47 years old contemplates the premiere of Emmanuelle in June 1974 , the film destined to burst the box offices of half the world with its soft eroticism , its feminine sexual liberation and an aesthetic of translucent fabrics, smoking cigarettes and oriental fantasies that it was going to make of the unknown polyglot model Sylvia Kristel a new myth of modern cinema. A film that broke into a France that was still conservative and prudish in sexual matters despite the post-68 turmoil and the counterculture, and that came to pave the way for a small revolution that prolonged the scandal of Last Tango in Paris .o Deep throat in a commercial product for the masses that would define a new sexual imaginary in times of feminist vindication of the right to abortion, the contraceptive pill and control of the body away from male guardianship.
Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard bought the rights to Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel (1959 ) in a daring and cheap deal, hired Vogue publicity photographer Just Jaeckin , Truffaut’s regular screenwriter (Jean-Louis Richard), and discovered the Dutch Kristel in a wrong casting to embark on the eventful and semi-clandestine adventure of a vacation shoot in Thailandto which Michel Piccoli could have joined, who was offered the role that a stiff Alain Cuny would finally play .
At his side, Kristel embodied a new, modern, uninhibited, desiring , mysterious, natural woman with a touch of photogenic androgyny that would be one of the keys to the film’s appeal, whose elegant, audacious, somewhat cheesy and syrupy ways of showing gender were also decisive for the success among the female audience at the time that male viewers in countries like Spain , from where they went to Perpignan or Montpellier to see the film over and over again, could project their many repressed fantasies into it..
Number one at the box office since the first weekend, Emmanuelle becomes a new Parisian tourist attraction next to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, people go to see it as a couple or in a group and it is sold to the whole world (it was seen more than 300 million viewers) to become a new fetish film for the covers, fashion or advertising thanks to its aesthetics , its poster, its typography, its costumes, its music and the song by Pierre Bachelet or that mythical wicker chair ‘Peacock’ that would end up being part of the furniture of so many middle-class flats and apartments.
After 47 years, it seems clear that her approach to female sexual liberation, with the display of masturbation, orgasm or lesbian play, may be naive or ambiguous , but it is no less true that, in her time and context, Emmanuelle stirred up a new imaginary about the pleasure of women that connected with the new society to fill a vacant gap in the film industry between Hollywood romanticism, Swedish educational nudies and pure and simple pornography.
They would come after the exploitation, the second, third and fourth parts, the black Emmanuelles, married or in space, with a single ‘l’ or a single ‘m’, also the attempts of Kristel, a fragile but clear-headed woman, to escape from the character and uncomfortable interviews or claim as an actress in films by authors such as Chabrol, Borowycz, Robbe-Grillet or Vadim , and the gradual personal decline with drugs and alcohol. A brilliant success story but with a sad ending, with the death of the actress in 2012 when she was just 60 years old. An entertaining documentary by Canal Arte tells us about all this , Emmanuelle: an erotic landmark of French cinema , by Clelia Cohen, which also coincides with theRemastered Blu-ray reissue of that first film and its genuine sequels.
Bo Burnham: how to do comedy in confinement We knew nothing aboutBo Burnham
until now , or rather, we remembered nothing, because if we saw Eight grade (2018), his directorial debut, an interesting dissection of adolescent traffic from that nerdy side that, sublimated by the pop aesthetic, made its protagonist a new heroine of self-affirmation and the difference in times of Instagram.
That same Burnham, we now know, is one of the emerging and cult stand-up comedians , a peripatetic body that has made his white, heterosexual, depressive and somewhat suicidal condition the essential raw material for his films.
monologues and satirical dissertations on the contemporary world. In Inside , the comedian elaborates a new confined format , without an audience and without leaving his small studio, to literally put himself on stage between spotlights, microphones, a piano, canned laughter and an extraordinary editing job that makes a one-man-show possible. in which the parody of the pop universe, the world of social networks as a framework of identity, the consequences of the pandemic or homegrown songs and video clips are linked with the monologues and sketches that reveal such a great guy and creative as the person on the edge ofcrises . There, on that uncertain border, is where this new comedy for lonely and confined times is gestated.
African animation in Three Cultures
Between the activities and cycles of the FCAT in Cicus and the programming of the Three Cultures Foundation , Seville can boast of being the capital of African cinema in our country. A stimulating session now arrives at Tres Culturas ( Tuesday 29, 8:00 p.m. ) dedicated to animated cinema made up of the medium-length film Le franc (1994), by the Senegalese master Diop Mambety, and the shorts A special present (2019), by the Mozambican Nido Essa, and Azumah: The ghanaian hero (2018), from Ghana and screened at the latest edition of the prestigious Annecy festival.
