#luc sante

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Youths of my generation learned about Brassaï from his eye-opening Secret Paris of the 30s. There were pictures of thugs, bums, prostitutes, brothels, drag balls, lesbian bars, interracial dances—who knew such things even existed forty years earlier? But then our fascinated naïveté was rewarded by further contemplation of the photographs, which were humane, sympathetic, endlessly inquisitive, beautifully composed, and drew every possible bit of poetry from the enveloping cloak of night.

– Luc Sante

[lascitasdelashoras]

Luc Sante, Collage

[less-ismore]

Among the intuitive stretches required of the flâneur is a lively belief in ghosts that does not particularly assume a belief in the supernatural. The past is always present, if sometimes in the way of those movie spirits who can be seen in the room but not in the mirror, or vice versa. All the tyrants and landowners and monopolists in vain set their shoulders to bulldoze the past out of existence, but it stubbornly remains, sometimes in the most indefinable and evanescent way and sometimes as a bad conscience. Luc Sante, The Other Paris, 2015.

[juliesandothings]

Four from Luc Sante - No Smoking, Assouline, 2004

Top: Monica Vitti, in Modesty Blaise - Joseph Losey, 1966

Second from Top: Carole Lombard, 1930′s

Second from Bottom: Jane Birkin, Paris, 1975

Bottom: Sharon Stone, in Basic Instinct - Paul Verhoeven, 1992

https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/no-smoking/author/sante/publisher/assouline/

[theblackestofsuns]

The Factory Of Facts (1998)

Luc Sante / Lucy Sante

Pantheon Books

[freemoneyfree]

Highlights from the monthly Art Book Club at Milwaukee Public Library- Central. (next one is 2/26!)

Images 1-2: Aperture 229 Winter 2017 (feat. Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose revisited)/ Aperture 241 Winter 2020

Image 3: from The Spirited Earth: Dance, Myth, and Ritual from South Asia to the South Pacific by Victoria Ginn

Images 4-6: from Nan Goldin / I'll be Your Mirror

[maggiethecatchatterley]

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Lit Hub: The Question of Homoeroticism in Whitman’s Poetry

Walt Whitman’s best poems demonstrate an almost unimaginable prescience; he and Dickinson, among 19th-century American poets, possess a nearly chilling self-consciousness, an acute self-analysis. Edward Carpenter, the British anarchist, writer, and champion of the Arts and Crafts movement whose life and romance were the model for E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, wrote this elegant description of a visit with Whitman in 1877; the emphases are Carpenter’s own: “If I had thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview certainly produced quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met any one who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing more than he did.” That there were words for homosexual behavior in Whitman’s day there can be no doubt. Social structures for enabling same-sex congress seem to have been a feature of life in the modern city at least since the later 18th century, when the “Molly houses” in London offered a zone of permission for transvestism. Herman Melville, in Redburn, carefully evokes the nattily dressed fellows who hang out in front of a downtown restaurant where opera singers perform; he means us to understand what these stylish outfits convey. Historian and theorist Luc Sante describes a 19th-century pamphlet that takes as its project the publication of the locations of various quite particular spots of diverse sexual practice in New York City—so that those informed of, say, the address of a bordello featuring willing boys can take special care to avoid this hazard. Trenchant evidence comes from Rufus Griswold’s review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: “We have found it impossible to convey any, even the most faint idea of style and contents, and of our disgust and detestation of them, without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears polite; but it does seem that someone should, under circumstances like these, undertake a most disagreeable, yet stern duty. The records of crime show that many monsters have gone on in impunity, because the exposure of their vileness was attended with too great indelicacy. Peccatum illud horrible, inter Christianos non nominandum.” Which is all a way of saying that Whitman inscribes his sexuality on the frontier of modernity; he is writing into being—particularly in the “Calamus” poems of 1860, with their frank male-to-male loving, their assumption of equality on the part of the lovers—a new situation. He does not know how to proceed—he has no path —but he does it anyway. My guess is that he couldn’t have written “Calamus,” or the boldly homoerotic portions of the 1855 Leaves, even ten years later, as the advent of psychology increasingly led to a public perception of the normative, and imagery of the sacred family becomes the object of Victorian romance. As a category of identity—sodomite, invert, debauchee, pervert, Uranian—begins to emerge, so the poems with their claims of a loving, healthy, freely embraced same-sex desire become unwriteable, paradoxically, just as new language of homosexual identity begins to appear. Unwriteable, and, it would seem from Whitman’s later remarks, and some of his revisions, barely defensible. Carpenter and his readers were reaching for signposts of a gay identity when such a thing barely existed, but Whitman is ultimately a queer poet in the deepest sense of the word: he destabilizes, he unsettles, he removes the doors from their jambs. There is an uncanniness in “Song of Myself” and the other great poems of the 1850s that, for all his vaunted certainty, Whitman wishes to underscore. Again and again, he points us toward what, it seems, must remain folded in the buds beneath speech, since it cannot be brought to the surface. (Full article)

