Word: phallically
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such an understated film. Swiss Director Alain Tanner also betrays an un fortunate tendency to hone a point or a joke until it loses its edge. In one se quence Rosemonde is shown at work, standing beside a machine that stuffs sausages inside skins with regular bursts of phallic efficiency. The image is funny and outrageous at first, but Tanner holds it longer to convey Rose monde's glazed boredom, then longer still, as if congratulating himself on his own cleverness...
...also takes issue with the wing of the movement that often equates male sexuality with rape -sometimes seeing rape symbolically as the distillation of the normal male sexual attitude. Says Adelson: "As any clinician knows, these days the problem in male sexuality lies in the opposite direction, not in phallic megalomania but rather in sexual diffidence and self-doubt...
Ever since King Kong aged enough to be a "classic," aficionados have argued over its implicit motifs. Kong's fall from the world's largest phallic symbol has led some to term the film a parable of unfulfilled sexuality. Others, noting his blackness and her whiteness, have damned the movie as racist. (Aside from its more abstruse symbolism, the film has a Chinese ship's cook named--you guessed it--Charlie. And Kong's New York is devoid of blacks, and his Asian island natives are Africans.) Not to mention the symbolic revolt of the worker, as played by exploited...
...entire mode of storytelling--a mosaic held together by the director's editing--is so self-propelled that nothing but action or obligatory dialogue becomes an integral part of the story. John Barry's production design and Russell Hagg's art direction drop sexual decorations and phallic sculptures in the midst of sterile modern architecture: a vain attempt to indict a Zeitgeist through innuendo. The gracelessness of the photography, however, is perhaps the most telling aspect of Mr. Kubrick's growing arrogance as a director. In vain, we wait for some formal structures to emerge from the succession of images...
...They denounce Freud and his notion of the superior role of the vagina. Certainly women are entitled to any sort of orgasm they like. But girls who are now being enjoined to "Think clitoris!" are being sold a mechanistic view of sex that is almost as dehumanizing as the phallic consciousness of Playboy...