printers of erotica in the late 1800s
Printers of erotica in the late 1800s: Jules Gay, Henry Kistemaeckers, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, Isidore Liseux
Theory
Alfred Binet
Alfred Binet (July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911), French psychologist and inventor of the first usable IQ test. He also wrote "Du Fétichisme dans l’amour." Du Fétichisme dans l’amour is an essay by Alfred Binet first published in the Revue philosophique of 1887. It was the first text to apply the word fetishism in a sexual context.
Visual arts
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies or universities.
Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des beaux-arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart. In this context it is often called "academism", "academicism", "L'art pompier", and "eclecticism", and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism".
L'art pompier, literally "Fireman Art", is a derisory late nineteenth century French term for large "official" academic art paintings of the time, especially historical or allegorical ones. It derives from the fancy helmets, with horse-hair tails, worn at the time by French firemen - now only for parades - which are fatally similar to the Greek-style helmets often worn in such works by allegorical personifications, classical warriors, or Napoleonic cavalry. It also suggests half-puns in French with Pompéin ("from Pompeii"), and pompeux ("pompous"). Pompier art was seen by those who used the term as the epitome of the values of the bourgeoisie, and as insincere and overblown.
L'art Pompier (a term supporters mostly avoid) has enjoyed something of a critical revival in the last twenty years, partly caused by the new Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it is displayed on more equal terms with the Impressionists and Realist painters of the period.
The Manifeste Pompier (Fireman Manifesto) by Louis-Marie Lecharny, was published in Paris in 1990. He also wrote L'art Pompier (1998).
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, Alfred Agache, Alexandre Cabanel and Thomas Couture are among the classic Pompier artists.
Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (August 29, 1780 - January 14, 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he thought of himself as a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was his portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.
La grande odalisque is a painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted in 1814 and sent to the Paris Salon of 1819. It was met with hostility by the critics, who ridiculed its radically attenuated modeling as well as Ingres's habitual anatomical distortions of the female nude.
When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a turkish bath (illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable. Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient.
The Turkish Bath was finished in a rectangular format in 1859, was revised in 1860 before being turned into a tondo. Ingres signed and dated it in 1862, although he made additional revisions in 1863. (Prat, 2004, p. 90.)
Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops (July 7, 1833 - August 23, 1898) was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint. He is best known for his painting Pornokrates and the frontispiece to Les Épaves by Charles Baudelaire.
Rops was born in Namur in 1833, and was educated at the University of Brussels. Rops's forte was drawing more than painting in oils; he first won fame as a caricaturist. He met Charles Baudelaire towards the end of Baudelaire's life in 1864, and Baudelaire left an impression upon him that lasted until the end of his days. Rops created the frontispiece for Baudelaire's Les Epaves, a selection of poems from Les Fleurs du mal that had been censored in France, and which therefore were published in Belgium.
Rops's association with Baudelaire and with the art he represented won his work the admiration of many other writers, including Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Joséphin Péladan. He was closely associated with the literary movement of Symbolism and Decadence. Like the works of the authors whose poetry he illustrated, his work tends to mingle sex, death, and Satanic images.
Pornokrates, also known as Pornocratie, is a 1879 painting by Félicien Rops.
It depicts a blindfolded woman being led by a pig on a leash. For some the pig with the golden tail represents the image of luxury and lucre steering the woman, whose only excuse is her blindness; for others, it is the image of man, bestial and stupid, kept in check by the woman. This image of the pig, as well as those of the puppet and the pierrot are shared by many of Rops’s contemporaries.
Pornokrates heralds the advent to the art world of the contemporary woman which Rops glorified. She is characterised by her arrogance, her composure and her ruthlessness.
In a letter to his friend Henri Liesse, he described the painting:
- "My Pornocratie is complete. This drawing delights me. I would like to show you this beautiful naked girl, clad only in black shoes and gloves in silk, leather and velvet, her hair styled. Wearing a blindfold she walks on a marble stage, guided by a pig with a "golden tail" across a blue sky. Three loves - ancient loves - vanish in tears (...) I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction". --Letter from Rops to Henri Liesse, 1879.
Edouard Manet
Édouard Manet (January 23 1832 – April 30 1883) was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.
Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet in the Realism style. Painted in 1863, it stirred an uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, because the gaze of the goddess depicted was not that of a Venus, but of a Nana.
Though Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) sparked controversy in 1863, his Olympia stirred an even bigger uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Conservatives condemned the work as "immoral" and "vulgar." Journalist Antonin Proust later recalled,
- If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration.
However, the work had proponents as well. Emile Zola quickly proclaimed it Manet's "masterpiece" and added,
- When other artists correct nature by painting Venus they lie. Manet asked himself why he should lie. Why not tell the truth?
The negative criticism included that of Jules Claretie, who in L'Artiste in May 1865 identified Olympia as "a courtesan no doubt" (une courtisane sans doute.) A few days earlier, Le monde illustré used a poem by Zacharie Astruc to brand this "auguste jeune fille," a courtesan.
The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe), originally titled The Bath (Le Bain), is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet. Painted between 1862 and 1863 , the juxtaposition of a female nude with fully dressed men sparked controversy when the work was first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, for in 1863; nudes were acceptable in under the pretext of historical allegories, but to show them in common settings was forbidden. The nude in Manet's painting was no nymph, or mythological being ... she was a modern Parisian woman cast into a contemporary setting with two clothed men. Many found this to be quite vulgar. Praised by contemporaries such as Emile Zola who said in 1867: "Painters, and especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not share the masses' obsession with the subject: to them, the subject is only a pretext to paint, whereas for the masses only the subject exists.", the piece is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris
In 1877, French artist Edouard Manet exhibited "Nana", a life-size portrayal of an prostitute in undergarments, standing before her fully clothed gentleman caller. The model for it was the popular courtesan Henriette Hauser. Manet was so much taken with the description of the "precociously immoral" Nana in Zola's L'Assommoir that he gave the title "Nana" to his portrait of Henriette Hauser. The painting was rejected by the hanging committee for the Paris Salon of 1877.
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting, best-known today paintings The Origin of the World, The Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans.
L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) is an oil on canvas painted by Gustave Courbet in 1866. Measuring about 46 cm by 55 cm (18.1 by 21.7 inches), it depicts the close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed and spreading her legs.
The framing of the scene, between the thighs and the chest, emphasizes the eroticism of the work. Moreover, an erect nipple and the redness of the labia suggest that the model just had a sexual encounter.
The painting was not publicly exhibited until the mid-1990s.
During the 19th century, the display of the nude body underwent a revolution whose main activists were Courbet and Manet. Courbet rejected academic painting and its smooth, idealised nudes, but he also directly recriminated the hypocritical social conventions of the Second Empire, where eroticism and even pornography were acceptable in mythological or oneiric paintings.
Courbet later insisted he never lied in his paintings, and his realism pushed the limits of what was considered presentable. With L'Origine du monde he has made even more explicit the eroticism of Manet's Olympia. Maxime Du Camp, in a harsh tirade, reported his visit of the work’s purchaser, and his sight of a painting “giving realism’s last word”.
