By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Linking Marx with Japanese soft-core pornography may be a long stretch, enclosed in a single framed space of mind, where class social revolts have nothing to do with the human experience of sexuality. But there was a point of intersection between Marx’s ideas and the socialist feminist discussions of the era, and the further exploration of sexuality by obscure Pinku Eiga filmmakers, an equivalent of the American sexploitation film genre, which was in itself a response to decades of repression: The uncovered flesh as an analogy of class uprising. If Marx himself never explained per se the concepts of sexual alienation, he was clear on what “exploitation of the capitalist society” was, and how it operated in the sexual lives and attitudes of people.

per: Narda Liotine

Uno dei modi migliori per indagare le relazioni interpersonali è analizzare i pasti. Evitando quelli solitari, frugali e scomposti, preferiamo quelli affollati e i tête-à-tête. Il regista surrealista ceco Jan Svankmajer -dal seminale Dimensioni del dialogo (Možnosti dialogu, 1982) passando per il più recente Meat Love (1989) – ci insegna che consumare un pasto in compagnia può portare a scontri e contrasti. Nella sua riflessione artistica i tavoli da pranzo e le stoviglie sono creati per generare tanto l’armonia quanto il caos, ritenendo il primo come una possibile conseguenza del secondo.

By Jan Philippe V. Carpio

Perhaps in no other art form (and other art forms may disagree with this) do cinema’s practitioners constantly choose (and it is a seldom choice) to wage war with the tyranny of audience expectations. To perpetuate the tyranny of the regime, audiences usually possess five (of many) insidious weapons – immaturity, indifference, arrogance, laziness, distraction – which cinema’s practitioners engage with experience, involvement, humility, dedication, focus. These perpetual wars seem to stem from practitioners and audiences differing perceptions of cinema and its uses. And it is here, on one of the many battlefields of perceptions, where Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was … wages its delicate and covert war.