De Sade

Barbs Were Traded

Cy Endfield grew up in Wilkes-Barre, PA, about twenty minutes from my hometown, Scranton. (Wilkes-Barre: the hometown too of Dan Sallitt.) De Sade, exhibited by Roger Corman's American International Pictures, is the filmmaker's 1969 follow-up to the 1964 epic Zulu. 

There's a gossamer pattern in the marquis's spacious chamber/theatre-space, a lattice of cobweb evoking draped semen strings. It goes without saying that even this Marquis de Sade version X has nothing on the novels in terms of an urgency to the rapacious libertinage. Yet unlike most fiction cinema, the deeply red-filtered orgy scenes of De Sade give one time to think (as opposed to whatever TV allows its audience — time to drift). De Sade (portrayed by Keir Dullea) enters into marriage contract with a physically sensational woman who upon the marquis's signature being laid to document, vanishes — or rather is replaced (as though nothing should be more normal) by a meek-jawed Briton, pretty in her own way but certainly of a different make... More metamorphoses involving buxom service-girls still as the movie progresses...

Simple découpage: ordering successive shots across space (location) and time (duration) like in most mainstream narrative films; here, normalcy that absorbs not just consideration of a scene's space-time allowance but also the cut that leads into the next scene's action. Examine time and space as an axiom of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. — another film wherein love and death / eros and thanatos create their dance, no matter how 'actually (and perversely) abstract.' Released a year prior to De Sade, time and aging will decisively conclude the Kubrick film.

Sade sheds psychic skins, shimmers like a boor-ealis... •

===