A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Behind Convent Walls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Behind Convent Walls. Show all posts

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Behind Convent Walls (Walerian Borowczyk, 1978

Marina Pierro in Behind Convent Walls

Cast: Ligia Branice, Howard Ross, Marina Pierro, Gabriela Giacobbe, Rodolfo Dal Pra, Loredana Martinez, Mario Maranzana, Alex Partexano. Screenplay: Walerian Borowczyk, based on a book by Stendhal. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Film editing: Walerian Borowczyk. Music: Sergio Montori. 

Nuns just wanna have fun, or so Walerian Borwczyk's Behind Convent Walls tells us. What forbids them from doing so is a stern Mother Superior, so when her back is turned they're up to all manner of rebellious behavior, the most lurid of which is perhaps the employment of a hand-carved dildo with an image of Jesus on one end. Ostensibly based on an essay in Stendhal's Promenades de Rome, Borowczyk's film is thought by some to rise above its soft-core prurience by virtue of some creative cinematography and its criticism of clerical celibacy and hypocrisy, but it seems to me not much more than a male fantasy about the lives of inaccessible women.  

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