In February 1994 the novel Adorations perpétuelles (Perpetual Adorations) by Jacques Henric, reproduced L’Origine du monde on its cover. Police visited several French bookshops to have them withdraw the book from their windows. A few proprietors, such as the Rome bookshop in Clermont-Ferrand, maintained the book, but others such as Les Sandales d’Empédocle in Besançon complied, and some voluntarily removed it. The author was saddened by these events: “A few years ago, bookshops were counter-powers. When the Ministry of Interior, in 1970, banned Pierre Guyotat’s book, Eden, Eden, Eden, bookshops had been resistance places. Today, they anticipate censorship…”.
Although moral standards and resulting taboos regarding the artistic display of nudity have evolved since Courbet, owing especially to photography and cinema, the painting remained provocative. Its arrival at the Musée d'Orsay caused high excitement. A guard was permanently assigned to the monitoring of this sole work, to observe the reactions of the public.
Achille Devéria
Achille Jacques-Jean-Marie Devéria (February 6, 1800 – December 23, 1857) was a French painter and lithographer. His father was a civil employee of the navy and student of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson and Louis Lafitte (1770–1828).
In 1822, he began exhibiting at the Paris Salon. At some point, he opened an art school together with his brother Eugène, who was also a painter.
By 1830 Devéria had become a successful illustrator and had published a many lithographs in form of notebooks and albums (e.g. his illustrations to Goethe's Faust, 1828) and romantic novels. He also produced many engravings of libertine contents.
His experience in the art of the vignette and maniere noire (dark manner) influenced his numerous lithographs, most of which were issued by his father-in-law, Charles-Etienne Motte (1785–1836). Most of his work consisted of "pseudo-historical, pious, sentimental or erotic scenes." (Wright) Since he rarely depicted tragic or grave themes, he appears less Romantic than many other artists of the time.
Eugène le Poitevin
Eugène le Poitevin(1806 - 1870) was a French artist, author of Les Diableries Erotiques.
Les Diableries Erotiques are a series of lithographs by French artist Eugène le Poitevin, depicting devils and other diabolic creatures engaging in various shenanigans on young girls. Circa 1830s.
Jean-Jacques Lequeu
Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Rouen, September 14 1757 – 28 March 1826) was a French draughtsman and visionary architect.
Born in Rouen, he won a scholarship to go to Paris, but following the French revolution his architectural career never took off.
He spent time preparing the Architecture Civile, a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Some of them are sexually explicit (Le Dieu Priape [2] (ca. 1779 - 1795) which shows a rather large male phallus and Trois images du sexe féminin) and are kept in the Enfer of the library. Most of these drawings have been reproduced in Duboy's book but can also be found in Sade / Surreal.
Félix Vallotton
20th century
The 20th century saw new technologies such as photography and cinema, which led to erotic photography and erotic films. Surrealism was one of the most remarkable developments as artistic movement in the 20th century, its penchant for eroticism was in evidence in surrealist literature and surrealist art. See Sade/Surreal and Sade's influence on Surrealism. See also the erotic photography of Man Ray and the paintings of Salvador Dali.
Also there is the work of André Masson and of Hans Bellmer.
Literature
Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918) was a French poet, writer, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died at 38 of the Spanish flu during a pandemic.
Les Onze mille verges (The eleven thousand rods) is an erotic novel by Guillaume Apollinaire - written around 1906-1907 (the publication is neither signed nor dated). The novel was banned from its release in 1907 until 1970, various clandestine printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel.
The Eleven Thousand Rods is about a Romanian prince who leaves Bucharest to find the perfect female. The book has elements of sadism, homosexuality, paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia and satirical commentary on French government officials, theater administrators, police and journalists.
Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan is a French novel by Guillaume Apollinaire first published in 1911. It was adapted as an eponymous film in 1987, and as a graphic novel by Georges Pichard.
The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt. The book was made into a film by Gianfranco Mingozzi in 1987.
Louis Aragon
- Le Con d'Irène, roman, Louis Aragon, 1928
Louis Aragon (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982), French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the communist party and prominent member of the Surrealists.
Irene's Cunt (French: Le Con d’Irène) is an erotic novel by Louis Aragon first published clandestinely in 1928 under the pseudonym of d’Albert de Routisie in order to avoid censorship. Régine Deforges will republish this French novel in 1968 under the bowlderized title Irène ; the book will nevertheless be seized by the authorities for its erotic content.
The original edition featured five eaux fortes illustrations by André Masson and was published on 150 copies.
Georges Bataille
- Le Mort, récit, Georges Bataille, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967
- Ma mère, récit, Georges Bataille
- Le bleu du ciel, récit, Georges Bataille
- L'abbé C, récit, Georges Bataille
- Histoire de l’œil, récit, Georges Bataille, Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967
Georges Bataille (September 10, 1897 – July 9, 1962) was a French writer, anthropologist, archivist and philosopher best known for his novella Story of the Eye. Philosophically, he traced the intimate connections between sex and death and is sometimes known as the metaphysician of evil. Though never an official member of Surrealism, Bataille described himself as Surrealism’s ‘enemy from within…’. More than Breton, he influenced 1960s French theorists and mid-1980s American art critics. His macabre interests can be deduced from his reportedly daily gazing at the Death by a Thousand Cuts photographs later published in his Tears of Eros thematic art compendium. Recently his novel My Mother was adapted for film by Christophe Honoré and in 2006 his visionary work was celebrated at the 'Undercover Surrealism' exhibition.
Histoire de l'oeil (Eng:Story of the Eye) is a novella written by Georges Bataille that details the sexual experimentation of two teenage lovers, and their increasing perversion. It is narrated by the young man looking back on his experiences. In its recent Penguin edition (2001), it includes Metaphor of the Eye, a commentary from the late Roland Barthes and notes by Susan Sontag on the significance of Bataille's novella for literary and cultural depictions of human sexuality. Story of the Eye also is one of the key texts in Sontag's nobrow essay The Pornographic Imagination.
Ma mère (English: My Mother) is a novella by Georges Bataille, posthumously and unfinishedly published in 1966. It was loosely adapted for a feature film by Christophe Honoré in 2004. See Ma mère (film). My Mother is a bildungsroman of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother. Its latest English language publication was bundled in My Mother, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man.
Violette Leduc
Violette Leduc (April 7, 1907 – May 28, 1972) was a French author noted for such novels as Thérèse and Isabelle and La Bâtarde. In 1968 American director Radley Metzger made a film of Leduc's novel Thérèse and Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael.
Thérèse et Isabelle is a 1966 novel by Violette Leduc. In 1968 Radley Metzger adapted the novel for film under the German title Therese und Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael. In the French countryside an elegant woman pays a nostalgic visit to her adolescent girl’s school, where she passionately remembers her first fiery and forbidden romance...the story of Therese and Isabelle. The tenderness of these two lonely girls' erotic awakenings sensuously blossoms amidst the hothouse atmosphere of their repressive environment. Having both experienced the clumsy and cruel lovemaking attempts of the local Lothario, Therese and Isabelle grow closer and closer to each other - until that fateful moment when they become lovers.
