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From the Constrictor Directly onto the Screen
Some Scatological Phenomena in Film History.
commented on by Patrick Bühler & Michael Gasser
What you are going to read here was originally a film-script for a docdumentary which we have committed ffor an exposition under the heading UNRAT (ORDURE), in the Tumb Galery GmbH (Zurich). The topic ARSE offers itself to divers approaches. However it is certainly incontestable that the arse is a constituent part of an overall concept through which ordure (colloquially 'shit') leaves our body. The arsehole (refinedly 'anus') represents the orifice which allows dischargement by means of the constrictor. But how does the film medium deal with such a taboo-fraught topic?
Lexically the term 'scatology' is paraphrased as follows: 'scientific examination of excrement' or 'preference for expressions from the anal area. By the expression koprophagy the eating of excrements is meant, supplemented in the DUDEN by the pejorative addition 'as anomaly of drive'. During the time of our research our hightened senses for anything bad-smelling occasionally made us come across impressive reports in the journalistic domain.
In an issue of the SPIEGEL from November 1995 we read that in Nicholas Hytners film 'The Madness of King George' this king appeared to be the master of english humour which reputedly has a touch of the anal and an amusing appeal in particular to rather immature personalities - so for instance when his physician Peppys doesn't tire of scrutinizing the contents of the royal chamber pot: 'his majesties excrement is of immaculate shape and colour and of just such a quality' or when the king himself describes the proportion of his stool: 'by God that's enough to menure 14 vicarages'.
In the comic scene too, the boom of various bodily excretions seems to have become a topic. As such the ZEIT from the 3rd of November 1995 in its literary supplement reported on, next to Kohout and McLuhan, the comic designer Roberta Gregory and her furious heroine Bitchy Bitch, who, according to Gregory, originally emmerged from a department internal joke: a parody on the preference for 'ugly' comic characters, which is spreading again, at the end of the present decade, and also on the fashionable roughness in the depiction of people, genitals and bodily excretions. Veronika Minder, head of the CELLAR CINEMA in Bern, remembers Devine's advice to the audience:'Eat Shit' in John Waters' 'Pink Flamingos' from the WOZ issue of the 3rd of November 1995 and conciders this to have been her best experience in the CELLAR CINEMA.
Now, does this film topic belong rather to a stupid contemporary grotesque instead of to the realm of sensuality, similar to Vachtova's criticism of Miro's astonishment at a plate of excrements in the Weltwoche of the 2nd of November, or is this produce of our digestion a first class means for provocation in film?
In 'Les Reves de Topor' (shown on ARTE), Roland Topor, recently deceased, demonstrates a cheerful photographic interest in a heap (of dog dirt) and the attack on it by french flies (with flags), which will be finished off by an act of violence: Topor tramples all of it down.
On TV we are constantly faced with murder, rape and a range of other crimes. LPs, books and magazines can become even more explicit as far as depiction is concerned. Human menure, excrement, shit, in the production of which we all take part, regardless of age, is rather a taboo in the media. Nevertheless there are people that don't shy away fom presenting the topic in one way or an other. Authors like Andres Serrano and James Joyce ventured near the 'heap' and finally were forced to realise that they were moving on controversial ground and they had to defend themselves at court against shocked and bewildered people. Our attention is on a selection of films that deal with this foul matter. The mentioned films are a 'must-see' and have one thing in common.: all of them feature WC-bowls. Not the silent, victorian Water Closet, which was intended to conceal any activity going on in the toilet in the 19th century, is of interest to us, but the unmasking of the toilet user by three options. 1. A fly, a so-called gutter-press journalist, rummages the WC-bowl filled with the shit of celebritiesand nibbles at it. (In ' Meet the Feebles' by Peter Jackson.) 2. The produce of excretion as an independently reasoning and talking organism which rises out of the bowl turning against its progenitor: thus a heap of shit starts to talk to a WC-goer and hops into his mouth. (In: 'I -bought a vampyre motorcycle'.) 3. A bang with consequences for the hygienic condition of Marcello Mastroianni: after the explosion of a WC-bowl, due to blockage, he is covered with excrements from head to toe. (In: 'The Big Binge')
The so-called youth-culture too, has quite a considerable contribution to make to our topic. The focus is on Rock, of course. To whom Punk springs to mind, is not too wrong here. In the documentary 'GG Allin & the Murder Junkies' GG Allin, who died rather too early, appears during one of his famed concerts. As we know from experience, it is not only rough sound that meets the ecstatic and frightened faces of the kids: in his concerts he in fact let frequently down his pants, showed his bum, took a shit on the stage and hurled around his 'emissions', which led to bad fighting. In Ken Russell's film of the Who-Rockopera 'Tommy', first a load of (english) baked beans swells out of the TV, followed by about two tons of some brown sauce: a scene which conveys three-dimensionality and thus almost appears reminisceent of the contemporary multimedia discussion.
