Robin Saker

Bellmer: The Sculpture Diaries [2009]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq02eN9pWzw

Januszczak, W. [2009] The Sculpture Diaries. Channel 4 [three-part series]

Bellmer: Pre-Code Hollywood & Screen Goddesses [1930s]

Suggestive erotic fantasy and sexual excitement, in 1930s Hollywood:

Publicity photo: Safe in Hell [1931] – William Wellman [USA]

“Films made in the Pre-Code era frequently presented people in sexually suggestive or provocative situations, and did not hesitate to display women in [revealing] attire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

Promotional photo: Joan Blondell [USA] – 1932

“This […] promotional photo […] was later banned under the then-unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

Publicity photo: The Greeks Had a Word for Them [1932] – Lowell Sherman [USA]

“Publicity photos like this […], with a women posing suggestively in her nightgown on a bed, provoked outrage among civic leaders”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

"Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the brief era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound pictures in 1929 and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines in 1934, usually labelled, albeit inaccurately, as the "Hays Code". Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until 1934, with the establishment of the PCA.
As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality. Strong female characters were [omnipresent], in such films as Female [1933, Michael Curtiz], Baby Face [1933, Alfred Green], and Red-Headed Woman [1932, Jack Conway]. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy [1931, William Wellman], Little Caesar [1931, Mervyn LeRoy], and Scarface [1932, Howard Hawks] were seen by many as heroic rather than evil. Along with featuring stronger female characters, films examined female subject matters that would not be revisited until decades later in American films. [Evil] characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant [consequences], and drug use was a topic of several films. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

The Public Enemy [1931] – William Wellman [USA] – Pre-Code

Freaks [1932] – Tod Browning [USA] – Pre-Code

Grand Hotel [1932] – Edmund Goulding [UK] – Pre-Code

Shanghai Express [1932] – Josef von Sternberg [Austria] – Pre-Code

Trouble in Paradise [1932] – Ernst Lubitsch [Germany] – Pre-Code

L’Atalante [1934] – Jean Vigo [France] – French Poetic Realism

Cinema: The Whole Story

1930-39 - Screen Goddesses [P112-13]:

When Belgian director Harry Kumel was preparing his cult vampire movie Daughters of Darkness [1971], he told his leading actress Delphine Seyrig that he wanted her to look like a Hollywood star of the 1930s – ‘because they are immortal’. It was [a wise] observation. Stars such as Greta Garbo [Sweden], Merlene Dietrich [Germany], Joan Crawford [USA], Bette Davis [USA], Vivien Leigh [British India] and Katherine Hepburn [USA] have a timeless quality that few actors of later generations could match.

Behind the scenes, publicity departments played a crucial part in the creation of magnetic screen goddesses. MGM, under legendary boss of the 1930s Irving Thalberg, liked to boast that the studio had ‘more stars than there are in heaven’. These stars were pampered and highly paid but had little control over their careers. ‘We told stars what to say, and they did what we said because they knew we knew best,’ Howard Strickling, the studio’s hard-driving publicity head, later claimed. The screen goddesses were locked into draconian contacts. Strickling and his team policed every aspect of their lives, burying scandals, forging the stars’ signatures on publicity pictures and even brokering their marriages.

KEMP, P. [general editor] [2011] Cinema: The Whole Story. London: Thames & Hudson

Bellmer: Dadaism

Keywords:

Destruction; liberation; unconscious; chance; nonsense; ready-mades; anti-bourgeois; nihilistic; witty

Post-World War I; French: "hobby-horse"; all received moral, political and aesthetic beliefs had been destroyed by war; destructive, irreverent and liberating approach to art; gave way to Surrealism in mid-1920s; "new reality"; shock; shaking society out of nationalism and materialism which had led to carnage of WWI, Duchamp, Picabia, Ray, Ernst, Schwitters

Bellmer: Nazi Germany

"Racism, especially anti-Semitism, was a central feature of the regime. The Germanic peoples (the Nordic race) were considered the purest of the Aryan race, and were therefore the master race. Millions of Jews and others deemed undesirable were persecuted and murdered in the Holocaust. Opposition to Hitler's rule was ruthlessly suppressed. Members of the liberal, socialist, and communist opposition were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. The Christian churches were also oppressed, with many leaders imprisoned. Education focused on racial biology, population policy, and fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, and the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased the Third Reich on the international stage. Propaganda minister Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, and Hitler's hypnotising oratory to control public opinion. The government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others."

Nazi Germany - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany

"The Nazis had clear ideas of what they wanted from women. Women were expected to stay at home and look after the family. Women doctors, teachers and civil servants were forced to give up their careers. Even at the end of the war, women were never asked to serve in the armed forces. Their job was to keep the home nice for their husband and family - their life should revolve round the three 'Ks': Children, Church and Kitchen. Goebbels said: “The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children to the world."

Women were supposed to emulate traditional German peasant fashions - plain peasant costumes, hair in plaits or buns and flat shoes. They were not expected to wear make-up or trousers, dye their hair or smoke in public."

Women in the Nazi State - http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/germany/womenrev1.shtml

Bellmer: Reference Keywords

BELLMER:

Life-size pubescent [youthful] dolls; sexualised images of female body - distorted, dismembered or menaced in sinister scenarios; erotomania; revenge; suffering; safety of womb; avant-garde; continuous rebellion against despised father; castration anxiety; unconscious sense of guilt.

Surrealists' fascination for dolls and machines resembling humans; rejecting Nazi's Aryan ideals; disturbing dolls from wax, wood, flax, plaster and glue; fetishistic; erotic obsessions; Freudian; psychoanalysis; hysteria; singular exploration in relationship between language and body.

Mass of limbs and organic forms; in danger of toppling over; many layers of pastry; disturbing; erotically charged; disembodied parts of children's dolls.

Draughtsman; painter; constructor of dolls; etcher; lithographer; erotic fantasy; 'artificial girls'; erotic variations of human body

SURREALISM:

Paris; Dadaism; exploration of everything irrational and subversive in art; spiritualism; Freud; psychoanalysis; Marxism; 'automatic'; emerging directly from unconscious without being shaped by reason, morality, or aesthetic judgements; strove to undermine most accepted truths and conventions; juxtaposition; destruction; eroticism; Dali & Ernst: all attention to detail of Realist paintings.

Max Ernst [Germany] - Attirement of the Bride [1940]

Rene Magritte [France] - Voice of the Space [1931]

Ernst - The Elephant Celebes [1921]

PHAIDON (1996) The 20th Century Art Book. London: Phaidon
SEMFF, M. & SPIRA, A. (2006) Hans Bellmer. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz
TAYLOR, S. (2000) Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/hans-bellmer-736