[diana-andraste]

Renée Jacobi, Jacques-André Boiffard, 1930

In this context it is worth looking again at the surrealist Jacques-Andre Boiffard's photograph of Renee Jacobi (1930), which suggests she is a corpse in a mortuary, and to consider Luc Sante's comments on crime photography: "In looking at a crime photo we know we are looking at an image of radical disjunction before we are consciously aware of its narrative content. But then crime retails death, or at best loss, so that even before spectations with no personal stake in the matter it is charged. It is surrealism with a knife."

Footnote 59 in Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927-63 by Peter Stanfield, found on Google Books.

[fashionbooksmilano]

Exhibit A Guy Bourdin

Samuel Bourdin- Fernando Delgado

Foreword by Luc Sante, Essay by Michel Guerrrin

Bulfinch,/Little Brown Publ., Boston NY London 2001, 208 pages, 38x29cm, 81 four col. & 19 duotone phot., ISBN 0-812-266 9 X

euro 150,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Guy Bourdin's surreal and erotic imagery filled pages of international magazines throughout the 1970s. Within the medium of fashion photography, he gave shape to a dark and intriguing vision that exerted lasting influence on the international style scene and altered the contemporary aesthetic. Bourdin rarely allowed his work to appear outside the pages of the magazines, and there has never been a book published devoted to his remarkable legacy. He remained an enigma, shunning publicity and becoming reclusive. After his death the French government seized all his work for non-payment of taxes and it was thought a book would be impossible. However, published under the guidance of Bourdin's son, Samuel Bourdin (who put his affairs in order and enabled publication) and creative director Fernando Delgado, Exhibit A presents for the first time a comprehensive look at the range and depth of Bourdin's photographic work, from the mid-1950s until his death in 1991. The images herein represent the highlights of his career - including his work for Vogue Paris and his revolutionary advertising campaign for Charles Jourdan shoes. Bourdin is featured and canonized in every history of commercial photography for a style described by one historian as the 'look of an era, glamorous, hard-edged with implied narratives and strong, erotic undercurrents'. Vogue became a playground for him, the magazine's double-page spread allowing him to indulge his fantasies. He constructed narratives and small scenarios; inventive, shocking and erotic they only served to nurture his own macabre and dangerous persona. A biographical essay by Michel Guerrin, photography critic for Le Monde, will provide a long-overdue look at Bourdin's career. Writer Luc Sante (author of American Photography 1890-1965 and New York Noir) contributes a foreword. Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin is a landmark volume; these compelling images are as provocative today as they were over two decades ago, and they have left an indisputable mark upon contemporary photography and the visual arts.

19/10/24

[filmaticbby]

Aries: Tarantino, F. F. Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Eric Rohmer, Edgar Wright, Ruben Östlund, Josh Safdie, David Lean, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Martin McDonagh

Taurus: Wes Anderson, Orson Welles, Sofia Coppola, Lars von Trier, Terry Zwigoff, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, John Waters, Frank Capra

Gemini: Fassbinder, Hideaki Anno, Makhmalbaf, Agnès Varda, Alex Garland, Clint Eastwood, Yorgos Lanthimos, Aaron Sorkin, Ken Loach, Alexander Sokurov, Giuseppe Tornatore

Cancer: Abbas Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai, P. T. Anderson, Mike White, Ari Aster, Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Paul Verhoeven, Robert Eggers, Béla Tarr, Mel Brooks, Ken Russell, Sidney Lumet, Kinji Fukasaku

Leo: Alfred Hitchcock, Greta Gerwig, Alain Robbe-grillet, Kubrick, Wes Craven, Taika Waititi, Luca Guadagnino, Christopher Nolan, Polanski, Sam Mendes, Richard Linklater, Nicolas Roeg, James Cameron, Pablo Larraín, M. Night Shyamalan, Iñárritu, Gus Van Sant, Peter Weir, Wim Wenders, Maurice Pialat

Virgo: Tom Ford, Joe Wright, Paul Feig, Dario Argento, David Fincher, Brian De Palma, Baz Luhrmann, Tim Burton, Friedkin, Takashe Miike, Noah Baumbach, Werner Herzog, Elia Kazan, E. Coen

