HORIZONTAL COLLABORATION AND VOLUPTUOUS PANIC: THE SEX CULTURE OF VICHY FRANCE AND WEIMAR GERMANY (W/ RARE FILM CLIPS AND ORIGINAL WEIMAR ERA ART EXHIBITION)
11/24/15
In celebration of the new Feral House book Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris 1920-1946, companion to the notorious pictorial classic Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Germany, mad professor and author Mel Gordon will take us on a tour of forbidden thrills, via extremely rare films and imagery from Weimar Germany and Paris, the city of pleasure, prior to and during German occupation during World War II.
After the Armistice, Paris competed with Berlin for hard-partying tourists. Here, sex-as-theatre was a greater draw and lasted well until the German Occupation. Included are color film clips of nude dancers from the Casino de Paris (1927), a Black Mass performed in a Parisian brothel (1928); scenes from the Lido nightclub (1932), color 1927 footage from Parisian music halls (30 mins), a virtually unseen 1932 “documentary,” This Nude World, created to be shown at American carnivals exploring nudity in Paris and Germany. Included in the lecture are film clips from lost films of the Weimar era, including Erik Jan Hanussen’s Hypnosis (1919), a melodrama about sex cults, and documentary footage recording Anita Berber’s Dances of Depravity, Horror, and Ecstasy (1922) as well as Eugen Steinach’s shocking Sexual Rejuvenation Operation (1922), shot at Magnus Hirscheld’s Berlin clinic.
Join us afterwards on the back patio for pre-WWII Parisian libations as Mel signs books and view a very special pop-up exhibition with Century Guild Gallery featuring incredibly rare original Weimar-era artworks, silent film posters, cabaret costume designs and more!