90. The Week in M(ovi)e(s)
A guest essay by my fave film critic, Sarah Artt.
I am honored stupid to bring you a guest essay by
, my favorite film critic. Her Substack film essays flay open Ken Russell and Dario Argento films to reveal their scents within, assigning fragrance and olfaction to characters’ intentions, hidden lairs, and sexual spark. She weaves discourse throughout of gendered gaze and directorial choice. I just love her shit. I send it to everyone. And now, I am sharing an EXCLUSIVE work of hers, with you all!Sarah Artt is an academic, critic, and writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland who teaches literature and film studies, and last year started a Substack called Visual Aroma. Sarah recently published her first book, Quiet Pictures: Women and Silence in Contemporary British and French Cinema - “the book is currently atrociously expensive but I have hopes it will come out in paperback soon.” Borrow it from your local university or college library!
The Best Eye Fucks
What is it to smoulder? To embody not simply rizz but a vibe so incendiary you can make an entire cinema audience question their sexuality?
Historically this quality has been the province of women filmed by men, but lucky for you I have seen a lot of movies and I’ve recently learned how to make a gif. Also, my students over the last few years have frequently commented that Timothée Chalamet does indeed make many otherwise straight lads feel they would definitely tap that.
Back in the heyday of the now sadly defunct The White Review, Rosanna Mcglaughlin observed “GIFs are the internet’s present to erotics. The best ones…exist in a seamless loop, enabling the viewer to remain suspended indefinitely in a moment of aesthetic bliss.” (2019) I would argue that part of the sensory ecstasy of the on-screen eye-fuck is that it is endlessly gif-able. Also, there is really nothing quite like giving a look—it’s a skill and while it is frequently represented for us via the cinema it’s also a skill we should all practice more, as a way of “hold[ing] solidarity with all things godlessly whoreish.” (
, writing on ’s Substack, June 2024)Here are some eye fucks you might not have seen, or that you might wish to revisit:
Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929)
One of the last silent films ever made, and Louise Brooks’ most iconic performance. Based on the plays of Franz Wedekind, adapted for the stage and then the screen, the protagonist Lulu is a character that has long fascinated me. I saw a stage production of this
as a teenager, and I remember my mother being very unsettled by it. Later, I wrote one of my best undergraduate essays on Pandora’s Box. This performance may well be one of the cinematic originators of the disaster bisexual.
Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
Like, fuck me up and ruin my life from beyond the gra, fuck me up and ruin my life from beyond the grave. I would be remiss if I did not mention Marlene Dietrich’s performance as Amy Jolly. This gif encapsulates her sublime appeal: the eyeliner, the tuxedo, the smoking, the wry almost smile as if she’s not sure whether to devour you or kiss you.
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
An incomparable screwball comedy, where Barbara Stanwyck shows us that crop top season is never over. In this scene, she provides a running commentary of women watching a man, all via the device of tilting her compact mirror. This film (along with Pandora’s Box) shows us the woman ‘returning the look’ of patriarchal structures, demonstrating a keen awareness of what it means to be a subject of the gaze, but also what it means to attempt to deliberately capture the gaze, to harness it for her own ends. Here, as in…maybe all the films on this list…flirtation is a method for returning and confronting the gaze.
Score (Radley Metzger,1974)
Such an underrated classic of the sex movie! I made this gif and aren’t you glad I’ve immortalised this exchange of looks for your delectation?
Also, a moment of appreciation for the camera pan and Jack’s (Gerald Grant) body hair, a thing we don’t see enough of in mainstream porn, or indeed any time anyone takes their clothes off on screen. But seriously, this movie is HOT and stylish. Special shout out to the work of Andrew Haigh, Francis Lee, and Rose Glass for giving us people with body hair on screen!
The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)
I mean, forget The Mummy because this is the movie that will make you question your sexuality. Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, AND David Bowie, with an appearance by Bauhaus? My wee goth princess heart grows three sizes every time I watch this.
Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, 1983)
Having recently rewatched this I can confirm it holds up pretty well (apart from its lack of solidarity between different types of sex workers). Jennifer Beals eating lobster with her hands, and wearing a tuxedo bib as a top is perfection. In this scene, Alex (Beals) is unwilling to be cowed by her date’s ex, who attempts to shame her for being a sex worker and a welder. But Alex is totally confident in her own allure, and is unashamed of her work; part of her arsenal is the way she removes her jacket, transforming her tuxedo from the armour of upper class masculinity into a playful re-appropriation of these signifiers, a kind of knowing pornification, skewering uptight moral posturing.
Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986)
Look, I was but a mere slip of a girl when this movie came out, and it caught me at a formative moment. Looking at it now it is all highly questionable but, as Amnia Srinivasan has so eloquently put it in “The Right To Sex” “desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us and choose for itself (2021: 91) and so it goes with me and this movie. I know I was very into it because I owned the novelisation, which had a set of colour images in the middle, and some of them were definitely from this sequence. If
writes of her teen self “all of my purple life I had been waiting for a boyfriend like Prince” (“Purple Rain” 2018: 65) then I have waited all my life for a fantasy lover like the Goblin King. Who amongst us can resist the fantasy of bringing a pop star to their knees? (I am looking directly at The Idea of You and all Harry Styles-adjacent transformative works when I write this)Henry and June (Phillip Kauffman, 1990)
This movie explains a lot about me. I was (am?) obsessed with AnaÏs Nin, so I was delighted to discover this movie as a teenager. I revisit it regularly. Maria de Medeiros as Nin dancing the rumba alone throwing glances at Henry Miller (Fred Ward) is equalled only by Uma Thurman’s unparalleled performance as June Miller, a force for erotic chaos that has rarely been matched (even Franz Rogowski in Passages pales in comparison). The trailer alone will leave you a quivering puddle of desire.
Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)
Full disclosure, I write about this film in my book. But I have kept coming back to this moment, where Oakley (Tom Hiddleston) first looks at Anna (Kathryn Worth) with interest in Joanna Hogg’s first feature. There is, as you may be able to tell just from this image, a substantial age gap between these characters. Hiddleston was in his mid-twenties when this film was shot, and Worth was in her 40s. Their characters share an affinity that is hard to define, sitting somewhere between the ache of longing embodied by something as questionable as Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), right up to what I am going to call the mainstreaming of MILF in The Idea of You (2024).
Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2023)
I know it is no surprise at all that I am mentioning Chalamet here, a performer who has built his career on knowing how to give a look. As Lee, he turns his not inconsiderable allure to cruising a fairground worker. This look is a trap, a lure, but Chalamet’s appeal as Lee also turns on this character’s outsider status, and the way he flickers across a spectrum of soft fabrics, and hungry looks, how he manages vulnerability with toughness.
Ultimately, I like to think of the eye-fuck on screen as a response to THE GAZE of film theory. The eye-fuck always feels like something in the hands of the performer who gives it, and its power is showcased by the camera. Yes, it tells us where to look, but also how to feel. And I have never been more interested in how movies make us feel.
Thank you to Tara for asking me to do a guest post for xoxo Gossip Giancaspro! I really enjoy Tara’s wide-ranging cultural tastes and her writing is both funny and moving. I’m very happy we found one another’s work via Substack.
To read:
I…didn’t know about like any of this. Oops. (
of )
“The scars of summer” by
, on writing as a career and impostor syndrome.Three poems by ME, published by Dusk Magazine.
More excellent commentary around media literacy from
:
This is literally just Simone:
I have in fact sung Edelweiss to Simone and cried because of this video.
This is literally just Lugosi:
Actually my babies:
Love you bitches,
TG
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As someone who's been reading romance for over 30 years,, I am all about the eye-fucks. And out of all the movies mentioned, I've only seen Henry and June. And LORDTY talk about some underwear-changing scenes! This was definitely a good movie choice for this list.
Thanks for the "Eye F*cks" the Flash Dance one certainly brought me down memory lane. I realize now how much I missed watching it the first time at age 17. The whole "sex worker" part went over my head.