Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Warhol began and ended as a commercial illustrator; what lies between is the interesting stuff. He was an adroit draftsman but not a distinguished one. He soon overcame the influences of his early advertising days (Jean Cocteau and Ben Shahn), but the drawing is never more than efficient. Partly for this reason his freehand "studies" of soup cans or dollar bills never acquire the pressure of the silk-screened ones, but it is hard to see how they could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments...
...Desire and other Almodovar films take many cues from homoerotic cinema, from the fascination with lust and death that animated certain films of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, John Waters and R.W. Fassbinder. But Almodovar also looks back in glamour to '50s Hollywood, when Rock Hudson could comfort a dying Jane Wyman in one film, then woo perky Doris Day in another. Thus his pictures are both bleakly comic and defiantly romantic, hipper than tomorrow and nostalgic for a pre-AIDS era when love's most toxic complication was a broken heart. "To classify movies is to impoverish them," he says...
...modern Nancy Drew. And in Renny Harlin's Nightmare 4, Alice Johnson is Alice in Wonderland, falling through the hole of her consciousness into a war with the Mad Felt-Hatter. All the Nightmare films are compact encyclopedias of classical and pop allusions. They quote Poe and Cocteau, Hamlet and Balinese dream theory; they crib ruthlessly from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws, Poltergeist and themselves. They are cultural carnivores...
Mapplethorpe's imagery comes trailing a long pedigree, from the Yellow Book decadence of Aubrey Beardsley to Edward Weston's peppers, from Cocteau's classical echoes and erotomania to the chiseled male nudes shot by George Platt Lynes in the '30s and '40s. It also indulges a fascination with style and surface that is very much of the present. Mapplethorpe trafficked expertly in the prevailing moods of the '70s and early '80s, the appetite for both glamour and decadence, high fashion and subterranean sex. That has caused him to be dismissed at times as a vendor of deluxe fantasy...
...This time it is Tiepolo. But the ancient crone sweeping and cackling, the commedia dell'arte clowns, the quartet of nude women gently interweaving in a dance, the men employing a variety of bird noises, the eerily believable copulation between a girl and a skeleton also bring to mind Cocteau and Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Diaghilev. If more explicitly violent and more frequently nude than necessary, Miracolo is nonetheless a fitting tribute to what was freshest and most original in early 20th century art. Recalling it, audiences may well end as Cinderella does, despite her tribulations, in Into...