Jean Genet
- Jean Genet
- "In the confessional, semi-autobiographical novels of Jean Genet, such as Our Lady of the Flowers (1944) and The Thief's Journal (1949), the author promulgates the Dostoyevskian immoralist philosophy and inverted value system of hardened criminals, con men, and homosexual drifters, a few of whom appear to be bona fide psychopaths. The most notorious of Genet's nihilists is the sailor Georges Querelle in his novel Querelle de Brest (1947). Querelle is a homosexual serial killer with sadomasochistic tastes who betrays and murders several lovers and acquaintances while on shore leave in the city of Brest." --Sholem Stein
Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986), was a French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including Querelle de Brest, The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks and The Maids.
Our Lady of the Flowers is the debut novel of French writer Jean Genet, published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society.
The Maids is a 1947 play by the French writer Jean Genet.
Genet based his play on the infamous Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. The story can be read as an absurdist exposition on the intricate power dynamic that exists between unequals. Solange and Claire are two housemaids who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away.
The focus of their Theatre is the murder of Madame and they take turns portraying either side of the power divide. The deliberate pace and devotion to detail guarantees that they always fail to actualize their fantasies by ceremoniously "killing" Madame at the ritual's denouement.
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin (February 21 1903 - January 14 1977) was a French-born author who became famous for her posthumously published personal journals. Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women to explore fully the realm of erotic writing. Before her, erotica written by women was rare, with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Kate Chopin. Titles include Delta of Venus and Little Birds, which explores male and female sexuality from a female perspective.
Her affair with Henry Miller was the subject of the film Henry & June.
Delta of Venus is a book by Anaïs Nin. It was first published in 1978. In 1995 a film version of the book was directed by Zalman King. There are multiple short stories in this work with certain important characters reappearing throughout. She deals with many different sexual themes, while maintaining the balance of her life's work -- the study and description of woman.
The collection of short stories that makes up this anthology were written during the 1940s for a private client known simply as 'Collector'. This 'Collector' commissioned Nin, along with other now well-known writers (including Henry Miller), to produce erotic fiction for his private consumption. Despite being told to leave poetic language aside and concentrate on graphic, sexually explicit scenarios, Nin was able to give these stories a literary flourish and a layer of images and ideas beyond the pornographic.
The stories range in length from less than a page to one hundred times that, and are tied together not just by their sexual premises, but also by Nin's distinct style and feminine viewpoint.
Histoire d'O
- Histoire d'O, roman, Pauline Réage, 1954
Anne Desclos (September 23, 1907 - April 27, 1998) was a French journalist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage. She is best known as the author of Story of O.
Histoire d'O (English title: Story of O) is an erotic novel about female submission and ultimate sexual objectification published anonymously in 1954 by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage. Desclos did not reveal herself to be the author until shortly before her death, forty years after its initial publication. Desclos said that she had written the novel as a series of love letters to her lover Jean Paulhan who admired the work of the Marquis de Sade.
Published in French, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, it is the archetypical sadomasochistic story of about a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who is blindfolded, chained, whipped, branded, pierced, made to wear a mask, and taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse.
O's lover, René, brings her to the chateau of Roissy, where she is trained to serve the men of an elite group. After that, O moves through a series of increasingly harsh masters, from René to Sir Stephen to the Commander. At the climax, O appears as a slave, nude but for an owl-like mask, before a large party of guests.
A critical view of the novel is that it is about the ultimate objectification of a woman. The heroine of the novel has the shortest possible name, consisting solely of the letter O. Although this is in fact a shortening of the name Odile, it could also stand for "object" or "orifice", an O being a symbolic representation of any "hole".
L'Image
- L'Image, Jean de Berg, Paris, Minuit, 1956
Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian) was born in 1930 in Paris is a French writer.
A theatre and cinema actress and photographer, she has published BDSM-related writings under the pseudonyms Jean de Berg and Jeanne de Berg.
L'Image, a sadomasochistic novel published in 1956 by Les Éditions de Minuit, was written under the pseudonym Jean de Berg. Radley Metzger made the novel into a 1975 film, The Image, also known as The Punishment of Anne.
The Image (or in French "L'Image") is a classic 1956 sadomasochistic erotic novel, written by Catherine Robbe-Grillet and published under the pseudonym of Jean de Berg. It was made into a 1975 film, The Image directed by Radley Metzger, also known as The Punishment of Anne.
Catherine Millet
Catherine Millet (born April 1, 1948) is a French art critic, curator, and founder and editor of the magazine Art Press, which focuses on modern art. She is best known as the author of the 2002 memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M..
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by the French art critic Catherine Millet is an erotic novel first published in 2001. It is a semi-autobiographical account of the sexual life of the author. An English translation by Adriana Hunter was published in 2002. Sexual Life was the subject of mild controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. It was reviewed by Edmund White as "the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman". The book details her sexual history, from childhood masturbation to an adult fascination with group sex.
Publishers
Obelisk Press was an English-language press based in Paris, France, founded by Jack Kahane. It published novels that were to risqué to publish in the United States.
Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States; an edition was printed by the Obelisk Press in Paris and copies were smuggled into the United States.
Obelisk also published Anais Nin, James Joyce, Parker Tyler, Frank Harris and Lawrence Durrell.
Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebadged version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic novels and avant-garde literary works, and is best known for the first print of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
Olympia Press was also the first publisher willing to print the controversial William S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch. Other notable works included J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man; the French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille and Story of O by Pauline Réage.
Jean-Jacques Pauvert (born April 8, 1926) is a French publisher, famous for publishing the work of de Sade in the late 1940s, sparking off a series of court cases that lasted eight years. He was the first publisher of Story of O in 1954 and the original publisher of Kenneth Anger's 1959 Hollywood Babylon. He published George Bataille's Tears of Eros. Between 1947 and 1970 his publishing house was the subject of about 20 obscenity trials. He was assisted in his defense by the usual suspects of French intellectuals such as André Breton, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau and Jean Paulhan.
Eric Losfeld (1923? - 1979) was a French publisher who had a reputation for publishing controversial material with his publishing imprints Éditions Arcanes (founded 1952) and Éditions Le Terrain Vague (founded 1955). A rival clandestine French editor was Jean-Jacques Pauvert. The difference between them was -- in the words of Sarane Alexandrian: "Jean-Jacques Pauvert was an editor of surrealism, Losfeld was a surrealist editor."
Film
The depiction of sexuality in mainstream cinema was at one time restricted by law and self-imposed industry standards. Films showing explicit sexual activity were, with very rare exceptions, confined to privately-distributed underground films or "porn loops". Beginning in the 1960s, however, mainstream cinema began pushing boundaries in terms of what is allowed on screen. Although the vast majority of sexual situations depicted in mainstream cinema are simulated, on rare occasions filmmakers have produced motion pictures in which actors were allowed (or instructed) to engage in some level of genuine sexual activity, up to and including sexual intercourse. The difference between these films and pornography is that, while such scenes might be considered pornographic, the main intent of these films is usually not pornographic.
The early beginnings of French erotic cinema are documented in The Good Old Naughty Days.
The Lovers
Les Amants (The Lovers) is a 1958 French drama film directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeanne Moreau. It was Malle's second feature film, made when he was 25 years old. A showing of the film in Cleveland Heights, Ohio's Coventry Village resulted in a series of court battles that led to a Supreme Court decision on obscenity issues and Justice Potter Stewart's famous "I know it when I see it" opinion about what the definition of obscenity is.
