Double Dream. Audiovisual Pornography Exploit through the Fantasy

  • Enrico Biasin University of Udine
Keywords: Fantasy, Film history, Neo-Victorian Studies, Pornography, Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the rhetorical strategies used by some contemporary audiovisual products in order to describe the birth of the pornographic film industry. In particular, through the analysis of three neo-Victorian key texts – Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Ripper Street (episode I Need Light) and Penny Dreadfull (episode Séance) –, the goal is to detect the “conditions of possibility” of pornography, considered as a cultural form, in the context of mass entertaiment related to mainstrem cinema and Anglo-American television series. The notion of fantasy, mainly studied in the field of psychoanalysis, is taken as a theoretical reference point in order to frame audiovisual pornography in terms of ideology (the codification of a cultural phenomenon), dispositif (its perceptual structuring) and narration (the grammar underlying it). The texts analyzed operate according to some historiographical “conceptualizations” extremely significant in terms of both historical and cultural understanding of the phenomenon investigated.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Enrico Biasin, University of Udine

Enrico Biasin, Ph.D in Film and Audiovisual Studies, teachs Research on Film Archives at University of Udine, where he organises, with Giovanna Maina and Federico Zecca, the Porn Studies Section of the Udine International Film Studies Conference and the MAGIS — International Film Studies Spring School. He is also editorial board member of Porn Studies (Routledge) and author of Oscenità di brand. L’industria culturale della pornografia audiovisiva contemporanea (Mimesis, 2013). His forthcoming book is entitled L’uomo, lo schermo e la nazione. Sguardi sulla mascolinità nel cinema italiano degli anni Venti e Trenta (Mimesis). He is currently working on the images of young people in the context of the 1940s-1960s Italian cinema.

References

Anderson Cordell, Sigrid, “Sex, Terror, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Coppola’s Reinvention of Film History, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6.1 (2013): 1-21.

Attwood, Feona, “Reading Porn: The Paradigm Shift in Pornography Research”, Sexualities, 5.1 (2002): 91-105.

Id., “Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture, Sexualities, 9.1 (2006): 77-94.

Baer, Alejandro, “Consuming History and Memory through Mass Media Products”, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.4 (2001): 491-501.

Baudry, Jean-Louis, “Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil debase”,Cinéthique, 7-8 (1970), tr. ingl. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”, Film Quarterly, 28.2 (1974-1975): 39-47.

Id., “Le Dispositif: approches métapsychologiquesde l’impression de réalité”, Communications, 23 (1975): 56-72.

Biasin, Enrico, Oscenità di brand. L’industria culturale della pornografia audiovisiva contemporanea, Milano, Mimesis, 2013.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, Una passione infiammabile. Guida allo studio del cinema muto, Torino, UTET, 1991.

Elsaesser, Thomas, “Specularity and Engulfment: Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, Steve Neale - Murray Smith (eds.), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, London-New York, Routledge, 1998: 191-208.

Foucault, Michel, L’Ordre du discours (1971), trad. it. L’ordine del discorso. I meccanismi sociali di controllo e di esclusione della parola, Torino, Einaudi, 1972.

Id., “The Confession of the Flesh”, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, Ed. Colin Gordon, New York, Pantheon Books, 1980: 194-228.

Freud, Sigmund, Traumdeutung (1900), trad. it. L’interpretazione dei sogni, Opere, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1971, III.

Id., “Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens”, Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, 3.1 (1911): 1-8, trad. it. “Precisazioni sui due principi dell’accadere psichico“, Opere, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1974: 449-460, VI.

Id., “Abriss der Psychoanalyse”, Internazionale Zeitschrift – Imago, 25.1 (1940): 7-67, trad. it. “Compendio di psicoanalisi”, Opere, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1979: 567-634, XI.

Gaudreault, André - Marion, Philippe, “Le Cinéma naissant et ses dispositions narratives”, Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies Journal, 1 (2001): 34-41.

