Telly - same old, same old...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

"Toulon, 1793..."
I may have mentioned this somewhere before, but it was on TV again this afternoon which gave me a chance to get angry and shout at the TV set (to the amusement of friends) all over again. And I've just found it online, so now you can, too, if you want to: http://en.sevenload.com/videos/jFzYVFP-Heroes-and-Villains-Napoleon (that seems to be the whole hour). Yes, the chappie gloating sadistically over the guillotine at the start is Fréron, the pantomime 'villain' of the title, and it was a nice surprise to find this obscure but horrible git the central baddie of the piece (a rare 'serious' (ahem) role for comedian Rob Brydon), but that's where the jollity ends, because, readers, viewers, despite the occasional positive role for the CSP in this little drama, nasty Fréron is here meant to incarnate the 'nasty' Revolution itself. Bummer!

(And no, Augustin Robespierre doesn't get a mention, 'cos if he did it would have to be in a 'positive' context that would screw up the whole 'revolutionaries are pervy little bureaucrats' line of the script...!)

It looks fabulous, though, damn it - why does the devil have the best cinematographers?

Comments

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

All right, so I watched the first minute and I was thoroughly disgusted. Mostly because I could feel the moment I saw the bugs that: "Oh, dear. Those bugs are in a basket where a head is gonna fall, isn't it?" And, oh, how good I am. Déjà-vu? I saw that view in a past life? I actually feared we would see the gory head falling.

This is just gross. Scoring right next to all the equally gross images of the Terror/guillotine I've seen, such as the opening image of a dead dog half-eaten by worms (with a zoom in) in Jacquot's Sade. Are they forced to be terribly macabre, Gothic and Sadean in their filmmaking? What, exactly, has gone so terribly wrong with our period? UGHHHH. I wish neoclassicism could still exist. And I don't care neoclassicism is propaganda. Schama can go fuck himself somewhere, with Gueniffey. Le Beau et le Sublime!

When are they going to censor the guillotine? Thermidorian imagery is pissing me off.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I don't think we can blame that on the Thermidorians. I think it's just human nature to be obsessed with death - 'a skull is more interesting than a naked woman', as the painter observes in 'The Seventh Seal', and Public Relations-wise it's incredibly unfortunate that the Revolution adopted a very novel execution device and stuck it in a very public and prominent place. Even without the political element, it remained popular: you could get package holidays to see a guillotining in the 19thc, just as people in the 1970's would go to Spain to watch bullfights - I think the Eiffel Tower was invented to make people think of something else when they thought of Paris!

I think the lesson is, if you are going to kill your political enemies (and personally I wish they hadn't, I wish they'd abolished the death penalty), do it using firing squads - no one ever remembers deaths by firing squad!