La Femme spectacle
La Femme spectacle (Eng: Night Women or Paris in the Raw) is a film directed by Claude Lelouch in 1964. It has been described as an essay of what makes a « femme objet ». In this film Lelouch toys with the "Mondo" genre. As a starting point, Lelouch presents female spectacle across the world. We witness prenatal exercises, a child birth, striptease sequences and scenes with transvestites and transsexuals. Filmed in black and white, the film was banned in France in its initial release. At the end of the film we are presented with a young woman dressed in a wedding gown atop the Eiffel Tower who attempts to kill herself. Lelouch destroyed the negative himself a short while later.
And God Created Woman
And God Created Woman (French: Et Dieu... créa la femme) is a 1956 French film directed by Roger Vadim and starring Brigitte Bardot. It is widely recognized as the vehicle that launched Bardot into the public spotlight and immediately created her "sex kitten" persona.
When the film was released in the United States by distributor Kingsley-International Pictures in 1957, it pushed the boundaries of the representation of sexuality in American cinema, making Bardot an overnight sensation. It was condemned by the Catholic League of Decency To this day, the scene of Bardot dancing barefoot on a table is considered by some to be one of the most erotic scenes in the history of cinema.
Belle de Jour
- Belle de Jour (1967)
Belle de jour is a 1967 French film starring Catherine Deneuve. The film was directed by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel. It is based on the 1928 novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel. It is the story of Séverine Serizy (Deneuve) is a young, beautiful Paris housewife who has masochistic daydream fantasies about elaborate floggings and bondage.
Barbarella
Barbarella, also known as Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy is a 1968 erotic science fiction film, based on the French Barbarella comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest. It has gained a cult following since its re-release in 1977 on home video, and has had considerable influence on pop culture in the decades following its original release.
La Grande Bouffe
- La Grande Bouffe (1973)
La Grande Bouffe, Italian title La grande abbuffata, also known as "Blow-Out", is a 1973 film, directed by Marco Ferreri and written by Ferreri an regular collaborator Rafael Azcona. It stars Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret. The film was produced by Jean-Pierre Rassam.
The plot revolves around a fantastic Franco-Italian orgy comprising of four middle-aged gourmets fed up with the mundanity of life, who embark upon a suicide pact: death by over-indulgence in food, sex and alcohol.
In the United States, the film was originally rated X; but the rating was later changed to NC-17 in 1998 for some explicit sexuality
Histoire d'O
- Histoire d'O (1975)
Histoire d'O is a 1975 film by Just Jaeckin based on The Story of O, starring Corinne Clery and Udo Kier. The film met with far less acclaim than the book. It was banned in the United Kingdom by the British Board of Film Censors until February 2000.
Spermula
- Spermula (1976)
Spermula is a French erotic science fiction film from 1976 directed by Charles Matton. The planet Spermula is facing destruction and the Spermulites plan to relocate to Earth. To do this, they have come up with a brilliant plan. They will transform themselves into beautiful women and suck out all men's semen, thus making men tired and lazy from sexual exhaustion and unable to procreate. One of the Spermulites didn't transform as planned... Instead of a beautiful woman, he became a beautiful man, Werner (played by Udo Kier). He likes being a man, except for one problem. His penis is only one centimeter long. The spermulites are cynics who hate this disgusting love and sex thing that earth people like so much. But some of the spermulites actually start enjoying themselves and think that maybe love and sex aren't as disgusting as they thought.
In the Realm of the Senses
- In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
In the Realm of the Senses, Ai no korīda, literally, "Bullfight of Love", French: L'empire des sens}} is a 1976 Franco-Japanese film directed by Nagisa Oshima. It is a fictional and sexually explicit treatment of a true story from the 1930s in Japan, the Abe Sada story. It garnered great controversy during its release; while it was intended for mainstream release, it contains scenes of unsimulated sexual activity.
In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida, molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments, drinking, and various self-indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife and family to pursue his affair with Abe. Abe becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where Ishida finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he is killed in this fashion. Abe then severs Ishida's penis and writes, "Sada Kichi the two of us forever," in blood on his chest.
Strict censorship laws would not have allowed the film to be completed as per Oshima's vision in Japan. To get around this, the production was officially listed as a French enterprise, and the undeveloped footage was shipped to France for processing and editing. At its première in Japan (and in all prints of the film there ever since), the sexual activity has been optically censored. In the USA, the film was initially banned upon its première at the 1976 New York Film Festival, but later screened uncut; a similar fate awaited the film when it was to be released in Germany. The film was not available on home video until 1990. Many individual scenes have been cut from the film for the sake of local censorship. For example, the British Board of Film Classification granted the film an "18" certificate (suitable for adults only), leaving all of the sexual activity intact, but ordered that a shot showing a prepubescent boy having his penis pulled as punishment be optically reframed so that the act itself was not shown. The film has been made available, however, in completely uncut forms in France, the United States (including the current Fox Lorber DVD), the Netherlands and several other territories.
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle is a 1974 French softcore erotic movie directed by Just Jaeckin, and starring by Sylvia Kristel. The screenplay was written by Jean-Louis Richard, based on novel Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman by Emmanuelle Arsan. The music score is by Pierre Bachelet. It remains one of the most successful French cinema ever produced.
Robert Fripp won an out-of-court settlement over the use of music in the film based on King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic".
At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Siritzky announced that a worldwide search was underway for a new Emmanuelle to star in a new series of films. Only films and episodes produced by ASP ("Alain Siritzky Productions") film company are official and based on Arsan's character.
Les Valseuses
- Les Valseuses (1974)
Les Valseuses (Going Places) is a 1974 French anarchic comedy film directed by Bertrand Blier, adapted from a novel by Bertrand Blier. The road trip of two drifters (Depardieu and Dewaere), who take from life as if it were a supermarket. They are joined by Miou-Miou who is on her own search for seemingly unattainable sexual pleasure. The film illustrates the frenetics of the sexual revolution and morality after May 1968.
Le Sexe qui parle
Le Sexe qui parle (The Sex Who Talks) is a French adult film of 1975. It was the first exclusive hardcore feature film produced and released in France to meet international success. The film was exported to the USA with the title Pussy Talk and started a period of French porn chic in America, followed soon by films such as Candy’s Candy (Candice Candy) and Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street (Mes Nuits avec Alice, Pénélope, Arnold, Maude et Richard) in 1976. The film was directed by Claude Mulot (as Frédéric Lansac) who also directed a sequel to Le Sexe qui parle in 1977, which starts with the “infection” passed by Eric to a prostitute.
Talking female genitals is an early theme in French literature as seen in Les bijoux indiscrets by Denis Diderot and the fabliau Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons.
Joëlle (Pénélope Lamour) is a beautiful executive at an advertisement company. Her vagina is infected with a mysterious malice and begins to talk and lead her to indecent sexual acts. It is soon revealed that her problems root from her hardships as an adolescent. In the finale, she has sex with her husband Eric (Jean-Loup Philippe (as Nils Hortzs)) and passes the “infection” to his penis.
