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spread over the pill’.20 The pill wasn’t entirely sugar-coated. One commentator describes as ‘labori ously educational’ the red dotted line intended as a guide for patrons to visit in strict order the Festival’s twenty-seven pavilions.21 An emphasis on the educational was also in evidence in the Festival’s rigorous concentration on the arts and sciences as elements of the general theme of the ‘Land and the People’.22 The Festival theme was translated into a physical presence within the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, which, according to the official guide to the exhibition
deploys a Hitchcockian counterpoint between sound and image. A small argument develops between Mrs Petti-grew and Charmian about whether the latter has remembered to take her pills that morning. Verbally the scene is about memory, but visually it is a struggle of wills, rendered in a little finger ballet as Clayton’s camera closes in on hands and pills, Pettigrew pushing the pills nearer, Charmian pushing them away; each move
morbidly obese casino patron who watches his previous self in that illusory mirror: the television set (Figure 14). Another obese casino patron recognises Enrique from the television and takes a photograph with his smart phone as real proof for his wife that, as he keeps telling her, the pills are a rip-off. Cut to a Weight Watchers-style meeting, where the thin, attractive team leader Abel (Roberto Enríquez) welcomes his new group of customers as he walks around the room tilting body-size mirrors towards each one of them and asks them to get undressed. The play with
placed ominously between them – no snuggling on the cards here. ‘Is the end in sight?’ asks Christine wearily, unable to get to sleep because the light is still on and Ralph insists on reading his pupils’ essays out loud. ‘No’, he tells her bluntly. Later, after another visit to the pub, Dick and Mandy argue more aggressively as they get into bed. ‘I’ve told you, Dick, I’m coming off the pill’, she insists. ‘Yeah, and I’ve told you you’re not, till I say so’, he says. They issue threats and counter-threats: he will force the pill down her throat; she will refuse to make
’s feelings may be in part a function of the fact that in this film, unlike Diabolo menthe , relationships between women are marginalised. Anne’s little sister Sophie has only a brief appearance at the beginning of the narrative (when she offers Anne her piggy-bank savings) and at the end; a girlfriend appears only briefly to give Anne the pill; the Italian anarchist is a rival who steals her belongings; and the woman doctor cannot
– the discussion about the pill – is represented as being as threatening as the dangerous sexuality of the femme fatale. Pravo also embodied the femme fatale in the television programme Stasera Patty Pravo (Falqui, 1969) (Tonight, Patty Pravo). In the show, she performed the song ‘La bambola’ (Migliacci, Zambrini & Cini, 1968) (The Doll), which talks about a woman who asks her man to stop
of a date is one of the most poignant moments in the film – and justifiably repulsed by the aggressiveness of her real gentleman caller, she is ready to pull down the curtains on her life and take enough sleeping pills to knock out all of New Jersey, as Stella notes. Hearing the song, though, makes her change her mind, put down the pills and open the curtains. The rest of her story is told elliptically, but the later vignettes are revealing: she is briefly seen rushing to look out to the courtyard, concerned by Jefferies’ cry for help, a sign that she is now more
pill was available on the National Health Service to all British women. Dominic Sandbrook tellingly points out that ‘It was in the early 1970s, not the 1960s, that young single women began taking the Pill.’39 The wider availability of ‘the pill’ in the early 1970s certainly appeared to mark a turning point in sexual behaviour, and in ways people talked and thought about sex.40 But, in British cinema, the permissive society was by no means always something to be celebrated. One film from the beginning of the decade worth considering here is Permissive (Lindsay
sexual relations of these young people. The opinion of young people is constantly surveyed with regard to their sexual behaviour, and in particular to their knowledge of contraception, from the new devices imported from America – the pill and the diaphragm – to the more ‘traditional’ methods of withdrawal or carefully selecting dates on which to have sex according to the female menstrual cycle. Masculin féminin captures a
zine’s approach would change as new voices came to the fore. Signed ‘P.N.’, the piece was in all likelihood written by Pip Nicholls, the ‘androgynous’ bass player of The Distractions who lived with Naylor and Carroll.69 Describing the Picador venue as ‘one of those contraception clubs, it could be as reliable as the Pill if used correctly’, Nicholls’ article displayed hints of the arch humour that would prevail from volume 2 onwards.70 This humour was often articulated through a camp inhabitation of existing discourses, generating a less declarative, more subtle and