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Metaphorically however, this spatial distance could also be read as an acknowledgement of her own impermeability and refusal to articulate or share her real desires. It is, after all, such emotional moments of openness, of explicit exposure, that Severin consistently tries to capture.
Interestingly however, Severin is seen in her diegetic world, to give all of the pictures she takes back to her subjects once she has inked or etched her thoughts onto the various portraits.
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Indeed, this act of giving back the image to the people could be read as an overt and politically informed act — a gift from Mitchell to his audience. It is, as such, worth noting here that the act of reimagining hard-core, making it real, giving it back to the people, was both a nominated challenge and aim of making Shortbus. Perspective, partnerships and politics A further politicised act of looking in Shortbus concerns voyeurism.
However, again, this practice is refigured and reframed by Mitchell as a soft, intelligible and protective rather than hard-core, aesthetic activity. While viewers are, from the outset of Shortbus given a sense of voyeuristic privy forced to look, via the camera, into the apartments of unsuspecting characters , voyeurism is also figured in the filmic diegesis.
After watching the character James in the bath as described above , we next see him setting his camera up on the living room floor of his apartment. As in our previous introduction to him, James remains naked, positioning his white towel on the floor in front of his apartment window. Softly-lit and framed from a low angle, James goes on to slowly autofellate. On climaxing however, James does not moan or express pleasure but rather, is seen to breakdown and cry.
Vastly at odds with dominant responses to climax on other hard- core Hollywood films, spectator responses to this scene are potentially complex. The chain are instead, overcome by the humour and genuine playful fun of the moment.
In opposition to the fun of this three way experience, Caleb, alone and watching the events, is distressed and perturbed. Significantly however, Caleb the proof reader knows this is in fact untrue, for through his voyeurism, he has seen the flaws and faults in the punctuation of their relationship. He knows that however much James and Jamie love each other, James will still not, after five years allow Jamie to penetrate him. Despite this and in line with hard-core conventions however, voyeurism in Shortbus nearly always leads to sex.
Unlike hard-core though, the sexual acts are not immediate and nor are they figured as straightforward penetrations.
Caleb watches James sleep, gently holding his hand. In response James tells him that he used to work as a hustler — performing pleasure on a daily basis. This, James confesses, is why he will not let Jamie penetrate him. This experience was, we can infer, a painful and destabilising one for James; a necessary but difficult means of survival. Their intimacy and honesty with one another following this conversation leads, significantly, to penetration.
More specifically, James allows Caleb to penetrate him and permeate the barrier or mental block that functions as a hangover from his scarred past.
Please re-enter recipient e-mail address es. See details for additional description. Publication date ISBN cloth: Metaphorically however, this spatial distance could also be read as an acknowledgement of her own impermeability and refusal to articulate or share her real desires. How to write a great review. This infatuation leads him to beg her to allow him to become her slave.
The aesthetic of equality here can be seen via a change in the camera position. Technological anxieties in the realm of the senses Indeed, this opening up of the body is connected to James locating his inner strength in an effort to live more happily and honestly in the world. Giving over control to her husband, Rob Raphael Barker , Sofia entrusts him with the remote control for her ironically named love egg.
Pulling a plastic model leg ornament off the salon wall, Sofia walks outside, removes the egg from her vagina and smashes it into pieces. Eventually stopping, Sofia bows her head, hunches her shoulders and begins to cry before walking away. More significantly however, this scene demonstrates that Shortbus is not reductive in treating sexual anxieties as problems that can be easily overcome.
Arguably, the failure of Sofia to experience an orgasm, coupled with the attempted suicide of James and the isolation of sex worker Severin, function to acknowledge sexual and social anxieties concerned with sex, satisfaction, and sensory permeation. Ultimately, Shortbus is dominated by the themes of technology and mis-connection.
Indeed, the irony of the mass of technologies that promote connection are, as Mitchell illustrates, also perhaps part of the problem of mis-connection. These technologies stress the possibility of connection, of pleasure and yet, can also be seen to function as the source of contemporary anxieties when people feel that they have failed to live up to, or connect with others, in spite of the endless possibilities.
As the film draws to a close, it is in fact a visible dis-connection — a black-out experienced by the whole of New York City — that functions as a catalyst to bring all of the characters back to the Shortbus salon. The new darkness of the city is made visible in order to reveal a malfunction associated with a contemporary societal over-reliance on connecting technologies.
The black- out brings to light the power of haptic human interconnections that can be made face-to-face. Sofia opens herself up to an experience with a couple whose lovemaking in the orgy room she has previously admired. Ceth and Caleb see each other in a new light and make a connection. Severin seems to genuinely enjoy the company and connections of others in a different and positive way.
The lights of the city come back on. The backdrop to all this is a salon party, a finale over which Justin Bond, dressed in a Grecian style gown mirroring the situation of the Statue of Liberty at the beginning of the film presides. Salon members smile, laugh, cheer, sing along, scream and dance. The aesthetic employed here, while climactic, is anything but affectively arousing. Rather, this finale makes visible the significance of community, active sensitivity and soulful connection.
The ending of Shortbus thus exhibits the displacement of the singularity of hard-core physical arousal, instead, appropriating in its place, the significance of intellectual arousal via a penetrating high-brow aesthetic. The salon is alight with hope, diversity, orgasmic energy and euphoria.
London and New York: Wallflower Press Lamble, D.
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