Série rose: Les Chefs d’œuvre de la littérature érotique
Série rose: Les Chefs d’œuvre de la littérature érotique (literal English: pink series, the masterpieces of erotic literature) is a French television series of 28 episodes of 26 minutes each, produced by Pierre Grimblat and broadcast on French television channel FR3 from November 8 1986 to 1990.
The series consisted of adaptations of libertine fiction from the European literary canon, original authors included Marguerite of Navarre, Comte de Mirabeau, Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne, Anton Chekhov, Chaucer, Guy de Maupassant, Jean de La Fontaine, Théophile Gautier, Daniel Defoe and Aristophanes.
Directors included Belgian director Harry Kumel (Daughters of Darkness), French colleague Michel Boisrond (Cette sacrée gamine) and Polish director Walerian Borowczyk (The Beast). Harry Kumel's contributions were separately released as The Secrets Of Love: Three Rakish Tales. Walerian Borowczyk directed four episodes for the series: Almanach des adresses des demoiselles de Paris, Un traitement justifié, Le Lotus d'or, and L'Experte Halima.
Série rose was bought by German and South-American and American television where they were known as Erotisches zur Nacht or Softly from Paris (USA).
Most notable appearance is that of Pedro Almodóvar ensemble cast member Penélope Cruz.
Bitter Moon
- Bitter Moon (1992)
- "We were headed for sexual bankruptcy." --Oscar
- "Just watch it Nigel. Anything you can do, I can do better." --Fiona
Bitter Moon is a 1992 film directed by Roman Polanski based on a novel by French author Pascal Bruckner. It's a classic story of sadomasochism and the war of the sexes.
L' Ennui
- L' Ennui (1998)
L'Ennui is a French film directed by Cédric Kahn released in 1998. The film is an homage to the Italian writer Alberto Moravia and loosely based on Moravia's novel La noia, an exploration of the theme of the incomprehensible desire that sometimes poisons life. The film stars Charles Berling, Sophie Guillemin, Arielle Dombasle, Robert Kramer and Alice Grey. Martin, professor of philosophy and tired of life, meets his elderly (and deceased) artist neighbour's muse Cécilia. He soon becomes possessed by a physical passion for her, a "femme-enfant" who is beautiful, naive, sexually voracious, and utterly pliant (see La Femme objet), but at the same time opaque; and because he cannot inhabit her mind, cannot make her feel intensely for him, he becomes neurotically obsessed by her, which leads to all kinds of abjection and abasement for him. In this, the film explores the tension between the male dream of feminine passivity, and the male nightmare of feminine impassivity.
Baise-moi
Baise-moi is a novel by French author Virginie Despentes, first published in 1999. A film based on the book, and with the same name, was released the following year. The film, directed by Despentes and actress Coralie Trinh Thi, received intense media coverage because its graphic mix of real rather than simulated sex and violence was on the limit of that allowed by censors in various countries around the world.
Romance X
Romance (Romance X) is a 1999 French movie written and directed by Catherine Breillat. It stars Caroline Ducey, erotic actor Rocco Siffredi, Sagamore Stévenin and François Berléand. The film contains several sex scenes that appear to have been unsimulated, especially the famous scene showing Caroline Ducey's coitus from behind with an erect Rocco Siffredi (who is not brought to completion, though). The film premiered in Belgium and France on April 14 1999 and in the United States on September 17 of that same year.
Marie is a schoolteacher who is deeply in love with her boyfriend, a model, who does not have sex with her. She explores increasingly risky sexual encounters with other men, including a BDSM relationship with a member of staff who works at the same school. Though she is pregnant with the child of her boyfriend, in the end she kills him and goes to her coworker for help in raising her child.
Romance was shown in mainstream cinemas in Europe. In the U.S., the original version is unrated, and an edited version received an R rating. In March 2004, the unedited film was broadcast late at night on German public TV, leading to some protests. The film has also been shown on the Australian cable TV network "World Movies" in its uncut form.
Irréversible
- Irréversible (2002)
Irréversible (2002, France) is a film written, directed, edited, and photographed by Gaspar Noé. It stars Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. Several reviewers declared it one of the most disturbing and controversial films of 2002, due to its explicit depiction of rape and murder. The film employs non-linear narrative.
Irréversible won the "Bronze Horse" award at the Stockholm Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the "Best Foreign Language Award" by the Film Critics Circle of Australia. It was also voted "Best Foreign Language Film" by the San Diego Film Critics Society (tied with Les Invasions Barbares).
The Dreamers
- The Dreamers (2003)
The Dreamers is a 2003 English/French directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The film is based on Gilbert Adair's novel The Holy Innocents. Adair also wrote the screenplay for the film.
A young American exchange student, Matthew, (Michael Pitt) has come to Paris in order to study French. Though he has lived there for several months, and will stay in Paris for a year he has made no friends. As a huge fan of film, he spends most of his time in the cinema. He comes into a rapid friendship with a Frenchwoman, Isabelle (Eva Green), and her brother, Théo (Louis Garrel). All three have an avid love for movies, especially "the classics". As their friendship grows, Matthew learns of the extreme intimacy shared by the siblings and gets pulled into their world. Over time he falls in love with them, and the three seclude themselves from the world, falling further and further from the reality of the 1968 student riots. An abrupt ending to this relationship comes when that world is shattered and they are compelled to face the reality of 1968 France.
Ma Mère
- Ma Mère (2004)
Ma mère is a French film directed by Christophe Honoré after the eponymous novella by Georges Bataille. It stars Isabelle Huppert as Hélène, the mother, Louis Garrel as the son and Emma de Caunes as Hansi. The film premiered on May 14, 2004. In the United States, the film was rated NC-17 for strong and aberrant sexual content; the edited version rated R for strong aberrant sexuality, some language and violent images. Michael Haneke referenced it in Caché.
My Mother is a bildungsroman of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother.
More films
- Douche après le bain (1897) - Louis Lumière
- The Mother and the Whore (1973) - Jean Eustache
The Mother and the Whore (French La maman et la putain) is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. It is one the last typical Nouvelle Vague films and an extended essay on male angst, the war of the sexes and the Madonna-whore complex. This dramatic film focuses on three twentysomething Parisians in a bizarre love triangle: Alexandre Jean-Pierre Léaud is a seemingly unemployed narcissist involved with both a live-in girlfriend Bernadette Lafont and a Polish nurse Françoise Lebrun whom he picked up at Café de Flore and with whom he begins a desultory affair. The film focuses less on plot than on the confused and ambivalent interrelations of these three lost souls. Clocking in at over 3½ hours, this film has a style seemingly borrowed from cinéma vérité and it tries to capture real life in post-May 1968 France. A typical scene is one where Marie comes home, puts a record on the turntable and listens to it in real time. It was preceded by a similar 1969 American film called Coming Apart.
- Bilitis (1977) - David Hamilton
Bilitis (film) is a 1977 softcore film directed by David Hamilton. Writing screen writing credits include Catherine Breillat. The story is after a Pierre Louÿs's Songs of Bilitis, a collection of poetry. Music was by Francis Lai. Patti D'Arbanville stars as Bilitis, Mathieu Carrière as Mikias. A coming of age story centering on the exploits of a young girl during summer vacation. The title character, Bilitis, ends up returning to school at the end of the film realizing she is not yet ready for adulthood. The film is shot in the same soft focus style that is common of David Hamilton's photography and his other films.