In 1920, a famous psycho-analyst, Karl Abrahams, held the view that adults were more prone to immediate satisfaction of the oral eroticism than of the anal one.
Today it is still difficult to discuss anal eroticism (crudely: arse fucking) on western parties. Although anal intercourse is prohibited in a few american states, in Europe it is no problem to poke about in other people's bums. Anal eroticism has nevertheless achieved a higher degree of acceptance in the Far East, as we have seen in the documentary 'Shocking Asia 3 - After Dark'. Under the suspciously thin cover of anal prophecy (sic!) a businessman-like male wishes to have his fortune told in the gutter, motivated by the confusing errantries of his anal tube and have his bum poked around in. The anal mistress, extremely poorly dressed, who runs her dingy metier in a box car, gives order to the man to undress himself. Dutifully he obeys her tinsel magic stick and strips of piece after piece. A correct procedure demands a keen eye, a not too modest amount of vaseline and some kind of dildo stud with pearls to bring out the truth on to the dim car light. Judged by the slightly distorted expression on the face of the customer, most likely the procedure exceeds fun, though in that it represents a form of art, to which a european never gains access. Possibly one has to suffer and to let suffer for sublime art. Not to mention the glimpses into the future one is allowed to take.
After such promising sounds and pokings, the time has come to introduce you to the probably most famous koprophagic scene of film history. It is to be found in Pasolini's 'Solo (120 Journées de Sodom)'. The controversial masterpiece, which comes across as getting even with the fascist ideologty, is a carefully planned intimate play, brought to the bitter end by provocative means of sexual and sadistic excesses. The film based on a novel by Marquis de Sade, deliberately and consciously transgressed the line of bourgeois taste and consequently was prohibited in many countries. In this film numerous people are forced to swollow excrement. Please take note of the product-placement by the chocolate company 'Sprüngli', which at that time preferred to stay unmentioned (according to a mythological anectode which after years is still alive).
Not only 'Salo' by Pasolini was a cause of a scandal; also in the american porno industry a taboo codex of the genre was shaken by Gerard Damianos 'Water Power' in 1977. An enema attack on an unsuspecting Stewardess committed by an established porno star by the name of Jamie Gillis saw to a bewielderment in bourgeois pornotaste. The treatment of the topic in an internationally distributed hardcore film, can be illustrated on a key-scene in Madame Claude's Cabinet. Here a future author of drive crime recognizes in a hospital szenario lascivious fulfillment: he is fond of enema. The scene takes place, what else could one expect in a brothel in New York's famed 42nd amusement street, which in the 90's is being taken over by Disney, where the admiration belongs to mice and ducks instead to dicks and vaginas.
Genet once said that the middle class pays high prises to look at scatological dicrimination. In the last twenty years John Waters' 'Pink Flamingos' has advanced to a midnight-shocker of bad taste in the opinion of a cinema frequenting public. Devine is to be seen eating dog shit - pure - no Sprüngli chocolate. With this film excerpt which you can load down from the internet, we have already come to the end of our modest documentation and we hope to have opened up a view on the world of smelling films. Certainly there are some thematic limits of the supportable for certain readers, but as long as such anectodes as the following circulate within journalism, we can turn without remorse to more of those delicate topics in the history of civilisation. In the 60's the CIA too, displayed an interest in scatology. This organisation pinched the excrements of Breznev and King Farouk during one of their visits on the toilet in order to examine by means of chemical experiments whether they could find anything suspiscioius. |