Libra: Julie Dash, Almodóvar, Jacques Tati, Ang Lee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ti West, Walerian Borowczyk, Nicolas Winding Refn, Satoshi Kon, Kenneth Lonergan, Michael Powell, Jacques Tati, Steve McQueen, Denis Villeneuve

Scorpio: Mike Nichols, Barry Jenkins, Charlie Kaufman, Céline Sciamma, Tsai Ming-liang, Jean Rollin, Scorsese, Louis Malle, Luchino Visconti, François Ozon, Julia Ducournau

Sagittarius: Sion Sono, Cassavetes, Raj Kapoor, Steven Spielberg, Eliza Hittman, Terrence Malick, Ozu, Alfonso Cuarón, Gregg Araki, Larry Charles, Judd Apatow, Kathryn Bigelow, Lenny Abrahamson, J. Coen, Jean Luc Godard, Diane Kurys, Ridley Scott, Lynne Ramsay, Woody Allen, Fritz Lang

Capricorn: Larry Clark, David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Damien Chazelle, David Lowery, Mary Harron, Sergio Leone, Todd Haynes, Pedro Costa, Gaspar, Noe, Fellini, Joseph Losey, Miyazaki, John Carpenter, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Curtiz, John Singleton, Vertov

Aquarius: Jim Jarmusch, John Hughes, Darren Aronofsky, Jodorowski, Michael Mann, Derek Cianfrance, Alex Payne, Truffau, Eisenstein, Tone Hooper

Pisces: Pasolini, Sean Baker, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Benny Safdie, Jacques Rivette, Bunuel, Luc Besson, David Cronenberg, Spike Lee, Rob Reiner, Mike Mills, Sebastián Lelio, Jordan Peele, Ron Howard, Robert Altman

[lascitasdelashoras]

Flier for a reading at Columbia University featuring Luc Sante and Jim Jarmusch

[kylo-wrecked]

★ Tag nine people you'd like to get to know better!

favorite color(s): greens and reds and especially black — orange is also lovely

favorite flavor(s): i think lime is just great

favorite genre(s): i like art house crap, body horror, horror, generally, the french new wave, sci-fi (specifically cyberpunk), classic old Hollywood cinema, '80s thrillers (like The Hitcher), dadaism, surrealism, gothic, the glamour of the new romantics, etc.

favorite music: i love everything from the (russian) five to industrial noise! there's this album i love by a french percussionist who plays the Eiffel tower. too hard to narrow it down.

favorite series(s): x-files, mad men, and atlanta

last song: saddlebags - lukid

last series: station eleven

last movie: spiderhead (NOT good oml, netflix pls)

currently reading: luc sante's low life

currently watching: an episode of cabinet of curiosities starring rupert grint apparently

currently working on: befriending the cat we're going to be looking after for the next few weeks

tagged by: @hopegained and @desireandduty <3

tagging: newish people! @ofcatnaps, @affcgato, @riiese, @nightmarefuele, @etoilebleu, @godresembled, @micaela-arg, @corinnebaileyrp, @normallyxstranger but also whoever wants to share.

[toxioinc]

Top 100 Films

I made this list a few days ago after feeling irritated at the predictability and staleness of the Sight & Sound list, but really I think this a good moment for me to make this list for myself. As you will see from my end of year list in a month, the emergence of a continuous type of filmmaking - Tiktok and Douyin filmmakers posting every day, Youtubers posting every few days - presents a new kind of problem for me who actually wants to make lists that do justice to beautiful filmmaking movements. So this may be the last time to even really want to make an all time list that focuses on the indvidual works rather than the directors filmographies as continuous entities. Although I couldn’t make a normal top 10 poll, and it was better in the end to have a 100 poll as an alternative to the full list, I have put in bold 7 films which I would definitely put in a top 10.

Hypocrites (dir. Lois Weber, 1915)

7th Heaven (dir. Frank Borzage, 1927)

Themes and Variations (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928)

The Seashell and the Clergyman (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928)

City Lights (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1931)

Le métro (dir. Georges Franju & Henri Langlois, 1934)

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)

Bambi (dir. David Hand, 1942)

Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942)

Meet Me in St. Louis (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1944)

Spring in a Small Town (dir. Fei Mu, 1948)

Song of Love (dir. Jean Genet, 1950)

Awaara (dir. Raj Kapoor, 1951)

Gate of Hell (dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)

Sansho the Bailiff (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955)

Pyaasa (dir. Guru Dutt, 1957)

