Robert Short
2021Barbarêveuse
Robert Short
About three years in the making, it was put together out of hundreds of fragments culled from a pretty formidable archive of of found, borrowed, snitched and home-made material. All this going on late at night to the sounds of John Peel's famous record programme featuring the most adventurous music prior to Punk - some of which inevitably found its way onto the sound-track.
Barbarêveuse
The Voluptuous Martyrdoms of the Magnificent Masturbators
Robert Short
The title owes a lot to Dali because the film takes off from the fascination shared by the great Catalan and his friends Lorca and Bunuel with the wounds of the martyred saint Sebastian. But the text in the intertitles comes, of course, almost exclusively from Georges Bataille’s Eroticism. This film is a darker, more focused, companion piece to the slightly earlier Barbarêveuse. It really ought to be a treat for any self-respecting sado-masochist. RS
The Voluptuous Martyrdoms of the Magnificent Masturbators
The Pleasures of the Capital
Robert Short
De Chirico in Legoland, perhaps. This film was part of the programme of a ‘happening’ on the same surrealist theme staged one night in the barns and grounds of a Suffolk farm. It seemed just right to conjure up the marvellous of the metropolis in the back of a rural beyond. Some of the opening shots are borrowed from Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film. The textual passages in the voice-over come from Giorgio de Chirico’s 1929 ‘novel’, Hebdomeros. In 1976, my first child was six years old and mad on Lego. There was lots of it about the house and it was only a short step to using the white bricks to construct miniature versions of the master of melancholy’s towers, squares and arcades. And another short step to imagining a cluster of suspect scenarios acted out within these metaphysical spaces. RS
The Pleasures of the Capital
