Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

Bresson too

korean director kim ki-duk's turn

Famed SKorean director #KimKiDuk was convicted of physically abusing an actress. Yet he has been invited to @berlinale film fest that publicly supported #MeToo campaign against abuse of women. I asked Kim's victim how she feels about it @AFP https://t.co/NaWp8dtYga #berlinale2018

— Hawon Jung (@allyjung) February 11, 2018

seems like korea has the most support for having an open conversation on men's sexual misconduct and women's rights issues, while in japan and china it's basically non-existent

cluck-clucking over every male filmmaker in history, goddamn i love atheist moral scolds

are you really saying every male filmmaker in history abuses or disrespects actresses?

no, you checklisters are coming close enough

so, it's only the great preponderance of them?

or maybe you'd agree that male filmmakers differ in this regard and by examining their words and actions those differences become apparent so that their views on the matter are open to judgment, including negative judgment?

strange, some posts on this board read as total gibberish to me. must be my eyes.

what exactly was bresson accused of?

I think reading has more to do with brains than eyes, tbh.

filmmakers have historically been mostly men. it's a job the combines artistic privilege with an even more massive power imbalance and (often) a whole lot of people beneath you. the fact that this combination has so often resulted in abuses is not surprising.

teasing out individual dead abusers and dragging them for their crimes is not that interesting to me unless there are living victims there to benefit from it. it's a systemic issue.

won't someone PLEASE think of the male filmmakers?

strange, some posts on this board read as total gibberish to me. must be my eyes.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Monday, February 12, 2018 1:54 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nah, think it's just your keyboard.

http://blog.edtechie.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/kingofcomedy.jpg

anyhoo Simon otm

It's historically important because it highlights how omnipresent that shit has always been (and especially necessary in cinema because there's a whole mystique around directors having to be tyrants/assholes/abusers in the name of their art, which I don't think applies as much to other arts).

I'm fine with accepting Hitch was both one of the greatest directors of all time and an abuser, don't really think pointing the latter out is in and of itself denying the former.

xposts

a whole mystique around directors having to be tyrants/assholes/abusers in the name of their art, which I don't think applies as much to other arts

hmmm, some off-Broadway play about Diaghilev and Nijinsky just opened. And y'know, The Red Shoes and its real-life analogues?

teasing out individual dead abusers

Dead in the way that michael haneke, lars von trier, woody allen and kim ki duk are dead?

it's a systemic issue.

and yet somehow it is personal, too

hmmm, some off-Broadway play about Diaghilev and Nijinsky just opened. And y'know, The Red Shoes and its real-life analogues?

This is correct, I think this applies to the director role in both theatre and cinema.

yes.

I was referring to Bresson and hitch fwiw xp

I think given the significant mental health issues D’arcy has been dealing with for nearly two decades, it would be more gross

what exactly was bresson accused of?

Entitled, abusive behavior clearly extends beyond stage/screen directors. TV moguls (Ailes etc), political candidates, novelists back when they could become stars, academics, CEOs, everyday workplace supervisors, ad nauseum.

Yeah we know

seems like a question for another thread really but it struck me as not impossible that the element of directing theatre and film that involves psychological mindfuck, to produce "authentic" performance of extreme states of mind, is an offshoot of the arrival of method acting? (not that bullying didn't exist before,obviously, but that a particular kind of psychological manipulation was greatly enabled, and somewhat encouraged, by the values that method acting most prized)

ballet i think is slightly different (tho i suppose the techniques may be similar) bcz it's pushing people to physical rather than psychogical limits -- tho actually you could sorta-kinda make a not-enitely trollish case for nijinsky being a pioneer of "method ballet"

(it happens in music also: miles, james brown, beefheart, mark e. smith)

It's been occurring to me as these stories continue to pop up that the key to that kind of provocation in the arts is the presence of a 'safe word' of sorts, a way for a performer to clearly indicate that they're uncomfortable and a sign for a director to back off before they cross a line. Those kinds of interactions can be valuable and reap rewards but boundaries need to be erected and respected or it just crosses the line into exploitation or worse.

I'm not suggesting shitty behaviour is limited to ppl in cinema (obv), I'm saying the popular perception of what a Great Director is like is more explicitly enabling of abuses of power than it is for, say, writers or musicians. This does not prevent writers and musicians from abusing their power!

ballet i think is slightly different

― mark s, Monday, February 12, 2018 12:23 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

from what a couple dancer exes have told me, it depends on what type of dance, but there is definitely a give it your all, pushing your limits psychologically, especially if the dancer relates to the story and it's a classical one of sorts (like ballet), if there is even a story. this is for another thread, though. i don't want to digress too much but my beef is with contemporary/jazz dance where everything is so abstract and the focus is on body movement/technique (kind of like the nederlands dans theater), plus like a lot of female dancers seem to want to meet their dancer soulmate when it comes to performing a piece, and doing a love duet, which just boggles my mind

(yes, i shd have said classical ballet -- and yes really we shd take this particular idea to a different thread)

maybe the john cassavetes thread

Morbs: in your opinion how should these allegations be dealt with?

as a hypothetical: famous actress A accuses famous director X of sexual misconduct.

what should happen?

Last week, or 50 years past / 90 years past?

5 years past

I don't have an answer. Are we talking the judicial system or the court of public opinion? I see deep, abiding flaws in both, and they work occasionally too.

