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Adapting Sex on Screen: the Cinematic Biographies of Lulu, La Ronde, and Venus in Furs
Julian Preece 
Swansea University Author:
Julian Preece
Abstract
Through authorship of Venus in Furs (1870) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch unintentionally gave his name to a sexual practice defined as a perversion by the end of the nineteenth century. An unacknowledged source for psychoanalysis, his most famous work was marketed as pornography but influenced diverse w...
| ISBN: | 978-1-3505-3813-9 978-1-3505-3814-6 |
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| Published: |
London
Bloomsbury
2025
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa68455 |
| Abstract: |
Through authorship of Venus in Furs (1870) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch unintentionally gave his name to a sexual practice defined as a perversion by the end of the nineteenth century. An unacknowledged source for psychoanalysis, his most famous work was marketed as pornography but influenced diverse writers and artists, including Lou Andreas-Salomé, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Lou Reed. It has also inspired major filmmakers from Ernst Lubitsch to Luis Buñuel, Jess Franco to Roman Polanski.The delayed premiere of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (1896-97), which dramatizes ten sexual encounters, resulted in an epoch-defining Berlin trial in 1922 and Schnitzler’s withdrawal of the work. Brought to international prominence by Max Ophüls in the film La Ronde, between 1945 (in France) and 2017 (in the USA), it was adapted 24 times for cinema, which provides a unique corpus of screened depictions of sexual behaviour, covering periods marked by Nazism, the Hays Code, the Sex Wave and AIDS.Like the German-Ukrainian Sacher-Masoch and the Austrian-Jewish Schnitzler, the American-German Frank Wedekind examined contemporary European mores from an outsider’s perspective. His Lulu plays focus on the relationships between powerful men and a working-class teenager decried by society as a femme fatale, who would be immortalized on screen by Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929).Tracing the three interlocking adaptation histories against a backdrop of cross-border transfer, translation, and censorship, this book narrates a unique account of one of the world’s oldest subjects: the portrayal of sex. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |