Surrealist Erotica: Imagine a Bullfight For You Alone // inspired by Laure

For this episode of the Surrealist Erotica series I was inspired by the French poet and writer Colette Peignot aka Laure. She has remained virtually unknown, but since I discovered her works a few years ago, I have been fascinated by her. I could go as far to say that my interest in Laure is what ultimately led me to doing a Surrealist-inspired film series because there is not much information out there about her- to get a better grasp on who she was, I turned to learning about other people she was associated with, and who they were associated with...and what was happening in Paris during the interwar years in general.

She is often remembered as a mere footnote to Georges Bataille, the writer whom she was romantically involved with during the last few years of her life. It is because of Georges Bataille and fellow writer Michel Leiris that her works were ever published.

I came to know her by accident. I had been interested in Bataille to some extent already, but at that point I hadn't looked that deeply into his personal life. A random google search brought me to this article, Laure: The "True Whore" as Muse. Its a very short piece on her, but after reading it, I needed to know everything about her, her works, her lovers, etc.

Reading her writings felt like I was reading my own. We both share a strange love for William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Bataille supposedly threw a copy of Blake's text into Laure's coffin when she died at the young age of 35 in 1938. I felt inspired by her works and compelled to publish my own small collection of poetry and I also recorded a concept album about her and Bataille. And for the Surrealist Erotica series, I channeled her...

"The bullfight has to do with the sacred because there is the threat of death and real death, but it is felt, experienced by others, with others. Imagine a bullfight for you alone." -Laure, The Sacred

Bullfighting was very popular in Europe during the interwar years and among many artists and writers at the time. Its a theme that appears in the works on Hemmingway, Bataille, Leiris, Masson... I have much more to say about this controversial topic but it deserves its own post. I have two scenes in this episode wearing the matador jacket.

In the next scene, I use edited footage of Mt. Etna erupting as the projection. I chose this because Bataille and Laure visited the volcano and it seemed to be a memorable experience for them... Bataille wrote:

"Arriving at dawn at the crest of the immense and bottomless crater- we were too exhausted and, in a way, swelling with a too strange, too disastrous solitude: this was the harrowing moment we leaned over the gaping wound, the rupture in the planet were we stood breathing... In the middle of our journey, upon entering an infernal region, we saw the crater of the volcano in the distance, at the end of a long valley of lava, and it was impossible to imagine any place where the horrible instability of things was more evident. Laure was suddenly seized by such anguish that she started running madly straight ahead: the terror and desolation we had entered had made her distraught."

I wore a bracelet that is actually from the 1930s that I bought in an antique shop- the charms on it are carved heads- which I chose to reference both Laure's involvement in Acephale and also to me, the jewelry symbolizes class- which was a point of contention in her life. Her family was well off, and even though she benefited from their wealth, she also resented it. The purse was a piece that I altered- I sewed a broken Jesus from a crucifix onto an old black leather purse with red thread- referencing Laure's Catholic heritage, her aversion to Catholicism after trauma and loss of faith, and some references she makes to religion in her works.

I saved this image for the end, but its actually at the beginning of the episode. The episode begins with the death of Laure. One of the last things she wrote before she died was a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell...

"Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."

I'm going to end this post on that note. Here's the soundtrack of the episode. Its available for free download on Bandcamp and is an extended remixed of a track called In Memory of Laure from the Laure/Batille concept album The Sacred Conjuration.

Surrealist Erotica // from Joan Pope on Vimeo.

This recent post has links to the other Surrealist-related posts I've written so far. (It contains a gif that is mildly nsfw). Also, for anyone who is interested, I have a side-Twitter account where I tweet mostly Laure and Bataille related things, but I've been expanding it to include Surrealism in general. I tweet about Surrealism a lot for my main Twitter account too.