Gaudreault, André - Marion, Philippe, “Per un nuovo approccio alla periodizzazione nella storia del cinema”, Le età del cinema / The Ages of Cinema, Eds. Enrico Biasin - Roy Menarini - Federico Zecca, Udine, Forum, 2008: 135-144.

Heard, Mervyn, “A Prurient Look at the Magic Lantern”, Early Popular Visual Culture, 3.2 (2005): 179-195.

Heilmann, Ann, “Doing It with Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist”, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2.2 (2009-2010): 18-42.

Houzel, Didier, “Il concetto di involucro psichico”, Gli involucri psichici, Ed. Enzo Funari, Milano, Dunod, 1997: 21-46.

Isaacs, Susan, “The Nature and Function of Phantasy”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29 (1948): 73-97.

Kaes, Anton, “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination”, History and Memory, 2.1 (1990): 111-129.

Kessler, Frank, “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif”, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Ed. Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006: 57-69.

Id., Notes on dispositif, paper non pubblicato, 2007, http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/f.e.kessler/Dispositif%20Notes11-2007.pdf (ultimo accesso 17/07/2011).

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre II. Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalise (1978), trad. it. Il Seminario. Libro II. L’io nella teoria di Freud e nella tecnica della psicoanalisi. 1954-1955, Torino, Einaudi, 2006.

Laplance, Jean - Pontails, Jean-Bertrand, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49.1 (1968): 1-18.

Llewellyn, Mark, “What Is Neo-Victorian Studies?”, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1.1 (2008): 164-185.

Lowe, Donald M., History of Bourgeois Perception, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

McNair, Brian, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and Democratisation of Desire, New York-London, Routledge, 2002.

Nead, Lynda, “Strip: Moving Bodies in the 1890s”, Early Popular Visual Culture, 3.2 (2005): 135-150.

Parente, André - de Carvalho, Victa, “Cinema as dispositif: Between Cinema and Contemporary Art”, CiNéMAS, 19.1 (2008): 37-55.

Petrelli, Diomira, “Fantasia inconscia”, Interazioni, 2.6 (1995): 165-170.

Plasseraud, Emmanuel, “Le forme del desiderio. Dalle grivoiserie alle webcam”, Il porno espanso. Dal cinema ai nuovi media, Eds. Enrico Biasin - Giovanna Maina - Federico Zecca, Milano, Mimesis, 2011: 127-142.

Scaggs, John, Crime Fiction, New York-London, Routledge, 2005.

Sigel, Lisa Z., Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914, New Brunswick-London, Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Tachou, Frédéric, Et le sexe entra dans la modernité. Photographie “obscène” et cinéma pornographique primitif, aux origines d’une industrie, Paris, Klincksieck, 2013.

Verza, Annalisa, Il dominio pornografico. Femminismo e liberalismo alla prova, Napoli, Liguori, 2006.

Veyenne, Paul, “La storia concettualizzante”, Faire de l’histoire, Eds. Jacques Le Goff - Pierre Nora, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, trad. it. Fare storia. Temi della nuova storiografia, Torino, Einaudi, 1981: 25-57.

Voros, Florian, “Domesticated Porn. Gendered Embodiment in Audience Reception Practices of Pornography”, Porn after Porn: Contemporary Alternative Pornographies, Eds. Enrico Biasin - Giovanna Maina - Federico Zecca, Milano, Mimesis International, 2014: 241-255.

Williams, Linda, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions”, Ciné-Tracts, 3.12 (1981): 19-35.

Id., Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989.

Williams, Linda, “Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field”, Porn Studies, 1.1-2 (2014): 24-40.

Zagarrio, Vito, Francis Ford Coppola, Milano, L’Unità-Il Castoro, 1995.

Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, Verso, 1989.

Id., The Plague of Fantasies, London, Verso, 1997, trad. it. L’epidemia dell’immaginario, Roma, Meltemi, 2004.

Published
2015-05-15
How to Cite
Biasin, E. (2015). Double Dream. Audiovisual Pornography Exploit through the Fantasy. Between, 5(9). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/1425
Section
Walls, Screens, Photographs - Planes of Censorship