Kino Eye
K H Brown
Known as El Topo while writing for iofilm K H Brown is the founder of Kinocite. He likes most sorts of cinema, so long as it's interesting - mainstream Hollywood need not apply. --http://www.kinocite.co.uk/contributors/1.php [Jan 2005]
Der Nackte und der Satan/The Head (1959) - Victor Trivas
The Head (1959) - Victor Trivas [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Art direction and pulp fiction merge in this story of a head grafted onto another's body. David Del Valle traces the history of brain transplants and living detatched heads.[*]
James Whale's head
The first tie that binds the aberrant behavior of our infamous Dr Ood would begin during the French Revolution, when a certain Dr Guillotine devised a scientifically expeditious way of separating man's head from his body. Much time would pass until the Théâtre du Grand Guignol would present "The Man Who Killed Death" in 1928. The brainchild of Rene Berton, the drama tells of a prisoner unjustly guillotined whose head is kept alive on a table.[1] The irony of this production is that the actor who portrayed the hapless head on stage, none other than James Whale, would go on to direct the most celebrated Faustian tale on man daring to emulate god, Frankenstein (1931).
Dr Frankenstein has always been the preeminent archetypal mad scientist. All other scientists, good, bad, or Ood would take their experiments in transplantation from his gothic laboratory. Films depicting disembodied heads elicit the frisson tingling along the suture of the mind/body split.
Old heads, new bodies
Dr Ood (Horst Frank) is the mad doctor in writer/director Victor Trivas's uniquely trashy Der Nackte und der Satan (literally from the German, "The Nude and the Devil," aka The Head, West Germany, 1959). It is Horst Frank's persona, with his entertaining, Conrad Veidt-like demeanor and demented sense of focus, that gives this film its centre. My introduction to The Head comes via American director Curtis Harrington, whose enthusiasm for the film was contagious. He was especially taken with the set design and atmosphere. Harrington discovered that Hermann Warm, the set decorator for Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Germany, 1919), had come out of retirement this one and only instance to give Trivas's film the nightmarish décor and ambiance that somewhat balances the trappings of the Edgar Wallace krimis inherent in the film itself.[2]
Der Nackte und der Satan exudes a spidery fascination as it opens on a full moon accompanied by the unsettling score of Jacques Lasry and Willy Mattes. The credits are suitably offsetting in a manner Tim Burton is fond of emulating. We are introduced to our mad doctor straightaway. He is seen in shadow approaching the laboratory/residence of Professor Doktor Abel (played by the distinguished Michel Simon). The residence is depicted in the manner of Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, France, 1959). The latter film's ambient tone is very much apparent in Der Nackte und der Satan, almost to the point of homage.
Dr Ood approaches the house and our first glimpse of Horst Frank is as he picks up a tortoise and slips away into a nest of dead branches which silhouette his bleached-white features. He observes and eavesdrops on the arrival of Dr Abel's hunchbacked nurse (Karin Kernke), whose appearance harkens back to the Universal Monster rallies of the 1940s. This whole sequence sets the tone for what is to follow. As we are led into Dr Abel's home, it is apparent that we are in an abode filled with futuristic trappings whose centrepiece is a Bauhaus staircase straight out of Edgar Ulmer. --http://www.kinoeye.org/02/06/delvalle06.php [Apr 2005]
Wolf C. Hartwig .... producer
Le Sexe qui parle/Pussy Talk (1975) - Claude Mulot
Le Sexe qui parle/Pussy Talk (1975) - Claude Mulot [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
K.H. Brown via http://www.kinocite.co.uk
The central gimmick - with the action punctuated by shots from the vagina's POV - feels somehow quintessentially French, giving the piece more intellectual gravitas than the likely American model of Deep Throat. The whole alternative title/subtitle Le Sexe qui Parle is replete with double meaning, "the sex" referring to both gender and female genitalia, and allusions to notions to French feminist and psychoanalytic theories of "the sex which cannot speak" - i.e. the female.
[...]
Nevertheless, you just know that someone, somewhere out there is going to discover the film and produce an academic paper exploring Pussy Talk's discourses around self and alterity and masculine constructions of female identity, making heavy-handed use of lines like the one where the pussy informs the reporter to come closer - "don't worry, I don't bite" - or constructing a history of similarly themed entries from Ever Ready the detachable penis-cum-phallus in the 1920s to the present as a history of meconnaissance in the porno genre… K.H. Brown via http://www.kinocite.co.uk/16/1620.php [Jan 2005]
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