- The Beast (1975) - Walerian Borowczyk
La Bête (Eng: The Beast) is a 1975 film written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk, starring Sirpa Lane, based on Lokis, a story by Prosper Mérimée. The film (originally conceived in 1972 as a film on its own, but then in 1974 as the fifth story in Contes immoraux) belonged to his later work, which was seen by many as a decline in the director's career after Dzieje grzechu, except in France, where it was hailed by prominent critics such as Ado Kyrou. Once upon a time in the 18th century a beast lived in the woods of an aristocratic estate. And this beast, possessed of a giant phallus and an insatiable lust, set upon the beautiful young lady of the house. Two centuries later, the tale of the beast would return in the dreams of an American heiress contracted to carry the male descendant of the same crumbling aristocratic family and their secret.
- Maîtresse (1976) - Barbet Schroeder
Maîtresse is a 1976 French film directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Bulle Ogier (Dominatrix) and Gérard Depardieu (boyfriend) in an early role. The film provoked controversy in the United Kingdom and the United States because of its graphic depictions of sado-masochistic behaviour, such as nailing a penis into a plank, and cunt whipping.
Olivier (Depardieu) is a small-time crook. He and a friend happen to meet a woman, Ariane (Ogier) whose plumbing needs to be fixed. They fix the pipes and learn that the landlord downstairs is away. They take the opportunity to burgle him. However they discover that in fact downstairs Ariane has a torture chamber — she is working as a professional dominatrix. Olivier, at Ariane's request, helps her with her work and slowly becomes obsessed with her but struggles with her sado-masochistic activities. Olivier tries to understand and take control of Ariane, who he believes is scared in her job. However, as their love blossoms, their natural roles of dominance and submission cannot be overcome.
Maîtresse was first considered for release by the British Board of Film Classification in 1976. It was banned from release, with the Board's examiner stating that the film was "miles in excess of anything we have released in this field". This quote itself led the film to achieve a certain level of notoriety. In 1981 the film was resubmitted. Following 4 minutes and 47 seconds of cuts from the most graphic scenes, the film was released with an X certificate. In 2003, the film was submitted for a third time and, following a relaxation of guidelines, passed at the 18 certificate without cuts. The film was rated X in the United States.
- La Cage aux folles (1978) - Edouard Molinaro
La Cage aux Folles (tr. The Cage of Queens or The Birdcage, lit. The Cage of Crazy Women or The Bird Cage) is a 1978 film adaptation of the 1973 LGBT play by Jean Poiret. It was directed by Édouard Molinaro. Like the play, the film tells the story of a gay couple - Renato, the manager of a Saint-Tropez nightclub featuring drag entertainment, and Albin, his star attraction - and the adventures that ensue when Renato's son brings home his fiance's ultra-conservative parents to meet them.
The film won over audiences with its sight gags, uproarious complications, and a tender and touching conclusion. It ran for well over a year at the Paris Theatre, an art house cinema in New York City, as well as theatres throughout the country in both urban and rural areas. For years it remained the most successful foreign film to be released in the United States.
- Beau-père (1981) - Bertrand Blier
Beau Pere is a 1981 film by director Bertrand Blier. The movie revolves around a never reached his potential piano player, Remy and his struggles with, first, his failing marriage...then his wife's untimely demise and finally the infatuation that his 14-year old step daughter has developed for him. Patrick Dewaere's character, Remy can never catch a break. He struggles for cash and his lack of motivation dogs him constantly. His role as stepfather to a budding woman is just another obstacle he faces in his downtrodden path. Ariel Besse plays a 14-year old woman-child. Maurice Ronet is a man about town but has also lost focus.
- Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) - Marco Ferreri
Tales of Ordinary Madness (it: Storie di ordinaria follia) (fr: Conte de la folie ordinaire) is an Italian-French 1981 film by Italian director Marco Ferreri. It was shot in English in the USA, featuring Ben Gazzara, Susan Tyrrell and Ornella Muti in the leading roles. The film's title and subject matter are based on the works and the person of US poet Charles Bukowski. The music was by Philippe Sarde.
The film follows the meandering (sexual) adventures of the poet and drunk, Charles Serking, laying bare the sleaze of life in the less reputable neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Serking's life takes a turn for the better when he meets Cass, a young prostitute with self destructive habits. They have a stormy relationship. When Serking gets an offer from a major publishing house, Cass tries to stop him from leaving, but fails. Serking gives in to the temptation of the big bucks, but soon realises his mistake and returns to LA only to find that Cass has killed herself in his absence. Devastated he hits the bottle in a nightmarish drinking bout, but finally reaches catharsis and returns to the seaside guesthouse where he spent his happiest moments with Cass. Here he rekindles his poetry with the aid of a young admirer in one of Ferreri's trademark beach scenes. While successful in Europe, the film met with a lukewarm reception in the US despite its American setting.
- Querelle (1982) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Querelle, a 1982 film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, adapted from French author Jean Genet's 1947 novel Querelle de Brest. The plot centres on the handsome sailor Georges Querelle (Brad Davis), who is also a thief and serial killer. When his ship, the Vengeur, arrives in Brest, he visits the Feria, a bar and brothel for sailors run by the madam Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), whose lover Robert is Querelle's brother. Querelle has a passionate love/hate relationship with his brother; when they meet at La Feria, they embrace, but also punch one another slowly and repeatedly in the belly. Lysiane's husband Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) tends bar and manages La Feria's underhanded affairs with the assistance of his friend, the corrupt police captain Mario.
Fassbinder's adaptation features surreal sets that underscore the dreamlike quality and abstraction of the novel. Filmed on a moodily lit soundstage, the look of the film was clearly influenced by the paintings of George Quaintance, whose campy paintings of barely dressed sailors and lion-tamers appeared in magazines such as Physique Pictorial. It also seems, with its shots of long, empty, walled cityscapes filmed in acid yellows and oranges, to be inspired by the Surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí. According to the book Criminal Desires, Genet, though aware of the film, declined to have anything to do with its production, claiming that he could no longer remember the novel's contents. He apparently never saw the finished product, allegedly saying he wouldn't go see it because smoking wasn't allowed in movie theaters.
- Betty Blue (1986) - Jean-Jacques Beineix
Betty Blue is a 1986 French film. Its original French title is 37°2 le matin, which means "37.2°C in the Morning" . The film was directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and stars Béatrice Dalle as Betty. It is based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Philippe Djian. Nearly twenty years after its release, it was on the list of Roger Ebert's most hated films.
Betty (Dalle) and Zorg (Anglade) are passionate lovers who live in a shack on the beach. He works as a handyman who does odd jobs to pay the bills. As the film begins, they have only been going out for a week and are in a very passionate stage of their relationship. Zorg narrates the story of their relationship via voiceover. He describes Betty, “like a flower with translucent antennae and a mauve plastic heart.” She yearns for a better life and quit her last job as a waitress because she was being sexually harassed by her boss. Zorg’s boss asks him to paint the 500 shacks that populate the beach — a fact that he keeps from Betty who thinks they only have to do one. She attacks the project with enthusiasm that quickly turns to anger once she learns the actual number. In response, Betty covers the boss’ car with pink paint. During a nasty fight, Betty accidentally discovers a series of notebooks that contain a novel Zorg wrote years ago. She reads it and falls in love with him even more. She then makes it her mission in life to type every hand-written page and get it published. Betty's freespiritedness and devotion to Zorg develop into alarming obsession, aggression and destructiveness, and the film alternates between comic and tragic modes.