I don't think people who abuse power should be allowed to keep wielding it. (I'd also like to see a much less hierarchical power structure at work in hollywood, along with robust protections helped along by organized labor, but I'm not gonna get all commie in here again I promise)

xpost
court of public opinion

It's also surprisingly easy to make good art and not abuse people

It’s just so easy to not sexually harass people you have supervisory authority over

It’s extremely easy to never do that

hey, what's the point of being an artiste if I can't play grabass

Forrest J Ackerman outed as an infamous monster:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/monsterkidclassichorrorforum/forrest-j-ackerman-s-metoo-moment-t68925.html

ugh

xxxpost

still waiting morbs

It's also surprisingly easy to make good art and not abuse people

It’s just so easy to not sexually harass people you have supervisory authority over

It’s extremely easy to never do that

hey, what's the point of being an artiste if I can't play grabass

A story I told elsewhere on another thread goes like: I went to a party in Soho in my mid-to-late 20s, put on by [a famous literature professor], and attended by [a famous film director], [a famous Broadway actor], [a famous composer], [a very famous author]-- all of whom were between age 45 and 65, all of whom were white and male and wealthy and gay and had "achieved their dignity". The party had many other similarly well-heeled influential white fags in addition to the ones whose names I knew.

The party was also attended by an equal number of gay men aged 20 to 30, including myself, who were all aspirants, people who looked up to these men in positions of power and influence. It became clear to me, as the night went on, that this party, which began as a cultural sort of salon, would conclude with many of these people pairing off to fuck.

I sat with [a famous film director], who was maybe 47 and extremely handsome, who pointed at the 21-year old singer (an gay escapee from Central America) and told me they'd been sleeping together. "I have to break things off with him," he said, affecting an air of melancholy, but unable to conceal the pride with which he was allowing the effects of his agency and influence to be displayed, "because he's becoming too attached to me. He told me he loved me last weekend. I don't think it will last much longer."

I stepped out on to the balcony for a cigarette with [a famous musician] and [the very famous author], who were talking about a particular service that Marc Jacobs employed. "They have a network of rent boys all over the world," the author said, "it doesn't matter where Marc is, at 10pm a young man will knock on his hotel room door, and Marc can decide if he's to come in or to leave. It's all set up through his secretary."

I did not judge the dynamics that were on display, because fags already have a history of being branded as perverts and pedophiles. But the question that this entire experience left me asking myself was this: what comes first? Do these men, playing at "culture", but talking about sex, do they aspire toward dignity and affluence because of a passion for their cultural interests, and find that sex follows their achievements? Or: is their aspiration toward dignity and affluence entirely motivated by sex, and to be surrounded by young gay men for as long as their influence and physical appeal can sustain that attention-- is the cultural stuff just a means to an end?

(If this sounds preposterous, that "that gay author is only writing books to bang young men", then I urge you to read more gay literature and the biographies of the gay men who write it, but anyway.)

I tried over the years to ask this question of older gay friends but never really got an answer-- the conversation would quickly turn away from "what it all means" and back to conversations about dicks and butts. But I've been thinking about it recently, as these stories have slid away from being between boundaries of "what is defined as consensual" and is now just a larger cultural indictment toward the very nature of power, and the way that powerful men wield it.

So in short, hey, what's the point of being an artiste if I can't play grabass is kind of the actual question here, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't know if there's an easy way to answer ums's question of Morbs-- but I do feel that the dialogue which once focused on rape, and then sexual assault, and then coercive sex, and then sexual harassment, and then sexual misconduct, it seems to be conflating ALL forms of male pattern badness, and urging the reader/listener into corralling every creep into a box of predation, sexual assault, illegality, the purpose of which seems to be the implication of carceral punishment, either legal or social. But I don't believe in carceral punishment, neither (I think?) does research. But I don't think many of the accused-famous-people (from basically Louie CK's level of 'crime' on downward) really deserve to lose their job, so much as they should go through a response system that doesn't exist yet. One that would allow them to respond to allegations frankly and fully, to slim down the possibility of legal recourse and thus skip all the meaningless denials, agree to some manner of punishment/rehabilitation that didn't feel rote or stupid, and reorganize the power structure that put them in the place in which they were able to abuse that power so that they were no longer able to abuse it.

On a fundamental level, these problems would be solved (and replaced with new, glorious problems for our future selves to solve) if there was greater gender parity of people in positions of power, but destroying the lives of powerful men who copped a feel seems to me to be a shit way of achieving what could be achieved more effectively by, say, requiring Hollywood studios, colleges and universities, record labels, music festivals, art galleries, and awards programs in all fields to meticulously enforce a 50/50-or-better gender split favouring women in their hiring, green lighting, curation and awarding practices.

But hey, then we wouldn't be able to engage in truth-to-power fantasies, and what fun would that be?

Even if my post is shit logic I hope I get bonus points for "male pattern badness" *cough*

I can't really argue against the idea that enforced gender parity would result in less toxic workplaces, even if I think the ultimate problem is that these power relationships shouldn't exist at all or should have the power differentials between humans be as minimal as possible. Better is better.

(Always appreciate yr input on this and all subjects fgti!)

that was an amazing post.

great post fgti

interesting to hear what's going on behind the FAMOUS GAY PERSON DOORS; sad that it's pretty much the same all over

yeah. i have nothing to add on the subject and will avoid it here henceforth as i do everywhere else online.

even if I think the ultimate problem is that these power relationships shouldn't exist at all or should have the power differentials between humans be as minimal as possible

a big problem is in a patriarchal society men by default have more power than women. it goes beyond authority figures, it permeates every interpersonal hierarchy