Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726

Pif Magazine
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Objects of Desire

What would film be without sex? And what would sex be without obsession? Obsession is the stuff of great drama, and to prove it here are three of the best known films on the topic. Granted, there are many others out there — from Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Luis Bunuel’s El and That Obscure Object of Desire — but it’s hard to guess what people find sexy anymore. It may be a bit hard to ask the current climate of TV slaves and pop culture nerds to see Louise Brooks as sexy when their paradigm is Pam Anderson (Anderson is to sex what Hootie and the Blowfish are to rock and roll: generic artifice), but it’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?

"In the context of Kubrick's film, Hum's middle aged perversion actually works to the film's benefit: he's simply a flummoxed intellectual here, dumbstruck and ultimately tragically blinded by sheer lust..."

"Pandora’s Box looks impressively modern for a silent film, and perhaps it is because of its expressionist/art deco style and for its content. Perhaps only Josef von Sternberg in some of his films with Marlene Dietrich from roughly the same era are comparable as sexually charged melodramas...."

"Perhaps more than anything, Last Tango is a study in the sadness and melancholia that comes from tragic miscommunication between adults. Ultimately, the film tells us, we never know anything about the people we love, no matter how much we think we do..."

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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.