- Mr. Hire (1989) - Patrice Leconte
Monsieur Hire is a 1989 French film directed by Patrice Leconte and starring Michel Blanc in the title role and Sandrine Bonnaire as the object of his affection. The film received numerous accolades as well as a glowing review from popular American movie commentator Roger Ebert. The film is based on Belgian-born French writer Georges Simenon's novel. Simenon wrote many popular detective books. Original music by Michael Nyman. Soundtrack also features the 4th movement in the "Piano Quartet, opus 25" by Brahms.
The plot of the film centers on a withdrawn misanthropic voyeuristic tailor, Monsieur Hire, who spies on his gorgeous neighbor across the street. This takes place in the backdrop of another plot, the unsolved murder of a local young woman. Monsieur Hire is hounded by a detective inspecting the murder and is also eventually noticed by the object of his gaze, the young woman Alice. Viewers will scarcely understand Alice's reciprocal interest in Monsieur Hire until an interesting plot twist unravels. Monsieur Hire propositions Alice to ditch her no-good boyfriend Emile, played by the handsome Luc Thuillier, and run off with him to his little home in Switzerland, where he promises to take care of her. What happens next is a tragedy of the highest order, with a dark surprise. A riveting and sensual film.
Directors
José Bénazéraf
José Bénazéraf is a French filmmaker and producer, born January 8 1922 in Casablanca, Morocco. After having finished his studies in political sciences, he started his career by producing Les lavandières du Portugal in 1958, a film of Pierre Gaspard-Huit. He started to direct erotic feature films in 1961 with L'éternité pour nous. Two of his early sixties films, Le Concerto de la peur and La Nuit la plus longue featured a Chet Baker score.
At the end of the 1970s, Bénazéraf moved his attention to the direct-to-video market.
Max Pécas
Max Pécas was a French filmmaker, scenario writer and producer. He was born April 25 1925 in Lyon and died 10 February 2003 in Paris.
After making erotic movies (I Am Frigid...Why?, I Am a Nymphomaniac and Les Mille et une Perversions de Félicia) and some thrillers, he shoots teenage comedies, including his classic "Saint-Tropez series". His filmography is considered as models of camp B-movies.
Some of Max Pécas's softcore films were imported to the U.S. by Radley Metzger.
Jean Rollin
Jean Michel Rollin Le Gentil (born November 3, 1938 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, France) is a French filmmaker, actor, and author best known for his films in the fantastique genre. He is the son of Denise Rollin-Le Gentil and is credited as having made the first French vampire film (Le Viol du vampire, 1968) as well as the first French gore film (Le Raisins de la mort, 1978). He is also one of the early pioneers of French X-rated cinema.
Influenced by traditional French and German expressionist cinema, classic American horror, early serials, comics, fantastic literature and surrealist art, Rollin's fantastique films have been rightfully compared to a sort of visual poetry, juxtaposing the macabre with the sensual and the beautiful with the bizarre. His poetic images are often accompanied by minimal dialogue and simple but haunting musical scores, and the pacing is generally slow and deliberate. All of these qualities contribute to an atmosphere which is commonly described as surreal and dream-like.
Radley Metzger
Radley Metzger (born January 21 1929) is an American filmmaker and distributor. He is also credited under the pseudonym Henry Paris, a name he adopted in the 1970s when he began to direct hardcore pornography.
Along with Ava Leighton, he founded Audubon Films in the early 1960s, a film distribution company that specialized in importing European features to exploit in the gradually expanding sexploitation film market. Metzger's skills as an editor were employed in re-cutting and augmenting many of the features Audubon handled. The company's first run-away success was Mac Ahlberg's I, a Woman (U. S. 1966).
As an auteur, he is considered by his fans to be among the more stylish directors of the porn chic era. He regularly collaborated with cinematographer Hans Jura. His company Audubon, distributed European films in the United States.
Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat (born July 13, 1948) is a French filmmaker and director based in Paris. She is known not only for her films focusing on themes of sexuality, gender conflict and sibling rivalry, but also for her best-selling novels. Ms. Breillat has been the subject of controversy for her explicit depictions of sexuality and violence. She cast the pornstar Rocco Siffredi in her films Romance (Romance X, 1999) and Anatomie de l'enfer (Anatomy of Hell, 2003).
In an interview with Senses of Cinema, she described David Cronenberg as another filmmaker she considers to have a similar approach to sexuality in film.
Film censorship in France
Extremely violent or graphic pornography is considered X-rated, may be shown only in specific theaters, and may not be displayed to minors. Incurs special taxes on revenue (33% for X-rated movies, 50% for pornographic online services). The rating system is controversial; for instance, in 2000, the sexually explicit and violent Baise-moi was initially rated as "restricted" by the French government, but this classification was overturned by the Conseil d'État ruling on a lawsuit brought by associations supporting Christian and family values.
Sex Stars System
French film magazine dedicated to erotic cinema and pornographic cinema. Emile Gir was the editor-in-chief and Jean-Pierre Bouyxou was on its editorial board. The magazine lasted for at least 18 monthly issues between 1975-76 (it is not confirmed if issue no. 19 came out as scheduled on November 1976). In December 1976, the magazine's name was changed simply to Stars System and new enumaration began.
Brigitte Lahaie
Brigitte Lahaie (born on October 12, 1955) is a French erotic actress best remembered for her performances in Jean Rollin's (Fascination) and José Bénazéraf's (Bordel SS) films.
Born Brigitte Lucille Janine Van Meerhaegue in Tourcoing, France, she began her career at the age of 20 performing in pornographic films from 1976 through 1980.
In 1980, having become a kind of idol of the French adult film industry's golden age, she decided to put an end to her hardcore career and appeared in more "traditional" movies and "big" productions, such as I comme Icare (Henri Verneuil, 1980) in which she played a stripper, and in Pour la peau d'un flic (Alain Delon, 1981) in which she played a nurse. However, she also made some softcore and Nazi exploitation "video nasties" during this time.
Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot (September 28, 1934) is a French actress, former fashion model, singer, and considered the embodiment of the 1950s and 1960s sex kitten in such films as And God Created Woman (1956), Spirits of the Dead (1968), Contempt (1963), Masculine, Feminine (1966).
Film production
Eurociné is a Paris-based, family-run film production company. Since 1937, Eurocine has been producing some of the most recognized low budget European flicks, including striptease movies and erotic crime thrillers. It is also a distribution company of b films, and is known for its collaborations with Spanish director Jess Franco. The company was featured in the Eurotika (TV documentary). With greater permissiveness in cinema at the end of the 1960s, Eurocine began to produce erotic movies. But when hardcore films were legalized, the market for erotic films disappeared and Eurocine turned to producing horror and fantasy movies.
Visual arts
Lui
Lui is a French adult entertainment magazine created in January 1964 by Daniel Filipacchi, a fashion photographer turned publisher.
