Word: courtesan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...harvest festival in the late fall, when the dark of the sky is deepest. There are social nuances in every garment, highborn or not. A man's white cotton overblouse can be tied in 58 ways, each with its own social connotation. The knots at the waist of a courtesan's skirt could be so intricate that only she could undo them: fashion as a fail-safe device. A contemporary turban, worn by an ironmonger, shows in its coloration and style of wrapping the wearer's occupation, his residence and his marital status: fashion as calling card...
Women who sought a livelihood could be shopkeepers, petticoat authors, peddlers or midwives. Perhaps the career with the greatest risk and the greatest social mobility was that of a courtesan. Fraser's wit any style are at their best in this passage...
...draped and cluttered rooms, the constraints of clothing, language, manners and social ritual were familiar givens, matters for exquisitely observed, morally neutral description. For Schlondorff they are a malevolent astonishment. If there is a rational explanation for the obsessive, socially destructive love Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) feels for the courtesan Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti), it is to be found in these oppressive surroundings, where the very air breathes of neurasthenic surrender and the will is strangled in brocade. If the screenplay by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helene Estienne omits or hastily vulgarizes Proust's nuanced...
...German Director Volker Schlŏndorff (The Tin Drum), 44, agreed to "jump on the sinking vessel to try to save it." He focused on a single vignette from the book. English Actor Jeremy Irons, 35, and Italian Screen Siren Ornella Muti, 28, signed to play Swann and the courtesan he marries. The result, Un Amour de Swann (English version: Swann in Love), has opened in Paris, where it is a sensation, attracting intellectual controversy and long lines. Says Producer Stephane: "The miracle happened...
...condition." Painters and sculptors thrilled staid merchants with luscious nudes fig-leafed with titles like Venus Now Wakes. Manet's Olympia shocked the salon of 1865 not because she was naked but because she looked back at the viewer with the defiant eyes of a thoroughly contemporary Parisian courtesan. On second thought, said Freud, who is one of Gay's principal heroes, perhaps "a certain measure of cultural hypocrisy is indispensable for the maintenance of civilization...