My Retrospace has a feature on the “monster carrying woman” shot, so ubiquitous in horror/Gothic film that Famous Monsters of Filmland remarked upon it.
Apr 042013
Mar 202013
Mar 142013
Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), Directed by Don Edmonds, Written by Langston Stafford IMDB
Mar 032013
Here’s a blog post on the work of artist Allen Jones, best known in kink circles for his sculptures of women as furniture (aka “forniphilia”), but also a designer of fetish attire.
The sculptures appeared in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and Jones also designed some costumes for the film that weren’t used.
Feb 232013
Django Unchained 2012, writer/director Quentin Tarantino, IMDB
(Spoilers ahead)
Briefly, Django Unchained is about a slave in the Old West, before the Civil War, who is freed by, then partnered with, a German bounty hunter, Dr. Schulz. They set off on a quest (explicitly compared to the German legend of Siegfried/Sigurd) to recover Django’s wife Broomhilda from a plantation known as “Candie Land”.
Sep 262012
Sep 242012
Roman Scandals is a 1933, pre-Hays code musical starring Eddie Cantor and featuring elaborate set piece dance number choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Presumably a parody of Biblical and/or classical Hollywood pictures like The Sign of the Cross (1932), Scandals gives up any pretense of drama and goes straight to the sexual decadence. The means dance numbers on elaborate sets performed by dozens or even scores of women dressed identically (the “Goldwyn Girls”, including a young Lucille Ball). If you want to have large numbers of scantily clad women moving around in a situation of high drama, you can’t go wrong with a slave market or auction scene.
Sep 242012
Spoilers ahead
…the function of the priests is to prevent the first, highest, level of cosmic eating, the eating of human mortals by gods. How? By way of performing sacrificial rituals. Gods must be appeased, their hunger for blood must be satisfied, and the trick of the priests is to offer the gods a substitute (symbolic) sacrifice: an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life. The sacrifice is needed not to secure any special favors from the gods, but to make sure that the wheel of life goes on turning. Priests perform a function which concerns the balance of the entire universe: if the gods remain hungry, the whole cycle of cosmic life is disturbed.
Slavoy Zizek, Living in the End Times
Aug 282012
iHarem is a blog with a vast collection of images and especially video clips of harem/slave girl/odalisque Orientalist fantasies, some going back to the early Silent Film era. Apparently, as long as there has been moving images, they have been used to deliver Orientalist fantasies of beautiful, available women, often in quantity.
Aug 182012
Look at the kink tag on Tenebrous Kate’s blogspot and you’ll find a delightful array of vintage kink, flagellation and bondage material. The only question is where to begin?
Here’s a glimpse into “Le Musee des Supplices” (translation: “The Torture Museum”) by Roland Villeneuve, published 1968.
