The images evoked by automobiles vary depending on which part of the car you examine. Surely, the front of a car is facelike, which is why automobile designers routinely referred to the radiator as the mouth and chrome uprights in the radiators as teeth. Throughout the early 1950s, the faces of cars tended toward hostility [...]
Author Archives: Tintin Törncrantz
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LHOOQ (1919), Marcel Duchamp’s “unshaved” Mona Lisa.
All of the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and molded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressively outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, [...]
BE MY WIFE
The scientist refuses to create a female helpmate for his melancholy monster. It is only at this point, on seeing all his hopes of companionship crunched, that this late Romantic forerunner of the cyborgs decides to kill the family and friends of his creator. Having had to watch Frankenstein dismantle the half-finished female monster and [...]
THE DEADLIER VENUS INCARNATE
Theda Bara worked for William Fox for five years. She made almost forty films, all of them variations on the vamp [...] She is the only actress who can claim to have played the entire repertoire of Romantic archaic heroines and fin-de-siècle Medusas […] The vampire that Bara played was really a 19th century character [...]
