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father away from him ( 2009 : 284). These feelings could have resurfaced following Juan’s departure. Despite these connections, Pablo associates Laura P with his sister Tina and tells her that there is ‘a certain affinity’ between the character and her life, ‘regarding your problems with men’. Pablo could be referring merely to the melodramatic aspects of Tina’s life, but the fact that Laura P cuts off her leg takes on a different dimension when viewed against Tina’s life because Tina has had Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). The story of Laura P could thus be a fantasy
and loved England could have made a film like If … ’.14 Leigh’s own next film, Naked, would prove as volatile and controversial as Anderson’s great 1968 work. Leigh’s background perhaps engendered the kind of dual perspective characteristic of a born, or at any rate instinctive, satirist. ‘Dad worked as a doctor, but I both went to school and lived in a middle-class home in the same building as his surgery within a working-class part of Salford’, he has said. ‘I didn’t know where I stood. And that could explain the class clash in my work … I suppose I was a big
associated with explosions of energy and desire; in La mujer sin cabeza the swimming pool’s domestication and contain ment of water is in question: will it be contaminated by the vet’s surgery next door where aquatic turtles are being kept? Perhaps even more insistent than these diegetic moments or narrative occurrences, though, is the films’ saturation, the sheer screen presence of water in the form of heavy rain storms, drenched windows crisscrossed with rivulets, the palpable humidity of La ciénaga, as well as the engagement with the tactile and sound qualities of
King (1971–72), which opens in Geneva, where a woman is undergoing plastic surgery. Next, in London, a man is released from prison. He jets to Switzerland to witness her unveiling: she now resembles the woman whose picture he carries. The title sequence follows. Jason King, the dandy crime-writer cum reluctant crime-fighter from Department S (1969–70), pounds away at his typewriter, while shots of him in action and posed with various ‘dolly-birds’ are inset in the upper right corner of the screen. Cut to New York, and then to King, played with absolute relish by
, scarring –are most frequently the result of therapeutic regimes of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery intended to treat it. While Lobel has suggested that solo performance may itself be ‘the perfect metaphor for being sick: one body on stage, isolated and vulnerable’ (Lobel 2012b: 14), cancer in itself is not readily seen. In response, Lobel’s trilogy traces a critique of the highly selective affirmations which allow a misfit to be seen and, more pointedly, validated as a survivor. While breast cancer’s emergence as the highest profile form of cancer (beyond other
narrative of Les Yeux sans visage is a more complex one, and only one of multiple interpretations the film offers, many of which are intertextually linked to other stories and films. A recent approach (Hawkins 2000 : 65–85) sees it as an allegory of events in European history, either of Nazi imperialism (Dr Genessier’s blockhouse-surgery as concentration-camp ‘sanitorium’) or of France’s Algerian war, underway at the time the
becomes an end in itself, a goal of self-fashioning for ongoing retrospection. Such a degree of mnemonic arrest produces a melancholic culture in which progress is marked by the increase of intimacy with the past: whole libraries available through a home terminal; lives video-graphed from birth through toddlerhood, graduations through sexual encounters, surgeries through testaments. Rather than Benjamin
:41:24 PM 44 Mar Binimelis et al. The Transplant was not so clear, but the programme contained all the elements of pessimistic humanism that Chicho had pointed to in his previous work. The story was about a man who was living in a society with few basic human rights and in which cosmetic surgery was the norm. He, however, was forced to sell his organs. The moral of the story focused on social differences and the abuse of power. Nevertheless, he broached the most daring subject in History of Frivolity. He came up with the idea of reviewing the history of censorship
which it found itself working. As Hand and Wilson explain, the Grand-Guignol set plays in ‘bedrooms in brothels, the ramparts of besieged consulates, lighthouses, rooms in museums, sitting rooms, boats, opium dens, doctors’ surgeries, operating theatres [. . .], cells in prisons and asylums, execution courtyards, carnival caravans, and barber shops. The claustrophobic potential of all these locations is exploited to the full
against that of the gynaecologist who indifferently prepares a pâté sandwich before abandoning the woman in his surgery. Women in the film are increasingly cast as sexual predators, who hunt men like animals, and round them up like prisoners of war. The men, including the classic Blier duo in the second of its many manifestations, are ultimately destroyed by the sexually active female body, which devours them through the vagina