Dangerous Liaisons 2013 + The Wardrobe Master

Dir. Unknown, Unknown, Unknown

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Sun 6 October 2013 // 19:30 / Cinema

FREE FILM EVENT


Dangerous Liaisons 2013 - 

The documentary Dangerous Liaisons 2013 targets a predominantly young audience, between the ages of twenty to thirty years old.However, it should be of interest to all viewers, as seduction is a universal theme, which everyone can relate to. Although the documentary consists of multiple interviews, approximately twenty-five, two central protagonists will underpin the documentary's narrative framework. At the beginning, the viewer is presented with a silent, somewhat bemused and encumbered male reader. This reader will complaisantly and conscientiously take in the voice-over, recited in French, of the ambivalent perspective of the narrator of the French writer, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, in his legendary, epistolary novel "Dangerous Liaisons": 'The male delights in the pleasure, which he feels and the female in that, which she provides. The pleasure of one is satisfying desires, that of the other is to incite them.' On the one hand, the first sentence of this archetypal quotation portrays the male as an experiential recipient of 'pleasure' through accentuating the verb 'feels' and the female as an active catalyst of the above via the verb 'provides', thus projecting a foreword-thinking viewpoint in the context of the eighteenth century era. On the other hand, the second sentence undermines and reverses the first statement, as it presents the female as a servile executor of this selfsame male oriented 'pleasure' with no access to her own personal 'pleasure' and the male as a selfish advocate of 'pleasure', interested only in the transitory aim of triggering this element for the sake of arousal rather than the sustenance of this physical reflex on a more long-term scale.In the context of contemporary gender roles, this two-part quotation is inconsistent: both pre-emptive of Feminism and traditionally chauvinistic, both adhering to and questioning the Freudian 'object/subject', 'ego/Super ego' corollaries. In the face of the post-colonial, patriarchal theories of Edward Saïd, this affirmation is similarly conflicted in its presentation of the female as the mysterious, exotic and passive 'Other': in Saïd's dialectic, the feminized East. The natural backdrop of the documentary is endowed with landscapes from Brittany: the epic North Western coast of France. Another central conflict of the film is the role of hypocrisy in reinventing and/or exaggerating certain aspects of oneself in attempt to seduce the other party This selfsame investigation via the responses of various interviewees fundamentally drives the story forward. The investigation culminates with the notion of erotic fantasies as it applies to each individual, who is willing to answer this question. The underlying drive of this piece is to encourage its audience to be more open about exploring traditional and untraditional gender roles; their own sexuality and erotic fantasies; their approach to the pursuit of seduction and human relationships, as a whole.

2. The Wardrobe Master - 

A short feature film based on scenes from Alex Kan's novel, "The Wardrobe Master", incorporating the performances of Linda Martinez and Mike Kuchar amongst many others.