Thanks to Kim for the inspiration<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ll write more about this haunting weird controversial little movie<\/a> later but for now I just wanted to mention that much of the film is fragmented, we see pieces of people, sides of their faces, hands, feet … a visualization of the dissociation our heroine feels within her own marriage. Nothing is whole, nothing is complete. Things are split off from the larger picture. It’s a wonderful device. This is a film told without too much metaphor, which is rather shocking, considering the year it was made (1933). It is the story of a woman who just got married to a man and on her wedding night discovers that he doesn’t like sex. There is no euphemistic portrayal of this situation. It is blatant.<\/p>\n Like I said, I do want to write more about it (and Hedy Lamarr’s wonderful brave performance, and the dreamboat Aribert Mog<\/a>) but for now, I wanted to just mention in passing the filming of objects throughout the film.<\/p>\n Not only people are filmed in fragments and pieces. But objects. The objects, at times, take on a life of their own, especially in one erotic sequence during a windstorm when Lamarr’s character makes the decision to “go to him” in the middle of the night … But from the beginning, we don’t just get a straight narrative, with wide shots, and masters, moving into closeup … We see parts of the action, and then there is a cutaway to an object in the room. The objects have import. It is up to us to assign them meaning. The tassels on the end of a rug being smoothed out by a man’s hand are not just tassels. They become an evocation of an entire emotional state. I loved that about the film. Later in the movie, when she begins to blossom sexually, we still see things in fragments, but now it becomes erotic, a burlesque dancer with feathers, what we don’t see is not what is missing<\/i> … but what is hidden<\/i>. A vital difference. She becomes whole, a full woman. And now, a hand twirling the tassels of a rug has a very different meaning – it is lazy, languid, like a woman dangling her fingers into a lake from a rowboat … The same gesture we saw earlier from her uptight husband is now about the relaxation that comes over her post-orgasm (literally! I told you this film was controversial!), and the feeling of love and trust and satisfaction she now experiences … NOT about a fussbudget rigid dude trying to keep things neat on his honeymoon.<\/p>\n I have this “thing about things”, anyway, as I have covered before<\/a>. I love contemplating the life of objects. Objects do seem alive to me.<\/p>\n More on Ecstasy<\/i> later, but for now: some objects from the film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanks to Kim for the inspiration. I’ll write more about this haunting weird controversial little movie later but for now I just wanted to mention that much of the film is fragmented, we see pieces of people, sides of their … Continue reading