Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
No pierced nostril for Barbie
Vavavoomski doll keeps her tattoos, blows off nose ring; Sen. Inhofe's staff's got a woody for porn; tools of the sex trade tax deductible in New Zealand.
By Amy Reiter
[06/16/99]

Column
Looking for life in all the wrong places
Thanks to snorefests like the Umbilical Brothers' "Thwack," comedy is deader than Lester Bangs -- and someone is not amused.
By Cintra Wilson
[06/16/99]

People Feature
Camille Does the Movies: Program notes
Camille Paglia's notes for films shown at the National Film Theatre, June 1999 program, under the auspices of the British Film Institute.
By Camille Paglia
[06/16/99]

Nothing Personal
Attack of the giant Leach!
Ohmygawd! He's baaaack! Buffoonish Brit boor bathes bare babe in gooey chocolate; Steve Forbes hates money; Plus: Cardinal Sin says condoms are for animals -- Arf!
By Amy Reiter
[06/15/99]

Brilliant Careers
Take this longing from my tongue
With his songs of love and God and unspeakable yearning, Leonard Cohen occupies his own place in the musical cosmos.
By Sean Elder
[06/15/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

We drop "Persona" off at the famous Tyneside Cinema (where in the lobby we spot my picture, arms akimbo, on the front of Pink Paper, the national gay weekly, with the headline "Paglia's pick of the flicks") and then set off for the nearby Castle Keep, a formidable tower whose first stones were laid in 1080. Buffeted by a cold wind on the high turret, we admire Newcastle's great iron bridge and curving Regency arcades.

We're eager to see Hadrian's Wall -- but little of it remains in town, so we end up desperately driving mile after mile into the countryside. The straightness of the road, chimes everyone, signifies that it was laid by my Roman ancestors, who observed no impediments of nature but just plowed right on through the landscape with their fanatical, mathematical vision. With nice timing, the rain stops and the sun beams down as we arrive at the half-excavated Roman encampment at Chester, where tourists wander the green pastures amid curious herds of cattle and sheep. Artifacts at the on-site museum include a votive statue of Mars and a perfectly preserved ancient leather shoe, found nearby.

After an acrobatically Clark Kent-like metamorphosis in a narrow toilet stall back at the theater, I emerge in formal dress for my lecture on "Persona" in the cinema's vintage Oriental-palace auditorium. Afterward, I am invited to sign the upstairs book reserved for special visitors and am floored to find on the last line (dated 1997) the dashing script of the divine Susannah York, one of the finest flowers of British cinema. "I am not worthy!" I exclaim, but sign anyhow after I catch my breath.

On the three-hour express train back to London, I dine on Chicken Tikka Masala, drink bottles of Hadrian ("Still Spring Water of Northumbria") and avidly study a guidebook about the Wall, which reveals, to my vexation, that the entire NFT party missed the symbolic lucky phallus carved on a Roman threshold at Chester.

Mon., June 7 An early call, as I must get to "Start the Week," a serious ideas show on BBC Radio. To my delight, the renowned biographer Antonia Fraser is also on the panel, and it's a great relief to be outranked for once in the diva department. Lady Antonia is very gracious indeed to a foreigner with, let's face it, a checkered reputation.

I'm infuriated that today's Independent, in an otherwise fairly favorable article on my visit, opines that I need "a better theme": "Sex was a world-class subject. Going to the pictures isn't." So dismissive a statement about film as a genre would be inconceivable in the U.S. except among the most hardcore religious conservatives. That a progressive British newspaper could make such a claim stuns and inflames me with a sense of mission.

In late morning, I get a rare treat -- a private screening in the empty NFT theater of Joseph Losey's lost 1962 classic, "Eva," in a dual-subtitled Scandinavian print that Losey said was the closest to his original cut, butchered by his French producers, the Hakim brothers. I am in ecstasy as I watch Jeanne Moreau at her height vamp around and trash the men of Rome and Venice. This was another film I brought to Bennington in 1973, but it isn't available on video, and the British Film Institute owns the one archival copy of the version I'm seeing. It's appalling that a whole generation of cinema-lovers has grown up without seeing "Eva," a film that had a profound impact on my thinking about sex.

At a midafternoon interview with London's Gay TV, I throw a diva fit over the lights (both Raquel Welch and Cindy Crawford told me that a gal must take control of her lighting), but things even out as I prepare for the evening's films. Yesterday, while we were in Newcastle, "The Ten Commandments" (1956) and "La Dolce Vita" (1960) were shown in my series at the NFT. Tonight is "Auntie Mame" (1958) and "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959), both of which I introduce to a very receptive audience. ("Agnes Gooch, c'est moi!" I declare.) Although frequently shown on American television, "Auntie Mame" is virtually unknown in England (where the sentimentalized Lucille Ball musical "Mame" has supplanted it). In Panavision on the big screen, "Auntie Mame" is a knockout, and the crowd breaks into warm applause at the end.

Afterward we decamp for the official series dinner at the glass-walled Oxo restaurant with its spectacular view of St. Paul's dome illuminated across the Thames. We are joined by my friend and ex-student Kristen Lippincott, who first saw many of these films at Bennington over a quarter-century ago and who now, as the director of the Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich, is literally overseeing the Western world's entrance into the new millennium. American women get it done!

Next page | What the hell is happening with films these days?