Subversive Pleasures
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The notion of carnival is also pertinent to the work of Lina Wertmuller. Much of the harsh criticism of Wertmuller’s work has been grounded in a kind of “genre mistake” by which the carnivalesque origins of her art have gone unrecognized. Bruno Bettelheim, shocked at Wertmuller’s farcical treatment of the Holocaust in Seven Beauties, excoriated the film as “completely untrue to the reality of the camps,” and feminists denounced the “exploitation” of Elena Fiore’s obesity in The Seduction of Mimi. But as William and Joan Magretta point out, the fatness of Wertmuller’s women does not signify misogyny “any more than Walt Disney’s dimwitted Goofy signifies a contempt for dogs.” The Magrettas go on to explore the roots of Wertmuller’s work in the carnivalesque rituals of Italian folk culture, in commedia dell’arte, in opera buffa, and in the Italian puppet theatre, forms of expression that ultimately go back to the Menippea discussed in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and to the carnivalesque art anatomized in Rabelais and His World."--Subversive Pleasures (1992) by Robert Stam |
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Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (1992) is a book by Robert Stam.
The book applies Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media and cultural studies and draws on Bakhtin's corporal semiotics of "the grotesque body" to analyze eroticism in the cinema, and explores issues including the "translinguistic" critique of Saussurean semiotics and Russian formalism.
Blurb
- Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media, and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range, Robert Stam explores issues that include the "translinguistic" critique of Saussurean semiotics and Russian formalism, the question of language difference in the cinema, issues of national culture in Latin America, and "the carnivalesque" in literature and film. He discusses literary works by Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Jarry and treats films by Vigo, Bunuel, Wertmuller, Imamura, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Marleen Gooris, and others. Now in paperback, Subversive Pleasures is a splendidly lucid introduction to the central concepts and analytical methods of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle.
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