The Ravenous Audience

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

I’ve always thought that at its best, art in some way disturbs us: out of complacency, ignorance, or innocence that has become a liability. The Ravenous Audience by Kate Durbin is a deliciously disturbing collection of poems that delivers a sensory-emotional feast ripe with smells, sounds, and flavors of the sacred and the profane. I was enchanted by the visual and visceral quality of the collection and was thoroughly engaged by Durbin’s command of language.

The book is divided into four Scenes (sections), and many of the poems are inspired by the works of other artists, including films, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. One section contains a thirty-page poem originally published as a chapbook. The poems vary greatly in form and include orderly stanzaed quatrains and couplets among other, less obviously ordered free verse. Deliberate spacing and line structure provide emphasis and cadence, while some poems span several pages, making effective use of white space and the pause as the reader turns the page.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is "36 Fillette." Taking its title from Catherine Breillat’s 1988 film, the poem's lines are taken from the film's dialogue. As the page-long poem progresses, repetition increases, lines lose their punctuation and merge, and by its end the poem has picked up such speed that I was completely drawn into the cyclone of experience it creates.

The Ravenous Audience also brings to life several mythic and iconic women of the early twentieth century (Amelia Earhart, Clara Bow, and Marilyn Monroe), and Durbin gives a fresh voice to these women of troubled lives and tragic destinies. Exhaustive research informs an imagined interview with Marilyn, a listing of the worldly possessions she left behind, and a final-days journal of the wrecked, stranded, and menstruating Amelia Earhart.

Focusing on the shock factor of much of the thematic material in The Ravenous Audience would be to overlook how well this collection reflects the overall experience of being a woman and boldly embracing the messiness of corporeal life. The raw descriptions of bodily juices, incest, transgressive sex, and violent objectification punctuate a collection of poems that bears unflinching witness and plays with and annihilates boundaries. The carnality and grossness of life are not ignored, but included simply as part of the whole.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, December 16th 2009

Taxidermia

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by György Pálfi

Regent Releasing

I was given a bootleg copy of Taxidermia about a year ago, before its North American release. True to bootleg copies, the disc went kaput about fifteen minutes into it, leaving me with the opening scene burned into my brain: the image of a flaming orgasm. Fire literally shoots out of a man’s penis.

When I had the opportunity to review this critically recognized and awarded Hungarian film, I was excited to get past the opening scene. All the reviews praised the cinematography and aesthetics of this film, with one caveat—if you can stomach it.

I will freely admit that I could barely stomach it. The flaming orgasm was only the tip of the phallic iceberg. Other masturbation and sex scenes prevailed. Again, tolerable. But then came the pig slaughter, and the subsequent sex scene on top of the pig entrails. I felt myself slinking down in my seat, looking around at my fellow reviewers, hoping someone else would walk out. But they sat tight, so I did as well, queasily.

Director György Pálfi’s Taxidermia is the story of three generations of men in Hungary. The grandfather Vendel Morosgovanyi, the pyro-masturbator, is an orderly for a crude family in the countryside, searching for love. His son Kalman becomes a competitive eater, pursuing victory as voraciously as a professional athlete. Finally Lajos, the last of this family, becomes the film’s namesake: a taxidermist seeking to preserve his own mortality.

The competitive eating chapter pushed me to the point of gagging, so I won’t indulge you with the details except that it involves vomiting and gorging on gelatinous delicacies. And the gruesome finale is a spectacle in itself. Self-taxidermy with the precision of a sculptor’s chisel.

However, lest this review be too tainted by my hang-ups, there are very impressive elements of this film that deserve noting.

A film like this makes me think, why? Is it a satire, a parody, or just sensation? There are plenty of torture films out there that probably rival the grotesque found here (such as the neverending Saw franchise), I just don’t go see them. Taxidermia should not be categorized with those films, because the purpose of this film is not to shock and disgust. This is a film about a family, linked by desire.

The cinematography truly is beautiful. A mix of realism, surrealism, and magical realism create an almost erotic experience, which makes the grotesque that much more disturbing. Two of my favorite scenes come in the first part, as the camera circles a wooden tub that is used for everything in a family’s daily life: to cradle a baby, to bathe in, to knead dough on, to hold the body of a dead relative, and to hold the recently slaughtered pig. It’s so beautifully and seamlessly shot that you forget about the unsavory details of this arrangement. The other scene is in Vendel’s imagination, as he walks into a three-dimensional fairytale storybook.

Consider yourself warned regarding the grotesque, and if you do go see Taxidermia, focus on what Pálfi is really doing here. If you can handle the sight of bodily fluids and animal slaughter, you will experience a unique story, set against a gray backdrop of intensity and hopelessness.

Written by: Claire Burrows, August 25th 2009