Fashion Victim

-

I don't think my Vogue subscription has lapsed since I was 13. I love fashion, even though I'm hardly a clothes horse and would probably recoil in horror at any real proximity to the industry. But when fashion and documentary collide? Frothy goodness. I am anxiously awaiting my first viewing of Frederick Wiseman's 1983 The Store now available on DVD about the fabled Dallas Neiman Marcus. I have been feeding my frivolity jones in the meantime with more contemporary fashion fixes, like the purported "insider" view of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld in Lagerfeld Confidential, he of the frosted hair, finger bangles and brittle Teutonic air. Andy Warhol had nothing on Lagerfeld's studied aloof, hologram-like cult of personality. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the vivacious, quip-master American hipster designer Marc Jacobs, the subject of a recent French doc, Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton I also reviewed for the New York alternative weekly New York Press.


Fashion it ain't, but for sheer weirdness, if you are in New York from April 9-22 and in the mood for something truly odd, check out the Israeli doc Stalags, reviewed here about the phenomenon of kinky paperbacks produced in Israeli during the Sixties featuring busty, whip-cracking Nazi prison camp guards torturing brawny American and British prisoners of war. The documentary doesn’t adequately explain why the Israeli Stalags authors did such a gender flip, and made women the cold, hard Nazi sadists and made rugged sides of male beefcake the victims of rape and torture. But this strange sub genre of porn, riding the coattails of the Adolf Eichmann trials and the testimony of Nazi sadism and degeneracy it provided, is required viewing for fans of the outré and the bizarre psychological byways of popular culture.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Dark Coming-of-Age Story for Girls

-
Image
Sidney Flanigan in Never Rarely Sometimes Always /Image courtesy of Focus Features Tales of innocence lost and knowledge gained, the male bildungsroman in film runs the tonal gamut from American Graffiti t o Stand By Me to Boyhood . It's an adventure story coupled with a rite of passage that signals a shift from childhood to manhood. Director Eliza Hittman's devastating Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a coming-of-age with a difference, an "adventure" defined by a quest, myriad obstacles and a fresh, painful reckoning with the world's injustices, for both protagonist and audience. The quest in this case is 17-year-old Autumn's (Sidney Flanigan) herculean effort to obtain an abortion following sex, the film insinuates, that may not have been her choice. The film's title comes from an interview in a New York City Planned Parenthood office in which Autumn is asked to, essentially, recount her sex life on a rating scale from good to horrific a...
Read more

Subtext

-
Image
Felicia Feaster was born in Jimmy Stewart's hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania.  She received her B.A. in film studies from the University of Florida and her M.A. in film studies from Emory University.  Her master's thesis on exploitation film became a book, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film co-authored with fellow lowbrow connoisseur, husband and filmmaker Bret Wood ( Hell's Highway , Psychopathia Sexualis ) and a Kino Lorber DVD series .  A former staff art and film critic for Atlanta’s alternative newsweekly Creative Loafing, Felicia is currently a managing editor at HGTV.com and TravelChannel.com and the art critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .  Her writing has appeared in Elle , The Economist , New York Press , Atlanta magazine, Sculpture , Art in America , Travel + Leisure , Artnews , Playboy online and Art Papers .  She has curated exhibitions for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and TEW Galleries in Atlanta. She has ...
Read more

Freaks and Geeks: Comic Con Episode IV Offers a Heartwarming Look at a Nerd's Paradise

-
Image
 With so much of American life centered on celebrity worship and aspirational window shopping, it is nice to be reminded of the merits of the not-beautiful, the marginal, and, frankly, the geeky. Morgan Spurlock's new documentary Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope is a salute to the underdogs in life's lotto, the kids who didn't get all the lucky breaks and the good looks. But, based on this documentary, they at least wring their fair share of fun from it nevertheless. Their nirvana is the annual comic book convention in San Diego, Comic-Con. Inaugurated in 1970, the event has since grown into an enormous, celebrity-packed merchandise-shilling geek fest of 120,000 fanboys and girls that nerds across the country pine to attend all year long. In a tongue-in-cheek opening bit mimicking an old-school filmstrip, Spurlock shows the crude beginnings of Comic-Con in black-and-white stills of fuzzy-h...
Read more