Is it located near the DU Gallery, and how do you get permission to access it? The DU Calendar that is...
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Let's just see how old we are here. Anybody remember this?
I Am Curious - Yellow<snip>
When Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint appeared in 1969, sending the intelligentsia into exegetical panic over masturbation and self-loathing, Roth remarked that his book was at present an event, but in time would be a novel. It did not take long; the author of the far more subversive Sabbath’s Theater is or ought to be on track for the Nobel. Yet it’s taken 35 years for the other cultural-sexual sensation of 1969 (one that originated in Sweden two years earlier) to achieve even the possibility of reassessment. Perhaps no other film in cinema history sparked so much critical and popular mayhem as Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious––Yellow, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.
After its initial, highly lucrative, court-delayed release, the 1967 Swedish film was rarely screened, and the video revolution passed it by. The only available prints were washed out, with frequently unreadable and censored pale-white subtitles. Only the title retained a lasting fame, often parodied by headline writers. Hardly anyone, including reviewers, bothered to see its companion piece, I Am Curious––Blue, during its fleeting stateside appearance. Blue lacked the publicity bonanza of bluenose interference. Yellow had been seized by U.S. Customs, guaranteeing not only a trial (could a film widely admired in Europe bring about moral collapse in the United States?), but also zealous highbrow support and palpitating pietistic outrage. Thus Norman Mailer proclaimed Yellow “one of the most important pictures I have ever seen in my life,” while Rex Reed called it “vile and disgusting,” “a dirty movie,” “crud,” and “as good for you as drinking furniture polish.” He derided Sjöman as “a very sick Swede with an overwhelming ego and a fondness for photographing pubic hair.”
Well, which do you think sold more tickets—Mailer’s endorsement or the remark about pubic hair? When the crowds actually saw the picture, however, they felt cheated; pubic hair was in short supply, the sex was unerotic, and the running time mostly given over to a droll, Brechtian-Pirandellian, mock-vérité exploration of the chasm between the political and the personal. Not that it wasn’t shocking in its day. I was twenty-one when I saw it with my father, who took it in stride until that notorious moment when Lena kisses her lover’s flaccid penis, at which point he observed with dismayed awe, “They used to arrest you if you had something like that in your home.” (In some states, they arrested you for doing it in your home, but that’s another story.) Since male genitals are still banned from Hollywood movies, you can imagine the anxiety raised by actor Börje Ahlstedt’s member, the only appendage of its kind seen on America’s big screens as of 1969.
Yet within a year or two, suburban theaters routinely programmed nudity-filled potboilers about nurses and stewardesses, soon to be followed by Deep Throat. Never again would audiences have to put up with socially redeeming values in the pursuit of pornography. Yellow triggered the sea-change that resulted, ironically, in the subsequent indifference towards Blue. It altered the American moviegoing experience, pointing the way to a post-code cinema.
In that sense, it served as a fitting finale for a decade that began with Psycho, which opened the portals to slasher violence while crossing a new frontier of intimacy—the opening shot of half-dressed Janet Leigh at a seedy midday tryst, the flushing toilet, the voyeurism. Thanks to Hitchcock, movie theaters were no longer safe or, for that matter, informal; by insisting that audiences not be allowed entry once the picture started, he ended the walk-in-any-time habits of a generation. Psycho was the first Hollywood film in decades that parents forbade their children to see. If Dashiell Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley” (as Raymond Chandler observed), Hitchcock relocated horror from Transylvania to the mind of Mother’s little helper. The major taboo he left in place concerned casual sex and nudity. Hitchcock later told Truffaut that he wished he had had Leigh play her first scene topless—as if he could have gotten away with it. After Yellow, he could and did, removing Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s bra (or rather that of her body double) in 1972’s Frenzy.
<snip>
Link:
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=180&eid=283§ion=essay
Everything old is new again.
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