Word: flesh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...undisturbed eating at a fenced-in country house once owned by the classical poet Boileau-Despreaux. Their arrival is followed by the arrival of the meat truck bearing wild boar, lamb, beef. Each carcass is ceremoniously described: "Three dozen young Ardennes roosters...two superb, soft-eyed deer, the flesh redolent...ten dozen semi-wild game hens...
...first law of the true-blue porn movie is the tyranny of the flesh: we dont see the characters in "The Grande Bouffe" otherwise occupied than at the feast, their one obsessive, consuming goal the constant satisfaction of the senses. Locking themselves away from the world in a mausoleum of a house and shedding civilized restraints, Ferreri's cardboard figures are participants in a porn-movie banquet, questers in search of absolute freedom. At their non-stop weekend orgy, food and sex are available in unlimited supply, and as with the Linda Lovelaces and Felicity Splits of the blue-movie...
...feast of carrion from its lowbrow cousins. Characters in porn movies are evaluated with regard to their sexual prowess and their freedom from guilt, and they are never more than temporarily unhappy: more frequent and more intense sex can solve any passing malaise. But here, the pleasures of the flesh are but harbingers of the coffin, and Ferreri's pestilential houseparty is, finally, a warning, an exemplum, an inverse appreciation of bourgeois restraint...
...with his pen what Bonaparte had done with the sword. He succeeded. As V.S. Pritchett says, "His fecundity throbs, his power of documentation, his ubiquity as a novelist are extraordinary. There is the spry, pungent and pervasive sense that, in any scene, he was there and in the flesh...
...blots, scribbles and stains of the paint-closely worked and yet oddly abstract, as if performed in a trance-are analogues to the liquidity of water itself. Paint "equals" water in much the same way as, in some Renaissance portraiture, the graininess of pigment "equals" the cellular structure of flesh...