The Cranes are Flying (dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)

Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Gertrud (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)

The Young Girls of Rochefort (dir. Jacques Demy, 1967)

For My Crushed Right Eye (dir. Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)

Everything Visible is Empty (dir. Toshio Matsumoto, 1975)

Atman (dir. Toshio Matsumoto, 1975)

In the Realm of the Senses (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1976)

House (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

¡Que viva México! (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1979)

Spacy (dir. Takashi Ito, 1981)

Drill (dir. Takashi Ito, 1983)

Ghost (dir. Takashi Ito, 1984)

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)

Sabishinbou (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1985)

Alice (dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1988)

Gang of Four (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1989)

The Stranger (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1991)

A Scene at the Sea (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 1991)

Cardiogram (dir. Darezhan Omirbaev, 1995)

The Neon Bible (dir. Terence Davies, 1995)

Kids Return (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 1996)

The River (dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)

Monochrome Head (dir. Takashi Ito, 1997)

April Story (dir. Shunji Iwai, 1998)

The Silence (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998)

Histoire(s) du cinéma (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (dir. George Lucas, 1999)

OH! Super Milk Chan (dir. Kiyohiro Omori, 2000)

Brother (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2000)

Spirited Away (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)

Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Avalon (dir. Mamoru Oshii, 2001)

Dolls (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2002)

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (dir. George Lucas, 2002)

Father and Son (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, 2003)

Waiting for Happiness (dir. Abderrahmane Sissako, 2003)

3-iron (dir. Kim Ki-duk, 2004)

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (dir. Wang Bing, 2004)

Tropical Malady (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise (dir. Ken Jacobs, 2005)

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (dir. George Lucas, 2005)

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part III (dir. Yang Fudong, 2006)

Fantascope 'Tylostoma' (dir. Yoshitaka Amano, 2006)

Lady in the Water (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2006)

Inland Empire (dir. David Lynch, 2006)

United Red Army (dir. Koji Wakamatsu, 2007)

Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2007)

City of Ember (dir. Gil Kenan, 2008)

Assault Girls (dir. Mamoru Oshii, 2009)

AKB48 - Heavy Rotation (dir. Mika Ninagawa, 2010)

Jewelpet Twinkle (dir. Takashi Yamamoto, 2011)

Spring Breakers (dir. Harmony Korine, 2013)

'Til Madness Do Us Part (dir. Wang Bing, 2013)

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (dir. Isao Takahata, 2013)

EXID - UP&DOWN (dir. Digipedi, 2014)

Tokyo Tribe (dir. Sion Sono, 2014)

Garm Wars: The Last Druid (dir. Mamoru Oshii, 2014)

88:88 (dir. Isiah Medina, 2015)

Creepy (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016)

Daguerreotype (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016)

Before We Vanish (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2017)

Idizwadidiz (dir. Isiah Medina, 2017)

Ending (dir. Isiah Medina & Philip Hoffman, 2017)

TWICE - LIKEY (dir. NAIVE, 2017)

Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017)

Ready Player One (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2018)

The Grand Bizarre (dir. Jodie Mack, 2018)

Eden is a Cave (dir. Alexandre Galmard, 2019)

OH MY GIRL - The Fifth Season (dir. Yoo Sung-kyun, 2019)

TWICE - FANCY (dir. NAIVE, 2019)

Alita: Battle Angel (dir. Robert Rodriguez, 2019)

OH MY GIRL - Nonstop (dir. Yoo Sung-kyun, 2020)

IZ*ONE - Secret Story of the Swan (dir. Ziyong Kim, 2020)

s01e03 (dir. Kurt Walker, 2020)

The Last of Us Part II (dir. Neil Druckmann, Anthony Newman & Kurt Margenau, 2020)

Eternal Love of Dream (dir. Yang Xuan, 2020)

おはようございます～ (dir. 小柔SeeU, 2020)

bande fucking annonce (dir. Rafael Cavallini, 2021)

高能来袭～准备好了吗？ (dir. 小柔SeeU, 2021)

NewJeans - Hurt (dir. Shin Hee-won, 2022)

[pityroad]

I remember Luc Sante writing once that one of the surprises in your work is that there you were, in the same scene with all this, and yet, you could take these pictures.

Goldin: I had to take these pictures. They gave me a reason to be there. I think the whole reason that I write about in The Ballad, about my sister’s death and the need to record everything, was predominant. It wasn’t an act of will or very much about pursuing art. It was out of need. All my work, I think, is out of need.

— Darryl Pinckney in conversation with Nan Goldin for Aperture, December 2022