The objective was to be bring some charm «à la française» to the market of man-only magazines, following the success of Playboy in the USA, launched just a decade before.
France, indeed, in the first half of XX century had an outstanding reputation for erotic publications, feeding also foreign market and inspiring also ersatz France-flavoured magazines abroad, when, for example, US publishers used French-assonating titles like Chère and Dreamé or placed tricolour flags on the covers, attempting to attract the casual buyer. It was anyway a semi-clandestine circulating material, not allowed to be freely displayed or admittedly bought. In this sense Playboy changed the way 'soft-pornography' (become more respectfully 'adult entertainment'), can be publicly circulated.
This magazine was particularly successful from its origins to the early eighties, featuring many B-List but also prominent French actresses, such as Brigitte Bardot, Mireille Darc or Marlène Jobert. Its motto was Lui, le magazine de l'homme moderne.
It featured a pin-up by Aslan.
Aslan
Aslan (real name is Alain Gourdon, born in Bordeaux (France) on May 23 1930) is a French painter, sculptor and pin-up artist. He is mostly famous in France for his pin ups. He contributed to Lui from the creation of the magazine in 1964 to the early eighties, providing a monthly pin up.
He is the sculptor of the Fifth Republic Marianne as Brigitte Bardot in 1970, followed by the Mireille Mathieu Marianne.
Paul Avril
Édouard-Henri Avril (21 May 1843 in Algiers – 1928 in Le Raincy) was a French painter and commercial artist. Under the pseudonym Paul Avril, he was an illustrator of erotic literature.
Avril illustrated such works as the , Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô, Gautier's Le Roi Candaule, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvray's Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas, Mario Uchard's Mon Oncle Barbassou (scenes in a harem), Jules Michelet's Woman, Hector France's Musk, Hashish and Blood, the writings of Pietro Aretino (Sonetti Lussuriosi (1524) by Pietro Aretino in 1882), Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux and the anonymous lesbian novel Gamiani. His major work was designs for De Figuris Veneris: A Manual of Classical Erotica by the German scholar Friedrich Karl Forberg.
Paul-Emile Bécat
Paul-Émile Bécat (1885 – 1960) was a French painter, engraver and draftsman who won the Great prix de Rome in 1920. He is noted for his illustration of erotic literature.
- Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: mœurs antiques and Songs of Bilitis
- Pietro Aretino, Ragionamenti
- Pierre de Brantôme, Vie des dames galantes
- Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
- Paul Verlaine, Les Amies
- François-Mathieu Pidansat de Mairobert, La secte des anandrynes
Georges Pichard
Georges Pichard (January 17 1920 - June 7 2003) was a French comics artist, known for numerous BD magazine covers, serial publications and adult comics stereotypically featuring well-endowed women and BDSM-imagery. Guido Crepax was an Italian contemporary with similar subject matter, yet a different style.
Toward the end of his life, Pichard adapted classic erotic stories such as Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Apollinaire, The Kama-Sutra by Vatsyayana, Trois filles de leur mère by Pierre Louÿs, La Religieuse by Denis Diderot and Germinal by Émile Zola.
Roland Topor
Roland Topor (Paris, January 7 1938 - Paris, April 16 1997), was a French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker, known for the surreal, fantastic and grotesque nature of his work.
Roland Topor is best known for his novel The Tenant ("Le Locataire Chimérique", 1964), which was adapted to film by Roman Polanski in 1976. The later novel Joko's Anniversary (1969), a fable about loss of identity, is a vicious satire on social conformity.
With René Laloux, Topor made "Dead Time" ("Les Temps Morts", 1964), "The Snails" ("Les Escargots", 1965) and their most famous work, the feature length Fantastic Planet ("La Planète Sauvage", 1973). Topor also played Renfield in Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) and worked on Marquis (1989).
Roland Topor was discovered by Jacques Sternberg and in 1960 he publishes his debut Les Masochistes, a collection of drawings. He exhibits in the university museum Maison des Beaux-Arts, Paris from January 20 to January 30 1961.
He published several books of drawings, including Dessins panique (1965) Quatre roses pour Lucienne (1967) and Toporland (1975). Selections from Quatre roses pour Lucienne were reprinted in the English language collection Stories and Drawings (1967). His carefully detailed, realistic style, with elaborate crosshatching, emphasises the fantastic and macabre subject matter of the images.
In 1962 he created the Panic Movement (mouvement panique), together with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal.
From 1961 to 1965 he contributed to the French satirical Hara Kiri magazine.
He created the drawings for the bizarre introduction of Arrabal's film Viva la muerte (1971).
In 1983, he created with Henri Xhonneux the popular French TV series Téléchat, a parody of news broadcasts featuring a puppet cat and a puppet ostrich.
Clovis Trouille
Camille Clovis Trouille, was born on 24 October 1889, in Amiens, France. He worked as Sunday painter and a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins, and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1905 to 1910. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris. His themes were anti-clericalism and eroticism.
Tomi Ungerer
Tomi (Jean-Thomas) Ungerer (born November 28, 1931) is a French illustrator best known for his erotic and political illustrations as well as children's books.
Photography
Gilles Berquet, Guy Bourdin, Mirka Lugosi, Pierre Molinier, Eugène Pirou
Gilles Berquet (born 1956) is a French photographer, and one of the driving forces in the European fetish erotica scene. He is also the editor of maniac. Kinky fetish and bondage photography with a film noir feel. Carefully posed with obvious illusions to the subrosa fetish photography of 1920s Paris, the photos maintain a caught in the act modernity.
Guy Bourdin (born December 2 1928 in Paris, died March 29 1991 of cancer in Paris) was one of the best known photographers of fashion and advertising of the second half of the 20th century. His themes included sex, death, violence, glamour and fear. Amongst others, Jean Baptiste Mondino, Nick Knight and David LaChapelle have admitted to be great admirers of his work.
Pierre Molinier (April 13, 1900 - March 3, 1976) was a surrealist painter, photographer and "maker of objects". He was born in Agen (France) and lived his life in Bordeaux (France). He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.
Eugène Pirou (1841-1909) was an early French filmmaker and photographer who made one of the first pornographic films, Le Coucher de la Marie in which Louise Willy performed a striptease, only a year after the first public screening of motion pictures, though he made his name filming the Tsar's visit to Paris a year later in 1897.
Obscenity censorship in France
The trial of the poet Théophile de Viau in 1623 is a milestone both in the invention of obscenity and in the history of censorship.
Sade - Pauvert - Maurice Girodias - Eric Losfeld - Gustave Flaubert - Charles Baudelaire - Hara Kiri
July 16, 1949: French law targets "publications destinées à la jeunesse," [publications intended for the youth]. Initially, the law applied to magazines and periodicals of a semi-salacious nature, usually well illustrated. In 1954 the law was expanded to include printed books as well.
Bibliography
- List of French erotomaniacs
- J.M. Lo Duca
- Ado Kyrou
- Gilles Néret
- Images Interdites (1989) - Yves Frémion, Bernard Joubert
- History of censorship in France in cinema, newpapers, magazines, posters and books.
- Paris Eros: The Imaginary Museum of Eroticism in Paris (2004) - Hans-Jürgen Döpp
- French Undressing - Naughty Postcards from 1900 to 1920
